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Cambridge Introductions to Literature This series is designed to introduce students to key topics and authors. Accessible and lively, these introductions will also appeal to readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy. Yeats C. Innes This publicaion is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

Commonwealth literature English — History and criticism. Postcolonialism in literature. Colonies in literature. Series PR I55 It seeks not only to discuss the authors and texts, but also to raise questions about the ways in which they have been thought about under the aegis of postcolonial studies, and to ask what varying meanings postcolonial literature may have in different contexts. This book cannot attempt to encompass the many literary texts and cultures that are an important feature of the anglophone postcolonial world.

Even to try to acknowledge half of those ninety territories or former colonies would result in superficial lists of authors and a blurring of the qualities and issues specific to different colonial and postcolonial histories and cultural contexts.

Hence, although there will be occasional reference to writers from other countries such as Canada, the Republic of South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, this book will concentrate on works from just a few former colonies, chosen as examples of particular kinds of colonial and postcolonial structures and traditions. In addition to Ireland, I have chosen India and West Africa specifically Ghana and Nigeria as examples of former colonies administered by indirect rule but with very different indigenous cultures.

Kenya and Tanzania, with their varied indigenous populations together with a history of white settlement and occupation of farming land, as well as immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, provide examples of settler colonies in Africa with a multicultural history and population.

Finally, the diasporic communities in contemporary Britain from former colonies provide another point of departure for contrast and comparison with Caribbean and other multicultural or intercultural societies. An Appendix provides brief histories of the selected areas to help orient readers.

Preface ix These histories have been compiled with considerable assistance from Dr Kaori Nagai, whose careful research and keen intelligence have also contributed to the biographical entries for the main authors discussed, and the glossary of terms.

I also wish to acknowledge the contributions of many undergraduate and postgraduate students at Tuskegee Institute, Cornell University, the University of Massachussets, and the University of Kent, whose varied enthusiasms and questions have informed my teaching and writing over the years. Sections of this book have appeared previously in different versions as journal essays or chapters in books.

Since they first appeared, they have been considerably revised, updated and elaborated within different contexts. I acknowledge their publication in earlier form and express my thanks to the editors and publishers of the following: Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, eds.

Clara A. Joseph and Janet Wilson, eds. Trier, Chapter 1 Introduction: situating the postcolonial Over the past half-century, postcolonial literatures and postcolonial studies1 have gained the attention of more and more readers and scholars throughout the world. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer from South Africa have been prominent when major literary awards such as the Booker Prize or the Nobel Prize have been announced, and their works now appear on numerous school and university syllabuses.

Concurrently, their writing has provided the nourishment for a variety of postcolonial theories concerning the nature of such works, approaches to reading them, and their significance for reading and understanding other literary, philosophical and historical works.

Indeed, the production of introductions to postcolonial theory has become a major industry. It will discuss the ways in which these issues have changed over the decades, involving questions of genre, form and language, as well as social and political concerns; it will also discuss how these texts may be read and responded to in different contexts.

For historians, the hyphenated word refers specifically to the period after a country, state or people cease to be governed by a colonial power such as Britain or France, and take administrative power into their own hands. Such studies are generally concerned with the subsequent interaction between the culture of the colonial power, including its language, and the culture and traditions of the colonized peoples.

And almost always, the analysis of those interactions acknowledges the importance of power relations in that cultural exchange — the degree to which the colonizer imposes a language, a culture and a set of attitudes, and the degree to which the colonized peoples are able to resist, adapt to or subvert that imposition.

The Indian writer Nayantara Sahgal, for example, dislikes the term because she considers that it implies that colonization by the British is the only important thing that has happened to India, and that it denies the history that precedes British colonization and the continuing traditions stemming from those earlier periods. It has been argued that predominantly European colonies such as Australia and Canada, which were settled by British and other European groups over a period of two hundred years, and which now have a relatively small indigenous population, should not be grouped together with settler colonies such as Jamaica and Kenya, where historically a small group of Europeans dominated a majority African population, and where, after the achievement of political independence, indigenous Kenyans and Jamaicans of African descent took over the reins.

As an island settled and governed by the British since the twelfth century, Ireland is seen by some to have a dual status as a postcolonial state in the south while remaining a British colony in the north. The Indian subcontinent changed over a period of two hundred years from being seen as a series of states whose rulers collaborated, often as a result of military intervention, with the British East India Company, to becoming in the Introduction: situating the postcolonial 3 nineteenth century an area governed by the British and subject to its statutes.

In both Ireland and India, the British sought to establish an intermediate class of English-speaking people who could act as interpreters, teachers and lowergrade civil servants, and so provide support for British cultural, military and economic domination. Similar policies were followed in African colonies such as Ghana and Nigeria after the allocation of these territories to Britain at the Berlin Conference in It is also important to be aware of the development of postcolonial studies and the peculiarities of the discipline, in order not to be confined by its present boundaries and terms, but rather to question and modify them.

From Commonwealth to postcolonial literary studies Postcolonial literary studies owe their origin chiefly, of course, to the enormous and exciting efflorescence of creative writing which first came to the attention of readers and critics in the s and s, and coincided with a series of states in Africa, South East Asia and the Caribbean moving from colonial to postcolonial status. In A. Norman Jeffares convened the first Commonwealth Literature Conference at the University of Leeds, and courses in Commonwealth literature became a significant part of the curriculum in English departments at various universities in Britain.

