Postcolonial Literature \"Everytime I Think

Postcolonial Literature

"Everytime I think I have forgotten, / I think I have lost the mother tongue, / it blossoms out of my mouth. / Days I try to think English: / I look up, / paylo kallo kagdo / oodto jai, huhvay jzaday pohchay / ainee chanchma kaeek chay / the crow has something in its beak." -- Sujata Bhatt

The immigrant is defined by his language; it is entangled with the "very roots" of his being (Kumar 17). As an immigrant struggles to find his identity in the world, there is one element that will always define him -- his language. "Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it…To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free" (17). This is clearly illustrated in A.K. Ramanujan's poem entitled "Self-Portrait," in which we meet a person who is writing in English thus obviously influenced by Western culture, however, when he sees himself in a shop window, his "self-portrait," he sees himself as the product of his racial ethos and nation. "I resemble everyone / but myself," he says. Here we seen an obsession with private ancestral memories, leading to a search for racial roots (Rukhaiyar & Prasad 125).

Likewise, China Achebe's Things Fall Apart was written in English, suggesting that he wrote it not for his Nigerian people, but he wrote it for the West. In the work, he critiques and attempts to correct the vision of Africa that was created by other writers of the colonial period. Achebe tackles the problem with communication between the Igbo and the missionaries. "Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten" (5). This sentence shows the reader how the formality in the Igbo language caused confusion when dealing with the Europeans. The Europeans are direct and efficient in their dealings, but the Igbo value the art of rhetoric and incorporate metaphors and imagery, which, to the missionaries, seems highly inefficient.

Achebe writes Things Falls Apart from a peacemaking position. He is desperately trying to understand his past as a way of finding his identity. Rather than coming from a place of absolute pessimism, Achebe, in fact, is able to make the search for his identity in a postcolonial world a positive quest. He is using education, incorporating the Igbo language, to reinvent his own sense of self. He is showing that there can be an existence of two languages. By writing in English, he is recreating himself and finding an identity that may not be the one he was born with, but he is also making it clear that he hasn't forgotten where he comes from. In other words, he will find his own identity through the English language which will inevitably be infiltrated with his own culture and language.

Salman Rushdie's story "The Prophet's Hair" gives the reader a strong sense of how conformist Muslims profoundly believe in the power of Muhammad the Prophet. In fact, Hashim uses his beliefs to justify his violent behavior. "…by keeping the hair from its distracted devotees, I perform -- do I not? -- a finer service than I would by returning it!" (Rushdie 44). There is the feeling that Rushdie is toying with the concept of freedom of speech in this story as well as destroying the concept of the East as mysterious. Rushdie uses English to tell his story, but he incorporates the Indian oral tradition without any kind of chronological structure to the story. He deconstruct the binary opposition of East and West. He himself is between the Orient and the Occident and he chooses to use both structures, combining Britain and India (Buran 10).

The factors of race and gender complicate the relations of class in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation," and Jean Rhys "Let Them Call It Jazz" in various ways. In Heart of Darkness, the story is centered on the typical male experience, which tends to alienate the female reader from the very "mannish" story. There is some speculation that Marlow and Kurtz's sexist views are part of the "horror" that Conrad was conveying as Marlow reveals a world that is very clearly split into two different realms -- male and female, "the first harboring the possibility of 'truth' and the second dedicated to the maintenance of delusion" (Moore 198-199).