POST-COLONIAL AND DIASPORA

INGLAN IS A BITCH
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON
Inglan Is a Bitch
w'en mi jus' come to Landan toun
mi use to work pan di andahgroun
but workin' pan di andahgroun
y'u don't get fi know your way aroun'

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
dere's no runnin' whey fram it

mi get a lickle jab in a big 'otell

an' aftah a while, mi woz doin' quite well
dem staat mi aaf as a dish-washah
but w'en mi tek a stack, mi noh tun clackwatchah!

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
noh baddah try fi hide fram it

w'en em gi'you di lickle wage packit

fus dem rab it wid dem big tax rackit
y'u haffi struggle fi meek en's meet
an' w'en y'u goh a y'u bed y'u jus' cant sleep

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
a noh lie mi a tell, a true
mi use to work dig ditch w'en it cowl noh bitch
mi did strang like a mule, but, bwoy, mi did fool
den awftah a while mi jus' stap dhu ovahtime
den aftah a while mi jus' phu dung mi too

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
y'u haffi know how fi suvvive in it

well mi dhu day wok an' mi duh nite wok

mi duh clean wok an' mi duh dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but it y'u si mi wok y'u woulda sey mi crazy

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
y'u bettah face up to it

dem have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly

inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry
fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah
now awftah fiteen years mi fall out a fayvah

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
dere's no runnin' whey fram it

mi know dem have work, work in abundant

yet still, dem mek mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin' quite ol'
yet still, dem sen' mi fi goh draw dole

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
is whey wi a goh dhu 'bout it?

DAVID DABYDEEN presents a similar idea when he mentions the

BBC radio etcetera and points out how everyones been watching or
listening to the English version of things which is basically giving in
to the English culture and accepting their superiority

The poem essentially describes to the reader a list of poorly paid jobs
he was forced to do whilst living in London ending each stanza with
the phrase ‘Inglan is a bitch, there’s no escaping it’. The repetition of
this phrase throughout the poem keeps the audience reminded of his
subject, essentially saying ‘it’s a horrible life but there’s no better
option’. The phrase is followed in each stanza by another line such as
‘No baddah try fi hide fram it’ and ‘Y´uhaffi know how fi survive in
it’. This last line appears somewhat comforting each time and hinders
the effect of the irate ‘inglan is a bitch’ line. The repetition of this
stanza also means it acts almost as a sort of chorus within the poem.
It is evident that Johnson’s use of dub poetry is not a coincidence but
a deliberate choice to express his West Indian roots. creole English,
which can be regarded as his resistance to the colonial power in the
level of language. Thus, the form – namely, dub poetry of
performance – and the language stand as the main elements of his
anti-colonial stance reflected in his art. In relation to dub poetry,
França states: “By making an effort to give a voice to a community
forged on the borders of privation and marginalization, dub poetry is
composed of a deeply antagonistic and conflictive nature (as most of
the legitimate claims made from the minorities perspective)” (2011,
5). As appropriate to the nature of dub poetry, “Inglan Is a Bitch”
reflects this antagonism through its aggressive language including
filthy words and this aggressive tone mirrors the fury of black
immigrants in England. Moreover, there are different kinds of English
that create tension in Johnson’s poetry (Hoyles, 2002, 64). Johnson
says:
when it comes to you as the native of another land, speaking
another language that you are just the colonized and you are
always being seen as the other you have a new kind of slavery as a
working class immigrant that you have to suffer certain problems
that you have to change jobs and do the hard work, etc. So maybe
that’s why he says, “Dere’s no escapin it”
There is a certain way of building this poem in terms of language and
form because it also enables Johnson to perform it. Of course
inevitably it makes this poem or this kind of poetry something
completely different than English poetry

this kind of reggae music and performing poetry is not making it

English. It’s something that’s to protect the culture, the Jamaican
culture in it, that’s why Linton Kwesi Johnson is actually a very
important poet. He is of course talking about immigrants, the black
British working class community actually you don’t have to be a
black working class person to sympathize and empathize with what’s
going on because he is actually referring to any member of the
working class, any immigrants living under these conditions in
England.

In the first stanza of the poem, he mentions his first arrival to

England. As the poem proceeds, we see the life story of a black
person, starting with his young years and ending with his old ones.
Johnson’s story exemplifies the discrimination against a black
immigrant. From the lines “y'u don't get fi know your way aroun' ”
(“you don’t get to know your way around”) in the first stanza,
Johnson’s confusion and desperation in a foreign country can be
sensed. His desperation does not subside at the end of the poem
and he adopts a more rebellious tone. After the first stanza, Johnson
starts to list some typical works like cleaning associated with the
Black community in England. Coming from the colonial lands, black
people generally worked as bluecollar workers in England. This
shows that the master-servant relation did not change for the blacks,
although they arrived in their mother country. So, black people
suffered from both belonging to the working class and belonging to a
racial minority group. It can be considered another version of
“double burden” since they are exploited more than the white
working class. Johnson also draws attention to the lesser wages for
black community, saying “w'en dem gi' you di lickle wage packit”
(“they give you your little wage packet”). Although they did the same
jobs with the whites, the blacks would mean the cheapest labor force
for white employers. So, their slavery did not come to end in their
mother country. In the seventh stanza, hard work undertaken by the
blacks is emphasized. Here, Johnson makes a reference to the “black
beast” image saying “mi did strang like a mule, but, bwoy, mi did
fool” (“Me was strong as a mule, but boy, me was a fool”). Black
people are always regarded physically stronger than the whites. Thus,
in the colonial plantations, they were always charged with hard field
works. Yet, their physical strength was not only exploited, but also
considered a threat against the white rule. The black beast
stereotype, promoted by Thomas Dixon’s racist work The
Clansman (1905), sketches a lazy and rapist portrayal for the
black man who craves for a white woman’s virgin body. In this
respect, a black man’s physical strength has a paradoxical role in the
white man’s discourse and his “bestial” power must be used for the
common good. This prejudice against the black man provided a
justification for the white man’s discourse as the blacks were given
the tasks that no white man wanted to do.
In the ninth stanza, Johnson makes references to some other
stereotypical images imposed on the black man. When the colonial
powers were invading the territories of black people, their aim was to
develop the living conditions of these so-called lazy and backward
men. So, as Rudyard Kipling offered in his 1899 poem entitled
“The White Man’s Burden,” these “lazy” black people were a
burden on white men’s shoulders. Indeed, Johnson’s reference to
this stereotype shows his selfawareness about his public image in
British society and challenges the prejudice. Over the stereotypes
ironically mentioned in the poem, Johnson criticizes the attitude of
white people against the blacks. Also, he projects them the other side
of the coin by depicting the harsh living conditions faced by the black
immigrants. The repetitive lines of the poem “Inglan is a bitch /dere's
no escapin it” (“England is a bitch / There’s no escaping it”) show
Johnson’s both hatred against and despair about England. In the last
stanza, Johnson raises an important question “Inglan is a bitch fi true /
is whey wi a goh dhu 'bout it?” (“England is a bitch, for true / Is
what we going to do about it?”). It can be argued that the last
lines reflect Johnson’s activism since he believes in the importance
of taking action to improve poor living conditions and change
England’s attitude towards black immigrants. Even this poem
with its subverted language and social realism is his weapon
against the white dominance.
Dhasal. Man you should explode

Johnsons choice to use ‘bitch’ specifically in this poem is interesting,

the taboo nature of the word renders the line powerful. Repeating
exclaim the word ‘Bitch’ creates an overtone of anger and
disappointment emphatically expressed through in his performances.

The poem does not just focus on employment alone but more
specifically the exploitations of immigrant workers. He refers in
one stanza saying ‘me know demav work, work in abundant/yet still
demmek me redundant’, this is referring to being asked to leave his
job as he is ‘fifty-five, getting quite old’, an unfair dismissal with
which he struggles to argue against. The jobs which Johnson lists in
the poem shows the journey he undertakes in the foreign country the
speaker has moved to.

The opening stanza describes the tribulations he experiences working

on the London underground. The speaker explains that ‘ workin pan
the undergroun, ye don’t get fi no your way aroun’, this exemplifies
the lack of knowledge which the speaker has of the culture and the
country he is trying to integrate in to, and has the sense of being lost
or disorientated. As he continues the speaker falls in to several other
jobs such as working in a hotel and in a ‘Faktri up in a Brakly’. When
talking about these jobs the speaker appears to be becoming more
optimistic about his future in the UK ‘afta a wile me was doin quite
well’ however when talking specifically about the factory he was
working in he refers to being made redundant after fifteen years, even
though he appears sure that they still have work for him. It could be
suggested that he was simply made redundant because he was no
longer of any use to them as he had grown quite old, John is
highlighting the exploitation of immigrant workers who are paid
very little for laborious jobs which have often have no prospect
for promotion, only to be laid off and sent to go on the dole,
explained in the line ‘dem sen mi fi goh draw dole’.

https://repository.usd.ac.id/2588/2/084214066_full.pdf
https://repository.usd.ac.id/2588/2/084214066_full.pdf
While English language can convey intellectual concepts and
denotative reference, only patwa which is spoken in childhood and in
home carries the emotional weight and connotation that are imp.
As Ashcroft explains the control over language is one of the main
features of imperial oppression. This control is maintained by the
istalling of standard version of English as the norm through education
system and marginalizing all variants as impurities. From the title it
can be seen that Johnson refuses to speak/write English. By using an
abbreviated ingla, LKJ translates the proud imperial signifier to fit a
particular voice and sensibility.
Mixed hybridity of black arabian and Jamaican creole – strange like a
mule

CULTURAL IDENTITY AND DIASPORA

STUART HALL

Stuart Hall begins his discussion on Cultural Identity and

Diaspora with a discussion on the emerging new cinema in the
Caribbean which is known as Third Cinema. This new form of
cinema is considered as the visual representation of the Afro-
Caribbean subjects- “blacks” of the diasporas of the west- the
new post colonial subjects. Using this discussion as a starting
point Hall addresses the issues of identity, cultural practices, and
cultural production.

There is a new cinema emerging in the Caribbean known as the Third

Cinema. It is considered as the visual representation of the Afro-
Caribbean in the post colonial context. In this visual medium “Blacks”
are represented as the new postcolonial subjects. In the context of
cultural identity hall questions regarding the identity of this emerging
new subjects. From where does he speak? Very often identity is
represented as a finished product. Hall argues that instead of
considering cultural identity as a finished product we should think of
it a production which is never complete and is always in process.

He discusses two ways of reflecting on cultural identity. Firstly,

identity understood as a collective, shared history among individuals
affiliated by race or ethnicity that is considered to be fixed or stable.
According to this understanding our cultural identity reflects the
common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which
provide us as “one people.” This is known as the oneness of cultural
identity, beneath the shifting divisions and changes of our actual
history. From the perspective of the Caribbean’s this would be the
Caribbeanness of the black experience. This is the identity the Black
diaspora must discover. This understanding did play a crucial role in
the Negritude movements. It was a creative mode of representing the
true identity of the marginalised people. Indeed this act of rediscovery
has played crucial role in the emergence of many of the important
social movements of our time like feminist, anti-colonial and anti-
racist.

Stuart Hall also explores a second form of cultural identity that exist
among the Caribbean, this is an identity understood as unstable,
metamorphic, and even contradictory which signifies an identity
marked by multiple points of similarities as well as differences. This
cultural identity refers to “what they really are”, or rather “what they
have become.” Without understanding this new identity one cannot
speak of Caribbean identity as “one identity or on experience.” There
are ruptures and discontinuities that constitute the Caribbean’s
uniqueness. Based on this second understanding of identity as an
unstable Hall discusses Caribbean cultural identity as one of
heterogeneous compositions. It is this second notion of identity that
offers a proper understanding of the traumatic character of the
colonial experience of the Caribbean people.
To explain the process of identity formation, Hall uses Derrida's
theory ‘differance’ as support, and Hall sees the temporary
positioning of identity as "strategic" and arbitrary. He then uses the
three presences--African, European, and American--in the Caribbean
to illustrate the idea of "traces" in our identity.

A Caribbean experiences three kinds of cultural identities. Firstly,

the cultural identity of the Africans which is considered as site of
the repressed, secondly, the cultural identity of the Europeans
which is the site of the colonialist, and thirdly, the cultural
identity of the Americans which is a new world- a site of cultural
confrontation. Thus the presence of these three cultural identities
offers the possibility of creolization and points of new becoming.
Finally, he defines the Caribbean identity as diaspora identity.

He points out that Cultural identity and diaspora are

simultaneously as political, historical and personal.  Hall explores
two concepts of “cultural identity.” The first is based on an
essentialist definition that emphasizes the similarities that purportedly
comprise the “oneness”, the underlying essence, of “a people”. It is
this identity that practices of representation, such as cinema, seek to
(re-)discover, excavate and articulate.  The second definition of
“cultural identity” emphasizes the similarities and the differences
amongst an imagined cultural group – such as “The Black Triangle”
of Africa, the United States, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. 
These groups are supposed to have similarities in their histories and
ancestries but whose past as “a people” contains ruptures due to “the
continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.  As a historical
materialist, Hall emphasizes that identity is contingent and not
ahistorical or fixed.  However, he takes ideas about identity,
representation and race more seriously and is concerned with them
more centrally than in many historical materialists accounts that focus
more exclusively on class and class consciousness.  Hall argues
that we cannot comprehend the trauma of “the colonial
experience” by using the first essentialist definition but we can by
using the second definition, which emphasizes historical and
social contingency. 
The Power and Creativity of Essentialism - Essentialist
conceptualizations of identity claim there is an authentic cultural
identity, a “true self”, which “people with a shared history and
ancestry hold in common”. --The “oneness” this definition purports is
understood to be a “stable, unchanging and continuous [frame] of
reference and meaning” that reflects the general, shared cultural codes
and common historical experiences of “a people”. --Within the
boundaries of this definition, the “authentic” cultural identity is
understood to be hidden underneath or obfuscated by “more
superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’”. “Authentic” cultural
identity, this shared essence, is foundational to “a people”; it is the
unwavering truth that lies “beneath the shifting divisions and
vicissitudes of [their] actual history”. --While Hall questions the
essentialist definition of “cultural identity”, he cautions against
neglecting or underestimating “the powerful and creative force”
motivating the rediscovery of “hidden histories” and the content of
what is “found” in these “rediscoveries” . --He points out that the
excavation of “hidden histories” has provided motivation and an
organizational logic to much feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial art
and activism. In the world of art, he suggests, it is essentialist
understandings of cultural identity that cinematic representations often
seek to dig up, mourn the loss of and romanticize. It is this
formulation that played the muse for the Negritude movement and the
Pan-African political project. The essentialist understanding of
cultural identity also played a motivational and organizational role in
anti-colonial struggles, such as the Algerian revolution, and continues
to inspire national and transnational art and activism. Notwithstanding
this “powerful and creative force”, however, Hall argues that the act
of “rediscovery” is ultimately “an act of imaginary reunification”.
Such acts seek to structure/unify such distorted non-linear narratives
or fragmented experience of diaspora.”. Cinema and photographic
practices achieve this “[imposition of] an imaginary coherence”
amongst “the peoples of The Black Triangle”, for instance, by
representing or conceptualizing Africa as the centre, “the missing
term”, that gives meaning and coherence to a purported underlying
black cultural identity. Such representations of cultural identities of
diaspora ignore the practical experiences of “ruptures and
discontinuities” experienced in the diaspora. But, for Hall, such
representations of “imaginary reunification” are significant in
beginning to heal “the rift of separation, the ‘loss of identity’” caused
by colonialism, transportation, and slavery. These representations are
resources of identity and of resistance intended to and, in fact,
strategically used to combat and to reinterpret “the fragmented and
pathological ways” that dominant, Western cinema have represented
colonial, post-colonial, and anti-colonial experiences. Yet, ultimately,
such essentialist approaches become problematic, despite the
ways that they give — and have given — creative and practical
impetus to important anti-colonial movements. An
Unaccomplished Fact For Hall, the authenticity and authority to
which the concept of “cultural identity” can lay claim is questionable
because practices of representation are always influenced by the
historical situation. Hall emphasizes that his own scholarly discourse
is spoken from specific places, including his own experience as a
Jamaican-born and raised youth who has spent his adulthood in
the diaspora. The implication of the positionality or standpoint of the
subject means that practices of representation are always enunciated
in and from a particular, yet ongoing and changing context of place,
time, culture and history. Because “all discourse is ‘placed’”, even
discourses of identity, it follows that identity is not transparent or an
“accomplished fact” that cultural forms of production, such as cinema,
can represent authentically and authoritatively. Rather, identity is
itself an ongoing process of “production” that is constituted within,
never outside, representation. -- --We cannot speak for long about
“‘one experience, one identity” with much exactness without coming
to acknowledge “the ruptures and discontinuities” in the history of “a
people”, whether it be people of a ‘voluntary’ diaspora or of an
imperial power forcing the dispersal and enslavement. ---
This is why Hall’s second definition of “cultural identity” is so
poignant: it points out that what we call “identity” is an ongoing
process “of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’”. In this way, it “belongs
to the future as much as to the past” . Identities are not a priori; they
do not transcend culture, history, time, and place . They are historical;
they “come from somewhere”; they change in and through power
relations that are temporal, placed, spatial, and situational. The past
does not just wait idly by; rather, through social imaginings of the
past, as well as material relations of the past that live on in the
configurations of contemporary relations, it is active; the past
transforms, and can be liberating or debilitating. This is why Hall is
so apt in describing identities as “the names we give to the
different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves
within, the narratives of the past”. This is why he argues that it is
only by using the second definition of “cultural identity” that we can
comprehensively analyze “the traumatic character of ‘the colonial
experience’”. It is this second position that enables an investigation of
the power and normalization to which the colonial regimes “subject-
ed” the colonized. If one adopts the essentialist definition of “cultural
identity” and forecloses the possibility that identities change, then one
cannot begin to comprehend, let alone recognize as such, the
differences as well as the similarities among “a people” and between
“different peoples” that were and are constituted in and by relations of
that “fatal couplet, ‘power/knowledge’”. In this light, cultural
representations like those in cinema, photography and other arts are
not simply ‘a second-order mirror’ of an essentialized identity, but
productive of old and new identities. In this sense, modern black
cinema is a vital part of the construction of new positionalities for
those in the black diaspora.

100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE

For over half of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the life of Colonel
Aureliano Buendıa functions as the leading thread to the plot. Some
readers may choose him as the central protagonist of the novel,
although he dies—of old age, defeated, without any honors, ignored
by the crowds and in complete solitude—while the novel continues.
His own family is not aware that he is dead until the next day at
eleven in the morning. His whole life seems like one big failure. He
loses all the wars he fights, and none of his eighteen sons continues
his bloodline. It is through Arcadio, the Buend ́ıas’ grandson, that the
lineage and the plot continue. With his lover, Santa Sof ́ıa de la
Piedad, Arcadio fathers three children: Remedios the Beauty,
Aureliano Segundo, and Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo. These great-
grandchildren of the original Buend ́ıas continue the emphasis on
the circular aspect of the plot. Remedios the Beauty is named after
Remedios Moscote, the child-wife of Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa.
Remedios the Beauty is free of small-town conventionalisms.
Unaware of her eroticism and her beauty, she prefers the solitude of
the house, where she goes around nude. However, her beauty is tinged
with tragedy, which leads those who become attracted to her to their
death. Like their grandfather (Jose ́ Arcadio) and their grand-uncle
(Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa) before them, Aureliano Segundo and
Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo also share the same woman (Petra Cotes), but
no children are born of her. However, Aureliano Segundo marries
Fernanda del Carpio and does have three children with her to carry
forward the Buend ́ıa name. Fernanda del Carpio brings to the Buend
́ıas the refinement they lack but also the prejudices they had lacked as
well. Although Ursula, the founding mother, accepts the first two
bastards (Arcadio and Aureliano Jose ́) as members of the family,
Fernanda del Carpio, who was educated “to be a queen” (222), feels
compelled by social and moral prejudices to hide the pregnancy of her
daughter, Meme. When the child of the love between Meme and
Mauricio Babilonia is born, Fernanda del Carpio hides the identity of
her grandson. This child, also named Aureliano (Aureliano
Babilonia), best describes the confinement and solitude of the Buend
́ıa descendents. Trying to describe each character individually would
be too time-consuming and complex to be useful. However, the main
characters can be grouped by the characteristics they share. Female
characters, for example, are developed as emotional beings who
experience both love and hate. The female characters are drawn
between the love and passion they feel for their men and the sad
destiny that surrounds each couple. All female characters in the Buend
́ıa family, with the exception of Ursula and Amaranta Ursula, lead
their suitors to either death or defeat. Jose ́ Arcadio, Rebeca’s
husband, is mysteriously killed in his own house; the Italian-born
Pietro Crespi commits suicide after being rejected by Amaranta; all
the suitors of Remedios the Beauty tragically die in an effort to
admire her beauty; and Mauricio Babilonia is shot in the back while
secretly visiting Meme and left unable to walk.
Amaranta Ursula’s husband, Gasto ́n, leaves her, she falls in love with
her own nephew, Aureliano Babilonia, the son of her sister, Meme.
Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Ursula are the only couple in One
Hundred Years of Solitude to find true love. This love, however,
brings destruction on them, as Amaranta Ursula dies giving birth to
the last of the Buend ́ıas, the one with a pig’s tail as feared by the
matriarch Ursula Iguara ́n in the beginning of One Hundred Years of
Solitude.
The male characters can also be described by common, salient traits.
The male names are repeated unceasingly through the six generations
of Buend ́ıas. The Arcadios, for example, are large in stature, whereas
the Aurelianos are smaller. The Arcadios are fond of loudness,
whereas the Aurelianos are introspective. The Arcadios are corpulent,
monumental in size; the Aurelianos are bony, thin, and par-
simonious. The Arcadios are active, strong-willed, independent, and
dictatorial, even to the point of being tyrants. The Aurelianos are
solitary, shy, and interested in reading. (One of them deciphers
Melquiades’ parchments.) The only instance when this name
classification becomes confused is with Aureliano Segundo and his
twin brother, Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo, who are so much alike that even
they would call each other by the wrong name. However, like a trick
of magic realism, the games they play end up confusing them and they
are changed for life. The names they use in the game begin to
determine their physical characteristics, changing even their
biological heritage. Thus, Aureliano Segundo, like all the Arcadios in
the family tree, grows to be tall and strong, and Jose ́ Arcadio
Segundo, who otherwise would have been tall and strong, is short and
bony. Jose ́ Arcadio Segundo shows interest in public affairs and tries
to decipher Melqu ́ıades’ parchments, whereas Aureliano Segundo
ends up leading a frivolous life.

MAGIC REALISM

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is rendered with a forte for blending the

everyday with the miraculous, the historical with the fabulous,
and psychological realism with surreal flights of fancy. He has
proved himself as one among the pioneers of magic realism.
Magic realism is a literary form in which odd, eerie, and
dreamlike tales are related as if the events were commonplace.
Magic realism is the opposite of the "once-upon-a-time" style of
story-telling in which the author emphasizes the fantastic quality
of imaginary events. In the world of magic realism, the narrator
speaks of the surreal so naturally it becomes real. Magic realism
in its literary and artistic applications aimed to re-imagine the
world and its reality. It is not an escapist venture but rather an
opportunity to see the fantastic in the everyday. It is rejection of
subjectivity and emotionalism, simultaneity of past, present and
future and defamiliarisation.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is an exemplary piece of magical

realism, in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and
the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary. The novel presents
a fictional story in a fictional setting. He carefully balances realistic
elements of life, like poverty and housecleaning, with outrageous
instances, like a levitating priest. There are many purposes of this.
One is to introduce the reader to Marquez's Colombia, where myths,
portents, and legends exist side by side with technology and
modernity. Another reason for this leads the reader to question what is
real and what is fantastic, especially in the realm of politics. It is to
force to question the absurdity of our everyday lives. The twisted and
meandering world of politics is under a great deal of scrutiny in this
novel, particularly the chapters that deal with Colonel Aureliano
Buendia.. he comments on how the nature of Latin American politics
is towards absurdity, denial, and never-ending repetitions of tragedy.
The extraordinary events and characters are fabricated. The politically
charged violence characteristic of Colombia’s history is paralleled in
Colonel Aureliano Buendia who wages war against the Conservative
who are facilitating the rise of foreign imperialist to power. The
wealthy banana plantation set up their own dictatorial police force.
The use of real events and Colombian history by Garcia Marquez
makes One Hundred Years of Solitude an excellent example of
magical realism. In this essay, I will look at three scenes that embody
magic realism. First: the existence of the village of Macondo itself, as
it does not exist in reality, but rather it is a figment of the writer’s
imagination. Second: imagining the birth of children with pigtails just
to marry a woman from his own blood, and finally to give an ordinary
drink, like chocolate, one of the priests a superpower so as to rise six
inches above the level of the ground.

