post-colonial literature

post-colonial literature consists of a body of writing emanating from Europe's former colonies which addresses questions of history, identity, ethnicity, gender, and language. The term should be used loosely and hesitantly, for it is replete with contradictions and conundrums. What, for instance, is the difference, if any, between imperialism and colonialism? Were not the forms of colonial rule and the processes of decolonization too varied to admit of a single definition? Is the literature of the USA to be included in such a body? Why does the once- favoured term ‘Commonwealth literature’ no longer seem appropriate? Is it that it contains too many implied assumptions of a multicultural community in which each country is working towards a sense of shared enterprise and common purpose? Did empire end with Indian independence in 1947, or in 1956 with Suez, or perhaps when the Bahamas were granted their independence, as late as 1973? Such questions notwithstanding, the term ‘post-colonial literature’ is to date the most convenient way of embracing the powerful and diverse body of literary responses to the challenges presented by decolonization and the transitions to independence and post-independence in a wide variety of political and cultural contexts.

Criticism of empire and imperial practices originated among the colonists themselves. Recusants such as Bartolomé de las Casas and the Dominican Antonio Montesinos were busy challenging the savage practices which were to depopulate vast swathes of the Caribbean of their indigenous inhabitants. When in 1511 Montesinos asked whether the Indians were not themselves men, his intervention was greeted by the almost unanimous demand from his fellow colonists that he be forced to recant and be repatriated to Spain. Out of this first colonial encounter was born an argument which has continued to be rehearsed right up to the present day. The dispute has been conducted around the contrast between natural and artificial societies: on one side, Montaigne argued that primitive peoples were more virtuous by reason of their uncorrupted existence in nature. On the other side, the social achievement of art and its superiority over nature was stressed.

The terms of the debate, then, were already well established by the time Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, in which there emerges the recognizable paradigm of the native who is first amicable, only later to become duplicitous and require the correcting hand of the ‘cultivated’ man. This theme was to continue through to the fiction of the present day, through Robinson Crusoe and the writings of Kipling, who, in conceding the passing of the British Empire, could exhort the USA to take up the moral duty of the ‘White Man's Burden’ and bring the backward races to maturity. Heart of Darkness (1899) marks a key moment in colonial literature, Conrad questioning the certainties about racial superiority which underpinned white rule.

Post-colonial authors have advanced Conrad's perspectives, contesting European versions of the colonial experience: ‘the Empire writes back,’ as Rushdie puts it. The forms of retaliation are manifold. Post-colonial literature, in seeking to awaken political and cultural nationalism, has dwelt on popular revolts against colonial rule, exposing the lie of the passive native. Writers like the Trinidadian C. L. R. James have brought to the fore neglected Black heroes. History, however, is not an epic narrative of kings and rebels, but a record of the day-to-day existence of the common people; by giving them voice and character, post-colonial writers seek to recover the people who truly mattered to history but who, for political and related reasons, were written out. The world-view of such ‘lowly’ people, expressed in their myths and legends, is also given space, writers like the Guyanese Wilson Harris arguing that Amerindian mythology reveals values and perspectives as complex and mysterious as any originating from the Graeco-Roman or Judaeo-Christian traditions. There is a corresponding reappraisal of oral expression, the riddles, proverbs, songs, and stories handed down over generations and shared by the whole community. These forms of orality are often spurned by literary academics as lesser forms of ‘literature’ and relegated to the dubious category of ‘folk tale’. But the folk tale is an integral part of the fabric of personal and social life, often with profound religious significance. To ignore it is to ignore the cultural history of a nation.

Western power has been most seriously challenged by being placed in a new historical perspective. In 1992 the 500th anniversary celebrations of Columbus's arrival in the Americas were significantly contested by a vast array of post-colonial writing which repudiated the very idea that the Americas were ‘discovered’ or ‘brought into discursive being’ by the appearance of European adventurers. Amongst many other examples, they pointed out that at the same time that Elizabeth I allowed the founding of the East India Company, the Mughal emperor of India, Akbar, had established dominion over a much larger trading area than his English contemporary.

Repositioning the coordinates of history has also involved coming to terms with the language of expression itself. Language is inextricably bound up with culture and identity, and as the colonizers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose the English language on subject peoples, the response from the formerly colonized has ranged from the outright rejection of English as a medium through which to exercise their art to the appropriation of it with subversive intent. After first using English as the medium for his novel, the Kenyan writer Thiong'o finally decided to reject it. For others, such as the Nigerian writer Achebe, English has been a means of uniting peoples across continents and of reaching a wider audience than would have been possible in their own mother tongues. However, whether or not the English language is capable of supplying the rhythms and cadences necessary to dramatize foreign landscapes, this has not prevented writers from doing ‘unheard of things with it’; certainly Caribbeanists like Walcott and V. S. Naipaul have used techniques such as switching in and out of standard English and local creoles to emphasize that the post-Columbian world is irrevocably multicultural and hybridized. There are now many people in all parts of the world who see English as having become detached from Britain or Britishness, who claim the language as their own property, for they have moulded and refashioned it to make it bear the weight of their own experience.

Another important progression has been the acknowledgement and reappearance of women's experience after being hidden from the histories of colonial societies. Many of the fixed representations of non-Western women have been powerfully rejected in a host of contemporary writings, most of which in their different ways refute imaginings deeply rooted in Western narrations and their subsequent over-simplistic depictions. The 1997 winner of the Booker Prize, Arundhati Roy, is only the latest to join a distinguished list of women writers which already includes Rhys, Desai, Emecheta, Senior, Gordimer, and G. Nichols. Such writers have placed women at the centre of history, as makers and agents of history, not silent witnesses to it.

Whatever the irony contained in the fact that very many post-colonial writers choose both to write in English, the language of their former colonizers, and in the literary forms, such as the novel, developed in European societies, there is no doubt that the new literatures in English constitute a body of exciting and dynamic texts capable at once of forcing a reassessment of the traditional canon and of providing a vigorous alternative to what are often regarded as rather defensive and introspective English texts.