Putting the "Postcolonial" into "Postcolonial Rabbit"

When I first started this blog (almost a year ago now) I intended it to be a space in which I could muse as much about my frivolous interests as my serious ones. But of late the book  and exhibition reviews have been neglected in favour of a lot of makeup and nail polish posts. Not a bad thing in its self, but I haven't been deserving on my "postcolonial rabbit" moniker, just the "rabbit" bit.

So I thought I'd write today about the postcolonial side of things and start to redress the imbalance. To introduce the term, and to explain why I decided to pursue postcolonial studies as my area of PhD research and as my career, I thought I'd write a bit about my first experiences of it.

I grew up in a diverse area of North London (Wood Green) but moved to a very white area of Surrey when I was eight. I ended up going to a private secondary school, and the environment was sterile, conservative and very old-fashioned. As was the syllabus. I excelled in terms of results but as I chafed at the unbelievable narrow-mindedness of the school and the dullness of the subjects I studied.

Until my English teacher (an incredible, terrifying, awe-inspiring woman, and the finest teacher I've ever come across) set me To Kill A Mockingbird for my coursework during my GCSES. I'd been a voracious reader all my life, but it was the first time that I saw the political potential of literary writing, that it could talk about race, community, division, and exclusion, things I'd experienced in the move but that I'd never really read about in books. (I note that To Kill A Mockingbird has become a bit of a cliche: the novel celebrities tend to cite as their desert island book, because it makes them look intelligent and "deep." I wish I could say it was Midnight's Children that I was first introduced to, and that I stumbled upon them in the library aged 12, but that was a later literary milestone for me, during my A-Levels).

To Kill A Mockingbird was followed swiftly by my English teacher with A Heart of Darkness accompanied by Chinua Achebe's essay on the novel, during my A-Level English course. These two texts started a passion that have got me here: a PhD in postcolonial literature and a job working on a postcolonial research project.

Achebe's essay, which angrily reacts to the dehumanised representation of Africans in Conrad's classic novel, struck a very deep chord in me. I loved its passion and fire and the fact that it dismantled a literary text that everyone had held to be great for so many years, but which had never been addressed in terms of its racial politics. It showed me what criticism could do, to completely transform the way a text is seen and read, and then via that re-written text, transform the way we look at the world. It's why I opted for English and American Literature over art at university. The rest is a lot of book-reading and letters after my name.

Writing thing post has made me realise that this blog isn't quite the space for me to talk at length on postcolonial issues. I like the frivolity of this space, and I want to keep it light and mostly about pretty things. So, as if I'm not busy enough, I've started another blog, called Postcolonial Adda (a Bengali word for a special kind of "idle chatter"). If you like this post, please follow the Rabbit's little sister!

www.postcolonialadda.blogspot.com

Hope to see you there!

The Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh

I love Amitav Ghosh's novels, and have managed to get The Shadow Lines onto every postcolonial option I've taught (to me, there's no better novel on the tragedy of Partition). I clutched The Glass Palace to me for several days after finishing it (during reading it I became so absorbed that I missed my stop on several train journeys, kept forgetting things and had to restrict myself to reading it at bedtime only for fear of what other troubles it might've got me into.) I love his impeccable attention to historical detail, his lyrical style and the way he creates epics of empire that span continents and are yet so deeply personal and believable. As a result, I was breathless with excitement at the prospect of hearing him talk on the issue of diaspora at the LSE last year for the Runnymede Trust. The Sea of Poppies had been on my shelf for some time, awaiting the right opportunity. I thought the talk would be a perfect prologue.

However, the talk was a disappointment. Ghosh spoke in woolliest, most idealistic terms about migration, as a form of transnational community, a world without restrictive, exclusivist borders, a world of infinite possibility. He tied his argument to the research he had undertaken for The Sea of Poppies, arguing that the sailors who used to traffic opium and the goods of empire were a ragtag bunch of multiple nationalities and religions who nonetheless "got along." Those left at home, he said, were "unfortunate," but could still dream of other places because of the adventures of their more courageous kin.

