Thumboo, E. and T. Kandiah, “Commonwealth Literature: Resisting Dichotomisation.” Introduction in The Writer as Historical Witness: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, edited by Edwin Thumboo and Thiru Kandiah. Singapore: UniPress, 1995: xv‑xxxvii.

It has been said that history has many cunning passages. The elements which shaped the cunning, chiefly manifest in the re-writings of significant episodes and appropriate discourses, has received much attention. The many, which touches on the variety of the British, French and other colonial and post-colonial management and experience, has not to the same degree. We make the point early as the need for generalisation — which is virtually unavoidable unless we are willing to make or include detailed case studies for each and every ex-colony covering pre-colonial and post-colonial history — should be accompanied with the need for caution. And there is the caveat that some generalisations are to be preferred to others, especially one's own. But this is not always the case, even with terms and labels. Many have serious reservations about “post-colonial”, yet continue to use it because it is convenient and, perhaps, for the room it allows them.

Given the nature of its historical space created by Empire. “Commonwealth Literature” defines a discursive field within which different voices contend with each other in articulating a response to the epistemological and existential crises/ challenges of post-colonial (national?) liberation, restoration and reconstruction raised by the ever-changing historically-constituted realities within which they are situated. The theme of the 1986 ACLALS Conference, at which the papers included in this volume were presented, namely ‘‘The Writer as Historical Witness'', defined a felicitous frame of reference within which the participants could engage closely with the implications and demands of the task. Predictably, diversity is the hallmark of this engagement. This Introduction will attempt to give it some semblance of cohesiveness by all exploratory critical intervention in some of the more significant issues it raises. This will, it is hoped help project the varied, often implicitly contending contributions as dialoguing among themselves to define a non-homogenous metatext which comments on the nature of the variegated “community” or “culture” of scholars they emerge out of, on its perceptions, assumptions and concerns. In particular, it will consider the adequacy of its responses from the point of view of the human subjects in whose lives the literature it examines is grounded. This in turn might justify the more wide-ranging expectation that the volume as a whole will make some modest contribution to the field of post-colonial literary studies, by marshalling useful insights into and understandings of the immensely complex problematic that the post-colonial endeavour inevitably presents. Doubt less, the situation in several of the countries involved (for example. South Africa, Ireland, Sri Lanka) has changed considerably since the papers were written. But, the issues that these papers raise remain as critically alive as ever, so that they can be expected to continue to resonate robustly with current initiatives within that endeavour.

Given the deep scepticism of binariness that our times profess, a useful way of trying to discharge this brief is by calling attention to some of the dichotomies that the papers themselves recognise, illustrate or challenge. These include: centre/margins: self/other; indigene/migrant; tradition/modernity; individual, personal/social, public; psychology/praxis; epistemology/politics; vision, myth-making, art/facticity, historical realism; and so on. The overriding opposition, however, one which is entirely unsurprising considering the prevalent post-modernist temper of our times and, particularly, the reservations of post-modernism regarding history itself, the history which the Conference theme privileges. This is an analytical/ methodological opposition, which counterposes text, the figural uses of language and so on to historicity, historical realism, politics, ideology and suchlike. In fact, the issue is encompassing-enough to use as the basis of this intervention, facilitating, it is hoped, not just a dissolution of the debilitating misrecognitions which set the terms of the various dichotomies mentioned in mutually exclusive opposition to each other, but also, in the process, a constructive encounter with deeper and not-always transparent concerns, even complicities that variously underpin the whole endeavour. For the sake of brevity, these two approaches will, admittedly simplifyingly, be termed the text-oriented approach and the historical approach, respectively.

The text-oriented approach is perhaps most explicitly articulated by Paul Sharrard and Craig Tapping. These critics reject what they appear to see as the necessary assumption by the historical approach of a pre-existing, essentialist reality made up of extra-textual political and other verities by which to read texts. On this basis they make a strong plea for focusing attention on the figural and structural tactics of the text as such, the rhetorical tropes it uses and the arts by which it constructs the always-fallible version of history that it promotes. The objection is familiar, post-modernist. This is that the too-explicit, linear narratives of history and historical realism define transcendental, totalizing meta-narratives which effectuate exclusions and closures that interfere with the proper understanding of the necessarily open-ended, fragmented, incomplete and indeterminate experience it narrates. At the same time, acceptance of this claim and the consequent shift of focus from object to tactics and arrangement are by no means taken as entailing a lack of interest in historical, political and ideological matters. On the contrary, the claim is that it is fundamentally through an examination of the way in which the writing works that t lie crucial political, ethical and also aesthetic dimensions of the text may be all the more discerningly uncovered and drawn out.

The most random glance at the pages of this volume will straightaway reveal near-uniform genuflection in the direction of such notions as ambivalence, indeterminacy, fragmentation, incompleteness and so on, on which this approach places a high premium. These notions also happen to be those nullifying, featureless abstractions that the post-modernist discourse of angst has, somewhat ironically, made totalisingly fashionable, the invariable hallmark of intellectual respectability. However, a more careful look at the actual writing, both of the critics and of the writers they discuss, seems in fact to reveal a rather less than total commitment to such notions as they are understood within that discourse. After all, these are hardly the kind of notions that can be over-enthusiastically endorsed by post-colonials, who had known the expropriations, exploitations, negations, violations and so on of colonialism as immediately real and true, very much undeniable facts of their lives, which they are now seeking to do something about; anything which would cause these certainties to be too easily waved away as uncertain, indeterminate and untrustworthy rhetorical constructions would of its very nature invite resistance. What Veronica Brady says apropos of Cohn Johnson is germane here: that in a certain very important sense Johnson has as it were abdicated his power to reshape events, the reason being that the story he is trying to tell “has already been concluded — disastrously - in reality”. And this exactly is what all of these writers maybe considered, in that important sense, to do.

Clearly, this is not all that they do; in response to this reality, they also seek with sure determination and affirmative concern those important things which even those whose commitment to indeterminacy is the greatest, cannot but talk of in non-fragmentary terms, namely the “truths and communalities” of a “once-whole culture” (Tapping), “meaningful participation”, “reality”, “forgotten images”, “our physical and mental world”, “material reality” (Sharrard) and so on. The quiet voice of Ee Tiang Hong, compellingly persuasive in its wholesome sanity and its utter humaneness, expresses it best: the most meaningful of the responses that post-colonial writers need very much to find are those that are dynamically rooted in “the reality of things and people as they are”; and their readers will he able to return the confidence that the writers place in them by writing from and to that reality because “the evidence is reasonable”.

In any event, there is already a history demanding to be challenged, the history of the colonisers whose narrative, as Wimal Dissanayake reminds us, misrepresented these people through its discursive practices as shadows, absences and silences (or, as ‘Terry Goldie has it, as the “never present” “corpses” of a past out there), and on that basis set up a binary opposition within which they perpetually remained a subjected and inferior Other. But, as Bruce Bennett observes, absences and silences always call to he filled, and the task of national self-identification this often associates itself with cannot simply he marginalised as a dead issue. And not the least, if Leslie Monkman is right, as there is a deep existential as well as aesthetic hunger propelling people to retrieve shape and order and unity out of their multitudinous experiences, even their voids; find out who they are, where they came from and where they are going.

