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post-colonial literature (aesthetics (reworking colonial art-forms (mixing…

- - - - oral forms : stories, poetry (even in written novels)
        
        Derek Walcott : claim of a "simple speech", a common langage which blends French patois and Carribean Creoles
        
        "The Schooner Fight"
        “I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
        I had a sound colonial education,
        I have Dutch, Nigger, and English in me,
        Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.”
        “…Well, when I write
        This poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
        I go draw and knot every line as tight
        As ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
        My common language go be the wind,
        My pages the sails of the schooner Flight.”
        
        Arundhati Roy : novel + indigenous modes of creative expression (oral poetry, dramatic performance)
    - - colonial art-forms tend to be the most famous too // not culturally present in the pre-colonial era in colonized countries
  - - - A Far Cry From Africa
        "I who have cursed
        The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
        Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
        Betray them both, or give back what they give?
        How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
        How can I turn from Africa and live?"
- - - - writing : representation of postcolonial African identity + idiom of cultural authenticity (recovering tradition and inserting postcolonial modernity) = hybridity
      - Intellectual and political concerns within the broader field of postcolonial cultural theory focus on international culture and political identity formation (myth/history + tradition/history)
      - His conception of identity promotes and modifies national perceptions of ‘Africanness’, rescuing them from the colonial and neocolonial logic of cultural denigration in a manner that fully acknowledges the cosmopolitan and global contexts of African postcolonial formation
      - against Negritude:‘The tiger does not pronounce its tigritude. It pounces. "
- - - - First British colony to gain independence in 1947. Much Indian writings reflect deeper cultural and religious traditions (Hinduism and Islam). English-educated, and predominant Hindu élite. Growing sense of social injustice (influence of communist ideas => see The God of Small Things in the state of Arundhati Roy, 1997).
    - - Use of English, the representation of Africans and their history, post-independence political corruption and the significance of traditional culture in modern Africa.
        
        Chinua Achebe “Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse-to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of years of denigration and self-abasement… The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front. For he is after all-as Ezekiel Mphalele says in his ‘African Image’-the sensitive point of his community.”
    - - Natives
      - African Americans
    - - Olive Senior,Talking of Trees, 1985
        Colonial Girls School
        Told us nothing about ourselves
        There was nothing about us at all
        How those pale northern eyes and
        aristocratic whispers once erased us
        How our loudness, our laughter
        debased us
- - - - Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children' : Indian British novelist; “writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss , some urge to reclaim, to look back(…). But if we do look back, we must also do in the knowledge-which gives rise to profound uncertainties-that our physical alienation means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the things that we lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands,Indias of the mind …” (Salman Rushdie, 1992).
  - - - correct some problems within the young nations : corruption, lack of democracy, etc
      - new link between the people / their environment of which they had been deprived, through dramatization, description, etc
      - present indirectly an anti-colonialist movement, throughout the fiction : the protagonist vindicates Gandhian ideology in Kanthapura, Raja Rao
    - - J.M. Coetzee, Foe, 1986 = rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In Coetzee's novel, it isn't just Cruso (with no "e") and Friday on a deserted island : there's a lady too, Susan Barton. She is rescued, and goes back to England, where she tries to get Foe (Daniel Defoe) to write the story of the island from her perspective.
- - - - vocabulary AchebeThings Fall Apart = "egwuwu", etc
      - "modified" English = pidgin
        dialects (Marlon James, Book of Night Women, ) "People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785."
        English has no power to show how violent is slavery
        
        Raja Rao: 1st Indian writer to appropriate English as a medium for authentic Indian expression: "We cannot write like the English. We should not… Our method of expression has to therefore be a dialect which will sometimes prove to be as distinctive or colorful as the Irish or the American…The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression…” (Khanthapura, 1938).
        
        R.K. Narayan: "Indianisation" of English :
      - writing in "non proper English" : showing the lack of education for indigenous people
        Peter Carey True history of the Kelly Gang
        "I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."
    - - By quotation and interpretation : Achebe in Things Fall Apart borrows in the title a verse by W.B. Yeats : "Things fall apart ; the center cannot be hold" inThe Second Coming -> re-reading of English classics : provocative (reference to a classic English master-piece in a work which debunks English supremacy) and enriching (intertextuality which enlarges Achebe's public, and incorporates his work within the framework of an universal culture)
      - By rewriting : Wole Soyinka in Bacchae rewrites The Bacchantes by Euripides, in Opera Wonyosi rewrites The threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht / Derek Walcott retells in the poem Omeros Homere's Iliad and Odyssey in a 20th century Caribbean setting
      - ! criticism : "language of the colonizer"
- - - - criticism of colonialism
        
        Dereck Walcott, Omeros, 1990 (English soldier supposedly speaking)
        "We helped ourselves
        to these green islands like olives from a saucer,
        munched on the pith, then spat their sucked stones on a plate,
        like a melon's black seeds."
        
        Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1990 = story of a girl in the Caribbean who emigrates to the US to become a nanny : sees some daffodils for the first time and remembers a poem she was forced to learn at school : "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (it has daffodils in it) by W. Wordsworth = English culture for everyone in the British Empire + colonized subjects don't realize it
        
        Checking Out Me History
        "Dem tell me bout Lord Nelson and Waterloo
        but dem never tell me bout Shaka de great Zulu
        Dem tell me bout Columbus and 1492
        but what happen to de Caribs and de Arawaks too"
        
        John Agard (British Guinea, Writer) 2004
    - - superiority
      - englightenment
      - civilization