100 Postcolonial SG

Postcolonial
literatures in English
BA English
B. Moore-Gilbert
2002 0033E100
This guide was prepared for the University of London by:
B. Moore-Gilbert, MA, DPhil, Lecturer in English, Department of English,
Goldsmiths College, University of London..
This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that
due to pressure of work the authors are unable to enter into any correspondence
relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject
guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.
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Contents
Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................1
Objectives....................................................................................................................1
Subject content ............................................................................................................1
Suggested study syllabus ............................................................................................3
Using this subject guide..............................................................................................6
General subject reading ..............................................................................................7
Methods of assessment ..............................................................................................9
Chapter 1: Section A author study: Chinua Achebe ............................................13
Essential reading ......................................................................................................13
Recommended reading ............................................................................................13
Introduction ..............................................................................................................14
Reclaiming the past ..................................................................................................14
Literary realism and the postcolonial novel ............................................................15
The role of the individual in Things Fall Apart ......................................................16
Reclaiming traditional narrative modes ..................................................................18
Politics, literature and modern Africa ......................................................................19
Achebe’s discussion of neo-colonialism in Anthills of the Savannah ....................20
Representations of the feminine ..............................................................................22
Learning outcomes....................................................................................................23
Sample examination questions ................................................................................23
Suggestions for further/alternative study ................................................................23
Chapter 2: Section A author study: Hanif Kureishi ............................................25
Introduction ..............................................................................................................26
Kureishi’s themes......................................................................................................26
Kureishi and colonial discourse................................................................................27
Kureishi and genre ....................................................................................................28
Chapter 3 : Section B topic study:
Postcolonial literature and the ideology of narrative forms................................33
Introduction ..............................................................................................................33
Dramatising the colonial encounter: Derek Walcott’s Pantomime ........................34
Postcolonialism and the postmodern novel:
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children....................................................................36
Politics and myth in Midnight’s Children ................................................................37
Caribbean poetry: a new language for ‘English’ verse?..........................................39
Caribbean verse and the search for tradition............................................................41
The case of the ‘white’ Dominions: colonial culture at the periphery....................41
The Bone People: choosing a postcolonial identity ................................................42
i
Postcolononial literatures in English
Chapter 4: Section B topic study: gender and postcolonial literature ..............45

Introduction ..............................................................................................................46
Gender and the African novel ..................................................................................46
The role of education ................................................................................................47
Education and the threat to women’s identities in Nervous Conditions ................48
Re-ordering the masculine........................................................................................49
Gender and postcolonial society ..............................................................................50
Appendix: Sample examination paper ..................................................................53
Section A ..................................................................................................................53
Section B ..................................................................................................................53
ii
Introduction
Introduction
Objectives
Postcolonial literatures in English is a Group B advanced unit. The unit is
concerned with poetry, fiction and drama produced since 1947 in the regions of the
world formerly under British rule. This subject has been designed to:
• help you identify what is characteristic of this literature
• develop your understanding of the complexities of, and differences between, the
various societies and literary traditions involved
• provide a context for the application of a range of critical approaches to the
literature.
It is important that you refer to these objectives in the planning of your subject and
when assessing your progress through the subject. (Self-assessment procedures are
discussed in the Handbook.)
Subject content
You should organise your course of study around both topics and individual authors.
The following is a list of the kind of topics which you might choose to investigate:
• the definition and meaning of terms such as ‘colonialism’, ‘neo-colonialism’ and
‘postcolonialism’
• representations of ‘metropolitan centre’ and the ‘periphery’
• problems of identity and cultural identification
• exile and diaspora
• hopes for, and disillusion with, political independence
• the role of the intellectual and the artist in postcolonial societies
• the response towards, and subversion of, Western literary forms
• issues relating to the writer’s usage of English language
• problems and opportunities of the postcolonial woman
• relations between postmodern and postcolonial forms.
In practice, some of these topics may well overlap.
The following is a list of authors whose works you may choose to study:
Chinua Achebe
Ama Ata Aidoo
Ayi Kwei Armah
Margaret Atwood
Edward Brathwaite
Merle Collins
Robertson Davies
Anita Desai
Buchi Emecheta
Nuruddin Farah
Nadine Gordimer
1
Postcolonial literatures in English
Wilson Harris
Bessie Head
Keri Hulme
Hanif Kureishi
Earl Lovelace
Timothy Mo
Les Murray
V.S. Naipaul
R.K. Narayan
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Grace Nichols
Christopher Okigbo
Ben Okri
Caryl Philips
Jean Rhys
Salman Rushdie
Wole Soyinka
Amos Tutuola
Derek Walcott
Patrick White
Benjamin Zephaniah.
You need not feel restricted by these lists of topics and authors and you are not
expected to know all of these figures and topics in depth. Their selection is intended
to give an idea of the wide geographical, cultural and political issues in
1
See ‘Methods of assessment’ postcolonialism. Studying the plays, novels and poetry of some of these writers will
1
below. certainly help with your preparation for both parts of the examination paper.
Similarly, the list of topics includes some of the central themes, genres and
approaches to this literature. However, it is quite acceptable for you to include the
study of topics and relevant authors not referred to here in your course of study. Since
so many of the texts to be considered are involved in interaction with the British
colonial novel, it would clearly be very useful for you to have studied the Group B
subject guide Empire and Literature. It is not compulsory to have already studied this
subject, but you should at least be familiar with some of the key texts of colonial
literature, such as Robinson Crusoe, Kim and Heart of Darkness.
2
Introduction
Suggested study syllabus

The following is a sample 20-week outline to give you an idea of how you could
construct an appropriate syllabus for this subject.
Week 1: Background reading of the definitions of postcolonialism
and its relation to colonialism: recommended text:
Loomba, A. Colonialism/Post-colonialism. (See general
subject reading below for full details).
Week 2: Background reading on the literary/historical contexts
pertaining to postcolonial literature: recommended text:
Boehmer, E. Colonial and Post-colonial Literature. (See
general subject reading below for full details).
Weeks 3–5: Author study: Chinua Achebe (see Chapter 1 below).
Weeks 6–8: Author study: Hanif Kureishi (see Chapter 2 below).
Week 9–10: Single text/author* study: Walcott, D. Omeros (London:
Faber, 1990) [ISBN 0-571-14459-4].
Weeks 11–13: Topic study: Postcolonial Literature and the Ideology of
Narrative Forms (see Chapter 3 below).
Weeks 14–16: Topic study: Gender and Postcolonial Literature (see
Chapter 4 below).
Weeks 17–19: Topic study: Postcolonial life-writing
Recommended texts:
Seacole, M. The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole
in Many Lands. (London: Xpress, 1999)
[ISBN 1-874509-85-9].
Kincaid, J. Autobiography of My Mother. (London:
Vintage, 1996) [ISBN 0-09-973841-4].
Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: A Memoir. (London: Minerva,
1998) [ISBN 0-09-926827-2].
Week 20: Revision. Practice of one-hour timed answers to previous
examination papers.
*NB See note in suggested study questions for Weeks 9–10 below.
Recommended secondary reading for suggested study syllabus
Week 1: None: use only Colonialism/Post-colonialism.
Week 2: None: use only Colonial and Post-colonial Literature.
Weeks 3–5: See Chapter 1 below.
Weeks 9–10: Brown, S. Derek Walcott. (Plymouth: Northcote House,
1999) [ISBN 0746308647].
Burnett, P. Derek Walcott. (Gainsville: University
of Florida Press, 2001) [ISBN 0-8130-1882X].
King, B. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
[ISBN 0-19-871131-X].
Thieme, J. Derek Walcott. (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999) [ISBN 0-7190-4206].
3
Walcott, D. What the Twilight Says: Essays.

(London: Faber, 1998) [ISBN 0-5711-96489].
Weeks 17–19: Anderson, L. Autobiography. (London:
Routledge, 2001) [ISBN 0-415-18635-8].
Fischer, M. ‘Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of
Memory’ in Clifford, J. L. and Marcus, G.G. (eds)
Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. (Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 1986) [ISBN 0-5200-57295].
Lionnet, F. Autobiographical Voices: Race,
Gender, Self-Portraiture. (Ithaca, NewYork: Cornell
University Press, 1989) [ISBN 0801-499275].
Marcus, L. Auto/Biographical Discourses.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994)
[ISBN 0-7190-5530-X].
Week 20: None.
Study questions for suggested study syllabus
Week 1:
How does Loomba define the terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism’? How
satisfactory do you find her definitions?
To what extent is postcolonialism dependent upon colonialism and to what extent
independent of it?
What is the relationship between colonialism, knowledge and representation? How
does this help us to understand the nature and functions of postcolonial
representation?
What does the term ‘hybridity’ mean? How useful is it in terms of identifying
postcolonialism?
To what extent can postcolonialism be understood as nationalist in sentiment and
orientation?
What is the role of gender in postcolonialism?
What is the relationship of postcolonialism to postmodernism? To what extent are the
two terms in opposition?
What part does literature play in Loomba’s argument? Should literature be seen as a
‘secondary’ expression of postcolonialism?
Week 2:
Note: These questions are based on Chapters 3–6 of Boehmer, on which you should
concentrate attention.
How does Boehmer connect the emergence of postcolonial literature to the histories
of anti-colonial nationalism?
To what extent can the literature of the ‘settler’ colonies (Canada, Australia, etc.) be
considered as ‘postcolonial’?
What considerations lie behind the choice of genre in anti-colonial and postcolonial
writers?
To what extent can postcolonial literature be understood as ‘subversion by imitation’?
4
Introduction
How important is the debate over language choice in constructing the identity of
postcolonial literature?
Can one usefully distinguish between ‘diasporic’ and ‘Third-World’
(or ‘non-diasporic’) postcolonial literatures?
Compare Loomba and Boehmer’s accounts of ‘mimicry’, ‘hybridity’ and the relations
between postcolonialism and postmodernism. Which do you find more convincing
and why?
Weeks 3–5:
See Chapter 1 below.
Weeks 6–8:
Weeks 9–10:
Note Omeros is a very long poem; it will therefore be counted as sufficient
material for an answer on Section A single author questions, although this does
NOT preclude your using any other Walcott texts, such as his drama (discussed
in Chapter 3), for Section A questions. Alternatively, you can use Omeros when
answering a Section B comparative question, for example in conjunction with
some of the other material considered in Chapter 3 of this guide on Caribbean
poetry. You may well have read Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad for Explorations 1.
If not, you should now read at least The Odyssey, before starting Omeros.
What elements of Homer’s work is Walcott most interested in and what does this tell
us about what is being attempted in Omeros?
To what extent can an Omeros be seen as a quarrel with Homer, and to what extent a
sympathetic ‘re-writing’?
What is the significance of Walcott’s effort as a Caribbean writer to employ the genre
of epic?
Is Omeros better understood as an example of ‘mock-heroic’? If so, why? And, if so,
what does this tell us about Walcott’s attitude to the Caribbean?
What are the functions of the narrative persona of Omeros? How important is the
narrator to the action?
What is the significance of wounds in Omeros? Does the poem offer a redemptive
vision of healing and regeneration?
How does Walcott represent gender in his poem? You may want to think about how
far this differs from Homer’s construction of gender roles and attributes.
How does Walcott represent ‘Home’ in his poem? Again, you may wish to start
thinking about this in relation to how this theme is treated in The Odyssey.
Think about the structure of Walcott’s poem; in particular, think about the means he
uses to keep the reader reading.
Weeks 11–13:
Weeks 14–16:
Weeks 17–19:
To what extent, and in what ways, do fictional forms of postcolonial life-writing differ
from their non-fictional equivalents?
5
To what extent, and in what ways, does women’s postcolonial life-writing differ from
men’s?
What is specifically ‘postcolonial’ about postcolonial life-writing?
To what extent does postcolonial life-writing make its subjects representative of the
communities from which they come?
‘The act of autobiography is at once a discovery, a creation, and an imitation of the
self’ (JAMES OLNEY). To what extent does postcolonial life-writing support this
proposition?
‘Autobiography, in short, transforms empirical facts into artifacts: it is definable as a
form of “prose fiction”’(LOUIS REIZA). Does postcolonial life-writing depend more
than other kinds of life-writing on its claims to truthfulness?
‘It is the hybridity and instability of life-writing which makes it such an appropriate
choice of genre for postcolonial life-writers.’ Discuss.
Week 20:
Go over the work you have done for at least two authors and at least two topics. This
is the minimum amount of preparation you need to do in order to face the exam with
confidence.
Make sure that you can comfortably answer the questions for Weeks 1 and 2 of your
programme of study.
Set yourself some questions from previous years’ examinations and answer these,
strictly observing a one-hour time limit for each answer.
Using this subject guide

This subject guide is not designed as an overview of the whole of the literature of the
postcolonial period. The content of the course of study you construct for yourself will
consist of both the primary texts you choose (these will include novels, poems and
plays) and secondary material such as literary criticism, history, biography and
so on.
This guide does not constitute the syllabus itself, but is an example of how you might
construct an appropriate course of study and of appropriate ways of studying the
material you will choose. It also indicates the range of material that is the minimum
amount necessary for you to face the exam with confidence. Simple regurgitation in
the examination of the illustrative material in this subject guide will be regarded as
plagiarism and heavily penalised. You must adapt such material in ways appropriate
to your own chosen syllabus of study. Examiners will always look unfavourably at
examinations composed of answers that draw solely on the illustrative material
provided in this subject guide.
Each chapter starts with a suggested reading list for the topic(s) covered in that
chapter. It is divided into ‘essential reading’ and ‘recommended reading’. The former
sets out the texts discussed in the chapter. The latter list includes a number of books
and articles that will enhance your knowledge and understanding of the topic.
In every chapter you will come across questions in boxes. These are short exercises to
let you test your progress and help you reflect on what you have just read. You will
make most progress if you attempt to answer each of these questions as you come
across them in the text. You should refer back to the reading and then write your
answers down or discuss them with someone else.
6
Introduction
We include a list of ‘learning outcomes’ at the end of each chapter. Learning

outcomes tell you what you should have learned from that chapter of the subject
guide and the relevant reading. You should pay close attention to the learning
outcomes and use them to check that you have fully understood the topic(s).
You will also find sample examination questions at the end of all the chapters. You
should try planning and writing answers to these questions as part of your study and
revision programme.
General subject reading

