The book you have just finished reading is remarkable—and when I was in your shoes, as I was when I just finished reading it, it left me a bit whiplashed. The stories were diverse, sure, and yet I was stunned by the remarkable thematic coherence that runs through this collection: certain images and ideas kept popping up over and again, telling us that the state of post-colonialism comes with its own set of markers and phenomena. Regardless of the culture that has experienced colonization, its aftereffects and post-concerns are quite similar.
Instead of analyzing individual stories, I decided to tackle the emergent themes—the book is certainly larger than a simple assemblage of individual stories, and I’d like to approach it as an entity in itself rather than dissecting it into parts; after all, more than one story in this collection warns us against this reductionist impulse. Instead, I will treat it as holistically as I can, since many of the themes seem to flow from one story to the next, and to develop almost independently of the writers’ will—and this, I believe, is a sign of truly talented editors, who have selected the stories and positioned them to assure both thematic unity and clarity of purpose.
The main and most obvious theme that becomes apparent early on is the push-pull of the contradictory demands of assimilation versus appropriation—that is, as the colonizing culture attempts to assimilate the colonized into its imperial (or colonial) hive-mind, it is also eager to appropriate the trappings of the culture it has taken over, thus leaving the colonized twice bereaved—robbed of what was theirs, and the stolen cultural treasures replaced by the dominant faux-narrative.
Meanwhile, the trappings of the colonized are left empty, divorced from their cultural meaning and memory—mere trophies in the hands of the colonizers. This twin cultural assassination is apparent in many of the stories, and mirrors closely the real-world narratives.
This insight is something that I feel is uniquely endemic to this particular book, or to this particular kind of story. Too often, the colonizers perceive assimilation as voluntary, and appropriation as paying their respect to other cultures, rarely realizing the true nature of the destruction that they are causing. However, these writers see clearly the harm being done. There is a mournful thread running through, based on the realization that the colonized often irrevocably lose their own voices, and even when they do create their own stories, it is done in the language of the outsiders. This narrative transplant, when the colonized people tell their story in the language and story structure of the conquerors, is a simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking phenomenon.
This is the terrible duality of the colonized mind, which often comes to accept the outsiders’ values as its own. This is not a free choice but a necessity—understanding the language of the dominant group is a matter of survival. (It is of course no mere coincidence that these stories are written in English.) Through needing to understand the dominant mindset, the oppressed are forced into accepting it, and this is the burden of post-colonialism: while the literal and the military shackles have been shed, the colonized mindset remains, and colonization finds its logical extension in cultural colonialism—and again, it is no coincidence that Hollywood, films and books feature so commonly in these stories.
These stories so persistently pushed upon us through every worldwide media outlet are not ours, these writers seem to say, but we will take them and make them our own. The difficulty, of course, is that taking something back and being taken over by it are not easily distinguished. Sometimes rebellion and consent may look remarkably similar. Sometimes we rebel by writing our own narratives, but end up complicit when those narratives are subsumed by the dominant culture and its language, awash in its story structures and values.
These values are so pervasive that the world we live today is constructed along the axes of the Western (or colonizing) thought: the constant Aristotelian dichotomies bisect our discourse and thoughts in every direction. Emotion and reason, art and science, male and female—all of these sharp dualities are not necessarily endemic to any given culture, but more often then not are introduced there by Western colonization.
Interestingly, this is another common thread: whether we look at the stories set in the colonized lands or in the West, science is often pitted in direct opposition to a holistic view of the world. By extension, science is often presented as a tool of the colonizers. Western reductionism, the need to dissect and disassemble and take apart, to study the details in order to comprehend the whole, is the very nature of the scientific method, and has transcended its applications, being often applied to entire peoples and cultures and souls. We see it in the reductionism of literary analysis, the reductionism of anthropology, and of cultural history. We see echoes of this idea in many of the stories; some even take the dissecting tools and (in some cases, literally) turn them against the conquerors.
