Insiders' Views of the Colonial Experience

Focus on Breast-Giver

". . . literature . . . of . . . postcolonial societies . . . incorporates the dynamism and internal tensions of an evolving society in which indigenous traditions, the colonial heritage, and an ongoing intellectual and artistic ferment coexist as parts of a common history." (p. 1596)

The Martin Waldseemuller world map of 1507, "the first document that truly understands, at least from a European perspective, the way the world is constructed," according to John Hebert of the Library of Congress.
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The Colonial Yoke

In the early modern period, explorers like Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan crossed seas and oceans in search of spice and treasure. These Portuguese mariners opened the way to Africa and India . Sailing with Spanish backing in search of the Indies, the Genoese Columbus came upon the Bahamas , Cuba , and Hispaniola , and dubbed their natives "Indians." Thinking he was sailing toward Japan, a Venetian sea captain known to his English supporters as John Cabot discovered Labrador and its great Atlantic fisheries. However confused about their destinations these early voyagers may have been, the powerful rulers for whom they sailed quickly seized the territories that they reached and the emerging nations of Europe began the long process of colonizing peoples who lived on distant continents.

Mahatma Gandhi with his peace brigade in East Bengal (now Bangladesh ) in 1947.
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Opposing Imperialism

Four centuries later, the subjugated populations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas struggled to reverse that process. In the twentieth century, in the face of increasingly organized local opposition, the great European powers withdrew from countries that they had both cultivated and exploited. The reasons for this withdrawal are complex, but one of them certainly was the articulate opposition of activists and intellectuals like Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948), who brought to bear the moral power of passive resistance and civil disobedience against the British in India, and Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who advocated violent means to liberate the oppressed subjects of French colonialism in his native Martinique and in Algeria. With freedom, however, often came chaos; the desire to make sense of this chaos generated a great outpouring of brilliant writing, as new literary voices emerged to diagnose and portray different stages of the colonial experience.

The national emblem of India .
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Achieving Independence

Although a few colonial occupations still persist, by and large we live today in a postcolonial world, where millions have to come to terms with the residue of non-native practices that their imperial rulers tried to impose, even as they have to reevaluate the old cultures that those rulers sought to undermine and discredit. How can the formerly dispossessed now govern themselves in new states that they have not always shaped? Which of their ancient customs should they keep and which reform? Among the newly but imperfectly enfranchised inhabitants of the old empires, great writers have arisen to frame and articulate these daunting challenges. The approaches they take are as varied as their personalities and situations.

Chinua Achebe, who "exploded the colonialist image of Africans as childlike people living in a primitive society" (p. 2855).
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Self-critical views of the colonial experience

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is generally considered the first postcolonial novel. As the Anthology headnote points out, the novel "was a conscious attempt to counteract the distortions of [Joyce] Cary 's Mister Johnson " (p. 2856), a caricature of Nigerian life written from the perspective of an Englishman. Achebe initiated one of the great artistic achievements of the twentieth century, the representation of formerly colonized peoples from "the inside," by allowing non-native readers to learn about the complex cultures that European imperialism had disregarded or actively opposed. In his later work, writing in-and then, from afar, about- Africa , Achebe's emphasis has shifted. The depredations of colonial oppression cannot be forgiven, but they seem less critical than the social injustice and political corruption that new nation states now face. Writing from the inside, primarily for the insider, requires difficult self-examination.

Yashoda and Krishna from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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A postcolonial critique of both old and new: Breast-Giver

Mahasweta's brilliant story, Breast-Giver , takes direct aim at the most sacred of inherited Hindu pieties. From beginning to end, the author spares no one. Naming her protagonist after the iconic mother of the god Krishna , she seems at first to invite pity for her Jashoda 's hard life, but the last lines of the story make a brutal assertion that requires readers to reassess whatever sentimental notions they may have entertained about the "professional mother's" plight. Writing in Bengali, Mahasweta uses English-language phrases to highlight the clashing assumptions that bedevil postcolonial existence. The simple response would be to think that she was thereby underlining the difference between the inauthentic impositions of imperial England and the native virtues that have managed to survive occupation. At the same time that her satire exposes the shortcomings of Western borrowings, however, it skewers the self-serving respect for tradition that guides the Haldars of Harisal: "you enter the sixteenth century as you enter the gates of this house" (p. 2827).

