The Predicament of Post-Colonial Hybridity: ‘A Grain of Wheat’ and ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’

Over the approximate four hundred-year period of its reign, the British Empire lay claim to land on all five continents, shaping the course of history.[1] Colonisation was a ‘lucrative commercial operation’, which desired to ‘create and control markets abroad’ and secure ‘natural resources and labour-power […] at the lowest possible cost.’[2] However, imperial forces inevitably brought with them far more than trade and industry alone when invading or ‘civilising’ foreign lands; imports also included the culture, language, religion, and values of the mother country.  These influences occur in the ‘contradictory and ambivalent’ ‘contact zone’ of colonisation, facilitating the creation of new ‘transcultural forms’ in which ‘linguistic, cultural, political, racial,’ and other forms of hybridisation arise.[3] Robert Young offers the simplified view that hybridity ‘implies a disruption and forcing together of any unlike living things’,[4] whilst Homi Bhabha stresses the ‘interdependence’ of ‘colonizer / colonized relations.’[5] While hybridity has frequently been described as ‘simply [a] cross-cultural “exchange”’, this definition has been criticised for ‘negating and neglecting the imbalance and inequality of the power relations’[6] involved in colonial situations and discourse. The complex aspects to, and results of, hybridity are key components in post-colonial literary discourse and theory, and it is these that I will explore in this paper.

In many senses, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a hybrid author. Born in 1938 in colonial Kenya and baptised ‘James’, he was educated at independent Gĩkũyũ and Christian mission primary schools.[7] He studied at a Ugandan university college, where his specialist subject was Joseph Conrad, and at Leeds University in England.[8] He read widely during his youth, ‘especially the novels of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Leo Tolstoy, in addition to popular thrillers’,[9] and wrote his early works in English, ‘a language’, Oliver Lovesey points out, ‘few of his fellow Kenyans would be able to read.’[10] Ngũgĩ’s uncensored political themes led to his exile from Kenya in 1982; he subsequently lived and taught in Britain and America.[11] This culturally varied education and career, Lovesey argues, places Ngũgĩ in the ‘ambivalent position of the postcolonial intellectual’, in which individuals are associated with ‘Europe and the colonizers’, and culturally distanced ‘from the majority of the people.’[12] This view conflicts with that of the bolekaja critics, Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike, who argued that the ‘historical and cultural imperatives [of African Literature] were radically different from and sometimes quite antithetical to those of Europe’[13] in an apparent refusal ‘to concede that the historical fact of colonialism inevitably leads to a hybridization of culture.’[14]

This hybridisation is evident in what is arguably Ngũgĩ’s most important novel, A Grain of Wheat, which Simon Gikandi likens to Frantz Fanon’s (a French-Algerian writer from Martinique) critique of decolonisation, The Wretched of the Earth (date). Gikandi states that this was where Ngũgĩ ‘discovered the politics of socialism and the grammar for representing colonialism.’[15] Fanon viewed decolonisation as ‘an arrested moment […] an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been’,[16] and in A Grain of Wheat this socialist portrayal of a disappointed and disillusioned people is offered from the very opening epigraph: ‘the situation and the problems are real – sometimes too painfully real for the peasants who fought for the British yet who now see all that they fought for being put on one side.’[17] On the same introductory page, and later throughout the novel, Ngũgĩ quotes passages from the bible. The epigraph, ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die’,[18] stresses the importance of sacrifice for growth or regeneration, and needless to say, has obvious Christian overtones. Similarly, while celebrating their uhuru (freedom), Ngũgĩ describes the villagers as mixing ‘Christmas hymns with songs and dances only performed during initiation rites when boys and girls are circumcised into responsibility as men and women’ (p. 200). This combination of cultures suggests Ngũgĩ and his characters have internalised these Christian values, which were originally spread throughout Kenya by colonialists.  

