Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory

CHAPTER 1. U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction: Toward a Poetics of Collective Narratives

Books and journal articles on narrative theory have largely neglected postcolonial literature until very recently (e.g., Prince, “Postcolonial Narratology”; Gymnich); nevertheless, some of the most fascinating narrative experiments have been conducted by postcolonial authors. The same is largely true for U.S. ethnic literature, though in this case the situation is not quite so dire. In the first part of this essay, I will look at several areas where narrative theory can help identify distinctive achievements by postcolonial and U.S. ethnic authors. I will ask two related questions: how can narrative theory help us better understand U.S. ethnic and postcolonial fiction, and what are the larger implications of these narrative practices for narrative theory as a whole? Finally, I will discuss the poetics of collective narratives, an especially compelling poetics that emerges from this analysis. The development of narrative techniques has expanded enormously since 1950; U.S. ethnic and postcolonial authors have made a number of original contributions to this transformation in the ways narratives are constructed, and their work has often gravitated to certain distinctive strategies. Employing some of the categories of narrative theory can help delineate these achievements as they are made to serve as useful supplements to predominantly ideological and sociohistorical perspectives. Narration The first of these newer narrative strategies is the use of innovative kinds of narrators; moving beyond traditional first- and third-person forms, Jamaica Kincaid uses a kind of second-person narration in A Small Place CHAPTER 1 U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction: Toward a Poetics of Collective Narratives brian richardson 4 Brian Richardson that is compelling both politically and narratologically: “You disembark from your plane. You go through customs. Since you are a tourist—to be frank, white—and not an Antiguan black . . . you move through customs with ease” (4 –5). The kind of second-person narration pioneered by authors such as Michel Butor or Italo Calvino is here transformed ideologically, for the “you” is marked racially and nationally. Another powerful postcolonial deployment of voice is the alternation between first-, second-, and third-person narration in Nurrudin Farah’s Maps as questions of identity, including gender, national, and territorial identity , are embodied within this shifting and unstable series of voices. As Rhonda Cobham writes, “the inability of the narrative voices that define Askar to differentiate between Askar [the protagonist] and Misra [the woman who mothers him], between maleness and femaleness, and between age and youth or accuser and accused works also as a metaphor for the shifting status of the signifier ‘nation’ within the Ogaden and for Somalia as a whole” (52). Probably most compelling is the large and diverse group of postcolonial authors who have used “we” narration to articulate collective struggles against colonialism: Raja Rao (Kanthapurna), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (A Grain of Wheat), Ayi Kwei Armah (Two Thousand Seasons), Edouard Glissant (La Case du commandeur), Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco), and Zakes Mda (Ways of Dying). These authors come from a broad range of places, from India to the Caribbean to East, West, and South Africa; all have found “we” narration to be a crucial strategy in forging a postcolonial narrative voice. Glissant has even called for a “roman du Nous” to articulate the distinctive Antillean experience. Some of the interesting features of this kind of narration are evident in a brief passage at the beginning of Texaco, where it is noted that well-to-do individuals would drive by the slum and observe its inhabitants: “But if they stared at us, we certainly stared back. It was a battle of eyes between us and the City” (10). The speaker is here not just narrating the general sensibility of the community but also depicting its shared field of vision and thus providing an unusual and fascinating collective focalization. In some cases this technique draws on indigenous narrative practices; Zakes Mda has noted that “the communal voice ‘we’ is quite common in both the Nguni and the Sotho groups of languages—especially in day to day speech. . . . In the narration of legends, myths and history (often the boundaries are blurred here) we do find the communal voice” (personal e-mail to the author, Dec. 18, 2006). Early in the text of Ways of Dying , Mda inflects this indigenous practice with a distinctively postmod- U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction 5 ern sensibility: “We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when...