Some, like Kamau Brathwaite, V. Naipaul and Wole Soyinka had come in the s and s to study in British universities; others, such as the novelists George Lamming and Samuel Selvon, and the poets Dom Moraes and Peter Porter, sought work and wider opportunities for publication. After World War II, Britain had recruited thousands of people from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent to sustain the national health and transport systems and to work in the steel and textile factories.

As the children of these recruited immigrant workers began to enter the secondary school and university systems in the s, teachers and students alike sought to encourage the study of African, Caribbean and Indian writing.

While Commonwealth literary studies had on the whole striven to remain apolitical, focusing on aspects such as form and style in the novels of Australian authors such as Patrick White, or the use of language in the poetry of Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, sometimes drawing comparisons with works by mainstream British authors, there was also considerable pressure to read and understand these works within a political context.

In North America the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and in Britain the racist attitudes which kept black and Asian people out of all but the most poorly paid jobs and resented their presence in British cities and suburbs, led to an increasing emphasis on political, psychological and cultural resistance to discrimination on grounds of race and colour. For authors such as Achebe in Nigeria and Brathwaite in the West Indies, as for students and teachers of African descent in Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, the writing and reading of texts by African and Caribbean authors were seen as a means of restoring dignity and self-respect to people who had suffered from hundreds of years of contemptuous dismissal, exploitation and enslavement by Europeans.

Postcolonial literature is concerned above all with the issue of selfrepresentation in two senses of the word, the artistic and the political. Writers from the former colonies wish to speak for themselves, to tell their own stories, including the story of the colonial encounter and its consequences, and so to Introduction: situating the postcolonial 5 create the psychological base and historical understanding which will encourage wise choices in self-government. But, as Paul Gilroy and other critics have pointed out, one of the consequences of the colonial encounter has been what the African American writer W.

Dubois described as a double consciousness, the ability to live within and between two cultures and two perspectives and sometimes more , and with that the creation of a particularly postcolonial form of modernism. From Commonwealth literary studies it derives its embrace of a wide range of European settler colonies as well as predominantly indigenous and former slave colonies.

The British Commonwealth category also involved an emphasis on English-speaking countries, writing in the English language and the exclusion of writing in indigenous languages and an emphasis on literary texts. The emphasis these intellectuals have placed on the power of language and modes of discourse has been particularly significant in the development of postcolonial theory. He studied medicine and psychiatry in France, where Lacan was one of his teachers, and published his psychological analysis of racism and its effects, Black Skin, White Masks, in Fanon writes: There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men.

There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. How do we extricate ourselves? He discusses various ways in which black intellectuals have sought to challenge racist attitudes. Senghor argued that African culture was completely distinct from but equal and complementary to European culture.

They wrote about the significance of Timbuktu as a centre of learning in the Middle Ages as defined by European historians , and of the prestige Introduction: situating the postcolonial 7 accorded kingdoms such as Mali by medieval Europe. They also reclaimed Egypt and its past artefacts and monuments as part of a continental African civilization.

But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to pave the way for the synthesis or the realization of a raceless society.

At the moment the black Orpheus most directly embraces this Eurydice, he feels her slip away from between his arms. However, it is important to remember that Fanon is writing from a particular position at a particular time — that is, a multiracial Caribbean colony ruled by the French, where the language is entirely French or French patois, and as one of the few black intellectuals studying in France. His situation was very different from that of Ghanaians, Nigerians or Senegalese living in societies which retained their own languages and continuing traditions.

The Nigerian playwright Soyinka expressed his view that it was superfluous for Africans to broadcast their African identity, pointing out that a tiger does not need to proclaim his tigritude. In this work 8 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English he continues his psychological study of the colonized, but also describes the psychology of the colonizers.

He is deemed to have no historical monuments, no literature, and hence no history. Indeed, a recurring European view of Africa was that it is a place which has no history, and that history does not become significant there until the European comes on to the scene.

Thus the German philosopher G. Hegel in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History expresses an attitude shared by many European historians even in the mid-twentieth century Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained shut up.

The negro [sic] as already observed exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality — all that we call feeling — if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.

At this point we leave Africa never to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no development or movement to exhibit. Historical movement in it — that is its northern part — belongs to the Asiatic or European world. At the same time, Africans and other colonized peoples were seen as mentally and physically adapted only for menial labour or routine clerical positions. Such justifications had been used throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans to work in the sugar and cotton plantations of the Americas; colonial settlers and governments continued to maintain that the people they colonized were incapable of self-government or of putting their land and its resources to good use.

Fanon believed that settlers and colonial governments could be uprooted only by violence. Moreover, Fanon argued, such violence was a means of destroying the mental colonization and sense of racial inferiority he had analysed in his earlier work. While Fanon had focused mainly on the relationship between colonizer and colonized in Africa and the Caribbean, the literary and cultural critic Edward Said, who was born in Palestine, concentrated more on portrayals of Asia, including India, and the Middle East.