Lovesey argues that these Christian references are one of A Grain of Wheat’s stylistic features that tie it to ‘the tradition of the European novel.’[19] He lists Ngũgĩ’s use of ‘recurring motifs and images’, ‘many references to weather’, ‘extensive and poetically charged descriptions of landscape’ and ‘an elevated sensual awareness of nature […] associated with an intense psychical longing’ as other characteristics common to A Grain of Wheat and European works.[20] The last of these features relates to Gikonyo’s first intimate encounter with Mumbi: ‘Gikonyo never forgot the scene in the wood; while in detention, yearning for things and places beyond the reach of help, he lived in detail every moment of that experience’ (p. 97). After this juxtaposition, he likens the moment to ‘as if [he] had made a convent with God to be happy’ (p. 97). Lovesey links this to the work of D. H. Lawrence, who ‘Ngũgĩ admired when contemplating his novel.’[21] These religious and stylistic features echo Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s claim, quoted earlier, that ‘colonialism inevitably leads to a hybridization of culture.’[22]

This notion can also be explored on more of a micro-level by examining characters in A Grain of Wheat, and they ways in which (de)colonisation has affected them. Karanja’s place in the novel, for instance, sees a complete inversion from oath-taking member of the Mau Mau movement, to colonial officer and ‘traitor.’ He recalls ’the many men, terrorists, he and other homeguards led by their white officers, [have] shot dead’, recollecting that ‘when he shot them, they seemed less like human beings and more like animals’ (p. 225); and when he learns of the departure of his white superior, John Thompson, from Kenya, Karanja is seized by ‘panic’ and ‘would have loved to suddenly vanish from the earth’ (p. 156). Furthermore, he becomes ‘scared of black power’, fearing ‘those men who had ousted the Thompsons and had threatened him’ (p. 225). When asked of his plans for uhruru day, he replies ‘I don’t know. Nothing…’ and later asks ‘Who is Mugo?’ when told everyone is anticipating him speaking (p. 155), indicating an unawareness and apparent disinterest or resentment in the transition to independence.  Earlier in the novel, Thompson recounts his belief that ‘to be English was basically an attitude of mind’ and ponders ‘reorientat[ing] people into this way of life by altering their social and cultural environment’ (p. 53). This, it seems, is what has been attempted with, and by, Karanja. The assimilation of colonial behaviour is discussed in Homi Bhabha’s essay “Of Mimicry and Man”: Bhabha suggests that mimicking imperial masters can lead colonialized people to become ‘appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command’, or what he terms ‘authorized versions of otherness.’[23] However, Bhabha also repeats Jacques Lacan’s assertion that ‘mimicry is like camouflage,’ and points out the ‘difference between being English and being Anglicized.’[24] Karnja’s internalisation and mimicry has made him hybridised, to the extent that he has ‘no simple possibility for asserting a pre-colonial past’.[25] This could explain the fear and detachment[26] Karanja acquires of his fellow ex-colonials, and his ambivalence towards their (and his) uhuru.

Such ambivalence is a common in hybridised colonial communities. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin comment on the ‘complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between the colonizer and colonized’, stating: ‘the relationship is ambivalent because the colonized subject is never simply and completely opposed to the colonizer.’[27] This uncertain relationship is embodied in the novel by the steam train. Initially regarded as an ‘iron snake’ from which villagers ‘ran for refuge’, it soon becomes ‘the meeting place’, ‘an obsession’ that is ‘longed for’ (p. 70). Here, colonised people have come to accept and almost worship this palpable symbol of colonial influence, indicating ambivalence and incomplete ‘opposition to the colonizer.’ More significantly, however, Gikandi notes that the entire Kenyan independence movement was ‘greeted with a sense of uncertainty and disbelief’,[28] and despite the uhuru celebrations in A Grain of Wheat, the evening before is marked by horrific weather which uproots tress and crops (p. 200), morning celebrations are shrouded by ‘gloom’ (p. 201), and doubts of the post-colonial future (‘would the government now becomes less stringent on those who could not pay tax? Would there be more Jobs? Would there be more land?’) are raised (p. 211). Perhaps what is the most ambivalent aspect of uhuru, however, and maybe of A Grain of Wheat generally, is the role of Mugo. Initially represented as ‘the archetypal subject defined by moral crisis’ and ‘alienation’[29], Mugo goes from ‘village hero’ (p. 175) to a ‘Judas’-like figure when revealing he ‘led Kihika to [be hanged at] his tree’ (p. 218). This reflects Gikandi’s claim that Ngũgĩ uses ‘allegory (the figure that valorizes the authority of ideals)’ and ‘irony (the figure that calls such ideals into question)’ to give ‘colonialism and decolonization a historical form and content’,[30] and it reflects the ambivalence that accompanies colonial hybridity.

