LITERATURAS POSTCOLONIALES I.

2018 PRIMERA SEMANA

This fragment corresponds to Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and the unnamed
first-person narrator is Antoinette’s husband, presumably, Edward Rochester, the male
protagonist of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. However, his name is never given in Wide
Sargasso Sea, even though, we, readers, can assume it through an intertextual connection if
we are familiarized with Brontë’s narrative.

This specific excerpt in which Antoinette is depicted as aggressive and mad by the narrator, is
located in part two in the final section of the novel. In it, we can see the male narrator’s
frustration and despair in his incapability of controlling his wife. He considers himself cheated
by his own father who indirectly forces him to marry Antoinette in order to obtain her family’s
fortune and properties in Jamaica.

From a postcolonial perspective, this text can be interpreted in several, opposite ways. Overall,
Antoinette Cosway, or Bertha Mason as she is called in Jane Eyre is doubly “colonized” and
treated as “the other” for being a Jamaican creole and a woman at the same time. Moreover,
she is also treated with scorn by the black Jamaican population since her family was composed
of slaveholders until slavery was abolished. Antoinette can be considered then an in-between
character, oppressed and oppressor at once.

According to McLeod in Beginning Postcolonialism, there is a “complicity between colonialism

and patriarchy” in this sense (McLeod, 2010, p. 201).

What has happened before this fragment is that Antoinette’s husband (or Mr. Rochester) has
taken for granted Daniel Cosway’s version (Antoinette’s half-brother) that the whole family is
mad. It is also alluded that Antoinette’s mother Annette, was crazy and internalized before her.

The fact that they are male characters who define the identity of female ones, is remarkable.
On the other side, the narrator is obsessed with the idea of exerting physical and psychological
power over Antoinette, whom he has already judged as mad: “I managed to hold her wrist”.
But she quickly rebels against his oppression with verbal and physical violence: “I felt her teeth
in my arm…”, “she smashed another bottle against the wall…”, “(t)hen, she cursed me
comprehensively”.

There is a point in the narrative that Antoinette assumes that her husband does not love her;
and she even asks her former servant, Christophine, for help in this regard with no success.

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Christophine is also represented from the male characters’ perspective, as a “witch” that
practices “obeah” (voodoo).

The last sentence of this fragment “It was at this nightmare moment that I heard
Christophine’s calm voice” refers to the moment in the plot that Christophine talks directly to
the narrator in favor of Antoinette and warning the narrator not to hurt her, which he
considers as a threat and a curse in this very moment of the plot.

Therefore, what the narrative voice, Antoinette’s husband, or Mr. Rochester is showing in this
excerpt, is exactly the depiction of his wife in his own terms assuming her madness and
aggressiveness due to her “mixed blood” and his inability to control her. At the same time, we
are seeing Antoinette’s rebellion against the patriarchal control her husband wants to exert
over her, and also the image she has of him.

Another important feature or the novel and of this specific fragment is concerning the names.
Here, the narrator, as aforementioned is supposed to be Mr. Rochester by making the
intertextual connection with Jane Eyre, but in the case of Antoinette, her name and surname is
changing constantly: Antoinette Cosway, Bertha Mason, now perhaps, Bertha Rochester… her
identity is always defined by men, and in the case of the narrator, his identity is defined
through the intertextuality and recognition that readers may infer from their own knowledge
of these two pieces of literature.

Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia, is set in the London of the 70s and in the
context that it takes place, gender issues are represented from several perspectives.

Karim Amir who is the first-person narrator of his own story, within his adolescent mind. uses
sexuality (and bisexuality) for his own fun as a game; and sees women around him from
different points of view depending on the kind of relationship they have with him.

For instance, his depiction of Eva is rather ambiguous. He seems to adore her but at the same
time is reproachful towards her, since he considers Eva, to some extent, the indirect guilty of
his parents’ separation. Haroon Amir abandons his wife for Eva, a middle-age and middle-class
British woman who is also separating from her husband. Eva is always affectionate with Karim,
who admires her and despises her at the same time for this issue with his father. Eva is
ambitious and little by little climbs the social ladder thanks in part of her using Haroon’s Indian
“exoticism” and exploited oriental “wisdom” to her own personal purposes. Her son, Charlie, is
Karim’s friend and also lover in some periods and he is depicted by Karim as ambitious as his
mother, although insecure, aggressive and with certain rejection to his own (bi)sexuality.

On the other side, Karim considers his mother an impassible woman who has been abandoned
by her husband and that because for this very reason she is forced to make a radical change in
her life, although it costs her a long time to recover from the separation and to change her life
for the better.

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Karim’s cousin, Jamila is characterized as a young feminist woman but who is entrapped in her
father’s rigid Muslim convictions and forced to marry Changez through an arranged marriage
organized by her father. But she lives her sexuality freely and never has a marital relationship
as such with Changez. She even keeps sexual relationships with her cousin Karim and ends up
in a commune having free sexual relationships with either men or women.

From a postcolonial and a gender perspective it is worth noting that Jamila’s character is
doubly oppressed, since she is receiving discriminatory treatment for being a woman and for
belonging to a Muslim family.

