Article Citation: Kabir Ahmed (2019). Literary Responses to Colonial and Post-colonial Modernity: Representation and Textual Politics in Selected Novels of George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. DEGEL: The Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Islamic Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1. ISSN 0794-9316
LITERARY RESPONSES TO COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL MODERNITY:
REPRESENTATION AND TEXTUAL POLITICS IN SELECTED NOVELS OF GEORGE LAMMING,
SAMUEL SELVON, CHINUA ACHEBE AND NGUGI WA THIONG’O
By
Kabir Ahmed
National
Institute for Legislative Studies, Abuja
Abstract
This paper offers a
critical analysis of the complex ways by which prominent African and Caribbean
writers such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa
Thiong’o responded to the moral and political problematics of modernity in
their representations of the moral and political dilemmas they faced as both
hybrid intellectuals and literary artists, especially in their confrontations
with questions of ethnic-racial identity and moral choices. The four primary
authors have historically had to deal with the complex relationship between
literary realism, and the kind of politics it underpins, and their negotiations
with modernity and modernist culture in more or less varied post-colonial
settings in Africa and the Caribbean. The paper examines this complex process
within the literary productions of the primary authors from the perspective of
what Edward Said calls "contrapuntal reading", a kind of textual
post-colonial reading of their canonical novels, namely In the Castle of My Skin,
(1953) The Lonely Londoners (1956), Anthills of the Savannah (1987), and Petals
of Blood (1977).
Introduction
The primary
authors for this study are George Lamming (1927-), Samuel Selvon (1923-1994),
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), and Ngugi wa Thiongo (1938-), all of them authors of
acclaimed novels, namely In the Castle of
my Skin (1953), Lonely Londoners
(1956), Anthills of the Savannah
(1987), and Petals of Blood (1977).1
These novels are canonical texts on the English
Literature and Literature in English syllabus in Africa
and the Caribbean even today. All four authors are prominent novelists who
share many biographical facts, namely being non-white individuals and born
under the cultural and political influence of the British empire, and its
ebbing around the time of their adulthood and writing career. What is more, the
four texts primary texts for this study emerged from the political and cultural
upheavals of the post-war period that saw mass migration from the colonies to
the metropolitan centres in Europe, and the apocalyptic intensity and global
reach of the events that defined the new emerging modern world in both
periphery and centre. All the primary texts under study thematically deal with
rapid ethnic and racial changes in modern societies, the complications of
cultural and social interaction, and the problems of urban living in ethnically
diverse post-colonial societies.
All four novels
also deal with the problems of subjectivity and individual psychology and
racial stereotyping in emerging multi-cultural societies. For example, In
the Castle of My Skin, features an autobiographical character named G.; and
the novel can be read as both a coming-of-age story as well as the story of the
Caribbean itself. The novel also seeks to define the place of the West Indian
in the post-colonial world, by a literary focus on personal identity and the
history of the Caribbean. The Lonely Londoners, like most of Selvon's
later work, focuses on the migration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s
and 1960s, and tells, mostly in anecdotal form, the daily experience of
settlers from Africa and the Caribbean. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of
different subcultures that exist within London, as with any major city, due to
class and racial boundaries.
Achebe's Anthills of
the Savannah focuses on the clash of Western and traditional African
values, the problems of autocracy and democracy in an African post-colonial
state. Petals of Blood (1977) deals with social and
economic problems in East Africa after independence, particularly the continued
exploitation of peasants and workers by foreign business interests and a
greedy indigenous bourgeoisie.
A Brief on the Primary Authors
George Lamming
was born on 8 June 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of
mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather,
Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St
David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere
School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his
teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Lamming left
Barbados to work as a teacher from 1946 to 1950 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, at El Colegio
de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he
worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial
Service. In the Castle of My Skin, was published
in London in 1953. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and was
championed by eminent figures the like of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright, the latter writing an
introduction to the book's US edition. Lamming was subsequently awarded
a Guggenheim Fellowship, and became a
professional writer. He began to travel widely, going to the United States in
1955, the West Indies in 1956
and West Africa in 1958.2
Samuel Dickson
Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad, and
is the sixth of seven children. His parents were Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant
from Madras and his mother was a Christian Anglo-Indian. His maternal grandfather was Scottish and his
maternal grandmother was Indian. He was
educated at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of 15 to work. He was a
wireless operator with the local branch of the Royal Naval Reservefrom 1940 to
1945 during the Second World War. Thereafter, he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. Selvon moved
to London in the 1950s,
where he worked as a clerk for the Indian Embassy, while writing in his spare
time. His short stories and poetry appeared in various publications,
including the London Magazine, New Statesman, and The Nation. In London he also worked with the BBC, producing two
television scripts, Anansi the Spiderman, and Home Sweet
India. Selvon was a fellow in creative writing at the University of Dundee from 1975
until 1977.[6] In the
late 1970s Selvon moved to Alberta, Canada, and found a
job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria.
Chinua
Achebe was a
Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often
considered his best, is the most widely read book in modern African literature.[3] He won the Man Booker
International Prize in 2007. Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school
and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English
literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan). He became fascinated with
world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as
a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to
the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide
attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his
later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). When the region
of Biafra broke away from Nigeria
in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as
ambassador for the people of the new nation. He lived in the United States for
several years in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. in 1990, after a car crash
left him partially disabled..
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, originally James Thiong'o Ngugi is an
award-winning, world-renown Kenyan writer and academic who writes
primarily in Gikuyu. His work
includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and
social criticism to children's literature. In 1977, Ngũgĩ embarked upon a novel
form of theatre in his
native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held
to be "the general bourgeois education system", by encouraging
spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project
sought to "demystify" the theatrical process, and to avoid the
process of alienation that produces a gallery of active stars and an
undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers which, according to Ngũgĩ,
encourages passivity in "ordinary people". Ngũgĩ was imprisoned for
over a year as was adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist
was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught
at Yale University for some years, and has since also taught at New York University, with a dual
professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and at
the University of California, Irvine.
