المستخلص: |
Salman Rushdie assumes that postcolonial writers living in the West write for the West and subscribe to what he calls a “bastard tongue” and Edward Said believes, in a statement defending Salman Rushdie, that the “fate” of such writers is to “abrogate” their convictions and leave nothing “unsullied.” This is partly true, this paper tries to demonstrate in a reading of The Slave Girl, Nervous Conditions, and July’s People - three African women’s novels published in 1977, 1981, and 1988 respectively. But many others artfully and convincingly present the powerful colonizer rather devoid of real authority over the colonized, unable to understand them, trapped in a web of his own making. Survival tactics (resorting to their language, to their land, their tribe, their understanding of things) allow the indigenous people to make fun of the colonizers’ bullying tactics. These novels abound with colonial dehumanizing “bullying” tactics; with human buffers catering for the Western ideology to the point of compromising the authorial credibility. But salient in these novels is the way the natives receive or treat these “bullying” tactics and disparage the aggressive colonizer.
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