Assignment Code: BEGC-114/TMA/2022-23

Course Code: BEGC-114

Assignment Name: Postcolonial Literatures

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Answer any five questions. All questions carry equal marks. (20 x 5 = 100)

1. What do you broadly understand by South African Literature? Is it different in any way from African Literature?

Ans) South African literature is a broad term for writings and stories told orally and written down that come from South Africa, or the Republic of South Africa as it is called officially since a vote in 1960. As a country, South Africa has an interesting mosaic and cosmopolitan feel, and its society is highly creolized. Anglo-Afrikaner, Indian, Nguni-Sotho, and Khoisan are the four groups that make up South Africa's diverse social landscape. These groups interact with each other and sometimes fight with each other. Each of these four groups has its own spoken and written history. As a result of social and literary creolization from the precolonial period to the present, the mixing of these traditions has created a labyrinth of South African literary forms and texts in the larger smorgasbord of world literatures. This shows the many different ways that people from different communities in South Africa interact with each other, from violence and ethnic conflict to love and closeness. Beyond these ethnic and native communities, there are also super communities made up of homosexuals, queers, cisgender straight women, and political and religious groups. There have been a number of important literary movements that grew out of the worries and experiences of these super-communities.

South African literature shows the incredible social and personal journey of the non-white population, from being subjugated, oppressed, and dehumanised by the arm-yielding whites to earning equal respect, dignity, and voting rights for all South Africans through extraordinary sacrifices and several movements that changed the world. Kabbo, a famous San storyteller and visionary from the 19th century, tells a moving storey about how he ended up in Breakwater Prison after stealing sheep from the Xamspeech community to feed his family. He and many others did this because their traditional hunting grounds were being taken away by the colonists so they could expand the Cape Province up to the Orange River, from where it used to end at the Sak. South African literature not only shows the bloody conflict between the non-white majority and the white minority, but it also shows the unsettling conflict between Europeanist and authentic, anti-establishment Africanist views of the country's past. We should be careful, though, about trying to divide South African literature into English, Afrikaans, Black, and Coloured streams for academic reasons, because doing so will blur its edges and make it hard to see how different each text is.

2. Who are some of the pioneers of postcolonial short story? Write about any two representative short stories.

Ans) The world of postcolonial writers is a huge body of literature that is still growing. This article will introduce you to some of its pioneers and best-known writers. There isn't a lot of focus on the three African women writers whose one storey you'll have to study in detail in the next units. Here is a short summary of almost twenty other women writers and what they have written. Australia and New Zealand, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the rest of the world make up the five main parts of the postcolonial world.

Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American author. Most of her stories are about national identity, revolutionary struggle, politics in the diaspora, and relationships between mothers and daughters. She's written a lot of books. Her short stories are put together in the books Krik Krak! and Everything Inside.

In her storey "Ghosts," Pascal is a poor boy whose parents used to raise pigeons in their village to make a living. People would buy these pigeons for a weird tradition that his parents’ thought was gross. They moved to a town's edge and opened a restaurant. His brother Jules and his girlfriend moved to Canada, while Pascal worked as a news writer for Radio Zorey, which was one of the most popular radio stations. Leaders of gangs and other criminals used to go to the restaurant and talk openly about what they did. When he heard Tiye, a gang leader with one arm and a bald head, he thought that he could do a radio show called "Man to Man" about these people. He told his friends about his plan, and many other gang members also heard about it.

Someone else took his idea, and they started putting on the show on Radio Zorey. The visitors made fun of Pascal, and they tried to get him to do something, but Pascal didn't want to. The Tiye gang set fire to the Radio Zorey building, and Tiye said Pascal was in charge. Pascal was arrested out of the blue, and in his prison cell, he was tortured to the third degree. His family, including his brother, spent a lot of money and tried hard to get him out of jail, but they were not successful. Pascal was let go when Tiye made a deal with the police and the judges. Tiye comes back to their restaurant, and when Pascal sees his prosthetic arm, he has a dream of putting on a radio show called "Ghosts" about people who have lost limbs.