Background
In the Castle of My Skin, the first novel by
Barbadian writer George Lamming, tells the story of the
mundane events in a young boy's life that take place amid dramatic changes in
the village and society in which he lives. First published in London in 1953,
the novel uses such characteristic devices of modernist fiction as shifting
perspectives and unreliable narration to recount the boyhood of a fairly
traditional fictional protagonist: a sensitive, unusually intelligent young
boy, with a protective mother, who grows up among his peers but, because of his
intelligence, takes a different path. The novel's main concern, however, is not
the individual consciousness of the protagonist. Rather, Lamming uses the
growth and education of G. (his hero) as a device through which to view the
legacy of colonialism and slavery in Caribbean village society in the middle of
the twentieth century, and to document the changes that time brings to this
sleepy hamlet. The novel's primary concerns are larger than the experience of
G. as an individual. Through his eyes, we see the effects of race, feudalism,
capitalism, education, the labor movement, violent riots, and emigration on his
small town and, by extension, on Caribbean society as a whole. In In
the Castle of My Skin, as befits his choice of protagonist, the scope of
perception is limited to the personal, domestic, and village spheres. Through
this restricted view, the reader receives a comprehensive image of significant
socio-cultural changes in a tradition-bound part of the world.
The relationship between
colonial powers and their colonies, and the effects that this relationship has
on the inhabitants of the colonies, is the enduring concern of George Lamming.
All of his works address these issues. As the first of his novels, In
the Castle of My Skin appropriately anatomizes this dynamic as it
bears upon a nine-year-old boy in one of Barbados' small rural villages. The
colonizing nation does not exert its power on the colonized people solely by
using raw force such as that at the disposal of governmental or military
bodies. Colonizing powers, especially those of European and Islamic origin,
also felt themselves driven by the need to "spread the light" of
their own civilization or religion, or at least many of their propagandists
argued this. Compounding the colonizer's ability to reward those who follow the
rules and punish those who don't are the almost inevitable differences between
subjects and colonizers. In England's first colony, Ireland, the difference was
religion. In Barbados, the difference is racial. Throughout the novel, in the
boys' school or in the relationships between villagers and the landlord,
Lamming shows how the colonizing powers devalue everything associated with
Africans and exalt everything associated with white English culture.
Lamming's entire book
dissects various ways in which the colonizer's values are instilled within a
native populace, but in Chapter 3 he describes one of its most basic
incarnations: Empire Day at the elementary school. At this holiday
celebration, commemorating and exalting the ties between England and its
colonies, the boys sing "God Save the King," learn about Barbados's
("Little England's") "steadfast and constant" relationship
to Big England. No hint of dissent or irony is heard from these children until
one of the boys explains to them his theory of the "shadow king."
"The English," this boy tells them, "are fond of shadows. They
never do anything in the open." Without realizing it, this boy opens the
door to the possibility of resistance.
Closely linked to colonialism
in Lamming's novel is the issue of race. European colonists felt that
darker-skinned people were primitive, inferior, and dangerous. For many years,
slavery was the cornerstone on which the West Indian economy was built. A debate
rages among scholars as to whether European racism caused African slavery or
whether European racism was constructed to explain the necessity of slavery,
but what is indisputable is that, by the twentieth century, the islands of the
British West Indies had two very distinct primary social classes: white
landowners and professionals of English descent and black manual laborers whose
ancestors came from Africa. The lessons of racism and black inferiority were
taught everywhere, though usually cloaked in the ideology of the "white
man's burden," the notion of benevolent white settlers improving the lives
of benighted savages in Africa and the Americas. In places such as Barbados,
where more than eighty percent of the population is considered to be of African
descent, people are encouraged to join the white society by means of hard work
and education. Successful people become metaphorically more "white,"
whereas those who remain low on the social ladder retain their
"blackness."
Because it is freighted with
social and political meanings, the category of race becomes the dividing line
between everything positive and nega-tive in the community. Later on in the
book, when the boys stumble upon the landlord's daughter and a sailor in a
compromising position, the sailor screams for the overseer to catch the
"native boys" and, later, the landlord's daughter claims that black
"vagabonds," not the white officer, claimed her virtue. The idea of
their own racial inferiority is so ingrained in the villagers that even the Old
Woman curses these fictional "vagabonds," not being able to imagine
that the landlord's daughter would lie.
In In the Castle of
My Skin, George Lamming makes use of many of the developments in narrative
that took place in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel has
always been a form that has permitted writers to experiment with points of
view. For example, Lamming changes techniques numerous times. Leaving G.'s
consciousness, the narrator becomes an omniscient third-person narrator,
entering the consciousness of G.'s mother or the overseer or even the old man.
In some chapters the characters' voices are transcribed as if they were
speaking dialogue in a play. After G. goes to high school and returns to the
village to talk to Trumper, the voice is much more confident, sophisticated,
and worldly—just as a teenager sure of his new maturity would be. In order to
achieve his goals of melding the personal and the political, Lamming chose to
use all of the narrative tools at his disposal.
As befits a novel set on an
island only 166 square miles in area, In the Castle of My Skin is
dominated by images of water. The first chapter opens with a hard rain, one
that eventually causes devastating floods in the village. The second chapter,
as well, depicts G. with water falling on him, this time from a skillet with
which is mother bathes him. Throughout the book water is something that brings
inconvenience (as with G.'s shower) or severe danger (as when Boy Blue almost
drowns at the shore, or at the docks where the riot begins). Rain opens the
chapter where the village learns about the riots, and Lamming uses the image of
taps being opened to describe the village waking up in Chapter 13, the chapter
in which the evictions are narrated. Symbolically, Lamming equates the
inexorable and irresistible motion of waters to what is often metaphorically
called "the tide of history." The novel, although set in the life of
a young boy turned young man, is really about the profound changes both in the
village and in Barbadian society as a whole. The forces of history, of
capitalism and colonialism and labor unrest and awakening racial consciousness,
lap at the village like the tide, and there is nothing the village can do to
stop them. All of the inhabitants of the village, from Creighton to G. to Mr.
