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Post-colonial Literatures
in English: History, Language, Theory
The anniversary of Columbus’s voyage and the celebrations are a reminder of the nostalgia and sense of pride that the West can resurrect of their long imperial adventure. But the national pride at the once expanding empire must be accompanied with the horrors of greed, violence and cruelty. Walder provides a historically rich account of colonialism by examining its history, language and theory, and explicates its political significance. It is a timely and thoughtful book written with historical sensitivity and, above all, an appreciation of the need to place the question of postcolonialism at the centre of an engagement with the colonial paradigm which acquires an urgency even today as cultural, racial, and moral differences established by imperialism still persist. In his analysis of Things Fall Apart, Dennis Walder interprets the term "postcolonial" as a celebration of "new literatures" and an exercise of resisting colonial attitudes. He quotes from Chinua Achebe’s Morning Yet on Creation Day: "The Nationalist movement in British West Africa after World War II brought about a mental revolution which began to reconcile us to ourselves. It suddenly seemed that we too might have a story to tell. "Rule Britannia!" to which we had marched so unselfconsciously on Empire Day now stuck in our throat. At the university, I read some appalling novels about Africa (including Joyce Cary’s much praised Mister Johnson) and decided that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else no matter how gifted or well intentioned. Walder then shows through two quotes, one from Cary and the other from Achebe, how the former exoticises Africa whereas the latter authenticates it. Achebe represents the existence of a society just before the arrival of the whites and exhibits their remarkable democratic system of governance with a system of rewards and punishments, values and observances. There is also no doubt that many of the lands colonised by the Europeans were perhaps more splendid than the culture that conquered them through the logic of the "white man’s burden". At the time when the charter for trade with what came to be known as the East India Company was signed, the Mughul rule was in place in India. It is said that Akbar’s reputation as a king, a statesman, a poet and a lover of books at the time far exceeded that of Queen Elizabeth I, who had ushered in the Golden Age of England. Akbar was the complete "renaissance man". Yet the 19th century European heart squirms at the thought of any contact with the blacks as evident in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But by the beginning of the 20th century, as Walder explains, the haphazard control over the South settled into an enormous enterprise with Britain at the helm of affairs declaring the demise of the feudal Arab and Asian states. The book examines English, the origins of pidgins and creoles, and colonialism, revealing cogently how the practice of colonialism permeated the cultures and discourses of both the colonial and colonised nations, the effects of which are still evident today. Rather than giving in to the popular belief that English has become a neutral language of global communication, Walder argues that it remains a language to which colonial discourses still adhere, a language still laden with colonial meanings. Colonial constructions are not only the result of colonial imposition, but a site for colonial production too. And this is visible in the use and spread of the English language and its inherent interweaving with the discourses of colonialism, a reminder of the need to rethink the practice of ELT and to decolonise applied linguistics in the context of the history of "world" English and of attitudes to English in the contemporary world. The colonial enterprise of the British Empire contained the thought that language was responsible for bestowing upon the colonised a civilization and its inherent benefits of knowledge and wealth, a syndrome that still predominates in many Third World cultures. The language of English, apart from this motive, goes on to also racially define the people that come under the hegemonic western dominance, and thus its significance for many "indigenous writers" who endeavour to understand the political nature of their position as different or exotic. The book urges the postcolonial writer to free the English language from the discourses of colonialism by generating counterdiscourses. The spread of English, argues Walder, is not natural, neutral, or beneficial as is often thought. It is a wicked plot, an invention of Western imperialism, and needs to be countered. |
The
word "postcolonial" really came into being when the Spanish
adventurer Christopher Columbus sailed away from European shores in 1492
to discover the "new world". Five hundred years later, in
1992, the media of the western world celebrated the occasion with
aplomb. At least 10 books appeared on the subject along with dozens of
articles and television series. Columbus had intended to find a new
route to India, one that did not cross the Cape of Good Hope on the
southern tip of Africa. When he touched land in Guanahani in the
Bahamas, he mistook it for India. The people there became
"Indians", and it is commonly believed that the misnomer is
the result of Columbus’s great error and obstinacy henceforth in
believing that he had found India.