The novel tells the story of 100 years in the lives of the Buendía
family, who live in the coastal jungles of an unnamed South American
country. It could equally be seen as the story of the town they found,
Macondo. Had it been not for the title, it might pass unnoticed that it
also contains examples of almost every type of loneliness and
isolation that it is possible for human beings to suffer, from literal
incarceration through blindness to the spiritual emptiness of repeated
sexual conquests, or the happiness of isolation with the one you love.
This is also the story of one hundred years in the life of Macondo and
its inhabitants - the story of the town's birth, development and death.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude myth and history inadvertently

overlap. There are three main mythical elements of the novel:
classical stories alluding to foundations and origins, characters
resembling mythical heroes, and supernatural elements. Magical
realism is inherent in the novel is achieved by the constant
intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. This magical
realism strikes at one's traditional sense of naturalistic fiction. There
is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo. It is a
state of mind as much as, or more than, a geographical place. For
example, one learns very little about its actual physical layout.
Garcia Marquez blends real with the magical through the masterful
use of tone and narration. He reinforces this effect through the
unastonishing tone in which the book is written. This tone
restricts the ability of the reader to question the events of the
novel; however, it also causes the reader to call into question the
limits of reality. The same narrative voice throughout the novel is an
excellent way to get the readers to trust the narrator and their
extraordinary tales. Using a unique time narrative technique to create
new suspense for the readers and to achieve the magical effect of
magical noise is the key to the success of One Hundred Years of
Solitude. The novel opens with a sentence: “Many years later, when
Colonel Aureliano is standing in front of the firing squad, he will
remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to visit the
ice cube.” Actually, it contains three time levels: the future, the past,
and the present. The author Marquez hides in the narrative level of
“reality”. This time structure reappears in the novel, constantly
creating new suspense for readers and producing magical artistic
effects with different repercussions. Therefore, it can be said that
Marquez pioneered the narrative technique of recalling the past from
the perspective of the future. In the novel, the names of the characters
are repeated from generation to generation, and the character
characteristics and events of the characters also appear repeatedly. It
shows that the novel does not clearly separate the past, present, and
future. Marquez split a complete story into many fragments
ingeniously, and then join each segment from end to end to make it an
independent individual. But at the same time it keeps them in touch
with the whole story, so there is a retrospective writing method at the
beginning of the novel. This kind of recollection of the present from
the future, and then back to the start-up period of Macondo, makes the
plot of the novel intertwined and confusing. In this way, the author is
writing about the present, remembering the past, and seeing the future
with ease
Garcia Marquez also illustrates magic realism with the description of
his characters. In describing Melques, he says, "He is a fugitive from
all plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind" (6). This a
very difficult statement to believe, but Marquez continues: "He had
survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malaysian archipelago,
leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in
Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in
the Strait of Magellan" (6). Once again, he is able to make
unbelievable ideas seem possible.
There is no explanation given for the unusual events occurring in the
story showering of yellow flowers, the ascending of Remidios
Buendia to heaven, the arrival and staying of Colonel Aureliano
Buendia’s children, the unusual raining and climatic changes are
mysterious with their lack of explanations. Plenitude is another
criteria that the novel clearly satisfies. The cultural hybridity is also
another aspect of the novel which states magical realism. The blood of
Jose Arcadio’s murdered body finds its way from his home back to
the kitchen of the Buendia house where his mother is preparing food.
The rain of yellow flowers takes place in Macondo, covering roofs
and blocking doors, when the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia dies.
Márquez’s clearest demonstration that official history does not always
match reality is the story of the strike.
When the workers on the banana plantation strike for better working
conditions, they are systematically rounded up and murdered and then
their bodies are dumped in the ocean. José Arcadio Segundo is the
only worker who survives, but his story is not believed when he
returns to Macondo—people prefer instead to read a fabricated
newspaper story claiming that the strike ended peacefully. In this
case, Márquez is making the point that people would prefer to believe
a toned-down version of history that allows them to avoid facing the
truth of the horrific events. The effect then, is to prompt the reader to
question what historical narratives can be trusted, destabilizing the
accepted narrative of Colombian history.
Heightened awareness of mystery is the most fundamental aspect
of a magical realism text. In the novel, the reader has to accept
unrealistic events by negating his sense of logic, radical thinking.

A “realistic text is hardly a satisfactory mode, much less an accurate

presentation of the thing in itself, Garcia Marquez contends, because
“disproportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself out of
all proportion.” In other words, Garcia Marquez suggests that the
magic text is, paradoxically, more realistic than a “realistic” text. And
this realism is conjured up by a series of magical supplements—such
as those of found in his One Hundred Years of Solitude
While Márquez shows official history to be somewhat disconnected
from reality, the book presents magic and reality as being utterly
compatible. This suggests that reality can be stranger than the stories
we tell about it, and it gives a poetic way of illustrating emotions and
experiences that are too extreme to be conveyed in words. For
example, when José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the family,
finally dies, a rain of yellow flowers falls from the sky, illustrating the
intense grief of the town for its founder. While the death of the town’s
founder and the family’s patriarch might be seen to have historical
significance, Márquez uses the flowers to show that it this death is an
emotional, humane event rather than an “official” one. All of the
examples of magic in the story allow for a historical narrative based
on lived experience, rather than a more academic, “official” account
of historical facts. Márquez thereby shows that the truest account of
life is one that allows for the subjectivity of personal experience.

CIRCULARITY OF TIME
Throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude, characters cannot break
free of their family’s behavioral patterns: instead, they find
themselves trapped within fates that echo their family history.
Characters are haunted by the decisions they’ve made, but also by the
decisions their ancestors have made, even becoming confused by the
difference between past, present, and future. As a result, Márquez
reveals the bulk of his characters to be fatalists, or people who believe
that their fates have been predetermined and are thus resigned to
whatever happens. By presenting the story as a predetermined
narrative, set in stone, and impossible to revise no matter a person’s
determination, Márquez suggests that fatalist progression of history is
impossible to overcome.

One of the clearest ways that Márquez illustrates the circularity of

time and the impossibility of overcoming the past is through the
repetition of family names, which reflect (or determine) the
characters’ personalities. Úrsula notes that the Aurelianos of the
family are silent and withdrawn, often possessing the gift of a second
sight; the José Arcadios, however, are generally stronger and more
boisterous, often marked with a tragic fate. These qualities are
predictable to the point of her becoming convinced that Aureliano
Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo, twins, must have switched
identities when they were children because they match the
temperament of the other’s name so well. This fixity between name
and personality suggests that a character’s fate is sealed at birth and
he or she has no ability to overcome it. The effect of reading these
repeating names can also be confusing, making it difficult to recall
which generation Márquez is referencing at any given time, but this
confusion is intentional: it allows a hundred-year span of generations
to appear as though they are existing simultaneously.

It’s not just readers who experience a collapse of past, present, and
future—the characters feel it, too. This undermines their agency,
because it makes them unable to logically associate cause and effect,
thereby trapping them in a present moment that is out of their
control. Pilar Ternera, for example, uses her cards to predict
people’s futures, and characters named Aureliano also have
psychic abilities, but they are not always correct in determining
whether their visions reflect current events or the future, because of
the confusion of repeated names and personalities. Characters tend to
see the predictions as being set in stone, rather than as warnings that
could allow them to adjust their actions to avoid these outcomes. 

Furthermore, not long after Macondo is established, a plague descends

on the town causing an insomnia that results in a collective amnesia,
trapping the characters in an eternal present. Before a cure is found,
Pilar Ternera begins using her cards to fill in the missing memories of
the past in the same way she predicts the future, and these “memories”
have a deterministic effect similar to her prophesies. Because of this
amnesia and these faulty memories created by Pilar Ternera, Márquez
suggests that whatever story one is told is true ends up determining a
person’s fate. This relates to Melquíades, who is able to foretell the
entire lifespan of Macondo and the Buendía family, though he keeps
his forecast a secret until the destruction of Macondo. Melquíades’
meticulous prediction of generations to come suggests that the future
is indeed predetermined and unchangeable.

Even the characters who attempt to entirely escape their histories (by
living elsewhere, educating themselves, etc.) fail to overcome their
past, seemingly because they remain emotionally devoted to
home. Colonel Aureliano Buendía spends much of his life away
from home, trying to protect the city he loves so dearly, but he
ultimately follows in his father’s footsteps, secluding himself in the
workshop to focus on his studies of alchemy and refusing to see the
ways in which his life mirrors his father’s. Amaranta Úrsula perhaps
comes closest to escaping her fate: she goes to school in Belgium and
marries a Flemish man, Gaston. However, her nostalgia for home
leads her back to Macondo, where she finds herself blinded by her
childhood memory of the place, rather than seeing it for the failing
city it truly is. The way she forsakes her passionate love with Gaston
for the nostalgic joy that Aureliano brings her is yet another example
of the way she remains firmly trapped in the past, rather than making
a new life. Furthermore, Amaranta Úrsula wants to name her child
with Aureliano “Rodrigo” (which is not a family name), but Aureliano
insists on the name Aureliano, which implies that the next generation
will not escape the past, either.

SOLITUDE
The solitude endured by the Buend ́ıas is a kind of curse, which
they brought on themselves for their inability to fall in love, their
strongly held superstitious beliefs, and the foundation of the
family from an incestuous marriage.
Despite the vast number of characters and the many communities
depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude, solitude is a characteristic
that marks each character in its own way. The males of the Buendía
family (particularly those named Aureliano) are repeatedly described
as having a solitary nature. Though the Aurelianos are characterized
as withdrawn, the José Arcadio characters also note their loneliness,
especially when in the company of others. Though solitude is
portrayed as a characteristic determined by fate, Márquez suggests
that the loneliest characters suffer from the negative effects of a
community that forces its members to do what’s expected of them,
rather than being allowed to more truthfully follow their passions.
The male characters, more than the female characters, embody the
myth of solitude, which permeates the novel. In his solitude, Jose ́
Arcadio Buend ́ıa (the founder) initiates a long meditation about the
passage of time. His son, Colonel Aureliano Buend ́ıa, the father of
seventeen Aurelianos with seventeen different women and who
“survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a
firing squad” (113), dies of old age, in miserable solitude, next to the
same tree where his father had died years before him.

José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the family, is perhaps the

most literal example of this community-imposed solitude, since his
natural eccentricities make him an outcast from his community. For
example, out of natural curiosity and ambition, he tries to innovate
new ways of using the technologies Melquíades brings to town, but
the community considers him to be insane for these pursuits, and they
condemn him to spending the rest of his life alone, tied to a tree in the
courtyard. When José Arcadio Buendía begins speaking gibberish, the
townspeople find this further evidence of his insanity, but a priest
visits and reveals that the man is speaking Latin. This embodies the
way in which José Arcadio Buendía is not crazy, but rather
misunderstood. When José Arcadio Buendía is invited back into the
house at the end of his life, he prefers to return to the tree, that
position of solitude now more comfortable for him than the bustling
house with the rest of his family. In this way, the community
forcefully imposed the solitude on this first male of the family until he
was insistent on maintaining his own solitude, which sets a precedent
for all of the males to come.

The solitude shared by the Buend ́ıas can be easily observed by the
isolation of the town, which appears to have been forgotten by
civilization and the outside world. The paths the main characters
follow in life also emphasize solitude. Ursula talks to the dead, a form
of solitude as nobody but herself can hear them; she also suffers from
blindness, thus enduring a life in the dark.

While José Arcadio Buendía’s solitude seems imposed on him by the

community, other characters’ solitude seems part of their
nature. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, for instance, is a loner from the
start, “silent and withdrawn” even before being born. This is fitting,
since he’s the first baby born in the isolated town of Macondo.
Despite being a loner, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is community-
minded: he fights for Macondo throughout his life, but it is in this
context that his community deserts him. Through his various political
evolutions, different political parties (which are forms of community)
come to reject him and even violently rebel against him, leaving him,
ultimately, in exile—forgotten by most people in Macondo, despite
his historic political and military importance.

José Arcadio Segundo, the great-grandson of José Arcadio Buendía,

is also isolated by the knowledge he possesses. When he takes the
initiative to lead a strike against the banana company, he is the lone
survivor of the battle and is met with disbelief when he tries to share
what happened during the strike. While José Arcadio Segundo
attempted to shed the solitary nature of his predecessors by building a
community of workers fighting for their rights, after the massacre
(and its public denial), he is forced to detach from the town, since he
cannot participate in the consensus reality that the massacre did not
occur.

Many characters of the novel also experience isolation and loneliness

because social norms force them into solitude or unfulfilling
relationships. Aureliano’s very existence is kept secret by his
grandmother because of his illegitimacy, which isolates him from
others and cultivates in him the desire to stay home even once he is
allowed the freedom to leave the house. Furthermore, Amaranta’s
refusal to marry Pietro Crespi and then Colonel Gerineldo
Márquez shows her way of imposing solitude on herself, and also on
the men she spurns, as an act of both contrition and vengeance. She
wants to punish herself for possibly willing the death of Remedios
Moscote, but she also wants her suitors to suffer for not having chosen
her sooner. Likewise, Rebeca is left in solitude, alone in her home,
when her husband is inexplicably shot, disowned by the family
because of the impropriety of having married her adopted brother.
Years later, when she is offered help, she refuses it, having grown
accustomed to the solitude that was initially forced on her.

Finally, Pilar Ternera and Petra Cotes, who are the mistresses of

many of the Buendía men, remain their mistresses rather than
becoming their wives: the Buendías maintain the ruse of being
happily married in unfulfilling relationships, while secretly visiting
the women they love who are less respected by society. Rather than
following their hearts, the Buendía men adhere to social standards that
require their relations with these women to be kept secret. Throughout
the book, then, solitude seems less determined by fate and personality
than by the community, which forces characters into their detachment
from society, a condition that grows comfortable and irreversible over
time.

CIVILISATION
One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read as an allegory of
Colombian history, with the book’s one-hundred-year span standing
in for hundreds of years of the nation’s past. Many of the novel’s
events—such as the Buendía family arriving in Macondo and
establishing a town, the military conflict between the Liberal and
Conservative parties, the expansion of the railway to connect colonial
settlements, and the hegemony of the American Fruit Company over
Colombian produce—echo the most critical developments of the
Colombian nation. While at first, Márquez seems to be depicting a
civilization in ascendance (a growing town with new technologies and
possibilities), the town reverses its course, falling into disrepair
caused by the repetitive destruction of civil wars and the stagnation of
local innovation. Therefore, the novel suggests that civilization’s
progress is a futile illusion.

Even in its infancy, Macondo does not seem to have great promise.
When José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguaran leave their home of
Riohacha, Colombia, to seek a better life for themselves, José Arcadio
Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors, suggesting a city with no content
of its own that instead reflects everything around it. While their hope
had been to live in a secluded place free of the outside authority of
others, Macondo’s new residents struggle with their desire to be free
from outside influence, while also wanting the conveniences of
modern life, which are only attainable through interaction with
outsiders. José Arcadio Buendía is the best example of this tension, as
he threatens to leave Macondo—the city he himself established—to
move to a place with greater access to new modern inventions.
However, José Arcadio Buendía’s interest in technology does not
mean that he’s able to bring innovation to Macondo. When new
technology is introduced to Macondo by the gypsies and others, it
advances the town’s way of life, but it fails to spark people to
innovate successfully on their own. Macondo seems to embody the
hall of mirrors of its founding vision: it doesn’t create anything of its
own, and therefore it can’t influence the outside world or even sustain
itself without the ideas of others.

As the novel progresses, Macondo makes peace with itself as a city

that is not wholly separate from the rest of society, and its measured
embrace of outside influence allows it to thrive for a time: new
residents come, new amenities become normal, and the economy
begins to boom as industry arrives. However, these developments
always come at a cost. For example, when the Colombian government
sends a magistrate to govern Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía
compromises with him to retain some of the independence that
Macondo is accustomed to. Nonetheless, the introduction of outside
politics brings strife to their peaceful town as political parties cleave
the town and lead to decades of fruitless civil war. Furthermore, the
introduction of the railroad brings with it the arrival of “gringos” who
seek ways to profit from the land, including Mr. Herbert who sees
bananas as a new investment opportunity, something the people of
Macondo didn’t realize they could export to grow their economy.
While the arrival of the American fruit company grows the town and
its economy, the people of Macondo see the arrival of these new
people as a challenge to their way of life, as gambling, drinking and
prostitution increase in the presence of the newcomers.

Worse, the people of Macondo come to rely on the work provided by

the plantation, the business that the influx of new residents brings, and
the imported goods that begin to flood the town. Eventually,
when José Arcadio Segundo joins the workers in fighting for their
rights and 3000 protestors are massacred, the people of Macondo are
so dedicated to the fruit company that they refuse to believe the
massacre actually occurred. When the weather turns bad and the
American fruit company evacuates Macondo, the workers leave, the
imported goods stop coming, and there is not enough work for
everyone, so the economy collapses, leading to Macondo’s rapid
decline.

Though history is often depicted as constant forward progress,

Márquez makes the point in this novel that many of the events of
history repeat themselves or regress instead of constantly improving.
The town of Macondo, by the novel’s end, has fallen into dilapidation
and abandonment, and the town is eventually destroyed entirely by a
hurricane, bringing it back to a state of wilderness, just as it was
before the Buendía family arrived to develop the town. This shows
that progress is an illusion, and that all civilizations are destined to
eventually fall.

The repetition of names causes confusion to the reader, although the

author is simply reflecting the Spanish tradition of passing the father’s
name on to his firstborn, a tradition also found in Europe and the
United States. Jose Arcadio, by contrast, is recognized by his
monumental size and is referred to by the author as Jose ́ Arcadio,
while his father is referred to as Jose Arcadio Buendıa. Jose Arcadio,
before leaving Macondo to join a group of gypsies, leaves Pilar
Ternera pregnant with his son. When the baby is born, he is also
named Arcadio, honoring both the father and the grandfather.

INCEST
In One Hundred Years of Solitude,  love and lust are inextricably
tangled: familial love is confused with sexual love, husbands and
wives have so little sexual chemistry that they must satisfy their urges
with other partners, and the parentage of many characters is kept
secret, heightening the risk of incest. These complicated
circumstances are caused by the characters’ misplaced dedication to
propriety and social norms. Márquez suggests that if the characters
were more honest about their mistakes and desires, then their lives
would be more straightforward and fulfilling.

Though the Buendía family is continually afraid of incest and its

punishment (having children with a pig tail, as their incestuous
ancestors did), their fear is not so strong as to overcome the power of
their sexual attraction to their relatives. The patriarch of the
family, José Arcadio Buendía, is the first character in the story to
commit an act of incest when he marries his first cousin Úrsula
Iguaran. Though the family warns them against marrying each other,
José Arcadio Buendía says he doesn’t care if the child is born with a
deformity because he loves Úrsula so completely; luckily, none of
their children is born with the tail of a pig. There are negative social
consequences to their union, though: José Arcadio Buendía
kills Prudencio Aguilar for mocking him, and the couple leaves their
hometown to found Macondo, a place where they won’t be judged. 

Throughout the story Márquez indicates that, despite the pervasive

fear of a child with a pig tail, the real danger of incest comes from its
social and psychological effects: causing divisions in the family and
insecurity around the legitimacy of one’s parentage. For one, the
Buendías’ inability to grow their family beyond its original
bloodline exaggerates their isolation and solitude. Incest, in this
context, keeps them from growing their community through
intermarriage. And when characters do intermarry, it not only fails to
incorporate new family members, but it also estranges old ones. For
instance, when José Arcadio falls in love with his adopted
sister, Rebeca, Úrsula disowns them. The couple is passionately in
love with one another, and because the threat of the pig’s tail does not
apply to their possible progeny (they’re brother and sister, but not by
blood), they decide that their relationship is worth the sacrifice of the
rest of their family.

In addition to these incestuous developments, many characters find

themselves barred by social propriety from the person they love, a
comment on the way that rules of decorum can end up causing more
harm than good. Aureliano Segundo, for example, marries an
outsider named Fernanda del Carpio to whom he is not physically
suited, but Fernanda’s Catholicism causes her to refuse divorce and
even look past his passionate affair with Petra Cotes. The passion
between Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes has positive effects
beyond just their mutual satisfaction, prompting extreme fertility in
the livestock they raise together, a sort of proof from the natural world
that they belong together, despite the fact that their community
doesn’t accept their union. Furthermore, Aureliano Segundo and
Fernanda’s daughter, Meme, has an illegitimate
child named Aureliano through her passionate affair with Mauricio
Babilonia. Fernanda insists on keeping the baby a secret, claiming he
arrived out of nowhere in a basket and raising him as an orphan, never
revealing his true parentage for the sake of social propriety.

This social shame takes Mauricio Babilonia’s life, destroys Meme’s,

and creates secrecy about bloodline that results, finally, in the child
with the tail of a pig. Despite generations of incestuous temptation,
the first child born with this dreaded defect is born to Aureliano
and Amaranta Úrsula (who do not know they’re related), just before
the city is destroyed by a hurricane. Both Amaranta Úrsula and the
baby die shortly after birth, which seems to be a punishment for her
and Aureliano’s sin, however unintentional. Incest, then, seems like a
taboo that should be respected, as is pedophilia, since Colonel
Aureliano Buendía’s young bride Remedios Moscote dies during
pregnancy, perhaps a punishment for Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s
pedophilic passion for her. Despite suggesting that the universe has
some taboos that must be respected, though, Márquez generally shows
that honesty and desire should take precedence over social propriety.
Following social norms leads to unfulfilling relationships, shame,
loneliness, and life-destroying secrecy.

The novel ends in the simultaneous death and birth of a child whose
name is Rudrigo. He is the offspring of an illegitimate love affair
between an aunt and a nephew. The infant is finally devoured by ants.
The very ending of the lives of Buendia family had been primarily
predicted by Melquidas, and now that Aureliano Babilonia, the
nephew attempts to discover the mysteries in Melquidas's manuscripts,
he perishes in a strong storm. Such an occurrence
coincides with the discoveries of Melquidas's coded manuscripts in
which he predicted that a child with a pig tail will be born, the last
member will sweep away in a strong storm. Consequently, the child's
mother dies of the bleeding after the childbirth. Marquez tells the story
of a family which for a hundred years did their best to prevent having a
child with pig's
tail; however, their very efforts in preventing it were useless.
THE MIMC MAN

Ralph begins his narrative depicting his first arrival in London for his
studies, “shortly after the end of the war,” and the “boarding-house,
called a private hotel, in the Kensington High Street area,” where he
began to live (Naipaul 1967: 7). He is writing his memoir at this
private hotel, where he has been provided with a rickety wretched
table for his act of writing. We learn that he can never have a settled
life and house; his destiny somehow binds him to homelessness. What
he feels is emptiness, nothingness, darkness, despair, despondency,
chaos, disorder, meaninglessness, insecurity, and horror! Later on, at
the end of the novel we see him as an experienced and mature person
who thinks his only home is his imagination and writing.