Foster, are caught up in these tides.
Written using shifting
perspectives, stream-of-consciousness narration, and typically modernist
explorations of a young boy's understanding of the world, the novel has
generally been analyzed in terms of its technique or in terms of its
psychological insight. However, the novel's content and Lamming's own enduring
concerns with political and economic justice demonstrates that readers view
this novel politically, as an analysis of and commentary on the development of
modern commodity capitalism in a rural, agricultural, quasi-feudal society.
In In the Castle of My Skin, though, Lamming does not spend his
time dissecting the plantation system or the immediate legacies of slavery.
Rather, he sets the novel in the 1930s, at a time when the last vestiges of the
plantation system were starting to disintegrate in the face of the immense
power and energy of free-market capitalism. At the beginning of the novel, the
town resembles a feudal estate of the middle ages. The "landlord,"
Mr. Creighton, owns the village and extracts rents from his tenants, who
nonetheless go about their business largely on their own terms. Feudal society
assumed that peasants essentially "belonged" to the land and to the
lord of the manor and that the landlord could charge whatever rent he liked; in
exchange, the church and other institutions of authority strongly encouraged
lords to be fair and responsible for their tenants. Mr. Creighton follows this
model: He provides a school and genuinely wants contact with his tenants. It is
a paternalistic relationship that he wants, of course, but nonetheless it is a
personal relationship.
But if slavery and the
plantation system showed the truly brutal extent of capitalism, the aftermath
of the plantation system succeeded, in a small and temporary way, in reversing
history. Briefly, the plantations returned to feudalism. In a quasi-feudal
society such as Creighton Village, selling the land is inconceivable, for the
land is metaphorically part of the Creighton family. The intrusions of
capitalism undermine this certainty. As he explains to the Old Woman, changes
in Barbadian society—specifically, the "rape" of his daughter by
local "vagabonds"—show him that the world is changing. The violent
changes in the island's class structure, epitomized by the strike and riots,
affect his family when people start to cross the previously unquestioned
borders separating white landowner from black laborer. (The irony, of course,
is that his daughter was "violated" not by a local but by a white
officer attending Mr. Creighton's party.) He decides that he will sell his
land, turning what had not been a commodity into something that can be bought
and sold.
Mr. Slime is the most
interesting character in the novel precisely because he embodies the
contradictory, complicated nature of capitalism. He is the inaccessible mind of
the marketplace; this aspect of his character is underscored by how he is much
more often talked about than actually present in the novel. Certainly it is in
the best interests of the inhabitants of Creighton Village to be freed from
their feudal dependence on Mr. Creighton, and by representing their interests
as laborers and providing them with a "Penny Bank and Friendly
Society" Mr. Slime does exactly this. He yanks the villagers from
feudalism into the new capitalist world. In this world, their freedom of activity
is enhanced as the old strictures disappear—but the social support network they
previously relied upon (i.e., the charity and goodwill of their landlord) also
disappear. Mr. Slime's bank buys the village's land, driven partially by the
idea that this will allow the bank to then sell the land to the villagers who
have lived there for generations. But a bank is an organization that must make
a profit or die, and in order to make a profit the bank has to sell this land
to people who can pay for its "fair market value." Selling the land
on the open market allows for land speculators and investors to buy the land
and do with it what they wish, for the villagers do not have enough money to
buy the land.
The Lonely Londoners
The Lonely Londoners is an iconic chronicle of post-war Caribbean
migration to Britain. Susheila Nasta explores how Samuel Selvon created a new
means of describing the city by giving voice to the early migrant experience
and capturing the romance and disenchantment of London for its new citizens. ‘One
grim winter evening’, Moses Aloetta jumps on ‘a number 46 bus at the corner of
Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was
coming from Trinidad on the boat-train’. As we accompany Moses, veteran black
Londoner on his routine journey to welcome yet another newcomer into the fold,
Selvon swiftly transports us into the tragicomic urban theatre of his fictional
world. It is a labyrinthine city that his cast of rootless, unlettered
characters soon learn to survive in and reinvent. As an iconic chronicle of
post-war Caribbean migration to Britain, The Lonely Londoners encapsulates
the romance and disenchantment of an imagined city that was both magnet and
nightmare for its new colonial citizens, a promised land that despite its
glittering lure turns out to be an illusion. Without doubt Selvon’s ironic
reversal of the El Dorado myth – his colonisation of England in reverse – has
important socio-political implications. First and foremost, however, it remains
a powerful imaginative work, timeless in its bitter sweet love affair with the
city and ground-breaking in its creation of an inclusive narrative voice that
creates a new means of describing it.
In The Lonely
Londoners, Selvon faced the challenge of both exploring London as a black
city and creating a suitable literary frame to inscribe it. In using a
creolised voice for the language of the narration and the dialogue, a voice
which transports the calypsonian ‘ballads’ of his errant island ‘boys’ to the
diamond pavements of Caribbean London, Selvon not only envisioned a new way of
reading and writing the city but also exploded some of the narrow and
hyphenated categories by which black working-class voices had hitherto been
defined. Closing the sometimes awkward gap between the teller of the tale and
the tale itself, Selvon thus finds a means to not only reinvent London but to
reshape its spaces, giving his previously voiceless characters a place to live
in it. During the first six months of the novel’s composition, Selvon tried in
fact to write the book in Standard English, but later admitted it ‘just would
not work’. The language was not sufficiently pliable and could not convey the
feelings, the moods and the – as yet – ‘unarticulated’ desires of his
characters. At the same time there were certain ‘physical and emotional scenes’
where the oral vernacular simply ‘couldn’t carry the essence of what I wanted
to say’. Once Selvon switched to what he calls the ‘idiom’ of the people and
shifted his register to fuse Standard English with the full range of a broad
and hybrid linguistic continuum, he was able to bring new life and rhythms to
the book.
