Re-writing the Post - Colonial Canon - Case Study Example

 Before we discuss the six novels against post-colonial backdrop, it is necessary to build the backdrop by answering certain fundamental questions such as, ‘What is canon?’, ‘What is post-colonialism?’, ‘What is colonialism?’ and ‘How is colonialism different from imperialism?’. We shall try to find their answers as the discussion moves on. Let us begin with ‘What is canon?’ According to Robert Eaglestone (2000. p49) the term ‘the canon’ comes from the Christian Church. It came into use when the Church was faced with the problem of identifying texts with true sources of divine revelation. It referred to a list of religious texts that every body would accept as authentic and authoritative. In literature, he argues, it refers to ‘the list of great books that we should read and admire’ .According to Anne H. Lundin (p27. 2004) ‘the canon’s main function is to position texts in relation to one another-and to exclude more than include’. Moreover, Eaglestone, further points out that this term associated ‘with the senses of identity to which countries and groups aspire and with the struggle to define identities’ (p54-55). Therefore, we can say that ‘Post-colonial canon’ refers not only to the admired and valuable ‘the English –language literatures of Africa, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia, and the Caribbean’, as Deborah L. Madsen (p1.,1999) points out, but also certain shared trends and values and identities which this canon embodies. As Valerie Kennedy (2000. p111) explains that ‘What links them is a concern with the imperial past…and with the links between the imperial past and the postcolonial present.’ What is this ‘imperial past’? How is it linked to the ‘postcolonial present’? In order to explore the answers of these questions, let us first try to understand the meanings of imperialism and colonialism. According to John McLeod (2000), ‘Colonialism was a lucrative commercial operation, bringing wealth and riches to Western nations through the economic exploitations of others. It was pursued for economic profit, reward and riches. Hence, colonialism and capitalism share a mutually supportive relationship with each other.’ Imperialism is different from colonialism. McLeod refers to Peter Childs and Patrick Williams who argue that ‘imperialism is an ideological concept which upholds the legitimacy of the economic and military control of one nation by another’ and that colonialism ‘is only one form of practice which results from ideology of imperialism, and specifically concerns the settlement of one group of people in anew location.’(p 7)’ McLeod further explains that settlement of one group in a new location is not a necessary condition. It is only one form of how imperialism works. McLeod is of the view that ‘it could be argued that while colonialism is virtually over today, imperialism continues apace as Western nations such as America are still engaged in imperial acts , securing wealth and power through the continuing economic exploitation of other nations’(p8). Thus he concludes that colonialism is a particular historical manifestation of imperialism, specific to certain places and times (p8)’. In order to give an idea of colonial discourse McLeod (p.17) refers to Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon who in one of his lecture in 1979 recalled an Indian fisherman who used to visit his street in San Fernando, Trinidad when he was a child. The partly paralyzed figure of the fisherman was ridiculed by children. One day, Sammy brought a white assistant on his round with him. This made Selvon furious who thought that the white man should be the master, not Sammy because this was ‘the way life was organised’. He records how he had learned to regard non-Westerners as inferior. He had internalized that: …The Indian was just a piece of cane trash while the white man was to be honored and respected-where had it come from? I don’t consciously remember being brainwashed to hold this view either at home or at school. (In Foreday Morning: selected Prose, Longman, 1989, p.211., cited in McLeod p17) This is how the colonial discourses went by. These discourses depicted the colonized as uncivilized people. From this condition, the colonized could be rescued, if they tried to acquire the world-view, culture and language of the colonizers. The colonial culture represented the true and natural order of life. These discourses were sources of trauma for colonized people ’who were taught to look negatively upon their people, their culture and themselves (McLeod p.19). When the colonized started their struggle for independence, not only the political leaders, but also the intellectuals and literary figures contributed to this struggle, a struggle for freedom from colonial brand of world-view. It was during 1960s that the: thinkers from the former colonies began to create their own forms of knowledge , their own discourses , to counter the discourses of colonialism: these postcolonial discourses articulated the experience of the colonized, rather than the colonizer, giving what’s called the subaltern-the subordinated non-white, non-Western subject of colonial rule-a voice.