None of the following titles on postcolonial literature is compulsory and none
indispensable. Nor is it intended that you should read everything on this list.
However, these items do address a range of important and central issues in
postcolonial studies.
*Ashcroft, B. Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. (Routledge, 1989)
[ISBN 0-415-01209-0]. A useful starting point for an approach to postcolonial
literature which embraces all former colonies.
Bhabha, H.K. The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994)
[ISBN 0-415-05406-0].
Bhabha, H.K. (ed.) Nation and Narration. (London: Routledge, 1990)
[ISBN 0-415-01483-2].
*Boehmer, E. Colonial and Post-colonial Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995) [ISBN 0-1928-92320].
*Brydon, D. and Tiffin, H. Decolonising Fictions. (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993)
[ISBN 1-871049-85-7].
Cronin, R. Imagining India. (London: Macmillan, 1989)
[ISBN 0-333-46705-1].
Dabydeen, D. and Wilson, N.W. A Reader’s Guide to West Indian Literature and
Black British Literature. (London: Hansib, 1988) [ISBN 0-87051-835-7].
Davidson, B. Modern Africa. (Harlow: Longman, 1994) [ISBN 0-582-21288-X].
Donaldson, L. Decolonising Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-building.
(London: Routledge, 1993) [ISBN 0-415-09217-5].
Fraser, R. Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Post-colonial Fiction. (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2000) [ISBN 0-7190-5371-4].
Gates, H.L. Jnr (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986) [ISBN 0-226-28434-4].
Gikandi, S. Reading the African Novel. (London: James Currey, 1987)
[ISBN 0-85255-504-0].
Gilbert, H. and Tompkins, J. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics.
Gurnah, A. (ed.), Essays on African Writing: A Re-evaluation. (London: Heinemann,
1993) [ISBN 0-435-91762-5].
JanMohamed, A. Manichean Aesthetics: The politics of literature in colonial Africa.
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1983) [ISBN 0-87023-395-5]. Includes a
chapter on Achebe.
Kanneh, K. African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Black Literatures.
(London: Routledge, 1998) [ISBN 0-415-16445-1]
King, B. (ed.) West Indian Literature. (London: Macmillan, 1995)
[ISBN 0-333-59463-0].
Kulke, H. and Rothermund, D. A History of India. (London: Routledge, 1986)
[ISBN 0-415-04799-4].
7
Lazarus, N. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Post-colonial World.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) [ISBN 0-521-624932].
*Loomba, A. Colonialism/Post-colonialism. (London: Routledge, 1998)
[ISBN 0-415-12809-9].
Moore, G. Twelve African Writers. (London: Hutchinson, 1980)
[ISBN 0-09-141850-X]. Dated, but still a worthwhile survey.
*Moore-Gilbert, B. Maley, W. and Stanton, G. (eds) Post-colonial Criticism.
(Harlow: Longman, 1997) [ISBN 0-582-23798-X]. A clear and accessible
introduction, with useful selections of postcolonial theory.
*Moore-Gilbert, B. Post-colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics.
(London: Verso, 1997) [ISBN 1-85984-034-5].
Moore-Gilbert, B. (ed.), Writing India 1757–1990. (Manchester: Manchester Univ.
Press, 1996) [ISBN 0-7190-4266-6]. Focusing on a single geographical area, this
book provides examples of analysis of colonial and postcolonial writing. Includes
a chapter on Rushdie.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o Decolonising the Mind. (London: James Currey, 1986)
[ISBN 0-85255-501-6].
Oxford Literary Review Volume 9: ‘Colonialism’. (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1987) [ISBN 0-9511-0801-8]. A useful essay on the postcolonial theorists
themselves. Includes Benita Parry’s timely essay, ‘Problems in current theories of
colonial discourse’.
Pandey, S. and Rao, R. Image of India in the Indian Novel in English 1960–1985.
(Hyderabad: Sangam, 1993) [ISBN0-86311-347-8]. Essays by Indian critics on
Desai, Rushdie, Narayan, etc.
*Said, E. Culture and Imperialism. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)
[ISBN 0-7011-3808-4].
*Said, E. Orientalism. (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1985)
[ISBN 0-14-055198-0]. A profoundly influential analysis of colonial writing that
has itself become a major postcolonial work.
Stone, J. Studies in West Indian Literature: Theatre. (London: Macmillan, 1994)
[ISBN 0-333-60078-9]. Contains a useful bibliography.
*Suleri, S. The Rhetoric of English India. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992) [ISBN 0-226-77982-3]. Includes chapters on Naipaul and Rushdie.
Tiffin, C. and Lawson, A. (eds) De-scribing the Empire.
Walder, D. Post-colonial Literatures in English. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
[0-6311-94924].
*Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory.
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)
[ISBN 0-7450-1491-7]. A large collection of essays, with contributions from all
the major postcolonial theorists.
Wisker, G. Post-colonial and African American Women’s Writing. (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000) [ISBN 0-333-72746-0].
Young, R. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. (London: Routledge,
1990) [ISBN 0-415-05371-4].
You should also look out for series such as Manchester University Press’s
‘Contemporary World Writers’ for volumes on individual writers.
* Especially recommended
8
Introduction
Methods of assessment
You will be assessed by one three-hour examination. The examination will be in two
parts. You will have to answer three questions, including at least one from each
section.
Section A will contain questions on either individual texts or, more usually, individual
authors. In preparing for this section you must study at least two of your chosen
author’s works.
Section B will contain questions inviting comparison between at least two texts by
different authors, in terms of specific themes, forms or critical approaches.
Please note the rubric of the examination appended at the end of this booklet. As well
as instructing you to answer three questions, including at least one from each section,
it says: ‘Candidates may not discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this
examination or any other advanced level unit examination.’
This subject guide will be organised around the structure of the examination paper.
You will find examples of the kinds of questions you can expect in the examination as
you work through the guide and a sample examination paper at the end.
Preparing for the examination
Important: the information and advice given in the following section is based on the
examination structure used at the time this guide was written. However, the University
can alter the format, style or requirements of an examination paper without notice.
Because of this, we strongly advise you to check the instructions on the paper you
actually sit.
The key to successful preparation for the examination is to:
• Know your primary texts thoroughly.
• Be prepared to think flexibly. Don’t attempt to predict examination questions.
Instead be confident and ready to apply your knowledge of primary texts in fresh
ways.
• Study the sample examination questions at the end of each chapter and use the
past examination papers to test yourself in the time allowed. The Examiners’
reports will guide you on how questions have been answered in past years. This
will give you the best idea of what you can expect to encounter at the end of your
study for this unit.
The sample examination paper included at the end of this guide gives you a good idea
of the range of questions you can expect. Remember it is better to go for depth rather
than breadth in the examination.
An essay is not only an attempt to understand but also to convey understanding. It is
this specialised skill which the examination seeks to test. Unfortunately, some
students’ essays fail to adequately convey understanding. This is rarely because the
student fails to grasp the concepts involved. Rather it is due to a failure to make a
complete, well-supported case for whatever he or she is trying to say.
Preparing for the examination, then, starts with the study of the authors, texts and
topics that interest you, followed by close reading and analysis of texts. Then you
must begin to organise the evidence that these analyses provide. Writing sample
answers and essays will not only prepare you for specific topics in the examination,
but will also improve your reading and analytical skills.
A successful essay selects a specific route through a range of possible directions. Start
at the beginning. The introduction is an essential part of the essay. Here, you should
tell the reader how you have interpreted the question and what direction the essay will
9
take. The introduction should contain your analytical response to the question as the
main argument that the essay will present. Look closely and ask yourself: will this
main statement answer the question? The essay, with the thesis statement at its centre,
should not simply express your opinion: it should make a considered and well-
supported argument.
The main body of the essay should then follow on from what you say in your
introduction. Each paragraph must be directly focused on developing what is implicit
in the main statement. You should also use the question as a landmark, referring back
to it at the beginning of each new paragraph to make sure you are following the right
path and actually answering it.
It is important that you also read the Handbook, especially the sections where the
essay techniques are discussed in depth.
Examination technique
If you have followed the instructions offered in the subject guide, read as much of the
suggested syllabus as possible and engaged with the topics under consideration, you
should be well prepared for the examination. However, in order to do justice to
yourself and the subject on the day of examination, it is useful to think about your
examination technique. The section entitled ‘Being Assessed’ in the Handbook will
give you good advice on how to prepare for assessment, so you should read this
carefully. The following suggestions should also be borne in mind as you prepare for
individual examinations:
In the examination hall always read the general examination rubric carefully twice,
and follow the instructions given.
Read the whole paper through before choosing which questions to attempt.
Take time to plan each of your three answers carefully. You may want to plan all three
answers at the outset of the examination when your mind is at its freshest. Half an
hour spent planning your answers is not excessive (10 minutes per question), since
doing so will provide you with the structure and main points you want to make when
you begin writing each answer. It is crucial to have a firm foundation on which to
build your answer, so make sure that you have properly considered the question
before you begin answering it. Remember that you are not being tested on how much
you can write in three hours, but how carefully you can answer the question. This
involves taking time to select your evidence and shape it properly. You will almost
always know more than you need to know in order to answer the question. What is
being tested is your ability to adapt what you know in the most efficient way possible
to answer the question most effectively.
In order to answer questions effectively, it is important to understand what you are
being asked to do, so look at the terms of the question (i.e. to consider, compare,
evaluate, discuss or define) and make sure you do what the question asks you to do.
DO NOT simply regurgitate an essay that you have already written as part of your
earlier preparations for the examination; and DO NOT allow yourself to get side-
tracked onto your own particular areas of interest if these are not relevant to the
question you are asked on the day. You must show that you can adapt material that
you have prepared to answer the question you have been asked on the day.
When writing your answer it is also useful to begin with a brief definition of any key
terms in the question. For example, your understanding of a term like
‘postcolonialism’ should be made explicit, since other people may well have a
different understanding of the term.
10
Introduction
Leave yourself sufficient time to answer all the questions you are asked to complete.
Ideally, all three questions you answer should be given the same time and weight.
Short or incomplete third answers are a sign that the candidate has not properly
managed his/her time and are usually penalised accordingly. If you do run out of time,
write down in note form all the points you would have included in the essay
concerned. (You may be given credit for an outline of an answer which you have not
had time to write in full.)
Proof it! At the end of the examination, read through what you have written,
correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation etc. and checking titles and the names of
authors for inaccuracies. Simple errors or slips can detract even from a good answer.
You will be penalised for inaccuracies of expression, spelling mistakes, etc. so it is
well worth giving yourself 10 minutes at the end of the examination to read through
your paper.
These rules may seem obvious but are essential for good examination performance in
any subject. To further develop and improve your examination technique you should
also read the Examiner’s report from the previous year(s) and consider the following
additional points:
Remember
• Don’t expect bald statements to stand on their own: support your claims with
examples (quotations, for instance) or close reference to the text.
• Don’t pad the essay with unnecessary details or quotations. The fine line between
too much and too little detail can be drawn by considering your audience: this is
usually a tutor or examiner who is most interested in your powers of analysis and
your ability to express yourself in a clear, organised way.
• Don’t include plot summary: you must assume that your readers are very familiar
with the work or works you are discussing.
• If you are using quotations, don’t expect them to stand on their own. Even a short
passage could be interpreted in more than one way. Quotations should be
explained and analysed if you are to maximise their contribution to the essay.
• Don’t be too abstract, vague or speculative: make your argument clearly and
concisely.
The conclusion should be a concise summary of your main thesis, but it must not
simply be repetitive. The conclusion might also be an appropriate place to mention
information that did not directly follow from your main argument but which is related
and of interest to the reader.
11
Notes
12
Chapter 1: Section A author study: Chinua Achebe
Chapter 1
Section A author study: Chinua

Achebe
Essential reading
In this chapter we shall look at two novels by Chinua Achebe written more than 30
years apart. Such a wide separation of time gives a good idea of how Achebe’s views
have developed over his career. You are free to study any other of Achebe’s works,
however, but it is recommended that you apply to them the critical issues raised here.
Bear in mind that the examination requires you to answer in relation to at least two
texts.
Achebe, C. Anthills of the Savannah. (London: Picador, 1987)

[ISBN 0-330-30095-4].
Achebe, C. Things Fall Apart. (London: Heinemann, 1958)
[ISBN 0-435-90001-3].
There is a three-volume edition of Achebe’s novels available, published by Picador
under the title The African Trilogy, which includes Things Fall Apart, No Longer At
Ease and Arrow of God. If you are considering studying Achebe in greater detail, this
book might be a more economical choice.
Recommended reading
Achebe’s essays provide an important political and theoretical framework for his own
fiction. It is strongly recommended that you read as many of them as possible. There
are an increasing number of critical studies devoted to his work, and you will also
find a great deal of useful material on him in wider studies of African writing, as well
as on postcolonial literature in general.
*Achebe, C. Hopes and Impediments. (London: Heinemann, 1988)

[ISBN 0-435-91001-9].
Achebe, C. Morning Yet On Creation Day. (London: Heinemann, 1975)
[ISBN 0-435-18026-6].
Gikandi, S. Reading Chinua Achebe. (London: James Currey, 1991)
[ISBN 085255-527-].
*Innes, C.L. Chinua Achebe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
[ISBN 0-521-42897-1].
*Ngugi wa Thiong’o Decolonising the Mind. (London: James Currey, 1986)
[ISBN 0-85255-501-6]. An important set of essays exploring the political
implications of African writers using Western literary form and language.
Ohaeto, E. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1997)
[ISBN 0-25-3333-423].
Yousaf, N. Chinua Achebe. (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998)
[ISBN 0-746-30885X].
13
Introduction
In this chapter, we shall consider two novels by Chinua Achebe. His seminal first
novel, Things Fall Apart, appeared in 1958 just prior to Nigerian independence. It is
significant that, rather than address the contemporary issues which concerned Nigeria
at the end of British rule, he should look back to a period in the previous century
when the colonial powers were about to dominate. We shall consider why this should
be the case in the light of Achebe’s theory of the novel, which argued that the African
novel in English needed to redress the colonial novel’s marginalisation of the African
voice. His most recent novel, Anthills of the Savannah, surveys Nigerian society
nearly 30 years after independence. Through this novel, we shall discuss how modern
African literature has dealt with the problems of society after decolonisation. The
distance in time between the two works will also raise questions about how the
author’s views of postcolonial life have developed, as well as the extent to which his
narrative technique and views on the role of the novel have changed.
At this stage it will be useful to read some of Achebe’s non-fiction, such as ‘Africa
and her Writers’, in Morning Yet on Creation Day, and ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, in
Hopes and Impediments. (It might be useful to complement this with Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Decolonising the Mind, for
example.) As you read the essays, think about how some of the cultural and political
issues raised in such essays are reflected in Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the
Savannah.
Reclaiming the past

African writers such as Achebe have consistently taken issue with the representation
of Africa in European history and art. They cite the work of European authors and
thinkers, from David Hume and Georg Hegel to Daniel Defoe and Joyce Cary, as
exemplifying a European tradition of writing on Africa where the African voice has
been marginalised, derided or denied. One of their primary concerns is the revision of
the colonial version of Africa’s history. In the colonial version, colonialism is a
beneficial and ultimately benevolent system in a continent that is innately violent and
anarchic, and trapped in a timeless and unchanging barbarism. Thus Chinua Achebe’s
essays provide a theoretical background to his concerns as a novelist:
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no
more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one
long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf
delivered them.
The need to refute this idea lies at the heart of Things Fall Apart (hereafter referred to
as TFA), and is clearly addressed in its deeply ironic concluding paragraph. There, the
English District Commissioner in Umuofia, the man responsible for administering the
new colony, expresses his belief that ‘he had toiled to bring civilisation to different
parts of Africa’ for many years, and yet he is completely unaware that any civilisation
already existed. He brings his European notions of Africa with him, of course. As a
political officer, and as an amateur anthropologist, a student of ‘primitive’ customs
who is writing a book on the subject, he can only see the surface of African life.
Achebe, of course, intends TFA to redress this view and to provide a more substantial
image of pre-colonial Africa.
Collect examples of how Achebe suggests the existence of a civilisation that existed
prior to the advent of the British. Do they convincingly argue for a positive African
version of the past? Can we argue that Achebe has simply idealised the past?
14
The final irony of the novel is an appropriately literary one, about reading and
misreading, which nevertheless serves as a rejoinder to how Europe has constructed
Africa. The District Commissioner walks away from Okonkwo’s hanging body
musing on the new material that the latter’s murder of the messenger and subsequent
suicide would provide. It:
would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him.
Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph at any rate. There was so
much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already
chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Tribes of the
Lower Niger.
The District Commissioner’s book represents the historical English writing of Africa
as the ‘Dark Continent’ and thus, given Achebe’s intention to challenge this image, an
ironic alternative text to TFA itself. In view of the novel as a whole, the irony that
governs the District Commissioner’s view of Okonkwo’s story being only worth a
paragraph stands out. Achebe’s careful building up of Okonkwo as a man of tragic
stature throughout the novel is not undermined by the conclusion, but instead throws
the emphasis of his critique against the attitude of the District Commissioner and his
representative Eurocentric notions of African culture and society. The District
Commissioner profoundly misreads the meaning of Okonkwo’s death. His need to
record his own misinterpretation, as a text that will explain Africa to a European
audience, creates a structural counterpoint in the novel. The tradition of
anthropological, political and literary writing on Africa from Europe is relocated in
juxtaposition with postcolonial African writing, and is seen to be no longer a ‘master’
discourse over one that can merely mimic. What we must now consider is the way in
which the novel privileges an African view of character and society.
In studying this topic, the importance of a literary, geographical and historical

knowledge of European empire, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century,
cannot be emphasised enough. You should be willing to use other texts,
encyclopedias and colonial literature (i.e. by authors such as Defoe, Kipling, and
Conrad), for example, to try to obtain an overview of the subject. In particular, look
at that period in the late nineteenth century known as ‘the scramble for Africa’, when
the continent was almost completely taken over by competing European empires.
Literary realism and the postcolonial novel

