To William Wordsworth
and to most of us these words conjure an image of the
cherubic individual who, in common parlance, we refer to
as a 'child'. But perhaps our image does not remain quite
so angelic if his complexion darkens and he is placed in
the context of colonized West Indian society. An
Antillean black child is, both literally and
metaphorically, miles away from his fairer counterpart.
His upbringing involves an education system that moulds
him into a black-Briton, half alienated from his original
culture. The colonial educational system is shaped by
deep economic and political motives, which need the child
as raw material for the further propagation of this
exploitative system. The authority imposed by the state
infiltrates the family and the education system, making a
victim out of the black child who finds himself trapped
helplessly in the mesh of a foreign way of life.
As Ngugi put it in Decolonizing the Mind [2]:
Children who
encountered literature in colonial schools and
universities were thus experiencing the world defined
and reflected in the European experience of history.
Their entire way of looking at the world, even the
world of the immediate environment, was Euro-centric.
Europe was the centre of Universe. The earth moved
around the European intellectual scholarly axis. The
images children encountered in literature were
reinforced by their study of history and geography,
and science and technology where Europe was, once
again, the centre. This in turn fitted well with the
cultural imperatives of British imperialism.
The picture holds true
for the Antillean child, who even in his own familiar
environment is considered as the 'other'. Thus it becomes
difficult for him to identify with either of the two
cultures. On one hand he is a member of the Antillean
community with its oral traditions, something that he is
not quite familiar with, while on the other he is groomed
by the Euro-centric education system, something that he
can neither identify with, nor shun. These constitute the
two worlds of the West Indian child.
The novels of Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge and George
Lamming plunge head on into this no-man's land, where the
black child is in a state of confusion, desperate to
clutch his/her roots, roots that s/he has never developed.
In Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, for example,
Lucy's reaction to Wordsworth's poem Daffodils
is one of distaste:
I remembered an
old poem I had been made to memorize when I was ten
years old and a pupil at Queen Victoria's Girl's
School. I had been made to memorize it, verse after
verse, and then had recited the whole poem to an
auditorium full of parents, teachers, and my fellow
pupils. After I was done, everybody stood up and
applauded with an enthusiasm that surprised me, and
later they told me how nicely I had pronounced every
word, how I had placed just the right amount of
special emphasis in places where that was needed, and
how proud the poet, now long dead, would have been to
hear words ringing in my mouth. I was then at the
height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed
one way, inside I was another, outside false, inside
true. And so I made pleasant little noises that
showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I
was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line,
every word of that poem. The night after I had
recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously it seemed,
that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street
by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I
had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down
from exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I
was buried deep underneath them and was never seen
again.
The poem, a strong
colonizing force for the child, haunts her even in her
unconscious. Lucy has to keep up the sham of enjoying it
just to please the audience, which includes people like
her mother, representatives of those who have accepted
the process of colonization as the norm. But unlike those
who applaud after her performance, Lucy desperately wants
to break away from the culture that has been forced on
her. The two selves that she speaks of are in conflict.
While her outer self recites the poem her inner self
sharply reacts to its meaninglessness. The word 'daffodil'
means nothing to the little girl who is made to recite it,
and therefore she can neither feel nor appreciate the
feeling of pleasure that the poem is supposed to
communicate.
When Lucy visits the Lake District for the first time,
the abhorrence that she had felt while reciting Daffodils
remain unchanged:
It was a big area
with lots of thick-trunked, tall trees along winding
paths. Along the paths and underneath the trees were
many, many yellow flowers the size and shape of play
teacups, or fairy skirts. They looked like something
to eat and something to wear at the same time; they
looked beautiful: they looked simple, as if made to
erase a complicated and unnecessary idea. I did not
know what these flowers were, and so it was a mystery
to me why I wanted to kill them. Just like that. I
wanted to kill them. I wished that I had an enormous
scythe; I would just walk down the path, dragging it
alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down at
the place where they emerged from the ground.
The desire to cut down
the flowers emerges from the hatred that she nurtures
deep inside her, a hatred rooted in her alienation from
her own cultural roots. Unlike a Briton Lucy cannot
appreciate Daffodils because she had never seen
them blossoming in her homeland, nor could she associate
it with any memory of her childhood. When Lucy refuses to
wonder at the daffodils or when she tries to erase the
poem from her memory we find the two worlds of the child
coming into a direct confrontation. Lucy has to pretend
to like it, because she has to rise above her station and
prove herself more a Briton than a colonized Antillean,
even though her conscience speaks a different language.