It’s a notion many of the writers explore—the weapons of the colonizers taken up by the oppressed in act of liberation. Yet, one cannot help but remember the immortal Audre Lorde’s quote about the master’s tools that cannot dismantle the master’s house, and the sense of loss and uncertainty lingers in these stories, as we are left to wonder—along with the writers—about the price paid for knowledge, as well as the adequacy of a blow that is a mere reflection of the attack.
The solution offered by several of the stories seems to be found in the integration: the tools of the colonizers are flawed, and they have to be modified, infused with cultural memory and meaning, in order to serve the oppressed. Because the very nature of post-colonialism includes the impossibility of being entirely rid of it, the best we can hope for is to comprehend the past, recognize the ongoing colonization of the mind and of internal landscapes, and to resist it as best we can.
Resistance, then: several of the stories talk about its nature, and the emerging consensus appears to be that resistance is often indeed futile; but the futility of it is not a good enough reason to stop trying. The very nature of the colonizing influence is that it is elusive and shifting, often changing its appearance or mode, and thus is extremely difficult to confront. The quest for recognition of it is never-ending, and resistance takes as many forms as the influence itself—from warfare to art. Here again we see Hollywood emerging as the cultural constant, as the colonizing influence so significant that it doesn’t need to hide—or that, by its very nature, is forced to take on many forms.
This shifting nature imitates the shifting internal boundaries as well, something that the stories in this anthology touch upon over and over again: sometimes the shift is occurring internally and sometimes externally, when the very buildings and external landscapes become mutable, deviating from known history and the memory of those living in the stories, becoming reflections of the changes taking place in the colonized psyche.
And this brings us to the final theme: transience. During colonial history, the boundaries between nations were constantly changing. As new colonies were acquired and relinquished, the conquerors redrew the internal boundaries between the conquered peoples in order to negotiate with each other, resulting not only in arbitrary divisions between nations, but also in the inherently transient nature of colonial history. The changing borders mimicked the cultural erasure and retellings, and became lines drawn in the sand, erased and drawn again. As were the colonial histories—histories retold by the conquerors, histories designed to cast the colonizers in the best possible light and to erase as much of the cultural memory of the colonized as possible.
This shortness of colonial memory is meditated upon in some of the stories as well—due to the transient nature of any specific legacy, coupled with the lasting impression of colonization itself, this transience is often remarked upon, and the loss of cultural memory in this context dovetails nicely with the theme of the intentional erasure of the colonized memory and history.
It is interesting, then, to see the role the US plays in many of the stories: the American narrative presents the country as a colony that has fought for its liberation, but in reality of course it was already settled by the colonizers, and its separation from British rule was hardly an act of anticolonial rebellion. The genocide of the native populations in the US are barely considered in the dominant narrative, and slavery has been consistently downplayed or justified. From that position, the US has risen to be the dominant colonization power today—be it through direct occupation of foreign territories, or the occupation of minds by the Hollywood machine. At the same time, the US is still often an aspirational goal for those who seek to leave their home countries for a variety of reasons, and the theme of immigration—and its disappointments—is also present in this book.
We find ourselves rebelling against the lies and the dominant narratives fed into our collective psyche, Clockwork Orange-style, by Hollywood’s dream factory—a truly terrifying notion, if you think about it for a bit. We find ourselves looking for ways to escape, but realizing, time and time again, that the post-colonial world is still rife with colonial injustice and oppression. And yet, slowly, slowly, we are finding voices to tell our stories, to reclaim what has been lost of history. These broken, half-forgotten histories and dreams will never be restored to their original form, and part of living in the post-colonial world is making peace with that. Because we can still create the future, and try to hope that it will be treated better than our past. The writers in this book are taking a step in that direction—because the frontier that they see is one not in space but in time, a time when all voices are heard and all stories are listened to, when no history is erased, no matter how small or inconvenient. We see a different frontier—and I hope that this book let you glimpse it as well.