Introduction
Colonialism and racism themes were abundantly explored for both fiction and non-fiction written works. It has evolved, from mere documentation or forms of studies to a sophisticated genre of science-fiction books and movies. However, colonialism and racism are not mere topics of personal or individual liking, such as finding a “muse” in mundane, everyday occurrences or objects. It is a form of political aesthetic that graced, if not served as the focus of many literary works that have survived generations and crossed boundaries of audience.
This paper will try to expound on the relevance of real-life politics, of colonialism and racism, with regards to two popular works of fiction that used as themes or backdrop colonialism and racism. The two novels chosen for this paper are J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Andrea Levy’s Small Island.
Discussion
Common formal (aesthetic) Politics
For most authors of fiction, politics is an ingrained aesthetic that dresses up humanity so that it becomes a necessity all throughout a narrative. According to Jo Bran, politics in fiction is “…everything that involves who gets to do what to whom… Politics really has to do with how people order their societies,” (Nadel, 1990, p 252).
In Coetzee’s Foe, the writer takes inspiration from “adventures” or misadventures of “Whites” or Caucasians in their sea voyages as colonizers of exotic, far-away places. It is inspired as well as linked to Robinson Crusoe, a 1719 novel regarded as the earliest most commercially successful novel in English, authored by Daniel Defoe. Coetzee uses Susan Barton, an English, who sets out to find her kidnapped daughter in the New World. Here, a woman’s voice is already used to present a “history” — political in content and usage. Her voyage brought her some adventures including meeting a ship captain who would be slain. She as the mistress remains a secondary voice to a leader captain, who remained a memory.
As Susan Barton implored Foe,
”The island was Cruso’s (yet by what right? by the law of islands? is there such a law?), but I lived there too, I was no bird of passage, no gannet or albatross, to circle the island once and dip a wing and then fly on over the boundless ocean. Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty. For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend it is otherwise). To tell the truth, in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through, and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades. I have none of these, while you have all,” (p 26, quoted from Donoghue, 2009).
She was brought to shore on the island of Robinson Cruso where she meets the man and Friday. There are several layers of “control” in this island scenario: that of an already “bigger” character Robinson, and a lesser character Friday who is a “native” representing the “conquered”. Susan is sandwiched in-between a “colonizer” or as a secondary voice, as a woman. A colonizer has always been regarded as a white male, but in Foe, although Susan is not a colonizer, she as a white female has been rubbed off the identity as colonizer to a lesser degree.
Her being a “superior” person, or as “colonizer” however, is highlighted with her close work and encounter with the tongue-less Friday. She is forever void of information by Friday’s tongue decapitation, wondering how it came to be. With Friday, comparisons of the levels of being able to hear or to voice out one’s self take three levels: a male’s voice and always be a colonizer’s voice, Susan having her voice, although not as authoritative as a male could be, or that of Friday, forever voiceless, and heard only through his futile acted out voice, actions, or even dancing.
The three set out to return to England, but Robinson was not able to survive through the voyage back home, of which he remained astute already committed to living out the rest of his days on the island. Susan and Friday met Daniel Foe, a novelist, probably a play on Daniel Defoe. Daniel became her lover. And in his presence, she sought help to get published about her adventures. The two, however, never agreed on what adventures to publish, or highlight.
For many critics, however, the central themes of Foe are perceived as language and authority, of power and voicelessness, presence and insignificance brought throughout the layers of voice, authority, colonized and the colonizers in the persons of Susan Barton, Foe, Friday, and Crusoe. Friday, however, is also seen as the main character that depicted the helplessness of the oppressed, the colonized (McGrath, 1994; Donoghue, 1987, p. 1). And this remained until the demise of all its characters including Susan Barton the main voice.
As Attridge (1993, p 325) noted, he assailed previous observation about Coetzee as an invitation “to contemplate the paradigm f understanding achieved through suffering [of Susan Barton], or models for a future, post-apartheid mode of discourse or conduct… I would want to argue that the haunting quality of Coetzee’s novels comes rather from their denial of conventional ethical models; they are more and less than the allegories by which they first seem to define themselves.”