In his influential and muchdebated book Orientalism , Said is concerned with the ways in which knowledge is governed and owned by Europeans to reinforce power, and to exclude or dismiss the knowledge which natives might claim to have. In this case, he argues, the writers about the East or the Orient acknowledge monuments, but only those which belong to the distant past — they are ruined monuments, and the cultures are seen as degenerate.

Scholars also acknowledge writings from India and Egypt, for example, but writings in the ancient languages — Sanskrit or Egyptian cuneiform script — not contemporary writers in Arabic or Bengali or Urdu, for example. In any case, contemporary oriental societies were perceived to be in need of civilizing, and that meant European civilization. He contends that: without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage — and even produce — the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.

European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. The fact that Said himself is criticizing orientalist discourse on these same grounds, for its lumping together and homogenising of a variety of historical 10 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English and geographical examples of Eastern culture, does not entirely invalidate his critics. Yeats from colonized and postcolonial countries.

In chapter 3 of The Wretched of the Earth, he discusses the various ways in which African and Caribbean intellectuals have responded to European stereotypes, first by internalizing European views of them and their cultures and showing that they can mimic the white man, and behave just like him. A second stage comes when these intellectuals, finding that they are discriminated against despite their demonstrably equal intelligence and educational attainment, begin to protest against this discriminatory treatment, often in terms of the very values which the Europeans have proclaimed — especially equality and justice.

Another move by educated Africans seeks to validate their own culture and civilization by rediscovering a buried history and celebrating early achievements, including the Egyptian pyramids, the medieval cities and scholarship found in Timbuktu, Mali and Ghana, the kingdoms of Ashanti and the Zulu King Chaka, the kingdoms and buildings of Benin and ancient Zimbabwe, and so on.

These acknowledgements of early African achievements were important, but to some extent they might be seen as accepting and responding to European views and values regarding what is historically significant, what is worth celebrating. And they also left open the question of why these kingdoms and centres of learning or artistic achievement did not survive.

Fanon believed that such restoration of the past was an important factor in giving colonized people the confidence to envision a future without European rule and a nation capable of future achievements.

It responded to and negated the European insistence that Africans were incapable of creating a civilization — or anything worth while. Moreover, the writing of an African or Indian history might involve a different view of events already narrated by British historians. But Fanon also insisted that the recovery of the past was not enough. In other words, cultural nationalism of this kind was necessary if one was to restore confidence and create a sense of identity, but it was not sufficient if the land occupied by colonizers was to be retrieved and self-government achieved.

Writers and intellectuals would need to be aware of current issues, political and economic concerns, and they would need to be in tune with the people as a whole, not just a small intellectual elite. Fanon believed that it was also necessary for writers to propose a political programme to show the way towards liberation. There is also a related historical movement with regard to the rewriting of history, which is referred to as subaltern history or Subaltern Studies.

In other words, most historical narratives have traditionally foregrounded the achievements or misdeeds of kings, presidents, prime ministers and the classes and cultures associated with them; subaltern histories might deal with the groups they dominated — perhaps the working class, perhaps women, perhaps members of a lower caste.

The study of subaltern groups has been particularly influential in India and has played a significant part in the work of another very influential postcolonial scholar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Drawing on psychoanalytical theory with particular reference to Sigmund Freud and Lacan, Bhabha has elaborated the key concepts of mimicry and hybridity. Whereas Fanon and Said have analysed the oppositions set up in colonialist and anticolonialist societies, Bhabha has sought to demonstrate that their discourses contain ambivalences and ambiguities.

Until recently, it has been the approaches and concepts developed by Said, Spivak and Bhabha that have dominated postcolonial literary theory and criticism.

He shares with Benita Parry, another opponent of theories based on poststructuralism, a commitment to Marxism as a basis for analysing the conflicts between colonizing and colonized nations, and for resisting new forms of domination.

Essays by many of the writers, such as Achebe, Lamming, Ngugi, Rushdie and Walcott have been equally influential in providing a framework and an orientation through which to approach not only their own writings but also those of others. Hence I have drawn attention to such essays as they became relevant. And of course much critical discourse which is not limited to postcolonial writing has also informed my thinking about these texts.

In the chapters that follow, each will include detailed analysis of one or more literary texts which relate to a particular concern in postcolonial writing and criticism. However, each chapter will also refer to relevant texts from other geographical areas, and other aspects of the chosen texts will be picked up and referred to in subsequent chapters.

Rather than being arranged according to various territories African, Caribbean, Indian, etc. I do not attempt to provide a complete coverage of postcolonial writing in English. As noted in the Preface, instead of skating thinly over many surfaces, I considered it more sensible to concentrate on literary texts from several areas which represent different histories of colonial and postcolonial relationships.

Thus I have chosen to refer mainly to writers from the Indian subcontinent, from East and West Africa, from Australia, from the Caribbean, from the black and Asian diaspora communities in Britain, and from Ireland. By focusing on writers mainly but not exclusively from just three different settler postcolonial areas Australia, East Africa and Ireland , three differing administrative ex-colonies Ghana, 14 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English India and Nigeria , and two areas which contain large and diverse diasporic communities Britain and the Caribbean , I hope the book will give its readers a fuller and richer sense of the cultural and literary contexts and debates within those communities, as well as the variety of writing which has been produced within and across these postcolonies.

