The prominent characteristic of postcolonial writing is the incorporation of writing back or rewriting history into the narrative from the point of view of the colonized. Postcolonial narratives speak out and attempt to expose the injustices of dominant culture often within their own cultural system. Within this framework, many female authors give agency to the once silenced female voice of the colonized. By employing their own narratives, many postcolonial female authors demystify the prescribed ideologies thrust upon them by a patriarchal culture while at the same time expressing their own sense of loss of cultural identity. Therefore, postcolonial literature applies a counterdiscourse that depicts the realities and struggles of …show more content…
In Hindu culture, the sex of a baby is more significant than in western cultures. In eastern countries, boys are revered and cherished while girls are considered “curses” since being born a girl brought to the father the burden of paying a dowry. This type of gender hierarchy is exemplified in Mukherjee’s novel by Jasmine’s statement, “I had a ruby-red choker of a bruise around my neck and a sapphire fingerprints on my collarbone after my birth. When I revealed this to Taylor’s wife, […] she missed the point and shrieked at my ‘foremothers’ […]. My mother was a sniper. She wanted to spare me the pain of a dowryless bride” (Mukherjee 40). Mukherjee utilizes Jasmine’s nonchalant description of her near death experience coupled with her rationalization to show that the brutal treatment of baby girls is a common occurrence in her culture. Conversely, the reaction of Taylor’s wife is a metaphor for the western perception that the conduct of Jasmine’s mother is a form of barbarism. By using Jasmine’s birth, Mukherjee exposes the realties of a male patriarchal society in which girls bring considered dilemmas to families.
Many postcolonial writers include how the natives’ land was overtaken by force and as a result, the natives had to change their identity to conform to the colonial power. While Jasmine relates her story about living in the native village Hasnapur, she tells the reader that she is married at the age of fourteen
In this short video and article on the topic of gendercide, reporter Elizabeth Vargas travels to India to found out from the people of India personally why there is such a shortage of females. She discovered that although aborting a fetus of a female child is illegal because of the shortage of females, families still continue to abort them because they don't want the burden that the baby girls brings. Vargas also discovered that illegal sex determination clinics can be found just about on every street. Men and their families also the wives to have sex determination tests and abort the baby if it’s female.
Mahasweta Devi’s short story, “Giribala,” is about the life of Giribala, a girl of Talsana village located in India. Born into a caste in a time when it was still customary to pay a bride-price, Giri is sold to Aulchand by her father. From this point on, we see a series of unfortunate, tragic events that take place in Giri’s life as a result of the circumstances surrounding Giri’s life. There are many issues in Giri’s life in India that Devi highlights to readers. First, the economic instability of the village leads to an extremely poor quality of life for the lower, working classes. Next, the cruel role of women determined by men in society is to either satisfy the sexual desires of men or to reproduce offspring who can work or be sold off to marriages. There are also other social norms and beliefs which discriminate against women that will be discussed.
This paper attempts to examine the fictional projections of Indian girls, to see how they emerge in ideological terms. Their journeys from self-alienation to self-adjustment, their childhood struggles against the hypocrisies and monstrosities of the grown-up world, eventually demolishing the unjust male constructed citadels of power that hinder their progress- are the highlighted issues. The point of comparison between the two novels focused on here is the journey of Rahel in The God of Small Things and Sai in The Inheritance from a lonely childhood to a tragic adulthood passing through a struggle with the complex forces of patriarchal society. Both the novels portray the imaginativeness, inventiveness, independence, rebelliousness, wide-eyed wonder and innocence associated with these young girls.
For this essay I have chosen to use the identity lens for the postcolonial theory review. There are three literary works I will be analyzing: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tempest, and The Heart of Darkness. Each of these literary works introduces us to characters dealing with struggles impacting identities. The identity lens will show the connection between the colonizers and colonized and better define the struggles of the colonizer.
Postcolonial critiques of literary works are often accomplished by reading and interpreting the work with a specific theme in mind or a ‘lens’. By allowing oneself to use a ‘lens’ when reading specific works, it allows the reader to interpret the effects of the themes and the changes throughout the writings. The goal of the critical lens is to seek to understand the behavior of characters or the society ("Post Colonialism," 2016). A few of the most popular themes used to view literary works are identity, oppression and power; applying this ‘lens’ can give the reader a different perspective and experience while reading the writings.
