LITERATURAS POSTCOLONIALES I.

2018 SEGUNDA SEMANA

This fragment belongs to Chinua Achebe’s narrative Things Fall Apart (1958). Achebe’s book is a
vivid portrayal of the Igbo community in Nigeria. The excerpt reflects a dialogue between Obierika
and Okonkwo, the main character. Both are two tribal men who are witnessing how their
community is disappearing thanks in part to the British colonization and to the help that their own
people are giving to the colonizers. The novel explores the clash between the traditional African
Igbo culture and the religious and social practices imposed by the British through the missionaries
in Africa.
The excerpt is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator who tells the story with all the
details from a detached perspective. Achebe, through this omniscient narrator, gives a detailed
account of the way of life in the fictional village of Umuofia, Nigeria, in which the Igbo community
lives relatively peacefully with their own tribal customs and internal conflicts with other tribes but
whose problems are solved in their own way until the British presence in Nigeria that impose over
them radical changes in their society and religion, not well welcomed by these two Igbo members,
but well received by others who have been either freely subjugated to British rule and religion or
by force due to the laws finally imposed.
The fragment above belongs to chapter 20, near the end of the story, where the two men talk
about how the “white man” has provoked an imposition over a people and a culture of which they
do not know anything about. The first sentence “Does the white man understand our custom
about land?” is uttered by Okonkwo who is answered by Obierika with a series or rhetoric
questions about the “white man” and his total lack of understanding regarding their culture,
religion, and customs. Obierika also complains about their “own brothers (who) have turned
against (them)”, that is, the own Igbo members who have freely joined the missionaries and the
Christian religion and values, such as Okonkwo’s own son, Nwoge, whom his father has always
considered as “weak” and not a real man at all.
Obierika also alludes to the fact that British colonizers have been able to disintegrate the whole
clan by “put(ting) a knife on the things that held us together” and “we have fallen apart”.
What this fragment and the book as a whole complains about, is the idea of the “white man” and
Western superiority over other races with no respect for their traditions and values, considering
their way of living, religion, and culture as inferior and less “civilized” than Western culture, and

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 black people as “savages” also as an inferior sub-race; as Frank Fanon denounces in his essay Black
Skin, White Masks, in which the issue of identity is put into question in terms of other “non-
white”, “non-Western” races.
In the same sense, the term “negritude” is very present in Achebe’s novel. Associated with the
Francophone writers Senghor and Césaire, this term evokes a kind of resistance to colonization
from different non-white peoples of different origins, united against their oppressors and proud of
their roots and culture. This “negritude” is clearly seen in Okonkwo’s feeling of pride and respect
for his way of living and against the white man’s oppression to which he resists till the end of the
story finishing with his own suicide defying this way their colonizers but failing at the same time to
his own customs, clan, and African civilization. (McLeod 109)
McLeod’s Beginning Colonialism also explains that the term “negritude” is “nostalgic for a mythic
African past” and cites Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a clear example of this, provided that the
novel starts in a sort of pre-colonial “golden age” in this Nigerian village, but showing that
Achebe’s himself did not consider that golden age as such either, and the novel also puts into
question that that “perfect pre-colonial civilization” never existed, since peoples and laws are also
fallible and have their own flaws. (McLeod 115)
Achebe’s work also reflects what McLeod and other postcolonial critics consider as a double
oppression of women, since the concept “negritude” has little to do with gender differences. In
Igbo culture and clans, women are equally oppressed and abused, considered as inferior to men.
There are many cases in the book in which Okonkwo beats his wives, and young girls are forced to
marry. Senghor’s view that the “African woman does not need to be liberated” is challenged by
black women and critics and manifested in the novel itself. (McLeod 115)
All in all, what this fragment reflects and Achebe’s work as a whole, is the fact that African
peoples, in this case Nigerian villages had a cultural past and heritage that, even though far from
being perfect and happy, was as valid as Western culture and values imposed by British colonizers
over Nigerian peoples “falling their civilization apart” into pieces in many times with the help and
consent of the members of the same oppressed community as it is also exposed in the excerpt.
The own oppressed peoples contribute many times with the power of colonization over them and
their subsequent subjugation to imperial rule.
McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Edited by Peter Barry and Helen Carr, Second Edition, Manchester
University Press, 2010.