One of the more contentious aspects of this study is the inclusion of Irish writers. While it is the case that because of the development of postcolonial studies from Commonwealth literary studies on the one hand, and Black Studies and Third World Studies on the other, Irish writing has traditionally been neglected in postcolonial literary studies, this situation is rapidly changing. Said includes a long section on Yeats as a nationalist writer in his Culture and Imperialism; David Lloyd has consistently written about nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Irish writers in the context of postcolonial writing, as have Marjorie Howes and more recently Elizabeth Butler Cullingford.

Thus the inclusion of Irish literature under the postcolonial remit takes account of changing perspectives which are to some extent revising the earlier frameworks for viewing postcolonial writing. Such perspectives include a growing awareness of race as constructed rather than given, and an interest in varieties of colonial experience rather than simple binary paradigms along colour lines.

He wrote: But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I believe there are not only more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours. Some of those interactions will be discussed in later chapters, and especially the next one.

These texts and their first productions provide a means of discussing the complex cultural mixtures of Trinidad and St Lucia and the politics of London Derry and the Field Day project, leading to an exploration of the wider issue of reading the politics of the past through the politics of the present. Both plays also raise the problem of translating cultures, and finding an appropriate language and idiom to express a culture distinct from the colonial one.

The discussion of the Field Day project will also include brief reference to the question of Ireland as a post colonial territory and culture acknowledging that territory and culture may not always overlap.

This chapter serves as an introduction to many of the main topics to be explored later with regard to other specific texts, topics such as language, place, mapping, history, cultural hybridity, genre and audience. There will be reference to differing histories and cultural contexts and how these affect writing. Here further distinctions will be made between male and female writers and histories. One means of establishing a new starting point for the writing of a national history which is not defined within the terms of the colonialist version of history is autobiography.

Chapter 4 explores the prevalence of autobiographical writing in much colonial and early postcolonial literature, analysing the ways in which 16 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English the story of the individual does and does not provide a base for departing from the collective history imposed by the colonizer on the one hand and the cultural nationalist on the other.

These analyses also draw distinctions between the projects of male-authored autobiographical works in relation to the nationalist project, and female ones which often question such constructions of the nation. As Said remarked with regard to Yeats, geography and the naming of places plays a prominent part in the work of many anticolonial and nationalist writers.

It contrasts the portrayals of landscape and place in the works of early settlers and visitors and those of later postcolonial writers. Here the gendering of land and landscape and its consequence for women writers as, for example, analysed by Aidoo and Eavan Boland is noted, but will be developed in more detail in Chapter 8. The question of which language to use and its relation to authentic identity has been a fraught one from the beginnings of postcolonial writing.

Chapter 6 outlines the debates over language vernacular or English, standard or Creole through a number of different positions, and the debates which took place in Ireland, Africa, and the Caribbean and Ireland.

Alongside the issue of language, and whether the English language could adequately express the experience of people whose worlds, attitudes, histories and experiences were very different from those of people whose history was rooted in England, postcolonial authors and critics have debated the question of form and genre. Can the form of the sonnet, developed during the European Renaissance, be adapted to express contemporary Caribbean or Irish thoughts?

Seamus Heaney, Walcott and Yeats have used the sonnet and other traditional forms, but have often given them a new significance. The Caribbean novelist Introduction: situating the postcolonial 17 Wilson Harris argued that the traditional form of the novel of manners was inappropriate for societies which needed to break from European assumptions and conventions, and embraced a form of fiction which radically questioned our concepts of realism.

The following chapter picks up and elaborates the brief discussions in previous chapters regarding gendered histories, narratives and landscapes, with specific reference to responses by postcolonial women writers to male colonial and postcolonial representations. Although these categories rarely fit neatly, this book will have followed these phases to some extent, discussing literature of resistance and national consolidation in the first chapters.

Later chapters deal with the literature by both male and female authors which portrays and opposes neocolonialism, whereby multinational companies and economically powerful nations such as Britain and the United States continue to control the economies and often the politics of newly independent states.

Chapter 9 will focus on the sense of disillusion expressed by authors such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi, Arundhati Roy and Rushdie, who expose the betrayal of the nation and its ideals by its leaders. However, as this chapter will discuss, authors such as Roy and Rushdie are also concerned to make room in their novels for marginalized peoples and groups. Whereas earlier nationalist novels and plays often implied a homogenous national identity, many later writers seek to acknowledge and celebrate a heterogeneous and inclusive nation.

In some cases, for example Australia and Canada, this movement also involves increasing acknowledgement of indigenous peoples as writers and speaking subjects, rather than simply subjects for writing. But in all cases there is also a sometimes troubled recognition of the nation as an immigrant nation with a multiplicity of ethnicities and cultures. Here, too, the question of languages and voices becomes significant.

For example, a Trinidadian reader might read V. But there can also be a complex interplay between these kinds of readings.

Readers are also influenced by critics and varying critical approaches, by publishers and cultural institutions including educational ones and books such as this one , and by state institutions which may censor or ban the works of particular authors.