This last is a pragmatically crucial agenda. The task of post-colonial recovery these people are engaged on cannot afford to fall prey to the self-perpetuating “deferrals” which Charles Steele acknowledges that hard core deconstruction, a twin of post-modernism, finds attractive. It very urgently needs to issue in an effective praxis of revision and reconstruction, something which Adil Jussawalla's entirely convincing exploration of the moral and artistic crises of post-colonial creation makes it impossible for us to forget, by obliging us to see how very interiorly action drives it and invests it with meaning. It thus becomes imperative for them to identify with some certainty the teleological formations of the imperial discourse which assigned them places of subordination and subjugation, and, furthermore, to define their own responses to them with some degree of assurance about what truly matters to them. For these people to luxuriate in the dubious gratifications of fragmentation, neither here-nor-thereness, uncertainty and so on, however persuasively these may be reified as absolutes, is in fact to accept into their ranks a Trojan horse whose only effects will be to subvert the entire endeavour, by coopting them into a discourse that has issued out of the contradictions of the very situation that they are seeking to challenge. Thus by default the ensuing consequences are legitimized. Ultimately, this would prevent them from identifying with clarity and confronting the forces they need to engage with, by making it all that more difficult for them to know with reasonable assurance who they are, where really they stand and what they want; which will only succeed in starting the whole wretched process going once again — to whose benefit it hardly needs to be spelled out.

For the purpose of doing what they have to, post-colonials “claim their history”, as Geoffrey Davis says Black South African writers are doing, wresting it from the void into which, according to Kevin Gilbert, it had been consigned, resuming its “broken line”, as Itala Vivan terms it and telling the narratives of their own lives anew in all their on-going dynamism. This helps them to identify, recognise, interrogate, challenge and subdue the distorting dominant history that had subverted and marginalised them, and with that greater legitimacy and freedom with which, Yasmine Gooneratne claims, literary writers, unlike historians, are able to do it. But that is not all. For, the visit by aboriginal writers, for instance, to their dream time is a means by which they both, in Kevin Gilbert's words, reassemble their identity from its colonial negations and also, as Trevor James indicates, retrieve out of the interaction between that past and their present realities a new metaphysics for these realities. This new metaphysics then becomes the basis of their consciousness, existence and actions within the highly complex post-colonial world which they occupy and in which they now seek to find meanings for themselves.

The task is by no means simple. As Cecil Abrahams, Ken Goodwin, Bernard Hickey, Paul Sharrard, and Angela Smith among others make it impossible to forget, post-colonial people are afflicted by their own contradictions and ambivalences, their own sense of uncertainty, unrealisation, angst and so on. What it is crucial to recognise, however, is that whatever content is to be assigned to these words in the writing of post-colonials needs to be determined not by the terms of the prevailing discourse but by those of the historical realities that created the post-colonial condition and also by those of the alternative discourse that these people are in the process of developing precisely in order that they can the more effectively engage with that condition.

Unless this is realised, the acknowledgement by these people of the contradictions within themselves could well militate against their reaffirmations, by condemning them to renewed silence. For, reconstituted in terms of the uncertainties engendered by the hugely different particularities of the very discourse and accompanying teleological formations that they are seeking to challenge, they could well be misrecognised as simply belonging together with the people who fashioned that discourse and its formations in the first instance, all of them fellow-sufferers in the one, shared limbo of the absolutes of nothingness. Clearly, such misrecognition, achieved by obscuring the fundamental differences between the two kinds of unrealisation, that of the victim and that of the perpetrator, thus providing a legitimization of the conditions that created the former, would only furnish a disincentive to develop a useful, praxis-oriented account against that discourse and the teleologies it constructs and condemn the writers to a kind of real world impotence.

Almost all that would need to he done would he to just recognise the malaise as existing, which is what Ken Goodwin does, or Bernth Lindfors when he displays for us the fundamental conundrum that is Thomas Mohole's Chaka without any effort to find out what this conundrum really means in terms of post- colonial concerns. Alternatively, the erasure of the difference could work against some of the more fundamental of these concerns, as Angela Smith's essay on Ngugi reveals. Smith treats Ngugi's response in A Grain of Wheat to the Mau-Mau related emergency in Kenya in terms of modernist fragmentation and this prevents her from appreciating the force of David Maughan Brown's demonstration (in his book Land, Freedom and Fiction that she cites) of the contradictory positions embodied in the novel's textual structures. This leads her eventually to the claim that “colonialism is a state of mind”— which is true after all, but not in the terminal way which releases the critic from the obligation to address the other things involved that also desperately call for attention. Brown's assertions certainly call to be examined, but in a way that will more perceptively reveal the actual nature of the predicaments in which many post-colonial writers find themselves. Fortunately, few of these writers appear to have allowed themselves to he intimidated by either their own awareness of the contradictions within themselves or the loud reminders by others of these contradictions to he diverted from the tasks that they have set themselves. The real question here is whether “contradictions” itself is an accurate or adequate description of existential realities.

Clearly, none of this implies that either the history or the metaphysics that is retrieved pre-exists in an already determined, static form. The writers do not claim to effect some kind of pre-lapsarian reversion to a perfect state which is assumed to be available for appropriation in an inalienable and unalterable pristine form. It is clearly too late, if it was ever anything but undesirably static, to seek this. Cultural “purity” is not to be preferred over cultural vitality. What the writers do offer is rather the result of an engaged act of semiotic creation, imaginatively constructed by the inspired exploitation of the figural resources of language to deny, recover, discover, shape, invent and so on. The concern is that the writing should make sense, from wherever it may have drawn, in the Now, in the “overwhelming present tense” as Kapil Kapoor and Ranga Kapoor nicely term it. Chinua Achebe attempts as much in Things Fall Apart, where the thrust of the main narrative is sharpened by inserting a reference to a fictitious colonial text composed by his nameless District Commissioner, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, which reproduces the misrecognitions of whatever did exist in the spaces the colonials had intruded upon. For that matter, as Govind Sharma argues, even historians in the empirical tradition, with their scientistic belief in the absolute inviolability of their facts and the objectivity of their observations, ultimately only hut construct in their work the “fictions” that make the most sense to them. It is interesting to note in passing that although a large number of contributions to this volume subscribe to this view, their commitment to it does not seem to be firm enough to dispel the terrors they nevertheless necessarily appear to see in the historical approach (as it has been termed earlier in this Introduction). We shall return to this point later.

The fictions of the post-colonial story teller, alive to the resources of language and self-reflexively aware of the implications of what these fictions are doing make the issue transparent. For they issue in the final analysis as a significant kind of decentred narrative in which, to draw on Leslie Monkman again, politics and aesthetics integrate in clarifying experience and giving it shape without concurrently eroding its plurality and open-ended complexity. So much so in fact that it even becomes possible to raise once again an old important question which modern criticism has intimidated into unfashionability. This question, mentioned by Bruce Bennett, is that of literary merit, quality, even value. Thiru Kandiah indicates one way in which the question may be asked when he argues that literary creativity and quality in the Sri Lankan fiction of the Insurgency are intimately correlated with the adequacy of the responses the writers make to the political/ historical situation they undertake to engage with even as they reconstruct it. What is involved here is an argument for a persuasive aesthetics which does not dichotomously separate art and politics, an argument built on a demonstration of the unsatisfactory artistic consequences of the inadequacy of the response the artistes make to the political issues they undertake to address. “Adequacy” here may be determined by something of the kind which Ee Tiang Hong tags when he talks of “a hierarchy and a norm of (human) values that enable the poet to select the important from the trivial, distinguish right from wrong, truth from falsehood, statesman from “cad”. In the case of the Sri Lankan fiction looked at, the demonstrable artistic price paid by the weaker writing of inadequate responses takes the form of an over-simple recourse to caricature, among other things, as a means of evading the fundamental human issues at hand. Needless to say, nothing here implies that an adequate response will, in the absence of artistic skill and inspiration, guarantee artistic success (see below).