The Mimic Men can be considered an autobiographical

bildungsroman because it narrates the life of a young man who
creates a self as the culmination of his psychological, intellectual,
and moral development. The way Naipaul handles his material as a
bildungsroman is not a linear procession of events. He does not begin
with Ralph’s childhood; he begins with a glimpse of his student days
in London, comes to the present, goes to his childhood, comes to the
present, and so on. This is a circular notion of history, and the
important thing is the idea, not the technical tools like plot, setting,
characterization, etc. Such a style of writing is an act of subverting the
petrified codes of the empire and achieving authenticity.
Undoubtedly, the motive to establish difference with the imperial
standards this way, using textual strategies of subversion, is
characteristic of almost all postcolonial writers. In short, when Ralph
constructs an independent self and identity, Naipaul simultaneously
constructs an independent and authentic writing style
The major themes that emerge from a reading of his novels are
related to the problems of the colonized people: their sense of
Alienation from the landscapes, their identity crisis, the paradox
of freedom and the problem of neocolonialism in the ex-colonies.
The people who can no longer identify with a cultural heritage lose
the assurance and integrity which the locating racial ancestor
provides. In addition, the harsh conditions of colonialism have left the
West Indian bad conditions under the burden of poverty and
ignorance. The Mimic Men, however, is more than a mere elaboration
of Naipaul's' previous West Indian novels: it is a profound re
enactment of the growth and nature of the East Indian, west Indian
psyche and its reaction to the three cultures, Indian, Creole and
English, which influence it. In the process, Kripal Singh, the narrator,
confessor and visionary, comments on power, politics, social and
racial interactions, sex, education, displacement, isolation and identity
crisis as experienced by the ex-colonial. Each topic is used to
illuminate a facet of his mind.

The main plot of the novel takes place on the imaginary island of
Isabella, which, in the novel, is continuing its existence still under
indirect British rule and dependency, even though it is supposedly a
newly liberated Caribbean island. As an inevitable result of having
been a colony of the British Empire, the culture and the language of
the Isabella people have been influenced greatly, of course not
excluding also the identities and characters of those people from the
range of influence of colonial power. The most striking example to
these people, who have lost their sense of orientation in between two
cultures, and are dragged in a liminal space that is created as a result
of their being ex-colonized, is Ranjit Ralph Kripal Singh. In The
Mimic Men, the protagonist Ralph has many elements borrowed from
the British culture. He uses few Isabella words and mainly prefers to
communicate in English – even his love life is shaped by the
preference of this language and he falls in love with Sandra, who is of
English origin. Also, he moves to London to get an education at an
English university. When he moves back home, he chooses to build a
Roman house and live in it, instead of using a traditional wooden
Isabella house for accommodation, because he cannot trust in the way
these houses are built anymore. However, after the Western
experience in London, Ralph realizes his yearn for Isabella, where he,
in return, feels the lack of London again. Ralph is a person, who has
lost his sense of belonging: he can never be fully happy anywhere,
neither in the land he has emigrated from nor in the land he has
immigrated to.
While he was there he developed a kind of relationship with the
Maltese housekeeper who took care of Mr. Shylock’s building. She
was another colonized woman who moved to live with many other
Maltese people in London. Although Singh had an affair with that
woman he looked at her like many other women he met in public
houses. She tried to show her love to him and move with their relation
to another level, but Singh refused to develop it. He was a womanizer
who got affairs with many ladies among which Stella Stockwell,
Sandra who became his wife later. He kept moving from one suburb
to another looking for his identity and a person to establish his life
with. In this regard, his situation reminds the reader of the famous
race novel, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Perhaps the first
name of the main character is not by chance, since it brings
associations of that character and his aimless wanderings and loss in
New York

BHABHA’S MIMICRY
The source of the concept of a mimic person originates back to Lord
Macaulay‟s infamous “Minute on Education” in 1835, where he
expressed his ideas about the advantages of the European influence on
India. According to this speech, Macaulay put forward the idea that
the European education is the only solution for creating civilized and
modern people, claiming that “a single shelf of a 5 good European
library [was] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”
(Macaulay, 1). Indeed, the European education helped to shape the
identities and behaviors of non-Europeans, in the end of which
formation, mimic people, who were neither fitting with their countries
of origin nor with Europe, were created. Homi Bhabha has coined the
term mimicry, which came into being as a consequence of the
aforementioned Europeanizing strategies and formation processes, to
explore “the ambivalence of colonial discourse” (Bhabha, “Of
Mimicry and Man”, 85). the main aim of the colonizer in colonial
discourse is to perform power and authority over the colonized to
ensure the maintenance of the hierarchy between the master and the
subject. These power relations between the colonizer and the
colonized are sustained through the employment of mimicry, which
can be interpreted as a strategy deployed by the colonizer. In this
frame the colonizer is civilizing the colonized, by providing him/her
with a proper English education and integrates him/her thus into the
society. This way the mimic person perceives himself/herself as a
functioning part of the colonizer‟s sphere and advocates advantages
that are brought with the presence of the colonizing mission of the
West to the East, as Macaulay is also putting it into words in his
infamous Minute. Bhabha defines mimicry as “one of the most elusive
and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge”

MIMCRY THROUGH LANGUAGE

Language is one of the most important aspects on which British
colonialism has left its highly effective imprints on the Isabella Island.
In The Mimic Men it can be observed that the imaginary Isabella
language, which seems to be a mixture of African languages, based on
the assumption that Isabella symbolizes a formerly colonized
Trinidadian island in the novel, is not actively used anymore by the
residents of the island. Even Ralph himself barely mentions only a
few Isabella words in the course of his narration, one of them being
the word „Asvamedha‟ 1 . As there is nothing left of a pure and
untouched Isabella language, a new language, which could be called
as the Isabella Creole (Trinidadian Creole), emerged from the
molding of two languages: the Isabella language and English. Naipaul
has deliberately created a sub-language, from the combination of
English, as the speech of the colonizer, and Isabella language, as the
speech of the colonized, with the aim of substituting for the lack of
tradition. “in a society like [Ralph„s], fragmented, inorganic, no link
between man and the landscape, a society not held together by
common interests, there [is] no true internal source of power, and no
power [is] real which did not come from the outside” (Naipaul, 246),
the English language is granted a much more significant role in the
novel than a mere language.

Firstly, English is the language of the magazines on the island, which

constitute the core of the meetings of Ralph‟s sisters and cousins, who
are introduced with and affected by the impacts of the global world
through the news and stories told in these magazines. Very much
interested in the current state of affairs in Hollywood, symbolizing the
West, Ralph‟s cousins, especially Sally, take the lives of American
stars as role models and feel attracted to their glamour, mostly
fascinated by their physical appearances. As an expected result of the
cultural appropriation process that comes along with colonization,
these magazines and also newspapers are composed in English,
making it the language of the West that opens the gates of the outer
world for the people living on the Isabella Island. English is not only a
unifying element that brings the West closer to Isabella, but it is also
the common ground of the residents of the boarding house in London,
where Ralph lives upon his arrival to the city. The English language
does not seem to be belonging to any nation or country specifically –
it is common property and stands for universality, bringing people
together both nationally and internationally.
Bhabha says The effect of mimicry is camouflage” (85). In the novel,
English is used as a symbol of utmost politeness and hospitality (or it
is employed at least to seem so) in order to camouflage reality. The
usage of English to seem polite and hospitable is not only true for the
Isabellans but also for Europeans, who live on the island. However,
not being able to pretend, and maintain the camouflage forever, as
soon as the Isabellans and the Europeans get angry and lose control
over themselves, they gradually tend to shift towards the usage of
their native tongues “losing control [also] of [their] English accent”
(Naipaul, 77), just like the Swedish host who shows Sandra and Ralph
around in her house and later loses her temper when Sandra makes
some negative comments about her house, saying that “it must get
damned cold up [t]here [at the house of the Swedish host]” (Naipaul,
77). After serving her guests some “open sandwiches”, the Swedish
host sees Sandra and Ranjit out with an “English [that] sounded like
Swedish when she said goodbye” (Naipaul, 77).
POLITICS OF NAME - As a person, who prefers to be called Ralph
in England, because it brings out his English dimension, and Ranjit in
Isabella, as it reflects his Isabella dimension, Ralph has managed to
find himself a place in between two countries, ending up as a mimic
person, the most powerful weapon of whom is the English language,
with which he tries to mold his identity.
By using the English language with the Isabella accent and creating an
Isabella Creole, Ralph and the Isabellans in the novel are actually also
performing a power play, in which they outface the colonizer. As
Ralph has tried to recreate himself in the gaze of the colonizer,
speaking in English and acting like an English person, he has also
enabled for the colonizer to have a look at its own gaze and thus
subverted its power. e, in the hands of the colonized, language can and
has become also a powerful tool to both undermine the colonizer and
to put forward its own force. The double vision of mimicry in the use
of language has turned into a weapon in the hand of the formerly
„muted‟.

Ralph overtly expresses actually his insecure feelings towards his

home country, using the situation of his house as a symbol for it. He is
embarrassed from his past in Isabella, and from the limited
possibilities that were offered to him by his country. He wants to
escape from Isabella to the West, on the pursuit of power and
happiness. That is why he chooses to build a Roman house in Isabella,
when they decide to get one together with Sarah, his wife. With its
sturdy cement walls it is indestructible for Ralph, just like the self-
determination of the West, copying the culture of the colonizer,
because it resembles power.

. He always feels the absence of something as an immigrant in

London, but then when he returns to his homeland Isabella he also
does not reach a level of consolidation with his life. Even success
makes him feel distorted. In fact, “the further Ralph Singh moves
away from an organic relationship with his society, the further he
moves away from understanding his self or his society‟s truth”
(Cudjoe, 111), drifting more and more towards a fragmented self.
Accompanied by the perpetual metaphor of a “ship-wreck” (Naipaul,
32) and the “feeling of being adrift” (32), there is a continuous search
for order in Ralph‟s life – he is dreaming of an order that he is never
achieving in the novel, as a result of his fragmented self and sense of
lack, which Bhabha defines as an inevitable outcome of mimicry, due
to which mimic men end up being “„partial [existences]‟, both
„incomplete‟ and „virtual‟” (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, 86).
Probably one of the most striking incidents that reflects the
psychology of an immigrant perfectly in The Mimic Men, occurs
when Ralph admits that he enjoys going “to the airport and [sit]
drinking in the lounge with intransit passengers, listening to the names
of foreign cities” (Naipaul, 83). Being on international terrains makes
him happy and he feels complete during his time at the airport
By simply mimicking the gestures of Mr. Shylock, Ralph acts as if he
was a true English man, but in reality this is only a “camouflage”
(Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, 90) as Bhabha puts it in Lacanian
terms. Never being able to fill the ambivalent gap between being and
becoming, Ralph ends up as a “recognizable Other” (Bhabha, “Of
Mimicry and Man”, 86) whilst trying to recreate himself with the gaze
of the Other.

ROOTLESSNESS
early scenes, then, which pass during Singh’s stay as a student in
London, tell about Singh’s disillusionment with London, to where he
has come, “fleeing disorder,” and “to find the beginning of order.” In
a second flash-forward, however, as Singh arrives at Isabella, he calls
his journey to and from London a “double journey” and a “double
failure.” This “ambivalent situation” indicates that Singh is nowhere
at home, and it is an indirect criticism towards the “coloniser”, who
can be said to be the original cause of Singh’s “rootlessness”, identity
crisis, because he has “displaced” colonial people like Singh. Singh
calls his return to Isabella a mistake, but he believes that the cause of
his mistake has been the “injury inflicted” on him by London, where
he can never feel himself as anything but “disintegrating, pointless,
and fluid.” This is another example that shows to what extent Singh
has been affected by the coloniser’s practice of “displacing” people.
Leaving Isabella, Singh feels relief. But as he arrives in London Singh
feels he is “bleeding.” For the second time he senses the “forlornness”
of “the city” on which he has twice “fixed so important a hope.”
Twice he has come to the “centre of Empire” to find order, but twice
he has been disillusioned.
IDENTITY CRISIS
The identity crisis that his characters face is due to the destroying of
their past and those who eventually overcome the crisis are the ones
who have recovered their past or somehow managed to impose an
order on their histories and moved on in life. Naipaul’s attitude to
culture has always been progressive. It is the Third- World’s blind
mimicry of the West that he cannot stomach. He lashes out at the
shortcomings of Third- World societies, which have their roots in
their traditional cultures, but are unmindful of them in their blind
following of the West. They are thus unable to maintain a distinct
identity.

In the end, “[Ralph] become[s] what [he] see[s] of [himself] in the

eyes of others” (Naipaul 25), as he wants to create a new identity for
himself that meets the expectations of the colonizer, as a result of his
Eurocentric education. Freed from his links to his past on the island of
Isabella, he assumes different roles and in a sense acts as a Caribbean,
putting on an English mask.
By naming roads and buildings, Singh reinforces the reality of his
power and political career, and by renaming himself, he redefines
his own reality However, the irony is that by changing his name,
Ranjit Kirpalsingh in fact has changed the very identity for which
he is searching so desperately. In his attempt to define himself
through his political activities, Singh realizes that he has become
separated from his people and has to play a role to preserve his
position. He feels incomplete because he is aware of the
meaninglessness of his role as a colonial politician.
 Naipaul has imitated the English language by contrasting it with the
Hindi language. Words from Hindi language, local reality, and
cultural alteration vividly describe the alienation of Ralph’s identity
and, most importantly, show his resistance in uprooting his origins,
thereby accepting the dominance and authenticity of the English
language.
ALIENATION
The Mimic Men seeks to see and judge the colonial experience on
people’s attitudes, reactions and understanding of things around them.
In other words, this novel has its action centered on the past, the life
in Isabella and how its rhythm has been drastically affected. Thus the
collective tone of the following paragraph “we” is fully emphasized:
We were a haphazard, disordered and mixed society. It was a group to
whom the island was a setting; its activities and interests were no
more than they seemed. There were no complicating loyalties or
depths; for everyone the past had been cut away. The deep feeling of
inferiority as a result of being colonized increased their sense of
alienation and displacement. The British colonial education and
culture were presented as a substitute or at least arrival for the original
Aryan education, culture, traditions and even religion. They were
introduced as new systems of discipline, success, and achievement.
As a result they dominated these people’s lives to the extent that the
colonized started to identify themselves with the colonizers rather
than with their original culture.
The deep feeling of inferiority as a result of being colonized increased
their sense of alienation and displacement. The British colonial
education and culture were presented as a substitute or at least arrival
for the original Aryan education, culture, traditions and even religion.
They were introduced as new systems of discipline, success, and
achievement. As a result they dominated these people’s lives to the
extent that the colonized started to identify themselves with the
colonizers rather than with their original culture.

IMPACT OF COLONISATIOIN
freedom and self-autonomy are both associated with the colonizer
even after independence. In an attempt of taking over the sugar cane
factories the government of the island was paralyzed and not able to
implement that single decision which will lead to the improvement of
the island’s economy. The politicians, represented by Singh, were
avoided by Lord Stockwell and one of the ministers and looked at as
children, “You can take back to your people any message you like”
(p.224). This proposes that the people of Isabella are not free and they
only have a kind of false 49 independence. Describing the impact of
colonialism on the whole population of the island, Singh succeeds in
portraying the chaotic political and economic situation that prevailed
soon after the independence. The political situation was not stable, the
social life was disturbed and confused, the economic situation was
declining, “The pace of colonial events is quick, the turnover of
leaders rapid…and I know that the people who supplanted me are
themselves about to be supplanted.” (p.6) Thus the people were
confused as regards to their real identity and life the people of the
island do not know whom they want to identify themselves with, their
original culture or the colonizers’.
Because he couldn’t bring himself to life in Isabella, he determined to
change his name Ranjit Kripal Singh into Ralph Singh, “this secret
name is my real name but it ought not be used in public” (p.100). This
shows the deep psychological and social impact of colonialism on
him. He is ready to sacrifice his cultural and social identity for the
sake of getting money and prestige. The educational system that has
been imposed by the colonizers increases Singh’s cultural alienation.
It makes him feel that self-realization cannot be achieved on the
island; he has to look for it somewhere else; the colonizers’ country.
This was his start as a mimic man, a man who copies and believes that
the colonizer has the right solution for all his life problems. he goes
over his economic and political activities. He was trying to find his
real identity through these activities. He admits that he had no certain
gift, profession, or skill to master any certain activity. However, his
construction work was inspired by having a residential area similar to
those of Britain. His political activities were not his own rather they
were suggested by his friend Browne; however he was not that skillful
politician. Clearly he has nothing original in his character. Nor does
he maintain any national side in his actions.
Browne, on the other hand, is one of Singh’s early life friends who
maintained strong relationship with him. He studied at the same
Imperial school of Isabella, and then he became a journalist and a
renowned politician. With Singh he founded a political party that
failed to achieve its goals of reform and social justice. Browne is
another mimic man who associates himself with the colonizers rather
than with his Isabellan society. He is influenced by the imperial
educational system of Britain, which in turn influences his cultural
and ideological perception. Browne and Singh have many points in
common, especially in their attitudes toward both the colonizing
culture and their own native culture; likewise he faces problems of
self-identity and alienation.

The Mimic Men is not simply a novel; rather, it is an attempt to

magnify the conditions and surroundings of displaced expatriates
within a colonized world. In The Mimic Men he has presented a
profound understanding of alienation within three different cultures.
Singh has neither rejected his previous values and traditions of Indian
origin, nor has he completely adjusted to the Caribbean culture.
Finally, Naipaul's protagonist character has failed to become a part of
London and, more precisely, the colonial empire. His failure to do so
has turned him into a deracinated individual with an uprooted identity.

FUNNY BOY

In Funny Boy, most of Selvadurai’s (and consequently Arjie’s) time

and attention is occupied by the socioeconomic, racial and religious
tension within Sri Lanka; a country in which he was born and lived
until the 1983 riots forced his mixed Tamil/Sinhalese family to
migrate to Canada. Even though the novel is very much about the
personal growth of the protagonist Arjie (modeled on the author),
each individual episode highlights the growing unrest during
Selvadurai’s residence in Sri Lanka. Since his family is a mixed
(Tamil/Sinhalese) one, Funny Boy focuses a great deal on the
complications that arise between friends, lovers and neighbours when
political ethnic differences impinge upon them. The chapter titled
“Radha Auntie” examines this through the oftrepeated trope of the
‘starcrossed lovers,’ albeit with a twist. Radha (a Tamil) and Anil (a
Sinhalese), more like the ‘statecrossed lovers’ are unable to sustain
their relationship given their ethnic differences. The couple does
attempt to give their relationship a chance until violence intervenes
While discussing ‘being’ or Dasein, Heidegger claims that every
human (every Dasein) is completely shaped by his or her culture. To
this he calls ‘das man’ i.e. ‘the One’ or ‘ the They’. ‘the One’ consists
other Dasein whose presence creates the world in which an individual
Dasein can act. The social practices established by ‘the one’ embody
1
Dasein’s possibilities For example in Funny Boy, being a boy in
Srilanka (where Homosexuality is ‘funny’) Arjie cannot play
‘bride-bride’ or being a Tamil arjie’s father has to be careful while
dealing with Sinhala. Having no control over the ‘thrown-ness’ of
one’s social environment, one becomes part of a culture, and all of
one’s behaviours are consequently learned from that culture.

MASCULINITY AND QUEERNESS

Set from the late 1960s to the early 1980s in Sri Lanka, Funny
Boy follows the childhood and adolescence of Arjie Chelvaratnam as
his nation hurdles toward civil war. At the same time as he watches
Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority gradually turn against his
minority Tamil community, Arjie comes to terms with the
consequences of being gay in a patriarchal culture and family.
From his earliest days, Arjie fails to meet his family's expectations of
a boy; he prefers staging weddings with his girl cousins, acting in
plays, and reading love comics and Little Women to playing cricket
with his male cousins or rugger with the boys at school. When his
parents start openly worrying about his “funny” sexuality and Arjie
realizes that he is indeed gay, they all react with deep embarrassment
and shame. Ultimately, Arjie’ does not manage to find acceptance for
his sexuality or even come out to his family during the novel; instead,
his great accomplishment is simply learning to accept himself,
reject shame, and disavow his family’s demand that he follow in
other men's footsteps.

Arjie grows up in a family and society structured by rigid gender roles

and a distinct concept of masculinity that he does not, and never will,
fit into. At the family's monthly gatherings, which they call “spend-
the-days,” Arjie and his numerous cousins have complete freedom to
play and invariably split up by gender: the boys play cricket, and the
girls act out weddings—along with Arjie, who is always the bride.
When Arjie’s cousin Tanuja (also known as “Her Fatness”) tries to
take over his role, she calls him a "pansy," "faggot," and "sissy."
Although she is no older than ten, she already has a deeply ingrained
sense of what masculinity—the “proper” way of being male—
requires. In order to cultivate his masculinity, Arjie’s dad (whom he
calls Appa, the Tamil word for “father”) sends him to his
brother Diggy’s school, Victoria Academy, in the novel’s penultimate
chapter. As Diggy puts it, Appa “doesn’t want [Arjie] turning out
funny,” but instead thinks he can “force [Arjie] to become a man” by
surrounding him with Victoria’s rambunctious, aggressive, athletic
students. Indeed, Appa’s continual fear that Arjie will become
“funny” and his commitment to masculinizing his son suggest that he
sees masculinity, femininity, and sexuality as changeable, rather than
innate, which means that being properly masculine is in one’s control
and reflective of one’s value as a human being. Like Radha auntie,
Arjie too realizes that ethnic politics can impinge on relationships
forged when individuals fall in love. In Arjie’s case however, the
private and public spheres intersect with particular intensity for unlike
Radha auntie Arjie’s break from tradition is twofold: not only does
Ajie experience a crossethnic love, but also one which deviates from
the normative sexual values established by society; by falling in love
with a Sinhalese boy Shehan he breaks norms of ethnic allegiance as
well as sexual orientation. From an early age, Arjie is targeted as a
“funny boy.” Arjie’s father, determined to “correct” his “queerness”
sends him to Queen Victoria’s Academy, a school famed for its
discipline. The school’s principal, Black Tie, administers it under a
strict hierarchy reminiscent of the British colonial era. The school’s
system of hierarchy includes and in fact is reinforced by a batch of
prefects which police, report and discipline irregularities. Under Black
Tie’s direction prefects are particularly vigilant about any sign
(howsoever remote) of queer sexuality. Boys are routinely whipped
and given other corporal punishments if they display or are suspected
of having shown any hint of effeminacy; one such instance is of
Shehan being canned by Black Tie for wearing his hair long. This
system of punishment replicates that which exists at the national
level─it is arbitrary, unjust and intolerant and does not provide for
any avenues of appeal
Arjie's deviation from traditional masculinity leads his family to
continuously shame him, and he quickly internalizes this shame
and begins to think of himself as inherently flawed. Largely
because they do not know what to make of him and fear that his
failure to be conventionally masculine reflects their failure as a
family, the Chelvaratnams repeatedly call Arjie “funny”—a word that
both betrays the family’s anxiety about admitting the possibility of
having a gay son and shows that their homophobia is based on an
unjustified, instinctual revulsion, tied to the cultural norm of
heterosexual marriage and families. While he is too young to even
understand his family’s conviction that he is the wrong kind of boy,
Arjie understands that he is being punished for simply being himself
and following his desires, things over which he has no control.
Although Arjie’s sexuality mostly falls out of view during the middle
part of the book, when he goes to Victoria Academy, he befriends and
falls in love with a boy named Shehan, about whom his brother
Diggy repeatedly warns him. After Arjie and Shehan first have sex,
Arjie immediately sees that Appa disapproves of Shehan and thus
lashes out at him, although internally, Arjie actually blames himself
for committing a “dreadful act” and feels he has betrayed his family.
Over time, Arjie has absorbed his family and culture’s sense of shame
surrounding queerness, and like many young people overcome with
such shame about sex, he is unable to fully appreciate or embrace his
first love.

Ultimately, however, Arjie does manage to overcome his shame,

and this shows the groundlessness and arbitrariness of the
conventional gender roles his family tried to squeeze him into.
Even in the first chapter, when Amma forces Arjie to play with the
boys rather than the girls, she reveals that she does not completely
believe in the restrictive notion of masculinity she is enforcing: she
says that Arjie must go with the boys "because the sky is so high and
pigs can't fly," as though gender separation is just an inherent and
necessary feature of the world. When Arjie challenges her, Amma's
frantic reaction proves to him "how little she actually believed in the
justness of her actions." She has done what she was pressured to do,
not what she believes. Eventually, Arjie learns to form his own beliefs
about gender and love; he learns to see "powerful and hidden
possibilities" in his friendship with Shehan, to recognize that the same
behavior his family shames him for also allows him to uncover his
true self and pursue his true desires without self-censorship. After
berating Shehan, Arjie soon realizes that what they share is love, not
deviance: he sees that Shehan "had not debased me or degraded me,
but rather offered me his love," and so he decides to take this at face
value instead of continuing to fight against his genuine desires.