Edward Said’s book Orientalism is based on a theorization of how colonial discourses may operate;
how the Western powers represented and saw their colonized lands from the 18 th century.
To explain this theory of the “orientalist concept” operating in a modern, Western, cultural
background, let us put it into practice in Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia.
Said’s text makes emphasis in certain stereotypes and binary oppositions that have been assented
and perpetuated along the history and taken for granted as facts. For instance, the stereotyped

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exoticism that oriental culture and people provoke on “Western” minds”. This is perfectly seen in
the character of Haroon Amir, an Indian immigrant who, in spite of being integrated long time ago
in the British culture and society, takes advantage of his Indian roots and heritage to seduce Eva
Kay, a middle-aged English woman who is escalating little by little in the social ladder and sees in
Haroon a kind of exotic “buddha” that can help to pursue her desired social status as a bohemian,
upper-class and elitist woman. Orientalism is applied here as a “Western fantasy” (McLeod 66).
Haroon abandons his wife for Eva and her ambitions and his own, what at the beginning makes
him feel important, happy and self-realized by spreading his “Eastern wisdom”. But later, he feels
miserable and empty when he witnesses Eva’s quick success and how she leaves him in the second
place. With this attitude, Eva is perpetuating the exotic and bizarre image that oriental image
provokes on British society for her own purposes and interests while at the same time, when it is
no longer useful, she leaves it aside, as something that has value only when applied to Western
necessities and interests.
On the other side, the strangeness of the “Orient” is another stereotyped vision that affects Karim
Amir, the main character and narrator of the story. Haroon’s son feels divided between his Indian
roots and his westernized assimilated “Britishness” since childhood. This oriental strangeness
plays somehow in favor and against Karim in many aspects of his life, since, as his father, he also
takes advantage of the supposed exoticism he possesses as an Indian and uses it to be an actor
and in his (bi)sexual and love relationships. But Karim also encounters with discrimination and
racism in his way to success. He is used by Eleanor, an actress and his girlfriend for a while, to
reach an intimate contact with the theater producer Mathew Pike who at the same time has
certain favoritism for Karim as an actor who he can exploit for his own profit.
Other stereotype spread by orientalism is regarding gender. Female characters in The Buddha of
Suburbia are portrayed from different angles and in different ways. Eva, Eleanor, and the rest of
“English” women are stereotypically portrayed as “freed women” in their Western world, whereas
“East women” such as Jamila, Karim’s mother (although English but married to an Indian) and
Princess Jeeta, are portrayed with a more “oriental” image. Jeeta and Margaret, Karim’s mother,
are first portrayed as submissive and subjugated women, housewives and workers who attend
their respective families in the traditional role imposed on them in gender terms. Jamila, however,
is the epitome of the “sexually lascivious exotic Oriental female” (McLeod 70) who is promiscuous,
provided that she has sexual encounters with her cousin Karim and later in the commune where
she finally lives after her father dies having forced her first to marry Changez in an arranged
marriage which turns into a total failure due to Jamila’s own insubordination despite his father’s
imposition of getting married. It is true that Kureishi tries to break someway these oriental gender
stereotypes by “liberating” Jeeta after her husband’s death and Margaret after being abandoned
by Haroon and rebuild her life.
Said’s Orientalism also draws attention on the fact that the oriental is considered “degenerate”,
that is, people from the Orient is regarded to have a “tenuous moral” (McLeod 71–72), laxity and
promiscuity which is also reflected and subverted in The Buddha of Suburbia. Karim is aware of his
sexual potential and exploits it in a way that many can consider inappropriate or degenerate, even
though he is not the only one who shows this “degenerate” behavior, since other “British”
characters behave in the same “deprived” way. In this sense, Kureishi dismantles the stereotypical
image that only “oriental” people are degenerate.

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 To sum up, Karim’s use of his oriental condition in the beginning and the internal conflicts that this
issue generates on him, is finally got over in the end when he achieves his own self-respect and
acceptance of his hybridity. This is the final triumph turned into a bildungsroman for Karim, an
achievement of matureness and self-knowledge. And in this sense, The Buddha of Suburbia uses
Said’s concept of Orientalism to both exemplify it and subvert it.
McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Edited by Peter Barry and Helen Carr, Second Edition, Manchester
University Press, 2010.

John Agard and Grace Nichols are both from Guyana. As migrants living in the UK, they both have
“hybridized” their identity in their respective poetry, in which the representation of otherness is
conveyed in several ways.
The two poems by Agard studied, “Pan Recipe” and “English Girl Eat Her First Mango”, provide
with a feeling of otherness that the poet has tried to highlight and at the same time to “reverse”
through the use of language and metaphor. In the same way, Grace Nichols’ “Wherever I Hang” is
a vivid picture of the ambivalent and conflictive feeling of belonging or the lack of belonging to
one single place.
Nationalist representations, in this case of the “mother land”, England, also have to do with the
sentiment of otherness that can be perpetuated in non-English born, non-white communities,
since that “nationalist” feeling can be lost in the fact that migrants from former English colonies
might see themselves with a not defined identity in terms of nationality and “Britishness”.
Besides, the perpetuation of the otherness of the colonized subject as it is exposed on McLeod’s
Beginning Colonialism, 2010, turns in a double movement to reduce and maintain this status of
being the “other”(McLeod 90). This duality is well depicted by Agard in “Pan Recipe”, in which the
poetic voice talks ironically about how the colonized subject is metaphorically “cooked” in the fire
of colonization through the physical abuse they suffer by being raped and whipped until they
finally “explode”. This explosion gives the colonizer an excuse to keep on perpetuating the abuse
in the double movement explained above of reducing and maintaining their status as the inferior
“others”.
In “English Girl Eats Her First Mango” Agard masterfully “reverses” the role of the other, in this
case, being the English girl who is eating a mango (an exotic and foreign fruit) for the first time,
immersing herself into a different culture and background. Here, the masculine poetic voice, who
may be considered at first “the other”, is who leads the girl through his universe in a kind of love
game, a game of seduction and of discovery of his “other” world.
Nichols’ “Wherever I Hang” puts the emphasis on the own sentiment of otherness that the poetic
voice herself feels when arriving in England and has to change her “calypso ways” in order to feel
integrated into the new society. But even though she finally gets used to “de English life”, she feels
“divided to de ocean”. The poem strengthens that feeling of otherness in its comparison of the
different customs both in England and Guyana, as Nichols contrasts one and then the other. She
finally reaches the conclusion that “Wherever (she) hang(s) (her) knickers, that’s (her) home”