At the heart of the novel is a representation of a society that has both strengths and
weaknesses, but one that nevertheless functions within its own cultural, religious,
political and legal structures. People are shown carrying out the business of everyday
life, and to this extent the novel presents the European reader with a subtle message
about Africa. We witness an Ibo village of the late nineteenth century that might seem
surprisingly recognisable if compared to the England we see in a nineteenth-century
realist novel such as Jane Austen’s, for example. There is the business of arranging
marriages, of negotiating with the competing interests of individuals and, ultimately,
the functioning of a whole society is viewed microcosmically through the workings of
a family. As such, the novel does not present us with an Africa of the exotic and the
threatening; it is not a backdrop for Europe’s own psychological and existential
anxieties, as is so often the case in the colonial novel. Even more familiar is the main
character, Okonkwo, the poor boy made good, whose need continually to prove
himself sets him in conflict with the conventions of the wider community. You may
wish to compare this aspect of the novel with Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, for
15
example. Thus, a classic European concern with how the individual asserts his own
identity, and is often crushed by the constraints placed upon him by his society, might
appear to be a central interest of the novel.
Is TFA simply an example of the classic European realist novel transplanted to an

African village? If not, in what ways does it challenge the conventions of such
narratives?
Okonkwo’s fundamental motivation is his unwillingness to be labelled an agbala,

which means ‘a man without title’ as well as ‘woman’. Agbala is what Okonkwo’s
father, Unoka, was called and Okonkwo, of course, seeks to escape from the
possibility that such a reputation may be attached to him, or, importantly, that such a
failing may be inherited. For at the start of the novel he believes that the individual
can transcend his familial and social restrictions, and thus he finds attractive the Ibo
proverb that ‘when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very
strongly’. From this comes Okonkwo’s energy and ambition and yet, ultimately, his
weakness and destruction. What he disdained in his father, and subsequently in all
others (see the opening paragraph of Chapter 4, for example), is not only failure, but
also those qualities associated with ‘unmanliness’ that are given positive value by
Achebe within the novel, namely the feminine and the artistic, through which the
tribe’s culture survives. An essential aspect of Unoka’s unmanliness, for example, is
his delight in playing music, rather than discussing an impending war.
Collect other examples of the tension between the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in
the novel. How do they support or refute the argument outlined above?
Clearly for Achebe, as artist and writer, the word is a vital instrument of a society’s
strength, of its sense of itself. It is the women who pass on stories about the
environment in which the tribe exists, and its mythological origins. It is no accident
that Agbala is also the name of the Oracle, where the word becomes sacrosanct:
The priestess suddenly screamed. ‘Beware, Okonkwo!’ she warned. ‘Beware of
exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!’
In this society, then, the feminine has a legitimate spiritual and cultural position, and it
is this that Okonkwo cannot acknowledge.
Is it possible to reconcile what appears to be the paradox that Achebe’s challenge to

the Europeans’ possession of the word, of literary culture, is written in the coloniser’s
language? Does this undermine his assertion of an indigenous cultural life against
that of the colonial powers? Because of this, to what extent do they remain in a
colonial relationship with the Centre and thus, at a profound level, unliberated from
empire?
The role of the individual in Things Fall Apart

Okonkwo’s fear of appearing weak consistently pushes him to act in ways that
contravene the clan’s own laws and customs. When he beats his wife during the
sacred Week of Peace, for example, the priest tells him that:
‘the evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have
insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish.’
There is a counterbalancing proverb to the earlier one we have mentioned which his
neighbours use of him:
They called him the little bird nza who so forgot himself after a heavy meal that he
challenged his chi.
16
The individual may be able to alter his own destiny, but must be careful not to allow
that to threaten the interests of his community. Okonkwo is an example of an
individual going further than his society demands of him, an issue of vital importance
for African cultural and political thought. Thus, despite his being told not to take part
in the death of his surrogate son, Ikemefuna, when the tribe decides he must be
sacrificed, Okonkwo nevertheless cuts him down with his machete. ‘He was afraid of
being thought weak,’ the narrative informs us.
Consider how Okonkwo’s suspicion of his son’s masculinity is alleviated when

Ikemefuna joins the household. If neither Okonkwo’s excessive masculinity or his
father’s excessive laziness are seen as desirable paths for the tribe to follow, then
does Ikemefuna, a peace offering from a defeated tribe, possess that balance of the
masculine and the feminine that is lacking in Umuofia? He has an ‘endless stock of
folk tales’, can hunt animals, carve flutes, and embodies, perhaps, a potential
alternative for the tribe’s future. Can we read the death of Ikemefuna as symbolic for
the future of the tribe?
Achebe seems to be identifying a sterility, a stasis in the tribe’s more rigid laws that
leads to its downfall. The society that dictates that twins, as aberrations, must be
killed and mutilated, and that Ikemefuna be sacrificed, is not balanced sufficiently by
the necessary values of the feminine.
Examine Nwoye’s reaction on his father’s return at the end of Chapter Seven:
‘Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way
inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow.’
In what ways does Achebe dramatise the clash of values between the masculine and
the feminine, and their effect on the tribe, through Okonkwo’s difficult relationship
with his son? Does Okonkwo’s act herald the collapse of the clan’s autonomy at the
end of the novel?
The ultimate result of this is Nwoye’s rejection of his father, and his baptism into the
missionaries’ church. Built into this conflict, then, is what Achebe sees as a
fundamental weakness in the tribe, and this allows the missionaries to gain a foothold
in Ibo society as a competing system of values:
It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated [Nwoye]. It was the poetry of
the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in
darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted
his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of
Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his
parched soul.
As we have suggested, then, Achebe identifies what he sees as fundamental problems
within the Ibo society, and these are dramatised in Okonkwo. It is he who attempts
the last, futile, warlike gesture against the new dispensation by killing the District
Commissioner’s messenger. For him, what is happening to the tribe:
was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and
falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so
unaccountably become soft like women.
Okonkwo acts beyond the demands of the community through an extreme
identification with the tribe’s destiny. He is unable to understand the real importance
of the Ibo proverb that he quotes, and which recommends the need for adaptability:
17
Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: ‘Men have
learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching
on a twig.’
Achebe’s narrative voice is deceptively simple. The narrative perspective is that of
one of the tribe, and the world of the novel is contained within the perceptual borders
of Umuofia. In what ways is this a strategy for excluding the reader from its narrative
field? Is it designed to make the European reader specifically aware of the limitations
2
See Chapter 9. of his/her knowledge? What is the reader to make of Ezinma’s buried iyi-uwa2 or the
3
See Chapter 18. death of Okoli?3 Achebe offers no super narrating knowledge which may explain the
tribe’s belief via a scientific, Western rationalism, and we are invited to understand
4
An important essay to read in these events on their own terms.4 Are we expected to learn the meaning of the several
this context is ‘The Truth of non-English words included in the text, and thus to participate in a specifically non-
Fiction’ in Hopes and
Impediments. European conception of the world (i.e. where there is no simple translation)?
We are aware that the individual lives in the political and social world of his
community, even when he thinks he is somehow able to step outside it or control it.
Ultimately, perhaps, we might suggest that this is not a novel which celebrates
individualism, or the existential dilemmas of the outsider at all. Okonkwo’s suicide is
not that of the existential hero; rather, it represents his ultimate transgression of the
tribe’s strict moral code. Okonkwo’s status in the novel is complex; he may symbolise
the tragic destruction of the old order, but he also symbolises what was wrong with
that old order.
Part of the problem with the idea of ‘realism’ is the assumption that the literary text
is a window through which the reader sees some objectively existing ‘real’ world. It
is worth asking yourself how far Achebe draws us into such a complicit reading of
his Ibo village. Is Achebe presenting us with a competing claim for the reality of
Africa’s past that challenges the European one? Does it draw our attention to the idea
that all versions of the past are subjective and party to the ideological conditions of
the time? We should not lose sight of the fact that Achebe’s is a past constructed
through literature, and not some objectively portrayed ‘real’ past, just as European
representations of Africa as a ‘heart of darkness’ are ‘literary’ strategies for rendering
it available to a Western audience.
Reclaiming traditional narrative modes

One of Achebe’s main techniques for conveying the life of the old Ibo world is
through the use of proverbs and traditional stories. Proverbs, we are told, are ‘the
palm-oil with which words are eaten’. Again, they tie the speaker to a world beyond
the utterance of the individual, to a formalised discourse shared by, and inherited
from, the community. Similarly, the main story that we hear, Ekwefi’s tale of why the
tortoise’s shell is not smooth, which stands at the centre of the novel, comments on
the society as a whole. It presents us with an image of the danger in the aggressive
self-interest of the individual over the community, for which the individual is
punished. The tortoise’s shell is smashed to pieces when he falls from the sky.
Significantly, it is reconstructed by a great medicine man. This traditional figure, a
possessor of ancient knowledge, forges a partial cohesion out of fragmentation,
although once a thing has fallen apart it can never be the same again. Achebe, in TFA,
tries to reconstruct the shattered past of Africa, but not by presenting it as a lost Eden.
The past cannot be simply put back together, just as the tortoise’s shell cannot be
smooth again. The novel is a warning not to idealise the past and seek to recreate it
exactly as it used to be, just as it is a demand that Africa’s past should not be written
18
and controlled by the Europeans. Essentially, though, Achebe employs ways of

communicating this which have their foundation in alternative modes of discourse to
that of the classic European novel.
Collect other examples of proverbs and stories. What purpose do they serve within
the larger aims of the novel? Might we argue that a society, which is too dependent
on the traditional wisdom that comes in proverbs, is one that is conservative, and thus
unable to withstand new forces? Achebe is seeking to address one of the fundamental
questions that has exercised African historians: how did the European nation states
manage to dominate an entire continent in such a short amount of time? Can
everything be blamed on imperialism, or does the novel suggest that African society
must also examine its own failures?
The Europeans bring their religion, their guns and administration, and their trade, but
even before their appearance in the novel, there are images of things falling apart.
Indeed, rather than the novel privileging the presence of the Europeans as the most
important event in the history of the continent, they come at the culmination of
something that had already happened in Africa. To this extent, they are disruptive and
destructive, but not paramount: they represent catalysts that will change Africa, but
not a superior culture that is destined to rule forever. It is in this sense that Achebe
draws out the full ironic potential of using Yeats’s apocalyptic poem for his title. Yeats
looks ahead to the end of the Christian era, but for Achebe the Christian world signals
the destruction of the non-Christian, African world. As suggested, Achebe is not
simplistic about the role of Christianity in Africa. But instead of the European writer’s
vague, apocalyptic, cultural uneasiness, the concept of ‘things falling apart’, when it is
located in the colonial era, has as its mainspring the actual, historical disintegration of
centuries of African culture.
Politics, literature and modern Africa

TFA is balanced between a sense of tragedy at the destruction of past tradition and the
old world, and the acceptance that its harsher elements and its brittleness made it
susceptible to historical changes from outside. Anthills of the Savanah (hereafter
referred to as AS), though focused on a very different period in Africa’s history,
contemplates the tension between a visionary need to rediscover a traditional view of
story and society, and the empirical fact of the African nation state as it has become
since decolonisation, a place of military dictatorship and civil war. In the modern era,
this expresses itself in fundamental questions about postcolonial identity, in relation to
both society and the individual.
Is the postcolonial experience irretrievably ‘inauthentic’, a ‘mimicry’ of the Western

world, which continues to exert a powerful influence over its former subjects both
culturally and economically? Or can postcolonial societies find a non-European
political and cultural path of their own?
TFA sought to offer that alternative view of Africa’s past, that it had an autonomous
cultural tradition, at the beginning of African independence. Thirty years on, however,
AS focuses on a nation struggling to achieve a coherent sense of its own identity.
Where does the African state look to for models of political and cultural discourse on
which to base its own practice?
At this point you may wish to research the modern African political situation. How
many current African governments are military dictatorships, and how many wars
have there been in Africa since the withdrawal of the colonial powers? What
explanations have been suggested for this? Consult encyclopedias and history books,
such as Basil Davidson’s Modern Africa, for example.
19
Clearly, the ruling elite in ‘Kangan’, a representative West African state – the
President/Dictator, his Cabinet, the intelligentsia – find it difficult to locate the
necessary examples in their own society. All of its members have been educated in
England. The President is a graduate of Sandhurst:
he was fascinated by the customs of the English, especially their well-to-do classes
and enjoyed playing at their foibles.
It is left to an English character to voice the most strident criticism of the:
dusky imitators of petit bourgeois Europe corrupted at Sandhurst and London School
of Economics…why are all you fellows so bent on turning this sunshine paradise into
bleak Little England?
Despite this, the British parliamentary model has not been successfully imposed on
the postcolonial African state (perhaps because democracy, though fought for so
tenaciously at home, was never part of the imperial way of rule). The novel begins
after one coup d’état, and ends with another. There are political murders and the
constant fear of arbitrary arrest. If the society of TFA at the end of the nineteenth
century was lacking the necessary coherence to withstand colonial incursion, the
society of AS is dangerously fragmented and unstable. We see again the
marginalisation of the feminine as well as, now, the marginalisation of dispossessed
lower classes and of certain regions in the nation. As one of the main characters, the
journalist and poet, Ikem Osodi, notes of the elite:
the very words the white master had said in his time about the black race as a
whole…[we now] say them about the poor.
Caught up in this irony is a profound disillusionment with the results of
independence, and a perception that those who have inherited power have become
remarkably like the old colonial masters.
Is the postcolonial novel relentlessly pessimistic about the condition of contemporary
Africa, wherever the blame might be laid? If we return to a novel such as TFA, can
we argue that the past offers a less complicated area for the postcolonial writer than
the perceived failures of independence? Or can Achebe’s work be seen as part of a
larger questioning about African society and its history?
Achebe’s discussion of neo-colonialism in