The whole talk sat uncomfortably with the reason for the lecture: the launch of a major project on Bengali oral history in London titled Banglastories. Anyone at all familiar with Bengali (or indeed, any) migrant narratives knows that Ghosh's take on migration is unbelievably rose-tinted. In particular, the lascars of whom Ghosh writes, worked in the very worst conditions on East India company ships, and died in their thousands on ships during the first and second World Wars. And they've hardly been recognised in official naval histories.

Which is why I had such hopes for The Sea of Poppies: a chance to tell the story of those who have been excluded from the historical record, to imagine their lives and experiences in a way we can't do in historical research because of the sheer absence of material. But although it is a fantastic yarn of a novel,  it is just that: fantastic. The unlikely set of characters that end up on this boat just do not convince. Throughout, Ghosh's desperation to create an imagined alternative sense of community to nation-based ones is all too evident: for example, in the passage describing a wedding on the ship, when all the "coolies," regardless of caste or village, become a "family." It's an embarrassingly laboured section where the author's ideological intention drives the narrative, and clumsily. Usually Ghosh is a master of entwining history and literary grace, but here the historical research is hammered home, at the expense of well-drawn characters. I didn't share Ghosh's own joy in the nautical Hindi-English hybrid that peppers the pages, which I just found annoyingly excessive. And there's a hint of intrusive magical realism too in one sub-plot of this novel that just shouldn't be in a Ghosh novel.

That said, it was immense fun to read. Ghosh has enough skill as an author to keep you compelled even when he's at slapdash form and his dreams overtake his plotting. I sped through 500 pages in a matter of a fortnight. Each night, I looked forward to picking it up again. And now I've finished, although not filled with the sense of aching loss that I usually am when I finish a Ghosh novel, I did just google "second part of the Ibis trilogy," which should indicate how willing I am to be on board again (I thought I could resist the urge for a nautical pun in this review, alas not). Just don't take this in the vein of a regular Ghosh novel: historical it ain't. But a lot of fun, it is.

Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie

I have seven books I consider to be my desert island, holy grail, favourite books of all time. I define them by the quality of writing: where one sentence after another leaves you so breathless with its beauty and brilliance, that you want to underline the whole darn thing (I'm an underliner). The books that you carry around with you for some time after you've finished them, simply because you can't bear to part with them just yet. (Mine are: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. And yes, there's a lot of American fiction in there, I know.)

Burnt Shadows, a novel that traces the interconnected lives of two families, and in doing so encompasses Nagasaki, partition, and the Afghan war, had moments of that kind of brilliance and beauty, moments that had me scrabbling for a pen and ruler (I always use a ruler). But at the same time, there were the kinds of sentences that are very obviously designed to get a reader scrabbling for a pen - over-written, with unnecessarily extended images, nestling uncomfortably with the rest of the prose and dialogue. Ones where you can visualise the author sitting back with a smug satisfied air, thinking, ah yes, that'll get them. There's a fine line between the two, and it's a subjective one. But when I come across these latter sentences, I just bristle with irritation (I did a lot of this whilst reading God of Small Things. Heck, I was just one irritated bristling thing throughout). And the spell is broken.

So I can't quite join in the critical frenzy that has occurred over this novel. This isn't to say it's not good - it really is, and at points I was moved to tears, hissed with anger, and at several points, really physically wanted to shake one of the characters. I'm also intellectually intrigued by it: it's a fascinating tale of migrations - but unlike some postcolonial texts, Shamsie's rendition of migration is the very opposite of celebratory. Her characters are forced to move, and hate doing so. They adapt, for sure, but she demonstrates how adaption exists alongside sadness and loss that do not dissipate with time. She also sets up an international network of people that span India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Japan and New York, but again, at no point does this seem a joyous example of globalisation, but is fraught and tragic, resulting in as many misunderstandings as insights into cultural difference. And the novel's denouement is devastating, and politically savage.