The role of language and its figural resources in the tasks of post-colonial literary creation under discussion cannot be underestimated. For it is only by fundamentally altering the signifiers in the Barthesian triple knot that Wimal Dissanayake talks of that the discourse can begin to meet the new demands that are now being made on it. Thus Raja Rao, as Dissanayake points out, makes the English language carry an Indianness through the distinctive musicality of its rhythms and the cumulative power of its imagery, while Salman Rushdie uses it with a “self-confident irreverence and purposive iconoclasm” to break through his cultural containment and create his version of history. Similarly, the Soweto poets whom Itala Vivan discusses use exciting African rhetorical forms and arrangements of rhythm, sound, imagery and so on. even “a highly impure kind of English” (this is a compliment) to resume the broken line of their history: and Louis James calls our attention to Edward Kamau Brathwaite's use of language and the conventions of the oral tradition in both his search for his African roots and his return to the here-and-now of the Caribbean spirit and cultural life. It is also interesting to note Cohn Nicholson's observations on the role of the Gaelic language and the cultural memories it carried in the efforts of both Sorley MacLean on the Isle of Skye and Alistair MacLeod in Canada to rescue moments of their Scottish history for their lives in the present.

In a very real sense, most of the writing discussed in this book explicitly or implicitly witnesses to the history of its peoples in this way, through the exploitation of the linguistic and rhetorical resources of their language. It does not, that is, give evidence of being written to a prefigured, fixed historical script, whose confident certainties inhibit self-reflexivity and awareness of contradictions and effect closures that interfere with understanding of the complexities of the situations and experiences it locates itself in. On the contrary, if we look just at Salman Rushdie we see in his work the distrust of “wholeness” and completeness that Govind Sharma finds in him. This raises the possibility that Rushdie is dancing to the postmodernist tune of fragmentation that can only so subvert the post-colonial cause; and, indeed, this is almost the charge that Chaman Nahal makes against him when he calls him a “colonial”, who endorses or reproduces the negative representations of India that were characteristic of the old imperial discourse.

To the extent that Rushdie does appear to choose to focus on just one strand of the contradictions he sees, the negative (contradictions do, after all, have more than a single strand), there certainly does appear to be something to be looked at here. At the same time, it is impossible to deny the power of the challenge he serves on the colonial project or to fail to see that the vast Indian muddle he offers for our agitated contemplation signals rather his self-reflexive recognition of the disastrous effects of this project as well as the complicities of his people in it than a luxurious indulgence in mere post-modernist fragmentation. On the contrary, this is the unrealisation not of the post-modernist but of the post-colonial. These people's “failure to live as full human beings”, a predicament that they share with George Lamming's Caribbean people whose condition Louis James uses these words to describe has everything to do with the actual “historical events” that James attempts to separate it from, and with the realities of the social, economic and political environment and system spawned by these events (the environment and system that, Cecil Abrahams points out, Alex La Guma made responsible for the destruction of the individual in South Africa); but these events, this environment and system, as Rushdie's, Lamming's and La Guma's writing make very obvious, are themselves the results of self-reflexive transcreation from the factual world out there into the writer's complex, pluralistic and dynamic world of fictional narrative.

As it turns out, a great deal of the writing discussed in this volume, taken both individually and collectively, gives evidence of being at the same time both inextricably rooted in historical, social, political and ideological reality and strongly aware of and responsive to the complexities and many-sidedness of that reality in transformationally (re)creating it in art. This make it difficult to sustain the distorting critical assumption that such writing necessarily conduces to fixity and closure, justifying the dichotomization of art and the reality it is necessarily integrated with. Persuasive examples of writing which resists such simplification are provided by the South African writers, Bessie Head and Alex La Guma, as it is discussed by Cecil Abrahams and Huma Ibrahim. As members of the coloured minority within the oppressed non-white majority, these writers found themselves banished into even remoter margins by the black majority within the margins that the dominant white minority had already consigned all of them alike to.

Their plight, it is worth noting, was very much that of the Creole, Antoinette, in Jean Rhys David's Wild Sargasso Sea, whose efforts to retrieve her sense of herself, Louis James reminds us, Edward Kamau Brathwaite would devalue and marginalise. However, Ee Tiang Hong's overriding hierarchy or norm of human values, which writers can deny only at some significant cost to themselves, will not allow the tellers of the Stories of these double-fold victims to unprotestingly accept the fate that their different oppressors, both those within the ranks of the non-oppressed and those within the ranks of the already-oppressed, would condemn them to. And so, in Dorothy Colmer's words, they set about “putting the record straight”, revising through their writing in ways of the kind Craig Tapping incisively characterizes the obliterating versions of literature and history that these others had devised for them.

This precisely is what Head and La Guma also do, linguistically and metaphorically reshaping their realities to map space for themselves and reconstituting their identities in ways that would allow them to occupy that space in the most humanly meaningful ways possible. The circumstances of redoubled choicelessness that their realities had placed them in did not, however, allow them any kind of usual or expected response in terms of the familiar ideological considerations or implications; they exacted some prices from them that they probably would have preferred to avoid paying had they the choice. They could not always, therefore, respond in the way that Rotimi Johnson says Dennis Brutus did. Like Head, though in different ways, he saw in exile a means of recouping creativity; hut, his almost exclusive preoccupation with protest accounts for the powerful anger, anguish, even despair his writing expresses over violations by the system of apartheid, his inability to act for change, his frustration. Johnson also comments on David Diop, the African writer, who was able to go even further, letting his revolutionary ardour push his poetry, under a norm of humanising values, to the absolute limits of uncompromising, action-directed protest. That is partly to be accounted for by the thoroughgoing Frenchified deracination inflicted on him by his circumstances.

On the other hand, Bessie Head sought to weave together the fragmented pieces of her self in an exile which only gradually released her from the multiple contradictions of her situation. Originally, these contradictions had driven her to escape and to seek, through an analysis of human nature and the way it revealed itself in the relations between man and woman, for an answer to some of the fundamental ills of society. She tenaciously sought to reconcile self-preservation with the insistent demands made by her moral courage. That required changing her language and her subject matter in ways that allowed her to turn her immediate gaze away from the uncompromising issues of ideology as such and to engage instead with the day-to-day doings of the common people, with their on-going manifestations of those larger, more abstract issues and also of the deep concerns of human existence.