Anthills of the Savannah
The criticism of neo-colonialism as the reason for the problems of modern Africa are
taken up more radically by writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (see his novel, Devil
on the Cross, for example). And yet AS delivers a rebuke of sorts to those who offer
pat answers. At a lecture to university students, Osodi cites examples of public fraud,
theft, and corruption:
To blame all these things on imperialism and international capitalism as our modish
radicals want us to do is…sheer cant and humbug…it is like going out to arrest the
village blacksmith every time a man hacks his fellow to death.
On the other hand, though, imperialism is also shown to be the ‘village blacksmith’,
which created the means for such alienation and deracination within the society and
its people. With the old social structures, so carefully delineated in TFA, shattered,
colonial withdrawal has meant that it is a lottery as to who takes power and who
sinks:
20
in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of postcolonial African

societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quite
easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the
people and the other a nightman carrying the people’s shit in buckets on his head.
An important function of the novel, then, is to engage various characters in a dialogic
examination of modern Africa. Achebe overcomes the problem of narrative
omniscience, or giving definitive overviews, through employing a narrative form that
is multivocal and dialogic and, despite an apparent use of the realist mode, tends to
the mythic and non-realist.
There are three narrators, from whom Achebe draws out a variety of responses to the
state of the nation. What is the purpose of displacing the single narrative voice? Can
we theorise about its function in the postcolonial text? For example, is it an aspect of
Achebe’s refusal to portray the postcolonial state as culturally or politically unified?
The novel traces the ‘real’ education of two of the narrators, Chris Oriko, a politician,
and Ikem Osodi, from the detachment of the Westernised intellectual to a greater
commitment – ultimately at the expense of their lives – to something more inclusively
African. Early on we hear how Osodi, a crusading journalist, attends a public
execution. He is more distressed, though, by the crowd than the spectacle. What he
feels there is his profound separation, a revulsion almost, from the ordinary mass of
people:
my tenuous links with that crowd seemed to snap totally at that point. I knew then
that if its own mother was at that moment held up by her legs and torn down the
middle like a piece of old rag that crowd would have yelled with eye-watering
laughter.
A little further on, he unwittingly gives another image of himself intellectually and
physically cut off from the market traders he wishes to celebrate:
I never pass up a chance of just sitting in my car, reading or pretending to read,
surrounded by the vitality and thrill of these dramatic people.
As the novel progresses, though, Osodi’s political awareness develops. In what way is
he changed by, for example, his meeting with the elders from the troubled region of
Abazon? He learns from them the story of the tortoise and the leopard, which he
develops into the theme of his speech to the students (see Chapter 12), but to what
extent are the discourses of the old world seen to be irrelevant to the situation of
contemporary Africa?
Osodi is led to contemplate how he can be part of a wider community, and Achebe
gives him one of the most important perceptions into the problems of the state:
The prime failure of this government began also to take on a clearer meaning for
him. It can’t be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly
intolerable; it isn’t the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it
isn’t even this second-class, hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is
it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students and
the destruction and banning thereafter of independent unions and co-operatives. It is
the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and
dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of
the nation’s being.
Consider the ways in which the ‘education’ away from detachment of the other main
male character, Chris Oriko, develops through the novel. What is the role of the taxi
driver, for example? What is Achebe suggesting about the role of the intellectual in
postcolonial societies?
21
Representations of the feminine

The third narrator is Beatrice Okoh, who allows Achebe to bring his ideas about
African society and the rejection of the feminine into the present time. It is because of
this that Ikem Osodi is criticised:
the way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society
gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough…It is
not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a
damn sight too far and too late!
How satisfactory do you find Achebe’s female characters? Are they generally as
individuated as his male characters, despite their importance for him in his critique of
African society?
Beatrice Okoh is Achebe’s most fully developed female character, and yet her role is
not just as an example of a modern, well-educated African woman, but also one who
is a mythical incarnation in whom the future hopes of the nation are reflected. She
tells us that she has:
taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic
history as I could lay my hands on.
Again, Achebe moves away from the straightforwardly ‘realist’ approach, towards a
mythic one.
Examine the opening section of Chapter Eight. What is Achebe trying to suggest by
the use of the mythic element here? What is the function of ‘Idemili’ in the novel?
The issue at stake once again is how the African novelist in English finds a means of
articulating his or her concerns about Africa. In TFA we saw the novel collapse into
despair. AS, on the other hand, leaves us with guarded optimism.
Does the mythic, allusive element of the novel allow Achebe to transcend the
immediate problems of contemporary African society, or is it unfounded in view of
what the novel has described?
Clearly, the two titles are important for suggesting how Achebe’s response to his
society had altered over his career. The phrase ‘anthills of the savannah’ specifically
points to a future where the anthills survive ‘to tell the new grass of the savannah
about last year’s brush fires’. This is also a function of Achebe’s novel. His narrators
are all writers to some degree, and Ikem Osodi declares:
storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten
usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit – in state, in church or mosque,
in party congress, in the university or wherever.
22
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having read at least two works by Chinua Achebe and
some of the recommended secondary reading, you should be able to:
• consider at least two of Achebe’s novels in detail in terms of both form and
theme
• discuss the ways in which Achebe writes about the individual in relation to the
political
• have some sense of how Achebe’s work engages with the traditional colonial
novel
• decide on the appropriate amount of primary material which you need in order to
prepare for the examination with confidence.
Sample examination questions

Please note that in the examination you cannot necessarily expect a direct question on
Achebe. The following questions are intended to help you write practice essays. All
answers must refer to at least two different texts.
1. Examine the relation between the individual and the community and/or family in
at least two works by Achebe.
2. Explore the role of myth and/or traditional story-telling in Achebe’s work.
3. In what ways does Achebe’s work challenge European representations of Africa?
4. ‘The church had come and led many astray.’ (Things Fall Apart) Discuss the
treatment of religion in at least two texts by Achebe.
Suggestions for further/alternative study

You may wish to develop the debate over ‘realism’ and narrative form in Achebe’s
novels. Influential critics such as Nadine Gordimer, in The Black Interpreters, and
Abdul JanMohamed, in Manichean Aesthetics, have argued that realism is the only
form which the African novelists are comfortably able to employ, because their novels
are largely concerned with the political and social problems associated with their
experience of colonialism.
When Achebe seeks to recuperate the African voice as central to an understanding of
the past, does he claim for it a historical, ‘critical realist’ accuracy, or does it involve
him in a more complex narrative approach, one that takes his work into the mythic
and the dialogic, and which challenges the potentially conservative implications of the
classical realist Western novel?
It might be productive to consider Achebe’s novels in relation to the English literary
canon.
Compare the view of Africa – its people, environment, traditions – in TFA, for
example, to that presented in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Joyce Cary’s Mister
Johnson. A useful general introduction to this issue is provided in the Group B subject
guide, Empire and Literature.
Consider whether the aesthetic issues – narrative voice, form, etc. – in postcolonial
literature are themselves political. It is certainly worth reading Achebe’s essay on
Heart of Darkness in Hopes and Impediments. Is this a valid critique of Conrad’s
novel?
23
You might also broaden your approach by comparing Achebe’s work with that of
another African writer, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or Ayi Kwei Armah.
To what extent do their literary and political visions of postcolonial society differ, or
does the experience of colonialism raise similar responses from them? Compare TFA
with Ngugi’s The River Between or Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons, for example –
all novels which look back into the African past.
You may want to concentrate on Achebe’s other novels.
Do they, taken as a whole, constitute an ‘epic’ survey of the Ibo people from pre-
colonial culture to the problems of a postcolonial society? Is this tendency towards
‘epic’ a ‘typical’ ambition of the postcolonial writer? Can you suggest any reasons for
this? (We shall discuss this further in the next section.) And what of the concern for
the relationship between the individual and the community? Does Achebe consistently
confront the Western concept of individualism, or do his later novels reflect the
inevitable success of this, as traditional values recede into the past?
If we read them as political novels about modern Africa, do they confirm or challenge
stereotypical Western views about Africa? Is Achebe seeking to create a compensating
myth for the image of Africa as a place of chaos and anarchy?
24
Chapter 2: Section A author study: Hanif Kureishi
Chapter 2
Section A author study:

Hanif Kureishi
Essential reading
In this chapter, we will be focusing on Kureishi’s novels as examples of postcolonial
writing. Since he has only published two novels (and two novellas) at the present
time, and you must answer on at least two texts for a Section A author study, you will
have less choice than is the case if you were to choose a more established
postcolonial author like Naipaul or Achebe.
Kureishi, H. The Black Album. (London: Faber, 1995) [ISBN 0-571-177522].

Kureishi, H. The Buddha of Suburbia. (London: Faber, 1990)
[ISBN 0-571-14257-5].
Remember that there is no reason, if you so wish, why you can’t combine one of the
novels with one of Kureishi’s longer plays, or his collections of short stories. Even if
you decide to write only on Kureishi’s plays, or confine yourself to the plays and
short stories, you should still be able to adapt the following material in profitable
ways. If you are interested in Kureishi’s short stories or plays, you will need:
Kureishi, H. Outskirts and Other Plays. (London: Faber, 1992)

[ISBN 0-571-16307-6].
Kureishi, H. Love in a Blue Time. (London: Faber, 1997) [ISBN 0-571-17739-5].
Recommended reading
Kaleta, Kenneth Hanif Kureishi: Post-colonial Storyteller. (Austin, Texas: University
of Texas Press, 1998) [ISBN 0-292-74333-5].
Moore-Gilbert, Bart Hanif Kureishi. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001) [ISBN 0-7190-5535-0].
It might also be profitable to read Kureishi in the context of some of the recent
postcolonial criticism listed in the ‘general subject reading’ for this subject guide as a
whole. In particular, we recommend that you read Ashcroft et al.’s The Empire Writes
Back and Said’s Culture and Imperialism, especially the Introduction and Chapter 3.
As you read this material, try to work out how far Kureishi’s fiction corresponds to
the various models of (postcolonial) inter-cultural relations between centre and
‘periphery’ that are discussed in these texts. In this context, remember that, because
Kureishi was born in Britain, of a British mother, he is likely to have somewhat
different concerns and perspectives from either postcolonial writers who are nationals
of (de)colonised countries of the ‘Third World’ and have largely remained in their
cultures of origin, or postcolonial writers like Rushdie who were born in the (former)
empire but who have since migrated to and settled in metropolitan countries like
Britain. This means that the work of Kureishi – and metropolitan-born writers like
him – may require some modification of certain established definitions of the
postcolonial.
25
Introduction
Hanif Kureishi, who has worked in a number of different genres, is one of the most
talented and interesting of the current generation of young British writers. Born of a
mixed British and Pakistani marriage in Bromley, just south of London, in 1954, his
career was first launched at the beginning of the 1980s as a playwright – Borderline
and Outskirts (both 1981) and Birds of Passage (1983) being the most highly
regarded of his dramas. In the mid-1980s, Kureishi moved into film, the Oscar-
nominated My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) and the highly controversial Sammy and
Rosie Get Laid (1987) being his best-known work in this genre. In 1990, Kureishi
published his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, which he subsequently adapted
into a successful four-part BBC series (if you are able to get hold of this on video,
you are strongly advised to watch it). His second novel, The Black Album, followed in
1995. Since then, Kureishi has produced another film, My Son the Fanatic (1997),
two collections of short stories, Love in a Blue Time (1997) and Midnight all Day
(1999), and two novellas, Intimacy (1998) and Gabriel’s Gift (2001). Kureishi’s
uncompromising vision of inter-cultural relations in contemporary London, as well as
his interests in sexuality and popular culture – especially pop music – have ensured
him a wide audience and a growing reputation.
Kureishi’s themes
The major theme of Kureishi’s writing, so far as his identity as a postcolonial writer is
concerned, involves his representation of the predicament of communities of non-
western origin which have migrated to the West. Very little of Kureishi’s work is set
outside the West and neither the histories of empire nor the current predicaments of
Third World countries like Pakistan preoccupy either of the two novels we will be
discussing to anything like the same extent as a text like Rushdie’s Shame.
As you read The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, identify the references
made to colonial history and the current state of the Third World. What is Kureishi’s
attitude to these two themes?
In earlier postcolonial writing, the migrant to the Western metropolis is often
represented as a victim of the West’s endemic racism. How significant a problem is
racism in Kureishi’s fiction? What other disadvantages do the ethnic minorities in
Kureishi’s fiction face? Do British-born members of these minorities experience the
same disadvantages, and to the same degree, as first-generation migrants? Compare
the experience of Changez and Karim in The Buddha, for example. To what extent,
and how convincingly, does Kureishi challenge the stereotype of the Asian migrant as
helpless victim?
One of the most interesting aspects of Kureishi’s treatment of migrant experience is

his analysis of anti-racist movements in Britain. These are of two kinds. The first
includes white liberals and radicals who seek to intervene on behalf of the
marginalised.
Make a list of such figures in each text. What different kinds of white anti-racist
attitudes and activities are present in each text? To what degree is Kureishi critical of,
or satirical about, white anti-racism? To what extent does Kureishi suggest that such
anti-racism in fact unconsciously reinforces certain aspects of the racism which it is
attempting to fight?
The second kind of anti-racism derives from the migrant communities themselves.
Consider the political organisations represented by Jamila in The Buddha and by Riaz
and his friends in The Black Album. Is Kureishi drawing a clear distinction between
such forms of activism? To what extent is Kureishi approving of, or critical of, each
26
kind of movement? You need to pay very careful attention to the way that Riaz and
his friends are represented in The Black Album in this context and respect the
nuances in his treatment of ‘fundamentalism’. In order to avoid simplifications, think
carefully about what is represented in positive terms in the context of Riaz’s group.
What is it that attracts an educated, British-born character like Shahid to the group?
At what point, and why, does Shahid become alienated from his former friends?
You should also take note of Kureishi’s interest in other kinds of marginalised groups
and other sorts of resistant behaviour. For Kureishi, sexuality, gender and class are all
important as sites where oppression is both experienced and resisted.
Do you feel that in Kureishi’s work ethnicity is the ‘privileged’ site of

oppression/resistance? To what extent does Kureishi’s fiction suggest that alliances
between different kinds of oppressed groups are possible? Or are their interests and
objectives not necessarily compatible? Think carefully about the representation of
class, gender and ‘deviant’ sexuality. How consistent is Kureishi’s treatment of such
issues? For example, think about the role of women in Kureishi’s texts. To what
extent are these stereotypical and to what extent does Kurieshi challenge the
patriarchy of various (sub-)cultures? How carefully does one need to distinguish
between Kureishi’s attitudes and those of his narrators/protagonists?
Kureishi and colonial discourse

