Colonialism and its aftermath in twentieth-century British literature constructs a genre of literary analysis that is important in interpreting its impact. Literary theorists, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and others respond with observations and analysis, focusing on relations between the colonizers and the colonized. In reading for colonialism and its aftermath in twentieth-century British literature, evidence of a hierarchy appears that establishes a usurper-usurped relationship in which the usurper becomes the governing culture. As the authoritative culture, the usurper secures a chosen geographical territory for the purpose of extracting natural resources as its own for economic advantage, resulting in activities that create irreversible changing realities. The purpose of this discussion will be to examine the evolution of colonialism and its aftermath from its defining historical moments to the contemporary viewpoints of Salman Rushdie who cites in The Empire Writes Back “those whom [the English] once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves,” and reflects the world’s current cultural construction.
Because these changes-of-reality are crucial to the theme of colonialism and its aftermath, it is appropriate to look into narratives whose central theme is about changes-of-reality such as, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) both of whom are historical studies of colonialism and its aftermath in its immediacy. V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2001), on the other hand, explore alternative views of “hybridity” in colonialism’s extended aftermath that gives rise to Naipaul’s cultural exclusion and Smith’s cultural inclusion, an inclusion as Salman Rushdie suggests, and is an expansiveness unheard of in the heady days of colonialism’s beginnings as Joseph Conrad portrays in his early twentieth-century novel.
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Heart of Darkness is the emblematic novel of colonialism and its aftermath that portrays a dual journey: an outer-journey of the African landscape and its external events, as a metaphor paralleling the inner journey of the narrator, Charles Marlow, and Kurtz the once-revered ivory idol. Textually, the narrative absorbs itself with the changes of reality in the form that Tom Nairn labels,“Imperial Delirium.” Marlow finds himself and Kurtz adversely affected by mental changes-of-reality beyond their grasp. Theorists indicate this “delirium”appears as a gap in an [European’s] mind between ingrained Victorian ideals and indigenous reality, making everything learned or known valueless. In the immediacy of what appears to be extreme culture shock, the powerful usurpers—Marlow and Kurtz—ironically lose their ability to function, and they become mentally usurped—by the effects of the delirium. Fredric Jameson simplifies it as “a kind of schizophrenia,” and a twenty-first-century NIH may note, Marlow and Kurtz suffer “from poor, or [no] executive function” that bars them from processing any new information.
Unfortunately, Marlow’s only pre-trip preparation is the grating pre-Congo medical exam in which the doctor inquires if there is any known insanity in his family, alluding to others returning in distress. In spite of the doctor’s cautionary words, Marlow experiences “delirium,” causing a rupture in his psyche, as he confronts the African’s diametrically opposed culture. David Spurr points out “this is the site or [moment] of [Marlow’s] terrifying encounter of his own nothingness.” Marlow loses his Western arrogance that was the foundation of his previous sense-of-self. Rereading Heart of Darkness in light of Marlow’s new sense-of -self, is the overriding factor that drives him, and forces him to face his own “heart of darkness.” Marlow’s alienation, therefore, becomes the signifier for the broader agenda of colonialism, and its aftermath that leaves him mentally displaced. Therefore, the title of Conrad’s novel is not necessarily a referent to Africa, but metaphoric for Marlow’s psychic emptiness.
And finally meeting Kurtz is an encounter with an enterprising rogue in a state of futility who has gone native, and has given way to extreme mental disintegration, becoming incomprehensible to himself and others. Fifty miles before Marlow finally meets Kurtz, at the Congo’s Inner Station, he finds a coping method, allowing him to hold onto some of his Victorian ethos, in the precision of Towson’s book (mechanic’s manual cum pseudo-Bible) that he reads repeatedly. Bhabha suggests Marlow’s rereading of Towson’s book allows for his “resolution between the madness of prehistoric Africa and the unconscious desire to repeat the intervention of colonialism.” Clearly, Marlow’s use of an otherwise mundane text to hold onto his sanity indicates the tenuousness of his grasp on reality and supports the immediacy of colonialism’s aftermath.
