Jim Beggs

English 956
Prof. Lingyan Yang

Edward Said's excerpt from “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” introduced a new
concept to me—what he cites as Fanon's category of the 'nationalist bourgeois.' They play a role
in a struggle for anti-colonial liberation movements, but only play a pretty limited role due to
their class interests. They want to assert a nationalist political project against an oppressive
colonial regime, but they are actually quite chauvinistic toward their own cultures. Said laid out a
very different landscape than what I anticipated or am accustomed to, with the righteous
indigenous people struggling against the evil imperialists. Instead the anti-imperialist struggles
were fragmented, maybe along class lines as I think Ngugi suggests. Fragmented anti-imperialist
struggle led Said to a number of disturbing problems, such as hadn't colonialism actually
improved countries and to what extent were the “backward” native cultures responsible for
holding their own people back and contributing to atrocities. And perhaps more disturbingly,
weren't these backward cultures better off under colonial rule? Said doesn't think much of these
arguments, which he associates with writers such as V. S. Naipaul.
The parts of Said that I enjoyed the most were when he linked the classic colonial
mentality, which he characterizes as “provincial” with current political situations. He stated that
educational systems uncritically reproduce justifications for colonial intervention for current
international military interventions. Said pointed to the interactions between Kuwait, Iraq, and
the United States as symptomatic of the logic of imperialism. He found the present tribalism that
is fracturing society as troubling and that our approach to “learning about other cultures” is to
study “the map of interactions, the actual and often productive traffic occurring on a day-by-day,
and even minute-by-minute basis among states, societies, groups, identities.” He summed up the
complex relations in a dense paragraph on insiders and outsiders. He said that interactions
between Britian and India were “quietly interesting,” but were usually overshadowed by the self-
righteous shouting back and forth between “aggressive Westerners and, ironically, those non-
Westerners for whom the new nationalist and resurgent Ayatollahs speak—away from the other
ongoing interchange.” Said lamented that so much of the interaction between the two opposed
groups was unproductive and destructive. The more I think about how to structure theoretical
arguments, I think it is better to try to avoid ideologically pure or righteous positions, because the
traditional move has been to erase complicity or productive conflict.
Ngugi talked a little more in-depth about the role of language in colonizing the mentality
of the indigenous person, how the English language also transmits and displaces other cultures
when it's taught in colonial schools. I think he ultimately chose to write in his native language
because he wanted to recover a sense of the culture he loved from his youth. He was kind of in a
bind, he could reach a larger audience in English and probably achieve greater material success.
Also, people felt alienated, like he was abandoning them, by writing in his native language.
However, English was inadequate to capture and convey his experience. He quoted Chinua
Achebe on English: “it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral
home but altered to suit new African surroundings.” The goal is not to make a break from English
literature with African literature written in English. Instead, the language must be altered to more
fully “carry the weight of . . . African experience.” I think Ngugi saw this as problematic and felt
he could more closely align himself with the peasantry of Africa against the comprador-bourgeois
interests which would rather he write in English.