Mahashweta Devi, a postcolonial writer, was born in Dhaka, India, which is now the capital of Bangladesh, but at the time it was part of India. She lived in Calcutta, which is in India. Most of what she wrote was in Bengali. Her books are written in many different languages. She gets her ideas for her writing from everyday people who do extraordinary things. She has also worked for the rights of people who are on the outside, such as the tribals and the Dalits. Her number of works is more than a hundred.

3. Make a critical appraisal of the poetic devices used in the poem, “Tonight I can Write”.

Ans) The poetic devices used in the poem, “Tonight I can Write” are as follows:

1. Repetition: One example of repetition is the title phrase ("Tonight I can write the saddest lines"), which repeats three times throughout, creating a cadence and circular movement to the poem, almost like a beating drum. This suggests the way the poet is coming back to the same thoughts of his lost love again and again. The word night(s) repeats nine times throughout the poem, and with each repetition, we learn more about the poet's relationship with his love. The word night almost acts a trigger, sparking imagery that brings his relationship—and his now loneliness—vividly to life for the reader.

2. Personification: An example of personification is in the second stanza (The night is starry, and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.) The stars are given the human quality of being able to shiver, conveying the poet's deep sense of how cold the night is without the human warmth of his love. The night wind is personified in stanza 3 (The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.) The word "sings" suggests a movement throughout the sky imbued with feeling, perhaps to juxtapose the emptiness the poet feels in its presence.

3. Magnification: An example of magnification is in the line "The same night whitening the same trees," where the poet draws our attention to the sameness of the night to magnify how very different his experience is in the night without his love next to him. And one of Neruda's most famous lines, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long," similarly magnifies his experience of loss, noting that in happiness, time seems to pass so quickly, whereas in sadness, time seems to stretch on forever.

4. Metaphor: The poet has used some metaphors in the poem. For example, ‘The night is shattered’ and ‘The blue stars shiver in the distance’. These are the metaphors of the present state of the speaker about his love life. His passion is now broken like that night, and where there was warmth once, now there is coldness, coldness between the lovers, cold to the extent making him shiver.

5. Irony: The speaker at first claims that he loved her, and sometimes she loved him back. It creates a belief that the love now lost was first lost from the girl’s hand. But then, the speaker says she loved him and sometimes he loved her back. So, we’re now unsure who was primarily responsible for the lost love.

6. Imagery: Throughout the poem, the night is revealed to us in several respects. In the second paragraph,’ the night is shattered’ and’ blue stars shiver’ make us see the night as the speaker sees it; cold and shattered. Imageries such as ‘endless clouds,’ dew to the pasture’ and’ night whitening the trees’ continue in the following paragraphs. The imagery lets us painfully sense the speaker’s grief.

7. Repetition: We also find repetition in the poem. There are many lines repeated in this poem. The title of the poem itself is repeated three times throughout the entire poem. Then the lines like’ I loved her’ and ‘loved me sometimes’ are also seen to be repeated. These repetitions emphasize the feelings of the speaker and portray the state of their love while it lasted. It emphasizes the melancholy and the sadness that the speaker feels.

8. Free Verse: The poem is written by free verse. It is without rhyme and rhythm. It is written in simple and concise language.

9. Personification: We also find personification has been used in the poem when the speaker says the ‘blue stars shiver’.

5. Name and briefly describe the communities whose correspondences and transactions are found in South African writings.

Ans) As a country, South Africa has an interesting mosaic and cosmopolitan feel, and its society is highly creolized. Anglo-Afrikaner, Indian, Nguni-Sotho, and Khoisan are the four groups that make up South Africa's diverse social landscape. These groups interact with each other and sometimes fight with each other. The people in the Afrikaner community are the Boers, who are the descendants of the early Dutch colonists. The Boers were Dutch, German, and Huguenot people who moved to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and put down roots there. The Anglo-Afrikaner is mostly made up of two groups with different colonisation histories. It includes the white, loosely Christianized Afrikaners and the British, who fought together against the black or non-white South Africans. They knew a lot about maritime navigation and industrial production, and they were also very good at understanding how markets work. The Anglo-Afrikaner community is not very old in terms of when it started and how long it has been around. It has been around since the 17th century.