( Mary Klages 2006 p153) Edward Said, Abdul R. Jan Mohamed and Homi Bhabha were such thinkers. Said’s Orientalism (1978) has been an influential work in post-colonial studies. According to Bill Ashcroft, D. Pal S. Ahluwalia(2001., pp50-51) ‘Orientalism , in Said ‘s formulation, is principally a way of defining and locating Europe’s others’. In this book, which is divided into three sections, the core of Said’ argument resides in the link between knowledge and power’, which is reflected in the words of Arthur Balfour’s defence of Egypt in 1910, ‘We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know any other country’ and Said explains ‘(1978:32-36., cited in Aschroft p 63). Commenting upon this, they argue, ’to have such knowledge of such a thing [as Egypt]is to dominate it, to have authority over it’ and that knowledge gives power, more power requires more k, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.’(Aschroft and Ahluwalia P. 63). This is how power and knowledge go together. This link between power and knowledge manifested itself in what is called ‘Orientalism as a discourse’. Explaining this Ashcroft and Ahluwalia observe that ‘as a discourse, Orientalism is ascribed the authority of academic, institutions and governments, and such authority raises the discourse to a level of importance and prestige that guarantees its identification with ‘truth’(p63) and that the discourse of Orientalism depicts the Orientals as subservient and subject to domination by the Occident. To quote Said: My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . As a cultural apparatus, Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge" ( Said, 1979. p. 204). After fifteen years he published Culture and Imperialism (1993). It examines how culture and discourse cause imperialistic adventures. It which begins with the premise that the ‘institutional, political and economic operations of imperialism are nothing without the power of the culture that maintains them’. It is culture which provides ‘moral power’ to ‘rule a society of hundreds of millions with no more than 100,000 people’ and achieve a kind of ‘ideological pacification’ (Aschcroft & Ahluwalia p83) Said maintains that imperialism, ‘like its orietalist cousin, is alive and well in the contemporary world--though modulated somewhat for purposes of camouflage’ (Abdirahman A. Hussein. 2004. p.265). This is post-colonialism. The writers from the colonies wanted to use literature to express what the colonized felt during colonialism. For this purpose, they decided to re-use the classics. Therefore one of the important areas of post-colonialism is the re-interpretation of classic English literature from the perspective of the colonized. Abdul R.Jan Mohamed (1984) stressed the importance of literary text as a site of cultural control and as a highly effective instrumentality for the determination of the ‘native’ by fixing him/her under the sign of ‘the Other’.Jan Mohamed also shows how these literary texts contain features which can be subverted and appropriated to the oppositional and anti-colonial purposes of contemporary post-colonial writing. By recognizing how the binaries of colonial discourse operate (the self-other, civilised-native, us-them manichean polarities) post-colonial critics could promote an active reading which makes these texts available for re-writing and subversion. It is this process which brings into being the powerful texts of contemporary post-colonial writing. According to McLeod (p193), this re-interpretation has two forms: ‘the re-reading of literary classics in the light of post-colonial scholarship and experience, and the re-writing of received literary texts by postcolonial writers’. He refers to Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). McLeod studies traces of colonial discourses in Jane Eyre. He draws our attention to the moment when Rochester takes Jane to see Bertha just after the disruption of their wedding: In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backward and forward. What it was, whether beast or human being , one could not , at first sight, tell. It groveled, seemingly on all-fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal; but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a man, hid its head and face. (Jane Eyre.1864 p.310). It is interesting to see pronoun ‘it’ being used for Bertha who had ‘mixed’ creole lineage and Jamaican birthplace’. McLeod explains that this reference to her ‘whether beast or human being’ speaks of ‘a frequent assumption in colonial discourses that those born of parents not from the same race are degenerate beings, perhaps not fully human, closer to animals. Another instance of influence of prevalent colonial discourses is seen in Rochester’s description of the fiery West Indian night: One night I had been awakened by her yells …it was a fiery West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates; being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-streams—I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which could hear from thence rumbled dull like an earthquake…the maniac still shrieked out…the thin partitions of the West Indian house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.(p.326) The metaphor of animal continues in this passage as well. Now she is a wolf the island, a hell, as Rochester himself concludes ‘this life, said I, at last, is hell’. He thinks of committing suicide. This passage, then, like the previous one, seems to represent colonial assumptions of those days. Jamaica is a hell and in this hell if he does not commit suicide, he will go mad. But, ‘What saves him from madness and suicide?’ asks McLeod. In the words of Rochester himself , a wind from Europe came to rescue him when he was about to resort to ‘loaded pistols’: A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement; the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution. This paragraph is followed by descriptions of fresh winds, leaves which restore his hope in life. This is strange that a wind from Europe transforms the Jamaican hell into a paradise of hope. McLeod concludes that these and other such passages ‘remind us that the canonical classical works of English literature did not emerge and don’t exist, remote from history, culture and politics.’