Nation in postcolonial literature
 In this continuous series on postcolonial literature, I would like to
explore the theme of Nation in postcolonial literature. Nation is a
prominent theme in postcolonial literature. Nation building in
postcolonial nations in Asia and Africa is an important part of
de-colonisation process. Nation being a culturally constructed and born
out of and upon the artistic, folkloric and philosophical discourses
about the nation, particularly the generation of postcolonial writers of
the 1950s and the 1960s were concerned about their role in national
building.
The novel has historically played a critical role in objectifying the
multiple and the unified nature of the national life and continuing
theme in postcolonial literature include the geographical, cultural,
economic and political contours of the nation. However, the perennial
issue of addressing a nation and its literature is how does a nation
represent itself to its people and to the world at large?
Postcolonial literature seeks to era the colonial past of a nation.
What the postcolonial writer does seek to is to resist and contest the
Western construction of their nations as primitive, savage, backwards
and ancient and try to retrieve pre-colonial past that would help define
the nation in a different light to what it was as defined by the
Western. Important facet of this project is not the definition of the
nation’s past but of its destiny and future. The postcolonial writers
seek to reconstruct the nation without the frames of references used by
the colonial masters.
The task would be more complex given the fact that most of the
postcolonial methodologies, rhetorical forms and epistemologies are
always and already infested with and informed by Western definitions and
interpretations. In postcolonial texts, past, present and the future are
fused when trauma (colonial), pride (nationalism) and hope
(postcolonial) converged. One of the examples these postcolonial themes
are eloquently articulated is Nelson Mendela’s first ‘State of nation’:
“The time will come when our nation will honour the memory of all the
sons, the daughters, the mothers, the fathers, the youth, and the
children who, by their thoughts and deeds, gave us the right to assert
with pride that we are South Africans and that we are citizens of the
world…we must, constrained by and yet, regardless of the accumulated
effect of our historical burdens, seize the time to define for ourselves
what we want to make of our shared destiny”
Although the sense of postcoloniality is exciting, it comes with the
increasing awareness that the postcolonial society will not be as
wonderful as it thought to be. It can be observed that writers in the
initial stages of independence were worried over the possibility to
colonial corruption slipping into postcolonial decadence. At the same
time, a segments of the population witnessed that they were being
marginalised by new native rulers. What is interesting to observe is
that the postcoloniality has brought about a process of exclusion.
The process enables a certain group/class to dominate the other
ethnic groups , communities, races, and classes and render them
disempowered, ‘colonised’ and marginalised even in the independent
nation states. Gyanendra Pandey argues that ‘minorities are constituted
along with the nation’ and nation constructs and colonises specific
groups and communities even it (nation) claims independence as
postcolony.
Subalternisation
Pramod K. Nayar argues that this process of marginalisation of
certain groups in the postcolonial society is ‘In postcolonial
societies, this argument has been borne out through a process that I
call postcolonial subalternization- a process captured and critiques in
many discursive and non-discursive texts of the 1980s and after from
Africa and Asia.’ These writers embarked on a process of writing their
own histories, realising that dominant cultural narratives refused to
represent them or misrepresented them.
Citing Ben Okri’s The Faminished Road (1991), Nayar points out, “Ben
Kri’s boy-prophet in The Faminished Road, has a dream where the
‘interchangeable dreams’ of politicians and ‘insanity of thugs’
manipulated the people. The nightmare that Okri describes captures the
unreal lapse into oppression, decadence, and the horror of the
postcolonial state. The citizens become the subalterns in the state. As
the Party of the Poor and the Party of the Rich begin to resemble each
other in Okri’s novel, Azro realises that the postcolonial state was
simply ‘the new incarnation of their recurrent clashes, the recurrence
of ancient antagonism, secret histories and festering dreams’.
One of the best examples of subaltern self-representation is the
Dalit writings in India. The Dalit corpus of writings also makes up
strong critiques of postcoloniality. The primordial concerns of the
literature of postcoloniality that construct ‘nationhood’ includes; the
mode of constructing, imagining and representing the nation, the role of
locality, community, and the space in creating national identity. They
also extensively deal with issues of cultural identity (particularly for
Aboriginal writings in postcolonial societies) and the politics of
nativism. One of the prominent themes of the literature of
postcoloniality is the centrality of religion and spirituality in making
of national identity which is a dominant theme in Piyadasa Sirisena’s
novels. The writers also concern about the continuation of colonialism
through other forms, particularly by postcolonial elites and the
marginalisation of certain communities and identities with the
postcolonial nation state. This Nayar eloquently describes as ‘a process
of subalternisation which leads to protest and movements for social
change and reform.’
Sri Lankan literary scene
In Sri Lanka, the construction of nation and very idea of
‘nationhood’ was spearheaded by the discourse of cultural nationalism
through the literary production by Piyadasa Sirisena although one may
consider his texts purely as propaganda literature. Describing his
pivotal role not only in shaping modern Sinhala novel but also
spearheading cultural nationalism, Prof. Wimal Dissanayake states, in
Sinhala Novel and the Public Sphere, “Piyadasa Sirisena can best be
described as a novelist of advocacy. His primary focus was on the
promotion of cultural nationalism as a way of regaining self-esteem and
re-possessing history. In order to achieve this goal, he dealt with a
number of overlapping themes in his fiction. In the first novel that he
published Jayatissa Saha Roslin, the guiding theme is religion-the
demonstration of superiority of Buddhism over other religions”. In a
way, what Piyadasa Sirisena sought to achieve through his fictions was
fiercely to contest the colonial history and emphasised the centrality
of religion and spirituality in making national identity. |