In simply deciding that his own feelings are more important than the
roles he is asked to fit into, Arjie overcomes his family’s restrictive
assumptions and accepts himself. Although Arjie does not come out to
his family or win their acceptance—which is another, longer battle—
he does realize that society’s scripts for what men should do, how
they should carry themselves, and who they should love really just
reflect everyone else’s fear of difference. While others see gender
roles as inevitable, like the fact that "the sky is so high and pigs can't
fly," Arjie proves to himself that an alternative is possible and learns
to reject shame in favor of self-acceptance.

Among these “queer” boys is Arjie who makes friends with and later
falls in love with a Sinhalese boy, Shehan. Arjie and Shehan begin to
protect each other in the wake of abuse as much at the hands of Black
Tie as the Sinhalese prefects who take pleasure in expressing their
authority by assaulting Tamil boys. But for Arjie, there is no real
difference between Black Tie, a Tamilian by ethnicity, trying to
maintain control over a multiethnic school and Mr. Lokubandara, the
Vice Principal who wants to transform the school into a Sinhalese
one. Arjie makes the difficult choice between ethnic allegiance and
sexual desire. When asked to recite poetry before a full audience
which includes a minister who would determine the destiny of the
school’s multiethnic character, Arjie deliberately gives a poor
performance. In the past Arjie had witnessed Black Tie regularly cane
and whip Shehan who persisted in wearing his hair long and thereby
showing effeminate tendencies. The novel is ambiguous whether
Shehan is a regular target for Black Tie because Shehan is queer, or
because Shehan is Sinhalese or because Shehan is both queer and
Sinhalese. Nonetheless, Arjie comes to realize that so long as Black
Tie remains the principal of Queen Victoria’s Academy, Shehan will
be treated brutally. By causing Black Tie to look ridiculous in the
minister’s presence, Arjie indeed puts an end to his authoritarian rule
and thereby extends protection to his lover

FORBIDDEN LOVE AND FAMILY

While Funny Boy's most important love story is undeniably

about Arjie discovering his sexuality and meeting Shehan, the vast
majority of the book follows other relationships, in all of which
people fall in love across, despite, and even because of the social
boundaries that separate them. Like Arjie’s sexuality, these forbidden
relationships draw familial ire; and yet, whereas Arjie learns to accept
his sexuality despite his family’s criticism, the book’s forbidden
relationships seem to end, for the greater good, because of a similar
family pressure. While Funny Boy shows how class, race, ethnicity,
and culture are never absolute barriers to desire, it also makes a case
for prioritizing family—to whom one is already committed—over
particular love interests.

Beyond Arjie's own love story, Funny Boy is full of relationships that

cross social barriers and prove that differences of class, race,
ethnicity, and culture can seldom stamp out the feelings of love—and,
in many cases, are precisely what attract people to one another. One
example of such a relationship is Radha Aunty’s relationship
with Anil, a Sinhala boy who acts alongside her in a production
of The King and I. Although she initially finds him annoying, Radha
grows attracted to Anil because she realizes that he loves her despite
belonging to an opposed ethnic group. In fact, The King and I also
foreshadows the failure of Radha and Anil’s interethnic relationship:
in the play, an English governess and her employer, the King of Siam,
fall in love but can never be together because, as Amma explains,
interracial love was not (and in many places is still not)
conventionally accepted. Amma’s ambivalence about interracial love
becomes even more clear when Arjie learns about her previous
relationship with Daryl Uncle, a white burgher who grew up in Sri
Lanka but has lived elsewhere for at least 15 years. And beyond
Arjie's relationship with Shehan, his early affinity for romantic
Sinhala comic books and insistence on playing the bride during his
mock weddings with his girl cousins demonstrate how his romantic
desires consistently land outside the sphere of social acceptability.
Whether ethnic, cultural, racial, or class-based, social barriers cannot
quash the feelings of love.

And yet all these characters face immense pressure for loving
someone outside their social group; they are ultimately forced to
choose between romance and family. Both Radha Aunty's mother
(Ammachi) and Anil’s father are horrified that their children are
dating across ethnic lines. And Daryl's return to Sri Lanka, while
Appa is in Europe for business, sows division in Arjie's
family. Neliya Aunty, Diggy, and Sonali grow distant and resentful
as Amma and Daryl grow close; Arjie is horribly ill the whole time,
and when he recovers, Amma brings him to a bungalow in the hills,
where Daryl soon shows up. As Daryl explains that burghers and
native Sri Lankans were effectively barred from dating one another in
the past because of social prejudice (obviously referring to his history
with Amma), Arjie, too, begins to resent him for getting between
Amma and the rest of the family. As though to prove Daryl's point
about the social pressures against interracial marriage, Aunty Doris,
the school theatre director who is also a burgher, warns Radha about
marrying Anil by divulging the fact that her own family rejected her
—by moving back to England without even informing her or leaving
contact information—when she married a Tamil man. Radha, Anil,
Amma, and Daryl—plus, eventually, Arjie and Shehan—end up in
moral dilemmas: while they know their families are wrong to reject
their love, they still have to pick between the sure thing that is family
and the enchanting uncertainty that is romance.

Ultimately, while the novel openly criticizes the social divisions and
norms that make intergroup marriages taboo, it also suggests that
people are correct to choose family over their transgressive
relationships. When Radha gets violently attacked by a Sinhala mob
on a train, she finally caves in to her mother's pressure, quits the play,
and marries Rajan, the Tamil man to whom she was already engaged.
After this, Arjie explains that he has lost the ability to think “that if
two people loved each other everything was possible,” a view that
might strike a young reader as cynical, but is full of wisdom: love is
powerful but can always be rediscovered, and sometimes prudence
requires sacrificing it and waiting. Amma loves and loses Daryl twice:
once in her youth, and then again when he dies while covering the
Tamil-Sinhala riots in the northern city of Jaffna. While his death is a
tragedy, Daryl Uncle likely would have broken up Arjie’s family had
he stayed with Amma. (When she visits the civil rights lawyer Q.C.
Uncle, he encourages her to do something similar: to give up her
passionate desire to avenge Daryl’s death in order to save her family
from the government’s wrath.) Aunty Doris, of all people, is the one
to deliver the book’s message about hasty love: after her husband’s
death, Doris explains, she began to wonder whether it was really
worth it to marry the person she loved and lose her family, since she
presumably could have had a successful marriage with someone else
down the line. In Funny Boy, romance is fleeting and limitless,
while family is enduring and finite; it is always possible to find
another love but never possible to find new parents and siblings.

Although Funny Boy shows how the social constraints around love

will never stop people from falling in love and sees a deep tragedy in
relationships cut off by family and cultural pressures, it also shows
how, in many cases, the tragedy of losing love might be preferable to
the tragedy of losing one's community or family. Despite this
preference for family ties, Funny Boy also pushes for constructing a
world in which people are not forced to choose between love and
community, in which difference makes relationships more vibrant
instead of more difficult.

ETHNIC CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE

Behind Arjie’s coming of age, Funny Boy also traces the lead-up to

the Sri Lankan Civil War, a growing tension between Sri
Lanka’s Sinhala majority and sizable Tamil minority that eventually
erupts into violent conflict and becomes the book’s driving force,
uprooting Arjie and his family forever. And yet Selvadurai presents
this ethnic conflict from the perspective of a boy who scarcely cares
about ethnicity. In doing so, he sheds light on the fundamental illogic
of the quest to secure a country for a single group of people, and a
single group of people for one’s country, in addition to showing the
horrifying impact of the random violence that seems to inevitably
emerge from such ethno-nationalist politics. By emphasizing personal
relationships that transcend the ethnic divide, Selvadurai suggests
that pluralism is the only route to political coexistence.
During Arjie’s childhood and adolescence, the reader watches Sinhala
and Tamil Sri Lankans grow increasingly mistrustful of and violent
toward one another. Arjie’s first encounter with this tension is hearing
about Ammachi’s hatred toward the Sinhalese, a response to her own
father’s murder by a racist Sinhalese mob in 1958. At this point, not
only does the young Arjie fail to understand Ammachi’s racism, but
he does not even know what the word "racist" means. When Daryl
Uncle returns to Sri Lanka after 15 years, he is there to document the
violent conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese in the northern region
around Jaffna. His mysterious death, declared an accident by the
police likely responsible for it, shows that the Sri Lankan government
actively backed the Sinhalese and drove the nation toward war. In the
following chapter, a young man named Jegan, the son of Appa’s old
friend, comes to live with Arjie’s family. A former Tamil Tiger,
Jegan’s presence makes Appa’s Sinhalese employees suspicious; after
the police falsely but publicly accuse Jegan of plotting an
assassination and then quietly release him, thugs deface Appa’s hotel
with threats and Appa feels he has no choice but to fire Jegan.
Although he disapproves of violence, Jegan is treated as a threat and a
pariah, which reflects Sri Lankans’ severe ethnic paranoia in the lead-
up to the war. The book’s Epilogue most saliently captures the toll of
Sri Lanka’s ethnic violence, as Arjie and his family have to flee their
house (which is then burned down), Appachi and Ammachi are
murdered, Appa’s hotel is burned down, and numerous Tamils lose
their homes and businesses, not to mention their lives.

The conflict between Sri Lanka’s Tamils and Sinhalese is

fundamentally a conflict over belonging: it is about who gets to
own the nation, whom the government should serve, and whether
different groups can coexist at all. Over the book’s course, Arjie’s
family increasingly feels that they are being defined out of the
national identity and made foreigners in their own homeland. The
novel explains that the earliest waves of Tamil rebellion and
violence followed the government’s attempts to make Sinhala the
nation’s only official language. The Tamil Tigers demanded their
own state because they felt Tamils were being made sub-citizens,
while being Sri Lankan increasingly came to mean being Sinhalese.
Yet ethnicity never means anything to Arjie, who is no more attached
to Tamil than Sinhalese identity; he shows how it is not at all
inevitable for ethnic identities to take on political weight. He takes
Sinhala-medium classes and surrounds himself with Sinhala friends;
in fact, he does not even speak Tamil. Despite this, when Jegan comes
to Colombo, the family realizes that, as Tamils, they are under
constant threat from the government, which can declare them
extremists and targeted them whenever it wishes. And near the book’s
end, Arjie and Shehan grow distant, despite being one another’s
primary source of emotional support; Shehan cannot understand
Arjie’s sense of constant persecution, and Arjie can’t fathom how
Shehan feels normal enough to propose they go see a movie. While
they never turn against each other, their rift shows how the
experiential and empathetic gap between a majority group and an
oppressed minority group can easily foster misunderstanding.

The book also shows numerous close relationships between Tamils

and Sinhalese that prove mutual understanding is possible and
disprove the government and Tamil Tigers’ shared assumption that
successful nations should be drawn on ethnic lines. During the riots,
Sinhalese neighbors and friends save Arjie’s family:
the Pereras shelter them from the mob that burns down their house,
and Chithra Aunty and Sena Uncle lodge them afterwards. In other
words, the Chelvaratnams manage to survive because of Sinhalese
people who put personal relationships and human connections before
the bare fact of ethnic difference. Similarly, in the last chapter, Arjie
chooses to side with the pro-Sinhalese Mr. Lokubandara over the
school’s racially indifferent principal, Black Tie, in order to save
Shehan from Black Tie’s cruel punishments. In a Sri Lanka apparently
unable to see past ethnicity, Arjie stubbornly insists on doing so, and
in his last reflections on immigration he expresses hope that Canada
might be able to accept him in a way his own home country cannot.
However, he also sees it possible that Canada will be just as racist as
Sri Lanka, and that his family could be reduced to begging. While he
can envision a better kind of nation, then, Arjie does not necessarily
expect it to be possible.

Alix Goldberg, in “Discussion of the Sinhala/Tamil conflict

throughout Funny Boy” says that, “after Radha Auntie’s direct
experience of violence, she no longer has an open mind with regards
to her love for a Sinhalese man. She reflects the view of her extended
family, in transferring the feelings of hatred towards her attackers
onto Anil. Ammachi and Kanthi Auntie’s feelings when they say,
‘haven’t you people done enough? Please go […] you are not wanted
here,’ are indicative of Radha Auntie’s transformation as she does not
stop them or intervene in time […]” Through the instances of Radha
Auntie, Selvadurai tries to point out that political realities of Sri
Lanka do not allow its people to romanticize love. Auntie Dorris’s
experience of being left alone in the world for having married a man
belonging to another community is indicative of that.

Radha Auntie takes Dorris as a warning of what the future might hold
for her if she decides to marry Anil. It is not that one experience with
violence has ‘closed her mind’ or that she has transferred her hatred
for her attackers onto Anil. That would be too reductive, given the
complex situation that informs the novel. It is just that Radha has
come to realize that, “[even] if two people love each other, the rest is
[equally] important […]” (ibid 78). The anger that she then directs at
Anil is misdirected only in that she is angry at the impossibility of the
situation and has come to realize that love cannot conquer all. Radha
lives in a real world — one that is torn by an ethnic conflict that
seems to have no resolution. The novel debunks the belief “that if
two people loved each other everything was possible

Radha and Anil are not the only lovers torn apart by the conflict. Arjie
too is directly affected by it in his relationship with Shehan, a
Sinhalese boy. In the chapter “The Best School of All,” Arjie
formulates his own opinion about the conflict. As he begins his
relationship with Shehan, he is made more and more aware of the
hostilities around him; the hostility is not only because of his
homosexuality; the tension between Black Tie and the Vice Principal
of the school represent a microcosm of the larger tensions. Not
wanting to “choose sides,” Arjie questions the distinction between the
two.

Selvadurai’s objective is not to communicate that tensions mark only

Sinhalese/Tamil relations. He also reflects on the manner in which
tensions dominate and dictate same race relations owing to a false
sense of “nationalism” that the two warring parties circulate and
survive on. In the chapter “Small Choices,” Arjie’s father warns
Jegan, “one must be careful not to antagonize the wrong people.”
Jegan’s protests, that he has been given the job on merit, and therefore
should not enlist resentment on the part of Sinhalese employees, are
justified. But the reasons quoted by Arjie’s father are equally
reasonable.

In the chapter “See No Evil” Daryl Uncle’s death/murder (his

tension with the government) is only an example of the plight of
those that set out to find “the truth.” Daryl tries to investigate
state terrorism, as he understands and sympathizes with Tamil
resentment. However, he disappears without a trace and his body
later turns up, dead, floating in the river. Circumstantial evidence
points to death by drowning but Arjie and his mother know better.
Even before his dead body is found, Arjie and Amma suspect foul
play when they realize that Daryl Uncle’s house has been ransacked.
They decide to file a missing person’s report with the police only to
realize that they inadvertently bring trouble for Somaratne, Daryl
Uncle’s domestic help. Somaratne is picked up by the police for
questioning and is falsely accused and arrested for ransacking Daryl
Uncle’s place and stealing things from it. Later Arjie and Amma find
out that Somaratne was so badly beaten in police custody that one of
his arms is paralyzed. The two eventually reconcile with the reality of
the political situation in Sri Lanka: there is no justice for the minority
community and the only way that a Tamil person can survive is to lie
low and not question either the government

In Funny Boy, Selvadurai shows both how real people are far more
complex than ethnicity and also how they are nevertheless reduced to
it by political forces. In doing so, he points to the insolubility of ethnic
conflict over national identity: people will never be as one-
dimensional or cut-and-dry as nationalists and racists want them to be,
and so nationalism and racism, beyond perpetrating horrible violence,
cannot achieve the kinds of societies they want to begin with. It is
only because some Sinhalese and Tamils do not care about being
Sinhalese or Tamil, in other words, that the efforts to create a fully
Sinhalese or Tamil nation will inevitably fail.

JUSTICE, POWER AND MORAL AWAKENING

As it follows Arjie’s coming of age, Funny Boy also becomes a tale
of moral development: Arjie encounters and grapples with blatant
injustices that challenge his initial faith in human goodness. Yet,
rather than giving up on the idea of a just world and resigning himself
to the self-interested worldviews of those around him—including, at
times, his own family—Arjie continues to pursue the just world he
recognizes as impossible. Nevertheless, in responding to the abuses of
power around him, he learns that pressure and manipulation—the very
tools of injustice—are often the only way to convince the powerful to
give the powerless their due.

Arjie learns early and clearly the world is not just, and in fact that the
same adults who claim to be the bearers of morality often fail to
choose good over evil. When Arjie and his younger
cousin Tanuja (whom he calls "Her Fatness") fight over the sari they
use in their game of bride-bride, Ammachi immediately blames Arjie
and ignores the rest of the children’s attempts to fully explain the
situation. Because Kanthi Aunty had already shamed Arjie for his
femininity, Ammachi decides the fight is his fault and makes him do
housework instead of playing with the cousins on the family's
subsequent Sunday gatherings. Similarly, in the chapter "The Best
School of All," Victoria Academy's draconian principal, Black Tie,
arbitrarily and cruelly punishes students he calls the "future ills and
burdens of Sri Lanka" for offenses like wearing long hair or winking,
even as he ignores violent bullying by students like Salgado.
And Daryl Uncle’s death shows how such abuses of power play out
on a larger scale. The Sri Lankan government targets Daryl for
documenting its human rights violations against Tamils, and then
refuses to investigate his mysterious death—for which Amma is
convinced it is responsible. And Arjie sees another dimension of
injustice—his own family's complicity in it—when he learns that his
father's hotel is supporting the prostitution of underage boys and,
later, goes with Amma to the village of Daryl's servant
boy, Somaratne, only to be violently kicked out because the village's
impoverished inhabitants are so used to being exploited by wealthy
city people like Arjie's family.

While witnessing, experiencing, and learning about his complicity in

profound injustices could have easily led Arjie to give up on his faith
in good and evil altogether, instead it actually inspires him to pursue
the kind of justice he thinks the world deserves. Daryl and Jegan,
who dedicate their careers to exposing the Sri Lankan government's
abuses of power and helping beleaguered Tamils, respectively, inspire
Arjie to try and live with a sense of moral purpose rather than simply
following the path of least resistance. And he continues to feel
inspired by them even after they suffer horribly for taking moral
stands. Due to his respect for both Daryl and Jegan, Arjie takes a
prominent role in his family's attempts to save each of them: he insists
on helping his mother search for Daryl (including by visiting
Somaratne's village) and tries to support Jegan while Appa grapples
with the consequences of firing him. In both cases, though, despite his
sense of what is right and effort to pursue it, Arjie does not yet have
the means to make a difference. His first serious opportunity to stop
an abuse of power comes when Black Tie labels Arjie’s friend and
lover, Shehan, as one of the so-called "ills and burdens." When Black
Tie makes Arjie recite poems, he punishes Arjie and Shehan together
whenever Arjie messes up; even though Arjie is ostensibly one of
Black Tie's favorites and Shehan one of the “ills and burdens,” their
struggle becomes one and the same, and ultimately Arjie ends up
deliberately messing up the poems in order to sabotage Black Tie’s
important ceremony and ensure that the more docile vice
principal, Mr. Lokubandara, takes over Black Tie’s job. In doing so,
Arjie willfully disobeys authority for the first time in order to end
Shehan’s unjust and unequal punishment.

In fact, by the end of the book, Arjie learns that he must fight
those who abuse their power with their own tools: ruthlessness
and manipulation. Because they do not care about morality, the
perpetrators of injustice do not respond to moral appeals; instead, they
must be pressured to correct their ways or be forced out of power.
Arjie first learns this in childhood, after Her Fatness ousts him from
the game of bride-bride and the adults force him to play cricket with
the boys. When reasoning with the adults and cousins fails, Arjie
hatches a plot: he hides the bride’s sari, he so seriously disrupts the
boys' group that they kick him out of their cricket game, and when
Her Fatness agrees to make him the groom in exchange for the sari, he
uses his sense of humor to steal his cousins’ attention and ruin her
moment, as if to remind her that she is not the game’s legitimate
bride. But Arjie truly proves his willingness to fight dirty for the right
cause when he deliberately botches his poetry recital at Victoria
Academy, which makes Black Tie’s speech based on the poems look
nonsensical. The audience breaks out in laughter when Black Tie
furiously insults Arjie before dutifully reading the contradictory
speech that he had prepared. At the end of the chapter, Black Tie is
poised to lose the presidency and stop unfairly punishing Shehan for
simply having had long hair on one day months before.

As a tale of moral development, then, Funny Boy is peculiar for

showing not only how Arjie gains a moral compass, but also how he
realizes that far too much of the adult world seriously lacks one. The
systematic injustices Arjie sees in Sri Lanka come from unchecked
power, and so he learns to respond to these injustices on the only
terms that they know: by doing everything in his power to hold the
unaccountable accountable.

POSTCOLONIAL LIT. ES

JAMES CLIFFORD-DIASPORAS

The essay discusses problems of defining a traveling term, in changing

global conditions. How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of
displacement, of constructing homes away from home? What
experiences do they reject, replace, or marginalize? The essay focuses
on recent articulations of diasporas from contemporary black Britain
and from anti-Zionist Judaism: quests for nonexclusive practices of
community, politics, and cultural difference.

Tracking Diasporas- , Khachig Tölölian writes, “Diasporas are the

exemplary communities of the transnational moment.” But he adds
that diaspora will not be privileged in the new “Journal of
Transnational Studies” and that “the term that once described Jewish,
Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger
semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate,
refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic
community” (Tölölian 1991:4—5).

