Jose Marti

                                  Jose Marti was a Cuban nationalist. He was born in 1853, January 28 and died on 1895 May 19.He was a poet, essayist, philosopher, journalist, professor, publisher and a political theorist. He was a Cuban patriot, freedom fighter .He never lived to see Cuba free yet he is considered as the national hero. In 1869 he was in serious trouble because of his work .The ten years war between Spain and Cuba (1868-1878) affected the lives of the slaves in Cuba .they fought against Spain and Young Jose wrote passionately in support of  the rebels. He was convicted of disloyalty and sentenced to six years labour .He was only sixteen at that time. Due to his parents intervention the sentence was reduced but he was exiled to Spain. On January 1891,His essay Nuestra America was published in New Yorks and on 3oth of that month in Mexico.He eagerly participated in the international monetary conference in New york as well. On November 26^th he was invited by the club Ignacio agramonte an organization founded by Cuban immigrants in Ybor city,to a celebration to collect funding for the cause of Cuban independence. the following night another lecture was given by Marti in another gathering in honour of the medical students killed in cuba in 1871.His style of writing is difficult to categorize. he used short, memorable lines that convey truth or wisdom. and long complex sentence considered a major contributor to the Spanish American Literary movement .He has been linked to Latin American consciousness of the modern age and modernity.

                        His writings reflected his own views both socially and politically. ’Cultivono Rosa Blanca” is one of his poems and I would like to analyze this particular poem:

I cultivate a white rose

In July as in January

For the Sincere friend

Who gives me his hand frankly

And for the cruel person who tears

Out of the heart with which I live

I cultivate neither nettles nor thorns

I cultivate a white rose

This poem expresses his hope for the betterment of his country. In Cuba January is a hot month. But July is cold and cultivating a white rose in winter would be a real action of love. The poet is prepared to carry out a labour of love for a true friend. It is truly worth to do something like that for a true friend. but he also says that he would do the same thing for his enemy as well. He was a man who faced the impact of colonization ,through this poem he is declaring that he will treat everyone equally and  explains his hope for his Home land. A kind or cruel regardless of the personality he cultivates a white rose. Which means he remains peaceful. This speaks about his ideologies and his desire to establish unity among the people. Communal identity regardless of ethnic and racial barriers. This could be possible if everyone treats each other as friends. The kindness of one person should be shared equally with his friend and enemy. On January 1891,His essay Nuestra America was published in New Yorks and on 3oth of that month in Mexico.He eagerly participated in the international monetary conference in Newyork as well.

References:

1. www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/366828/Jose-Julian-Marti

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Martí

Parvathy 1214231

Pablo Neruda [1904-1973]

The  poem “Discoverers of Chile” from the CANTO GENERAL [1950] by Pablo Neruda

“Discoverers of Chile” is taken from Canto General, Neruda’s most important work. First, it was conceived as Canto General of Chile and later became the general song of America, i.e., Canto General. The new practice of addressing to an audience, communicating with a group of people becomes more specific in Canto General, a collection of poems that are often called epic poems of Chile. Published in 1950 and divided into fifteen sections, these poems tells the tale of Latin American people. Songs of Canto General were composed over twelve years, which are also considered years of militant Neruda. Many sections of Canto General are dedicated to workers and peasants whose homes and experiences the poet had shared so many times. While reading these poems one feels that these are the people who are lending their voice to his poetry. Through these poems Neruda explains how his people were oppressed and exploited first by the conquerors and then by the dictators, the collection ends with an autobiographical account of the poet himself.

"Discoverers of Chile" describe the destruction and violence unleashed by the colonisers. In the part entitled "Betrayed Sand" he writes against the dictators, especially Gonzalez Videla, the oligarchies, the advocates of the dollar, the exploiters, the United Fruit Company, the Standard oil Co., diplomats and heavenly poets, In “Discoverers of Chile”, Neruda starts with the history of the Spanish settlers in Chile, enamoured as they were by the tales of richness and of wealth. It marks Neruda’s return to his native land..This poem is the beginning of Neruda’s American genesis and this cultivates in his visit to Machu Pichu. This poem is a “first clear stirring of an allegiance that for the rest of Neruda’s life would never be far from his poetry”. According to John Felstiner, “The war on Spanish soil tightened his bond to Chile. One affiliation prepared the next. While stilled gripped by Spain, Neruda more and more felt the need, as he said in 1938, to reach and touch “my true soil”. This poem appears in Canto General where Neruda celebrates the mysteries of South America, its flora and fauna, and gazes with wonder at an antique civilization that really belongs to pre-Columbian days. It is a continuous Eurocentric history that is only displaced by the myth of creation, where an eagle drops a strip of land in the sea and the country is born. Neruda describes his country in its actual physical form, in tellingly simple phrases such as ‘my thin country’ and ‘silence lies in its long line’. This contains a veiled suggestion of people that could not hold out against the powerful invaders and so were compelled to merge their own history and culture with that of the masters. For him, there is never a conflict between Spain and Chile, Spain’s social and political crisis clarified Neruda’s voice and turned it directly towards the people of his own native land.

Spanish colonization over Chile can be defined as settler colonization, wherein the colonizers mingle with the colonized and the dichotomy between the two cultures is blurred. The conquistadors took it on themselves to be a part of the establishment and not demean the status of the colonized. They shared culture, language and became one with the residents of their colony. This is one of the reasons why Neruda’s poetry does not comprise of any hatred towards Spain. There is no hostility towards the colonizers of any kind. Neruda sees himself as an embodiment of the Spanish culture, as “the poet of violated human dignity who brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams” According to Jaime Alazraki, “Neruda is not merely chronicling historical events but re-interpreting them with a definite outlook of history. He’s looking back at American pre-history and examining the land’s rich, natural heritage”.

Gather Together In My Name

The second of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, ‘Gather Together In My Name’ covers her life between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. Angelou, called Rita in the book, is the example of a single mother’s struggle in a society that is almost repulsed by the very existence of an African-American woman. The book was written three years after and immediately followed the events of her first autobiography ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’. Maya Angelou has long since been the representation and voice of African-American women in a post-war America, which was essentially a white-male-dominated society.

To give a short summary of the plot, the story revolves around Rita’s life as a young mother and the struggles she faces in locating herself and her identity in a changing world. The shadow of poverty creeps closer to her through the narration as she slides down the social ladder into a life of crime.

The thread of racism has run unbroken through all of Angelou’s works in one form or the other. This book is no different, in terms of her honest depictions of the social realities of such a time in history. There are several instances where the binary of white/black comes uncomfortably close to the surface. For example, a quote from the beginning of the book,

“A Crow gives birth to a Dove. The bird kingdom must be petrified.”

            

         This was said by one of Rita’s classmates, on seeing her infant son. This is in reference to the fact that Rita’s child had a comparatively fair complexion and did not have the distinctive large-lipped mouth marking his African-American heritage. Such a blatant display of the colonial influence is almost shocking to read, moreover because one must keep in mind that this is an autobiography, which allows us to see things as they really were. To assert this point further, the woman saying these words, is also African-American. The illusion of setting what is considered ‘normative’ in a society is one of the primary tools of the coloniser, and this is successful when the colonised begins to accept this norm. We also see how Rita herself is a nonconformist, in that she takes offense at her classmate’s implication that her child has ‘white’ features. Seeing as to how Angelou’s goal from her very first autobiography was “to tell the truth about the lives of black women”, it is apparent that she is successful in doing so.

        The most important element of the book would be its prologue, which highlights the confused state of mind of African-Americans in the post-war period. This quote aptly summarises that feeling:

“There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend.”

      

       One must keep in mind that African-Americans are, by this time, natives to the land of America. The American way of life does not just belong to the white population, but to them as well. Yet, we see that no member of this community is allowed to live out that American dream as long as they themselves consider their community as the marginalised and the oppressed. The injustice done against the African-American community has far reaching effects, which go much further than the violence of the American Civil War period, or the blatant attitudinal racism that followed this. Maya Angelou’s book marks the period in history, where America transformed its blatant racism to a more subtle form. The book is very much concerned with everything that Rita learnt and how she learnt it. Unsurprisingly, none of this is through the medium of education, but through her experiences from fighting back against the norms set by society.

        

       In conclusion, the second volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies illuminates the difficulties in locating the self in a society that one has been forced to adopt as one’s own, while subsequently being suppressed by the same party that forces this society upon the individual.

Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor's Last Sigh is written in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century novels that combined the fate of a family with the flow of a nation's history. Rushdie makes this explicit by including a diagram of the Da Gama/Zogoiby Family Tree before the Contents page, and then, as Coetzee points out, beginning the novel with the "dynastic prelude" that establishes the characters, directions, source of income and general attitudes of Moraes's forebears. The plurality of this family history is crucial because there is a clash of ideas and positions from the start. The narrative begins in Cochin (now Kerala) as this is the place where the West (Europe) and the East (the Indian Subcontinent) first interacted, and it is the location of the spice trade which led to the relative affluence of the Da Gama line. Rushdie equates pepper with passion (especially in the rush of love the overcomes Abraham Zogoiby and Aurora Da Gama), and draws a distinction between the origins of both love and material success in the realm of a natural resource, and their corruption in the realms of commerce and politics, areas that are debased by their removal from the natural world. Moraes's family is torn by more than the gulf between an agricultural economy and the techno-financial manipulations of the modern world, however. Differences in temperament, demeanor, and desire stem from a more personal, internal matrix of motives that supersede the changes in the social milieu but remain linked to it. The understandable rivalry of separate families forced together by a marriage is compounded by the inner conflicts assailing the main characters.

This is something of an abstraction, but it is a revealing indication of how Rushdie approached the main themes of the book: The tangle of emotional responses to a country as a kind of home; the clash of positive and negative feelings engendered by a difficult relationship with a heterogeneous family, particularly the problems of dealing with a powerful, controlling father; the ways in which a creative imagination—here expressed through an exhibition of the myriad delights of language and the revelatory capacity of painting—can provide both insight and consolation as the loss of home leads to perpetual migration; and as Rushdie's response to the interviewer indicates, the force of love in the course of human affairs, perhaps the most primal energy source in the cosmos as Rushdie sees it.

The Moor's Last Sigh, which Rushdie spent five years writing, follows the life of Moraes ("Moor") Zogoiby from his birth in 1957 to the "present" in the mid-1990s, preceded by what J. W. Coetzee calls "a dynastic prelude" reaching back to the birth of Moraes's great-grandfather, Francisco da Gama (1876), who began the spice trade in the province of Cochin that led to the family's rise to moderate affluence. Da Gama is a social progressive and Indian nationalist whose differences with his wife Epifania Menezes—a traditionalist described as believing in "England, God, philistinism, the old ways"—sets the terms of a schism that eventually splits the family and which parallels the divisions in the country at large. Their son Camoens has a vision of an independent India which he hopes will be "above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened." Rushdie's knowledge of history and his personal experiences as an inhabitant of India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom prevent him from sharing this idealistic conception, but Rushdie's social vision includes, as Moraes puts it in describing some of the paintings of his mother Aurora Da Gama, "a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation."

A ferociously witty family saga with a surreal imagination and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Post colonial analysis of Arundhati Roy's God of small things

Post colonial texts often encompass its own variety of English augmenting often on the backdrop of the native culture which is distinct in its form. Writers often portray their local situation in their work which shapes their writings and their colloquail language to depict the impact of colonialism which is highly evident in Arundhati Roy’s God of small thing. In the novel, Roy has employed the usage of a different forn and style.
It is often highighted that the form of language she has chosen to articulate her message to the readers is often a departure from the conventional usage of words and sentences of the imperial language. For example, the English Roy uses can be seen as an ammalgamation with the colloquial Malayalam language. 