(p.156). However, he makes it clear that the views of Rochester are not necessarily the views of C.Bronte (p.158). This story of Jane Eyre, then, seems to raise certain questions about the attitudes which Rochester had about Jamaica and Bertha. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea seems to retell the story from the point of view of ‘Bertha’. The character identified as Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea is Antoinette who is the narrator of the first part of this novel. But, there arises a question. Why did Rhys think of re-writing Jane Eyre’s Bertha? Actually, Rhys, as Helen Carr explains ‘was colonial in terms of her history and a postcolonial in her attitude to the Empire and in her employment of many postcolonial strategies’ (Jean Rhys, Northcote House, 1996, p18. cited in McLeod p 161). In this context, McLeod is of the opinion that perhaps because of her Caribbean background, Rhys became preoccupied with Bronte’s Bertha Mason. Both Bertha’s mother and Rhys’ mother were creoles; both Bertha and Rhys left the Caribbean for England as young women’. Therefore, explains McLeod, Rhys grants an opportunity to Bertha to tell ‘the things from her point of view.’(p161) As the curtain rises, the reader witnesses Antoinette Cosway telling us about her childhood in Jamaica, just after the end of slavery following the Emancipation Act. In the mounting tension between the white and the local, her house is burned and her brother is killed which causes her mother’s death. The second part is narrated by a nameless character who is the husband of Antoinette. The reader identifies this nameless character as Bronte’s Rochester. It is in the second part that the clash between colonial and postcolonial starts. This clash starts when their love reaches autumnal dryness. The tension starts when Rochester of this story starts calling Antoinette ‘Bertha’ to which she objects. Furthermore, he begins to entertain misgivings about the mental health of Cosway family. He thinks that he has been tricked into marriage and like Bronte’s Rochester; he is not comfortable with the island and its inhabitants. The following row over Christophine, the black servant, seems to be the tip of an iceberg: ‘Her coffee is delicious [I said] but her language is horrible and she might hold her dress up. It must get very dirty, yards of it trailing on the floor’. ‘When they don’t hold their dress up it’s for respect,’ said Antoinette. ‘Or for feast days or going to Mass’ ‘And is this feast day?’ ‘She wanted it to be a feast day.’ ‘Whatever the reason it is not a clean habit’ ‘It is. You don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because it shows it isn’t the only dress they have’ (Wide Sargasso Sea, 1997. p52-53) Here, then we see her husband’s narrow attitude towards the local culture. The ‘Sargasso Sea’ of the local culture seems to be too wide for her husband. McLeod rightly points out that the clash between Antoinette and her husband is a clash of perspectives. It is actually ‘a contest of power which is simultaneously colonial and patriarchal’ and that in this exchange, ‘we might also find figured relationship’ between the two novels ‘with the latter answering back and critically challenging the views of Caribbean of people and places in the former. Antoinette’s husband wishes to be the arbiter rather than the recipient of knowledge’(p163-64). Her husband’s refusal to learn the local culture and reconcile with it, makes him leave for England where Antoinette does not feel at home in the large house. At the end, she takes a candle and leaves the house. The candle in her hand may symbolize search for catholicity or freedom from colonial pride. While Wide Sargasso Sea, tells us a story from the Caribbean island, Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip tells us story from Papua New Guinea .It seems to re-write Charles Dickens Great Expectations. Mister Pip is set against a conflict or a civil war between the white rulers and the local rebels, on an island Bougainville. While in Great Expectations the story is narrated by young Pip, the story in Mr. Pip is narrated by Matilda, a thirteen year old girl. We get a glimpse of how the locals of the island perceived the white people when they arrived first: When our ancestors saw the first white they thought they were looking at ghosts or may be some people who had just fallen into bad luck. Dogs sat on their tails and opened their jaws to await the spectacle. The dogs thought that they were in for a treat. May be these white people could jump backwards or somersault over trees. May be they had some spare food. Dogs always hoped for that. (p5) This paragraph contains an important aspect of post-colonial literature that it tries to record the perspective of the colonized. This view of white people as ghosts contrasts with the views of greatness of white people, aired by colonial discourses. So, here is a chink which offers us to know the views ‘the inferior’ had about ‘the superior’. Moreover, the novel is permeated with references to the skin colors, ‘She was Grace and black like us. He was Tom Christian Watts and white as the whites of your eyes, only sicker’; ‘We had grown up believing white to be the color of all the important things.’