It was also noted by Barnett (1999, p 290) that South African writers were tied by their location to deal repeatedly with the themes of life in an oppressive society. Race is pointed out as an axis of power and significance and that led to a view that racism is “a historical anachronism, the result of irrational belief systems,” (p 290).
Levy’s Small Island is another narrative of the book’s characters centralized on Victoria Bligh, forever called Queenie, and her “colored” tenants, two of which are Jamaican Gilbert Joseph and his wife Hortense. Another voice came in the form of colonizer Bernard, who was a banker-turned-war soldier who returned demoralized by his superiors and disillusioned about his racial superiority. Here, both colonizers and the colonized are well-represented in a world of change, their lives intertwined interestingly as they all discover the need to adjust their expectations based on their experiences after the war.
Queenie is a light-hearted woman who had to take care of his father-in-law after her husband Bernard disappeared in the war. She took in “colored” immigrants as tenants to make ends meet, unmindful of the neighbors who complained. Gilbert is an air force recruit who served under the British during the war against Hitler. He soon found less interest in his island and went to explore the mainland for opportunities he had imagined could be vast. Hortense thought of the same with her Jamaican teacher diploma. With nose high up, she set out to join her husband in Queenie’s attic. Their set-up was stirred when Bernard finally returned from India after a mutiny based on historical facts.
A bourgeois attitude is imbued by Hortense, having had means, been educated, and having golden skin because of mixed-race parents. She looked down even on “working class” Queenie and the baker who combed his hair with his bare fingers before handling her bread. She soon found that in England, her education hold no importance and that she is soon subjected to racism, already pondered and accepted by Gilbert who became a postal truck driver after giving up his ambition to become a lawyer.
Queenie on the other hand escaped her tedious “butcher” line of her family by marrying Bernard the banker, who soon was stationed in India during the war. She is considered the warmest and most down-to-earth among the protagonists who did not mind walking down the street with a colored Hortense. She, however, directed the Jamaican to step aside when English women came the other way. She also fought to sit beside the colored Gilbert in the theater in another historically-entwined event.
The ear was post-war 1948, when the colonized set out to the United Kingdom, seeking what has been promised by a motherland who had no choice but embrace change spread out and preached in its colonizing days of the east and the Caribbean.
Control and politics in themselves in this novel are widespread and quite humanized if not almost realistic. Racism is all over, whether the color was white or black. Racism and discrimination were a reality that each had to live within a day-to-day existence to survive. For the British Bligh couple, there is only acceptance of change and the integration of their lives to the Jamaicans, or even Africans if their understanding had sought it, like when Queenie declared to her teacher that she went to Africa when Africa was brought to Wembley.
For Gilbert and Hortense Joseph, there is the humbling acceptance of their fate to be discriminated upon in a land of Caucasians, and of the colonizers who could not easily hand it over to immigrants like themselves, to which they, specifically Gilbert, had to ask if London knew him after his faithful service in the war.
Formal characteristics (point of view, symbolism, tone, or genre)
The point of view used in Foe is that of lead character Susan Barton, whose story and history had to be derailed, detracted, and derided by novelist Daniel Foe himself due to her gender. It was, however, the black man and slave Friday’s voicelessness that define postcolonial characteristics in the novel. Much of history about African slaves and eastern colonization has always been seen through the eyes of the colonizer-narrator. The colonized are subjects of study, curiosity, or plain subjugated by a power that was vested by color and self-judgment. Friday’s lack of tongue, with questionable history on how it came to be, encapsulates a phenomenon, a reality that represents the removal of the basic human rights championed by the Christian colonizers.
Post-colonial literature in this context is still much entwined to a long-gone era of centuries-old Robinson Crusoe, although expounded in a way that brutality and inhuman acts are personalized on Friday. By essence, Friday is the soul of the novel. He represents a vast population of African slaves that were treated like mere animals who created noise but had no voice. Susan is constantly bothered by who could have done such atrocity on Friday, and at the same time, she had assumed a responsibility to give voice to Friday (Donoghue, 2009, p. 1). Foe on the other hand believed that “”Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech,” (Donoghue, 2009, p 1) proposing to Susan that writing can substitute Friday’s voice.
