My name's Elleke Boehmer and I'm the professor of world literature and English here and the English faculty in the University of Oxford,
I have worked extensively across the past 20 years or so on both colonial and post-colonial literature in English and some in French and Dutch.
And currently I'm finishing up a big book that's taken me quite a few years on Indian travellers to the UK in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
and I'm looking at their writings, their memoirs and the ways in which they see England as exotic.
SP2 -Fantastic. Now, I know that you wrote a biography on Nelson Mandela with the recent news of his illness.
Has this refuelled a desire to revisit your work on him?
It has indeed, partly through pressure of circumstance.
I wrote the short biography of Nelson Mandela, which in part addresses his legacy some five years ago,
around the time that he turned 90 and he recently turned 95.
And what with his illness, there has been a lot of attention focussed not only obviously on him,
but also on his legacy and what it means when this great era, if you like, of Nelson Mandela passes from us.
What does he bequeath to the future in terms of humanitarian understanding?
In fact, I've been invited to to write a couple of obituaries about him,
and that has led me to look again at that legacy and to revisit it and also to consider some of his not only his great heroism,
which is undoubted and which are written about, but also perhaps some of his flaws,
his his very human, but nonetheless very tangible flaws, which I could expand on.
But, yes, certainly it's been very interesting to revisit the question of what is bequeathed to the 21st century.
Do you think post-colonial literature, like feminist literature, is often misunderstood?
Yes, I do think it's often misunderstood, not least because folks, if you like,
the man or woman in the street is probably at first sight confused by the word post-colonial.
Some might ask, when did colonialism end? If we are after colonialism, post-colonial?
When did it end? Is post-colonial literature always, in a way, an appendage of colonial literature,
as again, the Post seems to imply it is even as a term quite confusing term.
It's also, I think, a term that is misunderstood by the writers that critics and teachers call post-colonial,
because a lot of these writers will be from now, you know, fully independent nations, confident nations,
you know, part of the the world community, Indian writers, for example,
or Nigerian writers who may rightly query whether they are always to be saddled with this label of coming after the British Empire post-colonial.
So for that reason, I think the term is also not so much misunderstood, but even possibly misread even by the writers to which the label is applied.
So in light of what you've said, what do you think is important when we talk with an author as post-colonial in a nutshell?
I like to define the post-colonial and I have done this in my work as literature that in some or other way, whether overtly or openly,
questions the experience of empire and not only the experience of, if you like,
being ruled by Britain or being ruled by France or having your land taken over by a foreign power.
But also the more subtle question of how do you write with a borrowed pen,
given that a lot of the writers that we call post-colonial are writing in English,
but that English is not necessarily their mother tongue because of colonialism.
So there are some really great post-colonial writers like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie,
V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. could see all of whom, and they're very,
very different ways,
have asked about the quality and the quantity of the master's tongue of English that they are required to use in order to express themselves.
So it's that inner conflict that split belonging to different kinds of literary and cultural heritage that makes an author post-colonial.
And that is so interesting about the post-colonial condition.
That's the conflict that has kept me very interested, has kept me writing now for over two decades about this kind of material.
So to perspective, undergraduate students, what would you say in response to the question, why should we study post-colonial?
Right. I would say there are a number of different responses that one could give to the question, why study postcolonial writers?
One, in short, is because post-colonial writers in English represent the future.
It's not for nothing that the name of the English literature degree at Oxford
University was changed from a B.A. in English literature to a B.A. in literature.
In English is precisely to embrace and to take account of the fact that
fantastic writing in English is being produced all around the world New Zealand,
the Pacific Islands, India, Mauritius, etc.
So post-colonial writing represents the future.
But I think what post-colonial writing also, interestingly, does is that it casts new light on partly political light,
but also a very interesting structural light on the legacy of English literature,
the legacy of the canon of Chaucer and Wordsworth and Dickens that has been
handed down to us today because it was those writers who in the time of empire,
were used to educate the natives in what civilisation meant an English literary education was intended to civilise.
And in some sense, that project went horribly awry from the point of view of, if you like, the coloniser.
But it also went creatively and wonderfully awry from a post-colonial point of view,
because that civilising education and English literature was taken over by these
new writers is post-colonial writers and was kind of embraced and made their own.
And through Dickens channelling Dickens or channelling Wordsworth, they discovered and developed their own literary voice.