In spite of the fact that the story is particularly about a West Indian mother's "sex preparing" her youthful little girl for her approaching female household part, it could be about any family, about any culture, and about any pre-adult girl's association with her mom. Its objectives, restrictions, mandates, cross examination, "how to's" and allegation propose the all inclusiveness of mother-little girl connections and the certainty
In many works of literature, especially those coming in Africa, Indian, Middle East, we meet characters who are struggling with their identities, culture, religions, submission of other people or country. As we can imagine when you analyze the novels from these countries as we cites the problem of characters are the same as: economic, political, cultural, and emotional effects that colonizer brought and left behind, these are called emotional trauma for the people of these nations cited. The literature asks the readers to enter a text through the post-colonial lens; the chart will help how the approach can be analyzed in reading of a text, the reader would look for the effects of colonialism and how the characters they addressed through of
We live in a society where the similarities between female and males are seen at birth. It begins innocently with the toddlers; girls get pink while boys get blue. The gap between boys and girls develops with time and becomes increasingly apparent. There are still gender stereotypes today, but it is not as bad as it was in the past. Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” perfectly portrays gender stereotypes. It represents gender concepts as cultural constructs in the period it was written. These conceptions are comparable to current stereotypes about gender. The book gives us a list of commands from a mother to a daughter. Men in the society are dominant to the women, and the set of rules is a product of patriarchy whereby the mother and daughter appear as subordinates to the men in their lives. The article makes one aware of the prevailing masculine hierarchy that exists in a family, and how it creates firm gender roles for females in the society.
The immensely heart-throbbing and extremely thought provoking book, Sold, tells the story of a young girl, Lakshmi, who was sold into sexual slavery in India, unintentionally. The story takes place in Nepal where Lakshmi lives with her mother, stepfather, and little brother; times are hard and they have very little. They live in a hut with a mud roof that drips during the raining season, they only have a small portion of land to grow on which is their main source of food, and Lakshmi's stepfather does not work and spends most of their income on himself. For the most part they are able to struggle through and make ends meet, but there comes a time when that’s just not enough anymore. With much reluctance from her mother, Lakshmi and her stepfather agree that she will go work in the city as a maid and send back her earnings for the rest of her family. After leaving her small town and travelling with a lady she is told to call “Auntie”, Lakshmi starts to question “Auntie”s real endeavours with her. When “Auntie” leaves her with a strange man who takes her over the border into India and leaves her at a questionable looking house,
Kamala Markandaya published “Nectar in a Sieve” in 1954 in attempts to enlighten the world about how hard it was to live a rural Indian life in that time period. She tells this story through Rukmani, a woman who was given away in marriage at the age of twelve to a poor tenant farmer that she had never met. Rukmani is very obedient to her husband as she helps him work in the unyielding fields and is a wonderful, caring mother to her seven children. The struggles that Markandaya highlights in her book are not only problems known to a peasant villager, but they are also specific to women. Women’s roles in India during the twentieth century is very different from women’s roles in the United States at that time, and because Rukmani was a woman, she played a silent but necessary part in her culture.
Marked by an intense engagement with the tenuous and ambivalent relationship between mother and daughter, Kincaids protagonist often exhibit simultaneous desire for and rejection of the mothers love. Although Kincaid’s fiction does not extend an explicit political ideology, the ambiguous relationship between mother and child has been read as a symbolic of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized a theme she specifically treats in her collection of nonfiction essays”. The prose that appears in both Kincaids stories ask the question of is it fiction or nonfiction is the reason that establishes her as one of the most innovative contemporary writers of the 20th century (bloom,
A wise man by the name of Revathi Sankaran once said, “If I were asked to define Motherhood. I would have defined it as Love in its purest form. Unconditional Love.” Universally, mothers strive to make their child feel loved, nurtured, and valued. However, the specific ways a mother does this, and the experience of motherhood altogether, differs from culture to culture. In Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s Secret Daughter, there is a powerful manifestation of how the way that a women is perceived and the gender roles that she is expected to take in her country impacts her experience in motherhood. Kavita, who lives in India, looses her two daughters due to the harsh outcomes of gender discrimination, and is forced to move to the city in the hopes of creating
Female infanticide is not easily talked about. Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion in India have been the subject of much attention in recent years. Many people believe that in ancient Indian traditions, female infanticide is to
Colonialism has shaped the lives of about three quarter people in this present day world. Post colonialism refers to the impact that imperial process has caused to the entire culture from the moment of colonialization till today. All through the history the continuation of colonising the minds through imperial rule by the Europeans is the cause of this. The effect of this European imperial domination has spread its impacts on the contemporary literature as well and it is therefore a major concern for the world today. The literature of Canada, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Zealand, Malta, Sri lanka, the South Pacific, the Caribbean and African countries, comes in the ambit of post-colonial literatures. One characteristic that can be found in common to all these literature despite of
Mistry demonstrates how the characters’ defiance of traditional Indian gender roles creates a line of causalities that ultimately determine the character’s path. Mistry contextualizes these gender roles when he describes that, “It was hard for [wives] not to be resentful - the birth of daughters often brought them beatings from their husbands and their husband's families” (Mistry 100). The author includes this quote to demonstrate the considerably large extent to which males hold power and priority in Indian society, thus making women nearly impotent with the exception of Dina, which may explain why the author gives her a central role in the novel. Therefore, the defiance of gender roles - which the society in which they live considers as a crime since the values of misogyny have invaded their worldview - is dangerous, but represented in the character of Dina Dalal. Dina was quickly widowed, but Mistry depicts her as a strong woman who struggles to keep her independence in a society that expects her to be subordinate to another man. Even after many years since her husband’s death, Dina’s brother, Nusswan, compares her life to “watching