She is seen to purposely familarise the theme of Indianness in her novel by featuring the hybridity of English and Malayalam, the regional language of her native state, Kerala and so procures a unique linguistic experience in a multicultural background. She includes the Kottayam dialect of Malayalam.

In the novel, she names her characters with traditional references such as Ammu (mother) Kochamma (honorable woman) Mamachi (grandmother) Papachi (grandfather) not giving the characters particular names to establish a separate identity from a traditional Indian household. In addition, it is argued that the diction she employs often follows the post colonial theme of the fragmentation of rules and rigid regulations. Therefore, her language consists of the creation of compound words such as ‘dustgreen’ or the combination of two words as one – whatisit? and so proving to the readers the flexibility of language. This can also be observed in Salaman Rushdie’s novel Midnight Children and so Roy has constantly been compared to Salman in this aspect. She often breaks free from linguistic rules and reegulations which often appear to be non-English.

The word ‘post colonial’ highlights that the writing transcends the confinement of locality, region and nation to be included in the global world and the novel encompasses a post colonial situation where it is revealed through the dialogues, characters and events. The impact of colonialism can be felt where the characters possess a hybrid identity, often conversing both in Malayalam and English as can be observed from Rahel and Estha, a set of fraternal twins. Thus we can see her trying to waddle two different cultures and with the introduction of a foreign culture, we observe this as a crucial factor in the creation of the identities of her protagonists. Hybridity is a process that often occurs due to the assimilation of the foreign culture by the colonised, producing a complex social pattern. It can also be resulted from the conscious forcing of one’s cultural values on others.

Therefore the world created in this novel itself is a merge between two different cultures and brings in multiple Western influences; Estha is passionate about Elvis Presley, uncle Chacko quotes from ‘The Great Gatsby’ and often, the English languague was emphasised in the household. The character of Sophie Mol is represented as ideal and there was a tendency to ahere to that level. Thus before she visited India, the grandmother is seen to be highly conscious of making sure her grandchildren speak properly and punishes them if they talk in their native language. The novel also depicts a sense of divided sense of self on the basis of one’s colour of the skin as argued by Frantz Fanon in his essay ‘Black Skin, White Masks.’ Sophie thus is welcomed graciously to the family due to her racial background and the behaviour of Baby Kochamma’s represents the urge to conform to the cultural norms that Sophie possesses, such as asking her on Shakespeare’s Tempest. In addition, her sense of inferiority is revealed when she tries to imitate the British accent and so attempts to set herself apart from the rest of the Indians. The imperial language is given importance and this obsession acts as a demarcation of a typical post-colonial society. This act is thus described as an unconscious subservience to the imperial modes and customs.

The adoption of Western influence can clearly be seen in the actions of Papachi who changes his lifestyle patterns to fit in with the Britishers which includes failing to don the Indian attire and smoking cigars. However, it can be noted that despite being influenced by the Western culture, his character is seen as stubbornly accepting the power structures outlined by hs traditional system. He is seen to be a chauvinist, a wife-beater and someone who displays exclusive powers of patriarchy in his household- private sphere despite being hailed as a gentleman in his public sphere.

Finally, the novel represents a clear outline of the power hierarchy of relations which can be referenced to how the Britishers controlled the upper class Indians so as to assert their dominance over the rest of the population. Mamachi, Baby Kochamma often are seen as holding the realms of power over Ammu, Rahel and Estha.

Therefore the novel questions and responds to the practices that resulted from colonialsm and brings focus its political intent. It attempts to re-tell and re-write the colonial experience from a colonised voice and so aims to rework the sense of history.