Roger Rouse gives an example of the A nguillan migration: It

has become inadequate to see Anguillan migration as a movement
between distinct communities, understood as the loci of distinct sets
of social relationships. Today, Anguillans find that their most
important kin and friends are as likely to be living hundreds or
thousands of miles away as immediately around them. More
significantly, they are often able to maintain these spatially extended
relationships as actively and effectively as the ties that link them to
their neighbors. In this regard, growing access to the telephone has
been particularly significant, allowing people not just to keep in touch
periodically but to contribute to decision-making and participate in
familial events from a considerable distance. – bei ng ab le to
m aint ain bonds transna ti on al ly

It is now widely understood that the old localizing strategies—by

bounded community, by organic culture, by region, by center and
periphery—my ob- scure as much as they reveal. Separate places
become effectively a single community “through the continu- ous
circulation of people, money, goods, and information” (Rouse
1991: 14). “Transnational migrant circuits,” as Rouse calls them,
exemplify the kinds of complex cultural formations that current
anthropology and intercultural studies describe and theorize.
Border theorists have recently argued for the critical centrality of
formerly marginal histories and cultures of crossing. Thèse approaches
share a good deal with diaspora paradigms. But borderlands are distinct
in that they presuppose a territory defined by a geo- political line: two
sides arbitrarily separated and policed, but also joined by le- gal and
illegal practices of crossing and communication. Diasporas usually
pre- suppose longer distances and a separation more like exile: a
constitutive taboo on return, or its postponement to a remote future.
Diasporas also connect multiple communities of a dispersed
population. Systematic border crossings may be part of this
interconnection, but multi-locale diaspora cultures are not necesarily
defined by a specific geopolitical boundary. It is worth holding onto
the historical and geographical specificity of the two paradigms, while
recognizing that the concrete predicaments denoted by the terms border
and diaspora bleed into one another. As we will see below, diasporic
forms of longing, memory, and (dis)identification are shared by a
broad spectrum of minority and migrant populations. And dispersed
peoples, once separated from homelands by vast oceans and political
barriers, increasingly find themselves in border relations with the old
country thanks to a to-and-fro made possible by modem technolo- gies
of transport, communication, and labor migration. Airplanes,
telephones, tape cassettes, camcorders, and mobile job markets reduce
distances and facili- tate two-way traffic, legal and illegal, between
the world’s places.
This overlap of border and diaspora experiences in 1ate-20th-
century everyday life suggests the difficulty of maintaining
exclusivist paradigms in our attempts to account for transnational
identity formations.
Safran discusses a variety of collective experiences in terms of their
simi- larity and difference from a defining model. He defines
diasporas as follows: “expatriate minority communities” (1) that are
dispersed from an original “cen- ter” to at least two “peripheral” places;
(2) that maintain a “memory, vision, or myth about their original
homeland”; (3) that “believe they are not—and per- haps cannot be—
fully accepted by their host country”; (4) that see the ancestral home as
a place of eventual return, when the time is right; (5) that are committed
to the maintenance or restoration of this homeland; and (6) of which the
group’s consciousness and solidarity are “importantly defined” by this
continuing rela- tionship with the homeland (Safran 1991:83—84). These,
then, are the main fea- tures of diaspora: a history of dispersal,
myths/memories of the homeland, al- ienation in the host (bad host?)
country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland,
and a collective identity importantly defined by this re- lationship.
“In terms of that definition,” Safran writes, “we may legitimately
speak of the Armenian, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian, Cuban, Greek,
and perhaps Chi- nese diasporas at present and of the Polish diaspora
of the past, although none of them fully conforms to the ‘ideal type’ of
the Jewish diaspora” (1991: 84). Perhaps a hesitation is expressed by
the single quotes surrounding “ideal type,” a sense of the danger in
constructing a definition, here at the outset of an impor- tant comparative
project, that identifies the diasporic phenomenon too closely with one
group. Indeed, large segments of Jewish historical experience do not
meet the test of Safran’s last three criteria: a strong attachment to and
desire for literal return to a well-preserved homeland. Safran himself
later notes that the notion of return for Jews is often an eschatological
or utopian projection in re- sponse to a present dystopia. And there is
little room in his definition for the principled ambivalence about
physical return and attachment to land which has characterized much
Jewish diasporic consciousness, from biblical times on.
In Safran’s prefiguration of a comparative field—especially in his
“centered” diaspora model, oriented by continuous cultural
connections to a source and by a teleology of “return”—African
American/ Carib- bean/British cultures do not qualify. These histories
of displacement fall into a category of quasi diasporas, showing only
some diasporic features or moments. Similarly, the South Asian
diaspora—which, as Amitav Ghosh has argued (1989), is not so
much oriented to roots in a specific place and a desire for return as
around an ability to recreate a culture in diverse locations—falls
outside the strict definition.
A more polythetic definition (Needham 1975) than Safran’s might re-
tain his six features, along with others. I have already stressed, for
example, that the transnational connections linking diasporas need not
be articulated primarily through a real or symbolic homeland—at least
not to the degree that Safran implies. Decentered, lateral connections
may be as important as those formed around a teleology of
origin/return. And a shared, ongoing history of displacement,
suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the
projection of a specific origin.
Whatever the working list of diasporic features, no society can be
expected to qualify on all counts, throughout its history. And the
discourse of diaspora will necessarily be modified as it is translated
and adopted.
Diaspora’s Borders- Rather than locating essential features, we
might focus on diaspora’s borders, on what it defines itself against.
Diasporas are caught up with and defined against (I) the norms of nation-
states and (2) indigenous, and especially autochthonous, claims by
“tribal” peoples.
The nation-state, as common territory and time, is traversed and, to
varying degrees, subverted by diasporic attachments. Diasporic
populations do not come from elsewhere in the same way that
“immigrants” do. In assimilationist national ideologies such as those of
the United States, immigrants may experience loss and nostalgia, but
only en route to a whole new home in a new place. Such narratives are
designed to integrate immigrants, not people in diasporas. Whether the
national narrative is one of common origins or of gathered populations, it
cannot assimilate groups that maintain important allegiances and
practical connections to a homeland or a dispersed community located
elsewhere. Peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by
collective histories of displacement and violent loss cannot be “cured”
by merging into a new national community. This is especially true when
they are the victims of ongoing, structural prejudice. Positive
articulations of diaspora identity reach outside the normative territory
and temporality of the nation-state.'
But are diaspora cultures consistently antinationalist? What
about their own national aspirations? Resistance to assimilation can
take the form of reclaiming another nation that has been lost,
elsewhere in space and time, but powerful as a political formation here
and now. There are, of course, antinationalist nationalisms, and I do not
want to suggest that diasporic cultural politics are somehow innocent
of nationalist aims or chauvinist agendas. Indeed, some of the most
violent articulations of purity and racial exclusivism come from
diaspora populations. Nation and nation-state are not identical. ‘A
certain prescriptive antinationalism, now intensely focused by the
Bosnian horror, need not blind us to differences between dominant and
subaltern claims. Diasporas have rarely founded nation-states: Israel is the
prime example. And such “homecomings” are, by definition, the
negation of diaspora.
Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can
never, in practice, be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in
transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they
encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host
countries and their norms. Diaspora is different from travel (though it
works through travel practices) in that it is not temporary. It involves
dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away
from home (and in this it is different from exile, with its frequently
individualistic focus). Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends
together, both roots and routes to construct what Gilroy describes as
alternate public spheres (1987), forms of community consciousness
and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national
time/space in order to live inside, with a difference. Diaspora cultures
are not separatist, though they may have separatist or irredentist moments.
The history of Jewish diaspora communities shows selective
accommodation with the political, cultural, commercial, and
everyday life forms of “host” societies. And the black diaspora culture
currently being articulated in postcolonial Britain is concerned to
struggle for different ways to be “British”—ways to stay and be
different, to be British and something else complexly related to Africa
and the Americas, to shared histories of enslavement, racist
subordination, cultural survival, hybridization, resistance, and political
rebellion. Thus the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of trans
nationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local,
as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement. The
simultaneous strategies of community maintenance and interaction
combine the discourses and skills of what Vijay Mishra has termed
diasporas of exclusivism and diasporas of the border (1994).
Idea of alternate spaces is important. Creating a community
conscious and solidarity in your own place outside the diasporic
places.
Tribal or “Fourth World” assertions of sovereignty and “first
nationhood” do not feature histories of travel and settlement, though
these may be part of the indigenous historical experience. They stress
continuity of habitation, aboriginality, and often a “natural”
connection to the land. – different type of isolation as the bond with
the land is not same.

Diaspora exists in practical, and at times principled, tension with

nativist identity formations. The essay by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin
that I will discuss below makes a diasporist critique of autochthonous
(“natural”) but not indigenous (“historical”) formulations. When
 claims to “natural” or “original” identity with the land are joined to an
irredentist project and the coercive power of an exclusivist state, the
results can be profoundly ambivalent and violent, as in the Jewish
state of Israel. Indeed, claims of a primary link with “the homeland”
usually must override conflicting rights and the history of others in
the land. Even ancient homelands have seldom been pure or discrete.
The ayodhya and babri masjid conflict wherein there might not
even have been a significant temple before babri masjid but
since it was of significance for the muslime.
Lines too strictly drawn between “original” inhabitants (who often
themselves replaced prior populations) and subsequent immigrants risk
ahistoricism. With all these qualifications, however, it is clear that the
claims to political legitimacy made by peoples who have inhabited a
territory since before recorded history and those who arrived by
steamboat or airplane will be founded on very different principles.
CLAIM ON LEGITIMACY IS GOING TO BE ON DIFF BASIS.

Diasporist and autochthonist histories, the aspirations of migrants and

natives, do come into direct political antagonism; the clearest current
example is Fiji. But when, as is often the case, both function as
“minority” claims against a hegemonic/assimilationist state, the
antagonism may be muted. Indeed there are significant areas of overlap.
“Tribal” predicaments, in certain historical circumstances, are diasporic.
For example, inasmuch as diasporas are dispersed networks of peoples
who share common historical experiences of dispossession,
displacement, adaptation, and so forth, the kinds of transnational alliances
currently being forged by Fourth World peoples contain diasporic
elements. United by similar claims to “first ness” on the land and by
common histories of decimation and marginality, these alliances often
deploy diasporist visions of return to an original place—a land commonly
articulated in visions of nature, divinity, mother earth, and the ancestors.
Dispersed tribal peoples, those who have been dispossessed of
their lands or who must leave reduced reserves to find work, may
claim diasporic identities. Inasmuch as their distinctive sense of
themselves is oriented toward a lost or alienated home defined as
aboriginal (and thus “outside” the surrounding nation-state), we can
speak of a diasporic dimension of contemporary tribal life. Indeed,
recognition of this dimension has been important in disputes about tribal
membership. The category tribe, which was developed in U.S. law
to distinguish settled Indians from roving, dangerous “bands,” places a
premium on lo- calism and rootedness. Tribes with too many
members living away from the homeland may have difficulty
asserting their political/cultural status. This was the case for the
Mashpee who, in 1978, failed to establish continuous “tribal”
identity in court. For in claiming both autochthony and a specific,
trans regional worldliness, new tribal forms bypass an opposition
between rootedness and displacement—an opposition underlying many
visions of modernization seen as the inevitable destruction of
autochthonous attachments by global forces. Tribal groups have, of
course, never been simply “local”: they have always been rooted and
routed in particular landscapes, regional and interregional networks.
If tribal groups survive, it is now frequently in artificially
reduced and displaced conditions, with segments of their
populations living in cities away from the land, temporarily or
even permanently. In these conditions, the older forms of tribal
cosmopolitanism (practices of travel, spiritual quest, trade,
exploration, warfare, labor migrancy, visiting, and political
alliance) are supplemented by more properly diasporic forms
(practices of long-term dwelling away from home). The
permanence of this dwelling, the frequency of returns or visits
to homelands, and the degree of estrangement between urban and
landed populations vary considerably. But the specificity of tribal
diasporas, increasingly crucial dimensions of collective life, lies
in the relative proximity and frequency of connection with
land-based communities claiming autochthonous status.
I have been using the term tribal loosely to designate peoples
who claim natural or/rsinotion sovereignty. They occupy the
autochthonous end of a spectrum of indigenous attachments:
peoples who deeply “belong” in a place by dint of continuous
occupancy over an extended period. (Precisely how long it takes
to become indigenous is always a political question.) Tribal
cultures are not diasporas; their sense of rootedness in the land is
precisely what diasporic peoples have lost. And yet, as we have
seen, the tribal-diasporic opposition is not absolute. Like
 diaspora’s other defining border with hegemonic national- ism,
the opposition is a zone of relational contrast, including similarity
and entangled difference.

The Currency of Diaspora Discourses

North America offers to its racialized sojourners very limited

opportunities of advancement bc of its socio economic constraints
such as its nonunion low wage sectors. This regime of flexible
accumulation requires massive transnational flows of capital and
labor—depending on, and producing, diasporic populations. Bc of
this population of women have increased in the work force. This
development has produced an “hourglass” mobility that is masses of
exploited labours at the bottom and a very narrow passage to a large
relatively affluent middle and upper class.

It is worth adding that a negative experience of racial and economic

marginalization can also lead to new coalitions: one think s of Maghrebi
diasporic consciousness uniting Algerians, Moroccans, and
Tunisians living in France, where a common history of colonial and
neocolonial exploitation contributes to new solidarities. And the
moment in 1970s Britain when the exclusionist term black was
appropriated to form antiracial alliances between immigrant South
Asians, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans provides an- other example of
a negative articulation of diaspora networks.
Diaspora consciousness is produced positively through
identification with world historical cultural/political forces, such as
“Africa” or “China.” The process may not be as much about being
African or Chinese, as about being American or British, or wherever
one has settled, differently. It is also about feeling global. Suffice it
to say that diasporic consciousness “makes the best of a bad situation.”

Flexible citizenship as Aihwa ong describes, denotes people

caught up in transnational movements of capital which extends
from binational citizens.For instance – Anguilla/Redwood City or
Haiti/Brooklyn to the Chinese investor “based” in San Francisco who
claims, “I can live anywhere in the world, but it must be near an
 airport” (Ong 1993: 41). This pseudo universal cosmopolitan
bravado stretches the limit of the term diaspora. But to the extent that
the investor, in fact, identifies and is identified as Chinese,
maintaining significant connections elsewhere, the term is appropriate.
Ong says of this category of Chinese immi- grants: “Their subjectivity
is at once deterritorialized in relation to a particular country, though
highly localized in relation to family” (Ong 1993:771 —772). Since
family is rarely in one place, where exactly do they “live”?
Much more could be said about class differences among diasporic
populations. In distinguishing, for example, affluent Asian
business families living in North America from creative writers,
academic theorists, and destitute “boat people” or Khmers fleeing
genocide, it will be apparent that degrees of diasporic alienation, the
mix of coercion and freedom in cultural (dis)identifications, and the
pain of loss and displacement are highly relative.
Diaspora experiences and discourses are entangled, never clear of
commodification. For example, the Los Angeles Festival of 1991,
orchestrated on a grand scale by Peter Sellars, celebrated the lumpy U.S.
melting pot by giving the bewildering diversity of Los Angeles a global
reach. The festival connected Thai neighbor- hoods with imported
dancers from Thailand. The same was done for Pacific is- landers and
various Pacific Rim peoples.'° Transnational ethnicities were collected
and displayed in avant-garde juxtaposition, ostensibly to consecrate a
non-Eurocentric art/culture environment. Los Angeles, successful host to
the Olympics, could be a true “world city.” The festival was well
funded by Japanese and American corporate sponsors, and for the
most part it delivered a nonthreatening, aestheticized transnationalism.
The low-wage sweatshops where many members of the celebrated
populations work were not featured as sites for either “art” or “culture”
in this festival of diasporas.
Diasporic experiences are always gendered. But there is a
tendency for theoretical accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures to
hide this fact, to talk of travel and displacement in unmarked ways,
thus normalizing male experiences. Janet Wolff’s recent analysis of
gender in theories of travel is relevant here (Wolff 1993). When
diasporic experience is viewed in terms of displacement rather than
placement, traveling rather than dwelling, and disarticulation rather
than rearticulation, then the experiences of men will tend to predominate.
Women’s experiences are particularly revealing. Do diaspora
experiences reinforce or loosen gender subordination? On the one
hand, maintaining connections with homelands, with kinship networks,
and with religious and cultural traditions may renew patriarchal
structures. On the other, new roles and demands, new political
spaces, are opened by diaspora interactions. Increasingly, for
example, women migrate north from Mexico and from parts of the
Caribbean, independently or quasi-independently of men. While
they often do so in desperation, under strong economic or social
compulsion, they may find their new diaspora predicaments conducive
to a positive renegotiation of gender relations. With men cut off
from traditional roles and supports, with women earning an
independent, if often exploitative, in- come, new areas of relative
independence and control can emerge. Life for women in diasporic
situations can be doubly painful—struggling with the material and
spiritual insecurities of exile, with the demands of family and
work, and with the claims of old and new patriarchies. Despite
these hardships, they may refuse the option of return when it presents
itself, especially when the terms are dictated by men.
At the same time, women in diaspora remain attached to, and
empowered by, a “home” culture and a tradition—selectively.
Fundamental values of propriety and religion, speech and social
patterns, and food, body, and dress protocols are preserved and
adapted in a network of ongoing connections outside the host
country. But like Maxine Hong Kingston redeeming the woman
warrior myth from all the stories transmitted to her from China
(1976), women sustaining and reconnecting diaspora ties do so
critically, as strategies for survival in a new context. And like the
Barbadian women portrayed in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl,
Brownstones (1981)—who work hard to make a home in New
York while keeping a basic “aloofness” from “this man’s
country”—diaspora women are caught between patriarchies,
ambiguous pasts, and futures. The lived experiences of diasporic
women thus involve painful difficulty in mediating discrepant
worlds. Community can be a site both of support and oppression. A
couple of quotations from Rahila Gupta offer a glimpse of a
South Asian (“black British”) woman’s predicament:

Young women are ... beginning to question aspects of Asian

culture, but there is not a sufficiently developed network of
Black women’s support groups (although much valuable work
has been done in this area) to enable them to operate without the
support of community and family. This is a contradiction in
which many women are caught: between the supportive and the
oppressive aspects of the Asian community.
Patriarchal oppression was a reality of our lives before we came
to Britain, and the fact that the family and community acted as
sites of resistance to racist oppression has delayed and distorted
our coming together as women to fight this patriarchal
oppression. (Gupta 1988:27, 29]

Do diasporic affiliations inhibit or enhance coalitions? Yes and

no.. On the one hand, feelings of diasporic identity can encourage
antagonism, a sense of superiority to other minorities and migrant
populations.' 4 On the other, shared histories of colonization,
displacement, and racialization can form the basis for coalitions, as in
the anti-Thatcherite alliances of “black” Britain which mobilized
Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and South Asians in the 1970s. But such
alliances fall apart and recombine when other diasporic allegiances
come into focus, a loyalty to Islam in the Salman Rushdie dispute, for
example. There is no guarantee of postcolonial solidarity.

THE BLACK ATLANTIC- In There Ain’I No Black in the

Union Jack(1987), Gilroy shows how the diaspora culture of black
settler communities in Britain articulates a specific set of local and global
attachments. On one level, diaspora culture’s expressive forms
(particularly music) function in the defence of particular neighborhoods
against policing and various forms of racist violence. On another
level, they offer a wider “critique of capitalism” and a network of
transnational connections. In Gilroy’s account, the black diaspora is
a cosmopolitan, Atlantic phenomenon, embroiled in and transcending
national antagonisms such as Thatcherite England’s “cultural politics
of race and nation. Gilroy returns the “black” cultural tradition to a
historically decentered, or multiply-centered, Atlantic space. In the
process, he breaks the primary connection of black America with
Africa, introducing a third paradigmatic experience: the migrations
and re- settlings of black British populations in the period of European
colonial decline. Gilroy is preoccupied with ships, phonograph
records, sound systems, and all technologies that cross, and bring
across, cultural forms. The diaspora cultures he charts are thoroughly
modern—with a difference.
Gilroy’s black Atlantic decenters African American narratives,
bringing the Caribbean, Britain, and Europe into the picture.
“The history of the black Atlantic,” he writes, “... continually
crisscrossed by the movement of black people—not only as
commodities—but engaged in
 DIASPORAS 326

various struggles toward emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship, is

a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and
historical memory” (Gilroy 1992a: 193). Gilroy brings into view
“countercultures of modernity,” bringing black not only into the Union
Jack but also into debates over the tradition of Enlightenment
rationality. This black element is both negative (the long history of
slavery, the legacy of scientific racism, and the complicity of
rationality and terror in distinctively modern forms of domination) and
positive (a long struggle for political and social emancipation, and
critical visions of equality and difference that have been generated
in the black diaspora).

Experiences of unsettlement, loss, and recurring terror produce

discrepant temporalities—broken histories that trouble the linear,
progressivist narratives of nation-states and global modernization. Homi
Bhabha has argued that the homogeneous time of the nation’s imagined
community can never erase discontinuities and ambiguity and
uncertainity springing from minority and diasporic temporalities (1990).
He points at the fact that the state often attemots to erase the histories
of these people and rewrite in a way that benefits the nation state. This
does not necessarily change the history as the people still carry it in
their hearts.
“The trouble with the English,” Rushdie writes in The Satanic Verses,
“is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it
means.”
Linear history is broken, the present constantly shadowed by a
past that is also a desired, but obstructed, future: a renewed,
painful yearning. For black Atlantic diaspora con- sciousness
the recurring break where time stops and restarts is the middle
passage. Enslavement and its aftermaths—displaced, repeated
structures of racialization and exploitation—constitute a pattern of
black experiences inextricably woven in the fabric of hegemonic
modernity. These experiences form counterhistories, off-the-
beat cultural critiques that Gilroy works to redeem.
Gilroy supplements the analyses of Zygmunt Bauman (1989) and
 DIASPORAS 327
Michael Taussig (1986) on the complicity of rationality with racial
terror. At crucial moments, the choice of death or the risk of death
is the only possibility for people with no future in an oppressive
system. Gilroy’s reading of Frederick Douglass’s struggle with
the slave breaker probes such a moment, paired with the story of
Margaret Garner whose killing of her children to spare them from
slavery is retold in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Diaspora cultures are, to varying degrees, produced by regimes
of political domination and economic inequality. But these
violent processes of displacement do not strip people of their
ability to sustain distinctive political communities and cultures of
resistance. Obviously the mix of destruction, adaptation,
preservation, and creation varies with each historical case and
moment. Kobena Mercer works with this constitutive
entanglement in a penetrating essay, “Diaspora Culture and the
Dialogic Imagination.”

What is in question [in recent black British film) is not the

expression of some lost origin or some uncontaminated essence in
black film-language, but the adoption of a critical ‘voice’ that
promotes consciousness of the collision of cultures and histories that
constitute our very conditions of existence. [Mercer 1988:56]
There are important differences between Mercer’s and Gilroy’s
conceptions of diaspora. Mercer’s version is rigorously
antiessentialist, a site of multiple displacements and rearticulations of
identity, without privilege to race, cultural tradition, class, gender, or
sexuality. Diaspora consciousness is entirely a product of cultures and
histories in collision and dialogue. For Mercer, Gilroy’s genealogy of
British “blackness” continues to privilege an “African” origin and
“vernacular” forms—despite his stress on historical rupture and
hybridity and his assault on romantic Afrocentrisms (Mercer 1990).'
7 For Gilroy, Mercer rep- resents a “premature pluralism,” a
postmodern evasion of the need to give historical specificity and
complexity to the term black, seen as linked racial formations, counter
histories, and cultures of resistance.
JEWISH CONNECTIONS- Gilroy’s history of black Atlantic
diversity and conversation, his rejection of “Africa” as privileged
 DIASPORAS 328
source (a kind of Holy Land) while retaining its changing
contribution to a counterculture of modernity, echoes the language
of contemporary Jewish diasporism, anti-Zionist visions drawn from
both Ashkenazic and Sephardic historical experiences.
Being a jew is not about a race but a religion. Most of the time, the
ancestry can’t be traced back to Palestine or the Jewish land
therefore they cannot be associated with a particular land. Similarly,
Gilroy creates a parallel between the black Atlantic through his
rejection of afrocentered diaspora.
Positive transnationalism can be understood as ambivalent refusal or
indefinite deferral of return which finds validation in the both
displaced Africans and jews.

The empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes a

solidarity and connection there. But there is not necessarily a single
place or an exclusivist nation. How is the connection (elsewhere) that
makes a difference (here) remembered and rearticulated? In a forcefully
argued essay, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,”
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin defend an interactive conception of
genealogy—kinship not reducible to race in its modem definitions—as
the matrix for dispersed Jewish populations (1993). They offer sustained
polemic s against two potent at ternatives to diasporism: Pauline
universalist humanism (we are all one in the spiritual body of Christ)
and autochthonous nationalism (we are all one in the place that belongs, from
the be- ginning, to us alone). The former attains a love for humanity at the
price of imperialist inclusion/conversion. The latter gains a feeling of
rootedness at the expense of excluding others with old and new claims
in the land. Diaspora ideology, for the Boyarins, involves a principled
renunciation of both universalism and sovereignty, and an embrace of the
arts of exile and coexistence, aptitudes for maintaining distinction as a
people in relations of daily converse with others.
Permanent conditions of relative powerlessness and minority status justify
and render relatively harmless ethnocentric survival tactics—for
example, imposing marks of distinction on the body (circumcision), or
restricting charity and community self-help to “our people.” “Return,”
de- fined as exclusive possession of “the land,” is not the authentic
 DIASPORAS 329
outcome of Jew- ish history. Against the national/ethnic absolutism of
contemporary Zionism, Jonathan Boyarin writes, “we Jews should
recognize the strength that comes from a diversity of communal
arrangements and concentrations both among Jews and with our
several others. We should recognize that the copresence of those others
is not a threat, but rather the condition of our lives”.
Diasporic cultural identity teaches us that cultures are not preserved by
being protected from “mixing” but probably can only continue to exist as
a product of such mixing. Cultures, as well as identities, are constantly
being remade. While this is true of all cultures, diasporic Jewish
culture lays it bare because of the impossibility of a natural association
between this people and a particular land— thus the impossibility of
seeing Jewish culture as a self-enclosed, bounded phenomenon. In
other words, diasporic identity is a disaggregated identity. Jewishness
disrupts the very categories of identity because it is not national, not
genealogical, not religious, but all of these in dialectical tension with
one another. When liberal Arabs and some Jews claim that the Jews of
the Middle East are Arab Jews, we concur and think that Zionist
ideology dismisses this idea. “Diasporized,” that is disaggregated,
identity allows the early medieval scholar Rabbi Sa’adya to be an
Egyptian Arab who happens to be Jewish and also a Jew who happens
to be an Egyptian Arab. Both of these contradictory propositions must
be held together- Boyarins.