Early on in the novel the
atmosphere of Selvon’s city is described: ‘it had a kind of unrealness about
London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in
a blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet’
(4). Mimicking the oral rhythms of a modified Caribbean vernacular, Selvon
immediately takes us inside the world of his immigrant characters creating an
intimacy between storyteller and reader and distancing us from the bleak
landscape of the alien city outside. Although earlier inscriptions of the city
reverberate (we feel the shrouding fog of Dickens’s Bleak House and hear the morbid
echoes of T S Eliot’s ‘unreal city’ in The Waste Land), the narrator’s voice
distinguishes itself from such earlier models, carrying with it the weight of a
differently formed historical and cultural experience.
The Lonely Londoners brings to fiction some
of Selvon’s early experiences with a group of black immigrants among whom
Selvon lived for a few years when he first arrived in London. Commonly referred
to now as the period of the ‘Windrush generation’, it was an era
(poignantly satirised in Tolroy’s surprise reunion with virtually his entire
family at Waterloo) when West Indian migrants, all wrongly christened
‘Jamaican’ by the neologisms of the British media, were oft reported to be
‘flooding’ London’s streets, streets which they soon discover were not ‘paved
with gold’. Basing his character Moses, on a real ‘live’ man from the Caribbean
with whom he ‘limed’ in the early days, Selvon’s initial aim was to give voice
to this early migrant experience, distilling the ordinary language of the
people and making it accessible to a wide readership. For Waterloo (rather like
Ellis Island in New York) comes to symbolise more than a place of ‘arrivals’
and ‘departures’; it is a migrant gateway to the city, a rite of passage, which
homesick 'fellars' like Moses, who has already been in Britain for ten long
years, ‘can’t get away from the habit of going to’ (10).
Although the majority of
colonial citizens held British passports and equal rights of residence, by 1958
racial disturbances had begun to erupt. And with the passing of a further
Immigration Act in 1962, an explicitly exclusionist government policy emerged,
designed to keep ‘coloured’ citizens out. Selvon frequently draws our attention
to this volatile atmosphere, as the room-based existence which his characters
lead becomes a powerful metaphor for their in-between existence both inside and
outside English culture. Never hectoring the reader, but nevertheless making us
fully aware of the absurdity and potential seriousness of the situation, Selvon
is keen to point both to the excitement the city offers – the hope inspired by
the grandeur of its monuments – as well as its grim realities: ‘… you know the
most hurtful part of it’, Moses warns Galahad, who is still hopeful that he
will find a job, ‘The Pole who have that restaurant, he ain’t have no more
right in this country than we. In fact we is British subjects, and he is a
foreigner … is we who bleed to make this country prosperous’ (22).
The London Selvon’s ‘boys’
survive in constantly changes its face as he evokes a variety of moods ranging
from desire to exhilaration, despair and frustration. Sir Galahad is the prime
vehicle for Selvon’s love of the city, and it is he who presents the other side
of the coin from that of the world-weary Moses. As a form of alter ego to
Moses, it is Galahad’s voice that constantly expresses the optimism of the
‘summer is hearts’ lyricism, and it is Galahad too, as cocky mock-epic hero,
who is able to confidently walk the streets of the city, with a wardrobe to
impress, feeling ‘like a king’. In spite of dire warnings from Moses, who ‘Lock
up in that small room, with London and life on the outside’, Galahad’s
sometimes naïve exuberance nevertheless allows a different kind of London to
emerge. Whereas Moses lives in a dark world of bleak interiors with ‘thoughts
so heavy he unable to move his body’, Galahad’s ambitious perambulations in the
wider world outside – ‘the centre of the world’ – reflect an element of
utopianism, a faith that things will work out: ‘Always from the first time he
went … to see Eros and the lights, that circus [Piccadilly] have a magnet for
him, that circus represent life … is the beginning and ending of the world’. It
is Galahad too, in his humorous ‘ballad’ with the pigeon, who has the resources
for constant renewal as he adapts to finding cheap food on the London streets.
In fact, one of the most
uplifting moments in the book can be found in Selvon’s long prose poem to
London (pp. 84–94). A bitter-sweet but lyrical love song, similar in tone to
his famous short story ‘My Girl and the City’, it is dedicated to ‘liming’ in Hyde
Park and delicately counter points the déjà vu prophet voice of Moses alongside
Galahad’s more youthful and innocent zest. Polyphonic like jazz, or the blues,
its mood of a modernist epiphany sings out as a more regenerative vision of the
city struggles to the surface. Here Selvon the black modernist not only
generates new and fresh perceptions of the city but its previously awesome
spaces are also transformed and creolised:
all these thing
happen in the blazing summer under the trees in the park on the grass with the
daffodils and tulips in full bloom and a sky so blue oh it does really be
beautiful to hear the birds … and see the green leaves come back on the trees
and in the night the world turn upside down and everyone hustling that is
London oh Lord Galahad say when the sweetness of London get in him … and Moses
sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who
frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about (pp. 84–94).
This almost choric voice
surfaces again towards the end of the novel as the ‘boys’ gather in Moses’ room
‘like if is confession’: ‘The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing
winds…sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular … in the grimness
of winter, with your hand plying space like a blind man’s stick … the boys
coming and going, working, eating, sleeping, going about the vast metropolis
like veteran Londoners’.
There
is no beginning or end to the experiences of the 'boys' in The Lonely
Londoners. As Cap puts it at one point, voicing the seriousness of a
philosophical coda that underpins the entire novel: ‘… is so things does happen
in life. You work things out on your own mind to a kind of pattern, in a sort
of sequence, and one day bam! something happen to throw everything out of
gear…’ (67). The surface fragmentation or conscious disorganization of the
novel’s structure is thus part of its main direction, that, ‘Under the kiff
kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, the
summer is hearts … is a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement
that leaving you standing in the same spot’ (69). Only Moses, who has
almost merged in consciousness by the close with the narrating voice, and
regularly descends like Orpheus into the Underworld, seems to perceive the need
to forge a new language for existence. As the ‘boys’ congregate every Sunday
morning, breathlessly swapping well worn anecdotes, we witness Moses’
increasing detachment from the group. We leave Moses on a warm summer’s night,
pensively looking down into the void of the River Thames, attempting to find
words to express some meaning in his life: ‘When you go down a little, you
bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening – what? He don’t know
the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart’ (45).