A photograph of Mahasweta, from the Library of Congress.
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A feminist as well as a Marxist, Mahasweta widens the scope of her narrative as she criticizes the hypocrisy of the Indian male intellectuals who profess to value female virtues:

Even those who . . . wish to slap current posters to the effect of the "eternal she" -"mona Lisa"-"La Passionaria"-"Simone de Beauvoir," et cetera, over the old ones and look at women the way that way are, after all, Indian cubs. It is notable that the educated Babus desire all this from women outside the home. When they cross the threshold they want the Divine Mother in the words and conduct of the revolutionary ladies. The process is most complicated. (p. 2831)

From a coloring book, an image of the lion-seated goddess Durga.
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With sly sophistication, Breast-Giver offers a deadpan account of the worldview to which at least some modern Hindus subscribe. Performing ritual observances, such as a pilgrimage to the temple of Durga , makes them oblivious to the social problems that surround them. Jashoda's hapless husband, Kangalicharan the Brahmin, ekes out an existence by cooking for the visitors to the Lionseated goddess's temple, who pride themselves on their proper reverence for the Brahmin and, Breast-Giver seems to imply, therefore take no responsibility to improve the life of their impoverished neighbors. Like the popular comic books that render Indian epics and mythologies accessible to the unlearned, a trivialized appeal to tradition satisfies the pilgrims' spiritual needs.

A "Bullet Nose" 1950 Studebaker. Perhaps this is the very model that ran over Kangalicharan in the beginning of Mahasweta's Breast-Giver .
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Alongside its ruthless vision of greed and self-interest as flaws intrinsic to all human beings, however, Breast-Giver also finds fault with a kind of materialism that seems specifically Western in its forms and origins. By attaching brand names like Studebaker to the artifacts for which the Halders (and by extension, Indian society) have corrupted themselves, Mahasweta signals the degree to which the importation of the colonizers' values have eroded whatever ethical proprieties might once have guided families like the Haldars. The second son who wants to preserve his wife's beauty while propagating more children on her body exults in the solution provided by Jashoda's milk: "Way found" (p. 2832) to keep the Haldar wives in "blouses and bras of 'European cut'" (p. 2834). With the death of the older generation of Haldars, Jashoda loses her employment, her marriage disintegrates, and the image of the Lionseated goddess is maliciously turned around. As the narratives reaches its conclusion, the italicized English phrases increasingly denote the scientific rituals of western medicine: " Painkiller , sedative , antibiotic . . . cancer " (pp. 2842-3). Hospitalized and therefore totally alienated from the culture of the past, Jashoda is left to die. And "Jashoda's death was also the death of God" (p. 2845).

A flag associated with Algerian nationalists who rebelled against French rule in 1945. The inscription says Allah Akbar , or "God is Great" in Arabic.
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Colonial Narratives of Guilt and Complicity

Albert Camus published The Guest in 1957, the year in which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Honored as a French stylist and moralist, Camus was a native of Algeria caught between the two camps that waged the war for Algerian Independence between 1954 and 1962 (two years after Camus died). An onlooker living in Paris for years, Camus sympathized with neither the prosecution of the war nor the French liberals who supported the National Liberation Front (FLN). He sought in vain to bridge the gap between the Europeans and the Muslims of Algeria, both of whom had a legitimate claim on the land. Horrified by the Arab insurgency that relied on terrorism as the means to free the Arab population from French colonial control, he found himself in an uncomfortable no-man's land, much like Daru in The Guest .

