The Courter - Salman Rushdie (1994) - Post-Colonial identity

Résumé du document

The consequences of British Colonial Empire can be felt in today's English society in various areas including politics, economics, culture, sociology, literature, linguistics… However, in this essay we will focus on the cultural impact of colonialism, and more precisely on the consequences on Post-Colonial identity. If at the peak of the British Empire glory, the old saying “The sun never sets on the British Empire” made sense, today we can see this large spectrum of cultures through English society. Contemporary England is a nation made of multiculturalism where a lot of immigrants from ex-colonies such as India, Australia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, etc., co-exist. This is why, balancing between their roots and their new country, England, the immigrants, nowadays, raise the question of their identity, such as England's identity is related to them. In this essay, we will study Postcolonial identity through the immigrants, using as a support Salman's Rushdie's short story The Courter, originally published in 1994 in the short story collection East, West.

Extraits

[...] We can thus assume that the Post-Colonial identity, as highlighted by Rushdie, is mostly about being a hybrid, both with an Eastern and Western identity. In this short story, the Post-Colonial identity is seen both in a negative and positive way, contrary to most of Rushdie's novels, such as The Satanic Verses, where is set a negative point of view over immigrants' identities. In The Courter, in one hand, the immigrants are considered as strangers in a country they are trying to adapt to. [...]

[...] So, when the courter is stabbed, to Mary, he loses his credibility, in the chess and in the game of integration and hybrid identity. Mary can't play this chess game without another player, without the west side of the game being shown to her, so she immediately decides to return to what she now calls “home”: Bombay. Calling India “home”, she demonstrates that England can't be home for her anymore, she rejects England forever. This is the reason why certainly-Mary returned in Bombay: “So it was England who was breaking her heart, breaking it by not being India. [...]

[...] Finally, both Rozalia and Chandi leave the narrator. Rozalia gets engaged to a “real man” while Chandi returns to India. This means that the narrator is not enough for a real man to stay with Rozalia, not enough for a real man, an Englishman, to embrace his Western identity. At the same time, Chandi comes back to India, living fully the Indian life. This is at this moment that the narrator complains about an “intense sense of loss”, a loss of his identity. [...]

[...] This difficulty to communicate fluently in English influences their identities as immigrants, as it modifies their way of talking. Certainly-Mary is called so because she always repeats “certainly” or “certainly not', since she pronounces it better. Mercir, the Courter, is called so because the ayah was unable to pronounce the “p” sound from “porter”. The love relation between the Indian woman and the Soviet man depicts the use of universal language as being part of the identity as a migrant, showing this remaining gap between their homeland and their new country, and showing that their language, as much as their current identities, is located between both of these places. [...]

[...] Mercir, as another stranger, being from USSR, helps Mary to feel understood and home in England, and makes her visit some touristic places she has never seen, listen to some English music, and spends time with her. Their relation illustrates the difficulties that the migrants can have in England facing languages difficulties, and lack of English competences. Both face the language barrier and communicate, firstly visiting the city, and then through the game of chess: “Chess has become their private language”. Their communication is mostly non-verbal, and their love is above all built on Mercir's caring attitude towards certainly-Mary, leading to the fact that they finally don't need to talk together to love each other. [...]