Anthills
of the Savannah
This
novel is Achebe's fifth, first
published in the UK 21 years after Achebe's previous one (A Man of the People in 1966), and was credited with having "revived
his reputation in Britain". A finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize for Fiction, Anthills of the Savannah has been described
as the most important novel to come out of Africa in the 1980s. Anthills of
the Savannah takes place in the imaginary West African country of Kangan,
where a Sandhurst-trained officer, identified only as Sam and known as "His
Excellency", has taken power following a military coup. Achebe describes the political situation through the
experiences of three friends: Chris Oriko, the government's Commissioner for
Information; Beatrice Okoh, an official in the Ministry of Finance and
girlfriend of Chris; and Ikem Osodi, a newspaper editor critical of the regime.
Other characters include Elewa, Ikem's girlfriend and Major
"Samsonite" Ossai, a military official known for stapling hands with
a Samsonite stapler. Tensions escalate through
the novel, culminating in the assassination of Ikem by the regime, the toppling
and death of Sam and finally the murder of Chris. The book ends with a
non-traditional naming ceremony for Elewa and Ikem's month-old daughter,
organized by Beatrice. Anthills of the Savannah is a frightening look at
oil-boom Nigeria, a world of robberies, road blocks and intimidation in which
those who are meant to be protecting a country's citizens are in reality
supervising the looting.
The novel also exposes the
ills of the African postcolonial nation-state in an effort to propose credible
alternatives to them. These alternatives are best described as horizons because
they do not take the form of systematic solutions or detailed political and
social programs. In Anthills we find a groping for possibilities that
are largely fragmentary, undecided—often amorphous. Its approach to the
question of the nation-state is, moreover, marked by a deep ambivalence. This
ambivalence, I will argue, should not be construed as the result of the
author's inability to come to terms with the implications of his contradictory
views (as David A. Maughan Brown believes) but instead reflects inherent
tensions that characterize the postcolonial nation-state and the available
alternatives that may remedy its abuses. With the critique Achebe mounts
against the nation-state in Anthills, he attempts to clear a space that
will enable fresh possibilities and open new horizons. Some of the new
possibilities he suggests capture the political alternatives that Africans have
put forward to redress the failure of many African nation-states to fulfill
their peoples' aspirations. In so doing, Achebe represents the contemporary
political situation in its irreducible complexity, refusing to resolve the
contradictions that necessarily obtain from such a painstaking representation.
Achebe assigns enlightened
intellectuals a significant role in imagining alternatives to the nation-state.
He holds that an enlightened leadership of intellectuals, represented in Anthills
notably by Chris Oriko and Ikem Osodi, could be instrumental in leading
Nigerians and Africans beyond the impasses of their nation-states. He also
proposes the emulation of indigenous forms of government, which valorize plural
decision-making and horizontal power relations. This return to pre-colonial
societies for the political lessons they can afford may appear atavistic
and reactionary, but in Achebe's hands they hold up a mirror to the
nation-state, not only to further undermine its legitimacy, but to compete with
it for political significance. Alongside enlightened intellectuals and the
horizontal political institutions of traditional societies, Achebe dramatizes a
woman, Beatrice Okoh, in positions of leadership, something that nationalism
has disregarded and that postcolonial intellectuals have started to consider
seriously. The novel concludes with a small multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and
religiously diverse group, which offers some utopian possibilities.
Ngugi Wa Thiongío’s Petals
of Blood examines, among other things, the betrayal by the
postcolonial regime of the ideals of this anticolonial struggle that helped
Kenya achieve its independence. The novel revolves around three men and a
woman. The four friends reveal different aspects of their history to each other
piecemeal, just as their families had guardedly explained the past to them. The
lingering effects of the Mau Mau revolt have affected all their lives and by
the end of the novel, each character is wrapped up in his or her own exclusive
epiphany about life in Kenya.
Abdullah, the trader, thinks
he failed the movement because he did not avenge the death of a friend who was
a revolutionary and who was betrayed. Munira, the schoolteacher and eventual
wide-eyed prophet, is paralyzed by the shadow of his successful father, who
condemned the Mau Mau but aided the crony corruption of independent Kenya.
Wanja, the beauty from a broken home, learns that it was two generations of
revolutionary fervor that distorted the home she grew up in. And Karega,
Thiongío’s union-pushing hero, scrutinizes the history of Mau Mau as if it were
a sacred text. Somewhere in that history, they all believe, is the key to
wisdom and justice. No one reading Petals of Blood can doubt
Thiongío’s faith in the power of national myths. But, like Faulkner writing
about the American South or Shakespeare writing about England, he also
understands how our obsessions with them can ennoble citizens but also can
transform them into something grotesque. The messages of Petals of
Blood can be as opaque as the history of Kenya, but in that it
reflects the relationship most of us have with our own national mythos.
In 1977, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s last artistic work written in English, the
novel Petals of Blood was published. A few months after its
publication, Ngugi was arrested and detained, without charge, by the then
authoritarian Kenyan government for a year in a maximum security prison. This
was because this epic novel, in addition to his community-driven plays with the
Kamirithu Community and Cultural Center which were written in Gikuyu such as Ngaahika
Ndeenda, criticized the manner in which the political ruling elite
hoodwinked the peasant class into a position of socio-economic privilege while
leaving the latter in a state of deprivation. Petals, which is
based on an investigation into the puzzling murder case of three capitalists:
Chui, Kimeria and Mzigo, is written such that it represents different types and
classes of people in the Kenyan society during changing historical times: the
pre-colonial, the colonial and the post-colonial eras. It reveals a society
full of betrayals of the peasant class by the powerful ruling elite. Through
this novel, which can be seen as a product of the then ongoing, albeit
incomplete, transition from an Afro-European to an African novelistic style,
Ngugi aims at awakening the revolutionary spirit among Kenyans similar to that
of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) freedom fighters during the battle
against the European settlers for independence. This national consciousness is
modelled on Frantz Fanon’s conception of the writer as a native intellectual
who is in one of the three phases: the first phase which is characterized by
the writer’s unqualified assimilation, the second phase where the writer is
"disturbed but decides to remember who he is’ by just recalling the past
life of his people and the third phase which is the fighting phase where the
writer becomes an ‘awakener of the people" (Fanon, On National Culture 40–41).