Similarly, La Guma sought artistic resolution by making visible the ugly underpinnings of the all-embracing system of oppression iii its vicious class divisions. Looking unflinchingly and without simplifying idealisation at the unsightly price of dehumanisation and brutalisation that these divisions exacted from their victims, he sounded a cry of defiant resistance to it all, with a view to wrestling a possibility of hope out of all this hopelessness.

This is not the only kind of writing that resists dichotomization and reminds readers and critics that they themselves are as much under notice to deliver on self-reflexivity and sensitivity to the pluralistic complexities of what is going on as the writers of whom they demand these qualities. Consider, for instance, the writings that issued out of the Nigerian Civil War, as they are discussed by Ernest Emenyonu and Chidi Amuta. All of these are rooted in a grim historical reality which, fictionally reconstructed or not, was, simply. there. For the many writers who had passionately believed in the Biafran cause and the ideals that had initially inspired it, the most immediate driving force behind their writing was the explicitly political/ideological one, the utterly disillusioning betrayal by the exploitative elite ruling class of the mass of the people whom they were purportedly leading to liberation and who it was who were called upon to pay the overwhelming price of their leaders' cynicism.

It was just these contradictions in their historically embedded situation that these writers set out to explore, and with an awareness of their nature that received sharp focus from their shared commitment to human concerns that would define the hierarchy and norm of values mentioned earlier. In much of the writing that came out of this, Emenyonu sees considerable artistic virtues — haunting imagery and immediacy in Chinua Achebe's war fiction, courageous power in Eddie Iroh's novel, passion and skill in Kalu Okpi's work. Yet, speaking of the situation as he saw it then, he concludes that “the great Nigerian novel is yet to be written”.

The claim need not be disputed, but Emenyonu's explanation for it calls for closer scrutiny. In Emenyonu's view, the writers had failed because their political commitment had overwhelmed their artistic vision — which is but an affirmation of a version of the old familiar dichotomy, a modified restatement of the claim that a central concern with politics/history/ideology is necessarily incompatible with art. The problem with this stance is that whoever wanted to create art out of this particular historical situation, whether it was the more effective writers mentioned above or the less effectives ones like Florence Nwapa and John Munonye, whom Emenyonu censures, or, for that matter, the successful writer who was/is going to produce the great war novel, all of these people alike could not but draw crucially, if differently, on essentially the same political/historical reality, even most likely the same political vision, the same kinds of details about military matters, refugee camps, underhand deals, cynical acts and practices, so sufferings, deprivations and so on that fill the pages of the actual writing produced.

The linguistic configurations developed for the purpose of projecting all of this fictionally, the literary devices used, the modes of metaphorization adopted and so on would, obviously, vary hugely. For instance, from Emenyonu's account, it appears that it was mainly Achebe who chose to retrieve for his purposes the memory of an “African traditional world view”, specifically to celebrate the resourcefulness of common persons in seizing control of their disrupted and disruptive realities. However this might he, no evidence is provided that the success or the failure of the writing may he determined by criteria defined by a simple, dichotomizing separation of art and reality, one which would see a concern with historical realism and the accompanying political and ideological commitments not just as unconnected with artistic creation hut as necessarily interfering with it by getting in the way of a response that recognises the plurality, the undeniable complexity of the situations dealt with.

Indeed, the very same logic involved in this separation, working now in the opposite direction, can be used to justify Chidi Amuta's assessment of the shortcomings of Wole Soyinka's fictional treatment of the Nigerian Civil War in Season of Anomy. Soyinka, too, had definite political and ideological commitments, but they were very different from those of the writers Emenyonu looked at, for unlike them, he belonged outside of the “Biafran malaise” and was equally critical of the Biafran secession and the Federal government. In Amuta's view, these firm political commitments and their associated artistic concerns, particularly in regard to the kind of narrative recreation the commitments made necessary, led Soyinka to modes of art that were more secular, more oriented towards materiality and action than the fundamentally mythical modes that had come so naturally to him in his earlier writing, especially in Idanre and Other Poems — an observation which reminds us, incidentally, of the inseparable link between medium and message that the dichotomy under discussion tends to forget. At the same time, these very same commitments and concerns led Soyinka, as it did Achebe and the writers “on the other side”, as it were, to seek out the resonances of the events and actions his artistry recreated at the deep levels of a “revitalizing ethic”. And for this, he still found the mythic mode the most artistically conducive and continued to draw on it, though in ways that were now different.

Far from showing an inadequate understanding of the complexities of the historical realities he deals with or of the nature of the artistic demands made on him by the fictional task he had set himself, all of this shows Soyinka's openness and sensitivity to these various matters. Yet, Amuta, applying the dichotomy under scrutiny the other way round now, announces that Season of Anomy is “an aesthetically profound artistic accomplishment” which nevertheless “remains a fatally flawed ideological statement”.

But this, equally with the opposite way of applying the dichotomy, fails to recognise that without the historical realities it is rooted in, and without the accompanying political and ideological coin in it me ills, there would he no writing at all, a fact which is true of all of the writing discussed in this volume. As far as the fictional object is concerned, it is simply not true that the writing and the realities it subsists in remain separate, that the writing attempts simply to reproduce a reality that exists out there, or that it merely allows readers to peer through it at that separate reality; the writing and the reality are inseparably one iii the work. The claims that the dichotomization seeks to establish are, of course, that rootedness in historical reality and commitment to political/ideological positions necessarily deny the complexity and plurality of the experience and situation under creative transformation, and that the requirements relating to the latter can be satisfied only at the expense of those relating to the former. The fact, however, is that none of this writing has pretensions to representing the single mode of discourse that can narrate that reality, exclusively of other possibilities. The claim it does make, rather, is that this is the version of the reality that its creator finds most meaningful, given his/her ideological and other commitments and the norm of human values presiding over them. And the variations in the writing indicate that different writers offer somewhat different versions of that reality even while drawing on the “same” “facts” and so on that go into its making.

And if, as will be expected in spite of all this, some instances of this writing turn out to be more effective or successful than others, the explanations that, if dichotomization is rejected, most readily come to mind would, most likely, be those relating to the quality of writing. This involves, as suggested earlier, adequacy of response, and together with that, matters of skill in the use of linguistic and artistic resources — some people just use these better than others, and the differences do not in any way point to a need to separate art from the things it is rooted in. This very commonsensical understanding of what is going on, not the most fashionable one but by no means indicative of intellectual incapacity or a lack of analytical sophistication, is what people quite naturally bring to hear in judging any communicative act, whether it is executed by a politician, a political or social scientist, an empiricist historian or a more comprehending one, a lawyer, a priest or whoever. And to exempt literary artistes from such normal and reasonable proceedings is to confer again on them an elite status which, however much their products may be conceded (somewhat condescendingly?) to be “open to the layman (Paul Sharrard), will be difficult to come to terms with.

What Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan says in his discussion of Peter Nazareth's fiction is very instructive here. As a minority Asian trapped in the grotesque nightmare of Idi Amin's Uganda, “the only country (he had) ever known”. Nazareth found himself caught up in as painful and complicated a contradiction within a contradiction as any of the writers looked at above. In this case, though, the complex contradiction was created by the fact that “If pan-Africanism, a consciousness people have of being black, if Afro-Asian solidarity ... are the creation of the white man, ... then the feeling of being African-Asian ... is the creation of the black man”. This feeling made Nazareth a victim; but, equally, it “create(d) him and prompt(ed) him to write”, “impel(led) him to witness”, to a historical reality so terrible that “fiction (could) not ‘surpass' (it)”. And, for Sarvan, the only criterion for judging the fiction that Nazareth nonetheless produced, and one that shares much with Ee Tiang Hong's criterion referred to earlier, is that “it must convince the ‘jury' of its truth and, more importantly, communicate something of the experience of its truth”.