One common characteristic of postcolonial discourse is its engagement with colonial
discourse. In many recent critical accounts, postcolonial literature is defined primarily
as a contestation of the representation of colonial peoples in writers like Kipling,
Conrad and Haggard and of many of the assumptions, political, philosophical and
formal, which underpin such work. For example, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958)
is, on one level, a determined attempt to correct the distortions about African peoples,
especially their supposed savagery, lack of history and lack of culture, which are
5
For more on this topic, see frequently found in certain kinds of metropolitan representations of the continent from
Chapter 1 of this subject guide. the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.5 One of the most striking attacks on
metropolitan literature of imperialism is provided by the Kenyan novelist Ngugi who
argues thus:
Cultural imperialism was then part and parcel of the thorough system of economic
exploitation and political oppression of the colonised peoples and [Western] literature
was an integral part of that system of oppression and genocide.
6
If you have already studied Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Buddha engages with the work of Rudyard
Empire and literature as an Kipling in some detail.6 The most obvious and direct engagement with Kipling’s work
advanced level examination, or if
you buy the guide for this comes in the context of Pyke’s adaptation of The Jungle Book.
subject, you will find a chapter
on the work of Kipling which you Consider the reaction of Jamila and Haroon after the play’s first night. What are their
are strongly recommended to
read. objections? Does Karim, or the novel as a whole, endorse their criticisms? Is it
Kipling or Pyke’s adaptation which should be criticised? Think about the demands
that Pyke makes on Karim in his role as Mowgli. Consider also the power relations
between director and Karim as ethnic minority actor more generally, both in Pyke’s
play and in Shadwell’s. To what extent are these relations an allegory of neo-colonial
power relations?
Although it is never an explicit presence, it could nonetheless be argued that Kipling’s

masterpiece Kim plays a more important role in The Buddha than The Jungle Book. If
you have not already done so, it would be a great advantage to you to read this text. It
will be useful for discussion of other postcolonial writers whom you may choose to
study for this subject. Note the verbal echo between the names of the chief
27
protagonists of each text, Kim and K[ar]im. Note that both protagonists perform the
role of servant/guide to spiritual authorities, the Buddhist Lama and Haroon, ‘the
Buddha of Suburbia’, respectively. Karim’s relentless renewals of his wardrobe
remind one of Kim’s frequent changes of clothes/disguises.
What other parallels can you detect between Kim and The Buddha of Suburbia? To
what extent is Kureishi providing a parody, or pastiche, of aspects of Kipling’s work?
To what extent is Kureishi appropriating colonialist stereotypes about the subject
peoples? To what extent is he challenging the political or ideological vision in
colonial discourse?
Perhaps the most important parallel between the novels is that each is exploring the
predicament of a protagonist who is ‘in-between’ cultures and unsure where his
loyalties really lie. Each novel belongs to the genre of Bildungsroman, which is
devoted to describing the transition to maturity and adulthood of its protagonists. For
both Kim and Karim, the chief problem faced in this transition to maturity involves
their complex negotiations between their ‘culture of origin’ and the ‘host culture’ in
which they find themselves.
Consider the alternatives Karim is offered in terms of his cultural identity, especially
by his mother’s family, Uncle Anwar’s family, Charlie Hero and Jamila respectively.
Consider the ending of the novel. To what extent has Karim resolved the dilemmas
he has faced up until this moment in this regard? Consider the tone of the last scene.
To what extent is Karim’s triumph tempered by anxiety about his personal future? Is
the comparative lack of resolution at the end of the novel a product of Karim’s
refusal rather than inability to make choices? If you interpret it as a product of
Karim’s refusal, to what extent can this be seen in a positive light? To what extent is
cultural hybridity represented as a desirable position of empowerment and to what
extent as a state of loss and vulnerability?
What is the effect of the parallels between Kim and Karim in terms of the definition
of postcolonial writing as a contestation or rebuttal of colonial literature? Is Kipling
rejected and dismissed? Does Kureishi’s treatment of Kipling accord with Ngugi’s
attitude to colonial literature? If not, what are the implications for Kureishi’s identity
as a postcolonial writer?
Now consider The Black Album. To what extent, if at all, does the text engage
directly or indirectly with colonial discourse? If you decide that its engagement is
minimal, or non-existent, what implications does this have for the novel’s identity as
a postcolonial work? To what extent does Shahid follow the same trajectory as Karim
in terms of his personal development? Are his dilemmas identical? Or do you feel
that Kureishi is covering significantly new ground in this latter text? If so, why?
Kureishi and genre

Stylistically, Kureishi is an interesting and complex writer – though he is never a
difficult read. In the first place, unlike so many postcolonial contemporaries,
especially those who are based in the West, like Salman Rushdie, Kureishi is not a
noticeably experimental kind of novelist. Having said this, the novels are certainly
self-conscious and self-reflexive in a number of ways. The Buddha of Suburbia
contains a consistent pattern of parallels between the world of the theatre, the world
of fictional creation and the ‘real’ world itself. In The Black Album, Shahid is an
aspiring writer who is learning his craft and who is thus involved in a series of issues
ranging from the questions of genre and style, to the responsibility of the artist to the
28
community from which he comes and censorship. The texts are also highly self-
conscious in terms of the amount of allusion to and citation of earlier writers and
artists.
As you read the novels, make a list of the other writers to which Kureishi refers.
How many postmodernist or magic realist writers are included in this list?
Among the writers whom you should have noted are Dickens and Thackeray, apropos
of whom Kureishi comments as follows in the preface to one of his film-scripts:
You have to ensure your work is accessible. You can’t indulge yourself…So, to take a
literary analogy, you have popular Thackeray and Dickens, say, as opposed to some
recent American writing, loaded with experiment, innovation and pretty sentences
which is published by minor magazines for an audience of acolytes, friends and
university libraries.
There are a number of ways in which Kureishi’s work looks back to these great
Victorian realists. Like Vanity Fair (1847) or Great Expectations (1861), Kureishi’s
texts explore issues of social mobility and follow the ambitions of two young men
determined to make their mark on the world. Perhaps more importantly, Kureishi’s
novels set these individual stories within a panoramic vision of the contemporary
‘condition of England’, as Dickens and Thackeray did for an earlier age. Among other
writers working in the ‘condition of England’ mode, to whom The Buddha refers, are
Wells, Forster, Orwell, Huxley and Waugh. Note Eva’s comment on Pyke’s play: ‘It
was about this country’, and consider how it might apply to Kureishi’s novels as well.
In particular, consider how English identity is shown to be in a process of flux and

change, and the role of new commonwealth migration in challenging and extending
traditional conceptions of Englishness. Begin with the opening paragraph of The
Buddha and consider how its arguments are extended and elaborated on in both the
novels. What does Englishness traditionally consist of in Kureishi’s novels and where
is it to be found? Is London represented as part of England, or is it in some sense
unique in its cultural identity? To what extent is England/Britain represented as a
country in terminal decline? Are there reasons for hope about the future?
It is often argued that postcolonial writing is experimental and subversive insofar as it

challenges both the language and conventions of the western canon.
As you read both novels, collect examples of the use of non-western diction. How
many are there? What significance do they have? Also look out for examples of ‘non-
standard’ English. Again, how many are there and what is their significance? How
often do Karim and Shahid in particular (they are British-born) stray from standard
English? When they or other characters do use non-standard English, to what extent
is this an expression of ethnic cultural identity and to what extent an expression of
their position within a youth or class sub-culture?
One way in which postcolonial writing is deemed to challenge traditional British

literature is in its recourse to non-western narrative traditions and cultural forms.
As you read each of the novels, collect examples of Kureishi’s references to non-
western art forms and artists. How many do you find in comparison with references
to their western equivalents? In The Buddha, Jamila describes the western canon as
‘all that “old, dull, white stuff”’, implying that it is irrelevant to the experience of the
ethnic communities of the metropolis and even that it may be an instrument in
‘policing’ them in ideological terms. To what extent do the novels taken as a whole
confirm or rebut her opinion?
29
There are a number of other important aspects to Kureishi’s style. In the first place,
although he is addressing serious social issues, there is a rich vein of comedy in
Kureishi’s work. The Buddha refers to the very English tradition of Ealing Comedy,
which is distinguished by its propensity to farce. For example, think of the encounter
between Karim and the Great Dane owned by Helen’s father.
Collect other examples of Kureishi’s use of comedy, both verbal and situational. Do
these elements of comedy reinforce or detract from the seriousness of his analysis of
contemporary England? Is The Black Album a more sombre text than The Buddha? If
so, why is this the case?
As suggested earlier, Kureishi’s novels belong to the genre of Bildungsroman. Look

up this term in a dictionary of literary terms or comparable work of reference and
consider the ways in which Kureishi handles the genre.
Do you find Karim and Shahid sympathetic figures, and if so, are they equally
sympathetic? Consider the differences between The Buddha as a text narrated in the
first person and The Black Album, which is narrated in the third person. How do these
different narrative techniques affect our response to each of the characters?
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having read both the Kureishi texts you have selected
and some of the suggested secondary/contextual reading, you should be able to:
• compare and contrast at least two Kureishi texts in detail in terms of both form
and theme
• have some sense of the relationship of Kureishi to a variety of different critical
models of postcolonial writing
• discuss in detail Kureishi’s use of genres and the nature and purposes of his inter-
textual allusions
• prepare with confidence for an examination question using Kureishi either as a
single author or as part of a comparison with another writer.

Please note that, contrary to some of the following examples, the examination may
not name Kureishi specifically in Section A questions. The questions below are
intended to help you write practice essays for this part of the examination. You
should write on at least two texts in each answer.
1. What advantages does realism offer the contemporary postcolonial writer?
2. To what extent does Kureishi celebrate cultural hybridity?
3. In what senses can Kureishi be described as a postcolonial writer?
4. Discuss the writer’s attempts to negotiate ‘the constraints of being direct, popular,
demanding and serious’ (Kureishi).
30

In this chapter, we have focused on Kureishi’s two novels. As indicated earlier,
however, there is no reason why you should not combine study of one novel with
either one or more of the longer plays or Kureishi’s short stories. You could also focus
exclusively on the plays (in which case you should study at least two of the longer
ones in detail, or a combination of plays and short stories, ignoring the novels
altogether). Any of these strategies would be appropriate for preparing for Section A
of the examination. You could also use Kureishi as part of a comparative study for
Section B of the examination, though in this case you are advised against also
answering on him in Section A of the examination. (Remember that you cannot use
the same text in more than one answer of this examination, or in more than one
advanced level examination.) For Section B questions, you might like to compare
Kureishi with any other writer of your choice as a postcolonial writer. An obvious
candidate would be Salman Rushdie. More specific topics might include the way that
Kureishi and any other postcolonial writer of your choice represent Britain, or
London more specifically. In this context a novel like Sam Selvon’s The Lonely
Londoners (1954) would be particularly appropriate. You might perform the same
kind of comparative exercise in respect of the representation of religion, or gender
roles in postcolonial writing (see Chapter 4 of this guide for further hints on preparing
the latter topic). Alternatively, you might want to compare the kinds of genres and
styles which Kureishi favours with those employed by other postcolonial writers, for
example in the context of Kureishi’s recourse to popular cultural modes, or his
preference for realism.
31
Notes
32
Chapter 3: Section B topic study: Postcolonial literature and the ideology of narrative forms
Chapter 3
Section B topic study:

Postcolonial literature and the
ideology of narrative forms
Essential reading
Hulme, K. The Bone People. (London: Picador, 1986) [ISBN 0-330-29387-7].
Nichols, G. I Is a Long Memoried Woman. (London: Karnak House, 1982)
[ISBN 0-907015-67-0].
A difficult book to obtain, but parts of it have been widely anthologised. See, for
example, Nichols’ book The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (London: Virago, 1984)
[ISBN 0860686353 (pbk)], and Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies
and Britain, edited by E.A. Markham (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001)
[ISBN 1852240873].
Rushdie, S. Midnight’s Children. (London: Picador, 1981)
[ISBN 0-330-26714-0].
Walcott, D. Remembrance and Pantomime: Two Plays. (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1980) [ISBN 0-81279-2968-0].
Recommended reading
*Brydon, D. and Tiffin, H. Decolonising Fictions. (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993)
[ISBN 1-871049-85-7].
*Burnett, P. (ed.), The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) [ISBN 0-14-058511-7]. A good selection of
poetry from the region, and with a useful introduction.
Cronin, R. Imagining India. (London: Macmillan, 1989)
[ISBN 0-333-46705-1].
Kulke, H. and Rothermund, D. A History of India. (London: Routledge, 1986)
[ISBN 0-415-04799-4].
*Ngugi wa Thiong’o Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African
literature. (London: James Currey, 1986) [ISBN 0 85255 501 6].
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)
[ISBN 0-7011-3808-4].
Introduction
Postcolonial literature has provided much of the English language’s finest writing
since 1947. This has been forged out of the problems which arose from the end of
empire, problems of racial and cultural identity, the perceived ‘inauthenticity’ of
modern life, of exile and diaspora, and the need to reclaim traditions lost through the
years of colonial rule. The formal and aesthetic means which were developed by
postcolonial writers in order to achieve this have answered back to, without always
being comfortably assimilated by, the ‘Great Tradition’ of metropolitan English
literature.
33
In this chapter we shall look at postcolonial writing in different genres and from
around the major areas of the former empire. It is designed to give an overview of the
issues involved when approaching the various narrative modes of postcolonial
writing. Thus we shall consider postcolonial poetry and drama as well as the novel,
and how the literature varies between the Caribbean, India and the white former
Dominions such as Australia and New Zealand. You should feel able to apply the
interactive questions to other postcolonial texts you may wish to read.
One important element of postcolonial writing has been its critique of the West’s
historic privileging of its own forms of writing on other cultures. For example, the
novel has been, from the time of the eighteenth century, the predominant cultural
form of the imperial societies and, in particular, of their ruling bourgeois class. Its
ideological function as an artefact of bourgeois culture has been to universalise the
values of that culture. As the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, has argued, the
attempt to turn indigenous cultures into replicas of Western culture has political and
economic implications, for it means they will become consumers of Western output
7 7
See his Decolonising the Mind (including intellectual output), and thus continue to be reliant upon the West. A
for a powerful exposition of this correlative of this is that indigenous history and culture will also remain marginalised.
idea.
In other words, the works a postcolonial culture produces might in fact reproduce the
colonial relationship, and thus be complicit in what can be termed ‘neo-colonialism’.
The postcolonial writer’s apparent experimentalism, based upon traditional modes of
storytelling, challenges the Western hegemony over literary form. A critique of
cultural imperialism is thus mediated through a form that is not simplistically learnt
from the West, but uses traditional and indigenous forms. Given that the language
used is that of the former colonial power, this may not be a ‘pure’ indigenous form.
But what it suggests, perhaps, is the development of new, hybrid languages and
forms, which spring from the postcolonial world’s need to negotiate with its colonial,
as well as its pre-colonial past.
Dramatising the colonial encounter: Derek