But it's just not quite brilliant. I'm a hard reader to please, perhaps, but there's just too much uninspired dialogue, with the odd overwritten sentence thrown in to pep it up. It's a shame, because the novel's vision is really quite ambitious, and Shamsie obviously has the skill to have written the entirety of it very well. So I bristle as much in irritation about what this novel could have been as I do over its odd overwritten sentence.

May We Always Remember: Half a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

So I'm in Canterbury, in a B&B, the day before the start of the tw0-day Global Youth Cultures conference I'm working on. I've just had curried goat at the local Caribbean restaurant, during which I finished Half A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Following last night's television "event" I could link from this rundown of my day to a celebration of a globalised post-national identity. But somehow, it doesn't seem appropriate, because I am thinking of Biafra.

The short-lived nation of Biafra (pronounced Bee-Afra) seceded from Nigeria in 1967 and existed in a state of war for three years before starvation and the brutalities of war brought the infant nation was reabsorbed into Nigeria. Ngozi Adichie's epic novel traces the courageous stories of a group of Biafrans during this period, and in doing so, reveals the history of a nation that now endures only in memory, and words.

I came to this novel in a roundabout way. I was doing my regular internet trawl for material on Bangladesh, when I stumbled upon a review of Half A Yellow Sun in which Bangladesh was mentioned. The two secessionist struggles occurred in parallel in the late 1960s, but with radically different outcomes, leading to a series of political science papers that used the two as comparative case studies upon what it takes for a nation to succeed. The "case" of Biafra, seen as a "failure;" the "case" of Bangladesh, a "success."

I meant to read this novel as research, but at some point during reading, my "postcolonial-theoretical" mind shut down. It seemed somehow disrespectful to Ngozi Adichie's magnificent act of remembrance, to immediately unpick it in terms of narrative technique or the representation of gender. Instead, I kept thinking of these two groups of people, Biafran and Bengali, fighting and dying to bring their nations into being and to keep them alive, thousands of miles apart. I thought also of others: Algerians, Vietnamese, Palestinians. With each page, postmodern critiques of nation rang hollower and hollower.

The horrors of war and starvation, and the courage and resourcefulness of a people in spite of them, brought to mind many stories I've read of Bangladesh. And it makes me consider what things would have been like if that war, so close to my heart, had turned out differently. I would, perhaps, be a British Pakistani right now, with a green and red flag stowed away in a suitcase, my soul, under occupation. And in turn, I wonder how it must be to be Igbo in Nigeria today, to have known autonomy, and then to go back to being a minority - but now more exposed and scrutinised than ever before.

I realise this isn't much of a review. I haven't spoken about the plot in anything but the most general terms, I haven't mentioned a single character. But perhaps it is testament to the novel that this is so (especially given that the last time I was so stunned by a novel, it was with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel so great I could never bring myself to write about it). But I will write on it, and, I hope, from it. Like Guillermo de Toro with Pan's Labyrinth, with Half A Yellow Sun, Ngozi Adichie has also shown me a way of telling history that one day I hope will inspire me to write Bangladesh's story, just as Achebe and Chinodya guided her.

Sometimes, I find the work of picking apart books to be so remote from the world that it depresses me. Sometimes theories that justify humanities research in terms of ways to comprehend the complexities of that world only seem like empty funding-application-speak, merely to justify our salaries. And then I read books like Half A Yellow Sun, and remember.

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly

I finished this book yesterday. It was another serendipitous charity shop find, and I confess that I was initially attracted to it because of its Rob Ryan-illustrated cover (one of my favourite graphic artists). But on further inspection, it turned out that the book including its charming, quirky cover and graphics could have had "For the Postcolonial Rabbit" written all over it in Rob Ryan's lovely handwriting. An adult fairytale about childhood grief, featuring a dark, often terrifying fantasy world that draws heavily on Grimm's Fairytales, Angela Carter and Hans Christian Andersen, this was just my cup of tea.

Actually, in parts, it was too scary for me and I had several nightmares during the course of reading. (I am a wuss when it comes to horror and scary stuff in general and probably shouldn't have read it so late at night just before sleeping). Yesterday, in the final pages, Bartimaeus called me and I jumped out of my skin!