The dichotomy we have discussed is not the only one which the actual writing challenges and dispels. A further closely related dichotomy, and one that is as pernicious as the one just looked at, is that between the “inner world” of the personal and the individual and the “outer world” of the public and the social, moving further “outwards” from even there to the general and the universal. This again is a dichotomy that the intellectual temper of our times disfavours but which nevertheless too often seems to covertly make its way back into critical practice. Many, in fact, of both the writers discussed in this hook and the critics who discuss them in it, appear, implicitly if not explicitly, to valorise the personal/individual, considerably at the expense of the other matters. Witness, for instance, Carroll Simons's interpretation of Australian writers' use of the past as “a metaphor of the inner lives of individual characters, individual struggles, individual evolution”; or Bernard Hickey's efforts to “rescue” the individual Australian writer, John Morrison, from the committed ideologue that he also was.  Among writers, Anita Desai more firmly than many declares her partiality for the personal and disclaims interest in public and social affairs, something which both Peter Alcock and S.N.R. Kazmi note, with the latter going on to present evidence from Desai's writing that appears to hear out these declarations and disclaimers.

Peter Alcock's discussion of Desai's novel, In Custody, however, makes impossible unquestioning acceptance of some of the implications of all such positions. As he leads us to see, the novel sounds a clear note of warning to anyone who would seek to extract from Desai's private propensities for the personal and the individual (and all writers inevitably have their own propensities, which need licensing from no critic!) a larger principle of writing that would separate the personal/individual from the social/public, and also universal, in any basic way. This it does by bringing organically together in experienced integration the private concerns Desai declares allegiance to and the public world she disclaims interest in. It is Sarvan again, talking of Peter Nazareth, who points towards what seems to be going on: “the novelist deals with individuals within the particular and so works towards general truths”, presumably taking in social truths along the way.

In Custody seems to do something of this kind, it brings together two marvellously delineated individuals, the young, impoverished, idealistic Hindi teacher Deven and the old, once-great Urdu poet Nur, in a quest for a cultural and political ideal that is to he pursued and found, through the extended encounter of the former with the latter, who interestingly is disillusioningly presented as a disintegrating, reactionary, slovenly, corrupt “Urdu monster”. The search, carried out considerably through the subjective imaginations of the two characters, takes place in the public world of an India that is unflinchingly recreated in terms of a squalid, teeming chaos that turns all positive expectations around and destroys any efforts at romanticisation or idealization. But, from out of all these disillusioning realities, their mishaps, frustrations and disappointments, there gradually develops between the two characters a friendship that for all its reflection of the perplexing confusion it comes out of, still has a resilience and a strength that allow it to yield rich rewards. As Deven recognizes, this friendship ‘‘could be an unendurable burden or else a shilling honour. Both demanded equal strength”. And so, through it, Deven grows into the personal self-knowledge that leads him eventually to the attainment of the large ideal, which, in the teeth of the ugly realities it has its being within, brings a peace where there is neither strife nor wanton cruelty.

It is perhaps, symptomatic that Alcock sees in this the articulation of “that unavoidable alienation from nature, self and divinity common to the cultural experience of all humankind”. This indeed would fill the post-modernist heart with joy, if such illicit states are at all permitted to it; but the actual state which Deven arrives at out of the chaotic, contradictory, frustrating realities he occupies is something satisfyingly affirmative, consistent with what we would expect from a writer whose self-declared aim is “to discover, underline and convey the true significance of things”.

As in the case of the other major dichotomy discussed earlier, there is no possibility of seeing here the personal and the public as in any useful way separate, not even in terms of a conception of the subjective individual as a means through which a separate public reality may he looked at; the two are integrally one. And, accepting Alcock's claim that In Custody is “in continuity” with Desai's previous work, work which appears to have been generally seen as private and subjective, perhaps the recognition of this fact may be seen as an invitation to revisit that work and rescue it from the dichotomization that critics have imposed on it on the basis of the writer's own statements about what are, after all, best taken as but valid artistic proclivities. This recognition might, in addition, make feasible the further claim that in fact it is through the reconciliation of the individual and the social that the resolution of that other significant dichotomy discussed above takes place.

In the face of such evidence that the actual writing leads against all attempts at dichotomization, one significant factor that appears to provide support to such attempts is the acceptance, mentioned earlier, of the fiction that the “history” of the historical approach must necessarily be rigorously empiricist and scientistic, inevitably exclusive of other possible versions of reality by laying claim to the one, “objective” truth. This is often in spite of overt declarations of opposition to such dichotomization and at times in spite, too of the recognition that history is always a construction. What needs to be looked at here, though, is the debilitating consequences of the dichotomies that an acceptance of the fiction facilitates and this is what most of the rest of this Introduction will concern itself with. The most deleterious consequence is that it permits a privileging of art/fiction/figurality/the individual/the personal/and so on at the expense of what is consigned to the opposite end of the dichotomies, namely historical realism, politics, ideology and so on. The latter are, as the preceding discussion has attempted to show, critically and inseparably interwoven with everything that is involved; yet, often covertly projected as of themselves impediments to the pursuit of things that really matter or at best derivative from the latter, they tend to get pushed into irrelevant sidelines within which they are deprived of true effectiveness and explanatory value.

A major unsatisfactory result is injurious interference with the making of discriminations that are absolutely crucial to the entire post-colonial endeavour and to the attainment of its most basic ends discriminations which can only be made if full and equal cognizance is taken of all of the integrated considerations involved in the writing, including the “realities” of history, and the political and ideological stances adopted. For instance, K.S. Ramamurti's preoccupation with comparatively trifling and mechanical matters of language use and manipulation in the writing he looks at and his insufficient recognition of the nature of the political/ideological implications of the linguistic activities that are going on leads him to ignore the insight that Dissanayakc opens into all this in terms of significant alterations of the medium in pursuit of significant changes in the more liberated messages that it is now made by the previously colonized to carry. Dissanayake shows us how Rushdie in Midnight's Children, as well as other writers are, from a linguistic point of view, engaged in a significant act of decolonization, subverting dominant discursive practices and stripping the language of these practices of its colonizing power, with a view to deconstructing the stereotype of the cultural Other that these practices would otherwise successfully constitute the colonized as. It is interesting, in this respect, that Shirley Chew sees in the similar language games Rushdie plays in Shame a pretentious, self-satisfied and tendentious attack on the English language.

This difference in response to the linguistic and figural dimensions of Rushdie's writing, clearly linked to the extent and nature of the recognitions of the relevant ideological and political considerations, coincides dramatically with a difference in the assessment of the writer and his work. For Chew, Rushdie's novel betrays those several vices that a situation in which the narrator is not answerable to the authority of a centre would lead him/her to, among other things, “solipsism, arbitrariness and triviality”. Dissanayake, on the other hand, sensible of the ideological force of Rushdie's refusal to remain trapped within the parameters of the dominant colonial discourse, sees the novelist as someone who has made himself a distinct powerful presence on the global scene, one who would strengthen the whole post-colonial struggle.