DIASPORIC PAST/FUTURES- Jewish life in Muslim Spain

before the expulsions—a rich, multireligious, multicultural
florescence—is one of the historical moments redeemed by this
vision. We enter, here, the whole geniza world of S. D. Goitein, the
1 I th-to-l 3th-century Mediterranean (and beyond) where Jews,
Muslims, and Christians lived, traded, borrowed, and conversed in
the process of maintaining distinct communities. 23

There are no innocent periods of history, and the geniza world had
its share of intolerance. For long periods and in many places,
people of distinct religions, races, cultures, and languages
 DIASPORAS 330
coexisted. Difference was articulated through connection, not
separation. In a recent book, After Jews and Arabs (1993),
which draws generously on Goitein's research and vision, Ammiel
Alcalay portrays a Levantine world characterized by cultural
mixing, relative freedom of travel, an absence of ghettos, and
multilingualism—the antithesis of current national, racia1, and
religiou s separations.
Alcalay’s history gives “regional” concreteness to a diasporist
Jewish history which, in the Boyarins version, is not connected to a
specific map/history. “Jewish history” is, of course, diverse and
contested. In the present Israeli state a division between
Ashkenazic and Sephardic/Mizrahi populations reflects distinct
diaspora experiences. As reclaimed in Alcalay's book, the
Sephardic strand offers a specific counterhistory of Arab/Jewish
coexistence and cross- over. Sephardic/Mizrahi histories may also
generate “diasporist” critiques by Arab-Jewish exiles within the
Israeli “homeland” (Lavie 1992; Shohat 1988, 1989). Sephardic
regional roots and emerging alliances with “Third World” or
“Arab” movements can articulate networks that decenter both the
diasporist figure of the “wandering Jew” and the overwhelming
importance of the Holocaust as defining moment in modern
“Jewish history.” In Israel, a minority of European Jews have taken
a leading role in defining an exclusivist Jewish state— predicated
on religious, ethnic, linguistic, and racial subordinations.
Sephardic/Mizrahi counterhistories question this state’s hegemonic
selfdefinition. Important as these struggles may be, however, one
should not overgeneralize from current hierarchical oppositions in
Israel. Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions are complex,
containing nationalist and antinationalist strands. There are strong
resources for a diasporist anti-Zionism in pre-Holo- caust
Ashkenazi history. (Indeed, the recent signing of a fragile peace
accord be- tween Israel and the PLO makes this vision, these
historical resources, seem less anachronistic. If a viable political
arrangement for sharing the land of Palestine finally emerges, Jews
and Arabs will need to recover diasporist skills for main- taining
difference in contact and accommodation.)
 DIASPORAS 331
Max Weinreich’s historical research has shown that the
maintenance of Ashkenazic Jewishness (yidishke yt) was not
primarily the result of forced, or voluntary, separation in distinct
neighborhoods or ghettos. Weinreich's prime specimen of
Ashkenazic border culture is Yiddish, the fusion language of which
he is the preeminent historian. He also lays great stress on the open-
ended process of Talmudic interpretation through which laws
(dinim) and customs (minhogim) are continuously adapted and
clarified anew in the light of the Torah (which, the Yiddish saying
goes, “contains everything”). The defining loyalty of the
Ashkenazaic tribe is to an open text, a set of interpretable norms,
not to
 DIASPORAS 332

a “homeland” or a even to an “ancient” tradition. I have been

quoting from a summary essay of 1967 in which Weinreich
characterizes Ashkenazic diasporic history without any mention of
return, Holy Land, or Israel. The distinction of Jew and non-Jew is
critical, but processual and nonessentialist: “It turns out that the very
existence of a division is much more important than the actual location
of the division line. More often than not, it appears, the distance
between
Jewish and non-Jewish patterns is created not by a difference in the
ingredients proper but rather by the way they are interpreted as
elements of the given sys- tem” (Weinreich 1967:2205). Difference,
for Weinreich, is a process of contin- ual renegotiation in new
circumstances of dangerous and creative coexistence.24 What is at stake in
reclaiming these different Ashkenazic and Sephardic di- asporist
visions, beyond their evident contribution to a critique of Zionism and
other exclusivist nationalisms? An answer is suggested by my own
belated route to the geniza world and the company of Goitein admirers: a
remarkable ethnog- raphy/history/travel hybrid, Zn an Antique Land by
Amitav Ghosh (1992). An Indian novelist-cum-anthropologist, Ghosh
writes of his fieldwork in the Nile Delta and in the process uncovers a
deep history of transnational connections between the Mediterranean,
Middle East, and South Asia—a history onto which he grafts his own
late 2Oth-century travel from one “Third World” place to an- other. In
the dispersed Cairo geniza archive, he sacks the almost forgotten story
of an Indian traveler to Aden, the slave and business agent of a Jewish
merchant residing in Mangalore. (The history of this archive is itself
an engrossing sub- plot.) Ghosh’s search for his 12th-century precursor
opens a window on the me- dieval Indian Ocean, a world of
extraordinary travel, trade, and coex istence among Arabs, Jews, and
South Asians. Like Janet Abu-Lughod’s important overview, Before
European Hegemony (1989), and the earlier world historical visions of
Marshall Hodgson (1993), Ghosh’s account helps us remember/imag-
ine world systems, economic and cultural, that preceded the rise of
an expan- sionist Europe. In the late 20th century it is difficult to form
concrete pictures of transregional networks not produced by and/or
resisting the hegemony of West- ern technoindustrial society. These
 DIASPORAS 333
histories of alternate cosmopolitanisms and diasporic networks are
redeemable (in a Benjaminian sense) as crucial political visions:
worlds “after” Jews and Arabs, “after” the West and the “Rest,” and
“af-
ter” natives and immigrants.
Such visions and counterhistories can support seategies for
nontotalizing globalization from below. The phrase, paired with
globalization from above, is proposed by Brecher et al. to name
transregional social movements that both re- sist and use hegemonizing
technologies and communications (1993). This con- stitutive
entanglement is, I have argued, characteristic of modem diaspora net-
works. Entanglement is not necessarily cooptation. Recalling older
histories of discrepant cosmopolitan contacts can empower new ways
to be “traditional” on a more than local scale. Epeli Hau’ofa’s recent
recovery of a long history of Pa- cific travels in the projection of a
new “Oceanian” regionalism (“our sea of is- lands”) is a case in
point (Hau’ofa et a1. 1993).
 DIASPORAS 334

2.2 The works I have been discussing maintain a clear, at times crushing,
awareness of the obstacles to such futures, the constant pressure of transnational capital
and national hegemonies. Yet they express, too, a stubborn hope. They do not merely
lament a world that has been lost. Rather, as in diaspora dis- courses generally, both
loss and survival are prefigurative. Of what? We lack a description and are reduced to
the merely reactive, stopgap language of “posts.” The term postcolonial (like Arjun
Appadurai’s postnational) makes sense only in an emergent, or utopian, context.2'
There are no postcolonial cultures or places: only moments, tactics, discourses, and
so forth. Post- is always shad- owed by neo-. Yet postcolonial does describe real, if
incomplete, ruptures with past structures of domination, sites of current struggle
and imagined futures. Perhaps what is at stake in the historical projection of a geniza
world or a black Atlantic is “the prehistory of postcolonialism.” Viewed in this
perspective, the diaspora discourse and history currently in the air would be about
recovering non-Western, or not-only-Western, models for cosmopolitan life,
nonaligned transnationalities struggling within and against nation-states, global
technologies, and markets—resources for a fraught coexistence.

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN-CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Colonialism and Nigerian Politics

Half of a Yellow Sun mostly deals with the Nigerian Civil War (also called the Biafran War),
which took place between 1967 and 1970. Nigeria had only recently freed itself from British
colonial rule at the time, and the country of Nigeria was itself an arbitrary unification (by its
colonizers) of over 300 different ethnic groups. The largest of these were the Igbo in the
Southeast, the Yoruba in the Southwest, and the Hausa in the North. Adichie paints a picture
of this hopeful young country in its new independence through scenes at Odenigbo’s house,
where politicians, professors, and poets argue and laugh together. But despite Independence
in 1960, Nigerian politics were still under British influence (which wanted to maintain its
access to Nigerian resources), mostly through the way the government was arranged – so that
the autocratic Northern Hausa had the most control. Ultimately the tensions between the
ethnic groups (exacerbated and sometimes even created by England) led to the massacres of
Igbo people in 1966 and the Civil War that followed, with the secession of the Republic of
Biafra in the Southeast.

Half of a Yellow Sun is told from the point of view of mostly Igbo characters – Ugwu,
Odenigbo, Olanna, and Kainene – who are all affected by the massacres and the war, and
hold a desperate hope in the future of Biafra. Adichie also gives us the viewpoint of an
 DIASPORAS 335
outsider, the white Englishman Richard, who though he belongs to the colonizers comes to
identify closely with the Biafran cause through his love of Kainene (and yet, at the same time,
can never actually be Biafran or completely extricate himself from the colonialist context or
to separate his own objectification of Biafrans from his love of Kailene. Ultimately none of
the political sides come out blameless in the conflict, just like the characters in the novel.
England started all the trouble by colonizing and oppressing Nigeria, stirring up ethnic
tensions, and supplying arms to Nigeria during the war; Nigeria used starvation and genocide
as weapons of war, and the Biafran soldiers committed their own atrocities against the
Nigerians and even their own people. The power of the novel is then to show human faces of
different aspects of this conflict, and to portray individual tragedies and victories that bring to
life events most Westerners aren’t even aware of.
Although Half of a Yellow Sun is set in a context six years after the colonization, this novel
echoes the impact of colonization towards economic and social aspect in Nigeria, including
the challenges in developing a new identity as a nation. This novel depicts the effect of
Nigerian civil war from the eyes of Ugwu, a houseboy, Olanna, an Igbo woman and Richard,
a British journalist. Adichie’s novel investigates the African country, Nigeria, in past,
during the Biafran war, and highlights the issues inherent in the concept of a “post-
colonial” society or a society after independence. The story is told through the lives of four
characters: Odenigbo, Olanna, Ugwu and Richard against the back drop of a Nigerian society
infiltrated, both literally and psychologically, by the British Empire. Within the novel, three
predominant ethnic groups are mentioned: Igbo (southeast), the Hausa – Fulani (of the North)
and Yoruba (in the southwest) who have varying cultures, religions and languages. Their
system of governance is also disparate, with the Igbos exercising more democratic systems,
demonstrated by the general assembly one notes in Half of a Yellow Sun with the elders
gathered under the Udala tree.
Half of the Yellow Sun intriguingly portrays the subtle and occasionally bold identity
politics. The British wanted to influence the politics in Nigeria, as well as have access to
resources within the country. Nigeria was colonized by Britain until 1960. Nigeria freed itself
in 1960, however Britain’s involvement continued to be strong up until the end of the civil
war. After they isolated themselves, the country was still unified by 300 ethnic tribes
including the two main categories Igbo people in the south and Hausa from the north. Many
of the characters in these narratives must have been done in the aftermath of the British
colonialism as they navigate the dynamics of their own identities and even develop a new
identity, Biafran nationalism, Hausa, Igbo far from the previously imposed and negotiated
Nigerian identity. At the beginning of the novel, before the war broke out, Ugwu, a young
illiterate houseboy who works for Odenigbo, an Igbo professional who is clearly an elite is
introduced. The interactions between Ugwu and his “Master” identify the class and identity
politics present in post-colonial Nigeria (HYS 171). He seems to be most comfortable in
English, speaking Igbo “Coloured by the sliding sounds of English, the Igbo of one who
spoke English too often” (HYS 11). Olannas’ relatives were all slaughtered and it forced
Odenigbo, Olanna and Ugwu to flea Odenigbos house and move to the Biafra area which was
made by the Igbo leader in response to the oppression. Adichie investigates the volatile
period in Nigerian history through the poly vocal, interwoven discourses of characters and the
 DIASPORAS 336
third person omniscient, re-cognizing the Euro-based, essentialist, dichotomous concept of
the post-colonial.
The disproportion dominates the ensuring “western dressed” African ‘infidels’ but inspires
the coup d’etat which later provokes a counter-coup (HYS 36). Prior to this event, the 1960
independence marked an increase in Christian households and the much sought after western
education; many Igbos sent their children to British universities which is the case for the
majority of the professionals and professors in the novel along with Olanna and Kainene
other regions are also said to be “Competing so fiercely” for “white salaries” and a white way
of life (HYS 51). However, the Muslim Hauses do not wholly absorb European cultural
imperialism in the same way the Igbo’s and the Yoruba’s do. The Northerners, therefore,
become the less literate and socio- economically thriving group in the Nigerian Population.
This fuels the resentment between ethnicities which is exemplified when a man on the plane,
next to Olanna, expresses how the bothersome Igbos “own all the shops; they control the civil
service, even the police” (HYS 273). Similarly, many Nigerians inadvertently adopt the
scepticism and stereotypes that the Europeans cast on the ethnic groups. The north is
therefore regarded as a site for the authoritarian, self- righteous posse of Hausas, the Igbos
are considered to be the “money-loving” clan and the Yoruba are seen as fawning
subordinates to their long time British contacts (HYS 184). Thus, the desire for all things
Eurocentric along with the colonial seeds of mistrust, intolerance and political inequality
matured in the free state. Adichie, counters the misguided presentation in the text and reveals
how Eurocentric powers remain in the New Nigerian economic and social space. While
expatriates remain behind in Nsukka for instance, present at major social events; they rub
shoulders with black Nigerians who maintain a mutual relationship with them of give and
gain, get and gain. They exert influence and maintain the hegemonic bonds of imperial
Britain. Black men and women can take the role of the dominant or oppressor as well. To
illustrate, the white female, Susan expresses stereotypical racist views, however she dulls in
comparison to Olanna’s parents. Chief Ozobia and his wife are certainly haughty and exhibit
their material possessions to give the population something to “covet” as kainene mockingly
puts it. They do not “acknowledge the humanity” of their servants and chastises a worker for
simply stealing some rice to feed his family (HYS 220). Olanna realizes how her father’s
activities in politics make them feel inferior: “father and his politician friends steal money
with their contracts, but nobody makes them kneel to beg for forgiveness… they build houses
with their stolen money and rent them out to people like man and charge inflated rents that
make it impossible to buy food” (HYS 226). Their actions indicate that it is not enough to
blame the white man in a binary of the blacks versus whites. Although Odenigbo and Olanna
are kind to Ugwu, his position as the master and hers as madam reflects how black faces can
imperceptibly reinforce the failed colonial logic of inferior versus superior life style or tastes.
When Ugwu and his guardian Odenigbo are forced to flee Nsukka and end up in Umuaha,
Ugwu notes how the “Ugly” “unpainted” compound is unworthy of master” (HYS 365).
Adichie deconstructs these assumptions of forwardness and backwardness through a specific
spatialization of narrative action … swinging between the village and the city” (Akpome,10)
revealing what each location lacks along with the symbiotic relevance of both spheres.
 DIASPORAS 337
The result of colonialism in Half of a Yellow Sun is revealed through the social events that
occur during the civil war. A couple of years prior to the start of the civil war due to the
division amongst tribes and oppression of Igbo people, many Igbos were murdered and had to
flee. It is clearly evident that every generation of writers confront the burning issues in its
society and wrestles with them. These writers mainly attempt to raise African awareness
about the biased and stereotypical imaging of Africa by the imperial powers.

Loyalty and Betrayal

On the political level, Adichie shows a “betrayal” within Nigeria through the massacre of the
Igbos, and also in the secession of Biafra and the powerful Igbo devotion to the Biafran
cause. The book focuses mostly on the individual level, however, and its main characters
experience personal loyalty and betrayal as well. The two central
characters, Olanna and Kainene, are twin sisters who in many ways act as a microcosm of
the Nigerian conflict, as they painfully break apart but are eventually reunited. The twins
don’t look at all alike, and they are close in their youth but grow apart as they get older.
Olanna then betrays Kainene by seducing her lover, Richard, and Kainene responds by
totally cutting Olanna out of her life. In a similar way Odenigbo betrays Olanna by sleeping
with Amala, his mother’s helper, and Richard betrays Kainene by sleeping with Olanna.

All of these betrayals cause great pain and times of personal reflection for the characters, but
they ultimately lead to forgiveness and a stronger loyalty than before. Olanna takes Odenigbo
back, Kainene burns Richard’s manuscript but stays with him, and Olanna and Kainene are
eventually reunited and grow closer than ever. In her well-developed characters Adichie
shows the human tendencies toward loyalty and betrayal, while at the same time showing
how these impulses play out in the larger political arena.

War and Violence

Most of the novel centers around the Nigerian Civil War, and the excessive cruelty and
violence of this conflict affects all of the characters. This war was sparked by the massacres
of Igbo people in 1966, when angry mobs killed soldiers and citizens as “retribution” for a
government coup. The creation of Biafra was then a time of hope for the battered Igbo, but
this was quickly tempered by the declaration of war from Nigeria. In Half of a Yellow Sun,
Adichie contrasts scenes of peace and optimism (like the dinner parties at Odenigbo’s house)
with sudden scenes of violence and fear. In this way she creates a tone of constant suspense,
as the country becomes a place of danger and casual violence.

Anywhere from one to three million people died of starvation and fighting during the Biafran
War, and Adichie draws out the personal tragedies in these astronomical numbers. She shows
small horrors like a woman carrying her daughter’s severed head in a basket, the girl’s hair
 DIASPORAS 338
still carefully braided, or Ikejide having his head cut off by a piece of shrapnel. There are
other tragedies as well, like the poet Okeoma giving up writing in order to fight,
or Ugwu contributing to the horrors of war by participating in the rape of a bar girl. War and
violence is often overwhelming in both the world and in the novel, and sometimes the only
redemption seems to be trying to avoid history’s mistakes by fully confronting them, as we
do in Adichie’s merciless writing.

Race and Culture

Much of the conflict in Nigerian politics and between the characters of the novel has to do
with race and culture. The root cause of this is the racist, oppressive colonization of Nigeria
by the British Empire. This is illustrated in characters like Susan, who sees all Africans as
less-civilized and inferior to white people. Colonialism also exacerbated cultural conflicts
among the Nigerians themselves, as the country’s borders are a “unified” region created by
England, forcing together over 300 different cultural groups. The main tension is between the
Muslim, autocratic Hausa and the mostly-Christian, republican Igbo. The British colonizers
gave most of the government control to the Hausa, as they were easier for the British to
influence from afar, but the Igbo and the Yoruba developed the strongest middle class.

Adichie’s characters then represent many of these different cultures and

races. Olanna and Kainene are upper-class Igbo, Odenigbo is a middle-class, intellectual
Igbo, Ugwu is an extremely poor Igbo from a bush village, and Richard is a white English
expatriate. Adichie is from an Igbo family herself, so she clearly identifies more with the
Biafran cause, but she doesn’t shy away from portraying the mistakes and atrocities
committed by Biafra. Overall her portrayal of the conflicts between race and culture shows
the common humanity of all, and how even someone like Richard – a member of the
oppressive culture – can be a force for good when he is willing to recognize the equal value
of all people and try to help them.

Love

Half of a Yellow Sun deals with political and historical events but it is also deeply personal,
particularly in the love between its characters. The romantic relationships
between Olanna and Odenigbo, Kainene and Richard, and Ugwu’s infatuation
with Eberechi are at the center of the novel, as well as the sibling love between Olanna and
Kainene. As with everything in the book, the personal is affected by the political and vice
versa: Olanna’s love for Odenigbo brings her into his world of radical politics, and Richard’s
love for Kainene causes him to cross racial and political boundaries.

The love between the sisters becomes a sort of symbol for the unity of Nigeria, as they
painfully cut off ties but are eventually reunited. Ugwu’s longings for Nnesinachi and
Eberechi are thwarted by the war, and then as a soldier he commits the atrocity of rape – the
ultimate corruption of love. The love between Kainene and Richard and the love between the
sisters seems the most enduring of the book, which makes it all the more tragic when Kainene
 DIASPORAS 339
disappears. Ultimately Adichie delves into all the deep aspects of the human experience: sex
as well as violence, romance as well as cruelty, and though she shows great injustice and pain
she also portrays love that can withstand such suffering.

Postcolonial Analysis/identity theme

The postcolonial theory is best suitable in analyzing Half of a Yellow Sun since the novel is a
representation of life after the British colonial rule. Likewise, the novel portrays the effects
of laws implemented, yet not set by the natives, abuse of power depicted through the
daily operations of the country, behavior of politicians and formalities at the time in
Nigeria. The novel depicts internal conflicts and power struggles which has risen out of
experiences and contact with the British rule (Mullaney, 2010). Through the novel, a reader
learns about the colonizers (The Hausa tribe) and the colonized (the Igbo) tribe and how the
latter was considered undeveloped, uncivilized and uneducated, defined as less superior
(O’Reilly, 2001).

Based on Edward Said’s Orientalism, the characters in the novel are in pursuit of their
identity which has been destroyed by the Us (Europeans, Hausa Tribe), resulting in countless
deaths. “Identity is not something that is stable; it calls for permanent re-structuration. That
is, someone’s identity is shaped by the world that surrounds him or her and collectivities as
well as personal choices and personal experiences” (Karambiri, 2002, p.1). For that reason,
Chinua Achebe also states that the Biafran war shaped the Igbo society, his statement
correlates to Chimamanda Adichie’s statement as she supports her venture to write Half of a
Yellow Sun: she states, writing about the Biafran war is a tool for Modern Nigeria to
understand the Igbo culture and identity.