The four protagonists in Small Island provided humanized characterization and voices of opposite races that were caught in a web of global change after the war. They all represent a little bit of helplessness about their circumstances, although they have been the ones who made their own choices to be in their actual position. Post-colonial literature in this context is centered on the need to accept changes brought upon by migration, historical movements, the civilization of citizens in a given locality, and the uniqueness of every individual as humans with traits, values, and faults.
As Connor (2003) proposed, “…much of the project of postcolonial literary history depends on a set of globalizing statements about literature’s theoretical relation to imperialism… Nowhere… more problematic than in postcolonial treatments of nineteenth-century British literature which has been a primary subject for such globalizing ever since Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” (pp. 217-218).
Presentation of Minority Subjects
In Foe, the “minority” colored subjects, the savages or prisoners and slaves were presented as distant characters. However, through Friday, they were given a face, a character, and a voice, in a form that has been mutilated, if not prevented through the cutting of his tongue.
Small Island presented the “minority” in already a democratized manner were Hortense and Gilbert had a sense of “equality” to their British counterparts. 1948 is not such a distant past and that information and democracy were already preached throughout occupied islands and territories. This preached democracy was what made the UK attractive to its colonized island citizens so that they set forth to a promised land with high hopes and regard to their adopted brother-colonizers. As Attridge (1993, p322) noted, “…certain idea of British liberalism and justice has represented for many an inspiration for anti-apartheid activism.”
Both texts relegated the “colored” minorities in their actual historical positions but with white protagonists that labored and attempted to ease them through their predicaments. The colonizers, however, as necessary “humanized” characters with an appeal to a wider audience, were made to have their faults, as Queenie being a working-class and Bernard as a disillusioned soldier. Susan Barton, too, was adamant about her ability to write, thus, making her appear with low self-esteem. In general, an “international” audience or literary public consciously helped mold the plot, the backdrop, and the characters of both novels with the view that “literature is a repository of universal humanistic moral values that underwrites this genre of criticism,” (Barnett, 1999, p. 290).
Plausible and Realistic Representation of Colonial Society
According to Stephen Clingman (1991), “…the darkness at the heart of colonial experience may be a certain history of madness,” (p 231). It is also seen as part of history involving the literary realm giving an honest evaluation of the socio-political crises depicting western imperialism in its various forms (Lungphinith, 2004, p 59).
The experiences of migrant Jamaicans Gilbert and Hortense Joseph in Small Island are personally plausible and a realistic representation of colonial society. He was recruited as an air force officer, with equal importance and role as the British members of the armed forces during the war against Hitler. Politically and economically, he was provided the same compensation as with the other recruits of whatever color.
One interesting scenario is of Gilbert seeing the stark difference in the generosity of American bases against the British who were fed of a uniformed, stationary kind of meals, mostly boiled and lacked the taste and appeal of their American meals counterpart.
Another experience of Gilbert about discrimination which is a very strong representation of colonial society is the denial for him to sit beside a white in the theater. His day-to-day work experience at the post office also provided a clear glimpse of the ordinariness of discrimination and the colonial divide between the colonized and the colonizer. One excerpt goes:
“It was the teardrop that splash on my lip, warm with salt, that causes me to stop. She was crying. Steady as a drainpipe, the crystal water ran from her eye. She starts contorting again to hide her face from me. A woman passing by begin staring at us. But it was not a concern for Hortense’s welfare, she was just ready to walk a wide circle around us two. ‘What happens?’ I asked her. ‘Nothing,’ she said. So I tell her, ‘Nothing is a smile, Hortense. You no cry over nothing.’ And the woman screams, ‘Nothing,’ at me again. Man, let her burn. Come, this was probably the first time the woman’s cheek ever felt a tear. She was insufferable! I walked away. Two paces. Then a hesitant third before I turned to look back on her. She was sniveling and trying with all her will not to wipe her nose on her good white glove. I thought to smile when I hear it: Hortense reeling wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand. Man, I was ready to tell her, ‘Pride comes before a fall.’ To leap around her rubbing my hands while singing, ‘Now you see… I tell you so… you listening now.’ But her breath rose in desperate gasps as she mumbling repeated over, ‘They say I can’t teach.’ Come, no pitiful cry from a child awoken rudely from a dream could have melted a hard heart any surer. I guided her to a seat in a little square, she followed me obediently. So did a little scruffy boy whose wide eye perused us all the way. Softly delivered in my ear, Hortense informed me that she was required to train all over again to teach English children… Come, let me tell you, I wanted to tempt these busybodies closer. Beckon them to step forward and take a better look. For then I might catch my hand around one of their scrawny white necks and squeeze. No one will watch us weep in this country,” (Levy, 2004, as quoted from Wattpad, 2009).