Another author that deals with post-colonial hybridity is Dominican writer Jean Rhys. Born in 1890 to Welsh and creole parents, Rhys’s ancestry lay in plantation and slave ownership,[31] and she was a ‘daughter of a colonial island’s ruling class.’[32] Dominica itself was ‘originally a French possession’, which Britain colonised at the end of the eighteenth century.[33] Like Ngũgĩ, Rhys was exposed to diverse cultural influences throughout her youth. She was given a Catholic education in French and had ‘open access’ to the language’s early modern literature, and developed a taste for ‘English romances and mysteries.’[34] She was later educated in England, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and eventually found herself on the fringe of ‘English Bohemia’,[35] before moving between Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and London.[36] Sanford Sternlicht states that Rhys ‘conflates memory, history and momentary sensations’ in her writing, which regards life as a ‘fragmentary, complex, disjointed experience;[37] characteristics which could all be considered typical of hybridised post-colonial writers.

Like Rhys herself, Wide Sargasso Sea’s main character, Antoinette, is white creole with a family history in plantation ownership. The departure of colonists, ‘emancipation troubles’ (p. 13) (largely due to the economics of falling sugar exports[38]), and the death of Antoinette’s father, meant that the family estate and home, Coulibri, ‘had gone wild.’[39] Their previous racial superiority was a result of economic power gained through exploitation of unpaid black labour, which cyclically, stems from colonial racial supremacism.[40] In losing this economic superiority, the status of the Cosway family deteriorates, resulting in Antoinette growing up ‘in an atmosphere of smouldering hatred and recrimination, alternation between poverty and affluence, cultural conflicts and misunderstandings, and the social and economic consequences of emancipation’,[41] and also leading to their fear of the people they once ruled. This fear is validated when Coulibri is attacked and burned in the first part of the novel, where cries of ‘look the black Englishman! Look the white niggers!’ (p. 22) are heard. Earlier, Antoinette mentions the influence of her stepfather, Mr Mason, on the home environment: she recalls eating English food, declaring she ‘was quite glad to be like an English girl but [she] missed the taste of Christophine’s cooking’ (p. 17).  Yet, the opening of the novel repudiates this notion of Englishness: ‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks’ (p. 5). Robert Young notes the nineteenth-century belief that ‘the descendants of mixed-race unions would eventually relapse to one of the original races’,[42] an anxiety evident in Antoinette’s husband fixation with her origins. He remarks: “Creole of pure English decent she may be, but [she is] not English or European either’ (p. 40), and he demands that she ‘play the parts [she] would have in England (p. xviii). As a creole without status of wealth, Antoinette is a hybrid that desires to relate to and mimic two opposing races and cultures, but ultimately, she is accepted by neither; she is an ‘”Other” to all.’[43]