The first, and arguably most important, factor to consider when
determining Ngugi’s aspirations in Petals is the people he
wrote the book for, his target audience. In his essay from Decolonizing
the Mind, titled The Language of African Fiction, while
commenting on the language crisis he found himself in, Ngugi posed, “I knew
whom I was writing about but whom was I writing for?” (Decolonizing the Mind 72) He termed Petals as ‘the
climax’ of his Afro-European writing but it is quite clear that despite writing
it in English, Ngugi had the Kenyan working class in mind as the novel’s
primary audience. The novel is set in a remote, but changing, village of
Ilmorog and the heroic characters such as Abdulla, Karega, Munira, Wanja and
Nyakinyua are people that the Kenyan peasant population can identify with. In
addition, Ngugi seems to be more accepting towards the peasant class and
critical of those who do not conform to the ideals of this class. For instance,
when Munira goes to Ilmorog at the beginning, he tries to settle in as an
intellectual who does not seem, and is afraid, to understand the dynamics of
the peasant class such as the rain patterns or the indo cia thakame,
things of blood. Due to this tendency, he faces resistance from the local
people such as Nyakinyua, who sees him as having come to fetch the remaining
children to take them to the city (Petals
9) and Njuguna, Ruoro and Muturi who see him as a ‘msomi’ whose ‘hands are
untouched by soil, as if they wear a ngome.’ (11)
Ngugi’s portrayal of Munira here shows a rejection of the middle class
intellectuals who refuse to be part of the people. The novel also chastises the
capitalist and political classes through characters such as Mzigo, Chui and
Kimeria, who end up being murdered at the end of the novel, and the
sloganeering politician Nderi wa Riiera as well as Munira’s father Ezekieli. On
the other hand, peasant characters such as Nyakinyua and Muturi are praised as
the guardians of the people’s history but who are oppressed by the ruling class
and who should therefore act together to change their situation. Karega, the
son of a peasant Mariamu, is shown as the force behind the resistance of the
Ilmorog people and workers against an oppressive regime and a profiteering capitalist
class. This leaves no doubt that Ngugi seeks to provoke the have-nots in Kenya
to see themselves in the characters and their struggles and realize their power
to rise against the tyranny of the haves.
The nature of the language in the novel also tells of a man clear in his
address to the working class, albeit in transition in terms of the language of
his writing. Ngugi uses cultural and local references without providing a clear
background for the reader to contextualize the experience in the book. For
instance, when the elderly men discus the weather patterns, not much detail is
given and a reader unaccustomed to the knowledge of the place would find it
difficult to make sense of their discussions. Also Ngugi sprinkles the novel
with Gikuyu and Swahili terms without providing a glossary or translation for
most of them. This is evidence of Ngugi’s increasing urge to write to his
people rather than just writing about them only for another group of people to
read about. From my own experience as a Gikuyu speaker and someone able to
easily contextualize the condition of life as written in Petals, I
found it much easier to access the meaning compared to my peers who were
limited by the Gikuyu and Swahili in the text and lack of a complete
description of the nature of the human condition in the novel.
Additionally, some of the literary techniques that Ngugi wa Thiong’o
employs in Petals include departure from a linear plot, stories
within stories and a constant shift in the narrative voice. Ngugi employs these
techniques both as a means of achieving a narrative of collective consciousness
and a move towards a more African novel inspired by techniques from other
experienced writers who influenced him. The shift in the narrative voice is
particularly important for creating collective consciousness. While parts of
the novel have an omniscient narrator or the diary form as Munira recalls memories
of his twelve years in Ilmorog, the third person plural perspective, such as at
the beginning of part three, depicts a community galvanized by their collective
struggle against oppression.
The allegorical nature of Petals is another factor that
can be seen as Ngugi’s effort to recreate revolutionary consciousness. As an
allegory, Petals is aimed at recreating a representation of a
neo-colonial Kenyan state through characters, places and events that mirror the
reality of the actual post-independence Kenyan state. The class differences are
created through the peasant class in the form of the Ilmorog farmers and
herders such as Muturi, Nyakinyua, Njuguna and Ruoro vis-a-vis the capitalist
and the political class represented by characters such as Nderi wa Riera,
Mzigo, Chui and Kimeria. There is also a class trapped in the middle which is
represented by the immigrants to Ilmorog, particularly through the character of
Munira. In addition, each character in the novel seems to play a specific role
which is typical of a certain group of people in the real Kenyan society.
Munira, for instance, represents the middle class that ‘stood outside’ during
the struggle for independence and is struggling to fit into the rest of society
by attempting to ‘pay back’ through service but who still fear to explore the
tough questions of the rampant inequality as depicted by his anxiety in
refusing to answer the children’s questions about the ‘flower with petals of
blood.’ (Petals 12, 26)
Munira aptly represents the second phase of the native intellectual as
conceptualized by Fanon. The more aggressive Karega, whose name coincidentally
means ‘the one who resists’ in Gikuyu, is a representation of the third phase
of the native intellectual who is willing to confront the history and material
reality of his people and with his people. As a teacher, he teaches the
children about the world outside Ilmorog and he actively seeks a deeper
understanding of the historical and political nuances of his people especially
after meeting the lawyer who represents a political class of revolutionaries
but whose fixation on property is faulted. Wanja on her part represents the
struggles of a Kenyan woman who is forced by the circumstances to use her
sexual power to gain favours but who nevertheless resists the capitalistic
class oppression. Abdulla represents the revolutionaries who have been part of
historical struggles but who have been betrayed and continue to languish in
abjection. Joseph and Wanja’s unborn baby seem to represent an upcoming
generation of revolutionaries who shall fight for a more just Kenya. On the
other hand, the capitalists (Kimeria, Chui and Mzigo) seem to represent ‘slaves
of the monster god’ that is money while Nderi wa Riiera represents the
deceitful neo-colonial politicians whose efforts to terrorize and divide the
people through the Kamwene Cultural Organization (KCO) are purely for his
selfish gain.
