The poems North and South by Derek Walcott and Lu Xun’s Upstairs reflect unique traditions and cultural values of the authors and their relations with the outside world. The poems depict hat physical segregation and badges imposed by white majority to mark them as minorities reinforced these feelings of exclusiveness. There is no neutral ideological ground upon which majority could meet, no religion of humanity that they shared. Individuals are wholly the one or the other. Thesis Walcott and Lu Xun reflect the culture they originate in through the concept of identity and the self.
In both poems, the concept of identity is emphasized by the authors as the core of their personality and a link with the past. Walcott states that few are the instances of individuals who could maintain a subjective consciousness of being no longer, or only minimally, a black despite the objective mark placed on all members of the “race.” The more common response was to look inward at an interior landscape that had long ago grown barren. Walcott describes himself as :” a colonial upstart at the end of an empire / a single, homeless, circling satellite” (Walcott). Similar ideas are expressed by Lu Xun who describes her Chinese identity and relations with the past. It is possible to say that both authors call for a revitalized community that would be capable of compensating in some measure for the loss of identity. Whereas a unique national identity is for most people either a religiously based morality or a loose bond of ethnic solidarity, the rise in awareness of the racial envy produced in many individuals a much more determined cultural uniqueness and the self.
The poems portray that the culture the authors originate in is a part of their self and their past. For existing forms of identity it is cultural awareness that offered the most serious challenge. For Derek Walcott the self is not principally a matter of externals. It is less a question of altering the conditions under which black people lived than of transforming the race themselves. Walcott writes “I prefer the salt freshness of the ignorance as language crusts and blackens the spots” (Walcott). The narrator intendeds that wide-ranging intellectual creativity would characterize Chinese culture depicted by Lu Xun. The friend compares herself with bees: “When I was a kid, I used to think that bees and flies were absurd and pathetic. … Who could have imagined that someday, having made my own small circle, I would fly back too? And who would ever have expected that you would do the same thing? Couldn’t you have managed to fly a little farther away?” (Lu Xun). The author is not willing to accommodate within Chinese culture any values that the narrator regards as wholly alien to the moral orientation of Chinese identity. The notion that the character qualities of the Chinese would have to change – and not simply their ideology – is present from the very beginnings of the self understanding. It had robbed the Chinese of their self-respect, their human dignity, and their national will. The restoration of nationhood therefore required a psychological transformation. Only after the Chinese and blacks themselves changed could they hope to transform their condition in the world.
In sum, North and South by Derek Walcott and Lu Xun’s Upstairs depict that national identity and the Self determination are the main concepts which help people to survive and keep their cultural traditions. Insofar, it set itself against all forms of identity and provided a parallel in national form to the individual aspirations of white majority, who likewise sought to minimize black and Chinese differences.
Works Cited
- Walcott, D. North and South. Norton Anthology of World Literature Volume F.
- Lu Xun. Upstairs. Norton Anthology of World Literature Volume F.