From her early schooldays, or perhaps from the day she is
born, the Antillean child is fed with the idea that she
is inferior, and that she has to rise above it. She is
also given a model of superiority to follow; the white
child. Thus the process of growing up forces a transition
from independent to dependent behaviour.
This process is also seen in the case of Tee, the central
protagonist of Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey.
In this novel Merle Hodge presents the process of
alienation by depicting Tee's transition from a typical
Antillean tradition to that of a pseudo-European culture.
Tee has to choose between two worlds, those of Tantie and
Aunt Beatrice. While all that Tantie has to offer is the
promise of staying on with the original culture of the
Caribbean islands, Aunt Beatrice offers the lure of
abroad - a culture that Tee slowly becomes familiar with
but does not belong to.
The inferiority that Tee is burdened with both in school
and with Aunt Beatrice disappears when her father asks
her to come abroad. Even her schoolteacher, who had
previously rebuked her, mellows down her voice and says,
'Seven years! But you never told us you naughty girl, you
never told us your daddy was abroad,' as if the fact of
having her roots in England made her superior to
everybody else.
As Frantz Fanon says in his book Black Skins White
Masks [3], 'It is the racist who creates his
inferior'. The creation of the inferior starts from the
day a child is born and continues throughout the whole
process of his education until he finally adopts a kind
of 'dependent behaviour'. Childhood's relation to
colonization is a rather strange one. The concept of the
child, as the blissful prototype of the beatific angel,
seemed null and void when it came to the black child of
the Antillean world - the very colour of his skin
suggested to the Colonizer a need for proper civilizing
education.
In his book Centuries of Childhood [4] Philippe
Aries claims that the modern concept of childhood is
essentially a seventeenth century construct. Rather than
a smaller version of the adult, the child then was
demoted to the inferior state of the latter. Childhood
thus lost its angelic connotations and was made to
resemble a tabula rasa on which adults could inscribe
moral and ethical codifications.
Building on Aries's view, Ashish Nandy in The
Intimate Enemy [5] explains how this pre-industrial
revolution concept frames itself on the line of
colonization:
it became the
responsibility of the adult to 'save' the child from
a state of unrepentant, reprobate sinfulness through
proper socialization, and help the child grow towards
a Calvinist ideal of adulthood and maturity.
Exploitation of children in the early days of the
Industrial Revolution in Britain was a natural
corollary of such a concept of childhood.
Colonialism dutifully
picked up these ideas of growth and development and drew
a new parallel between primitivism and childhood. Thus
the theory of social progress was telescoped not merely
into the individual's life cycle in Europe but also into
the area of cultural differences in the colonies. What
was childlikeness of the child and childishness of
immature adults now also became the loveable and
unlovable savagery of primitives and primitivism of
subject societies.
It was thus assumed that the 'childlike native' was the
loveable one who could be reformed through westernization,
modernization and Christianization; while the 'childish
native' was the ignorant, ungrateful and sinful savage
who had to be repressed by providing tough administration.
Thus the term 'child' is something of a double-edged
sword, indicating either a spiritual inadequacy referred
to as 'childlikeness', or the barbaric savagery of a 'childish'
adult native. In most cases, however, these two
principles act upon same individuals. The inference is
that the colonizers' terming of the native as 'childlike',
meaning gullible and innocent, is mere eyewash beneath
which lie darker truths rooted in a firm belief about the
savagery or childishness which they think can be
controlled and regulated by coercive and exploitative
methods.
As Fanon [3] says, 'The black man has two dimensions. One
with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro
behaves differently with a white man and with another
Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of
colonialist subjugation is beyond question.'
Practically speaking, how would a child know that he is
black and inferior unless it is pointed out to him that
he is so and in constant need of westernization?
Moving back two centuries, we find the French philosopher
Rousseau presenting a similar theory in his Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality Among Men [6], where he
eulogizes the incorruptible 'noble savage' as 'the
happiest state of humankind' when contrasted with the
civilized individual of the city. An attempt at self-understanding,
Rousseau's theory provided a hypothetical 'other' as an
alternative to the decadent community. This so-called 'liberal'
idea of the noble savage is neatly turned on its head by
the Hobbesian-Lockeian view of the 'nasty, brutish and
short' existence of the savage unfavourably contrasted
with the white, civilized European. It is the latter
concept which holds sway in the psyche of the colonizer,
as it is more viable economically and politically in the
power game inside the colonies. The 'civilizing' process
of the colonizers, of course, includes a gradual process
of colonization.