Identity unites and differentiates persons in a society; it is non-constant and requires

realignment. Therefore, a person’s identity is formed by his or her spatial horizons, decisions
and experiences (Lecznar, 2017)
The Igbo tribe were unaware of their identity until they were aware of the difference between
themselves and the white man. Hence before colonialism, there was no struggle for identity
neither the discussion of it as it was never challenged, altered or considered inferior the white
men. Adichie highlights this notion in the book- Half of a Yellow Sun in a dialogue between
the faculty members of the University of Nsukka: "My point is that the only authentic identity
for the African is the tribe," Master said. "I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria
and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as
different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came." Professor
Ezeka snorted and shook his head, thin legs crossed. "But you became aware that you were
Igbo because of the white man. The pan-Igbo idea itself came only in the face of white
domination. You must see that tribe as it is today is as colonial a product as nation and race."
(Adichie, 2006, p.20)
Adichie displays three characters in the novel, Olanna, Ugwu and Richard. In one way or
another, the identity of all characters has been questioned due to the experiences of the war,
 DIASPORAS 340
diaspora and their interaction with other members of the Igbo tribe. Olanna grew up and
obtained her education in England, therefore, she struggles to understand and at times comply
with traditional beliefs and practices. As for Ugwu, despite growing up in the village where
traditional practices surpass any other practices, he is unaware of his identity as an Igbo.
Richard is perceived as a stranger to the Nigerian community as he is British, having
migrated to the country after he fails to find his identity within his native country. Therefore,
the experience of the war inevitably establishes a sense of identity as Biafran for Ugwu and
Olanna but for Richard, it establishes an understanding of the Nigerian ethnic community.
2.3.1 Shaping the Identity: Olanna

Olanna is a modern- Nigerian woman, from the Igbo tribe, she grew up and completed her
university in England. She left her Hausa Muslim boyfriend for Odenigbo, a full breed Igbo
University lecturer and an activist for Igbo community. “Ironically, Olanna has chosen
Odenigbo for the immediate perception of kinship and community he creates. As she recalls
the scene of their first meeting, he affirms his people in the face of the privilege granted to
whites in the aftermath of colonialism” (Strehle, 2011, p. 662). Thus, Olanna unconsciously
made this choice without knowing her deep desires to identify herself as an Igbo.
In the novel, Odenigbo's mother represents deep rooted identity of the Igbo people, while
Odenigbo’s girlfriend- Olanna represents the British colonialist. Odenigbo’s mother
perceives Olanna as a threat to tradition, she states, "Too much schooling ruins a woman,"
(Adichie, 2006, p. 98). In the same way, Olanna is seen as the other as the two women fight
an internal battle despite the external Biafra war that constantly worsen the situation.
Olanna’s identity is first shaped by her experience with the Odenigbo’s mother. Hence,
Olanna is made aware of her differences from the Igbo tribe by her interaction with
Odenigbo’s mother as the latter constantly points out her unworthiness to be an Igbo and
fiancé to her Son.
When Olanna is fleeing the northern Nigerian city of Kano because the Igbo are attacked by
local Hausa Muslims, she is directed by her ex-boyfriend Mohammed to “[not] raise her
face” (Adichie, 2006, p.148), lest she be recognised as an Igbo. …. She places a long scarf
over her head and winds it round her neck, jokingly concluding that she “look[s] like a proper
Muslim woman” (Adichie, 2006, p. 147). In this regard, Olanna still rejects her identity as
Igbo.
Olanna, views her identity as something she can change in scenarios when her life is
threatened. When Olanna and her cousin Arize are surrounded by armed men at an open
market in Lagos, they are ordered to identify themselves as Igbo. As in previous examples,
Olanna dismisses Igbo identity by rapidly switching to “fluent, loud Yoruba” (Adichie, 2006,
p.132). As seen in the examples above, Olanna perceives identity as an aspect that can be
changed. As with the first instance, she identifies herself as Muslim, then a Yoruba and
thereafter a Hausa. Perhaps growing up in England as an African, she constantly had to
change her identity in order to blend into her surroundings. As a character struggling with
identity and far-fetched from her origin, she is afraid of being judged and considered as an
outsider.
 DIASPORAS 341
After the announcement of the Republic of Biafran, Olanna realizes how “Odenigbo and
Baby were moving round and round . . . singing off-key, a song he had made up –This is our
beginning, oh, yes, our beginning, oh, yes” in that moment her thoughts are diverted to “the
cashew-juice stain on the front of Baby’s dress” (Adichie, 2006, p. 162). This signifies that
her attention and awareness to internal thoughts as opposed to the news to be celebrated. In
another incident, Olanna watches Odenigbo raise his arm and shouts that “Biafra is born,”
however, she does not identify herself with the celebration of other Igbo members as they
anticipate a better future. Instead, she thinks about “how awkwardly twisted Aunty Ifeka’s
arm had looked, as she lays on the ground, how her blood had pooled so thick that it looked
like glue” (Adichie, 2006, p. 163) in this scenario, her emotions are set on her previous
experiences in the civil war, this represents how she sees previous defeats more than the
current victory.
On yet another occasion, when Olanna and Odenigbo are part of a political rally, Olanna first
watches “Odenigbo sing [Biafra win the war] lustily, only to immediately shift her attention
to a sharp pain in her knee” (Adichie, 2006, p. 275). The shifts away from public displays of
Igbo nationalism to private experiences indicate that Olanna cannot yet imagine the formation
of the Igbo nation. once again this demonstrates her inability to experience the progress made
by the Igbo ethnic group and to a great extent identify herself with the whole community, this
make her look like an outsider with feelings unconnected.
Olanna’s slowly identifies herself as an agent of change during the war as she started
realizing and making peace with the current events of the war. Olanna realized, “If she had
died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu had died, the bunker would still smell like a freshly
tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around. The war would
continue without them” (Adichie, 2006, p. 280). “Olanna channeled from feelings of
hopelessness and perceiving herself as a victim to a courageous, externally aware agent to the
fight of freedom. Until Biafra won, the vandals would no longer dictate the terms of her life”
(Adichie, 2006, p. 280). Likewise, she now perceives herself as an active member of the Igbo
society, a vessel of strength, persistence and warrior in her own right. Her active involvement
in communal activities such as political rallies and teaching the children about the Biafran
flag and the representation of colours on it depicts this transformation within her.
Likewise, her insight and self-focalization has changed as she joins the Igbo women in
singing and dancing for Biafra: “Olanna joined them, buoyed by the words – Who will win?
Biafra will win, igba!” (Adichie, 2006, p. 332). This proves that Olanna’s character has
matured, she has removed herself as a centre of focus, however, the narration of events as
Olanna grows as a character and becomes aware of her identity also represents the growth in
strength and identity of the Igbo community.

2.2.2 Shaping the Identity: Ugwu

In Half of a Yellow Sun, Ugwu is presented as a boy without formal schooling. He is a

houseboy for Olanna’s Fiancé Odenigbo, a University professor who is passionate about
 DIASPORAS 342
politics while a full participant of all debates around the Biafran war. Ugwu’s perception of
the world is confined to Odenigbo’s household, thus representing a large part of the Igbo
people. As his new home intrigue and challenge him, it equivalently represents the shock yet
challenge of the Biafran Civil war on the Igbo tribe. “Ugwu held back from reaching out to
touch the cement wall, to see how different it would feel from the mud walls of his mother’s
hut” (Adichie, 2006, p. 4)
As the identity of the Igbo is shaped as the war progress, so is the character and identity of
Ugwu, a continuous development. Ugwu’s lessons from Odenigbo and preceding formal
school causes him to be ethnically self-aware unlike Olanna who chose to deny her identity to
protect her life. In the Geography class, Ugwu is taught: “This is our world, although the
people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours […] our world is
round, it never ends. Nee anya, this is all water, the seas and oceans, and here’s Europe and
here’s our own continent, Africa, and the Congo is the middle. Farther up here is Nigeria, and
Nsukka is here, in the south-east; this is where we are” (Adichie, 2006, p. 10). Ugwu departs
from this class with knowledge that he did not know about. He is now aware of his origin and
how he is integrated in it.
At first, Ugwu does not participate in the rallies neither the debates led by his master and
friends from the University council. However, as he is exposed to more debates and while the
Biafran civil war becomes intense, the concept of Igbo identity becomes familiar to him
(Vuletic, 2018), and likewise, he starts to actively participate in the heated debates while
thinking about joining the war. “he looked distinguished in their khaki uniforms, boots
shining, Half of a Yellow Sun sewn on their sleeves,” only to soon afterwards exclaim how
he wishes he could join the Civil Defence League or the militia” (Adichie, 2006, p.179).
After joining the defence, Ugwu begins to realise the complexity and brutality of the war. He
is made to participate in a gang-rape of an Igbo girl working in a bar, he is a witness to
inexcusable violence towards Igbo civilians as well as the corruption within the army, and
has his book torn and used to roll cigarettes (Adichie, 2006 as cited in Vuletic, 2018). “When
they listened to Radio Biafra, the reader is informed, Ugwu would get up and walk away
because the shabby theatrics of the war reports, the voice that forced morsels of invented
hope down people’s throats, did not interest him” (Adichie, 2006, p.399). After his bad
experiences, Ugwu does not become alienated to his Igbo identity, in fact, he is inclined into
his culture and identity and when Richard propose to write a book on the Biafran civil war
experience entitled, The World Was Silent When We Died, Ugwu agrees that the war was
never Richard's story to tell. Likewise, he withdraws from the war as he finds a different way
to express himself and his identity by writing a book, Narrative of the Life of a Country, in
this way he becomes a speaker and historian for the Igbo people.

2.2.3 Shaping the Identity: Richard

Richard is a white British Journalist who leaves his wife for Kainene, Olanna’s sister. He tells
Kainene, “I've always been a loner" (Adichie, 2006, p. 62), in that way hoping to be accepted
by her and the immediate Igbo friends and the Igbo community. As he is trying to fit into the
 DIASPORAS 343
Igbo community, Major Madu sarcastically emphasize how the “British freely move to
[African] countries while having themselves decided to control the immigration from the
Commonwealth” (Adichie, 2006, p. 79). Before the separation of Biafra from the Nigerian
state, Richard begins to feel excluded from the Igbo community, he starts learning Igbo, as a
way to identity himself and hopefully connect to them. After interacting with Major Madu for
the second time, he speaks in Igbo and the former responds in English. This depicts that
Major Madu is aware of the symbolic function of language in the process of identity
formation, hence, he consciously prohibits Richard from entering and identifying himself as
Igbo (Vuletic, 2018).
Even after the separation of the Igbo tribe from Nigeria to form Biafra, Richard remains
persistent in speaking Igbo. He greets an Igbo customs officer at the airport in Kano in Igbo,
the customs officer reacts excitedly: “Eh! You speak [Igbo]! I na-asu Igbo!” (Adichie, 2006,
p. 151). The man also “took Richard’s hand in his moist one and shook it warmly and started
to talk about himself” (Adichie, 2006, p. 151). Thus, after the Biafran separation, Richard’s
attempts to speak Igbo allows him some access to the Igbo community.
As Richard becomes more involved in the Igbo community, he starts to think: “It frightened
him that he slept well at night, that he was still calmed by the scent of orange leaves and the
turquoise stillness of the sea, that he was sentient” (Adichie, 2006, p. 167). Thus, he notices
that he does not experience the Biafran civil war as the Igbo community, hence, life is not the
same for every person who witnessed the genocide. “Then he felt more frightened at the
thought that perhaps he had been nothing more than a voyeur. He had not feared for his own
life, so the massacres became external, outside of him; he had watched them through the
detached lens of knowing he was safe”.
At first, Olanna questions the Igbo tradition to the point of rejecting herself as Igbo. As the
war progress, she comes to realise her identity as an Igbo with the help of Odenigbo her
fiancé. Ugwu portrays partial awareness of his identity despite growing up in the village
where the emphasis on traditional Norms, beliefs and values are highly respected and
followed. Richard is torn between two worlds. Even though he lives amidst the war, he
constantly fails to belong to the Igbo community. In the novel, Half of a Yellow Sun by
Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi, the major characters likewise identify themselves differently
within the Igbo community. Olanna often challenge formalities in the Igbo community,
Richard tries to blend in as a local, but to the natives, he remains the other while Ugwu who
ought to be strongly rooted shows limited knowledge of his identity. The Biafran war
challenged and shaped these characters’ lives to a great extent.
Producing exile: diasporic vision in adichie's half of a yellow sun- Susan Strehle

In writing about the Biafran War, which resulted in the deaths of over two million people,
Adichie has narrated the conditions under which, in one national location, postcolonial
African history produced massive suffering among refugees and migrants. Adichie's novel
depicts the inevitable failure of the nation created by British colonialism and grounded in the
Western myth of the nation as a single family of those born (natio) to a homogeneous clan .
 DIASPORAS 344
The violations of the social contract in Nigeria, made vivid in sanctioned genocidal
murders of the Igbo minority, fracture the nation, and the doomed war for Biafran
independence strips the novel's protagonist-witnesses of their status as citizens and
propels them into diaspora. In the first days of the war, they lose homes; by the war's
end, they lose homeland—not simply because Biafra is defeated, but also because their
experiences have shaped them as permanent outsiders. The loss of Biafra renders these
figures spectral in their powerlessness and foreign in their alienation from the triumphant
nation. Adichie represents in her novel the emergence of a diasporic vision, conscious of the
vicious exclusivity implicit in nationalism and attuned to the costs of diaspora.
Half of a Yellow Sun places Nigeria in historical context as a nation created in Europe, by
Europeans, for European profit, and infused with European ideological commitment to the
nation as an emblem of popular unity. The novel depicts the ravages of diaspora as ethnic
hatred explodes into massacre and war. At first, Igbos flee dwelling places in the North and
West for the safety of the East; later, they flee Eastern cities at the edges of Igboland as
Nigerian forces take Nsukka, Abba, and Port Harcourt. The narrative attends displaced,
wounded, starving, and dying Igbos on trains, in refugee camps, and in cramped and squalid
temporary housing. All of the major characters lose their homes in the war, taking to the
roads with thousands of others. At the end, the structures they have considered home are
either damaged or inhabited by Nigerians who erase all traces of the Igbo owners. The
Ozobias are forced to buy their own home, denuded of furniture, from the Yoruba "friend"
they left to care for it when they fled to England (427). Odenigbo's home, empty and fouled,
loses its security when Nigerian officers invade to harass the returned Biafrans (423). Ugwu's
village home no longer provides solace; his mother has died and his sister's energetic spirit
has not survived her rape and beating by Nigerian soldiers. Kainene's home in Port Harcourt
has been taken over by a woman with tribal marks who has erased all traces of the past (426).

Adichie underscores the British role in fostering tribalism in the nation they created. When
the first Nigerian republican government is overthrown in 1966 by the military, heavily
staffed by educated Igbos, a guest at Odenigbo's comments, "The BBC is calling it an Igbo
coup" (125); others point out that the deposed government was largely led and staffed by
Northern Hausas who had been put in powerful positions by the departing British. When a
second coup occurs six months later, the victims are Igbos, blamed for the bloodshed during
the earlier coup: "Northern officers have taken over. The BBC says they are killing Igbo
officers in Kaduna" (137). An Igbo who has fled the massacre tells Odenigbo, "They are
killing us like ants," and the radio reports "teachers hacked down in Zaria, a full Catholic
church in Sokoto set on fire, a pregnant woman split open in Kano" (144). The BBC takes a
prominent role in interpreting Nigerian events as outcomes of tribal legacies, and its reports
reflect the influence the departed empire continues to exert on public understanding, not only
internationally but also inside its former colony. Behind the BBC reports, the British Foreign
Office was "managing the news" throughout the Biafra War, supporting the Nigerian military
government and discrediting as propaganda reports of the bombing of civilians (Jacobs
170).10 To be sure, ethnic hatred, fanned by the winds of transnational capitalism, reached
 DIASPORAS 345
catastrophic proportions in the events of the Biafra war. Adichie shows tribalism poisoning
communities while it generates public massacres. Far from exonerating the victimized Igbo,
her characters acknowledge that Igbos kill Hausas in reprisal attacks and condemn Yorubas
for their efforts to stay out of the murderous bitterness. In a rage, Odenigbo accuses Miss
Adebayo: "Is it not your own people who are killing the Igbo in Lagos?" (174). Olanna's
mother regards Mohammed, Olanna's Hausa former partner, as "the enemy now" and says,
"Thank God you didn't marry him" (189).
The novel takes on the postcolonial question, not of how to become a national citizen, but
rather of how to understand and manage why states fail (628). Amy Novak considers the
relationship between Richard and Ugwu as "the binary between a knowing Western Subject
and an impossible traumatic Otherness" (40). Ugwu becomes "the chronicler of trauma as the
colonial voice that Richard represents fades into the background, marking the exit of the
Western subject from narrative control" (40). As trauma fiction, the narrative serves "to
counter the psychic shattering of the trauma victim with details that record concrete, tangible
experiences" (44).
Adichie sets the story of Ugwu's growth in a social context defined by two love stories, both
neglected in the criticism to date. The romances involve Olanna and Kainene, twin daughters
of the wealthy Chief Ozobia. These fraternal twins, born and raised together but different in
personality, separated through most of the novel and lost to each other at the end, form an apt
image for an originary wholeness that is divided and scattered in diaspora. Recently returned
from university education in London, the twins choose men reflecting parallel but divergent
relationships to Nigeria's postcolonial history. Olanna falls in love with Odenigbo, a
mathematics professor and a passionate advocate for African self-affirmation as well as for
the Igbo tribe. Kainene grows attached to Richard who, unlike the superior and
condescending white men she dated in England, has "an endearing uncertainty about him—
almost a shyness" (36). While Olanna's lover would remove the privilege still granted in post-
independence Nigeria to the white colonizer and empower Africans, Kainene's lover
represents the white colonizer transformed into a figure who learns an African language,
values African people and their culture, and thereby affirms Africans. Yin and yang, or
balanced but divergent exemplars of a similar logic, both men stand for postcolonial healing
and for the value of the Igbo tribe. In these love affairs, Adichie meditates on doubles,
divisions, and the differences that make identities necessarily complex. The love stories at the
heart of Half of a Yellow Sun reflect characters' longing for a community of self-respecting
citizens whose private bonds might energize and serve as a model for the society around
them. In a novel about civil war, strife within the family separates friends and sisters, and
compromises previously happy lovers. Like the public civil war, the fracturing of personal
bonds can be traced to Nigeria's colonial history, with its construction of an estranged and
self-divided people. Inventing fictional characters to reflect the struggles of middle-class
Igbos through the catastrophic war, Adichie imagines relationships that begin as models of
close community and end in diasporic distances.
In the first series of events revealed in part three, Odenigbo's mother arranges to have a
village girl seduce her son while Olanna is away. Mama's objective is to produce a grandson
 DIASPORAS 346
who will provide security and prestige; she does not trust that Olanna will bear a child, or the
right sort of child. Mama sees Olanna as a witch: she is one of a pair of twins;13 she has not
married; she has no children, though she is beyond the age when village girls give birth; and
worse yet, she has been to university in England.
To remedy her son's mistaken choice, Mama brings along a village girl "with downcast eyes,"
the subservient, uneducated, docile Amala, whose language is limited to "Yes, Mama" and
"No, Mama" (93). Amala comes from Odenigbo's home village of Abba: a part of Mama's
tribe, she represents Mama's chosen way to bring her son back to the community of his birth.
Mama serves what Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka has called double patriarchy: "The colonial
factor in black women's experience subjects them to another form of patriarchal authority, a
foreign power, in addition to the one in their cultures; for both the colonizing powers and
indigenous African cultures . . . are patriarchies" (162). Mama herself is strong and self-
determined; nonetheless, she condemns Olanna's independent and unmarried state, cows and
uses Amala, and insists that her grandchild must be male: "When this baby boy comes, I will
have somebody to keep me company and my fellow women will no longer call me the mother
of an impotent son" (238). Her effort fails when the child born to Amala is a girl, so devalued
that neither Amala nor Mama will keep the baby. Mama's intervention strains and fractures
her connections to all of the others, including her son and Amala; distance appears between
Amala and her community and between Olanna and Odenigbo.
While the war scatters the community of intellectuals, Olanna and Odenigbo's private
community is irretrievably compromised by the chain of infidelities set off by Odenigbo. In a
gesture she intends to be self-liberating, carefree, and without consequence, Olanna seduces
Richard. Although he feels, afterwards, that "He had not been chosen; it could have been any
man" (235), Olanna's choice actually reflects a postcolonial dynamic. Her attraction to the
white British journalist offers a clear rebuke to Odenigbo, in that she has chosen the figure
historically vested with power—the one privileged by the ticket seller. Richard's presence in
Africa arouses both servile attention (as when an unknown woman invites him to be her first
white lover [171]) and resentment (as when Okeoma looks at him with "quiet disdain" [111]).
This second affair frays bonds between lovers, friends, and sisters. After Olanna tells
Odenigbo about the affair, she understands that, rather than freeing herself, she has fractured
her bond with Odenigbo; she "realized that distrust would always lie between them" (244).
Odenigbo severs his friendship with Richard; Kainene punishes Richard and refuses to speak
to her twin sister. These conflicts reflect on the civil war as they enact the metaphor of the
house divided against itself.
While the central couples find their attachments disrupted and distanced, other personal
bonds suffer as well. Infidelities raise havoc between Chief Ozobia and his wife, who learns
that her husband has bought his Yoruba mistress a house in "a neighborhood where Lagos
socialites lived" (218). Susan admits to an affair with her close friend Caroline's husband,
John Blake, hoping to distress Richard (236). Mrs. Ozobia berates a servant, Odenigbo
expresses frustration with Ugwu, and Richard wants "to cane Harrison" (255). In part three
of the novel, the civil war that began in part two finds its corollary in the private homes
of major and minor characters, as communities dissolve within a postcolonial state that
 DIASPORAS 347
has perpetuated the assumptions and values supporting a "divide and rule" empire. As
the war propels them into diaspora, their sustaining attachments disintegrate.

Diasporic Vision- Richard is the most visibly diasporic of the witnesses: from beginning to
end he has no citizenship in the place where he chooses to live. An outsider even during his
youth in England, he yearns for sustaining communities both personal and social. His parents
ignored their only child and "raised him as an afterthought" (115); after they died, he lived
with an aunt who left him feeling that he did not belong in her London home (61). Tentative
and uncertain, Richard "wondered just what he was doing" in Nigeria (72). Though he tells
Kainene "I've always been a loner" (62), Richard hopes "He would belong" in the new nation
of Biafra because he has shared in its birth (168). He makes a strong effort to gain acceptance
in this community, learning Igbo and writing articles for international newspapers supporting
the Biafran cause. His articles earn praise from two historical figures, Ojukwu (306)and the
Swedish pilot Count Von Rosen (309), and Richard briefly feels "a part of things" (306). But
he remains an outsider; he neither renounces his British citizenship nor marries Kainene.
Richard's efforts to claim community with Biafrans rouse skepticism, as when Major Madu, a
commander in the Biafran military, treats him as "a foreigner" (314). Even Kainene raises her
eyebrows when Richard proposes to write a book titled "The World Was Silent When We
Died" (374) and Ugwu agrees that the war was never Richard's story to tell (425). Like the
other witnesses, Richard watches events from a position of diasporic uncertainty. While he
studies Igbo history and culture, he does not always understand. He makes frequent mistakes
as he attempts to gain acceptance in Nigeria and later in Biafra. In an early visit to a small
village, for example, he asks about Igbo kings, though he knows the Igbo have a long history
of republican governance (71); later, he pays a condolence visit to the family of a young man
massacred in Kano without bringing the gifts he knows are customary (165). He is
"bewildered by Kainene's busy life" (77); he wonders about her relationship with Madu (82);
he is not sure what Kainene thinks about his writing (167); and he is uncertain how to relate
to Olanna (169). Richard habitually registers events without knowing how to interpret them.
His frequent mystification confers duplicity on the narration of what he sees and thinks, as
the narrator asserts third-person objectivity while undermining the pretense of reliable
knowledge associated with it. Watching Richard witness in uncertainty, the narrative itself
manages to know without knowing. Richard loses all hope of belonging as the novel ends.
Kainene's disappearance erases his own sense of home; once Biafra surrenders, Richard's
reason for being in Nigeria evaporates. He exchanges hostile words with Major Madu, who
has insulted him at every opportunity and who now asks, "Will you go back to England?" as
though Richard belongs in the imperial homeland he abandoned a decade earlier. Madu
claims Kainene with a comment whose "we" excludes Richard, who has constantly searched
for her: "I don't understand how we have found out nothing about Kainene" (429). Richard
wonders silently whether the Igbo's "filthy black hand" ever touched Kainene (430); then he
hits the powerful officer. His jealousy, frequently provoked by Madu, brings to the surface a
latent racism that undermines Richard's commitment to the Igbo, to the Biafran cause he has
served, and to Kainene. Madu's return punch brings an instant recognition of his loss:
"Darkness descended on him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene
 DIASPORAS 348
again and that his life would always be like a candlelit room; he would see things only in
shadow, only in half glimpses" (430). Understanding that Kainene is lost, Richard sees that
he is condemned to dwell in indeterminacy. Lacking home and homeland, light and clarity,
he will now be limited to a half-life of half-glimpses. Ironically, this is how Richard has seen
events and people throughout the narrative. Richard's hitting the larger and more powerful
man constitutes both folly ("You idiot," Madu says twice) and a quixotic act of resistance. He
has endured the Biafran officer's repeated claims on and of Kainene; in this final scene he
gestures his protest. He has been insulted by a drunk Major Udodi who claims that white men
sexualize African women but never marry them. Madu compounds the problem by
apologizing to Kainene but not to Richard, the real target of Udodi's insult (80–81). In the
doomed act of hitting Madu, Richard resists all that Udodi has implied about his own
compromised motives and all that Madu has insinuated about the superiority of Biafran
manliness. Atavistic and hopeless, painful to his hand and too late to make a difference,
Richard's gesture also rejects Madu's implicit invocation of the founding myth of nation—
that those born inside the national family like Madu have greater rights than those like
Richard who choose to serve. That he will now live a half-life does not lessen Richard's
courageous moment. More constructively, he gives Ugwu the title he has abandoned,
promises to bring him a copy of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, and encourages Ugwu with praise for an early draft. Richard helps empower
Ugwu's creation of the story of a people afflicted by a war between two nationalisms, both
careless of their suffering. Richard displays courage, too, in his decision to stay in Nigeria,
though he has no home there and can never belong to the sutured nation. Rejecting
nationalism altogether, he will join a new "Institute for African Studies" (429).