As a reader, these views or parts of the literature provide not only an account of daily experiences with other ethnicities. For some times, it is like a different era, when “equality” and cosmopolitanism is a far-fetched idea of an ideal society. It is a little bit difficult to imagine nowadays that a “colored” president, considered as the most powerful man on earth today, has been placed into power by the same colonizers (or most probably the bigger majority of ethnic groups) that rejected the color. So that it is much more effort to imagine the harsh climate provided in Small Island against Gilbert and Hortense Joseph, Jamaicans in mainland Britain. However, their experience before the seating of a “black president” is a reality that many minorities in the United States experienced. This is not only represented in mass media’s print, broadcast, or internet but also in everyday campus life when “other” ethnicities are seen as “troublesome” or difficult to deal with by their white classmates or teachers.
On a personal level, the experience of discrimination is tantamount to racism as society delegates a position for every individual, depending on wealth, authority, or popularity. Those who have less in each of those stated are like Gilbert, or even Friday whose voice is either present but ignored, or entirely ignored or removed. I for one experience this when people around me provide less “attention” or importance on my person or opinion due to lack or presence of wealth, power, or popularity. All of these traits are celebrated and promoted in a western society whose main equation of activities and presence is economically-based. The more you have of wealth, power, or popularity, the more an individual is heard and given importance in society.
In Foe, one realistic depiction of reality is the experiences of Susan needing to be under the mercy of males: the ship captain, Cruso, and later Foe. She had to be protected by the ship captain, in the island shore, taken by Friday to his master Cruso, and with Foe, the need to be her writer-publisher in order to earn and have a voice. Females throughout time have to struggle with male dominance in society, such as the so-called glass ceiling in employment, domestic violence, marital subjugation, and other gender issues experienced inside and outside their domain called “home”. Motherhood, for quite some time now, has been acknowledged of its importance in rearing better citizens of a society, but in a global perspective, there is still a continuing clamor by females to be provided not only lip-service but concrete acts supported by male-dominated institutions such as business organizations, churches or governments.
Relationship between Colonialism and Racism in Authors’ works
For Coetzee’s Foe, he has segued an 18th century colonialism period in a post-colonial globalization view. Here, Coetzee sanitized the atrocities and barbarism, with little differences on who’s doing which between the colonized and the colonizers by cutting African Friday’s tongue. As Donoghue (2009) noted, “But if ”Foe” presents Coetzee in a new tone, it still maintains continuities of pattern and implication with the earlier novels. Mr. Coetzee has long been occupied with political or administrative systems and the people they exclude or fail to contain.”
On the other hand, Levy has sanitized colonialism and racism in a manner in which the colonized and the colonizer mingle as equals in a society that did want to believe the races or ethnicities are equal when in reality and in Levy’s novel, they were not equals.
The relationship between colonialism and racism in Foe is a practice and belief about the lowliness of the colonized as beings no higher than mammals that need to be tamed and domesticated. Depicted as prisoners and cannibals, the colonized are domesticated through the person of Friday: with the removed tongue to be subdued. Meanwhile, on Levy’s Small Island, the relationship between colonialism and racism has evolved into a 21st century view in consideration of “civilization” that societies have started to polish.
Colonialism in literature at most depicted the psychological ordeals that writers face in clashing cultures and prerogatives. In its simplicity, there is only the colonial state: “a simple binary between a “white” Europe and a “black” frontier … identity is no longer (and perhaps never was) simply a problem of seeing one group in exact opposition to a racial “other.” (Luangphinith, 2004, p. 60). Donoghue (2009) added, “Coetzee’s novels imply is that every colonial society is caught between a past so seemingly changeless that it may be conceived as beyond time and history, and a present moment entirely given over to power, empire, history and the systems that further those interests,” (p 1).