So I think what the study of post-colonial writing does is that it infinitely expands
our sense of the incredible richness and capacity of the English literary tradition.
In terms of writers such as Kipling, where does he fit in? Would you consider him a post-colonial writer?
The question of Rudyard Kipling. His relationship to post-colonial literature is a very, very interesting one.
Kipling, having been called for a very good reason, the bard of Empire, certainly he was the poet of the Raj.
It would be very difficult to style Kipling as, strictly speaking,
post-colonial because he doesn't have an interrogative for questioning relationship in relation to the Empire.
He kind of, he thought, does a pretty good thing if done well.
But what is fascinating about Kipling, and he's he's such a very, very complex and multifaceted writer,
is that he's one of the first writers in English of India to write imaginatively.
Absolutely. From inside India, which is why a well-known Indian writer writing today, Salman Rushdie, for example, Amitabh Gurche,
also very well known, will always write kind of in some sort of interesting relationship or dialogue with Kipling.
Kipling's vision of India has been in some sense taken on by them, but also revised.
So there is, if you like, a post-colonial Kipling by virtue of the fact that these Indian writers of the present day have
used him in order to articulate something about India today that is revealing and interesting.
So what new perspectives come post-colonial work bring to literature?
I think post-colonial literature, almost by definition, brings new perspectives to, if you like, more conventional understandings of literature.
If we think of literature as an assemblage, for example,
or the genre's post-colonial literature immediately kind of opens up what we understand by the lyric poem or what we understand by the novel.
Because what these writers do or these post-colonial writers do is bring their own vernacular traditions,
say from Persian poetry or from Kreyol Calypso.
In the case of Derek Walcott, they're bringing these infusions from their own traditions and their hybridise them kind of cross-cut
them with English literary traditions and create something that is sort of amazing and completely new.
So really, they kind of stretch and expand the boundaries of what we understand literature to be.
Now, you've studied a whole repertoire of post-colonial writers.
Is there any particular works or writers that you find most compelling?
As you can probably tell, I'm a I'm a very enthusiast. Supporter, a fan of this kind of work,
and it's very difficult because we are dealing with such a massive diversity of world writers to pick just a few favourites.
So the right number to mention, I'm going to mention, because he's been in the news, having sadly died in 2013, the year in which we talking.
And that is Chinua Achebe, who's often called the father of African literature because his great novel,
Things Fall Apart, which was published in 1958 over 50 years ago.
And it completely changed the shape of what we understood African writing to be, but also the English novel.
He takes the novel form and he kind of deforms it and changes it in all sorts of interesting ways.
He literally caused things to fall apart and then he put them back together.
He also wrote several other fascinating novels. He wrote memoirs, he wrote short stories, and he's never been out of print.
And Things Fall Apart has sold millions and millions of copies in Nigeria.
It's a kind of standard text like, you know, Great Expectations is in the U.K. since so Achebe is a world changing writer.
Absolutely fantastic. And he's one of the names that I would put forward.
Would you recommend to students who are going to start their interest in literature and
potentially study post-colonial literature that this text would be a gateway into that?
Yes, yes. Yes, certainly, yes. In fact, I was recently working with a former who's interested in going further and studying English,
and this student was very interested in Conrade and in Kipling.
And I then recommended that they had a look at things fall apart, especially at the end, because there's a very,
very Trixi ending to things fall apart that kind of spans the whole colonial literary tradition around, turns it on its head.
So I recommended that the student have a look.
You know, he was fascinated and he could see the very complex and subtle ways in which Achebe was talking back to Joseph Conrad and in a sense,
also to Kipling was saying, actually, look, you know, Africans were not inarticulate, you know, mosque like presences.
They were actually sort of full human beings with sorrows and joys like the Europeans in Conrade.
So that definitely worked. In the case of that, student things fall apart.
It can be because the names are very unfamiliar. They ebow the Nigerian.
It can just initially be a little sort of alienating because it is such a different culture that you're being invited into.
But I would say to any new reader of Achebe, just give it a go, spend an hour, dwell a bit.
Some of these writers, because of their unfamiliarity, you know, they aren't speaking from,
if you like, the heart of Victorian London, which is in a way much more familiar to us.
They're speaking from, say, an island in the Pacific or a village in the Nigerian delta area.
You need to give it. It's a little bit more time. It's like meeting somebody from a very different culture.
You just have to spend a little bit of time getting used to a different accent, a different perspective.
But once you've got used to it, then it's amazing.