Conrad’s textual placement of the “book” according to Bhabha is, “the triumph of the colonialist moment in early English Evangelism,” and points to creationism. Supporting this idea, David Spurr recalls a correspondent who sees the African plain as the Book of Genesis for the colonizers, rewriting the ancient myth of origin. This further validates the colonizers’ power, a power that evaporates for both Marlow and Kurtz, leaving a psychical blank sheet for rewriting just as the colonizers are rewriting the African landscape. Kurtz’s final commentary demonstrates his own consumption by imperialism as he exclaims: “The Horror, The Horror.!
Another emblematic twentieth-century British text is E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India that foregrounds colonialism and the immediacy of its aftermath. And like Heart of Darkness is immersed in changes-of-reality, concerning two Englishwomen visiting India: Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore both of whom experience “Imperial Delirium.” In their quest to see the “real” India, Dr. Aziz, hosts a day trip to the Marabar Caves. Sara Surlei points out, “the essence of India is represented in [the caves] inner spaces, which can be described but not interpreted, implying a nothingness that metaphorically, India—like Africa in Heart of Darkness— is a historical zero available for the colonizers to construct. Because A Passage to India, can also be read as a parodic interpretation of the 1857 Indian rebellion with its lingering memory of murder and rape of Englishwomen and children, the novel’s pivotal moment surrounds the alleged rape of Adela by Dr. Aziz in one of the caves.
Unable to process what did occur in the cave, Adela transfers her trauma from a psychical to physical anguish, allowing time to deal with the indeterminacy of her terrifying experience—she later recants. But by placing the thrust of her story in a state of corporeality, Adela becomes signified as a rapist—symbolizing her imperialist status—and a victim in a “base” act that circumvents spirituality. Adela’s act of recanting; therefore, is easily read as a betrayal of the colonial’s way of life, which places her both physically and psychically in limbo. What surfaces in assessing the reactions to the rape by the colonizers, is the belief that crossing the invisible cultural divide is fraught with dangers for the colonials who are already wary of the “delirium.” Sara Surlei concludes, “this is not about rape, but the emotional fragility of intimacy, an intimacy that affects the sensibilities.” Adela’s companion, Mrs. Moore’s [moments of deli-rum] is in some ways more extreme, but “closer to the point” writes Alan Wilde in Horizons of Assent. Alone in a cave when something vile strikes her face, a breathless-madness are followed by the nothingness of the echo, Mrs. Moore describes as “boum,” irrevocably altering her spiritual world.
Like Marlow’s serendipitous book find, Mrs. Moore has unsought for thoughts of Christianity as she emerges from the cave, realizing that all its divine words from “Let there be light” to “It is finished” only amount to “boum.” Mrs. Moore involuntarily replaces her strong Christian beliefs with “Everything exists, nothing has value,” evoking secular philosophical precepts, more like the African Igbo and Yorùbà who believe everything is equal or of no value. Mrs. Moore’s new thoughts; nonetheless, suggests she crosses the cultural dividing line, placing herself close in thought to “Other,” and validates the notion the caves and the echo are symbolic of an unexplainable emptiness. Thus, Forster’s catastrophic concept of the consequences of crossing the cultural dividing line in A Passage to India’s creates changes-of-reality in ambiguity for Mrs. Moore, and Adela Quested. The delirium of colonialism’s aftermath is immediate in both Conrad’s and Forster’s novels, but fifty years after A Passage to India, V. S. Naipaul writes about the extended aftermath from a colonized viewpoint.
On one level, the 1974 post-colonialist novel, A Bend in the River reads as a retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Where Marlow’s journey—knowing little in advance—is on a steamboat heading up the Congo in search of Kurtz, the ivory idol. Salim’s, journey in A Bend in the River—on a cousin’s word and little else—drives hopefully from coastal Africa in search of mercantile fortune in a kleptocratic Central African country that ends in illegal ivory trading. At the outset of Naipaul’s nihilistic postcolonial novel Salim is seemingly in Bhabha’s third space of “hybridity,” due to classification as Afro-Arab of Indian descent with a British Passport, which assumes that reality changes for Salim are in the past. Applying Bhabba’s displacement theory presumably fills the blanks of Salim’s backstory: liminality (transitory threshold of change), ambivalence (signifier between colonial authority and colonial desire), and mimicry (signifier of a double articulation). In Salim’s spurious designation of “hybridity” his wandering indicates lingering elements of liminality, ambivalence, and mimicry, supporting Salim’s inability to find a space of hybridity. Salim’s dis-ease is further clouded by his powerlessness to make solid connections with others, because everyone in his world is suffering the same post-colonialist effects symptomatic of the aimlessness of liminality and ambivalence.