Petals can also be seen as an African adaptation of the modernist form of
artistic expression. Modernism is an artistic movement that started in the 19th
Century and became more popular in the early 20th century through artists such
as Pablo Picasso, Bertolt Brecht and Igor Stravinsky. It was characterized by a
rejection of the norms set by prior forms such as realism and romanticism,
criticism of the modern form of life dominated by capitalism and a higher level
of alienation of the audience so as to stir deeper thinking and understanding.
The didactic nature of Petals, which can also be viewed
as a modernist resistance to the classical novelistic norms and a function of
Ngugi’s address to Kenyan working class, also tells of a novel bent on teaching
as a way of raising a national revolutionary consciousness. While a classical
western novel would aim at entertaining its readers through its fiction in
their leisure time, Petals takes a different path. While it
certainly entertains as an investigative thriller, it also teaches Kenyan
history and the present socio-economic and political condition. At some points,
it takes on a completely didactic form to the extent that it looks like a
textbook with elements of a novel. For instance, at the beginning of part two,
Nyakinyua tells the Ilmorog people a story about the history of Ilmorog.
Despite the fact that it takes on a narrative form, this part of the novel
clearly teaches the pre-colonial history since the time of the founder of the
community, Ndemi, to the coming of the colonialists when people like Munoru
betrayed the community by collaborating and getting assimilated by the
Europeans while Nyakinyua’s husband resisted (Petals 145–149). By doing this Ngugi wants the Kenyan people to
understand their past, and while not romanticising it, learn lessons from it in
order to change their current condition.
Also important in considering Petals as a tool for
inspiring a revolutionary consciousness is the way in which Ngugi views Kenyan
history as seen by different types of people. In the interview with Michael
Pozo, Ngugi maintains that aesthetics do not occur in a social vacuum and as
such art must reflect the conception of life which it represents (Pozo 2). For
this reason, Ngugi looks into different versions of history ranging from the
tautological “history is history” (Petals
206) by Chui at Siriana meant at institutionally assimilating Kenyan students
to the black professors who viewed African history as “one of wanderlust and
pointless warfare between peoples” (237). This is in sharp contrast to history
that Nyakinyua made the Ilmorog people relive through her songs in the
Theng’eta drinking session. The Theng’eta-inspired history is one that is in
touch with the people’s present reality and the one that leads to the
revelation of truth. This version of history, also praised by Fanon “the truths
of a nation are in the first place its realities” (Fanon 42), is the one that
Ngugi believes will awaken the people into national consciousness. It is
therefore clear that Ngugi used his last English literary work, Petals
of Blood, to present the history and present reality of the Kenyan
people in the form of an allegory that was constructed based on the collective
struggle of the Ilmorog people to inspire consciousness among the Kenyan
peasant and working class.
Methodology
This paper has used a method of reading that may be
called "post-colonial theory" in which the writing of Edward Said and
Homi Bhabha converge, especially around the issue of the relationship between
the colonizer and the colonized and the kind of discourse that emerges in this
encounter. This paradigm also applies to "nativist" texts such as Anthills of the Savannah and Petals of
Blood. Unlike In the Castle of My Skin
and Lonely Londoners, which deal with
racial and individual identify in the metropole and the Western Indies (where
ethnic and racial identities undermine any neat classification of personal
identify, especially in a migrant context), Anthills
and Petals deal with the internal
problems of post-colonial or newly independent African states, where the racial
and ethnic identities are replaced by class and social status, especially in
the context of African modernity.
Edward Said argues that if colonized peoples are to
become free and therefore subjects of history, post-colonial theory must
uncover and analyze the discursive
process of resistance to colonial
representation. For Said, then, the task of post-colonial theory is to
highlight the complex relationship between culture and imperialism, so as to
show how imperialism created a discursive space which silenced and excluded any
overt reference to its actual discursive practices. For this task, Said
recommends a “contrapuntal reading”, a critical method which articulates what
imperial discourse has concealed, silenced, or repressed and which also seeks to show how and why imperialism is excused for
its role in oppression, denigration, and construction of the self-identity of
the imperial power.
In Culture and
Imperialism (1993): Said here pursues the view that Western culture has
historically energized imperialism (formal colonial empires and control of the
resources of people by a colonizing country). In this book, Said shows how
knowledge and fantasy about non-European lands and peoples have marked a large
part of Western culture in all its forms: literature, music, philosophy, etc.
Here, Said also shows how the Same (Europe, the West) has “constructed” the
Other (the savage, the primitive, the non-European, the Black, etc.) as a
mysterious and duplicitous “other”, which acted as a means of stabilizing and
affirming the identity of the imperialist power (the Same; a theme later taken
up by Homi Bhabha from a Lacanian and Fanonian position).
Homi Bhabha’s version of post-colonial theory is best
suited to the study of native texts in a post-colonial situation
(post-coloniality). For example, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity is very valuable here: for it is about, what he calls, in
celebrated phrase, “the difference ‘within’, a subject that inhabits the rim of
an ‘in-between’ reality” (Location of
Culture, 13). This, I would argue further, is precisely what a contemporary
post-colonial critic would find very valuable for a study of this kind: the
double-voicedness, the in-between position of an indigenous, English-speaking
post-colonial writer, a subject that is invariably both traditional and modern; native and other; indigenous and
expatriate, insider and outsider,
etc. Indeed Bhabha’s famous rhetorical questions go to the heart of the issue:
How are
subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of
difference (usually intoned as race/ class/ gender, etc.)? How do strategies of
representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of
communities where, despite shared histories of denigration and discrimination,
the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative
and dialogical, but may even be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even
incommensurate? (ibid, 2).
