Postcolonial Britain Weeks 4-5
For the works studied in weeks 4-5, my topic of research will be postcolonial Britain, and how the country’s imperialistic past shaped it leading into the 20th and 21st centuries. The biggest text, which my class spent a week analyzing, was “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. The other two texts from the last week that I individually studied were “The Moment before the Gun Went Off” by Nadine Gordimer and “The Sermon in the Guava Tree” by Kiran Desai. I love that “English texts” also includes all works that come from colonized lands. Desai is from India, Gordimer is from South Africa, and Conrad is from Poland. It allows radically different perspectives to grab the limelight, while in their writing many of them disparage and distance themselves from their ruling Great Britain.
In Heart of Darkness, while Britain was nearing the end of it’s colonial rule, the story follows a man who accompanies a trip to Africa to join an ivory trade. Britain has infested Africa with hunters who kill elephants for their tusks and sell them for a fortune back in England. The story shows the colonial effects of corrupting the land conquered, corrupting the native population, corrupting the Englishmen who arrive in the new land, and finally that corruption spreads all the way back to England itself, rotting and festering in the “glorious” city until it is hardly distinguishable form the “savage” lands they conquer. It also shows the postcolonial mess of freeing those lands, helping the natives, and figuring out the domestic complications that arose from such fierce imperialism. What a mess. It's a modern story written at the end of the Victorian era.
In Heart of Darkness, while Britain was nearing the end of it’s colonial rule, the story follows a man who accompanies a trip to Africa to join an ivory trade. Britain has infested Africa with hunters who kill elephants for their tusks and sell them for a fortune back in England. The story shows the colonial effects of corrupting the land conquered, corrupting the native population, corrupting the Englishmen who arrive in the new land, and finally that corruption spreads all the way back to England itself, rotting and festering in the “glorious” city until it is hardly distinguishable form the “savage” lands they conquer. It also shows the postcolonial mess of freeing those lands, helping the natives, and figuring out the domestic complications that arose from such fierce imperialism. What a mess. It's a modern story written at the end of the Victorian era.
For the story “The Moment before the gun went off”, it shows a wildly unique circumstance that arises from the decolonization of South Africa by England and the subsequent apartheid that followed. The story, set right after the fall of apartheid, shows a singular perspective on potential downsides in the freedom of blacks. Not that the slavery of blacks is a good thing, but this story shines light on the villification of a white man who accidentally killed a farm hand when his gun fired in the bed of the truck as it went over a pot hole and killed him. The white man knows he will be hunted by the newest protestors who are looking for examples to point to the government of racism in South Africa, but what the protestors don’t know is that the farm hand he accidentally killed was his son. The colonization of the world by England created so many more problems than it solved, financially and socially. The global reach and frustration with colonization is evident in the countless stories, like this one by Nadine Gordimer, that have appeared from every colonized nation across the world.
“The Sermon in the Guava Tree”, a book written very recently in the 1990s, shows the effects of colonization far after the ruling country has left. The author, Kiran Desai, is from India, and the short story shows the hybrid cross of English ideas and science with Indian lore and religion-based thinking. A young man decides to leave his family and inhabit a guava tree as his home. At first the town and his family thinks him crazy, but he cunningly begins revealing secrets about townsfolk that he knows because he worked at the post office and opened all of the town’s mail and read their secrets. The town then hails him as a sage, all-knowing god who knows the futures of the citizens of the town. The effects of colonization are hilariously also the post office itself, which would’ve never been there if not for the modernization brought by Great Britain. A crazy story, but telling of India’s history and how it has been rewritten by colonists, it gives a modern perspective of decade-old colonization.
Postcolonial Britain was a rapidly changing, morphing and struggle-some affair. It brought great despair to England but wonderful freedom to many countries around the world. The literature brought out of this maelstrom of struggle is timeless and will show future generations the danger of inequality.
Photo used under Creative Commons from @LUI_PIQUEE