In the 19th century, the Indian community, which came from the former British colony of India and was mostly made up of unskilled and semiskilled workers as well as people from the trading class, was in thrall to the South African people. Indians have only been living in Natal since after 1860, so it's not like they've been there for a long time. The Nguni, the Sotho, and the Tswana are all members of the Nguni-Sotho community. They all speak Bantu languages and know how to make iron. They also depend a lot on their knowledge of farming, raising and caring for livestock, herding, and animal husbandry. The Nguni-Sotho are native to the area and have been around since about the 11th century. They are very old, but not the oldest. Lastly, the ancient Khoisan community was made up of the Khoi and the San, who were also called Hottentots and Bushmen in the past. The Khoi and the San were dependent on and defined by their pastoralist and hunter-gatherer ways of living. The Khoisan community is the oldest and most distinct group of native people. Much later, when the Khoisan mixed with the Afrikaner and slave communities, the "mixed race" Cape Coloured community was born, which is halfway between the "whites" and the "blacks."

Each of these four groups—the Anglo-Afrikaners, the Indians, the Nguni-Sotho, and the Khoisan—has its own oral and written history. As a result of social and literary creolization from the precolonial period to the present, the mixing of these traditions has created a labyrinth of South African literary forms and texts in the larger smorgasbord of world literatures. This shows the many different ways that people from different communities in South Africa interact with each other, from violence and ethnic conflict to love and closeness. Outside of these ethnic and native communities, there are also super communities made up of homosexuals, queers, cis-gendered straight women, and political and religious groups. There have been a number of important literary movements that grew out of the worries and experiences of these super-communities.

6. Discuss poetry in the postcolonial space with critical notes on the poems from this course, BEGC-114.

Ans) The postcolonial poet had to deal with the colonial past and the neo-colonial present. He or she had to work hard to find a place in which to place a sense of belonging to the poet's own country and its people, as well as to a world that is always changing quickly because of globalisation. There's no getting around the fact that the postcolonial poet is stuck between two worlds. One is the culture that is put on someone, and the other is the culture that is already there. And in this kind of world, we have poets like Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott, and David Malouf, to name just a few.

Pablo Neruda was a poet, diplomat, and politician from Chile. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was probably the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. Many people think of him as the Picasso of poetry. Neruda was the son of a railroad worker named José del Carmen Reyes and a woman named Rosa Basoalto. He lost his mother when he was very young, and his father remarried and moved the whole family to Temuco, a small town in the south of Chile. Neruda started writing poetry when he was only ten years old, but his father never encouraged him to do so. This is likely why the young poet started publishing under the name Pablo Neruda. In 1910, he went to the Temuco Boys' School, where he finished high school in 1920. He read a lot and was generally a very quiet person. Gabriela Mistral, the head of the Temuco Girls' School, was a talented poet who would go on to win a Nobel Prize. She gave him a lot of support, which was a good thing.

He had a very hard time of it. Even though he wrote a lot of poems, he was not able to make a living from them. He started publishing in all kinds of newspapers and other places to make money. Neruda's poetry is so rich and varied that it is hard to classify or sum up in a few words. It grew and changed in four main ways. His love poetry, like the Twenty Love Poems he wrote when he was young and the Los Versos del Capitán he wrote when he was older, is tender, sad, sensual, and passionate. In "material" poetry, like Residencia en la tierra, the author is sucked into a world of dark, demonic forces because of loneliness and depression. Canto general is the best example of his epic poetry. It tries to reinterpret the past and present of Latin America, as well as the struggle of the oppressed and downtrodden masses there for freedom. Lastly, Neruda wrote poetry about common things, animals, and plants, like in Odaselementales. In 1936, during his time, the Spanish Civil War started. His journey as a poet was again stopped. He even got involved in politics in his own country, but he didn't agree with the ideas of the regime in power, so he was forced to leave. He worked hard to find a solution to both colonial and neo-colonial oppression. The poetic space he made in his own language is really something to admire. The Nobel Prize for Literature was given to him in 1971 because his writings are all written in the same style and have the same goal.