To carry through these insights, Bhabha uses the terms
ambivalence, hybridity, mimicry to highlight first, that colonial discourse
does not and cannot smoothly work; second, the formation of colonial
subjectivities is a fractured process, never fully achieved of perfectly
carried out; and third that in the colonial discourse fails to be, as it were,
but becomes diluted and hybridized, so that the fixed identities that colonial
relations seek to impose on the colonizer and colonized is subverted and thus
becomes unstable, so that, again, the colonizer and the colonized become caught
up in complex reciprocity and negotiation (within the cracks and slippages of
domination, and which can take many complex ways and forms; a view taken from
Post-structuralism, especially from Deconstruction).
The net result of Bhabha’s theorization of colonial
discourse is that Orientalism is not just “representation” (which may or may
not correspond to the “real” Orient) but a discourse,
and forms an entire discursive field, in which there is the question of
Enunciation (who speaks to whom or for whom?). Yet this discourse if framed by
a powerful ambivalence towards the
Other, which is seen as an object of desire and derision both at once, which
shows, in effect, that colonial discourse is founded on, and fractured by, an
anxiety towards the other, and that colonial power itself is subject to a
conflictual economy (of fissure, division, and ambivalence, highlighted by
Nietzsche and Lacan in different contexts). The same perspective may be applied
to the issue of power/knowledge, (the imbrication of knowledge with power),
which Said took from Foucault, according to which, Bhabha argues, “subjects are
always disproportionately placed in opposition or domination” (Location, 72). For Bhabha, this makes it
difficult to conceive of domination as consisting of a relationship in which
the dominator and the dominated are implicated. Now this perspective allows the
questioning of the alleged claim of a single intention of the colonizer and the
dominance of colonizer.
In sum, then, this is the justification for Bhabha’s
use of such terms as hybridity (the
interdependence and mutual construction of colonial-colonized subjectivities;
the contradictory and ambivalent space of cultural identity; the lack of unity
and fixity in the meaning and symbols of culture; any culture’s essential
hybridity: “the in-between space that carries the burden of the meaning of
culture” — Location of Culture, p.
38); Ambivalence (the mutual
relationship between the colonizer and the colonized; complicity and resistance
in this relationship; the way in which the authority of colonial discourse is
undercut and disrupted by this relationship, which is unsettling to colonial
dominance); and mimicry (mockery,
which may parody what it mimics; and if this happens, it implies the
uncertainty of colonial discourse because it designates a process in which, as
Bhabha argues, there is “at once resemblance and menace”; a situation in which
the authority of colonial discourse is stricken by an indeterminacy, and which
leads to a process of disavowal of colonial discourse. In memorable phrase,
Bhabha describes colonial mimicry as
“the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite”—
ibid, 86; original emphasis).
Findings/Results
This paper has offered a critical analysis of the
complex ways by which prominent African and Caribbean writers such as George
Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o responded to the
moral and political problematics of modernity in their representations of the
moral and political dilemmas they faced as both hybrid intellectuals and
literary artists, especially in their confrontations with questions of identity
and moral choices. The four primary authors have, in their fictional works, dealt
with the complex relationship between literary realism, and the kind of
politics it underpins, and their negotiations with modernity and modernist
culture in more or less varied post-colonial settings in Africa and the
Caribbean.
The paper has examined how post-colonial writers have
dealt not just with the question of identity and morality but also with the
most effective way to represent their experiences in fictional form. In the
case of the primary authors, there is the more or less palpable tension between
their commitment to fictional authenticity (realist aesthetics) and to the
moral and political necessity of confronting the inescapable pressures imposed
by literary modernism, the transatlantic cultural phenomenon that influenced
the direction of the twentieth century novel and the myriad extra-literary
developments of its day. This paper has vindicated Edna Aizenberg's famous
thesis that many African and Caribbean writers found new ways of writing to
depict the new realities of the post-colonial situation in their countries. In her own words, those writers felt the need to
develop a "literary language to symbolically enact the disillusionment…a
style in which the complex form, strained language and uncertain ground of the
modernist aesthetic were melded with indigenous linguistic and narrative
traditions to transmit the new instability and bitterness of [their society]”
(Aizenberg 89).
The paper also examines this complex process in the
selected primary texts from the perspective of what Edward Said calls
"contrapuntal reading", a kind of textual post-colonial reading of
the texts under study. The central finding or discovery of this paper is that
the primary novelist under study have had to necessarily take into account, in
their writing practices and political understanding, the emerging, post-1930s
early literary modernism, despite the novelists' individual inclination towards
literary realism in the face of the ever-growing anti-realist and
pro-postmodernist experimentations that were slowly becoming the norm in
literary culture within formerly colonized societies. Furthermore, the paper
has shown how the moral and political implications of the tension between the
four authors' tendency to privilege realist aesthetics and their painful
awareness of the slowly encroaching modernist literary perspective which, in
its own way, was threatening to undermine their hitherto confident realist and
anti-colonial aesthetics and politics.
Notes
1. The following editions of the
primary texts have been used in this paper: In
the Castle of My Skin, London: Penguin, 1977; )The Lonely Londoners, London: Penguin, 1997, Anthills of the Savannah, Ibadan: Heinemann, 1990; Petals of Blood, East African Publishing
House, 1980.
2. For critical biographies of the
four primary authors, see the following sources. Clarke, Austin, 1994; Brooker
and Gikandi, 1996; Ezenwa-Ohaeto, 1997; Innes, 1990; Pouchet, 1983; Salick,
2001; Ramchand, 1983.
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