Postcolonialism: Love it or Hate it- it

1
Postcolonialism Love it or Hate it- its there.

• Megan Miller

2
Background

• Seamus Heaney born in Northern Ireland, won
  multiple awards for his poetry. Seen as the
  greatest Irish poet since Yeats and he was
  influenced by British writers too. He translated
  Beowulf and tries to bring an Irish sound to his
  poetry written in English.

http//www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber_studyskil
ls/tasks/task-for-session-4/seamus-heaney/
3

• William Butler Yeats was an Irish cultural
  nationalist, who helped forge Irish cultural
  identity and inspired the poet-revolutionaries
  who led the Easter Rising of 1916 against the
  British. (p 91) The Norton Anthology of Modern
  Contemporary Poetry
• Derek Walcott was influenced by Yeats. His
  loyalties to his African ancestry and to the
  English tongue I love. (p 494) The Norton
  Anthology of Modern Contemporary Poetry
• He is a successful Caribbean poet who dealt with
  similar issues as Yeats and Heaney.

http//www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/d
ublin/literary/W.B.Y.html
http//www.amatmoekrim.com/site/?p115
4
Introduction to Idea

• Postcolonial writers may resent the colonizers,
  but without them they wouldnt have the angst or
  oppression to write about.
• Not necessarily a binary relationship between the
  colonizer/colonized, but a dual person who has
  influences of colonizer and attributes of his
  native people. (English/Irish)
• By at looking Seamus Heaneys poems and
  discussing the themes we will see how his work is
  shaped by his upbringing.
• Show that similar themes appear in Derek Walcott
  and W.B. Yeats.

5
Literary Critics Say

• For postcolonial cultures include both a merger
  of and antagonism between the culture of the
  colonized and that of the colonizer, which, at
  this point in time, are difficult to identify and
  separate into discrete entities, so complete was
  the British intrusion into the government,
  education, cultural values, and daily lives of
  its colonial subjects. (p 419)
• -Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today

6

• Tyson also says, Postcolonial theorists often
  describe the colonial subject as having a double
  consciousness or double vision, in other words, a
  consciousness or a way of perceiving the world
  that is divided between two antagonistic
  cultures that of the colonizer and the of the
  indigenous community. (p 421)

7

• Edward Saids view Said reads a metaphor of the
  colonial relationship, and the question it
  provokes did the colonized benefit from
  colonization, no matter how violent the structure
  of the relationship? Although it may be clear
  that Yeatss poetry joins his people to its
  history, one also notes the fact that in Saids
  formulation, agency is with the national poet,
  not the people, and they are yoked to their
  history whether they wish it or not. (p 319)
• -Conor McCarthy, Edward Said and Irish
  Criticism

8

• Different themes
• Animal relationship between colonizer/colonized.
  (Hunter/hunted)
• As with the colonist/colonized relation, the
  essential human/animal relation is one of
  exploitation. (p 7) Hugh Denard.. The
  association of the colonized with animals
  commonly occurs as part of the colonists
  construction of the Other in colonial
  discourse.
• Even though colonizer (British) tries to stress
  they are better than the colonized colonized
  still feels better than them. That they even have
  a closeness to nature that the British cant
  achieve.

9

• Punishment
• I can feel the tugof the halter at the napeof
  her neck, the windon her naked front.It blows
  her nipplesto amber beads, it shakes the frail
  riggingof her ribs.I can see her drownedbody
  in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating
  rods and boughs.Under which at firstshe was a
  barked saplingthat is dug upoak-bone,
  brain-firkin her shaved headlike a stubble of
  black corn, her blindfold a soiled bandage, her
  noose a ringto storethe memories of
  love.Little adultress, before they punished
  you

• you were flaxen-haired, undernourished,
  and yourtar-black face was beautiful.My poor
  scapegoat, I almost love youbut would have
  cast, I know, the stones of silence.I am the
  artful voyeurof your brain's exposedand
  darkened combs, your muscles' webbingand all
  your numbered bones I who have stood dumbwhen
  your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by
  the railings, who would connivein civilized
  outrageyet understand the exactand tribal,
  intimate revenge.
• -Seamus Heaney

10
Theme

• Us/Them The relation between colonist and
  colonized becomes essentially one of opposition
  the Other is not only different, the Other is
  an enemy. (p 9)
• -Hugh Denard, Seamus Heaney, Colonialism, and
  the Cure
• Betraying sisters our women were with the
  English men. That is enough grounds to be
  tortured on, since those men are different. Those
  men are the enemy.
• If the English men are different, they are the
  savage beasts, than why did the Irish torture the
  women?
• Savage/civilized/both

11
From Station Island

• XII
• Who cares,
• he jeered, any more? The English language
• Belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
• a waste of time for somebody your age.
• That subject people stuff is cods game,
• Infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.
• You lose more of yourself than you redeem
• doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
• When they make the circle wide, its time to swim
• out on your own and fill the element
• with signatures on your own frequency

12

• James Joyce is speaking to Heaney that it is
  okay to write in English.
• Heaney taking the time to debate writing in
  English, shows that he feels guilty not writing
  in Irish language.
• The use of native languages often requires
  native writers to put forth the double effort of
  writing in their indigenous languages and then
  translating their work into English or having it
  translated.
• Many ex-colonials therefore feel they must
  assert a native culture both to avoid being
  swamped by the Western culture so firmly planted
  on their soil and to recuperate their national
  image in their own eyes and in the eyes of
  others Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today

13

• Digging
• Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen
  rests as snug as a gun.Under my window a clean
  rasping soundWhen the spade sinks into gravelly
  groundMy father, digging. I look downTill his
  straining rump among the flowerbedsBends low,
  comes up twenty years awayStooping in rhythm
  through potato drillsWhere he was digging.The
  coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaftAgainst
  the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out
  tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter
  new potatoes that we pickedLoving their cool
  hardness in our hands.By God, the old man could
  handle a spade,Just like his old man.My
  grandfather could cut more turf in a dayThan any
  other man on Toner's bog.Once I carried him milk
  in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He
  straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right
  awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving
  sodsOver his shoulder, digging down and downFor
  the good turf. Digging.The cold smell of potato
  mold, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the
  curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken
  in my head.But I've no spade to follow men like
  them.Between my finger and my thumbThe squat
  pen rests.I'll dig with it.

• Heaney maybe trying to hide guilty feelings
  towards this new Ireland.
• But Ive no spade to follow men like them
  refers to he is not as good as his father or
  grandfather.
• Ireland moving away from farming into industrial
  as a result of colonization.
• This feeling of being caught between cultures,
  of belonging to neither rather than to both, of
  finding oneself arrested in a psychological limbo
  that results not merely from some individual
  psychological disorder but from the trauma of the
  cultural displacement within which one lives, is
  referred to by Homi Bhabha and others as
  unhomeliness. (p 421) Lois Tyson

14

• from The Cure at Troy
•  
• Human beings suffer,they torture one
  another,they get hurt and get hard.No poem or
  play or songcan fully right a wronginflicted or
  endured.
•  
• The innocent in gaolsbeat on their bars
  together.A hunger-striker's fatherstands in the
  graveyard dumb.The police widow in veilsfaints
  at the funeral home.
•  
• History says, Don't hopeon this side of the
  grave.But then, once in a lifetimethe longed
  for tidal waveof justice can rise up,and hope
  and history rhyme.
•  
• So hope for a great sea-changeon the far side
  of revenge.Believe that a further shoreis
  reachable from here.Believe in miraclesand
  cures and healing wells.
•  
• Call the miracle self-healingThe utter
  self-revealingdouble-take of feeling.If there's
  fire on the mountainOr lightning and stormAnd a
  god speaks from the sky
•  
• That means someone is hearingthe outcry and the
  birth-cryof new life at its term.

http//www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c3/c17242
.jpg
15

• Heaneys work boldly opened up a dialogue
  between its Sophoclean model and the culture and
  politics of Northern Ireland. To the Sophoclean
  representation of a wounded, embittered
  Philoctetes. Heaneys version, avoided merely
  aestheticizing The Troubles by the toughness
  and realism of its tenor, and the long shadows of
  irony with which it concludes. Hugh Denard,
  Seamus Heaney, Colonialism, and The Cure
• Mary Robinson and Bill Clinton quoted
• Heaney created his version in hopes his people
  would see their similar story in this.

16
Heaney summary

• Heaneys writing is a direct result of his
  postcolonialist upbringing.
• He is a hybrid, he is aware of the impact the
  English have on him. Questioning himself for
  writing in English, but he did translate several
  poems into Gaelic. He was influenced by English
  writers as well as Irish writers.
• If he was a writer not under postcolonialism his
  writing would be drastically different. Even his
  interest in writing versions like The Cure at
  Troy.
• Heaney may feel superior to the English people,
  but without them he may not be Nobel Prize wining
  Seamus Heaney.
• The same can be said about W.B. Yeats and Derek
  Walcott.