This final chapter refers back to texts previously discussed for examples. Chapter 2 Postcolonial issues in performance Drama has played a crucial part in the development of national cultures and audiences, and yet has received relatively little attention in postcolonial literary studies. This is all the more surprising given that dramatic performance raises so many issues that are central to postcolonial cultures — questions of identity, language, myth and history; issues regarding translatability, voice and audience; problems relating to production, infrastructures and censorship.

In The Wretched of the Earth , it is drama rather than poetry or the novel that Frantz Fanon advocates as the best means of raising the consciousness of people involved in an anticolonial struggle.

In cultures where literacy has been confined mainly to a small elite group, and where there is a continuing oral culture with roots in precolonial traditions, drama and performance provide a means of reaching a much wider indigenous audience and tapping into forms and conventions which are already familiar to them.

They stated their aims thus: We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.

We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed.

We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us. This was not only a highly literary play, but ran counter to the myths, beliefs and oral traditions associated with the Irish famine —7 , when the play is set. The play received an enthusiastic response, and Stephen Gwynn, who saw it as a young man, later wrote: The effect of Cathleen ni Houlihan on me was that I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot.

However, that enthusiasm was soon to be severely tested by another play which drew in a different way on Irish folk culture, The Shadow of the Glen by J. Its central figure is Nora, married to a much older and miserly husband, and lonely and unfulfilled Postcolonial issues in performance 21 in a remote glen in Co.

The play draws on an anecdote Synge heard when he lived among the people of the Aran Islands about a husband who pretends to be dead in order to spy on his wife. In a letter to the United Irishman newspaper, Yeats defended the freedom of the National Theatre to stage works which drew on whatever influences the playwrights found inspiring.

In return, the socialist political leader James Connolly argued that at this point in its history, that is, while the nation was in formation and yet to become independent, it was necessary to build up an Irish-based drama which both reflected and reflected upon Irish life. What language is appropriate, and can English be used to depict the experience and culture of the indigenous population?

To what extent can nationalist playwrights borrow forms, conventions, and plots from other cultures and still represent and speak to their own society?

In many of those debates, the characterization of women becomes a focus for critical consternation, for women are often seen to embody the nation and preserve its traditions. Heckling and riots broke out, causing Yeats and other members of the management to bring in the police, with the bizarre result that the Irish National Theatre had to be protected by English police.

The Australian playwright and poet Louis Esson, now seen by many as the father of Australian drama, was particularly inspired by Synge and Yeats in his attempt to create a national theatre for Australia. In the s Douglas Stewart was one of a number of artists who used the Irish-Australian outlaw Ned Kelly as a focus for reflecting on Australian identity.

However, both these playwrights were also able to draw on vibrant and continuing West African dramatic traditions, and so to create a distinctive form of theatre, often primarily African in its concerns, conventions, and techniques, but also employing English as its main language and inflected by ancient and contemporary European drama, notably classical Greek tragedy and the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht.

Both plays end with the maiden finally rejecting her younger suitor and choosing to live within a patriarchal society. Although Sidi finds Lakunle and his aping of Western customs ridiculous, and rejects him in favour of the aged patriarch and head of the village, Baroka, neither Soyinka nor Baroka reject Western technology and art forms altogether.

Thus her image will officially represent her region as it moves into modes of administration and communication made possible and necessary by the implementation of European technology and forms of government. Here, as in the Yeats play, much of the dramatic interest focuses on the conflicting values of a Western secular and pragmatic society and a prejudiced one , and a traditional society in which spiritual values both add to and supersede the fullness of life in this world.

Soyinka had foreshadowed this danger in some of his earlier plays, sometimes comically, as in The Trials of Brother Jero , sometimes solemnly, as in A Dance of the Forests, the play he was commissioned to write for the Nigerian independence celebrations in The moral concerns the responsibilities of government, and shows how man too often pursues aims that are selfish and narrow and attempts to further his own interests at the expense of his fellow men.

Through the figure of Demoke, once a court poet and now a carver, it also raises the issue of the role of the artist in relation to the traditions of the past, and the future of his community. In it was in Ghana then called the Gold Coast that the first two full-length plays in English by West Africans had been published by J.

Danquah and F. Fiawoo, and in the s theatre was written and promoted by Efua Sutherland, who drew on traditional Akan forms to create a storytelling performance art, involving music and dance as well as language. Following the achievement of independence in Ghana in , Sutherland founded the Experimental Theatre Players, producing work in both English and Akan. Three years later, this group was to have its own building, the Ghana Drama Studio, one of the first modern African theatres to be based on an indigenous model rather than the European model with its platform and proscenium arch.

Aidoo also drew on the storytelling performance model for her two early plays, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa first staged in and respectively.

As do Soyinka and Achebe, she creates an Africanized form of English for her characters, an English which conveys the impression of speech in Akan. Soyinka and Aidoo both create a hybrid drama, combining Western and African conventions, and both choose the English language as their primary medium for drama, though it is an English mingled with and inflected by indigenous languages.

Ngugi and Githae-Mugo aim to recreate Kimathi as a man committed to the freedom of his country and his people, the courageous hero of folk memory. Although based on the actual transcripts of his trial, the play is not naturalistic but draws on Gikuyu songs, mime and dance, as well as oratory. Like Brechtian theatre, which likewise drew its inspiration from folk song and pageant, the play is epic rather than realistic, calling on the audience to understand the issues, judge and take action.