Clearly, Naipaul sees colonization as an overwhelming cultural experience that leaves the colonized permanently disabled. Naipaul’s message about the powerlessness of colonialism’s aftermath is clear when Salim severely beats his girlfriend, Yvette. His beating of Yvette not only reveals a psychopathic level of misogyny, but is also symbolic of a brutal homeless man in an act that is an allegorical eruption of his exposure to social genocide. A social genocide Neil Lazarus describes, as “the destabilizing and in many cases the liquidation of indigenous societies, resulting in the colonized recreating themselves.” Salim’s disorientation is emblematic of colonialism’s aftermath, requiring him to write his history anew. Franz Fanon embodies Salim’s struggles to find solace in Black Skin, White Masks, “In a world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself, [eventually],” nonetheless, Fanon’s thoughts on recreating oneself proves that Salim is not completely without hope for the future. Salim’s hybridity-of-culture also signifies Rushdie’s referent, as he argues in The Empire Writes Back that in the post-colonialism world “no one can or should try to retain a singular identity.” Bhabha validates Rushdie’s global-ness, and points to cultural “hybridity” as a world without “imperial rulers” and with equality.
What Rushdie theorizes, Smith practical-izes in her 2001 novel, White Teeth through a focused societal group of Bengalese, Jamaican, and British cultures, set in 1980s-1990s England. Like A Bend in the River, the characters strain in recreating themselves to fit into the British lifestyle. Unlike A Bend in the River there is a strong sense of solidarity among the three cultures, which they, for the most part, seem oblivious to as they conduct their day-to-day lives, but consistently struggle against like salmon swimming upstream. It stands to reason that Bengalese Samad Iqbal, like Salim, in A Bend in the River has passed through liminality, ambivalence, and mimicry before merging into Bhabba’s third space of hybridity in London.
Unfortunately, Samad suffers from nationalistic nostalgia. And like many parents decide to live through his identical twin sons: Magid (“the precious intellectual”), and Millat (“the-good-for-nothing”). Samad deviously plots sand discusses with his World War Two British army buddy, Archie Jones, enlisting his aid to kidnap one of the twins in the middle of the night, drive him to Heathrow, and fly him to Bangladesh on a one way ticket to become a honorable-Muslim man..Samad’s less than well thought out plan can best be explained metaphorically using the concept of smashing protons that results in a shower of particles where “anything” can and will happen. What happens in Samad’s recreating of his personal Big Bang is, Magid returns from Bangladesh after eight years a well-educated Englishman, more English than an Englishman, dressed in the Englishman’s ubiquitous white linen suit, and aligns himself with a geneticist researcher, precluding any answer to any God. The first irony of this saga; however, is Millat who remains in England living a life of sex, rock, and roll until one day he turns that inevitable corner. Millat’s re-creation goes beyond Islāmic basic precepts by placing himself in the inner circle of the fundamentalist group, KEVIN, wearing their ubiquitous green bow tie.
The greatest irony; however is Irie Jones—daughter of British Archie Jones and his Jamaican wife—has sex with Millat early on a day, and sex with Magid later on the same day. The “anything” that can happen, happens, hybridity without recourse, since the twins have identical DNA, of course, there is no way to prove paternity. According to Said in support of Bhabha “no-one, today has only one nationality; no one originates from only one source or one nation,” or perhaps like Irie from only one union.
In reiterating the evolution of colonialism and its aftermath--from its defining moments to contemporary viewpoints--is clear in the four novels. For example, in Heart of Darkness Marlow, patently loses his grasp on his learned reality. Needless to say, Kurtz is just lost! Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India is at-sea psychically and physically, and no longer has anything to live for. Adela is unable to come to terms with the changes in her life breaks her engagement to Ronnie Heaslop and returns to England. Salim in A Bend in the River portrays cultural exclusion in his African wanderings, albeit with a glimmer of hope as noted by Fanon. Smith, on the other hand, writes in White Teeth, a story of the cultural inclusion Rushdie proposes, showing it as irreversible, as life becomes for the unborn child of British-Jamaican, Irie Jones, and Bengalese Magid or Millat Iqab. It is not the perfect world envisioned by Bhabha without hierarchy or prejudice, but an ongoing saga that continues to evolve.
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