Exploring Postcolonial Literature: Themes, Authors, and Controversies

Postcolonial Writers and Themes

African Writers

• Buchi Emecheta - The Joys of Motherhood (Lagos, Nigeria)
• Wole Soyinka - Telephone Conversation / The Lion and... (Nigeria)
• Niyi Osundare - Not My Business (Nigeria)
• Gabriel Okara - Once Upon a Time / Spirit of the Wind (Nigeria)
• Nadine Gordimer - WSA - The Train of Rhodesia (South Africa)

Caribbean Writers

• Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place (Antigua)
• Dolores Prida - Coser y Cantar (Cuba)
• V.S. Naipaul - "The Mystic Masseur" / "The Suffrage of Elvira" (Trinidad and Tobago)
• Derek Walcott - "Dream on Monkey Mountain" (Saint Lucia)

Indian Writers

• Salman Rushdie
• Bharati Mukherjee - The Management of Grief
• Arundhati Subramaniam - The Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian
• Rabindranath Tagore

Other Writers

• Alice Munro - Fiction (Canada)
• Fernando Pessoa - 35 Sonnets (Portugal)

Fernando Pessoa's Sonnets

• He wrote 35 Shakespearean sonnets.
• Rhyme pattern: Shakespearean sonnet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
• Themes:
  • Whatever we do is useless.
  • What we shall of ourselves people deny.
  • We can't connect what we have (bridge).
  • We can only express one part of what we are.
  • We are what other people dream of us.
  • No African correction/mention in this poem.

• Calderón de la Barca - La vida es sueño - Life is about a dream and dreams are just dead.

Problems with the Term "Postcolonial Literature"

• Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are best-selling authors, but there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty as to what the term "postcolonial" denotes.
• "Postcolonial literature" (PSL) seems to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other nations, but there are many problems with this definition.
• Binary Opposition/Representation: It's a sarcastic label for subjugated countries, ruled by the UFC by their own indigenous governments.
• Misleading: Colonialism is over when in fact most of the nations involved are still culturally and economically subordinated to rich industrial states through various forms of neocolonialism, even though they are technically independent.
• Post-Eurocentric: It can be argued that this way of defining a whole era is Eurocentric, that it singles out the colonial as the most important fact about the countries involved.

Topics in Postcolonial Literature

1. Anger Against Colonialism: Nigerian poet and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's masterful irony skillfully conceals anger at the racist attitude in his famous poem "Telephone Conversation." After negotiating for a house rent on the telephone, he tells the landlady of his being Black African. He was rudely shocked when he was 'caught...foully' by the lady's query regarding his darkness: "How dark?"
2. Idealization of Africa: One of the most important phrases in African poetry is "Negritude," a powerful literary movement founded by Aimé Césaire of Martinique. They worshipped anything African in scintillating rhymes. David Diop's poem...
3. Clash of Different Cultures: Piano and drums. Culture shock.
4. Pessimism: Images that can evoke a situation beyond hope which are reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's war poetry visible in K. Brew's poem "The Search: The Past is..."
5. Optimism: The memorable lines of Peter's poem "On a Wet September Morning" with their sheer beauty of imagery and the underlying thought of universal brotherhood celebrate the oneness of the human family.
6. African poetry is not small because it is different.