As such, Antoinette exhibits a sense of ambivalence towards her situation reminiscent to that in A Grain of Wheat. Her relationship with black friend Tia, with whom she had ‘eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river’ with (p. 24), is one ‘torn between love and hate’.[44] The pair racially insult one another over three pennies (pp. 9-10), and as Antoinette runs to Tia during the attack on Coulibri, planning to ‘live with [her] and be like her’, she is hit by a stone Tia throws at her (p. 24). Immediately after this, the pair stare at one another, faces wet with tears and with blood, and Antoinette feels ‘It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass’ (p. 24). This is reflected in what Sternlicht terms Antoinette’s ‘double isolation’: she sees herself as and identifies ‘with Blacks, the very people who at the moment are oppressing her’, and is a ‘self-appointed member of the group […] that has rejected her.’[45] This also resonates in Antoinette’s close relationship with her nurse, servant, and friend, Christophine. Because of this ‘surrogate mother’-like bond, Antoinette ‘never hates blacks but respects and even envies Black society and culture’[46] (p. 111) despite its arguably racist and threatening relationship to her.

These ambivalent relationships echo Rhys’s own ‘ambiguous feelings towards Blacks’: she regarded black people as ‘frightening and hostile’, but also ‘friendly and earthy’[47], and is said to have ‘wished to be black’,[48] yet Rhys spent the majority of her life in Europe and, as Sanford Srernlicht states, Paris was ‘the one city Rhys fell in love with’,[49] making her culturally hybrid. However, Rhys’s thoughts on another group, her fellow creoles, are clearer and less ambivalent. After all, her main motivation for writing Wide Sargasso Sea was to ‘write back’ to ‘Jane Eyre’s lurid description of the Creole wife, which reflected nineteenth-century British stereotypes about white Creoles.’[50] In a letter to a friend, Jean Rhys writes that she was ‘Vexed at [Brontë’s] portrait of the “paper tiger” lunatic, [and] the all wrong creole scenes’,[51] and in writing her amalgamation of post-colonial and English canonical novel, Rhys ‘reinvests [her] own hybridized world with an authoritative perspective.’[52] Much of Rhys’s writing, especially depictions of childhood, has ‘centred on white creole children’ and the ‘confused cultural identity and a resulting diminishing sense of self’ that accompanies this existence.[53] This troubled identity is a result of hybridity in both origins and surroundings, which has shaped Rhys’s writing and indeed much of her experience of life. Sternlicht illuminates this in claiming Rhys ‘was creating the character of a Creole mad woman […] and the creation was too close to her own psyche, […] like a prophecy of a potential future Rhys.’[54]

Part of Brathwaite’s concept of creolization focuses on ‘two cultures of people, having to adapt themselves to a new environment and to each other’, and the subsequent ‘friction created by this confrontation’, which he recounts ‘was cruel, but it was also creative.’[55] Creolization is closely linked to hybridity, and this friction is apparent in both A Grain of Wheat and Wide Sargasso Sea, where different cultures adapt to new environments created by the presence and lack of ‘each other.’ It is also necessarily present in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Jean Rhys, and in post-colonial Kenya and the West Indies, in order for the these texts to be produced as they have been. This friction stems from what Bhaha terms ‘translation and negotiation, the inbetween space’, which is what ‘carries the burden of meaning of culture’,[56] and Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin argue that ‘Post-colonial culture is inevitably a hybridized phenomenon.’[57] Bart Moore-Gilbert, however, argues that ‘all cultures are impure, mixed and hybrid’, and cites Bhabha’s admission that ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity.’[58] This, combined with the observations made over the course of this paper, suggests that hybridity is indeed a ‘characteristic predicament of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century’, and is not limited to (post-)colonial texts. However, this conclusion is not without its issues. Moore-Gilbert indicates that ‘doctrines of hybridity perhaps do not take sufficient cognizance of those who resist the vision it inscribes’,[59] and it could be argued that novelists must incorporate European and canonical elements into their work and selves, if they wish to be considered seriously, especially in terms of western academic literary theory. This could indicate that, although hybrid post-colonial texts are clearly accepted and discussed as valid forms of literature, the legacy of empire is ever-present in the form of cultural imperialism.

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Bibliography:

Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, B., and Tiffin, H., Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2^nd edn. London: Routledge, 2000).

Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, B., and Tiffin, H., eds, The Empire Writes Back. (2^nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002).

Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, B., and Tiffin, H., eds, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2nd London: Routledge 2009).

Bhabha, H. K., The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 2008).

Brathwaite, E. K., ‘Creolization in Jamaica’, in Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, B., and Tiffin, H., eds, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2nd London: Routledge 2009).

Diedrick, K., Funk, M., and Davidowitz, S., Emancipation in the British Colonies: The History in Wide Sargasso Sea, <http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/eng/s05/eng224-01/wikis/Group-2/index.html> (accessed 24 January 2013).

Gikandi, S., Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Gregg, V. M., Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

James, L., ‘The Other Side of the Mirror: The Short Stories of Jean Rhys and Oliver Senior, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 3: 3 (2003) pp. 193-198.

Lazarus, N., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Lovesey, O., Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (New York: Twayne, 2000).

McLeod, J., Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

Moore-Gilbert, B., Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso, 1997).

Ngũgĩ, w. T., A Grain of Wheat (London: Penguin, 2002).

ní Fhlathúin, Máire, ‘The British Empire’, in McLeod, J., ed., The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (London: Routledge, 2007).

Rhys, J., Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1997).

Savory, E., The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Sternlicht, S., Jean Rhys (New York: Twayne, 1997).

 Young, R., ‘The Cultural Politics of Hybridity’, in Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, B., and Tiffin, H., eds, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2nd London: Routledge, 2009).

LL645

The Management of Grief: The High-Rise Writes Back

by

Matt de Sousa

I stare at the handful of unfamiliar coins and step aboard the bus. I am transported to two places. The route home to Agincourt is the same as ever, but the broken air conditioning brings a heat that takes me home to Punjab. There are few seats free, but I find one beside a woman I recognise. She has lived here longer than us. She comments on the heat but leaves her indigo sari in place. We make small talk: events on the estate, food prices… the absence of one topic leaves an uncomfortable gap in conversation. “Have you… heard anything?” she asks, apprehensive but eager. It has been three weeks; the rumours were spread within days. “Their boys were on the plane”, they say, “Killed by their own”.

 The bus pulls away and I walk through the car park, the two light bags of shopping in hand (we have become incredibly frugal since the accident). Some young men from the estate play cricket. I imagine Aman and Saihaj playing with them, as they did when we first moved in. My aching face forms a delicate smile; “they will be back at the wickets in no time”, I think to myself, and I wipe the moisture from the corner of my eye before it fully forms.

In the corridors, each closed door leaks dribs of culture. Hindi, Punjabi, English, Cantonese, and French catch my ears. Onion, turmeric, cardamom, and Sichuan pepper fill my nose. I brush shoulders with residents of different ages, different origins, but all are equipped with a polite smile. Some have the same inquisitive look as my fellow passenger earlier, but most show simply friendliness and compassion. The news is abuzz with the words ‘Sikh bomb’, but our diverse neighbourhood remains home to one and all. Inside the apartment, my husband sits beside the oil lamp (we stopped using the electric lights once the letters started arriving; letters with unknown words and numbers in red). I notice the anticipative look beneath his striking long hair, and immediately hand him the Canadian Punjabi Post from one of the shopping bags. He hurriedly but pensively skims through it, as he religiously has everyday since the accident.

I enter the kitchen and put away the groceries. I use only one cupboard.  “You ought to get ready, we’ll have company soon”, I remind my husband. “I’m reading the paper. And besides I’m tired of this government woman bothering us, we have enough of these English letters. Everybody will get their money.” Except there is no money. The boys take responsibility for most of our Canadian life. Everything is in their names, and even if it weren’t, we wouldn’t know how to manage things ourselves. Such bureaucracy is entirely new to us. All that is to be taught gradually, as soon as they return. If they return. The government woman assumes our boys are dead. She wants us to sign papers and believe the same. I do not care whether she wishes to give money, take money, or otherwise. It is a parent’s duty to hope.