Non-western Literature
Read the following quotes and analyze them stylistically and thematically. In other words, explain what we
learn about post-colonial literature from these examples. For example:
a. What the quote reveals about the author’s writing style
b. The relevance to the rest of the text
c. What we can learn about post-colonial themes or style from this quote
Write 2-3 sentences per point. (5 points for each answer – 25 pts. total)
1. “Astride his bicycle, leather attaché attached to the carrier, my grandfather whistled. Despite
irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for
twenty-three years, his good humour was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He
whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum.” (Rushdie 40)
2. “And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the idea) I suggest that at the deep
foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical
cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, the country’s East and West Wings were separated by the
unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion
was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as
ahomogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our
then and now” (Rushdie 420).
3. “Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening
gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to
crack all over like an old jug – that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history,
subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming
apart at the seams” (Rushdie 37).
4. “So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we
all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents – the children
ofmidnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen.
Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream” (Rushdie 137).
5. “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as not other activity can hope
to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for
every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because
implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil;
the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent. . .” (Rushdie 167).
6. “. . .because I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three,
and at least somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release. Yes, they will trample me
underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks
of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who
will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and
one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is
the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times. . .”
Part II.
Choose any two of the following elements of Post-Colonial Literature and in a well organized essay, define
the terms by analyzing the relevance to Maru. (20 pts.)
Resistance
Hybrid Representations
Otherness/Marginality
Language
Nostalgia/Memory
Reclaiming the past
Modernity
Part III.
Write a short explanation about the ways in which Neruda’s poetry relates to either Rushdie or Head. (1-2
paragraphs total)
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