17

• Man and the Echo
• Man. In a cleft that's christened AltUnder
  broken stone I haltAt the bottom of a pitThat
  broad noon has never lit,And shout a secret to
  the stone.All that I have said and done,Now
  that I am old and ill,Turns into a question
  tillI lie awake night after nightAnd never get
  the answers right.Did that play of mine send
  outCertain men the English shot?Did words of
  mine put too great strainOn that woman's reeling
  brain?Could my spoken words have checkedThat
  whereby a house lay wrecked?And all seems evil
  until ISleepless would lie down and die.Echo.
  Lie down and die.Man. That were to shirkThe
  spiritual intellect's great work,And shirk it in
  vain. There is no releaseIn a bodkin or
  disease,Nor can there be work so great

• As that which cleans man's dirty slate.While man
  can still his body keepWine or love drug him to
  sleep,Waking he thanks the Lord that heHas body
  and its stupidity,But body gone he sleeps no
  more,And till his intellect grows sureThat
  all's arranged in one clear view,pursues the
  thoughts that I pursue,Then stands in judgment
  on his soul,And, all work done, dismisses
  allOut of intellect and sightAnd sinks at last
  into the night.
• Echo. Into the night.Man. O Rocky Voice,Shall
  we in that great night rejoice?What do we know
  but that we faceOne another in this place?But
  hush, for I have lost the theme,Its joy or
  night-seem but a dreamUp there some hawk or owl
  has struck,Dropping out of sky or rock,A
  stricken rabbit is crying out,And its cry
  distracts my thought.
• -William Butler Yeats

18

• He questions whether his words resulted in people
  dying.
• Yeats reclaims a land colonized by the British
  imposes Irish rhythms, images, genres, and syntax
  on English-language poetry and revives native
  myths, place-names, and consciousness. (p 91)
  The Norton Anthology of Modern Contemporary
  Poetry
• Yeats also moves to another style with his
  writing, but may not have been the same if he did
  not start at the Irish nationalist writing.

19

• Derek Walcott
• The Schooner Flight
• Line 41-43
• I had a sound colonial education,
• I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
• and either Im nobody, or Im a nation.
• Walcott is able to illustrate how he is a hybrid.
  
• Walcott asks time and again how the postcolonial
  poet can both grieve the agonizing harm of
  British colonialism and appreciate the empires
  literary gift. (p 495) The Norton Anthology of
  Modern Contemporary Poetry

20
Where do I go from here?

• I would research further Yeats and Walcott poems,
  and possibly other postcolonialist writers.
• Look for evidence that the colonialism made
  these writers who they were. Without their
  upbringing, country, they wouldnt have written
  the literature they did.

21
Work Cited

• Berson, Misha. "In his play "the Cure at Troy"
  poet Seamus Heaney explores the wounds within."
  The Seattle Times. 6 Apr. 2008. 18 July 2009
  lthttp//seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/200
  4325045_cure06.htmlgt.
• Denard, Hugh. "Seamus Heaney, Colonialism, and
  the Cure." Project Muse (2000) 1-18.
• Ellmann, Richard, and Robert O'Clair. "Derek
  Walcott." Ed. Jahan Ramazani. The Norton
  Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,
  Third Edition, Volume 1 Modern Poetry. 3rd ed.
  Vol. 2. Boston W. W. Norton Company, 2003.
  494-534.
• Ellmann, Richard, and Robert O'Clair. "William
  Butler Yeats." The Norton Anthology of Modern and
  Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, Volume 1
  Modern Poetry. By Jahan Ranazani. 3rd ed. Vol. 1.
  Boston W. W. Norton Company, 2003. 90-143.
• McCarthy, Conor. "Edward Said and Irish
  Criticism." Project Muse 310-35.
• Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert
  O'Clair. "Seamus Heaney." The Norton Anthology of
  Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition,
  Volume 1 Modern Poetry. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Boston
  W. W. Norton Company, 2003. 720-49.
• Tyson, Lois. "Postcolonial criticism." Critical
  Theory Today A User-Friendly Guide, Second
  Edition. 2nd ed. New York Routledge, 2006.
  417-27.