(p3-4) and then again ‘According to Port Moresby we are one country. According to us we are black as night. The soldiers looked like people leached up out of the red earth. That’s why they were known as red skins.’(p9) These references to skin colors speak of the division of the world into white people and non-white people as mentioned earlier in the discussion about Said’s Orientalism. This consciousness of difference of skin color, is not skin deep. The novel depicts a conflict between local culture and foreign culture. Local culture is represented by Matilda’s religious mother and foreign culture by Mr. Watts. Matilda is caught between these two cultures. She is not happy with her daughter's preoccupation with an immoral novel Great Expectations. The mother wants to win her daughter back from Mr. Watts who seems to her a symbol of those white men who showed her husband the dreams of a lucrative job in Australia. She thought that the white men led the black people astray from the right path. While the whole world in the novel is trapped by the civil war, Matilda and her fellows find refuge in Dickensian Victorian England, ‘We could escape to another place, it didn't matter that it was Victorian England. We found we could easily get there.’ Matilda not only finds refuge in England but she also falls in love with and identifies herself with Dickens’ Pip ‘…I felt like I had been spoken to by this boy Pip’. (p23). Matilda’s this realization of her close identification with Pip seems to expose the colonial boundaries of color, country and race as false. Matilda is not alone in rising above the colonial divisions. Mr. Watts has already done it before Matilda could do it by marrying a black woman. Thus a white man moves towards a black woman and a black girl moves towards a white boy and in the latter movement even temporal boundaries don’t count. A similar attachment develops in Great Expectations where the bond between Magwitch and Pip which ‘enables the two figures to overcome all the divisions of class, education and age (Jay Clayton.2003.p.157) By depicting this bond between the two, explains Clayton, Dickens provides ‘a symbol of those qualities in the national character that might still secure the hegemony of British civilization, even if the nation’s place in the new world order was permanently diminished’. Through Magwitch Great Expectations ‘is also a novel of about empire and colonialism’. In colonial days criminals were ‘shipped off’ to colonies as a convenient way of getting rid of the ‘awkward individuals’. In Great Expectations, the reverse movement occurs, not out from the imperial core to the colonial periphery but back from Australia to London’. (Great Expectations.1992. Intro) . In addition to the character of Magwitch, Miss Havisham seems to symbolize imperialism in her exploitative attitude towards Pip. Moreover she herself along with her house is ‘a consequence of colonial exploitation’ (Phyllis Lassner2004) .It also exposes, explains Lassner, ‘what little British privilege and prestige is left to a woman alone in this eroding colonial base’ (p21). While there were problems at the colonial bases, the imperial powers ransacked the world for resources and treasures. Even the darkest places on the earth did not escape. As we read in the foregoing discussion about imperialism and colonialism that the colonized non-white people were regarded as emotional and inferior. Africa, being a less frequented and secluded continent, was a dark continent in the eyes of the colonialists and the heart of this darkness was Congo: In the Geography of imperialism…, the Congo occupied a special and important place as the degree zero of the ‘primitive’ world envisaged by imperialism. Long after it interior had been explored and opened up to colonial exploitation of rubber and ivory, the Congo was considered the very ‘heart of darkness’ (Mirzeoff.1998. p170). If Congo was the heart of darkness, there arises a naïve question. Why did the Europeans go there? They went their not to enjoy the natural beauty of the landscape or study the cultural diversity of that place or for some humanitarian reasons. They went there for exploitative ends—for ivory. In this context the title ‘Heart of Darkness’ of Joseph Conrad’s novel seems to wear a new meaning when we keep in mind their expansionistic ambitions, that even the remotest and farthest parts of the world were rummaged by them. In this rummage, the Europeans caused much upheaval in the social and cultural set-up there. Their cultural and social systems had little importance for the European colonists. They thought that these people’s lives amounted to chaos. This is what Heart of Darkness seems to convey. Though Conrad was not a racist yet he was perceived as one: In the realm of the modern novel, Conrad perhaps the most outspoken critic of European Imperialism and expansionism. However he came under sever attack by postcolonial writers and critics. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, for example has called Conrad a ‘bloody racist’ referring especially to his Heart of Darkness p142 Daizal R . Samad 2003). Achebe’s Things Fall Apart tries to remove the tag of darkness from the face of Africa by showing us that the darkness did not mean chaos or animal-like existence. The African society shown in this novel is very much organized and systematic in its own way. Achebe tries to vindicate that African civilization was organized even before the arrival of the colonists. During this study of the six novels, we have seen that the three writers came from different parts of the world. The common thing among the writers of these six novels is language—English. In case of writers of colonial times, it is understandable, but the question is ‘Why did the post-colonial writers decided to write in colonial language. A challenge faced by the pos-colonial writers was to use an effective tool of communication. Their preference was the language of their past masters. Chinua Achebe’s confession shows the feelings of the post-colonial writers while using the language of the colonist as a tool of communication. