Post-Colonial Literature

Post-colonial literature consists of a body of writing emanating from Europe's former colonies which addresses questions of history, identity, ethnicity, gender, and language. The term should be used loosely and hesitantly, for it is replete with contradictions and conundrums. The term 'post-colonial literature' is to date the most convenient way of embracing the powerful and diverse body of literary responses to the challenges presented by decolonization and the transitions to independence and post-independence in a wide variety of political and cultural contexts.

*Heart of Darkness* (1899) marks a key moment in colonial literature, Joseph Conrad questioning the certainties about racial superiority which underpinned white rule. Simple greed is what motivates empire, Conrad suggests, the quest for money making Europeans more barbarous than the supposed black cannibals they governed and worked to death.

Post-colonial literature, in seeking to awaken political and cultural nationalism, has dwelt on popular revolts against colonial rule, exposing the lie of the passive native. Writers like the Trinidadian C. L. R. \*James have brought to the fore neglected black heroes like Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the greatest slave revolt in history, defeating French, Spanish, and British military forces to set up Haiti, the first free black republic in the West. History, however, is not an epic narrative of kings and rebels, but a record of the day-to-day existence of the common people; the cane-cutters for instance, whose labour produced the sugar which not only boosted the profits of imperial commerce but, in the 18th cent., created a taste among the gentry for taking sweetened tea. By giving voice and character to cane-cutters and the like, post-colonial writers point to the people who truly mattered to history but who, for political and related reasons, were written out. The world-view of such 'lowly' people, expressed in their myths and legends, is also given space.

There is a corresponding reappraisal of oral expression, the riddles and proverbs and songs and stories handed down over generations and shared by the whole community. These forms of orality are often spurned by literary academics as lesser forms of 'literature' and relegated to the dubious category of 'folk tale'. But as the Nigerian writer Chinweizu reminds us, the African folk tale is a product of ancient traditions of eloquence and rhetoric, created for courtship or wedding ceremonies, or ceremonies marking birth and death. The folk tale is therefore an 'integral part of the fabric of personal and social life', often with profound religious significance. To ignore it is to ignore the cultural history of a nation.

Repositioning the co-ordinates of history has also involved coming to terms with the language of expression itself. Language is inextricably bound up with culture and identity, and as the colonizers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose the English language on subject peoples, the response from the formerly colonized has ranged from the outright rejection of English as a medium through which to exercise their art to the appropriation of it with subversive intent. There are now many people in all parts of the world who see English as having become detached from Britain or Britishness. They claim the language as their own property, for they have moulded and refashioned it to make it bear the weight of their own experience.

Another important progression has been the acknowledgement and reappearance of women's experience after being hidden from the histories of colonial societies. Many of the fixed representations of non-Western women have been powerfully rejected in a host of contemporary writings, most of which in their different ways refute imaginings deeply rooted in Western narrations and their subsequent over-simplistic depictions. A distinguished list of women writers includes Jean Rhys, Anita Desai, Buchi Emecheta, Olive Senior, Nadine Gordimer, and Grace Nichols. Such writers have placed women at the centre of history, as makers and agents of history, not silent witnesses to it.

Whatever the irony contained in the fact that very many post-colonial writers choose both to write in English, the language of their former colonizers, and in the literary forms, such as the novel, developed in European societies, there is no doubt that the new literatures in English constitute a body of exciting and dynamic texts capable at once of forcing a reassessment of the traditional canon and of providing a vigorous alternative to what are often regarded as rather defensive and introspective English texts.

1. ↑  Drabble, Margaret. *The Oxford Companion to English Literature*. Oxford University Press, 2000.