The novels of Kincaid, Hodge, and Lamming reflect the
seeping in of the European civilization through the veins
of the children growing up in the Antilles and receiving
European education in schools. They highlight the narrow-minded
schooling system which inculcates alien values, bringing
about this gradual metamorphosis.
In Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey Tee's
education puts her above the 'ordinariness' of Tantie's
household, but at the same time, it does not make her
belong anywhere. As Sophia Lehmann [7] aptly puts it, 'The
paradox of assimilation is that it tends to exacerbate
rather than alleviate the sense of marginality for which
it was supposed to be the cure'. However, assimilation
only became needed as 'cure' once Tee was feeling
marginalized, a condition she did not know before her
schooling or her stay at Aunt Beatrice's. Thus, the
colonized middle class passes on its own sense of
marginalization, which results in an endless cycle of
attempted assimilation as a supposed resolution to a
state brought about by the desire for education - and
education then makes the feeling of marginalization more
acute.
For Tee, this closed circle of alienation leads to such
feelings of hopelessness that -
her sense of
unworthiness expresses itself in a desire for
annihilation . . . I wanted to shrink, to disappear.
. . I felt that the very sight of me was an affront
to common decency. I wished that my body could
shrivel up and fall away, that I could step out new
and acceptable.
Though she does not
actually contemplate killing herself, her self-hatred and
eagerness to assimilate are the cultural equivalent of
suicide.
Trinidad seems to offer no escape from this condition for
Tee, and so it is that both Tee and the reader suspect
that Tantie was the instigator behind Tee's father in
England sending for her, as a means of saving her from
Aunt Beatrice's self-negating and self-hating cultural
influence. The novel thus ends on an ironic note: to save
Tee, who is unable to return to the Caribbean-ness she
has known in Tantie's household through having become
socialized in the worship of Englishness, Tantie sends
her to the ultimate source of this cultural negation: to
the metropolis, to England.
George Lamming wrote In the Castle of my Skin,
an intensely local novel in which he portrays the
claustrophobic intimacy of the native village, when he
was twenty-three and homesick in London. The child-hero
George goes to a school which celebrates the Empire's Day,
Queen Victoria's birthday. Marshalled in squads below the
Head Teacher and Inspector, the boys' individuality is
swamped by rote learning and discipline, and the boys
form a picture reminiscent of their ancestors packed in
slave ships.
But the amnesiac ritual has expunged the slave past.
Slavery 'had nothing to do with people in Barbados. No
one there was ever a slave, the teacher said. It was in
another part of the world that those things happened'.
They are given pennies, but the boys are confused. Whose
face is on the coins, validating them? Had anyone known
or seen him? Perhaps 'there was a shadow king who did
whatever a king should do . . . The shadow king was a
part of the English tradition. The English, the boy said,
were good at shadows'.
George is intellectually precocious. At school his
literary talent is recognised and encouraged by a
schoolmaster, but education cuts him off from his
emotional roots, and his knowledge both protects and
alienates.
Nothing would ever
go pop, pop, pop in your head. You had language to
safeguard you. And if you were beginning to feel
strongly, you could kill the feeling; you get it out
of the way by fetching the words that couldn't
understand what the feeling was all about. It was
like a knife.
Fanon [3] echoes
Lamming while discussing the Negro and language:
In any group of
young men in the Antilles, the one who expresses
himself well, who has mastered the language is
inordinately feared; keep an eye on that one, he is
almost white. In France one says, 'He talks like a
book.' In Martinique, 'He talks like a white man.'
George remains
ambivalent about his intellectual acquisition but goes on
with his education while his friend Trumper goes off to
the United States where he discovers his identity as a
black man.
The result of such indoctrination is to inscribe
Caribbean subjects into an English reality, and make them
objects of English power.
To view the flip side of this scenario the enlightening-cum-colonizing
procedure acquires a kind of subversive status for its
subjects, and the children are seen to draw amusement by
making up absurd and grotesque replicas of the
authorities imposed upon them. The culture to which the
children are introduced does not treat them with either
love or respect. From the very beginning they are treated
as Calibans, and the natural tendency for the West Indian
child undergoing Europianization is to subvert or
ridicule the established white authority.
In Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey, a portrait
of Winston Churchill
hung on the wall
behind Mr. Hinds . . . [Whose] daily endeavour [was]
to bring the boys to a state of reverence towards
this portrait; when they became rowdy he would still
them into shame at their unworthy behaviour in the
very sight of the greatest Englishman who ever lived
etc, or he would still them into incomprehension
because in his angry rhetorical transports he soared
into a vocabulary that fell like gibberish on the ear.
But for the children
the personage on
the wall was and remained simply Crapaud-face. (Frog
face).
A similar instance is
found in Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin where during
the occasion of the Queen's birthday, amidst inane
eulogizing, the boys embark upon a comical exchange:
'It wusn't me,' he
said. 'It was Boy Blue. When the Head say 'bout the
Queen was a great Queen and not like the kings in
seventh, Boy Blue ask . . . '
'What he ask?' the boys urged.
'He ask if the Queen's bloomers was red, white and
blue.'
These colours are the
colours of the Union Jack.
These deliberate acts of rebellion are interspersed with
unintentional ones, which arise out of ignorance and
produce a comic effect. Hodge presents such a situation
when the children are made to recite The Lord's
Prayer, which is beyond both their comprehension and
vocabulary, generating nothing but an incoherent
gibberish.
In these novels we find a gradual moving away of the
protagonists to their 'promised land' by virtue of their
educational excellence but 'quo vadis?' The roads are not
laden with manna and what lies before them is nothing
short of gross disappointment, they arrive in a strange
land where they are denied acceptance. Kincaid, on her
visit to England felt like a stranger visiting distant
shores and Lucy, her character, has the same feelings:
Now that I saw
these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down
by so many people entering and leaving them in real
life, and it occurred to me that I could not be the
only person in the world for whom they were a fixture
of fantasy. It was not my first bout with the
disappointment of reality and it would not be my last.
This awakening to a
painful reality is the lot of those who try to find
refuge in the mother country. While trying to find their
way in the great white arena they are confronted with a
harsh step-motherly treatment that in no way accepted
them.
In the all-time favourite To Sir With Love, E. R.
Braithwaite explores the predicament of a black teacher
in a tough East End school. The liberal, just veneer of
England is torn apart ignominiously when he recounts his
abortive attempts to secure a job where he is
disqualified principally on the basis of his skin
pigmentation. Braithwaite's conclusion is blatant and
stark:
Yes, it is
wonderful to be British - until one comes to Britain.
By dint of careful savings or through hard-won
scholarships many of them arrive in Britain to be
educated in the Arts and Sciences and in the varied
processes of legislative and administrative
government. They come bolstered by a firm,
conditioned belief that Britain and the British stand
for all that is best in Christian and democratic
terms; in their naivet they ascribe these high
principles to all Britons, without exception.
The question of
identity remains for black children an enigma. Trapped
between two worlds, and unable to identify with either
they become inhabitants of a floating world. They move
between shores and their lives become an endless journey
without a destination. Perhaps this is why many of the
principal West Indian novels structurally tend towards
the bildungsroman. All these novels end with a journey, a
journey to the Promised Land. The education which could
have been the messiah in their journey through the
shifting universe proves to be a misleading will o' the
wisp driving them into the quagmire of uncertainty,
deprivation and ultimate failure to look for themselves,
rather than for the labyrinth of 'success'.
This feeling of a vacuum can be sensed in this excerpt
from an interview with Jean Rhys:
'Do you consider
yourself a West Indian?'
She shrugged. 'It was such a long time ago when I
left.'
'So you don't think of yourself as a West Indian
writer?'
Again she shrugged and said nothing. What about
English? Do you consider yourself an English writer?'
'No I am not, I am not! I'm not even English.'
'What about a French writer?' I asked.
She shrugged and said nothing.
'You have no desire to go back to Dominica?'
'Sometimes,' she said.
References
1. William Wordsworth. Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood. 1807.
2. Ngugi Wa-Thiongo. Decolonizing the Mind.
3. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins White Masks
4. Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood
5. Nandy, Ashish. The Intimate Enemy
6. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality Among Men. 1754
7. Lehmann, Sophia. In search of a mother tongue:
Locating home in diaspora. Melus 23.4 {1998}101-115,
Infotrac 28 Nov 2000
See also:
Narinesingh, Roy. Crick Crack Monkey 'Introduction'.
London : Heinemann, 1981
© Tannistho Ghosh, June 2002 email the author
© Priyanka Basu, June 2002 email the author
|