Like Richard, Olanna sees without certain knowledge. Although she knows her culture as
Richard does not, she has been distanced by privilege, by her education in a private British
preparatory school and then in London, and by her father's wealth and power. Her awareness
of complexity makes Olanna slow to judge; she recognizes her own uncertainty and wishes
she could be "a little more certain, a little less questioning" (27). As events unfold, she cannot
comprehend the murders in Kano, where "she was not sure" of what she saw (148); with her
father, "She was not sure" how to understand his response (219). Frequently surprised or
puzzled, Olanna marvels at the power of bombs (279); she wonders what Mrs. Muokelu
means (379); "She did not entirely understand" her resentment of Odenigbo (382). Her
response to the events of the Biafran War, to death and starvation and unpredictable cruelty,
constitutes an entirely appropriate bafflement. She witnesses in amazement, and her
bewildered registering expresses a doubt similar to Richard's: the events recorded as
historical fact by the third person narrator strain credulity and seem unreal. Through Olanna's
eyes, outrageous wartime events take on the paradoxical status of unthinkable knowledge.
The disappearance of her sister reflects Olanna's loss of home and homeland in ways parallel
to Richard's. Kainene's disappearance haunts the end of the novel: it figures the loss of those
missing in the war, presumed dead, leaving a grief that can never be resolved. Olanna looks
for her among the living and the dead, alternating between "moments of solid hope" and
"stretches of raw pain." She rages at her inability to know: "She did not know where her sister
 DIASPORAS 349
was. She did not know. She raged at herself for not waking up early the day that Kainene left
for afia attack and for not knowing what Kainene wore that morning and for not going with
her and for trusting that Inatimi knew where he was leading her" (431). Condemned like
Richard to a future in which she will never know, Olanna asserts to Odenigbo that "in my
next life, Kainene will be my sister" (433). For the remainder of her current life, however, she
exists as one half of a lost whole. Self-divided and compromised, "she felt tarnished" (431).
As the novel ends, Olanna gestures her resistance to the bullying nationalism that follows
Nigeria's victory in the war. On their way home to Nsukka, they encounter Nigerian soldiers
who beat Odenigbo and order him to carry wood: "Let's see how you can help a united
Nigeria" (416). When one of the soldiers looks at her, Olanna calls the commanding officer
and warns him to tell the soldier not to touch her. Her tone and action surprise Ugwu: "she
sensed his intake of breath, his panic at her boldness" (417). In effect, she defies the
conquering nation's assumption of power over the bodies of women.
Like Olanna and Richard, Ugwu is an outsider who does not belong and does not know;
he watches without understanding. The novel begins with his introduction to plumbing and
electric appliances; these he quickly masters. But "He did not know" how to replace the sock
he has destroyed (16), and he "did not understand" the contents of books or the conversations
between Odenigbo and his visitors (17). When the first coup occurs, Ugwu "was not sure"
(124) what the radio announcement meant and "was surprised" at Odenigbo's response (125).
In a refugee camp, Ugwu "did not know" how people were managing (288), "did not hear" a
report on the radio (289), and "didn't know" that Eberechi's brother had joined the army
(291). Most importantly, he does not know until after the war that his mother has died and his
sister has been raped and beaten; even at the end he does not know that Eberechi has died
(428). Like Richard and Olanna, Ugwu serves as a limited witness. The narrative emphasizes
all of the characters' inability to know events beyond the horizon; as the youngest witness,
Ugwu also turns away from knowledge he does not want. Duplicity arises at the juncture
between his innocence and the other witnesses' knowledge. Ugwu's self-exiling experience in
the war occurs when, among a group of soldiers, he participates in the gang rape of a bar girl.
Challenged to join in the rape by other young soldiers—"aren't you a man?"—Ugwu finds his
way to a "self-loathing release" in the girl (365). The memory of this event "haunted him,
filled him with shame" (396), and when he dreams of Eberechi being raped, "He woke up
hating the image and hating himself" (397). All of the women he cares about "would loathe
him" if they knew what he had done (399). Like Richard and Olanna, he has betrayed his own
values and tarnished his sense of self-worth: "Ugwu felt stained and unworthy" (398). At the
end of the war, Ugwu returns to his village to find his mother dead, his sister damaged, and a
girl he has desired carrying the baby she conceived with a Hausa officer. Though he
continues to serve Odenigbo and Olanna as houseboy, Ugwu has no home place, no
community, and no certainties as the novel ends. The only comfort for his guilt comes in
writing about the war, begun as a way to hold off pain and carried on as Ugwu's act of
resistance to a triumphant Nigerian nationalism. He writes with a powerful awareness of his
own inadequacy and of the inability of any account to describe the horrors he has witnessed:
he realized that he would "never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes
of mothers . . . never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry people" (398).
 DIASPORAS 350
However uncertain his faith in the power of language, Ugwu writes a chronicle of what he
has seen among the Biafran people. Unlike Adichie's novel, "The Book" does not narrate
fictional events among invented characters, but rather traces the emergence and defeat of
Biafra, blaming England and Nigeria as well as other nations: "He writes about the world that
remained silent while Biafrans died. He argues that Britain inspired this silence" (258). His
book about Biafra is an effort, made by a young man inhabiting a despoiled diasporic
location, to memorialize a lost homeland. In the eight fragments described in Half of a
Yellow Sun, he records the poignant inevitability of this loss, together with glimpses of
Biafrans like the woman sitting "on the floor of a train squashed between crying people,
shouting people, praying people," caressing the calabash with her daughter's head inside (82).
Justly seen by critics like John Marx and Amy Novak as an assertion of his own authority to
tell the Biafran story, Ugwu's book constitutes an act of resistance against a triumphant
Nigerian nation.

THE MANAGEMENT OF GRIEF- BHARTI MUKHERJEE

The story uses a first-person narrative, and it makes it moving and realistic. It is a mixture of
narration and dialogue. The text abounds in specific terms, naming traditional Indian clothes
and dishes. This creates a realistic atmosphere and makes the understanding of the theme
easier for the reader. We feel as if we were members of their community of immigrants
ourselves. So, the setting is the Indian community in Toronto struck by a heavy loss.

The “The Management of Grief” theme may be observed in the title; that is why we can say
that it is suggestive. “The Management of Grief” tells us there exists such grief that every
person has to face sooner or later. It is the death of our near and dear people, people who
represent all lovely qualities of life for us, people who are the sense of our lives.

And our task is to accept and manage this grief properly, but for the “The Management of
Grief” characters, this is even more complicated because they live in a foreign country with
different traditions and mentality.

The message of the story can be formulated like this: every person is free to decide how to act
in his life. The most important thing is peace in our soul that will come sooner or later, even
if we have experienced severe grief. We have to look for the answers in our soul, not in the
traditions and customs of our country.

As we have already mentioned, the story is told in the first person. The storyteller is Shaila
Bhave, a Hindu Canadian who knows that both her husband, Vikram, and her two sons were
on the cursed plane. She is the narrator and the protagonist at the same time, so the action
unfolds around her.
 DIASPORAS 351
Shaila makes us feel her grief. It is natural that tears may well up in our eyes while reading.
Speaking about other characters of the story, we should mention Kusum, who is opposed to
Shaila. Kusum follows all Indian traditions and observes the morning procedure while Shaila
chooses to struggle against oppressive traditions, and she rejects them because she is a
woman of the new world. Josna Rege says that “Each of the female protagonists of
Mukherjee’s … recent novels is a woman who continually “remakes herself” (Rege 399).

And Shaila is a real exception to the rule. She is a unique woman who is not like other Indian
women. We would say that she is instead an American or European woman: strong,
struggling, intelligent, with broad scope and rich inner world.

Shaila Bhave is the thirty-six-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator of the story. She
is repressed through most of the story and outwardly shows only subtle emotions. Much of
her character is revealed by what she wants to say, but does not. Yet under all the repression
of emotion, she wants to talk. She first begins to open up to Dr. Ranganathan, partly because
he seems to understand her and encourages her hope. Shaila regrets not telling her husband
that she loved him, and when she writes an expressive poem to him and throws it in the sea,
she begins to gain an authentic voice for herself.

She also becomes more assertive as the story progresses. She screams at the customs officer
in India, noting that she is no longer acting like the proper Indian woman. When she realizes
that talking with Judith is pointless since Judith cannot hear her voice, Shaila abandons her.
Shaila's numb, quiet, anxious calm in the beginning of the story grows into a more self-
assured, accepting calm by the end.
Shaila flutters, as she says, ‘‘between worlds,’’ between the progressive, rational world of
her parents and of Judith, and the more spiritual and traditional world embodied in her
grandmother and India. Like many of the other characters, she is trying to find between the
two a balance that will allow her a fulfilling life. In the end, she and Dr. Ranganathan seem to
be on a similar path, one that embraces the West and the freedom of more progressive ideas
while also acknowledging the strength to be drawn from their Indian culture and people.

The Management of Grief” is a fictional depiction of the June 25, 1985, terrorist bombing of
an Air India Boeing 747 en route from Canada to Bombay via London’s Heathrow Airport.
The crash killed all 329 passengers, most of whom were Canadian Indians. Mukherjee and
her husband, Clark Blaise, had researched and written a book on the tragedy (The Sorrow
and the Terror [1987]). 
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the tale opens in Toronto in the kitchen of Shaila
Bhave, a Hindu Canadian who has lost her husband, Vikram, and two sons, Vinod and
Mithun, in the crash. Through Shaila, the central character, Mukherjee illuminates not
only the community’s immediate reactions to the horrific event but also the Indian
values and cultural differences that the well-meaning Canadian social worker Judith
 DIASPORAS 352
Templeton struggles vainly to comprehend. Valium mutes Shaila’s own grief as she
commiserates with her neighbor Kusum, whose husband, Satish, and a talented daughter were
crash victims. Kusum is confronted by her Westernized daughter Pam, who had refused to
travel to India, preferring to stay home and work at McDonald’s; Pam now accuses her
mother of favoring her dead sister. As well-intentioned neighbors make tea and answer phone
calls, Judith Templeton asks Shaila to help her communicate with the hundreds of Indian-
born Canadians affected by the tragedy, some of whom speak no English: “There are some
widows who’ve never handled money or gone on a bus, and there are old parents who still
haven’t eaten or gone outside their bedrooms” (183). Judith appeals to Shaila because “All
the people said, Mrs. Bhave is the strongest person of all” (183).
Shaila agrees to try to help on her return from Ireland, site of the plane crash. While there she
describes the difficulties of Kusum, who eventually finds acceptance of her loss through her
swami, and of Dr. Ranganathan, a Montreal electrical engineer whose entire family perished.
Shaila is in denial and is actually relieved when she cannot identify as hers any of the young
boys’ bodies whose photos are presented to her. From Ireland, Shaila and Kusum fl y to
Bombay, where Shaila finally screams in frustration at a customs official and then notes,
“One [sic] upon a time we were well brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept our
heads veiled, our voices shy and sweet” (189). While with her grandmother and parents,
Shaila describes their differences—the grandmother observes Hindu traditions while her
parents rebelled against them— and sees herself as “trapped between two modes of
knowledge. At thirty-six, I am too old to start over and too young to give up. Like my
husband’s spirit, I flutter between two worlds” (189). She reenters her old life for a while,
playing bridge in gymkhana clubs, riding ponies on trails, attending tea dances, and observing
that the widowers are already being introduced to “new bride candidates” (190). She
considers herself fortunate to be an “unlucky widow,” who, according to custom, is ineligible
for remarriage. Instead, in a Hindu temple, her husband appears to her and tells her to “finish
what we started together” (190).
And so, unlike Kusum, who moves to an ashram in Hardwar, Shaila returns to Toronto, sells
her house at a profi t, and moves to an apartment. Once again, Judith seeks her help, this time
with an old Sikh couple who refuse to accept their sons’ deaths and therefore refuse all
government aid, despite being plunged into darkness when the electric company cuts off their
power. Shaila cannot explain to Judith, who as a social worker is immersed in the four
“stages” of grief, that as a Hindu she cannot communicate with this Sikh couple, particularly
because Sikhs were probably responsible for the bombing of the Air India fl ight. Still, she
understands their hope that their sons will reappear and has difficulty sympathizing with
Judith’s government forms and legalities. Shaila leaves Judith, hears her family’s voices
exhorting her to be brave and to continue her life, and, on a hopeful note, begins walking
toward whatever her new life will present.
Bharati Mukherjee writes this short story in the first person narrative, told by the protagonist
Shaila. Although events are ordered chronologically, the details of the setting are given very
gradually, and many times appear from the contrasts Shaila makes between where she is and
where she has been or where she must go. As Shaila travels from one country to another, the
 DIASPORAS 353
movement is merely written at the beginning of a new paragraph, with no chapters or clear
emphasis of the change, with the exception of the journey to India as there was a slight
problem at the airport. This was marked more obviously than the rest to try and show a
contrast between the Indian women that left for Canada and the changed ones they now
regressed as. Upon arrival at the Indian airport, Shaila screams at the man working there as he
creates problems for them in customs and then goes into an interior monologue to point out
how they were once more passive and dutiful women.
Connected to the airport trouble is a comment made at the beginning of the story about their
lack of importance which at first appears to originate from the fact that they are residing in a
foreign country, but it would later seem that both their insignificance and that of their tragedy
is more universal. Their middle class status in the world’s structure does bring out a lot of
affection from the people of Ireland and it is even commented how well the forces in charge
of such an operation worked, but after a few days, time was running scarce and things had to
be hurried along. Hurried along for what is not clear, but it makes for an identifiable
situation, where people are just shushed along with their problems, even during such a
tragedy as this.
The majority of the text’s description is given to the characters and through their dialogue the
reader learns about the storyline, conflicts and cultures. When dialogue is not the best
way to express ideas, Mukherjee gives the protagonist the use of stream of consciousness.
This not only lets the reader get deeper into the psychology of the situation but also helps to
demonstrate the development of the protagonist’s recovery. The beginning shows many
conversations and there is, although blurry on the first reading, a clear difference between
what the character says aloud and how she finishes saying things in her mind. And although
honestly, Shaila does not show much difference between the various stages of grief, most
likely due to her numbness, she does at one climatic point turn to a new life. However, this
new life is somewhat disorientating to her, where she has been holding onto the memory of
her family and been told by the apparition of her late husband that she should finish what
they started, she is not at all sure how to do so. By the story’s end, Shaila has heard her
husband’s voice for the last time, and although still unsure as to what she will do, it is clear
she will finally be moving on.
In her journey to recovery Shaila passed through several phases, but not as clearly as they
were listed in the story: rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction. Her rejection of
the reality of her loss was clear and even when she gave to understand sudden acceptance,
she was converted back to rejection by Dr. Ranganathan. As a result of her numbness, the
stage of depression does not seem to apply to her, but rather moves into a lost acceptance.
Here, the fact that she thinks she still hears her family’s voices and doesn’t want to let them
go, prevents her from advancing to reconstruction. It is only when she hears her husband’s
voice that seems to almost be giving her permission rather than encouragement, that she
finally move on to the last phase. As part of the reconstruction process, she goes back to
Canada and puts her house in order, afterwards listening to some advice and dedicating her
time to a cause of personal interest. But it is only upon the last vision of her husband that she
actually finds the courage to leave it all behind, knowing that she had most likely kept the
 DIASPORAS 354
memory of her family alive to guide her. Once she hears her husband’s last guidance, she
manages to take control and bring peace to the narrative. It is her story that opens the novel
with chaos, although connected to the others, and only by following through at her pace can
end it, disregarding the other characters’ quicker progress.
Moving on to how the various characters deal with the multicultural aspects of their lives, one
of the first actions represented in the story after Shaila’s apparent acceptance on the beach
was to throw a love poem to sea for her husband. She did this because in life she had
never told him that she loved him and was worried that he did not know. The presence
of the theme of love gives a real sense of the Indian characters’ origin and upbringing but
also gives them a connection to their new encountered culture. In India it was not necessary
to express one’s love aloud but in the Western world it is a normal everyday occurrence.
Although Shaila’s neighbor tells her not to fret upon this, Shaila does not seem to be at peace
until she has embraced the sentiment.
Other examples of possible internal conflict are resolved as naturally as the one above, for
example, the presence of India is strong with the making of tea, and although this custom has
been adopted by the Western world, there is something particular about the way it is made
that keeps the main characters true to their roots. Not much of what is mentioned about
Western culture seems to be rejected, even the arrival of new neighbours was celebrated with
a barbecue. The new generation also seems to have integrated well into society which is seen
in Kusum’s younger daughter, and the elder generation only really appear to reject things that
anyone from their era would (independently of the location of birth), the best example of this
is the naughty postcard sent to Kusum by her daughter. However, there is one clear
annoyance against the new culture and it is made by Shaila as she shows anger towards her
job, given that instead of being the conventional mother and wife, she had a day job which
did not permit her to be on the plane to India. Therefore, it may have been her old life that
provoked the tragedy, but it is her new life that has made it a tragedy for her.
The loss of family brings together culture and religion in the story. Both Eastern and Western
parts play a role in what was demanded from the characters in their attempts to deal with the
plane crash. Most were demanded by Eastern family religion to remarry, and the characters
that lost their entire family were also advised to change home and job by their Swami. Shaila,
however, was the only one to experience opposing requests from those who wanted to guide
her. She was lucky in the sense that she was not demanded by her parents to remarry which
would have been her religious womanly duty, but neither did they ask her to do the same as
her deceased husband. Although this could actually be her conscience talking, it is true that
her husband had original wanted a better life for them by immigrating to Canada, so Shaila
enters into conflict when she does not want to stay in India with her parents but neither wants
to return to Canada alone. The first vision of her husband gives the sense that although she
was not ready to go back home alone, the idea of him accompanying her in spirit, was
reassuring enough, without which she would have been stuck in limbo. As Kusum was also
helped along by the vision of her daughter, the ability to hear one’s family over the anguish
seems an important occurrence in the stages of grief.
 DIASPORAS 355
To end, the title which clearly identifies the centre of the story as the journey of each
character through their grief, overall allows for the exploration of: leaning on one
another for strength and support; facing denial and letting go of the impossible; the
possibility of suicide; reaching inner peace with an apparition of a loved one; and most
importantly, the journey in its own right to let “all grieve in their own way.”

IMAGINARY HOMELANDS
It is a kind of essay where Salman Rushdie is in Search of One's Own Identity and Origin.
It highlights an individual's inner desire to belong somewhere, especially Migrant's desire to
claim their native country as their Homeland. Imaginary Homeland emphasizes more on the
life of writers who are living with multiple cultural identities, Also about writers who share
multicultural experience, and within these different identities what are obstacles and
consequences they felt as a writer. In the words of Michael Ondaatje, 

"(Writers) born in one 

place and choosing to live elsewhere, fighting to get back or to get away from our homelands
all our lives"

Whenever a writer lives away from their native country and writes about their homeland then
he should be more conscious, more knowledgeable and more intellectual. Because his/her
Physical Distance from the country can categories their writing only as fiction, not actual
cities or villages but only Imaginary Homeland, 'Indias of Mind.'
The phrase given by Rushdie for Migrant people is 'Translated Man.' Whenever we translate
any text something is always missing in that because of cultural context. In the same manner
when a writer located in another country writes about his own native country his memories
are like 'broken mirrors.' As it is said 'Out of sight, Out of mind. One cannot retain every
single thing. Some Fragments unconsciously lost from that. So, these Broken Memories are
not the complete truth but a small part of the truth. And with these Fragmented memories
they give partial explanations. That's why a Writer writing about their native land from a
distance is called a 'Transplanted Writer.'
There is extensive use of metaphor in the essay Imaginary Homelands by Rushdie. This
is driven by the need to convey the theme of alienation that people in the Diaspora are
invariably plagued with.
Mostly, the exiles have to do with faint memories, which have gaping hiatuses and therefore,
they have to fill in using their imaginations (Seyhan 2000). The use of metaphor, it can be
argued, deliberately reflects on Rushdie’s personal history. The metaphors have been
discussed as follows.
The old photograph that hangs in the room where Rushdie works is metaphorical. It
represents a section of Rushdie’s past from which he has been totally alienated. He was not
yet born when the photograph was taken. The old photograph is significant because it
prompts Rushdie to visit the house immortalised on it.
This is a black and white image of the house, and as Rushdie discovers, his childhood
memories were also monochromatic (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This implies that his childhood
memories were untainted.
 DIASPORAS 356

Pillars of salt have also been used metaphorically. It is an allusion to the biblical story of Lot
and his wife in which the latter turned into a pillar of salt upon looking back at the destruction
that was befalling their homeland. Pillars of salt, therefore, refers to the dangers faced by
those in exile when they try to reconnect with their homelands. This point to the trouble that
Rushdie faced from his motherland when he wrote the novel Satanic Verses which featured
Prophet Mohammad sacrilegiously. Consequently, a fatwa was declared on him and he had to
be given a round-the-clock police protection by the British government.

Then, there is the metaphor of the broken mirror. The metaphor denotes the distant and
almost obscure memories that those in exile have about their homeland. The memories are
made up of many pieces that cannot be patched up together. The fact that some crucial pieces
are missing aggravates matters. In extreme cases, those living in diaspora have no
recollection at all about their homeland.
Consequently, they resort to imaginations to complete the picture. In the essay, the author
writes: “…we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones,
imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). He further admits that he
made Saleem, the narrator in one of his earlier works; suspect that “his mistakes are the
mistakes of a fallible memory…” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10).

Closely related to the metaphor of broken mirror is the reference to shards of memory. Shards
are small jagged pieces that result when something is shattered. It is impossible to reconstruct
the original item using them. More often than not, a considerable number of them are
irretrievable. This is a reflection of the hopelessly inadequate memories about their
homelands that are nursed by those in the diaspora
They can only afford tiny fragments of memories, which cannot be put together to build a
complete picture of their motherland. They then resort to the “broken pots of antiquity”
(Rushdie 1991, p. 12) to reconstruct their past. Rushdie further argues that as human
beings, we are capable only of fractured perceptions (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) because we
are partial beings.

Rushdie also likens meaning to a shaky edifice built from scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries,
newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films among others. This implies that the meaning
attached to the memories that those in exile harbour is constantly being amended. The shaky
edifice has to receive constant patches and repairs in order to maintain it.

Rushdie uses the expression “imaginary homelands” as a powerful metaphor to

elucidate the shattered vision of the migrant who is abroad. This semantic field denotes
the preoccupation with lost memories experienced by those in exile. To them, home is not a
real place, but an imaginary rendition authored by discontinuous fragments of memory
conceived in imagination.
According to Rushdie, it is impossible to reclaim the lost memories and, therefore, the need
to recreate a vastly fictionalized “Indias of the mind” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). This amplifies
the alienation faced by those in exile.
Another semantic field is evident in the expressions “lost time” and “lost city” (Rushdie
1991, p. 9-10). In Rushdie’s essay, they refer to a lost history, which those in the Diaspora
cannot recover. What are available are the disjointed shards of memory that are scarcely
sufficient to build a history on.
 DIASPORAS 357
Due to this, Rushdie is confined to creating his own version of India and as a result, he
ends up writing a novel of memory and about memory. It implies that everything is lost
thus making the exiles more alienated from their homelands.
He narrates: “A few years ago, I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of
something like half my life.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This is an effective way of reaching out to
the readers, most of whom may not be familiar with the feeling of alienation experienced in
exile.
The narrative forms involve orientation, which sets the scene, time and the characters in the
essay. In this case, the scene is Bombay; the time is a few years ago; and the characters
include the narrator himself. There is also the compilation, which outlines the problem that
leads to a series of events.
In this essay, the old photograph made the author visit Bombay after many years. Narrative
forms also involve a resolution. This is the answer to the problem elucidated in the essay. In
this essay, the author reverts to the use of imagination to make up for lost memories. He
creates the India that he can afford.
Being an essay, it can also be considered a factual text. This is because it entails a discussion
on the problem of a fragmented memory. The author draws the reader’s attention to the plight
of emigrant troubled by a lost history. Plagued by insufficient recollection, the author, as a
literary artist, discovers that he is less than a sage.