I did enjoy it though - and I suppose I'm starting to understand why some modes of terror can be pleasurable (I've never been able to understand that, until Pan's Labyrinth came along. I've always refused to watch scary films but I can't resist its dark, tragic beauty, and it is one of my favourite films). Anyway, The Book of Lost Things is in a similar vein, and I think it would make an incredible Guillermo del Toro film. There were some episodes in this novel that I think would make for fantastic cinema.

But it's the episodic, quest-orientated nature of the novel that I also found somewhat wanting. The story follows David, a boy grieving for his mother in WW2 England, into a dark alternate world, where he has to complete a quest to find the Book of Lost Things, and find his way home. On his way, David meets both friends and horrific, terrifying foes. I think the strongest part of the novel were the fairytales that David stumbles into, which were wonderfully realised. Whilst the overarching narrative structure was weak (I didn't feel that David's journey was particularly urgent, and the connection between the two worlds was laboured rather than executed with the panache exhibited by China Mieville in Un Lun Dun) the fairytales had a tightness of form that made me wonder if the novel had been produced from a series of short stories strung somewhat clumsily together. In addition, the prose, striving to be pared and simplistic, is often merely workmanlike, and this renders what could have been truly wondrous merely a fun ride. Connolly is no Carter. While there's darkness a-plenty, the magic is scant.

As a result, although the novel is about coming to terms with the death of a parent, I didn't feel as moved as I think I should have done (particularly given I've lived through this experience recently). In fact, I think Rowling renders grief and the process of living with it, with more emotional clarity. But for the grownup fairy stories, and the illustrations, overall, I would recommend this to fans of fantasy fiction. Connolly's is a dark, nightmarish world that is interesting to visit, even if one isn't compelled to remain.

Animal's People, Indra Sinha

My first postcolonial post!

I finished this a couple of days ago, and whilst I mostly had my "fun" reading hat on whilst reading it, I also kept straying into thinking about it in terms of work.

First off, it's fantastic and I heartily recommend it. Animal's People is based vaguely upon the Bhopal chemical disaster, for which the multinational Union Carbide has evaded charges of corporate manslaughter for over 25 years. In spite of the subject matter it is caustically funny, engaging and also, in parts, affecting. It has some sharply satirical, politicised teeth. And I'm tempted, now, to write about it.

Particularly in conjunction with the project I start work on in October. The project is based at Kent, led by Caroline Rooney and called Radical Distrust:Radical Distrust: A Cultural Analysis of the Emotional, Psychological and Linguistic Formations of Religious and Political Extremism. The project aims to examine the breakdown in trust between citizen/state in the postcolonial period, arguing that this breakdown results in a rise in extremism, oppression and violence from both sides. Regions to be looked at include: Southern Africa, Israel/Palestine and Egypt. It's a fascinating premise and I'm excited to be part of it as Research Associate.

I was thinking about the project vaguely whilst reading Animal's People, and another text - Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In tone, the two novels are very different. But they both develop a similar narrative conceit, positioning the reader very self-consciously as the "Western" "Other" and both, to me, seem to address this notion of radical distrust (the way the narrative technique specifically works to explore this idea is something I'd like to explore in detail). Except, what's striking is that in both texts, the "state," is a noticeable absence. Rather, the confrontation at the heart of both novels is between the very local and the giant multinational (the big US corporation that the narrator works for in RF, the Kampani in AP). In both, the "nation-state" is seen as remote, out of touch with local needs and impotent against the force of global capital.

This doesn't necessarily contradict the argument of the project - in fact, the nation-state's apparent remoteness may confirm that a near-irreparable breakdown in trust has taken place, to the point where it hardly figures at all in its citizens' lives (but I'm hesitant to really assert this due to my own ideological leanings). But I think it does call for a closer examination of how the flows of global capital have impacted upon the relationship of trust that exists between citizen and state. If the state makes promises to its citizens, only for these to be dashed by multinationals, where is the frustration and violence that is provoked directed? If multinationals exert pressure on the state to control its citizens' behaviour, can the state protect its citizens' freedoms, or must it yield?

Stuff for further thought...