Walcott’s Pantomime
In Derek Walcott’s play, Pantomime, one of the classic novels of the early European
period of empiricist, scientific expansionism, is interrogated and ‘rewritten’. Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, and shows how a man (an Englishman,
more accurately) can overcome the most unfortunate circumstances by accepting the
will of God, and by hard work. Once he is stranded on the island, it is Crusoe’s task
to dominate his alien environment, to bend it to his will and to domesticate it. When
the native, whom he christens Friday, arrives, he, like the terrain, must be subjugated
by Crusoe. Once this has been achieved, Crusoe is rescued from the island – the proof
of his salvation in the eyes of God is in his success in controlling this ‘other’, alien
space. The novel can be read as a prototypical myth of colonial encounters with the
‘Other’. In this context, it is worth reading Ian Watt’s book, The Rise of the Novel,
which contains a good chapter on Defoe’s work. Watt draws out the close relationship
between the advent of the novel as the dominant literary form, the rise of a powerful
middle class and the beginnings of empire.
It will be very useful to have read Robinson Crusoe before you read Walcott’s play.
Consider the relationship between Crusoe and Friday. Is it representative of Europe’s
attitude towards its colonial subjects? How does it compare to the relationship
between the characters in Pantomime? Walcott expressly addresses this early text, but
to some degree, are all postcolonial texts, as Salman Rushdie puts it, writing ‘back to
the Centre’?
34
Chapter 3: Section B topic study: postcolonial literature and the ideology of narrative forms
Walcott sees the dramatic potential of that part of the novel concerned with the two
men bound together on the island, the one as master and the other as his servant.
What concerns him, of course, is that the basic assumption behind Crusoe’s position
is his racial identity, the notion that he represents ‘civilisation’, whereas Friday is the
savage. In Walcott’s version of the story, Harry Trewe, a remnant of English
colonialism, is a sad, decadent inheritor of Crusoe’s position of dominant white man.
He owns a poor guest house in Tobago, and his factotum, Jackson Phillip, is a
belligerent Friday, who, if aware that he still occupies a position of inferior wealth
and opportunity in the modern world, at least is not willing to be quiescent about it.
Trewe’s intentions are to perform a Crusoe pantomime, but in the late twentieth
century, Defoe’s story cannot be simply recreated. Through the two characters’
interactions, Walcott brings in both critical interpretations of the original text, and a
commentary on the effects of colonialism on the Caribbean.
You will notice that there are many references in the play to acting, performance,
role-playing, mimicry and parroting. These are not just aspects of Walcott’s awareness
of self-referentiality in modern literature and the precedence of the dramatic work of
Samuel Beckett. They raise important ideas about the nature of colonial identity.
Walcott suggests that the identities of coloniser and colonised were not racially fixed,
stable entities, but inauthentic, created elsewhere – both performed roles that were
culturally constructed for them through prior, European assumptions of what
constitutes master and servant.
The play is very complex on the question of who is controlling whom, and whether
or not a person inhabiting a postcolonial society is able to speak their own words or
if they are ‘acting’ out a prescribed role. Can the characters change their roles in this
case? Is it possible for the former colonial rulers and the formerly colonised to escape
the overbearing burdens of the past?
Trewe may claim he wants to know what Friday felt, and is willing to take on his role
in the pantomime, but he cannot accept Jackson giving him orders. Throughout,
though, Jackson’s is the voice of scepticism over the continuing, as well as historical,
relationship between the European and colonial position. In a moment that disrupts
the play’s uneasy light pantomime, he answers back to the British on behalf of all the
empire’s former subjects:
For three hundred years I served you. Three hundred years I served you breakfast
in…in my white jacket on a white veranda, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib…in
that sun that never set on your empire I was your shadow, I did what you did, boss,
bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib…that was my pantomime. Every movement you made,
your shadow copied…and you smiled at me as a child does at his shadow’s helpless
obedience, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib, Mr Crusoe…But after a while the child
get frighten of the shadow he make. He say to himself, That is too much obedience, I
better hads stop. But the shadow don’t stop, no matter if the child stop playing that
pantomime…He cannot get rid of it, no matter what, and that is the power and black
magic of the shadow, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib, until it is the shadow that
start dominating the child, it is the servant that start dominating the master…and that
is the victory of the shadow, boss…And that is why all them Pakistani and West
Indians in England, all them immigrant Fridays driving you all so crazy. And they go
keep driving you crazy till you go mad. In that sun that never set, they’s your
shadow, you can’t shake them off.
35
Jackson’s rhetorical technique here, repeating the native word for ‘master’ from
different parts of the globe where the British ruled, becomes increasingly ironic given
the condition in which the British now find themselves, and which they are
challenged to face up to at the end of the speech.
Is Walcott suggesting that the postcolonial world remains bound up with the colonial
one, that the mentality of ‘Mr Crusoe’ is still there, even though his power has gone?
Are contemporary issues in the ‘Mother Country’, such as immigration and racial
tension, in fact part of the continuing problems associated with large-scale exile and
diaspora, displacement and economic dislocation, that were set in motion by the
global disruptions of European empire over the last four centuries?
Walcott’s play brings the ongoing implications of colonial rule from the peripheries of
the metropolitan culture into its heart. (This is an important aspect of Caribbean
literature. Consider, for example, V.S. Naipaul’s novel, The Mimic Men, and poems
by Evan Jones, Louise Bennett, E.K. Brathwaite and Walcott himself, among others,
in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse.)
Collect further examples of some of the ideas that Walcott raises in the play about the
following aspects of the colonial encounter:
• the colonised subject as mimic man or ‘parrot’
• the master-servant dialectic
• the importance of language as an instrument of domination.
The play revolves around the need to address the English colonial novel, but does it
proffer an alternative version of the English language in Jackson’s use of dialect, and
the traditions of the calypso as an indigenous Caribbean form? In view of this, how
should we interpret Walcott’s poem, ‘North and South’? In this poem he says about
the British that:
it is good that everything’s gone, except their language,
which is everything
Postcolonialism and the postmodern novel:

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
At first sight, Midnight’s Children announces itself as an experimental, self-referential,
‘postmodernist’ text. Many of its early critics compared it to the work of Günter Grass
and Gabriel García Márquez. Its epic sweep, non-linear narrative technique and self-
conscious commentary on its own writing process play with our expectations of what
a novel is. Its narrator is disintegrating even as he tells his story, and generally
subverts the Bildungsroman (a novel structured around the protagonist’s development
from childhood to maturity, such as Tom Jones or David Copperfield) that it also
seems to imitate. The novel blends history, adventure, realism and the magical, and is
structured through symbolism and recurrence.
Where does the novel find its sources? Is it dependent on the European literary
tradition for its origins? It is a good idea when discussing postcolonial writers such as
Rushdie to bear in mind that when we use terms such as ‘the epic’, ‘the novel’,
‘postmodernism’, we are referring to Western forms or concepts. However, writers as
diverse as Achebe, Ngugi, Rushdie and Walcott, seek in diverse ways to recreate or
give life to old, indigenous forms. Given the oral, non-literary nature of many
traditional forms, the modern work often strives to recapture the appearance of the
oral narrative. Does this explain the apparent experiment with novel form in
Midnight’s Children?
36
Rushdie has suggested that:

listening to [a famous storyteller in India] reminded me of the shape of the oral
narrative. It’s not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the
middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops, it
every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then
takes you off again, sometimes summarises itself, it frequently digresses off into
something that the storyteller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to
the main thrust of the narrative.
Consider the ways in which the postcolonial texts you have read approximate to oral
narrative.
Midnight’s Children most prominently looks to the ancient Persian narrative, Tales
from the Thousand and One Nights, both as a pre-European literary antecedent and as
structural parallel. Rushdie follows the Thousand and One Nights by providing us
with a multiplicity of stories that are at times disconnected, yet interrelated through
the storyteller’s continual creativity. In the earlier tale, Sheherazade tells a new story
every night in order to keep the King interested in her, and thus spare her life. Up to
that point he has tired of, and had executed, each wife after the wedding night.
Rushdie, too, provides a narrator who must narrate in order to save his life, and who
tells his story to a dramatically present audience. Midnight’s Children, though, inverts
Sheherazade’s narration to the King. Saleem Sinai tells his story to Padma, who
comes from the lowest strata of Indian society. This allows Rushdie a constant
dialogue between naïve, sceptical listener and the narrator/artist on the book in
general and upon the art of creating stories in particular. Such an apparently
postmodernist device, however, is employed here in order to link the novel to an
earlier narrative tradition, and to present the idea that both the process and the social
implications of creating stories in the postcolonial world are different from in the
West. Profoundly complicated by their social context, they are never simply a matter
of telling a story for its own sake.
Politics and myth in Midnight’s Children

We are, in this novel, back in the world of the mythic again. Perhaps, Rushdie
suggests, the European narrative model is not large enough to contain the life and
events of the postcolonial experience.
How do we read, or explain, the magical elements in the novel, such as the telepathic
and supernatural powers possessed by the ‘midnight’s children’, born at the same time
as independence? Are they meant to be symbolic, and thus explicable by reference to
what it is they symbolise, or do they represent a different narrative order altogether,
one that, as with the magical elements of the Thousand and One Nights, remains
unexplained?
Rushdie seems to suggest that India is a land of ‘myths, nightmares, fantasies’:
August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday…and this
year…there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a
nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting
us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had
invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was
nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist
except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all
agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and
Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal
which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth – a collective
37
fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty
fantasies: money and God…I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous
nature of this collective dream…
Examine this passage closely. Does it, to an extent, recreate the old colonial view that
the colonised peoples were innately uncontrollable, and their societies anarchic and
disordered? This was one of the ideological underpinnings of Empire. Or does it
serve Rushdie’s critique of what the postcolonial world inherited from empire; in
India’s case, at midnight on 14 August 1947? Is Rushdie looking to pre-European
narrative forms in order to question postcolonial culture? Consider this comment
from Richard Cronin in Imagining India:
‘writing in Gujurati, or Tamil, or Bengali confers on the writer a regional identity that
unavoidably takes precedence over his identity as an Indian. That is why the Indian
novel, the novel that tries to encapsulate the whole of Indian reality can, as yet, only
be written in English…Kipling and Rushdie have in common [the] impudence of the
trespasser.’
What are the implications of this argument for postcolonial literature in English?
The India ‘born’ after independence was a place of huge variations in languages,
religions and cultures. How can such a vast miscellany be constructed, politically and
aesthetically? Saleem Sinai clearly embodies India. Not only is his face compared to
the map of India, both their histories begin at the same moment. They are both
troubled from birth, but are also magical and fantastic. Most important of all, Saleem
is disintegrating, and tells his story so as to hold his life together by the coherence of
art, not reality. Similarly, India was partitioned at birth, and is constantly in danger of
falling apart. We can see now how often the postcolonial text fears the perceived
disintegration of postcolonial society and individuals. The world inherited from the
colonial powers was rarely the liberation it promised to be. For Saleem, as for India in
this case, it is only a narrative effort of will, a continual ‘dreaming’ into existence,
which keeps the whole thing together. Rushdie, although not a Hindu, also ties the
novel to the Hindu god of creation, Brahma, who dreams the world into being.
This is an example of one of Rushdie’s main organising principles in the novel, apart
from the framework of traditional narrative. For the novel is shaped by motifs of
recurrence and correspondence. The novel pushes towards the encyclopedic,
embracing a multiplicity of voices that are intended to give a paradigmatic range of
their society, from the ghetto in Delhi to the Prime Minister and the generals. The
patterning of recurrent images and symbols, such as the hole in the bedsheet, or the
idea of fragmentation itself, strives to achieve a cumulative effect that holds the
potential unwieldiness of the text together: as Saleem comments, ‘there was no escape
from recurrence’.
Similarly, the characters are given depth beyond their individual roles through their
correspondence to other figures, their situation as avatars of mythological characters
or gods. For example, Mrs Gandhi appears as Devi, the Mother goddess, who calls
for absolute submission. Saleem fulfils a complex and multifarious role as avatar. As
suggested, he is Brahma, dreaming the universe into existence; he also appears, both
physically, because of the size of his nose, and symbolically, as author and scribe, as
the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, the patron of learning and letters. He is analogous
to Sheherazade, telling stories to stay alive, but also, in his travels and adventures
around the sub-continent, Sinbad the Sailor, a character who appears in the Thousand
and One Nights. Such correspondences, of course, tie him to the pre-European culture
of the sub-continent, even as he writes under an ‘Anglepoise lamp’; that is, from what
may seem to be an Anglo-Indian perspective.
38
Collect further examples of symbols and motifs in Midnight’s Children. Do they

function in the same way as indicated above?
To what extent is Midnight’s Children a postcolonial satire?
Consider the following passage:
‘All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving
thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up
commerce…businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed!
It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the
British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their
cheeks…The businessmen of India were turning white.’
What criticisms is Rushdie making of how the postcolonial world had developed?
Can you identify other aspects of modern India which Rushdie criticises in the novel?
How is Mrs Gandhi portrayed, for example? What is the point of the digression on
the war with Pakistan (see Book Three)? Can we read India’s history in this novel, or
is it one history of India among many? What should we make of the magicians’
ghetto in Delhi (see The shadow of the Mosque section)? Is it intended as an
alternative communal way of life in India that is indigenous? (Note the scepticism
towards all foreign ideologies, including socialism.) As is usual with this subject,
some historical knowledge of the country in question will be useful. Use the
references to India and Pakistan in an encyclopedia, for example, or consult a book
such as Kulke and Rothermund’s A History of India.
Caribbean poetry: a new language for ‘English’

verse?
Modern Caribbean poetry has created an identity out of its response to two
fundamental influences, both deriving from elsewhere: the sense of a lost ‘homeland’
in Africa and the enforced acquisition of a new language from the colonial, slave-
trading power which caused that displacement. In a sense, this may be the best
example of a hybrid becoming something altogether new, and indeed, much
Caribbean poetry celebrates this aspect of Caribbean culture. It has not been reticent
about employing vernacular, Creolised English, nor about continuing to look back to
Africa as a place of origins. Yet a clear poetic language has developed, one that is
distinctively of the region.
The slaves who arrived in the Caribbean brought their own languages and cultural
identities with them, all of which the British sought to eradicate. It is in the nature of
empire to be cosmopolitan, and to ignore regional differences. In the Caribbean,
peoples from several different African ethnic groups were transplanted. Modern poets,
of course, have no knowledge of where exactly they originated, and so Grace
Nichols’ poem, I Is a Long Memoried Woman, celebrates the survival of the larger
diaspora from Africa:
I require an omen, a signal
I kyan not work this craft
on my own strength
alligator teeth
and feathers
old root and powder
I kyan not work this craft
39
this black magic

on my own strength
Dahomey lurking in my shadows
Yoruba lurking in my shadows
Ashanti lurking in my shadows
Even as the various peoples of West Africa exist indefinably in the poet’s blood, so
she looks to those aspects of old African knowledge that survived in the Caribbean.
This is at the centre of the experience, and Nichols’s poem, as with many others,
combines a lament for the past with a celebration of the survival that has meant there
is now a postcolonial Caribbean, ruled by descendants of those slaves. It is significant,
in relation to Achebe’s work, that she is particularly keen to celebrate the role of the
woman as guardian of storytelling. In this case, the poem is a memory, a refusal to
forget the destruction of their separate African identities, the loss of ‘deep man pride’,
and the displacement which saw them taken across the Atlantic:
From dih pout
of mih mouth
from dih
treacherous
calm of mih
smile
you can tell
I is a long memoried woman
Child of the middle passage womb
push
daughter of a vengeful Chi
she came
into the new world
birth aching her pain
from one continent/to another
Consider the ways in which Nichols uses narrative voice in this excerpt. We have
looked at how form and theme are employed in the postcolonial text in order to
interrogate assumptions of European cultural superiority. What does Grace Nichols’s
poem suggest about the privileging of standard metropolitan English as the proper
language for literature? Do poems that use Caribbean vernacular challenge notions of
the centrality of standard English? Does this suggest that English is inadequate as a
vehicle, because too remote or too elitist, perhaps, for conveying fully the experience
of life in the postcolonial Caribbean? Note her use of the word ‘chi’ here. What does
her untranslated use of this word tell you about Nichols’s sources? From our reading
of Achebe, for example, we know what ‘chi’ means. Do the postcolonial literatures in
English serve to transform the language which they primarily employ? Do we, as
readers, become involved in a set of cultural referents which exist outside the
traditions of the metropolitan culture?
40
Caribbean verse and the search for tradition