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 asserting once and for all her feeling of belonging to a place, although she does not deny neither
of her two identities or “nationalities”, being this way part of one and part of the “other”.
The use of Caribbean English that both poets employ, reinforces the resistance but also the
assimilation into the English culture. By using the English language but in their own way, they are
emphasizing their condition of otherness and at the same time challenging it in the dual terms
aforementioned.

McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Edited by Peter Barry and Helen Carr, Second Edition, Manchester
University Press, 2010.

Negritude is an influential term in postcolonial studies in Africa, the Caribbean an America that has
served to enable oppressed peoples “to imagine themselves as a particular and united collective”
(McLeod 109). Francophone writers Césaire and Senghor found themselves identified as “negroes”
in France, fought against this derogatory view of black people by enhancing the validity of their
race and culture.
South African writer J.M. Coetzee does not refer directly to the Apartheid event in South Africa in
his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, but the colonial message of torture and abuse over other
peoples that his literary work gives through this story in a “frontier town” whose setting is
unspecified, is clearly conveyed.
As history recounts, black people in South Africa were harshly discriminated by the Apartheid
laws, considering them as an “inferior” race and banning them from becoming mixed with whites
in all the regards.
In Waiting for the Barbarians, the white oppressors see Barbarians, that is, black nomads, as
menacing, inferior and savage who are feared by “civilized” people. In other words, beings who
must be tortured and punished. The concept of negritude is conveyed here in the character of the
nomad girl, who has been abused and tortured before being rescued by the Magistrate, the main
character who takes care of her until he returns her back to her tribe, defying this way the laws of
the “Empire”. Although the Magistrate protects the girl from being again tortured, he also
considers her as an inferior being, since he does not treat her as he treats other women.
In the novel, black people are the barbarians. They are seen as primitive and degenerate by
Colonel Joll and Mandel, the official and servants of the Empire who justify their abuse over them
on the grounds that they are savage and threatening. Along the novel, however, we easily see,
that the real barbarians are not the black ones.
The changing position of the Magistrate when witnessing these injustices, and when decides to be
sympathetic with the girl and her people, makes him suffer in himself this abuse and oppression
from the servants of the Empire. His sympathy towards the supposed barbarians grows bigger and
is considered as a betrayal of the empire’s laws and values. In bearing this torture himself and the
mistreatment to which he is submitted, the Magistrate becomes one of them, accepting now their

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customs and their nomadic life as worthy and even more human and “civilized” than that one
offered by the Empire he was serving during all his life and that now abhors.
Moreover, the binary oppositions white, European, civilized – black, African, savage, become here
dissolved in the concept of negritude and in the whole novel. Being Coetzee a white South African
who overtly opposed Apartheid and defended human rights and equality for all South African
population, he uses the dissidence of the Magistrate and his join to the “barbarians” to exemplify
that “horizontal comradeship” (McLeod 108) that the use of the term “negritude” conveys to
make visible the “other” as equally valid, reversing the savagism to the side of the oppressor.
Moreover, negritude is seen in other details of the novel, such as the closer connection that the
barbarians are supposed to have with nature and how African culture celebrates this connection.
But the term “civilization” is however totally reversed in the savage behavior of the officials of the
Empire in contrast to the passivity of their “barbarian” prisoners.
All in all, we cannot see in Waiting for the Barbarians a mythic pre-colonial past, also proposed
within the concept of “negritude”, because, although at the heart of negritude was the celebration
of blackness (McLeod 110), we, as readers, are not given the choice to see how the supposed
barbarians really behaved before being colonized nor we are given any clue of what their
traditions and culture were, except that they are nomads living somehow peacefully, until the real
barbarians arrived and stayed in their lands to oppress them and dispossess them of their
territories and their own human condition.

McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Edited by Peter Barry and Helen Carr, Second Edition,
Manchester University Press, 2010.