Princess Jeeta, Jamila’s mother and Karim’s aunt, despite her aristocratic Indian origins, is first
a submissive and subjugated woman who obeys her husband, Anwar, Jamila’s father, who
imposes her the arranged marriage aforementioned. We can also see in this character the
oppression suffered for being a woman and for her own culture, religion, and husband’s
impositions. In this sense, Anwar is represented as the typical radical Muslim who forces his
female relatives to follow his instructions rigidly. Jamila and Jeeta are perhaps the two female
characters in which is more easily observed the patriarchal devices operating for being
“oriental”. However, we are also seeing that British female characters such as Eva, Margaret
and the ones we are going to analyze now, although “westernized” and in theory more
“liberalized”, they share a common representation of the stereotyped gender roles that
Kureishi both exemplifies and subverts.

Regarding other female characters that are worth mentioning are, for example, Eleanor, the
actress whom Karim falls in love with in perhaps, the most idyllic way of the whole story. But
despite that Eleanor knows she is being used sexually by the producer Mathew Pike and Karim
is also aware of that, she decides to continue with this “abuse” in order to improve her
professional career as an actress.

Marlene, Mathew Pike’s wife is another female character who seems at first to accept her
husband’s “exchange of couples” and even she also participates in the game. But when she is
rejected by Karim because Karim at the same time is reproachful towards Eleanor for her
maintaining her sexual relationship with Mathew, she scorns Mathew for his sexual game with
women, finally perpetuating the representation of women as mere objects and subjugated
beings. Mathew is the characteristic male “Western” powerful white who uses his power and
status to achieve his goals utilizing people, men and women, less powerful than him.

All these female characters who at first seem sexually liberated, are finally conditioned by male
desire and abuse and the patriarchal roles imposed on them, and they are no longer seen as
“free” as they appeared in the beginning. It is true otherwise, that Hanif Kureishi’s treatment
of these characters is someway dissident and subversive in order to give them their own voice
and finally finding a position within “Western” society.

Likewise, male characters are also first represented as stereotyped and later on we can
discover through Karim’s narrative of the events and the development of the action that some
of those characters are also subverted, above all, we see that development in Karim’s behavior
and sense of hybridity.

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Frantz Fanon and Edward Said were very influential as postcolonial literary critics before the
1980s and his essays widely studied by subsequent literary critics after them. Their studies and
essays are perfectly applied to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Hanif Kureishi The
Buddha of Suburbia, two narratives that embody some of the most studied colonial and
postcolonial assumptions studied by them.

To begin with Fanon’s essays, let us say that in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of
the Earth, he studies writes about the damage that French colonization carried out upon
millions of people and how the internalization of the colonial set of values is an effective way
of disempowering people and a source of trauma for the colonized. Fanon explored the
psychological effects of colonialism and the cost to the individual in a world where due to the
color of their skin, the subject is rendered peculiar, and object of derision, an aberration. In the
chapter entitled “The Fact of Blackness”, Fanon remembers how he felt in France when white
strangers called him “dirty nigger”. Fanon is defined in negative terms by those in a position of
power, not as a human “subject”, but as an “object”, a peculiarity at the mercy of a group that
identifies him as inferior. His identity is conveyed powerfully in the image of amputation. To
him, the relationship between language and power is fundamental.

Furthermore, in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon explains the consequences of identity
formation for the colonized subject who is forced into the internalization of the self as the
“other”. The “Negro” epitomizes everything that the colonizer is not. The “Negro” remains the
“other”.

The issue of being oneself identified in racist terms as explained above is exemplified in The
Buddha of Suburbia, in the racist attacks received by Changez for example, or in the treatment
that Karim, who is born in England but of Indian ascendancy, has when he is given a part in
theatre interpreting Mowgli in the play The Jungle Book. Although Karim finally takes
advantage of his hybrid condition of Anglo-Indian, he is used in racist and exotic terms as the
“other” for having a darker skin than the rest of the actors.

All this criticism can also be applied to Things Fall Apart is clearly seen in the way it affects the
Igbo community in Nigeria. Okonkwo, the main character who is considered black and savage
by the new colonizers subjugating his village and his people ends up committing suicide when
he sees his own world and civilization totally broken and fallen apart due to the effects of
imperialism in Nigeria. Okonkwo and the Igbo community are considered the “others”, the
savages, the ones who need to be “civilized” and indoctrinated in the Christian religion without
taking into account that this community had its own laws, culture, religion and society before
its colonization. Here it also takes part Said’s theory that we are going to see below, that the
belief of the superiority of Western civilization over the “others” does not allow to see
colonizers that these people had their own “civilization” that worked in an efficient way before
them.

In turn, Said’s Orientalism (1978) explored how colonialism institutionally created a wide-
ranging body of knowledge which supported the divisive practices of colonial government and
settlement from a Marxist and post-structuralist perspective, analyzing mainly the theories of
Gramsci and Foucault.

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Said’s asserts that Western imperial powers created a knowledge about their colonies that was
institutionalized and that helped to justify their subjugation as in the aforementioned case of
Things Fall Apart.