The pattern gets repeated, and the explanation remains always the same. Thus Ling Mei Lim sees V.S. Naipaul as “one of the most valuable voices of Commonwealth writing”, while Dissanayake sees in his entrapment within the regnant discursive practices a voice subversive of the post-colonial struggle. Both these assessments are based on Naipaul's response to the post-colonial effort discussed earlier to probe memory, reconstruct history and restore submerged voices, but the difference between them relates again to the extent to which the ideological issues involved arc recognized and the way in which they are conceived and aligned. For Dissanayake, Naipaul refusal to undertake the ideologically driven task of interrogating and deconstructing the colonizer's discourse entailed his applying to the post-colonial experience and endeavour the yardstick of the essentialising and universalizing norms of this discourse, something which Could again only subvert them.

Ling shows no interest in searching out such ideological motivations and their implications for the post-colonial struggle. Naipaul's virtue from her point of view is that in looking at the past he shows “cultural responsibility”. Thus, he refuses to indulge a “static reverence” for the past, keeping himself open to the world outside which the colonizers had introduced the colonized to and refusing to look this gift horse in the mouth, thereby giving the colonized a chance to take advantage of the opportunities it offered them to open the way for beneficent change.

It is not difficult to see that more is involved here than simply a reluctance to engage with the ideological dimensions that all of the discussion that has gone before attempts to show are inescapable in the writing and also central to the whole post-colonial endeavour. By ignoring the dynamic dialectical interplay of the ideological and other issues involved, this approach turns itself in fact into an effective comprador means, a conduit, for subverting that endeavour. This is because it diverts attention from almost everything the endeavour entails and reconstitutes it in terms dictated by the dominant discourse (see, for example, the distorting translation of the past into an invariable “static” condition), without any effort to interrogate these terms. It requires little acumen to see that in the process the discourse of the colonizers and their position get legitimized, reinforced and reproduced. The irony to be observed here is the way in which a purported indifference to ideology is powerfully, if invisibly, loaded in favour of the dominant ideology.

Interestingly, Lim claims dynamism for her approach on the grounds that it opens a door to change. In fact, by refusing to engage with the dialectical interplay of ideologies and so on that the post-colonial tasks of creative reconstruction entail, she is driven to depend on a static balance sheet kind of approach, in which the limitations of a dark past are balanced against the possibilities of an enlightened present that the colonizers had inducted the post-colonials into, the two remaining separate and opposed on either side of the sheet.

In such a situation, which represents hut another way of reasserting the dichotomous thinking that has been under scrutiny above, a major perspective in terms of which any kind of interaction between the two separate components, short of outright conflict, calls to be handled is the between-two-worlds or borderland perspective. Predictably, this is strongly reminiscent of the uncertainty and self- indulgent ambivalence that post-modernism is enamoured of. The sheer explanatory inadequacy of this ideology-blind, hut not ideology-free, perspective is, however, sharply displayed by the poverty of the understandings it generates of post-colonial writing and its significance, when compared with a treatment of that same writing which clearly recognises the ideological dimensions of that writing and is therefore able to dispense with ambivalence for its own sake. Thus, if we may take Joy Kogawa's Obasan, for all its obvious differences from “mainstream” post-colonial writing, as in fact centrally representative of the kind of thing that such writing will include, it would, under the former perspective, be very little more than an expression of a fashionable trivialising unrealisation which, moreover, evokes such petty objections as its failure to mention Japanese aggression during the Second World War. By deliberately deflecting attention from the central concerns of the novel, such objections inadvertently lay bare the recidivist ideology that determines that perspective, an ideology that might otherwise have remained concealed.

Chua Cheng Lok's inspiring treatment of the same novel, however, unabashed in its recognition of the radically ideological nature of the experience of race and racial prejudice the novel deals with, even as it remains admirably responsive to the writer's management of her linguistic and other artistic resources is able to make us experience it as a profoundly moving human work which has no use for fragmentation for its own fashionable sake. On the contrary, at the level of the fundamental norm and hierarchy of human values, we see and experience in a deeply satisfying way the dynamic resolution of the deep ideological and human contradictions implicated, as the heroine, through the telling of the narrative of her life, “aggregates and integrates herself into a stronger, firmer, more wholistic (holistic) personality cleansed of shame and free of repression”, something which opens the way to the aggregation of all victims everywhere into “structures of communion ... throughout the world”.

One very significant aspect of Chua's critical accomplishment is that its simultaneous openness to all integral dimensions of its experience, the ideological/political and the artistic and the human, saves it from having to retreat into fashionable dichotomies of any kind. Rather than move in the direction of “contradiction”, dichotomies per se are parts of a “wholistic” spirit. Thus Chua is able to recognise that the Japanese and the Canadian within the heroine are not separate creatures which meet in their discrete compartments in some nebulous borderland. Instead, both these dimensions of her cultural personality are seen simultaneously and ongoingly defining her and her experience in a symbiotic way. This comes out with particularly compelling power in the way in which she transforms the Christian symbols. which are so very much part of her life, in interaction with the deep-rooted Japanese memories which she retrieves into the empowering means of realizing her new integrated, symbiotic Japanese Canadian self.

This achievement of both author and critic delivers the field from a very widespread misconception that it could have avoided had it paid attention to what Frantz Fanon pointed out a long time ago in his Wretched of the Earth. Calling into question the propensity of native (= post-colonial) intellectuals to seek out their people's liberation by trying to get hack to “a past out of which they have already emerged”, Fanon makes a persuasive argument for recognising the fundamental reorganizations of intelligence, identity, experience, sensibility and so on that have taken place in these people's under and after colonialism. This reorganization is a result of the dialectical interactions within them between the various cultural, intellectual, ideological and other components that have entered from both their indigenous and their colonial heritages into the construction of their current identities and realities. (See, too, Thiru Kandiah's “Adolescent Nationalism and the Perpetuation of the Twentieth Century Conflict Syndrome”, in Commentary, May 1989, and “Perceiving the ‘Other' within One's Own Unique Self: Understanding Sri Lankan Creative Writing in English”, in Edwin Thumboo, ed. Perceiving Other Worlds, 1991.)

It is important to emphasise here that, in its awareness of the dynamic, dialectical interactions of forces and movements of history in the fashioning of the present, this perspective generates the kind of self-reflexive understanding that disallows colonial reappropriations and subversions of the sort that the more static approaches looked at above were shown to fall prey to. Thus, both the writer, Kogawa and her critic, Chua, are able to project entirely convincing recreations of the achievement of (post-colonial) cultural and individual reconstruction and recovery. These justly recognise its symbiotic complexity while at the same time remaining on guard against the post-colonials' own complicities with the colonial discourse that operate to trap them within that discourse and lead them to erode post-colonial concerns in the way that some of the criticism considered above permitted or even encouraged. (Incidentally, writers, too, are not immune to the effects of these complicities, as unwittingly demonstrated by Robert L. Ross's discussion of Bapsi Sidhwa's work.) The complicities are difficult to resist, since they have been embedded deeply within the psyches of post-colonials by the dynamics of the history that created them; particularly so because the writers tend too often to be separated from the people that they aspire to speak for by their class constitution. How difficult is shown not only by the essays already critiqued above hut, most pointedly, by S. Sri Padmanabhan's readiness to acquiesce in the Caliban role assigned by colonialism to post-colonials, without any recognition that however much it may be patched up along the lines he recommends, it remains fundamentally irreconcilable with any of the concerns of post-colonialism.

