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We see much the same thing in any ethnic American fiction, although most
clearly perhaps in African American writing. Perhaps because the history
involved is so horrific, not merely the dealing in human beings as commodities,
although that in itself is quite bad enough, but also because of the brutalities of
slavery and plantation life, the oppression on a grand scale that followed for a
century after emancipation, and the ongoing effects of that history, African
American novels possess a power that is hard to match. Richard Wright’s Native
Son (1940) can only have come out of a certain pattern of experience, one which
no one would wish for himself, yet it implicates all of us in its tragedy. The
novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin capture black
life seventy and eighty years after slavery, making something both familiar and
strange out of the experience. Sometimes black striving with the slave-holding
past is comic, as in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), sometimes tragic
or strange, as in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1992—and African Caribbean or
African British comes into the picture here, as well), about a freed slave who
finds himself re-enslaved, or Edward P. Jones’s account of blacks who owned
slaves in The Known World (2003). Sometimes, it is all those things, which is
part of why Toni Morrison may be the greatest novelist of our time. Even her
failures (and I have read Jazz) are fascinating. And in her best work, in Song of
Solomon (1977) or Beloved (1987) or Paradise (1998), the sense that history has
come alive and is animating characters in ways they can’t quite understand or
appreciate permeates the narratives. And the prose simply takes your breath
away. Sadly, that history will never leave us but will go on providing material for
novelists for a thousand years. And all the novels in the world can’t justify or
erase the enormity of slavery and racism.
The specific issues differ in postcolonial writing, whether from India, Africa,
Latin America, the Middle East, the British Isles, or the Caribbean, and of course
they differ from country to country and culture to culture, yet always history
announces itself in fiction, frequently in quite overt ways. The original Troubles
in Ireland, those spasms of nationalism that eventually led to independence for
the twenty-six counties of the Republic of Ireland, from the Easter Rising of
1916 through the Black and Tan War against English soldiers after the Great
War, to the Irish civil war, figure down the years from Liam O’Flaherty’s The
Informer (1925) to William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune (1983) and beyond. At the
time the Black and Tans were dispatched to Ireland, Prime Minister David Lloyd
George said, “We have murder by the throat.” Establishing a pattern, that one
didn’t go quite as predicted. The later Troubles, the ones in Northern Ireland,
show up in such disparate works as Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street
(1997) and Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which an
elderly woman in the Irish Republic is held hostage in her own home by a
fugitive IRA terrorist. O’Brien employs the Lloyd George quote as an epigraph
to the novel. There are numerous other novels, poems, plays, and memoirs on
the Troubles, and there will be many, many more down the years. As I write this
chapter, the British Army has just pulled out of Northern Ireland. It went into the
province in 1969, the government’s idea being that the deployment would last a
few months; it lasted, in fact, thirty-eight years and cost over thirty-seven
hundred lives, military and civilian. How can such a period not color the writing
by residents and onlookers?
Becoming a nation is never simple or easy. Establishing a national identity
can be even more arduous and can take many more decades. This process is
something Americans know a great deal about, whether they’re aware of it or
not. Try this experiment. Read several works from any emerging nation. Make
sure to read more than one author, and a lot of authors would be useful. Read R.
K. Narayan, one of the Malgudi books or even The Painter of Signs (1976), and
Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Midnight’s Children (1981),
or pretty much any Rushdie, and maybe Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust
(1975). Feel free to make substitutions. Read Desai’s mother, Anita, instead.
Pick and choose. The writers and titles don’t matter all that much, except that
good writers make the best reading. Now here’s the experimental part: don’t read
them as strange visitors from someplace you’ve never been. Read them as if
you’re one of them, or they’re one of you. Read them as if they’re nineteenthcentury American novelists. Here’s what I think you’ll find: minus the surface
details, it’s the same project as the one undertaken by James Fenimore Cooper,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. They’re trying to
figure out and articulate something that has never existed before, an identity as
part of a newly established country separate from that same place and that same
people under colonial rule but also (in the case of India, which is vastly older
than British rule) from what it had been before, which in any case no one living
ever experienced. They’re trying to work in a received literary form and adapt it
to the sensibility and the reality of their time and place. Kiran Desai isn’t Mark
Twain—her adaptation must needs be a far cry from his—but she’s certainly not
Jane Austen or Iris Murdoch, either. Oh, and while you’re on the case, read her
comic novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), which deserves reading
for the title alone.