Joy
The writing of personal history vis-a-vis national in the Midnight
Children creates history and rewrite it again from the point of view
of the people themselves and not as perceived by those in authority or
the colonizers. This story is satirizing the government after the independence
of India and also its former colonizers. In its comparison of Saleem's
life and his family and that of India, we can see, for example, that Saleem's
birth which takes so long, is compared to India's
delayed independence. According to secondary sources, Saleem's
confusing tangle in terms of his possible parents tells of every Indians
possession of a mixed cultural heritage, and Methwold's
cuckolding Winkie is a comparison to Britain's
illegitimate occupation of India. In Wide Sargasso Sea, we can see
how the former slaves are directly resisting the white people or the Creoles
who were slave owners before and in a violent way drove them away from
place. The heroine of the story, a Creole, who is also an underdog and
is rejected by both the black people and the white ones, showed resistance
by being silent and ultimately getting mad, than being servile. Mr. Mason,
the Englishman, is portrayed as not able to understand the black people
till it was too late. We are told that Jean Rhys got an inspiration from
Jane
Eyre, with Rochester having a mad wife at the attic who comes from
the West Indies. In Jean Rhys story, this mad woman becomes the heroine,
the underdog of one of the widely read novels in English literature. By
writing the story as such, there is a sense of rewriting ‘history,¡¦
as it becomes now 'her story.'¦ In
terms of language, the Midnight Children uses Babu-English, not
only the standard English language. In "Waiting
for Aunty to Cough,"¨ the words are different from the usual English
(subverting the language, I would say), and the grammar and sentence construction
are different (e.g. “lime¡¨ for
hangout, or “I ain’t
see Brackley a long time, man.¡¨) I think to use nonstandard
English is to establish a kind of identity among themselves as immigrants,
something which they can call their own, and not just imitating. We know
though, that because of this, the white people would consider this way
of speaking as inferior and one would be even suspected as capable of doing
bad. The narration part in Midnight Children and Wide Sargasso
Sea makes the story realistic and supports the view of some critics
that these stories unmake a past history, both personal and national. There
is also humor especially in both Midnight Children and “Waiting
for Aunty to Cough,¡¨ but it is filled with social criticism
(Saleem’s comment on time at the start, which
is “variable and constant as Bombay’s
electric power supply¡¨ or Brackley’s
naive way of solving problems and his humorous way of discovering London
which enable him to live there even if at times its dangerous). I would
agree with what Rushdie says about
“writing
one’s own story as unmaking it¡¨
and that the “personal birth has only meaning
if seen in the sum total of the incidents in which it occurs.¡¨
The way I see it is that it seems Rushdie or Rhys gives importance to personal
or family account yet relates this account to national event. In this relationship,
both individual and national events take on a different meaning: the individual
uplifts its position as an important being in the nation’s
history while the nation recognizes its need for individuals to make its
own history.
These stories open our minds to a lot of possibilities and not just
passively accept whatever is there already. If it is impossible to go back
to times past and change history, at least we can do it by writing and
through it, we open possibilities for the point of views of the ones colonized
or those underdogs in the former stories to take the center page, so to
say, and let the former protagonists see themselves being put in the corner.
I do believe that writing is a potent weapon for change in terms of ideas
and consciousness, which hopefully and in the right time, would open a
way to a change in the manner people see and relate to those groups who
are different from them because of race, culture, or religion.
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