Consider this statement by Nichols:
I tend to want to fuse [Standard English and Creole] because I come from a
background where the two worlds were constantly interacting, though Creole was
regarded, obviously, as the inferior by the colonial powers when I was growing up…I
think this is one of the main reasons why many Caribbean poets…have reclaimed our
language heritage and are now exploring it. It’s a language our foremothers and
forefathers struggled to create after losing their own languages on the plantations and
we are saying it’s a valid, vibrant language. We are no longer going to treat it with
contempt or allow it to be misplaced. We just don’t see Creole as a dialect of English
even though the words themselves are English-based, because the structure, rhythm,
and intonation are an influence of West African speech.
Language, for Nichols, is clearly a political, as well as cultural, medium. Analyse her
comments here in relation to her own poems, as well as other poetry in The Penguin
Book of Caribbean Verse.
The poem functions to repossess the voice of the Black woman as both link to an
African heritage, and as midwife and mother to a new culture. The ‘Middle Passage’,
the name for the journey the slave ships made between Africa and the Americas, is
reclaimed as a time of rebirth, rather than shame. This recuperation of the past is, of
course, a key element in postcolonial writing, and has a political, as well as aesthetic
basis. The search for a new poetic language has taxed poets this century from T.S.
Eliot onwards. In some ways, the use of English by Caribbean poets is the most
radical challenge yet to a conservative ‘norm’. As with Rushdie and the novel, we
should not forget that such experiments with language and form spring from sources
other than Western postmodernism or experimentalism when they arise in the
postcolonial context.
If you are interested in West Indian literature, consult the Group A subject guide,
Moderns, for material on the novelist Earl Lovelace. Look at the section headed ‘An
eighteenth-century poem’, which discusses the earlier work of white West Indian
poets. Compare the poetry of the white tradition with Nichols’s poetry. Do they share
any similar concerns with the problems of establishing a ‘Caribbean’ identity? Or, if
you like, compare Nichols with a contemporary West Indian male writer. In what
ways do their poetic aims differ/coincide?
The case of the ‘white’ Dominions: colonial

culture at the periphery
Following our comments on Caribbean culture and the ‘hybrid’, there is another claim
made for a literature that is caught between two traditions as representing a new, hybrid
literature. An influential recent critical work, The Empire Writes Back, written by
three Australian critics, discusses the idea that postcoloniality is not restricted to the
formerly colonised, and that the literature from New Zealand, Australia and Canada:
can be shown to constitute a literature separate from that of the metropolitan
centre…White settlers…faced the problem of establishing their ‘indigeneity’ and
distinguishing it from their continuing sense of their European inheritance…The
relation between the people and the land is new, as is that between the imported
language and the land…But the language itself already carries many associations
with European experience and so can never be ‘innocent’ in practice. Concomitantly,
there is a perception that this new experience, if couched in the terms of the old, is
somehow ‘falsified’ – rendered inauthentic – at the same time as its value, judged
within Old World terms, is considered inferior.
41
The book locates the ‘white’ Dominions within the larger postcolonial experience,
existing ambivalently at the margins of, as opposed to being attached to, the former
colonial centre. As with the Caribbean writers, the issue of writing in a place where
‘the landscape and the language are not one’, as the Australian writer, David Malouf,
put it, stands at the heart of the literature. Where do these writers find a language able
to match the ‘new’ world? They, after all, do not have a ‘native’ language or tradition
to call on, or even, as in Nichols’s case, to lament the loss of.
What does constructing ‘indigeneity’ involve? Can it give the white, native English-
speaking writer, whose situation is conditioned by an earlier colonial authority, access
to a ‘postcolonial’ position that approximates at all to that of the African or Indian
subject of empire?
The Bone People: choosing a postcolonial

identity
If we consider Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, it is worth bearing in mind these
questions as to the postcolonial status of a modern New Zealand text. For Hulme’s
novel has a complex, ambivalent relationship with both the English, in terms of
language and culture, and the Maori, reduced and marginalised by years of English
domination. These tensions meet in the main female character, Kerewin Holmes, an
artist removed from the world in her tower, but drawn into what is, by now, the sad
condition of Maori life, through her connection with a Maori family, the Gillayleys.
Hulme’s novel, then, ‘chooses’ an identity for itself, in order to free itself of the
constraints of an inadequate English/ness. She seizes on Maori language, and the idea
of an ancient Maori knowledge of the landscape, in a way that should be familiar to
the student of postcolonialism by now. The novel moves increasingly further from a
European order of experience of the world to one of myth, and of the pre-‘Pakeha’,
pre-European.
Thus the encounter between the modern Maori, Joe Gillayley, and the strange figure
of the kaumatua, or elder, is explicable as belonging to the realm of the mythic rather
than the realist, and thus provides a visionary response to a contemporary New
Zealand where the original inhabitants are still dispossessed. The old man has been
guardian of an ancient canoe, which serves as a mauriora, a type of talisman (for
which there is no simple English translation). He has been waiting for the next
guardian to come before he dies, and Joe, unwittingly, is that person. Before he dies,
he must educate Joe into the true, Maori way of seeing the world. The mauriora:
is the heart of this country. The heart of this land…I was taught that it was the old
people’s belief that this country, and our people, are different and special. That
something very great has allied itself with some of us, had given itself to us. But we
changed. We ceased to nurture the land. We fought among ourselves. We were
overcome by those white people in their hordes. We were broken and diminished. We
forgot what we could have been, that Aotearoa was the shining land. Maybe it will be
again…be that as it will, that thing which allied itself to us is still here. I take care of
it, because it sleeps now. It retired into itself when the world changed, when the
people changed. It can be taken and destroyed while it sleeps, I was told…and then
this land would become empty of all the shiningness, all the peace, all the glory.
Forever.
42
Consider this passage in relation to the following:

• an explanation through myth of the indigenous society’s place in the world, and
the reason for things falling apart
• the promise of future regeneration separate from the European, colonial culture
• the need to protect a traditional, pre-colonial identity.
To what extent does this emphasise the novel’s position within a postcolonial
aesthetic?
Unlike Achebe, Nichols or Rushdie, who choose myths from their own culture’s past,
Hulme has chosen to identify with the indigenous people who have been crushed by
European domination.
Is this a radical example of what The Empire Writes Back calls ‘establishing
indigeneity’? Does it suggest that, in some respects, the former Dominions are the
last colonial societies, where indigenous cultures remain politically and linguistically
suppressed? Does it call into question the problematic nature of a New Zealand
cultural identity? As you read Hulme’s book, do you feel that such an identity is
insecure, not English and yet not Maori; not of the metropolitan centre, but not
attached to a genuine indigeneity? Does this make the book seem difficult to place in
context, or does it contribute to its sense of being ‘Other’ to the English novel, an
appearance of being to some degree ‘experimental’?
Consider this view of the highly positive critical response to The Bone People in
New Zealand, which argues that it reflected:
the desire of New Zealand to see a reconciliation of its postcolonialising and
postcolonised discourses…the reconciliation is achieved, but the price of that success
is that the otherness of the Maori is destroyed. (De-scribing the Empire, p.55)
Does the novel enact a repossession or – almost – recolonisation of the native voice,
and thus its fundamental alterity (otherness), its autonomous identity separate from
that of the European’s knowledge? Is it a way of salving the settler culture’s guilt at
dispossessing the Maoris of their land and thus that very ‘voice’ itself?
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having read at least two texts by different authors and
some of the recommended secondary reading, you should be able to:
• compare and contrast different postcolonial narrative forms
• describe some of the strategies by which postcolonial authors have sought to
challenge Euro-centric or Anglo-centric perspectives
• discuss the general theoretical debates with regard to postcolonial literatures from
different parts of the world
• feel confident about studying other postcolonial texts you have read in the light of
the arguments outlined in this chapter.
43

Please note that in the examination you cannot necessarily expect a question directly
on the above topics. The following questions are intended to help you write practice
essays. All answers must refer to at least two different authors.
1. ‘We lived at the cross-roads of cultures.’ Do you agree that the postcolonial text
is inevitably situated between cultures?
2. Discuss how any two postcolonial writers of the period have treated one of the
following:
• the situation of women in postcolonial societies
• racial identity
• exile and/or diaspora
• the relationship between ‘metropolitan centre’ and ‘periphery’.
3. Examine the role of language and/or narrative form in the work of at least two
postcolonial writers.
4. Does the term ‘postcolonial’ help or hinder your understanding of the texts you
have studied?

You might want to pursue the theoretical side of postcolonial discourse. In any case,
some knowledge of the theoretical issues surrounding the subject is strongly
recommended. As an introduction, it may be useful to read a collection of essays, or a
‘Reader’, such as Williams and Chrisman’s Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial
Theory, which contains examples from virtually all the major critics. One of the
seminal texts, though, and an interesting book generally, is Edward Said’s
Orientalism, which focuses on the relationship between writing and power in the
colonial encounter specifically in the context of the Near and Middle East. This might
provide a useful starting point for your critical approach to postcolonial literature.
One new direction you may wish to take will lead you away from the former colonies
to the ‘Motherland’ itself. As Walcott suggests in Pantomime, the experience of the
postcolonial world – the displacement, exile, cosmopolitanism – has come back to
confront the heart of contemporary England. You might therefore want to apply these
ideas to work produced by those members of the various diasporas who now reside
within the metropolitan ‘centre’ itself.8 Consider how their work connects them to the
8
See Chapter 2 for further hints wider issues of postcolonialism. Do they look for a tradition, or an aesthetic, outside
on this subject. that of the country in which they write?
44
Chapter 4: Section B topic study: gender and postcolonial literature
Chapter 4
Section B topic study: gender

and postcolonial literature
Essential reading
This chapter will look at novels by African women writers. However, you are free to
study women writers from any region of the former British Empire. The examination
requires that you are able to answer in relation to at least two texts by different
authors, although in this chapter we shall be referring to three, fairly short novels.
Aidoo, A. A. Changes: A Love Story. (London: The Women’s Press, 1991)

[ISBN 0-7043-4261-8].
Dangarembga, T. Nervous Conditions. (London: The Women’s Press, 1988) [ISBN 0-
7043-4100-X].
Nwapa, F. Women are Different. (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1986)
[ISBN 0-86543-326-7].
Recommended reading
There is a wide range of critical work you can use, and it’s worth looking in library
catalogues under headings such as gender and cultural studies as well as postcolonial
literature and theory.
Ashcroft, B. et al. (eds) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
Colonial Literatures. (London: Routledge, 1989) [ISBN 0-415-01209-0]. Look at
the section on ‘Feminism and Post-Colonialism’.
Azodo, A. and Wilentz G. (eds), Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. (New
York: Africa World Press, 1999) [ISBN 0865435812].
Gates H. L. Jr. (ed.), Reading Black, Reading Feminist: a critical anthology. (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1996) [ISBN 0-452-01045-4].
*James, A. (ed.), In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk. (Hemel
Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1990) [ISBN 0-85255-507-5].
Msiska, M-H. and Hyland, p. (eds.), Writing and Africa. (Harlow: Longman, 1997)
[ISBN 0-582-21418-1]. See in particular Chapter 11, ‘African Writing and
Gender’.
Nasta, S. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South
Asia. (London: The Women’s Press, 1991) [ISBN 0-704342693].
*Nnaemeka, O. (ed.) The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and
Resistance in African Literature. (London: Routledge, 1997)
[ISBN 0-415-13790-X]. Includes a chapter on Dangarembga.
Odamtten, V. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo. (Gainsville: University of Florida Press,
1994) [ISBN 081-3012-767].
*Stratton, F. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. (London:
Routledge, 1994) [ISBN 0-415-09771-1].
Umeh, M. Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa. (New York: Africa world Press,
1999) [ISBN 08654-351-54].
Williams, P. and Chrisman, P. (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory.
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)
[ISBN 0-7450-1491-7]. Read in particular Part Three: ‘Theorising gender’.
45
Wilson-Tagoe, N. Ama Ata Aidoo. (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2000)

[ISBN 0-746309457].
Wisker, G. Post-colonial and African American Women’s Writing. (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000) [ISBN 0-333-72746-0].
Introduction
This chapter is concerned with a number of issues that derive from the ways in which
the postcolonial novel deals with issues of gender, and how they affect contemporary
postcolonial African societies. We shall look at women writers from very different
parts of Africa – Flora Nwapa is known as Nigeria’s first woman novelist, Ama Ata
Aidoo is Ghanaian, and Tsitsi Dangarembga comes from Zimbabwe. However, this
chapter will concentrate on the essential themes which they share such as the
generational conflict between older, more traditional, African women and modern
urban ones; the ambiguous benefits gained from an elite, Europeanised education; and
the difficulties in dealing with the unreconstructed expectations of men.
As so often with postcolonial literature, these works engage with the perceived
inadequacies of the existing literary canon. But in this case we shall discuss how they
challenge what has become a postcolonial canon by African male writers, as well as
9 9
See the Empire and literature the white metropolitan one. Finally, a subject which is fairly understated in these
subject guide for further hints on
colonial literature’s treatment of novels is that of imperialism itself. Dangarembga’s novel is set in the 1970s when
issues of gender. Zimbabwe was still under white colonial rule and known as Rhodesia, and because of
this, the lingering effects of colonialism in the continent are closer to the surface. But
we shall still want to consider the ways in which even Aidoo’s novel, in one sense a
comedy of manners looking at Ghanaian life in the 1990s, nonetheless remains
engaged in the debate with the cultural after-effects of empire.
Gender and the African novel

10
See Chapter 1 of this guide. From reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,10 you will already know that
African women have long been seen as the instruments by which African culture in
general – and storytelling in particular – was preserved and passed on through the
generations. Indeed, in novels by Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ayi Kwei Armah,
female characters often symbolise the most valued aspects of Africa itself. For
example, Beatrice, in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, and Mumbi, in Ngugi’s A
Grain of Wheat, clearly represent modern incarnations of, respectively, mythological
Igbo and Gikuyu Goddess-Mother figures. It might also be noted, however, that the
gendering of Africa as feminine was frequently carried out by colonial writers, even if
from a very different perspective. In King Solomon’s Mines, Rider Haggard explicitly
depicts the African landscape as a woman’s body, and one which is available for
penetration by white men. It is such treatments of women – as symbols of Mother
Africa as well as the colonial depiction of Africa as receptively feminine – that
African women writers have consistently sought to address.
Consider the narrative technique employed by Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo and
Tsitsi Dangarembga. What do you think the reasons are for them favouring the realist
mode? Can we say that realism, which posits the central importance and integrity of
the individual consciousness, challenges the characterisation of women as mythic and
symbolic as seen in works by male writers such as Achebe and Ngugi? To what
extent can novels like Changes and Women are Different be seen as an ongoing
critique not only of African society in its treatment of women, but of the classic
postcolonial African novel’s representation of women?
46
On the other hand, you might want to argue that the women novelists also share with
African male writers a strategic intention to write their characters into the life of the
nation as active protagonists.
To what extent can we say that, as Innes and Rooney suggest in Writing and Africa,
they ‘recapitulate Achebe’s point of departure [from colonial depictions of Africa]
while also addressing the blindspots in this very point of departure’?
Women writers have not so much sought to correct the omission, or marginalisation
of women from the postcolonial novel, therefore, as to engage with the ways in which
they have been represented in the major canon of postcolonial literature. If you think
back to the concern of writers such as Achebe and Ngugi to challenge canonical
metropolitan writers like Conrad and Joyce Cary, it might seem that, ironically, we are
back in familiar territory. For it is this issue of how a dominant group uses dominant
cultural forms to represent another group, one without a voice or the means to
represent itself, that brings the question of gender in postcolonial writing into a
complex relationship with other critiques of imperial literature. For example, Edward
Said’s seminal work on Western colonial discourse, Orientalism, is specifically
concerned with the imperialistic exercise of power that the West carried out via its
project of writing about the Orient. Said argues that this rendered those other cultures
knowable to, and able to be possessed by, a Western readership. It is significant that
we might be able to use this same theoretical model to mount a critique of literature
by male African writers. In this sense, it is possible to suggest that the relationship
between masculine and feminine modes of postcolonial writing mirror that earlier one
between coloniser and colonised. The women writers we shall look at in this chapter
have consistently investigated the possibility that they were themselves subject to a
quasi-imperialistic oppression within the newly independent African nations.
In Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, the main character’s mother tells her:

this business of womanhood is a heavy burden…with the poverty of blackness on
one side and the weight of womanhood on the other.
To what extent is there a sense in these novels that women have suffered a ‘double
colonisation’, at the level of both race and gender? Is their historical experience of
imperialism therefore innately different from that of men?
The role of education

One of the key themes that links the novels is that of education. In Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Tambudzai is shown as engaged in a struggle to
achieve an education otherwise reserved for boys, such as her brother, or girls from
wealthier families (like those seen in Women are Different, for example). In her case,
we might say there is the possibility that a triple displacement from power is at work
– at the level of race, gender and class. Her eventual path out of this is through the
death of her brother, which leaves her as the eldest child, and the intervention of
Babamukuru, the successful uncle who has himself been educated in, and rewarded
by the Rhodesian colonial system. But even by the end of the novel, she cannot
escape the prevailing attitude of men towards women who seek education. As she
comments:
in terms of cash my education was an investment, but then in terms of cattle so was
my conformity.
Her uncle and father see it as either causing a problem for her future marriage
prospects or enhancing her value, but never as something worthwhile for a woman to
pursue in order to be independent.
47
Look at the novel’s opening paragraph. To what extent does the narrator’s declaration
that her story is about escape, entrapment and rebellion establish the essential images
of the novel’s portrayal of women? Is education seen as the only means by which
someone such as Tambudzai can escape her circumstances? Are there other types of
education which she undergoes apart from that available at the Mission school or the
Convent? What does Tambudzai learn by the end of the novel?
Tambudzai’s intellectual development marks her growing sense of identity as an

individual separate from the constrictions of tribe and family. This of course allows
her a deeper awareness of the problems which traditional attitudes bring to women in
family life. More importantly, perhaps, her education gives her access to a language
with which to enunciate this critical viewpoint.
Consider this passage from Chapter 7:

It stung too saltily, too sharply and agonisingly the sensitive images that the women
had of themselves, images that were really no more than reflections. But the women
had been taught to recognise these reflections as self and it was frightening now…to
acknowledge that generations of threat and assault and neglect had battered these
myths into the extreme, dividing reality they faced.
To what extent is Tambudzai’s perception here the result of her Western education?
Does the novel demonstrate that Tambudzai is able to break through these false
images of self? To what extent does her education merely raise a whole new set of
problems related to identity? Does a character such as Nyasha, her cousin, who has
been educated in England, provide a warning of what dangers might lie ahead for
Tambudzai? Is Nyasha’s increasing psychological disintegration evidence that she is
not so much a hybrid, situated in both African and European cultures, as someone
who has no place in either? To what extent is cultural hybridity represented as a
negative attribute?
Education and the threat to women’s identities

in Nervous Conditions
The title of the novel points to the sense of unease that hangs over the lives of the
female characters in this society. If in Tambudzai’s traditional home they are
oppressed through lack of education into accepting an image of women’s secondary
status, in Babamukaru’s Westernised one they are browbeaten into submission despite
their education. The difficulties involved in educated women finding a new way is
seen in both the narrator and her cousin’s lives. Babamukuru’s desire to return Nyasha
to the position of acquiescence after their return from England, something achieved
with his equally well-educated wife, leads ultimately to her fall into anorexia and
illness. This can be seen partly as an aspect of her rebellion. However, it also marks
symbolically her inability to suppress what her education has created – that is, her
uneasy sense of identity as a cultural hybrid. In contradistinction, Tambudzai’s
response to her uncle is, as she says, to take ‘refuge in the image of the grateful poor
female relative’, and remain silent. For her, his struggle for education and material
success within the colonial system has been heroic, and her ambition to emulate him
leads her eventually away from the Mission and to the convent dominated by white
colonials.
Although white people are almost absent from the novel, to what extent do they
control the lives of its characters? To what extent is Babamukaru a creation of the
colonial culture? If he is Tambudzai’s role model, are we to infer a criticism of her
position in the novel?
48
Ultimately, then, the novel highlights a process of cultural assimilation within

Rhodesia, which has governed her uncle’s life and threatened to control her own. At
the end of the novel it is left to her mother to draw attention to the dangers inherent in
the process of her education.
It’s the Englishness…It’ll kill them all if they aren’t careful.
And so although Tambudzai continues with her education, she comes to see that she
had been ‘too eager to leave the homestead and embrace the “Englishness”’ of the
school.
Does this suggest that if education is a form of escape from the constrictions of
traditional life, it must not simply turn towards European culture for its values? To
what extent is traditional knowledge privileged over Western education? To what
extent is Tambudzai’s awareness of the potential for cultural assimilation through
education produced by her gender positioning?
Now consider the novels by Flora Nwapa and Ama Ata Aidoo. To what extent do
they suggest that women’s education is the key to postcolonial societies finally
decolonising at the level of gender? To what extent do they share Dangarembga’s
concerns that education might only serve to place women in an ambivalent position
in relation to their culture?
Re-ordering the masculine

Clearly, in works where issues of gender are central, one of the most important
subjects dealt with is women’s relationships with men in modern Africa. Flora
Nwapa’s Women are Different follows three friends from their school-days through to
married life and motherhood. Two of the women, Dora and Agnes, are abandoned by
their husbands and left to support their children and make their own way in Nigerian
society. By showing that they can eventually succeed without husbands, Nwapa
develops an idea, apparent from the novel’s opening pages in the girls’ school, that the
bonds between women are ultimately the essential ones.
Consider the male characters in the novel. What are the implications of their being
generally shown as feckless, marginal figures? Examine closely the discussion
between Rose and Dora in Chapter 7. What explanations are offered here for
Nwapa’s view of the crisis in male–female relationships in contemporary Nigeria? Is
it the fault of colonial disruptions of traditional culture, or is it due to the
impossibility of modern women fulfilling traditional male African expectations of
behaviour? To what extent is the idea that women’s relationships with each other are
paramount also seen in Changes and Nervous Conditions?
One of Nwapa’s characters says that:

the young parliamentarians thought that taking over from the British meant having
licence to corrupt young schoolgirls and their mothers.
49
To what extent does Nwapa’s examination of gender in modern Nigeria amount to a

political critique of postcolonial society? Is there a sense that the condition of
relationships between genders is at the heart of a wider, social corruption? How
different is this critique of society from that of male writers you have studied for this
subject? To what extent is gender posited as the most important area of oppression in
modern Africa?
You will have noticed that, in all three novels, male characters leave Africa to be
educated in Europe. The novels suggest that they never return with the same sense of
African identity, while many never come back at all. As one of Nwapa’s characters
says:
there must be something in Europe that makes our men behave in that strange way.
In what ways do these novels criticise male attitudes towards the former colonial
culture? Look at the occasions when African men are shown in Europe in Women are
Different and Changes. What effect does the encounter with the West have on them?
Does it have the same effect on the female characters? If not, can you suggest
reasons why this should be the case?
Gender and postcolonial society

The novels by African women writers studied in this chapter are driven by their
critique of what is essentially wrong with the social structures of postcolonial society.
Moreover, they are involved in a search for ways in which that society might be
reformed in terms of its treatment of gender relations. Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes,
whose very title reflects the sense that things must alter for women in postcolonial
society, has its main character, Esi, undergo a quest for new forms of social and
sexual relations between men and women in modern Ghana. A significant part of this
quest involves her seeking to retain professional and intellectual independence within
marriage. The novel may be finally sceptical about the possibility of this occurring in
modern Ghana, as evidenced in the tentative, open-ended conclusion of ‘one day, one
day’. But there is a sense that a change in society is nonetheless imperative.
How are we meant to interpret Aidoo’s disclaimer in the epigraph that the novel ‘is
not meant to be a contribution to any debate, however current’? Do you accept this?
What is the significance of Esi and her friend Opokuya meeting in the Hotel
Twentieth Century? Does it invite us to read the events that take place as being
symbolic of the era?
Look at Esi’s series of conversations with Opokuya and with her grandmother. What
are the differences in how the conversations view women in Ghanaian society? To
what extent are they generational differences, rather than due to education or class? Is
it possible to reconcile the two viewpoints? Examine Esi’s grandmother’s comments
at the beginning of Chapter 14. Do they express conservative or radical ideas about
women’s lives? How do you interpret her idea that the traditional marriage ceremony
is a ‘funeral of the self that could have been’?
Given that Esi and Opokuya are affluent, middle-class women, and that life for the
majority of Ghanaians is difficult for many other reasons, there is a sense that the
narrative voice seeks to undercut their musings on the difficulties raised by issues of
gender in modern Ghana. In the opening paragraphs of Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, Esi’s
life is placed ironically within something like a postcolonial version of fin-de-siècle
exhaustion, where she seems to be completely cut off from the reality of ordinary
people’s lives. The novel at these moments seems to suggest that the reformation of
gender relationships needs to be achieved within a larger transformation of social and
economic structures.
50
To what extent does the novel imply that these structures have been inherited from
the colonial power? If you consider the three novels we have looked at in this chapter
collectively, to what extent do they constitute a re-writing of the narratives of
postcolonial society?
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having read at least two novels by different authors,
as well as some of the suggested secondary reading, you should be able to:
• compare and contrast the ways in which women writers treat issues of gender in
modern postcolonial societies
• discuss in detail the leading thematic concerns and stylistic features of novels by
African women writers
• outline some of the key strategies by which postcolonial women writers challenge
dominant canons of both Western and postcolonial literatures
• prepare with confidence for an examination question on gender and postcolonial
literature using either the writers referred to in this chapter or others of your choice.

Please note that in the examination you cannot necessarily expect a question directly
on gender and postcolonialism. The following questions are intended to help you
write practice essays for the examination. You should discuss at least two texts by
different authors in each answer.
1. ‘They say education is life.’ (DANGAREMBGA) Discuss the treatment of
education in the work of at least two postcolonial women writers.
2. ‘Writer of colour? Woman writer? Which comes first?’ (TRINH MINH-HA)
Discuss in relation to at least two postcolonial women writers.
3. ‘The tyranny of gender differential is imperialistic.’ Discuss with reference to at
least two postcolonial women writers.
4. ‘I was convinced that the further we left the old ways behind the closer we came
to progress.’ (DANGAREMBGA) Discuss in relation to the role of women in
postcolonial society. Answer with reference to at least two postcolonial women
writers.

You might like to compare the work of postcolonial women writers with that of
postcolonial male writers who highlight the position of women in modern society. For
example, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross and Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah place
considerable emphasis on the main female characters.11 In what ways are they treated
differently from the female characters in novels by Nwapa, Aidoo, Dangarembga or
11
See Chapter 1 of this guide for other postcolonial women writers you have read? You could compare and contrast the
further hints. work of postcolonial women writers from different parts of the world. To what extent
are the concerns of African women writers similar to those from India or the
Caribbean, for example? You might also wish to consider different forms of
postcolonial women’s writing such as poetry.12 For example, in what ways are the
12
See the section on Grace concerns we have outlined in this chapter dealt with in postcolonial women’s poetry?
Nichols and Caribbean poetry in Does poetry raise issues about gender that the novel cannot deal with (and vice
Chapter 3 of this guide for a
further discussion of this topic. versa)?
51
Notes
52
Appendix: Sample examination paper
Appendix
Sample examination paper

Answer three questions, including at least one from each section. Candidates may
not discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this examination or any other
advanced level unit examination.
Section A
1. ‘Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure.’ (ACHEBE) Examine
the idea that the postcolonial novel is predominantly a didactic form with detailed
reference to the work of any one postcolonial writer you have studied.
2. ‘We have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left.’ (HAMIDOU
KANE) To what extent is postcolonial experience rendered in terms of existential
problems of identity? Discuss with reference to any one postcolonial writer you
have studied.
3. ‘How choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?’ (WALCOTT)
Examine the way in which any one postcolonial writer has challenged the use of
the colonisers’ language as a medium of discourse.
4. ‘The validity of black historical reality is not predicated on objective truths so
much as…the visionary reconstruction of the past.’ (SOYINKA) Discuss the
treatment of the pre-colonial and/or early colonial past in the work of any one
writer.
5. ‘You know England, born there, you live/To die there, roots put down once/And
for all.’ (D’AGUIAR) To what extent can writers of the diaspora who have been
born or grown up in the British Isles be considered ‘postcolonial’? Answer in
relation to any one writer.
6. ‘Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.’ (ACHEBE) Discuss how
any one postcolonial writer has employed traditional narrative forms.
7. Consider the role in the work of any one postcolonial writer you have studied of
either fantasy or myth.
8. In what ways have postcolonial writers sought to redefine the relationship between
colonial margin and metropolitan centre? Answer in relation to any one writer.
Section B
9. ‘The Caribbean offers us a literature about the process of growth through, or in
spite of, a history of exploitation and prejudice, about the turning of negatives into
positives and the creative synthesis of ancient traditions.’ (PAULA BURNETT)
Discuss with reference to at least two writers.
10. ‘We the women who toil/Yet we the women/who praises go unsung/who voices go
unheard.’ (NICHOLS) Discuss how women writers address their own
marginalisation within postcolonial societies. Answer in relation to at least two
writers.
11. ‘The hyena can’t walk down two roads at the same time.’ (NGUGI) To what
extent is postcolonial literature a literature of commitment? Discuss in relation to
at least two writers.
53
12. ‘The [post-]colonial politician is an easy object of satire…his situation satirises

itself, turns satire inside out, takes satire to a point where it touches pathos if not
tragedy.’ (NAIPAUL) Do postcolonial writers only view postcolonial societies
with scepticism and satire? Answer in relation to the work of at least two
postcolonial writers.
13. ‘The problem has seemed to be how to find a way out of two mutually exclusive
alternatives: between either locating oneself wholly within a marginalised culture
or locating oneself entirely outside it, within the “mainstream” as defined by the
imperial culture.’ (BRYDON) In relation to the work of at least two writers,
examine how the literature of the former Dominions has sought to establish a
separate identity.
14. Discuss the treatment of one of the following by at least two writers: the
relationship between the personal and the political in postcolonial society; exile;
representations of the feminine; religion.
15. ‘The word “post”…confers on colonialism the prestige of history proper;
colonialism is the determining marker of history.’ (McCLINTOCK) Is the term
‘postcolonial’ a satisfactory one? Answer in relation to at least two authors.
54
Notes
Notes
55
Notes
56
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Published by: University of London Press

Chapter 4: Section B topic study: gender and postcolonial literature ..............45

Suggested study syllabus

Walcott, D. What the Twilight Says: Essays.

Using this subject guide

We include a list of ‘learning outcomes’ at the end of each chapter. Learning

General subject reading

Lazarus, N. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Post-colonial World.

Section A author study: Chinua

Achebe, C. Anthills of the Savannah. (London: Picador, 1987)

*Achebe, C. Hopes and Impediments. (London: Heinemann, 1988)

Reclaiming the past

In studying this topic, the importance of a literary, geographical and historical

Literary realism and the postcolonial novel

Is TFA simply an example of the classic European realist novel transplanted to an

Okonkwo’s fundamental motivation is his unwillingness to be labelled an agbala,

Is it possible to reconcile what appears to be the paradox that Achebe’s challenge to

The role of the individual in Things Fall Apart

Consider how Okonkwo’s suspicion of his son’s masculinity is alleviated when

Reclaiming traditional narrative modes

and controlled by the Europeans. Essentially, though, Achebe employs ways of

Politics, literature and modern Africa

Is the postcolonial experience irretrievably ‘inauthentic’, a ‘mimicry’ of the Western

Achebe’s discussion of neo-colonialism in

in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of postcolonial African

Representations of the feminine

Sample examination questions

Suggestions for further/alternative study

Section A author study:

Kureishi, H. The Black Album. (London: Faber, 1995) [ISBN 0-571-177522].

Kureishi, H. Outskirts and Other Plays. (London: Faber, 1992)

One of the most interesting aspects of Kureishi’s treatment of migrant experience is

Do you feel that in Kureishi’s work ethnicity is the ‘privileged’ site of

Kureishi and colonial discourse

Although it is never an explicit presence, it could nonetheless be argued that Kipling’s

Kureishi and genre

In particular, consider how English identity is shown to be in a process of flux and

It is often argued that postcolonial writing is experimental and subversive insofar as it

One way in which postcolonial writing is deemed to challenge traditional British

As suggested earlier, Kureishi’s novels belong to the genre of Bildungsroman. Look

Sample examination questions

Suggestions for further/alternative study

Section B topic study:

Dramatising the colonial encounter: Derek

Postcolonialism and the postmodern novel:

Rushdie has suggested that:

Politics and myth in Midnight’s Children

Collect further examples of symbols and motifs in Midnight’s Children. Do they

Caribbean poetry: a new language for ‘English’

this black magic

Caribbean verse and the search for tradition

The case of the ‘white’ Dominions: colonial

The Bone People: choosing a postcolonial

Consider this passage in relation to the following:

Sample examination questions

Suggestions for further/alternative study

Section B topic study: gender

Aidoo, A. A. Changes: A Love Story. (London: The Women’s Press, 1991)

Wilson-Tagoe, N. Ama Ata Aidoo. (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2000)

Gender and the African novel

In Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, the main character’s mother tells her: