Everywhere I see the battle for mastery that rages between classes, peoples, etc., reproducing
itself on an individual scale. Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass?
On the basis of my desire, I imagine that other desires like mine exist. If my desire is
possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.

—Hélène Cixous, Sorties (1986)

My final essay will be centered on the philosophical and literary writings of eminent feminist, philosopher, and poet, Hélène Cixous, who called for a style of writing now known to all as écriture féminine. The gendered nature of the title may be misleading – the title only makes sense once one understands the logic of what this form of writing advocates. To sum up her ideas crudely, Cixous works against the privileged terms in the longstanding binary of male/female and its corresponding binaries of mind/body, civilization/nature, individual/collective, and writing/speech that are the backbone of western philosophy. She critiques, specifically, their inherent drive towards mastery and control, of the self, of nature, of communities, of the other. Instead, she advocates for a re-signification of the terms hitherto considered inferior – the body, or nature, community, orality – and demands that they enter discourse in order to formulate a new modes of thinking, reading and writing that transcends the logic that underpins inherently exclusive institutions in our present day: hyper-nationalism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Majority of the decolonial thinkers we have read have grappled with their desires for mastery. From Gandhi to Fanon, we have seen thinkers wrestle with the question of how to reclaim control over themselves within a world that is set up and designed in the logic of the colonizer. As in Cixous’ quote above, what resonates in all their works is this horror, this frustration, “Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass?” And to add, seldom do they recognize and acknowledge the plight of women who, under colonial domination or not, are regulated and controlled by patriarchy, foreign or local. I wish to demonstrate how Cixous’ model offers us a mode of thinking, reading, and writing, that trains us to unlearn our compulsive desire for self-mastery and control over others and nature, to disentangle ourselves from the ever present legacies of violence inherent in our mode of being in this patriarchial, capitalist, neocolonial age. Cixous seeks to create instead a “non-acquisitional space” where the self can explore the non-self, the other, in mutual respect, harmony and love. A space that is generous, that gives, that finds affirmation of the self in multiplicity and difference – not in homogeneity or control. It is a mode of being fundamentally at odds with the world – but for now, she demands that we begin articulating it, to have it enter discourse to slowly but surely steer our futures away from violence and destruction, away from our fantasies of invulnerability that cause us to hurt other humans, animals and the environment. Her writing is poetic, inherently poetic since it demands that the body enter into the written word. It is sense, feeling, that recognizes, that appreciates, that expands the range of possibilities of being and of reality, well before the mind categorizes, filters, structures, approves or condemns. Her poetic language, her language of the body, stretches the bounds hitherto permitted under the modernity’s reign of reason.

The passage I have referenced above almost reminds one of the manner in which Descartes uttered his famous phrase: “I think, therefore I am” – that self-centered, individual, introspective orientation that spawned philosophies that now have exhausted their productive potential. Cixous radically inverts this moment. She exclaims how it is on the basis of desire and a trust in others who feel the same way – the body and community – acknowledged, recognized, that she can imagine a world worth living in, living for. This desire must be given a voice to redeem, to reclaim what is left in the world for us to admire, to appreciate, to perpetuate, to bolster – those otherwise subordinate terms  – the body, the voice, nature and community – for they may save us all.

The form of my project will be an essay, most likely, but rife with references to poetry!

In 1938, CLR James published Black Jacobins in an attempt to give black history as the staring point of world history as we know it. About twenty-five years later, Malcolm X aimed to subvert racial order by making African-Americans feel pride in their identity and struggles. Among the things both highlighted, they mention the need for internationalizing racial emancipation. While Malcolm X explicitly called for a worldwide black nationalism, James – at least in the first edition of Black Jacobins –  did not really engage with that idea. But by using Malcolm X’s words to understand the history presented by James, one can understand how an international struggle has always been a part of racial emancipation as imagined by black people.

Although James and Malcolm X focused on the West Indies and the United States respectively, they both speak of experiences of slavery. Both used their sharp command of language and irony to articulate the suffering and degradation of identity that came about through the institution. Malcolm X pointed out that those who attended Bandung realized that the Belgian, Englishman, Frenchman were all white colonizers who viewed their individual colonies as racially inferior to them. That statement makes sense once we look at James’ text because slavery was used to advance the colonial project. But through Malcolm X’s emotive imagery (and the reaction of the crowd) can one orient oneself in James’ anger and sarcasm as he explained the conditions of the slaves. And even as the colonies became nations, there were few to no laws which could alter their conditions for the better. The need for international solidarity existed because the state failed to guarantee rights and safety for the black slaves. And if that occurred in the United States, then black people in other countries could be facing similar circumstances.

In light of this stance, the only way to ensure international solidarity was to frame the issue as a human rights violation. In The Ballot or the Bullet,Malcolm X insisted that considering black freedom a human right would legitimize their struggle in the eyes of the international community. Human rights are both internationally recognized and universally accepted. Once those rights were curbed, black people could seek the support of international organizations like the United Nations. One can see seeds of this thought in Black Jacobins. James recounted Abbé Raynal who used Enlightenment ideas of freedom and liberty (which now constitute the basis of European liberalism) to mobilize a slave revolution for the relief of Africa and Africans. And, as James mentioned, these ideas were later used by Toussant L’Ouverture during the Haitian Revolution. So, when Malcolm X called out for seeing the civil rights struggle as a human rights struggle, he was movingly echoing the words of L’Ouverture, who was the first black man in world history to successfully turn these ideas into action.

That is not to say there have not been other efforts to create international links since 1791. In the Appendix, James connected the revolutionary ways of L’Ouvrerture with those of post-WWII revolutionaries like Castro. What was pertinent here is how he traced proto-Negritude feelings among the Haitians lead to the creation African Bureau and the idea of Pan-Africanism. All these movements were the attempts of black people to reconnect with their ancestry and seek to define themselves in their own terms. Malcolm X witnessed legacy of these movements when he traveled abroad 1964 and encountered worldwide support for him. He believed that the same could be achieved in the black national movement once people focused on their shared struggles as opposed to individual differences.

One can look at the words of both men in succession: the ideas which originally sprang up with the Haitian Revolution and in James’ work remained within intellectual tradition till they ended up Malcolm X’s ideology. But this idea can also be inverted: the emotion and the frankness used by Malcolm X to state the condition of black people can help us not just appreciate the boldness of earlier black revolutionaries (like L’Ouverture, Lumumba, Nkrumah etc.) but that of James who told their stories. It was James who went against conventional narratives (just as Malcolm X), and wrote a history which placed black people at the front and centre of it. And one can conclude from looking at both texts together that the strength found in a large community of proud black people in an international arena would surely prove to be a powerful and formidable force.

For this weeks blog, I have chosen to focus my attention on C.L.R. James’ preface of The Black Jacobins, to unpack his methodology. His work, the story of the successful slave rebellion of San Domingo, led by the revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, goes beyond a mere account of causality and event. Rather, it is an exercise of the imagination – a plunge into the world which made possible such a revolution, with an investigation of all the possibilities and alternate directions history could have taken accounted for. The journey is described in such detail, so richly, that it is almost cinematic.

What is truly distinctive, to me, is how unabashedly present C.L.R James is in his description and analysis. His account does not merely present multiple images and voices passively for us to make sense of. He directs our journey into the past – his work is a curated history told from the vantage point of the people with a drive so evident that his emotions are uncensored in his retelling. His work is no churning out of supposed objective, apolitical literature – if such a thing could exist. His loyalty is very evidently to the people, and he makes it apparent. He is their storyteller, deliberately emotionally charged, to tell a history complete with the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations that were part and parcel of the revolution. It comes as little surprise, then, to find out that he is a Marxist historian.

In his preface he argues that analysis is the science of history, and the telling of it, art. He clearly asserts that his telling of the revolution is shorn of the tranquility of Wordsworth’s definition of art, of poetry, as the overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquility:

“The violent conflicts of our age enable our practiced vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than heretofore. For this very reason, it is impossible to to recollect historical emotions in that tranquility which a great English writer, too narrowly, associated with poetry alone. Tranquility today is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality. It was in the stillness of  seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco’s heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin’s firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. Such is our age and this book is of it, with something of the fever and the fret. Nor does the writer regret it”

He cannot feign objectivity. For those who feel the tremors of history today, there is no way to speak of it outside “the fever and the fret”. He writes as a black man from Cuba in the 80’s, and one imagines that his choice in writing a book on the history of the revolution of an island not so far from his own, is one that cannot be anything but interested. It reads as a very conscious immersion into the past with the aim to make sense of the present, both for himself and his readers. He writes to see where his people have succeeded in the past, and where they had failed, and how those in the present can learn from their example. This drive for context, for a deeper understanding of his place is evident in that his final chapter links Toussaint and the revolution to Cuba’s history and to Fidel Castro.

His method reflects this drive, his approach is not one of simply glorifying of romanticizing the revolution – this immersion must be productive, must be understood. Here is the science of this historical method. He remarks, disapprovingly, that it is routine practice for historians of the revolution to romanticize Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leading role. Though he concurs that “no single figure appeared on the historical stage more greatly gifted than this Negro”, and that his present work too will convince them of this fact – still:

“Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth…great men make history, but only as much as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and their realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true work of a historian”.

He uses, what is to me, a beautiful metaphor to describe his task:

“In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are meaningless chaos and lend themselves into infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came. The writer has sought not only to analyze, but to demonstrate in their movement, the economic forces of the age; their molding of society and politics, of men in the mass and individual men; the powerful reaction of these on their environment at one of those rare moments when society is at boiling point and therefore fluid”.

If I were more efficient in writing to save room to go into the text itself and put forward what his method looks like in practice, this would be a more thorough blog. I can, however, quickly mention my favorite technique he employs, particularly in his chapter on the slave trade titled The Property. He juxtaposes long, richly detailed account of lives of the Native Americans, or the black slaves, with empathy, with emotion, against a short and sharp ironic shift to how the colonizer responded to their misery, or how they justified it. It is here where his obvious partiality, his lack of objectivity, is most apparent. For example, in the very first paragraph, in describing the slave ships as so horrific that “the Africans fainted and died, the mortality in the “trucks” being over 20 per cent.” And yet, “outside in the harbor, waiting to empty the “trunks” as they filled, was the captain of the slave ship, with so clear a conscience that one of them, in the intervals of waiting to enrich British capitalism with the profits of another valuable cargo, enriched British religion by composing the hymn “How Sweet the Name of Jesus sounds!”  It’s laughable, it’s horrific. There is no question of accepting in context the white man’s prejudice – they are immediately condemned. He does this repeatedly, and it builds a tempo, an energy, a frustration that demands release. C.L.R. James has, in his first chapter, achieved his aims – to ensure your sympathies are with the suffering, and has made you eager to see how they resist. This first chapter very much exemplifies how the telling of history is indeed an art.

I intend to create a project based on the African American blues tradition. This will be to highlight the influence of Blues music in identity creation. There will be an investigation of regularly occurring troupes and symbols in the music which promote a certain identity for Black Americans. The project will try to represent as accurately as possible the blues experience of the African American. What was the experience the blues genre was trying to impart on the listener? Why was the music structured a certain way? Why were the lyrics trying to convey? There will be a concerted effort to historically contextualize the blues, so that an understanding can be formed of why the genre evolved as it did, and how it influenced the African American in viewing himself as an individual and in the context of the African American community.

The importance of this lies in that any oppressed community turns to music for expression. This reflects the collective experience and in turn empowers marginalized groups to retake the narrative. Blues tapped into slavery and racism and retold the story of the African American through their music, reclaiming the voices that would otherwise not be heard. The influence of the blues has been massive with Jazz, Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues and Hip Hop all taking some inspiration from the genre. These genres still exist and are widely heard in the mainstream music today, indicating the far reach of the influence that the Blues has had on the African American.

The project will consist of three inter-related parts;

1. Blues song list
2. Pictures
3. Analysis 

Blues Song List

An album of blues song will be provided to the listener. There are two distinct directions the project can take with the song list. It could either try to cover a large variety of recurring themes in identity formation or one specific idea could be the focus. Restrictions can also be made on sub-genres and geography. The most accessible sub-genre will be electric blues of the 1950s based in Chicago, due to the superior recording quality.  

The project will require the listener to put on the album of selected songs while viewing pictures and then reading the analysis. The track list is thus the lynchpin of the project, meaning the selection of songs will be crucial in shaping the direction of the project. It will be the basis through which pictures are chosen and analysis is made; the reason being that a project on music should give greatest importance to the music itself.

Pictures

A visual representation of the song will be part of the attempt to situation the reader in the moment of the African American. The picture will be neither of the singer nor of the album art but rather it will be a depiction of the plight of the African American; a way to illustrate the source of inspiration for the blues. It will also attempt to draw attention to the conditions of the African American community. The pictures are meant to elucidate the larger point that each individual blues song is making. The use of pictures will be paired with an analysis underneath it.

Analysis

After the audience has “heard and seen”, this section will attempt to explore themes related to identity formation for that particular song. There will be reliance on secondary sources and various interpretations will be provided of the song. Focus will be on identity but general information and other important themes will also be discussed for the sake of completness. The section will therefore be where I will attempt to link the music, the visuals and the entire “guided tour” into one coherent whole. This section will not serve as an essay and instead will serve as a supplement. It will aim to leave food for thought of the entire “exhibit”, as opposed to shoving the words down the readers throat.  

For my final project, I intend to discover the deeply ingrained effects of colonization on the normative values of a society and its subsequent implications. The idea is to investigate the conventional values of a system that appear to have evolved from within, however, have the deep-rooted effects of the colonial past of a society. In other words, the inability of a society to ‘break’ from the imposed and infectious values of their unfortunate past. My area of study in this regard is Pakistan. I will be researching on the deeper corrupted values that I have found contradictory to the normative understandings of people in Pakistan.

I derive the importance of this investigation based on my personal experiences and from what I have understood and experienced as I have grown up in this society. What rather concerns me is the over-arching dilemma of identity and the elements of influence that I found contradictory and demeaning to our everyday conduct and existence. I believe it is elementary to point out the inherent differences that lie between the colonizers and the once colonized peoples of the subcontinent. We have so profoundly incorporated ideas of the colonizer that have corrupted our normative values and belief systems. I want to bring to the front a realistic image of these very corruptive values and what undesirable impact they have on our society.

At this point in time, I aspire to give my study and investigation a more pictorial shape. I intend to create a directory of images that are a living representation of these micro-level corruptive values. I want to humanize these problems and so, I will want to give it a structured outlook by organizing visual representations of such subjects. The images will incorporate people, sets, streets, art, old newspapers, advertisements (old and new), lyrics, poetry, speeches etc. to elaborate on the over-arching conventions and will try to bring forward the incoherence they exemplify. The medium of this directory will most probably be Instagram as it is a platform where I can make a sequential collection of pictures and short videos which will be followed by detailed descriptions for every post.  

My project is based on the way food was used as a form of decolonisation amongst African Americans. Soul Food originated in the South and incorporated a diet and cooking techniques that were born out of the slave experience and the reconstruction era. Soul food includes: cornbread, fried chicken, sofkee, black eyed peas, biscuits, watermelon, collard greens etc. Amiri Baraka was one of the proponents who advocated the concept of Soul Food and through his work and others’, I will attempt to understand food as a site of decolonial struggle and repair.

It is important because it signified the shared racial and class oppression that caused this form of cooking and food to emerge. It was criticised by the African American community itself for contributing to unhealthy eating and Muslims amongst the community for the consumption of pork. More importantly, it was re-appropriated by the Black Power Movement and it marked food as a part of African American identity in the 1960’s. The Black arts movement was about redefining what the black body meant and tied to it were food consumption and cooking techniques. Deep fat frying was one of these techniques that was a part of soul food cooking. It represented the conditions of African American diaspora as there is an element of intuition and spontaneity when it comes to cooking depending on the availability of ingredients.

I anticipate it taking the form of a a pictorial essay explaining the context of particular food and how food was a part of the de-colonial struggle or a cookbook with a commentary, for cookbooks were also the way African Americans started passing on the recipes for soul food.

For the purpose of my final paper, I want to look at the pedagogy outlined by the Brazilian educationist  Paulo Freire as decolonial aesthetics. What Freire set out to do in 1970 has long since become a blueprint for political activists, leftist intellectual, teachers, politicians, psychologists, radical theologians- the list is endless, who hope to bring about any semblance of change with the current structures. His work outlines the need to reconceptualize the paradigms of our education system in light of various structures of power and oppression by posing a critical, problem-posing pedagogy. For Freire, literacy or rather how literacy is imparted, had the power to create a free subject. Education was a project that was humanizing when it was critical, dialogical and praxical. It could not be apolitical, for it either created students that conformed to the present system or became ‘the practice of freedom.’ It is this concept- education/teaching as freedom that I  am interested in. While Freire never strictly limits the group he refers to as oppressed, he cites them as the poor in Brazil who are crushed under the rubric of both capitalism and dictatorship. Even so, his understanding of  a ‘death-affirming climate of oppression’ and the subject it produces allows fo the world to use Freire to understand the oppressed under multiple different power structures, including colonial government.  Freire speaks of the dehumanization that is intrinsic to power relations. For him humanization does not take place without dehumanization. His detailing of what this dehumanization looks like and the effect it has on the psyche of the oppressed is emblematic of what Fanon, Memmi and other postcolonial thinkers are writing about. “The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him; between following prescription or having choices; between being spectators or actors…This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account”. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decolonial precisely in this act, it demands that the way the colonised are taught about their own community, about their own image, must be done by themselves. For no one understands them better than them: “a pedagogy which must be forged with not for the oppressed (be they individuals or whole people) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.”

What makes this an aesthetic to me, more than its applicability to the social, political and economic violence inflicted on the colonised countries, is the ethic of hope that this text is loyal to.  It is a labour of love, at the heart of which is Freire’s uncompromising belief that there is beauty left to redeem and and that the oppressed can make it material. Hope, follows all the texts he wrote in his lifetime and twenty years later he writes the Pedagogy of Hope. 

“From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and in the creation of a world in which it is easier to love.” 

This paper will be most probably take the form of a boring old paper (for now).

My project will be drawing on folklore and legends to examine the new forms that the creative expression of the colonized peoples takes as it shifts away from the medieval, ambiguous time frame it has been frozen into. I will be focusing in particular on the unlikely heroes that feature in these songs and legends. The framework for this project is rooted in Fanon’s theory on the emergence of national culture in the wake of anti-colonial struggles. Fanon argues that with the collapse of the colonial institutions, great innovation takes place in folklore- stories no longer allude to “once upon a time”, “a long time ago” or any other obscure time period. The stories now refer to events that can easily take place in the present. Similarly, the stories have a different kind of hero, one who is a social misfit or an outlaw, that point towards new ways of being human. These heroes are rehabilitated and cast in a new, less negative light.

One such legend I will be looking at is the story of Jamalo Sheedi, immortalised in the popular folk song, Ho Jamalo. Jamalo Sheedi too is one of the unlikely heroes that emerge as folk songs and tales are revitalized. Jamalo Sheedi’s story takes place in the late nineteenth century. Not only this but it features a lot of characters we associate with modernity- railways, prisons and British colonial administrators. Jamalo Sheedi is a death row prisoner who takes on the task of test-driving a train across the then newly constructed Sukkur Bridge. This is a task that the British administrators have been unable to find volunteers for. Sheedi agrees to drive the train on the condition that he be released if he successfully completes the journey.  Sheedi manages to beat the odds and crosses the bridge. The British colonial administration is forced to release him and on his return his wife is said to have composed the song Ho Jamalo. Jamalo Sheedi makes an unlikely hero with his criminal past and his wits. Not only this, the story is also unique in how it can be easily placed into a time frame and is not a tale from an ossified past that the colonizer’s literature subjects the stories and heroes of the colonized to.  The project is significant because it will be looking at how stories evolved and modernized with recent struggles and events in the foreground. Although it might be a stretch to see Jamalo’s legend as an act of resistance against the colonizer, stories like these are important because they help show how the folklore of the colonized is a dynamic entity that has the capacity to reinvent and reinvigorate itself.

 

I will be looking for similar legends and stories. Another possible source for this project would be literature on the Thuggee culture in Southern India (might be referring to Philip Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug.

This project will most likely be an essay because it would be referring to secondary sources and tales.

 

References:

Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture.” Wretched of the Earth.

Finding out that the origin of the zombie myth was among the slaves in the sugar plantations of Haiti instead of the work of some science fiction novelist really sparked my interest. The realisation that this mythical, science fiction monster had a much richer, deeper history than I had ever imagined was surprising, to say the least. At first, I wanted to write my essay on how the myth originated and the symbolism of it among the slaves of the time. But upon doing some research I came across various articles and books analysing the representation of zombies in pop culture today and the symbolism that comes along with it.

Turns out the zombie trope I was most familiar with has not been consistent throughout films since their first adaptation onto the silver screen. Their image has evolved along with the culture of the times they were being written in. Exploring the evolution of the zombie in each era and its representation of cultural anxieties immediately seemed like a much more interesting theme to follow for the purpose of my own research.

This was one of the more popular research topics related to zombies which I came across. So for my essay, I shall trace the evolution of the zombie trope based on cultural changes within the Western world. From emerging out of magic to one band of survivors being stuck in a zombie infested world to viral infections leading to the apocalypse the zombies have had all sorts of origin within movies. We all watch these movies and absorb their content without question but upon taking a closer look they disclose great detail about the society they are produced in, especially their fears and anxieties. Thus, I would like to use this age-old myth which came out of the troubles and fears of the displaced African people, even helped them portray a part of their identity, to explore the ideas and the fears of the Western world today. It will guide me in understanding the identity they create of themselves through their fiction as all fiction always holds true some part of the writer’s identity.