Said points out that travelers going to Egypt or the Middle East for instance, ever tried to learn
much about their culture, religion or way of living, or from the natives themselves, but they
instead recorded their observations based upon held assumptions about the “Orient” as a
mythic place of exoticism, moral laxity, sexual degeneration, and so forth. These assumptions
are presented as scientific truths by an “institutionalized” view of colonialism in order to
“educate” and “civilize” the barbarians colonized and uncivilized. This way, the missionaries
who arrived in Nigeria tried to impose Christianity despising and rejecting natives’ own gods
and beliefs as explained in the novel.

In regard to the issue of exoticism and the moral laxity explored by Said and the stereotypes
perpetuated by the Western view of them, we can also see them identified in The Buddha of
Suburbia and how those stereotypes are exploited by Kureishi in order to exemplify how the
Western belief of Indian exoticism and his “degeneration” is carried out by both the Indian
characters themselves such as Haroon and Karim and by the English ones having the clearest
example in Eva, who takes advantage of Haroon’s exotic Indian “wisdom” in the same way he
also uses his condition to help her escalate the social ladder. Moral laxity is exemplified in
Karim’s sexual behavior having intimate relations with his own cousin Jamila, even when she is
already married in an arranged marriage organized by her father. But Kureishi wisely refutes
and subvert this view of depravity and sexual degeneration by giving this quality to the
“Western” characters as well, showing that moral laxity is present in all cultures and races.

The conclusion we can extract from these essays by Fanon and Said is that “Empire colonizes
imaginations”. Fanon shows this at a psychological level for the oppressed and Said
demonstrates the legitimation of Empire for the oppressor. If colonialism involves “colonizing
the mind” then, resistance to it requires “decolonizing the mind”.

Fanon also highlights the importance of language in Black Skin, White Masks pointing out that
“a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that
language”.

South African author J. M. Coetzee and Nigerian Chinua Achebe are two cases in point that
exemplify in their narratives how colonial power operates to try to justify and perpetuate the
subjugation of the colonized peoples in Africa in these cases, although, as we will see later,
Waiting for the Barbarians has no specific spatial setting.

The main elements functioning in the dynamics of imperialism and colonization that we are
going to analyze here are basically the role of language and discourse, religion, and otherness.

Over the centuries, European countries have carried out the so-called “Scramble for Africa”
and their imperialistic view was that human beings in the African continent were savages,
illiterate, and uncivilized peoples.

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Chinua Achebe, who was very critical of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the
dehumanizing vision used to describe blacks in the Congo, creates a masterful narrative
focused on the Igbo community in Nigeria in his novel Things Fall Apart. In it, Achebe describes
in detail their society, their customs, their religion and their way of living which was, by no
means so “uncivilized” and “primitive” as the colonizers believed. The narrative indeed
exposes how the “civilized” British impose their imperialist rule over the Igbo community in
several villages.

Okonkwo, the main character, is the most reluctant to this submission to the colonial rule and
finally suffers the consequences of his insubordination when observing his entire world “falling
apart” resolves to commit suicide, a thing that in his society is seen as a violation of their main
spiritual principles, but full of despair and hopeless he puts his life to an end after many years
of fighting and hard work, in order to be a recognized member of his village and community.

What Achebe highlights in his literary work, is the fact that before the imperialist rule, Nigeria
had its own civilization constituted in villages and tribes, and even though not perfect as any
civilization is, it was well-organized and with a hierarchy that allowed self-government without
the intromission of any foreign individuals. However, the role played by the new English rulers
and English missionaries imposing Christian religion and the conversion of all the natives, is
that one of subjugating a whole community that they consider inferior in moral and values.

In the case of Waiting for the Barbarians the dynamics of colonial power functions in a similar
way as in Things Fall Apart, that is, the dehumanization of the non-whites as being uncivilized,
illiterate and savage, and, in this case, barbarians. Coetzee does not give a specific time or
spatial setting, only a “frontier” village in which a Magistrate receives orders to be applied
there from the “Empire” which is not specified either. But the Magistrate is little by little
opposed to the Empire when he witnesses more and more violence and torture towards the
nomad tribes and peoples considered barbarians. Some literary critics agree that Coetzee
wrote this story with certain reminiscences in the Apartheid episode in South Africa. As
Coetzee empathized with blacks marginalized in his country, the Magistrate ends up
empathizing with the non-white and abhors the inhuman treatment they receive from the
whites.

The colonial discourse in these two works operates, as Fanon asserts in his essay, through
language. Although Fanon spoke French and his discussion revolves around French
colonization, the English language in these cases has been the language of power, of the
colonizers in which the colonized have created their own image subjugated to the language of
the powerful Empire. This way, their identity has been created in these terms, as the “Other”,
the inferior, non-white creature.

Regarding religion, in Things Fall Apart is very visible the influence that Christianity exerts over
the Nigerian villages colonized despite the previous rejection by Umuofia’s inhabitants.
Religion is perhaps one of the most powerful mechanisms in colonialism, since in the name of
God, colonizers put their religion over the colonized ones, rejecting them and considering
inferior and pagan.