Repetition in the colonialist and post colonialist imagination
The Writings of Jamaica Kincaid and Alex La Guma In works of the poetic imagination, repetition is often used as arhetorical or literary trope to give aid to the beauty and rhythmic verbaltexture of a written work. Both the South African writer of the 1960's AlexLa Guma and Antigua's (and North America's) contemporary novelist andessayist Jamaica Kincaid could be called poetic authors in the sense thatthey are both master craftspeople of the linguistic, prosaic art ofwriting. They deploy repetition to add beauty to the texts they unweavebefore the reader's senses. Yet repetition in the titular short story ofLa Guma's "A Walk in the Night" uses the narrative functions of repetitionas a way of showing the tragic sameness of the central characters livesunder an oppressive White regime, as well as a way of rendering theugliness and repetitive texture of daily life in poetic prose. JamaicaKincaid, in contrast, in viewing the world of her native Antigua as a placethat has been liberated from colonialist rule in the author's lifetime,uses repetition as a device to thematically and philosophically emphasizesthe sameness that often exists in corrupt political regimes, although she
For all of the plurality of her perspectives,still she cannot tease out an answer to her nation's sorrows. Kincaid thus showshow her homeland was misinterpreted through the eyes of white colonialists,continues to be misunderstood by tourists, and continues to be abused bythose in power, first by foreigners, and then by natives who sell theirland's sights to foreigners, the same land oppressed by colonial rule. "If you go toAntigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. Kincaid believes that colonialism was a crime of empirenot merely cause it destroyed Antiguan culture, but also because its legacyhas proven so difficult to escape, and the institutions of the island arestill suffused with corruption. Kincaid herself, having seen the same things through the differenteyes of a child, a resident, and a kind of tourist with ties to the land,as well as through the eyes of her American family and friends, issupremely and uniquely qualified as an individual and an author tounderstand the befits of a repetitive yet multiple perspective, and alsothis perspective's limits. Kincaid gives the reader the narrative perspective of seeing Antiguaunder colonialist rule and now free. You may be the sort of touristwho would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named afterhim-why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great publicmonument. Antigua'sdifficulties remain the same, essentially, even when viewed throughdifferent eyes. Kincaid uses the duplication of the samescenes on the same island to emphasize the historical sameness of colonialand post-colonial modalities of rule, corruption, and oppression wieldedfirst by oppressors then of the oppressors on themselves. His South Africans of 1962 merely dwell in the sounds and smells of themoment, the repetitive stink of fish and sewage of daily repetitive life,rather than of history. " (Kincaid, 2000) The reason that an airport bears the name of the Prime Minister, isbecause Antigua continues to sustain its economy through tourism andforeign dollars, a kind of neo-colonial oppression, as the land is stilldependant upon the wealth of the West to survive, suggests Kincaid,provocatively. Beyond thebeautiful blues of the ocean that the tourist's eyes can see, is a landwithout a decent library or hospital or sewer or school system, and thecorrupt colonial government that denied the land these things was replacedby a corrupt native government that relies upon the supposed exotic beautyof the land to the eye-the colonialist's perspective-to sustain thenational economy. The author's repetitive use of the world 'you' thus takesthe reader into the eyes of a travel book, forces him or her to enter therhythm of seeing the world through a tourist's eyes, and also through thenative author's eyes. By showing the same scenes yet again,but through different eyes, by repeating images but shifting the internalperspective of the narrator, Kincaid demonstrates that the post-colonialera simply has different problems than the colonial era-and the sameproblems to, as tourism replaces colonialism, tourism as merely a differentkind of colonialism.
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Acceptance Essays