The audience response in Nairobi was enthusiastic, with many spectators joining in the final triumphant dance and continuing it in the streets. In this play also, he celebrates the role of women in the struggle for liberation.

The Kamiruthu Cultural Centre, which had worked with Ngugi on the play, received delegations from other rural Communities asking for advice and help in setting up similar cultural centres and theatrical events. But the play also attracted the attention of the authorities. The Kiambu District Commissioner withdrew the licence for performances and Ngugi was arrested and detained without trial for nearly a year. I learnt my language anew. I rediscovered the creative nature and power of collective work.

Although the overall direction of the play was under Kimani Gecau, the whole project became a collective community effort with peasants and workers seizing more and more initiative in revising and adding to the script, in directing dance movements on the stage, and in the general organization.

The rehearsals, arranged to fit in with the working rhythms of the village, which meant mostly Saturday and Sunday afternoons, were all in the open, attracting an ever-increasing crowd of spectators and an equally great volume of running appreciative or critical commentaries. The whole process of play-acting and production had been demystified and the actors and the show were the gainers for it.

Soyinka and Aidoo could also choose between English and Yoruba or Akan, and indeed they have drawn on both languages, but like many other African writers and similarly Indian subcontinental writers , their reason for choosing English is because it is a common language for the nation as a whole, rather than for specific ethnic or cultural groups within the nation.

But for Caribbean writers the English language is the only one they have, and their choice must be between a standard version and one that is inflected by the idioms, pronunciation and vocabulary of Caribbean speakers. Yet most Irish people do not speak like English people; neither do most Africans or West Indians white and black.

And many African Americans do not speak like white Americans. How then can one realistically represent their speech in writing or on stage without reinscribing that history of prejudice regarding their speech and character?

Indeed, how can one respect and celebrate that speech, the experience and view of the world it expresses? For other West Indian playwrights also, Irish drama has proved instructive. This play with its urban setting in the Dublin tenements and its delight in language and rhetoric found an appreciative audience in Kingston and Mona. But Walcott sought a drama and a kind of language that resonated with the world of peasants and fishermen in his native St Lucia.

They were the niggers of Britain. Now, with all that, to have those outstanding achievements of genius whether by Joyce or Becket or Yeats illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, depraved, oppressed situation and be defiant and creative at the same time.

He had taken a fishing port kind of language and gotten beauty out of it, a beat, something lyrical. Now that was inspiring, and the obvious model for The Sea at Dauphin.

When I tried to translate the speech of the St. Lucian fisherman into an English Creole, all I was doing was taking that kind of speech and translating it, or retranslating it, into an English-inflected Creole, and that was a totally new experience for me, even if it did come out of Synge.

In the remaining part of this chapter, I propose to explore in detail two plays, one West Indian and one Irish, both of which build upon the examples provided by Synge and the Abbey Theatre tradition, and which demonstrate particular issues regarding language, community and the performance of identity in a postcolonial context.

Why these two plays? The choice firstly has to do with the ways in which each work was centrally involved with the project of setting up a community theatre. Like Friel, Walcott was influenced by an earlier model of postcolonial theatre, the Abbey Theatre, founded as a means of reaching audiences more open to oral performance than the written word.

Indeed, Walcott acknowledges his debt to Synge in pointing the way to a dramatic language which could convey the richness of the local idiom, and overcome the associations of comic inadequacy traditionally evoked by stage Irish or black minstrel performance.

In both plays the issue of language is paramount and is closely tied to the question of identity and naming. In Dream on Monkey Mountain the conflict is between standard metropolitan English and the regional or creolized English spoken by the people of St Lucia and Trinidad; in Translations it is between the English and Irish languages.

The voicing of these different languages on stage makes the conflicts particularly pointed and dramatic. But in terms of the communities for which these plays were written and performed, the issues of language are especially resonant. Like the Abbey Theatre directors, Walcott sought to create a company of actors who could be at ease in their own way of speaking, and their own form of English, whose voices and gestures would identify them with the audience, not with an alien theatrical tradition.

Their role was to bring theatre home, and to allow the audience to see and judge their own social attitudes and conflicts. It begins with the imprisonment of an old charcoal burner and ends with a scene in which he is released from prison. In the opening scene he is forced to name himself as Makak monkey , lampooned by the gaol guard and fellow Postcolonial issues in performance 31 prisoners as a monkey, and ridiculed for having also named himself the Lion of Judah.

In the final scene he is able to name himself as Felix Hobain and is set free to return home to his mountain. Without child, without wife. People forget me like the mist on Monkey Mountain. Is thirty years now I have look in no mirror, Not a pool of cold water, when I must drink, I stir my hands first, to break up my image.

I will tell you my dream. Sirs, make a white mist In the mind; make that mist hang like a cloth From the dress of a woman, on prickles, on branches, Make it rise from the earth, like the breath of the dead On resurrection morning, and I walking through it On my way to my charcoal pit in the mountain.

Make the web of the spider heavy with diamonds And when my hand brush it, let the chain break. I remember, in my mind, the cigale sawing. Sawing, sawing wood before the woodcutter, The drum of the bull-frog, the blackbird flute, And this old man walking, ugly as sin, In a confusion of vapour, Till I feel I was God self, walking through cloud, In the heaven of my mind.