It was noted in the authors’ biographies that they had first-hand experience and learning about colonialism and racism. For Coetzee, as a white South Afrikaan where power meant color and segregation is plain black and white. For Levy with Jamaican parents migrating to London, it is about growing up as “black” in a neighborhood of whites. These personal experiences and actual encounters provide a big influence and impact on their works. It adds human values and appeal to flawed personalities where a wider audience may realize upon themselves, thus, establishing a universal link that may or may not directly involve colonialism and racism.
Luangphinith (2004) suggested that colonialism is “as bureaucratic as it is ideological, is legitimated and enforced through the rational identification of various elements in society and in the institutions that are created to recognize the differences among those elements,” (p. 61). As such, both can be said about Levy and Coetzee who had to both plays the role of the colonizer and the colonized, the discriminated upon and the discriminator. Weaving in and out of four major characters, Levy was Queenie and Bernard Bligh, white working-class British who, although imperfect, acted superior against their Jamaican tenants. Levy was Gilbert and Hortense Joseph, first captivated to Britain for the understanding of a society with equal opportunities, and soon to find out that it was not. Coetzee was Susan the adamant writer secondary only to the white male characters with initial imposing personalities but later on, depicted as weak and imperfect. Coetzee probably had to feel Friday’s pain, restrictions, and limitations as one without a tongue. Because only through inner knowledge and understanding of different personalities do authors are capable to establish the identity and uniqueness of each novel’s character.
Conclusion
Colonialism and racism are depicted in form as an understanding and experience of the authors in their works of fiction. At most, the themes are expounded based on history, reality, and the rich repository of the human imagination. Truth, however, as it was popularly acknowledged is “stranger than fiction,” so that even in closely depicted fictions like Foe of Coetzee and Small Island of Levy, it is difficult to separate fiction from truth.
The genius in writers like Coetzee and Levy, however, provided a platform for better understanding and interest on colonialism and racism in two different eras, plot and point of view. One links with an old colonial tale of the exploration period while another connects with the more recent historical events of the Second World War. Both British in reference of origin for the colonizer, Coetzee had an African slave as the colonized, therefore discriminated upon. Foe’s voice, however, used that of the British woman Susan Barton, another “secondary” voice in the strata of societal power and authority. Levy on the other hand had Jamaican migrants to the motherland whose lives were intertwined with working-class British who had their own evils and weaknesses to deal with, aside of course from discrimination and racism inherent in their present society.
Differences of gravity of colonialism and racism issues, however, varied as the two stories had their setting at a wide distance: Foe was set in circa 1700s while Small Island was set after the war, right when globalization is becoming a trend among keen observers of international relations and movements.
Colonialism and racism will continue to be depicted in personal and ethnic struggles both in reality and in fiction but like the novels presented here, these will evolve in form, substance, as well as impact, taken from individual or general population point of views. They will be depicted as individual experiences that will break national boundaries to engage a wider audience, but will continue pounding on the writers’ imagination and stacks of personal accounts that are lifted from reality.
References
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- Attridge, Derek. “Review: Coetzee in Context Reviewed work: A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context by Susan Vanzanten Gallagher,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 3, African Literature, pp. 321-323, 1993
- Nadel, Alan. “Listen to the Voices: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, and: Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature, and: Reminiscence and Recreation in Contemporary American Fiction, and: The Modern American Novella (review).” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 36, Number 2, pp. 251-254; 1990.
- Luangphinith, Seri Inthava Kau-ikealaula. “Tropical Fevers: “Madness” and Colonialism in Pacific Literature.” The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 16, Number 1, 2004, pp. 59-85
- McGrath, Patrick (1994). “To Be Conscious Is to Suffer”. New York Times, 1994, Late Edition – Final.
- Donoghue, Denis (1987). “Her Man Friday“. The New York Times: p. Section 7; Page 1; Web.
- O’Connor, Erin. “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism.” Victorian Studies, Volume 45, Number 2, pp. 217-246, 2003.
- Wattpad. “Small Island by Andrea Levy: Excerpts”.