Albert Camus in a typical pose.
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"Though I can understand and admire a fight for liberation, I have only disgust for a killer of women and children. The cause of the Arab people in Algeria has never been worse served than by terrorism against civilians." (Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life [trans. Benjamin Ivry], New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000, p. 363)

A Reuters photo of the Palestinians with flags in the Gaza Strip taken in March 2002. .
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The Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests in 1968, just after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, in which the Israeli Army staved off an anticipated pan-Arab invasion by occupying the Arab-controlled portion of Jerusalem , the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Gaza Strip that had been held by Egypt to the south. Born of a Sephardic family that had lived in Jerusalem for generations, Yehoshua writes as an insider. He looks critically at the competing narratives that guide the views of extremists on both sides of the conflict over the land of Israel . The State of Israel was in the main founded and governed by Ashkenazis, Jews who had been born in Eastern Europe and came to the British-ruled Palestinian Mandate in the 1930s and 1940s. The story told by the Ashkenazi majority was that they had revived an empty land and made the desert bloom; the story told by the indigenous Arab population was that there was no evidence of the ancient Hebrews in the land from which the Palestinians had all been forcibly uprooted by armed assaults.

A candid photo of A. B.Yehoshua, from his faculty page on the Web site of Haifa University .
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Yehoshua has affiliated himself with the liberal Peace Now movement that believes that the state of Israel has a right to exist, but that it should confine itself within the borders that had been settled in the original war for Israeli Independence and internationally agreed upon in 1948. As Facing the Forests indicates, Peace Now activists understand that Arab populations were displaced in the process of Jewish settlements. At the same time, however, as Yehoshua's family history attests, he would argue that Jews have a legitimate and ancient claim on the land that they have called their own since biblical times.

Even with a binocular, it can be hard to interpret what one sees.
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Camus and Yehoshua each imagines an isolated and disaffected intellectual who finds himself drawn into a colonial conflict not of his own making. The Guest takes place in a snowbound landscape that leaves Daru the schoolteacher alone in his classroom with no students to teach. Facing the Forests opens in fog and follows its nameless protagonist to a hilltop watching post surrounded by pine trees that blur into a haze. In each case, the intellectual scans the landscape for signs at moments of compromised visibility. Through an accumulation of realistically rendered details of weather and landscape, these stories suggest how hard it can be to see clearly.

The Dilemma of the Future

In Breast-Giver , Mahasweta surveys the post-imperial scene and finds flaws intrinsic to the social order she critiques. Camus and Yehoshua write from within an unresolved crisis, without knowing what troubling future awaits the inhabitants of colonial societies. They eschew propaganda; implicitly condemning the status quo, their work explores the human cost of any sort of occupation by focusing on the inner lives of those caught in the middle of a power struggle. The schoolteacher Daru and the fire scout are servants of an unjust system. By virtue of their intelligence and sensitivity, they see the ugliness that these systems promote and suffer some degree of unearned guilt because they have profited from them. Ironically, when they try to make some amends for the cruelties the systems have promoted, they only make matters worse.

Like their creators, Daru and the fire scout are hardly imperialist occupiers. Native to their lands, both men are thrust into situations that make them acutely aware of the sufferings of the subjugated Arab population in whose midst they live. Their moral sensibilities make them complicit with damaged but potentially dangerous individuals who represent the Enemy Other. In the story by Camus, the intellectual's attempt at generosity backfires. The Arab chooses of his own free will the road to the prison to which Daru has expressly refused to escort him. Yet the story's conclusion implies the futility of the schoolteacher's effort to keep his hands clean: he now lives in a world where he must make bad choices, for neutrality is no longer possible. We know that Daru has not done the bidding of the colonial police, but the guerillas who threaten retaliation assume that he has. In Yehoshua's story, the intellectual becomes a kind of madman, permitting a conflagration that destroys the forest and, it would seem, himself. The mute Arab has taken revenge, but he will be made to suffer. In each case, the outlook seems very bleak indeed.

A blazing sunset from a Colorado observatory.
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