Ich habe geschrieben ( an essay written for my class here)

History and Identity

A division arises among the authors we have engaged with in these two weeks:
There are those who seek to dig deep into their roots, and from this sense of place, write great literature; there are those who traverse the globe in order to discover themselves for the first time (perhaps in a museum), and from this more complicated position write great literature; and there are also those whose sense of history is somewhat lost, and who discover their identity by celebrating the present as its own tradition, and from this dais write great literature. In each case, the predicament comes as a result of what Rushdie calls cultural transplantation—the issue that lies at the center of this varied collection of literature. Despite the incongruities we have discovered relating to the lives of these writers outside their writing (of course I’m referring to our Rushdie-hatred), I have decided to let the writing speak for itself. I take as a foundation Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, in which I find an expression of the post-colonial predicament that most certainly applies, in one way or another, to all of the authors we have read in this class. Rushdie’s essay addresses two of the principal concerns for the post-colonial writer today, the notion of history and identity.

What role does history play in the creation of literature for our writers? At first, I aligned Walcott against the past, with Naipaul fighting for it and Rushdie somewhere in between. Yet, when deconstructed, Walcott’s negative depiction of the sigh of history must yield to his theory of the broken vase; in order for the pieces to be put back together, with the glue of a “stronger love,” it must be broken in the first place. The long sigh of history is the culprit. Perhaps Walcott simply isn’t sure where he stands. In defiance of history, he disregards the numerous traditions that serve as the foundations of his current culture by embracing the present and future, while simultaneously defining the process of poetry as “one of self-excavation and of self-discovery.” Were he to excavate the Antilles—not physically but culturally—he would indeed find the ruins that the islands themselves lack. His ancestry traces back to Rushdie’s India, Soyinka’s Nigeria, the South Africa of Coetzee and Gordimer. Walcott cannot escape history.

Naipaul replaced Proust’s “talent” with hard work and luck. This luck, which puts you in the right place at the right time, also has the ability to put you in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps this is really what makes for great literature: the experience of trial and hardship. But what can one reach out and grab hold of during oppression and pain if not their past? It is fitting that writers such as those gathered in our compilation all speak of history. It is the responsibility of the international writer to deal with such an issue. To write in the post-colonial moment, one must confront the history of colonialism and with it, breathe the long sigh that remembers the transplantation from mainland to island.

The Nobel committee recognizes the necessity of this confrontation. Let us consider these phrases, taken from some of the Nobel pronouncements of the past fourteen years: “arbitrariness of history” (Kertesz, 2002), “see the presence of suppressed histories” (Naipaul, 2001), “portray the forgotten face of history” (Grass, 1999), “exalt…the living past” (Heaney, 1995), “sustained by historical vision” (Walcott, 1992). Why are these authors celebrated for their writing? Because they excavate the shared history of humanity. The story of the Yoruba and the Zulu and the stories of the Antilles belong as much to the students of the ISU as those told by Proust, Dickens, Kafka, or Melville.

The second imperative our authors share can be found within the speech of the Nobel committee. Harold Pinter, the most recent recipient, was awarded the Prize for a literature that “forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” The reason they are closed is because a writer has not yet entered them—at least a writer who is publishing in English to a wide audience. From the act of entering into these rooms, which were closed by the colonial world, new identities emerge.

Naipaul traversed the globe because his story had not been written even behind the gate of his own house. Rushdie has sought out world experiences in order to critique them. Soyinka writes in an effort to shout words beyond the confines of his Yoruba world, or perhaps even his prison cell. Underneath all of these writers lies the urge to resist suffocation by obsession with ones own culture. Rushdie clarifies with a suggestive dictum, which speaks against a “ghetto mentality”: “To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers, would be, I believe, to go voluntarily into that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the ‘homeland’.” I think Gordimer agrees. She refers to the post-adolescent maturation of the as “(t)he process of standing apart and being involved…” To this, I hear Rushdie responding in kind, linking Gordimer’s post-adolescence with the current state of being in post-colonial literature: “we are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders.”

But I question whether this is universally possible. When the space between insider/outside is crossed, perhaps one must take sides. Is Walcott still a partaker of his culture? Or has he been sufficiently successful so as to become merely a caretaker—a watchful yet distant observer of the culture that his writing has introduced to the world? Of course this anticipates the debate over a writer’s motivation and the question of Audience. Behind this question lies the critic’s own motive of moral evaluation. Do I accept the author’s motivation as valid and valuable? From their place, their home, their dais, the written words project out into the world. The world can then choose whether to accept, reject, embrace, or ignore them. What action we choose individually does not diminish the fact that each of our authors has taken the shattered fragments of suppressed histories and written them into an international literature through the linguistic amalgamation of English.

One could put forth an argument based on ratios and proportions of minority and majority populations in certain countries, but perhaps the imaginary homeland is simply the world in which we live today--where the residuals of modern, colonial existence insist themselves in the literature of our greatest, most gifted writers. A combination of talent, luck, and hard work, this writing attempts to restore the fragments of shattered histories in order to engender an emerging, self-conscious identity. Post-colonial, as a term, not only contains an inherent chronology but also pushes the focus towards the culture, indeed once a colony, which has now emerged from imperial darkness. But it also becomes easy to appropriate the concept of the colonialism of the empirical powers to other, somewhat connected moments in our collective history: the destruction of European Jewry, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid. These and other events suggest further that perhaps we have not yet entered the post-colonial age.