Then I hear this song, Not the blackbird flute, Not the bull-frog drum, Not the whistling of parrots As I brush through the branches, shaking the dew, A man swimming through smoke, And the bandage of fog unpeeling my eyes, As I reach this spot, I see this woman singing 32 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English And my feet grow roots. I could move no more.

A million silver needles prickle my blood, Like a rain of small fishes. The snakes in my hair speak to one another, The smoke mouth open, and I behold this woman, The loveliest thing I see on this earth, Like the moon walking along her own road.

During this, the apparition appears and withdraws 24 I have cited this passage in full to illustrate how powerfully Walcott deploys the idiom and voice of the local language, rooted in the local environment, to summon up a world and a vision, despite the fact that the whole event takes place on a bare stage representing a prison cell. The subsequent scenes of the play enact the consequences of this vision. In scenes 1 and 2, Makak becomes a local hero, a redeemer and Christlike figure who heals a dying man through his faith and, significantly, through a piece of coal.

In scene 3 Moustique, his assistant and friend, impersonates Makak in order to make money, and is beaten to death when the crowd discovers that he is a fraud. Part II presents a Rastafarian dream, with Makak as a powerful African king, the Lion of Judah, destroying all whiteness and, finally — at the behest of Corporal Lestrade, beheading the white-woman mask. It is this act which restores him to his real name and returns him home to Monkey Mountain, for both the vision of black power as a negation of whiteness and of whiteness as a negation of blackness must be discarded before the black man can be at home with himself.

Throughout the play, Lestrade, who is of mixed race, represents the schizophrenic world of the Caribbean, taught to aspire to the worlds claimed by white colonizers — of law, order, civilization and culture — and to despise all that is embodied in black people. Caribbean reviewers recognized the significance of the play in its dramatization of Lestrade for themselves.

However, like Dream of Monkey Mountain, Translations26 explores issues of Postcolonial issues in performance 33 communication between those who are poor and relatively powerless and those who assume power. Here, too, standard English is the language of imperialism, and imperial law. Thus the historical event around which the play is staged, the ordinance survey and mapping and naming of Irish locations by the British in the s, had a particular resonance for the citizens of Derry in In the s Derry had also been the scene of bitter and violent demonstrations and clashes between Irish nationalists, who continued to oppose the partition of Ireland strongly and saw Northern Ireland as colonized territory, and unionists supported by British troops, who equally opposed the reunification of Ireland and consequent loss of British citizenship and identity.

But its energy is bound to spread much more profoundly through a place like Derry. So it portrays the transitional moment between a confident and locally based Irish culture and the imposition of a powerful English culture, reinforced by military superiority.

At a time when the educational system in the Irish republic was seeking years later to restore an Irish-speaking culture, and when one of the principal signs of resistance among nationalist political prisoners in Northern Irish gaols was the study of the Irish language, the issue of language was particularly relevant.

A central figure in the play is the translator and interpreter, Owen, the brother of Manus, who is working for the British army. But ironically, Owen also finds himself constantly misnamed by his British employers, who insist on calling him Roland. O w e n : A new map is being made of the whole country. Yo l l a n d : I think your countryside is — is — is — is very beautiful. I hope we are not too — too crude an intrusion on your lives.

O w e n : He is already a committed Hibernophile. At the same time, we are aware that his audience is thoroughly at home with Latin and Greek.

But the overarching paradox is that although the actors are all speaking in English, the illusion is that some are speaking in Irish and some in English. While Makak is bewitched by the white goddess figure, and dreams of becoming either a Christlike redeemer figure or a king, Jimmy Jack is bewitched by Homer and the goddess Athena. Jimmy Jack and Hugh, the father of Manus and Owen, recall how they set out as young men to join in the rebellion led by Wolfe Tone, the most revered of the risings in Irish nationalist history, and the event that Yeats summons up in his dream-vision play Cathleen ni Houlihan.

Jimmy Jack and Hugh turn back and return home, however, before reaching the scene of the rising — and in so doing reject not only the call of Cathleen ni Houlihan, but also the Yeatsian version of nationalist theatre. For this particular Yeats play was received as propaganda calling for a military rebellion. Both playwrights call upon their audiences to reflect and judge 36 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English through becoming aware of the analogies between the world portrayed on stage and the world they inhabit.

In the face of European denials of any worthwhile native culture or history, he states: the claims of the native intellectual are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent programme. Achebe sees this as one of the main messages carried in his historical novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God , the first of which will be discussed in greater detail below.

The Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite produced an epic trilogy, The Arrivants , which traces the migrations of African peoples in the African continent, through the terrible sufferings of the Middle Passage and slavery, and further journeys to England, France and the United States in search of economic and psychic survival.

The middle section of the trilogy, Masks, seeks to recover for African Caribbeans the Ghanaian culture 37 38 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English from which many of their ancestors were forcibly torn two or three centuries ago. In his role as a historian, Brathwaite had published a book-length study, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, — , and also an influential literary study, History of the Voice , both of which focus on the continuation of African cultural expressions, especially through music, dance and oral poetry, in the Caribbean, and the creation of a distinctive hybrid European and African culture.

