The Postcolonial Cultural Identities of Individuals and Nations - Essay Example

Defining the Postcolonial Cultural Identities of Individuals and Nations Colonialism has left an indelible mark on the historically separated groupsof people involved in it. Questions of identity related to race, gender and nationality are closely interrogated by the postcolonial theorists. Edwards Said’s book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient and Chinua Ahebe’s essay ‘Colonial Criticism’ address the pertinent issues related to the criticisms and prejudices directed towards postcolonial literatures emerging from different parts of the world. Postcolonial studies are not restricted to a temporal aspect, and are rather a focused on a set of ideological and cultural representations from the beginning of colonialism. Therefore it is possible to read E.M Forster’s novel A Passage to India, written many years before the Indian independence, as a text that represents both colonial and postcolonial sentiments. Derek Walcott’s long poem ‘The Schooner Flight’ deals with the complex cultural aspects of identity and nationalism in the colonial Caribbean islands. Edwards Said’s thoughtful analysis of the ways in which the West has constructed an orient that suits their colonial needs has left an indelible impression in the cultural discourses prevalent in the latter phase of the previous century. He exposed how the West conveniently constructed the misconceptions of cultural stereotypes for their benefit. Such cultural labeling and role-fixing had been a part of the dominant colonial discourses that misrepresented the history and culture of colonized nations. In his view, “the orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1). Chinua Achebe tries to deconstruct the popular notions of the false notions of innate inferiority and cultural dependence of once-colonized nations to the colonizers. His responses to the brash comments by the Western critics aimed at the emerging postcolonial lietratures are laden with a judicious blend of intelligent arguments and indigenous cultural sentiments. Contesting the accusation that writers like him have been imitating the Western forms of cultural discourses, he observes: The colonialist critic, unwilling to accept the validity of sensibilities other than his own, has made particular point of dismissing the African novel. He has written lengthy articles to prove its non-existence largely on the grounds that the novel is a peculiarly Western genre, a fact which would interest us if our ambition was to write ‘Western’ novels (278). Achebe points out that jazz was not an imitation of the Western musical tradition, but a remarkable invention of a new genre with the help of the musical instruments discarded by them. Likewise, postcolonial representations are capable of appropriating and transforming the existing cultural devices. The India that E.M. Forster portrays in his A Passage to India is essentially an India of a Western writer’s imagination and limited knowledge. In it the English lady Mrs. Moore reflects on the way India has failed to define her national identity: “She (India) knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal” (136). It is possible to see the novel as one among the many attempts of Western writers to define a colonial nation. However, the fictional space of it accommodates multiple viewpoints from the perspectives of various characters, and can thus be analyzed with reference to the postcolonial sentiments as well. The novel deals with the traumatic experiences the widowed Indian Dr.Aziz undergoes after an unsuccessful attempt to mingle with English people. He is accused of rape by the young Ms. Adela Quested, though in the end it is revealed that she did hallucinate that she was raped during a claustrophobic misadventure. The European fear of the orient as a savage land occupied with cultureless people must have shaped Ms.Quested’s hallucinations, and in this sense the novel can be analyzed with reference to Said’s reflections on orientalism. Achebe observes that colonial discourses represent certain cultural and individual types, “of ‘simple natives’ – houseboys, cooks, drivers, schoolchildren – supposedly more trustworthy than the smart alecs” (273-4). However, Forster’s novel is not infested with such characters as in the case of conventional European travel writing. Moreover, there are occasional references to the impropriety of the colonial situation, as in the reflection of Ms.Quested on Ronny Heaslop, her fiancé: “One touch of regret – not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart – would have made him a different man and the British Empire a different institution” (51). Thus the novel carries a complex cultural matrix with various identities and perspectives. Derek Walcott makes use of a new language that creates the poetry of unique expressions. In ‘The Schooner Flight’, the protagonist, Shabine, records in poetic expressions his cultural dilemma related to identity. The vivid description of his voyage through the Caribbean islands is interspersed with his keenly observant reflections on the unequal world order that has led to his identity crisis: “I am just a red nigger who love the sea,/ I had a sound colonial education,/ I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/ and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”. Shabine expresses his intense concerns for the ways in which entire nations are redefined in accordance with the whims and fancies of colonial nations. Colonized individuals gain significance only in relation to their identification with the colonial values: “if we live like the names our masters please, / by careful mimicry might become men”. Shabine finds solace in the immense power poetry offers. Here a colonial tool is appropriated and used as a powerful weapon of postcolonial expressions. The way in which Shabine is branded by the dominant communities is reminiscent of what Said speaks of with regard to the western creation of the orient. The colonized subject finds out a release through culturally significant expressions. The hybrid culture of the nation and the individual can be best represented through art and literature and that is what Shabine attempts to do. Contrary to the European notion of a universal culture that Achebe is skeptical of, the poem wields power on its cultural uniqueness. Walcott does not fall prey to the Western notions of the aesthetic realm of poetry or the grammatical purity of English language. His expressions are emotionally charged, culturally explicit and filled with irreverence to the overpowering ideologies of colonialism. The innovative ways in which the postcolonial discourses redefine cultural identities of the individual and nation are evident in the works analyzed. The creative and critical aspects of these works make postcolonial studies a highly esteemed and rewarding branch of culture studies in the contemporary world. References Achebe, Chinua. “Colonialist criticism” in Literature in the Modern World edited by Dennis Walder. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. New York: Harvest, 1952. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001. Walcott, Derek.Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Read More