Significantly, the self-reflexivity that releases the more perceptive writing and criticism from these complicities is facilitated by precisely the political/ideological/ historical awareness and concern that the text-oriented approach discounts in its pursuit of this very self-reflexivity. There is a rather piquant irony in the whole situation, since the devaluation by this approach of such “external” matters makes it utterly oblivious of the fact that, like most other things, it is itself unquestionably ideologically vested. As Sarvan observes with appropriate wryness, “to avoid politics does not mean that politics repays the compliment”. And the failure to realize this is very dangerous. For, by helping induct the field into the equivocal fragmentariness that becomes in the circumstances the only certainty permitted, an(l even uttering in support of itself the “successful” exposés of undesirable ideological and political operations during colonialism that it may in certain ways facilitate (Craig Tapping's essay impressively demonstrates some of these successes), it could erase discriminations that are crucial in the interests of the human subjects who are at the centre of it all, in the various ways looked at above. The effect will be to subvert the entire post-colonial endeavour, not the least by legitimizing the colonial situation under challenge and, thereby, taking the endeavour into an unhealthy state of complacence and quietism.

The point may be demonstrated by comparing the reconstructive efforts and experiences of the people who had previously belonged among the ranks of the colonised with those of the people who had originally belonged among the ranks of the colonizers, and, also, by looking at the critical treatment meted out to these two separate sets of exertions. At the very outset it must be emphasized that both sets of people were equally confronted with the tasks of reconstruction and identity creation. Obviously, though, the former colonizers would pursue the tasks in somewhat different ways from the others; for, given that, as John Hay points out, “every act of colonial settlement is always already an act of displacement”, their task would formulate itself in terms of the need to transform themselves from migrants to indigenes. What it is most important to recognise is, of course, that by the overriding norm and hierarchy of human values both sets of tasks were equally valid and important. As Terry Goldie expresses it, and with an admirable un-post- modernist certainty and a rightness that put it entirely beyond dispute, “I am constantly amazed at the immediate assumption that no colonizer or colonizer's descendant belongs. As a fifth generation white Canadian I find it very difficult to think of any other place where I might belong”.

It is, therefore, entirely to he expected that these former colonizers, too, authentic post-colonials by this account (since they were as much the creatures of colonialism as any of the others), set about probing their memories, reconstructing their histories and creating their identities and soon in much the way that has been outlined above, calling upon all of their linguistic, metaphorical and mythicizing resources with comparable creativity and imagination. In one real sense, however, their task made some particularly challenging demands on them of a significantly different kind from those made on the previously colonized. Their problem was the “inheritance-alienation” pattern that Som Prakash, borrowing the term from G.N. Devy, says the New Zealand poet. Maurice Gee suffered from. The point is that the new circumstances and environment of these people made it difficult for them to simply transfer their parent culture to their present time and place and to retrieve for themselves in a truly satisfying way the past that was their most immediate and legitimate inheritance.

No doubt, this is what, according to Cohn Nicholson, the Canadian fictionist Alistair MacLeod, mentioned earlier, tried to do with his revival of Scottish highland memories and literary traditions. But, success was hard to come by. The efforts of the Canadian writers whom Gerald Noonan discusses to transplant the European pastoral tradition on Canadian soil, for instance, failed, thwarted by the uncongenial conditions of the new capitalist economic ethos and natural environment within which it now needed to subsist. Similarly, Morag Gunn in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners struggles “with ironic futility' as Charles Steele calls it to “establish a conventional family identity” for the self she was trying to define in the new Canadian environment. No doubt similar frustrations entered into the creation of the strong sense of unrealisation which, in Trevor James's account, is betrayed in the struggles of the New Zealand poets James K. Baxter and Allen Curnow and in some limited sense even in those of the Australian poet Judith Wright to write their present lives, a sense of unrealisation associated specifically with an insubstantial occupancy of the land that was now their home.

The natural environment, including the reversal in the seasons that led to winter in July, was a particular vexation, resisting appropriation by them and reminding them of their outsiderness. Patricia Excell's treatment of the ways in which Charles Harpur, Christopher Brennan, Douglas Stewart, David Campbell and Judith Wright treated the environment, particularly the distinctive Australian phenomena of light and fire, is full of such terms as demonic energy, malevolence, treachery, dry heat and silence, torture points, strangeness, remoteness and separateness that were inconsistent with true satisfying realization. The challenges raised by all this demanded from these settlers the new kinds of toughness and resilience that, according to Albert Wertheim, Athol Fugard, in A Lesson from Aloes, suggests that the Afrikaners, unlike the English in South Africa, were able to produce in response to similar challenges from the natural environment. As Fugard also indicates, it was just these very qualities of strength that created “the arid political and social climate in South Africa” from which the apartheid system sprang up, and which by that very fact those who wished to dismantle that system also needed for their purposes.

However all this might be, the writers did formulate responses to the various challenges, differently exploiting all the figural resources of language at their command to reinscribe their forbidding environment in ways that sought to bring it more within their capacities and control. Excell speaks of Australian poets “swinging” “between the physical and the metaphysical, the real and the surreal”, gradually moving as time went on to the use of literary devices of various kinds for the purpose of drawing out symbolic dimensions of the environment, or of creating “surrealistic images” of it, and so on. Charles Steele's splendid account of the Prairie writers in Canada shows us the kind of response they similarly developed for the purpose of meeting their needs for self-definition and identity. These writers sought to “resight/site/cite” their past, imaginatively creating through their use of the figural resources of their discourse, constructs of an “a- historical reality' to “make them(selves) real”. Robert Kroetsch, by this account remythologizes character and experience by both using the realities of history and deconstructing them to release them from the trammels of time. John Newlove exploits the “identity of place” he shared with the original Indian occupiers at the land to claim them as “our true forbears”, as, for that matter, Rudy Wiehe also in effect does, when he brings the past story of the Indian Almighty Voice into the present of his “artist's intuition”.

Of exciting responses then there is no dearth. But in the treatment meted to them by the critics certainly, what too many of them seem to share is a strong sense of unrealisation and fragmentariness. Thus, Excell's last sentence signals that realization is still ahead: “Perhaps we now need to make the leap... and rather than see likeness, become what we see and feel”; like the Canadian writers dealt with by Gerald Noonan, these people are “waiting for history to make them whole again”. All is ambivalence and uncertainty, and, as Charles Steele, quoting Laurence, insists, we must finally end with an “enigma”, where we see these writers and their people “trying to answer, knowing there is no answer”.