For my final project, I will be writing a piece of fiction. My purpose is to show how redeeming language, specifically the English language, can help decolonize the postcolonial Pakistani. The following explanation will provide a literature review that led me to my current topic. It will illustrate the power of language using Fanon’s texts, elaborate on Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, establish literature as a tool of shaping and reshaping identity, and discuss Rushdie’s ‘chutnification’ as a means of reorienting language and taking ownership of it. It will conclude that by using the colonizer’s language to provide alternate representations of his identity, the colonized is able to claim said language and decolonize himself.

Language is a powerful tool that can be used for oppression or liberation. This is recognized by Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks where he explains how the culture of the white man makes the black man feel inferior and sub human. In order to deal with these insecurities, the black man adopts the white man’s culture. An example of this is black people learning the French language in Antilles. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon uses a different approach to this adoption of culture. He explains how the Algerians learnt the French language in order to have a shared language for communication as well as to hide their political affiliations so that they could safely start a revolution against the French. The language which had previously made them feel inferior and had been instrumental in their dislocated identities later helped them unite and feel protected. By using it differently and benefitting from it, they seemed to have claimed ownership of it. It was as much theirs as it was of the French because they had both used it for their own particular purposes.

Language is instrumental in shaping identities. Fanon explains the adoption of the colonial language by the black people in an attempt to become white and be treated like real human beings. In doing so, the colonized becomes a hybrid. Homi K Bhabha suggests that a hybrid emerges when there’s a mixture between the colonized and colonizer’s culture. The postcolonial man is a hybrid. In fact, any man in this multicultural world would be a hybrid as we adopt different practices from the diverse cultures we encounter. Bhabha’s hybridity is a bit different in the sense that it involves competing selves and causes confusion and anxiety in the postcolonial subject who no longer knows who he is and where he belongs. Literature provides multiple examples of such subjects. Before elaborating on this further, I’ll establish the role of literature itself in shaping identities.

Edward Said, in Orientalism, shows this by analyzing the oriental discourse and tracing how the Western writers produced and translated fiction about the Orient in the East in order to create and associate a stereotypical identity with them. The lazy, sexually perverse, and backward Orient was meant to contrast with the civilized people in the West. For example, the despot in the Persian Tales is anti-nationalist, a horror for the British nationalists to encounter. The promiscuous women in Arabian Nights are a disgrace to a British lady. Literature was thus used politically to shape and impose an identity by popularizing these stereotypes.

If literature can shape identities according to the colonial agenda, the reverse is also possible. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft et al. theorize Fanon’s description of the black people embracing French language. They state that by appropriating the language of the colonizer, the colonized is able to liberate himself. The process of decolonization, they suggest, should be undertaken through writing in the colonial language. This way the colonized can take ownership of the very tool that oppressed him. Salman Rushdie uses this idea in the form of ‘chutnification’—the combination of words from different languages, specifically English, Hindi, and Urdu in his case. In his novel, Midnight’s Children, he uses chutnification to subvert the colonial narrative. Arundhati Roy does the same in A God of Small Things by combining Malayam with English. Moni Mohsin combines Urdu and English to achieve the same effect in The Diary of a Social Butterfly. The characters in all these novels are hybrids whose struggle is shown in their use of multiple languages. However, none of these characters end up resolving their internal conflicts, perhaps signifying the ongoing process of decolonization. Literature thus has the potential to make space for this decolonization and produce a new kind of identity which is a hybrid but is not struggling, an identity that is stable despite being complex; this is the representation of the decolonized man who takes ownership of the forces that had previously bound him and who feels comfortable in his hybrid body.

This brings me to question at hand: what is left to redeem now? Language. A way of decolonization is to redeem the language of the colonizer by reshaping and reorienting it. How? By using the language to write back to the imperial center with different representations of the colonized or post colonial man. By subverting the narrative of the victim.

That will be my mission for my final project. I aim to write a piece of fiction, set in postcolonial Pakistan and centered on a postcolonial subject who grapples with the anxieties of his hybrid identity. I will depict these anxieties through the form of chutnification in his language.  The plot will revolve around the character’s struggle in trying to take ownership of the language. Whether or not he succeeds fully, I have not decided yet. However, I do wish to show some level of development as far as the decolonizing process is concerned.