One such story from the contemporary annals of a village I have tried to tell. The voice of the narrator allows Rao to link traditional oral narrative, myths and legends, and social structures to create an impression of rural India which is also a microcosm of the nation as a whole, and the ways in which the Gandhi movement brings change.

Never had we heard Harikathas like this. And he can sing too, can Jayaramachar. He can keep us in tears for hours together. But the Harikatha he did, which I can never forget in this life and in all lives to come, is about the birth of Gandhiji.

But gradually the divisions are broken down and replaced by a sense of village identity, which in turn allows the villagers to unite against the British landlord, Skeffington, and his plans to extend his coffee plantation. Problems relating to postcolonial reading with reference to texts written by postcolonial writers will be discussed at greater length in chapter 11; here I will focus briefly on readings of colonial and metropolitan texts and responses to them.

Achebe has written bitterly about his sense of outrage on reading it as a college student and finding how Africans are characterized — as cannibals, as having no speech, as a mass of whirling savages indulging in unspeakable rites, and also as mere background to the story of Marlow and Kurtz. This has led in turn to new readings of the play and an emphasis on Caliban as a colonized native rebelling against the imperial power represented by Prospero.

Indeed, it is rare now to see productions of the play which do not relate it to a colonial and political context. Marina Warner has written a novel called Indigo which features Sycorax as an Amerindian woman with magic powers, who has a child, Caliban, with an escaped slave, and Ariel as her adopted daughter.

However, in this case the clerk is rooted in a history of cultural and political change; he is the grandson of Okonkwo and the son of Nwoye, whose stories are told in Things Fall Apart. Shakespeare and Conrad have provided two canonical versions of the colonial encounter. This novel has often been seen as providing a paradigm of the colonial enterprise, especially in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Similarly, Australia was declared terra nullius, land belonging to no one, despite the presence of aboriginal peoples on that continent for many thousands of years.

Robinson Crusoe became a reference point for many African and Caribbean writers, and it is significant also because it is seen as the first major novel in English, and the seminal work for a genre which is distinctively European in its values. Derek Walcott has written a number of poems using Crusoe as a motif, and a witty radio and stage play called Pantomime, in which the roles of white master and black servant are reversed.

Yet many readers of this novel are likely to feel some disquiet at the portrayal of these women. Roy Foster and L. Curtis have written about the depiction of the Irish in the nineteenth century as simian, childlike and effeminate. Only recently did the Australian Supreme Court overturn the ruling by earlier British and Australian governments that Australia was terra nullius when Europeans first arrived.

Fanon argues that the process of colonization involved not only physical occupation of the land and imposition of government on the colonized people, but also mental colonization.

By this charm alone can we insure their obedience. Naipaul also satirizes would-be leaders of postcolonial Caribbean states and laments the long-term effects of cultural colonization in his novel The Mimic Men The title of his novel also alludes and responds to a poem by the Irish poet W.

He 44 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. Tuesday 26 July Wednesday 27 July Thursday 28 July Friday 29 July Saturday 30 July Sunday 31 July Monday 1 August Tuesday 2 August Wednesday 3 August Thursday 4 August Friday 5 August Saturday 6 August Sunday 7 August Monday 8 August Tuesday 9 August Wednesday 10 August Thursday 11 August Friday 12 August Saturday 13 August Sunday 14 August Monday 15 August Tuesday 16 August Wednesday 17 August Thursday 18 August Friday 19 August Saturday 20 August Sunday 21 August Monday 22 August Tuesday 23 August Wednesday 24 August Thursday 25 August Friday 26 August Saturday 27 August Sunday 28 August Monday 29 August Tuesday 30 August Wednesday 31 August Thursday 1 September Friday 2 September Saturday 3 September Sunday 4 September Monday 5 September Tuesday 6 September Wednesday 7 September Thursday 8 September Friday 9 September Saturday 10 September Sunday 11 September Monday 12 September Tuesday 13 September Wednesday 14 September Thursday 15 September Friday 16 September Saturday 17 September Sunday 18 September Monday 19 September Tuesday 20 September Wednesday 21 September Thursday 22 September Friday 23 September Saturday 24 September Sunday 25 September Monday 26 September Tuesday 27 September Wednesday 28 September Thursday 29 September Friday 30 September Saturday 1 October Sunday 2 October Monday 3 October Tuesday 4 October Wednesday 5 October Thursday 6 October Friday 7 October Saturday 8 October Sunday 9 October Monday 10 October Tuesday 11 October Wednesday 12 October Thursday 13 October Friday 14 October Saturday 15 October Sunday 16 October Monday 17 October Tuesday 18 October Wednesday 19 October Thursday 20 October Friday 21 October Saturday 22 October Sunday 23 October Monday 24 October Tuesday 25 October Wednesday 26 October Thursday 27 October Friday 28 October Saturday 29 October Sunday 30 October Monday 31 October Tuesday 1 November Wednesday 2 November Thursday 3 November Friday 4 November Saturday 5 November Sunday 6 November Monday 7 November Tuesday 8 November Wednesday 9 November Thursday 10 November Friday 11 November Saturday 12 November Sunday 13 November Monday 14 November