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it. (Achebe 1975 p 62). But, perhaps like Achebe the post-colonial writers had no other choice. By using the language of the masters, perhaps their main focus of communication was their previous masters to whom they wanted to send their renewed version of reality. If post-colonialism was an act of subversion of ideas, then language was tool that showed not only the subversion of ideas but also the subversion of language. Language itself was de-colonized at the hands of the post colonial writers. Moreover choice of colonial language was helpful in another sense as well. The colonies consisted of multifarious cultures, tribes and states, having their own languages. In this context colonial languages had secured the status of ‘lingua franca’. Using a lingua franca, they could not only pass their message not only their colonial masters but also to their ‘subjects’ who had won freedom. Doing this they could win readers as far as East Indies and West Indies. This is why, African writers like Achebe, Caribbean writers like Rhys and New Zealander like Lloyd are popular all over the world and their novels are being taught in universities and colleges where English is taught. To conclude we can say that in this study, we have thus, tried to understand the six novels against colonial and post-colonial background. We find the colonial discourses finding expressions through the characters of the novels of that time. But, we can not blame their writers for this because they are not necessarily the views of the writers as vindicated by McLeod in his discussion of Bronte’s Rochester. Moreover, writers represent life to us through their pens. The writers can not be wholly responsible for the colonial discourses prevalent in those times. There other fathomless aspects of history, culture and society. However, one shortcoming that the changing times have exposed in their writings is they did not present the perspective of the colonized. They did not study the impact of colonialism. Colonialism had a great impact on the physical, spiritual and intellectual lives of the colonized people. The colonial masters still haunt the minds of the colonized people. The phenomenon of colonialism has robbed these nation of their past history and cultural expressions. The intellectual elite of the post-colonial era represent the sensibility that is the mixed blend of awe and fear. At one place there is an effort to reject the previous master’s legacy. On the other hand there is an unconscious fascination for the idols of the past who reigned the imagination of the people. Even their books, the winds from their lands have magical power to change the course of the destiny of the people. This post-colonial character is a lost creature that is still unable to look for the course of his destination. He is yet to detach himself from his past rulers. He finds himself more entangled during his struggle to entangle himself. The issue of identity is still an enigma. Still it is the beginning of the journey and we have miles to go before sleep. References Achebe.C. 1996.Things fall apart. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers.   Ashcroft,B., . Ahluwalia,D,P,S., 2001 Edward Said. London : Routledge.   Bronte,C. 1864. Jane Eyre. 3rd edn. NY: Carleton Publisher. Conard.J. 1990. Heart of Darkness.London: Dover Thrift Editions. Clayton.J. 2003.Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: the Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. NY: Oxford UP. Dickens.C.1868. Great Expectations. Cambridge: Riverside Press. Dickens.C 1992. Great Expectations . Hertfordshire: Wordworth Editions Limited. Eaglestone. R. (2000).Doing English: a guide for literature students.2nd edn. London: Routledge. Hussein.A.A.2004. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. NY: Verso. Lloyd.J. 2007.Mister Pip.NY: The Dial Press. Lassner.P .2004. Colonial Strangers: Women Writing The End Of The British Empire. USA: Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data. Lundin,A.H (2004). Constructing the canon of children's literature: beyond library walls and Ivory Towers.N.Y: Routledge. Kennedy.V. 2000Edward Said: A critical Introduction Cambridge:Polity Press. Klages.M. 2006 Literary theory: A guide for the Perplexed London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Madsen.D.L 1999 Post-colonial literatures: Expanding the canon. Sterling USA: Pluto Press. Mirzoeff . N. 1998. ‘Photography at the Heart of Darkness. Herbert Lang’s Congo Photographs (1909-15)’ Barringer,T., Flynn. T.1998.edit. Colonialism and the object: empire, material culture, and the museum. London: Routledge. McLeod.J. 2002.Beginning postcolonialism. Manchester : Manchester UP. . Rhys. J. 1997 Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Books. Said.E.W. 1979. Orientlaism. NY:Vintage Books Edition. Samad. D.R. 2003. ‘Joseph Conrad’. Colonialism: an international, social, cultural, and political Encyclopedia., Volume 1. Page. M.E (edit).USA: Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data. Badaracco.J. 2006.Questions of character: illuminating the heart of leadership through literature. Massachusetts: Harvard Business school.   Read More