This fetishization of unrealisation and uncertainty is fraught with great danger for the post-colonial endeavour. For, as already recognised, by inhibiting direct engagement with the inescapable historical realities, politics, ideology and so on in the name of open-endedness and complexity, it prevents necessary discriminations from being made, in the process obliterating distinctions between victims and victimizers. The point, as Terry Goldie perceptively extracts it precisely by engaging with such reprobate matters in her discussion of the writing of Australian, Canadian and New Zealand authors, is that for the white signmaker, the Indigene is the Other, an image to be “denied” or “embraced”, with all of its facets manipulated to suit the focus of white culture and the “needs of the white text”.

The embrace is as worrisome as the denial, arid more dangerous bar what it conceals. In the case of Steele's prairie writers, for instance, it appears to consist of a desperate opportunistic appropriation of the victims' heritage to legitimise their dispossession of the latter and justify their abrogation of their moral responsibility to rectify the situation and make reparations to these victims. From Derek Crawley's discussion of Major John Richardson's Tecumseh, the best that the indigenes could expect to get out of such appropriations, even when it was still not too late, were expressions of regret and discomfort from their oppressors, as the latter observed “the passing of an era of Indian civilization” and “the supplanting of a people and of a way of life”.

There is something very important to be gleaned from all this. For, what it shows is that if the valorisation of uncertainty and ambivalence opened experience out to the recognition that it could never be handled by “a single mode of discourse”, as John Hay terms it, the other modes of discourse which now make their way in still belong strictly within the parameters determined by the driving ideology of the whole exercise, which (and this is what is most disturbing) now remains effectively concealed by virtue of the strictures against engaging with it. The alternative discourses of the Other, which have effectively been silenced by the operations of this dominant ideology, continue to have to observe the closures effected by it and remain in their unlicensed margins.

There are at her ways too in which such self-indulgent certainty and fragmentariness and the concomitant neglect of ideological and political considerations devalue the experience of the victims or cause it to he misunderstood or insufficiently understood. Thus Bernth Lindfors' celebration of the ambiguity of Thomas Mofolo's “desperately schizophrenic” novel Chaka, while interesting in itself, does not consider the possibility that the syncretism it displays might not he anything like the creative symbiosis of Obasan or of Colin Johnson's metaphysics mentioned earlier. We can therefore fail to reach that engagement with the issues which the post-colonial endeavour renders crucial, namely, the conflicts of competing ideological assumptions and intrusions, the complicities, the entrapments, the self-reassessments and so on that are worked into the entire experience.

And where the victims themselves undertake such engagement and work their way to some kind of position from which they may function viably within their reality, the dispositions under examination lead critics to knowing scepticism or sheer incomprehension. Thus, although Trevor James, recognizing the validity of Cohn Johnson's unfashionable assumption of a residual and inalienable aboriginal identity” and, also, of Ken Hulme's deep awareness of her Maori past, is able to show sensitive appreciation of the nature of the integrated new consciousnesses that they construct for their lives in their own times, Eckhard Bereitinger, overwhelmed by the fear of an “overemphasis (on) the affirmative aspect of the historical heritage”, which might turn it “into folkloristic staleness”, confesses to bemusement and incomprehension in the face of Cohn Johnson's achievement.

All of this only helps extenuate and validate the whole colonial enterprise which the post-colonial endeavour puts under challenge. Thus Peter Pierce shows much sympathetic concern for the inability of Rolf “Boldrewood”, Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells and Rosa Praed to sustain the fervour of the imperialist cause and their consequential lapses into insecurity, anxiety, pessimism and soon. But not once through any of this sounds the voices of the victimised Other, interrogating the assumptions underlying all this — which might, perhaps, have pointed towards a more perceptive understanding of what was going on and towards the possibility of liberation for these writers trapped in their unquestioning colonial consciousness. On the contrary, all that Pierce is able to conclude from this satisfying uncertainty is that it hears witness to ‘‘the malaise of history''.

It is Patricia Morley who makes the issue entirely transparent in her comparison of the responses of two Canadian novelists, Sara Duncan and Margaret Laurence, to “imperialism”. According to Morley, Duncan saw imperialism as associated with “the brotherhood of races and nations under the aegis of British order and traditions'', and with ‘‘ideas of Christian responsibility and sacrifice''. What Duncan was mainly concerned with in her novel The Imperialist published in 1904, was the transfer of this “three-hundred-year patrimony” with all its beauteous virtues to her own indigenous place. ‘‘Two-thirds of a century later'', Laurence attacks imperialism as something that denoted ‘‘everything most hateful in political relationships', subservience, dominance and so on. And, Morley concludes, this difference is merely a linguistic one: “It is largely the language that has changed”, as the word “imperialism” falls on hard times” and become(s) pejorative”. Otherwise, the imperialist and the anti-imperialist concepts are the same, both alike inspired by “idealistic visions of human equality, independence, and community cooperation”. It is all a matter of language and words, the rest is delusion and, presumably, post-colonialists can now in silence turn their energies to more profitable pursuits.

Our journey through this volume has been a long one; but if there is any one thing that the volume as a whole does indisputably show, it is that the field of post-colonial endeavour, as it is displayed by ‘‘Commonwealth Literature'', is a highly diverse and differentiated one. This is entirely to be expected, for no human community or culture or endeavour is homogeneous, as the specific historical and personal particularities of its participating members dispose them to follow different leads and pursue different paths, something which there is good reason to be thankful for. At the same time, communities, cultures and endeavours do have a certain wholeness and integrity and a certain creative commonality of purpose, and difference always opens out human possibilities of working together on the basis of shared commitments to the things that matter, the things which form the basis of the norm and hierarchy of values that Ee Tiang Hong has never allowed us to forget throughout our entire critical intervention in the contributions to the volume. But creative communality, like anything good, has to he worked for, for there are incompatibilities that have to he recognized and resolved through agreed interventions on the basis of what matters — the field is a site of struggle, resistance and creative negotiation, all going on at the same time. To turn this to account in praxis, we need a Freireian kind of critical awareness, which allows us to recognise clearly everything that contributes to the achievement of true communality and at the same time does not shrink from the identification of anything which might stand in its way. Such awareness will help display and dispel the kinds of dichotomous thinking that, inveigling itself into the field sometimes even under the guise of openness and complexity, is very often the source of the imperceptiveness and confusions within it.

This Introduction has undertaken to play some little role in this agenda, exercising for the purpose an editorial prerogative in attempting to draw out of the various contributions made to the volume something more encompassing than and different from what each of these contributions might have itself been specially concerned with. But finally it is the volume itself that will speak and help lay bare for readers diverse facets of the very exciting activity going on in the field, as these are revealed by the actual creative writing as well as by the extremely stimulating thinking that is done, in a thankfully non-homogeneous fashion, about it. The hope is that out of all this will begin to emerge a shared culture for the held and a true community of participating spirits who will he able to perceptively recognise at the deepest levels the existential and epistemological concerns of the human subjects who inhabit its arena of inquiry, and arrive at better and more sensitive understandings of their different preoccupations, perspectives and natures, standing up where necessary to those historically constituted obstacles of understanding and response in the way of true communality. On such effort will depend the emergence of an effective praxis of change within the historical place and time that the human subjects involved occupy; and this is something to be valued, for it might in turn help improve the chances that this post-colonial world we are all privileged to belong to might become just that little bit better a place for all of us different people to live in.

The Editors