Colonialism versus Origin
Within Wole Soyinka’s and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s intricately weaved novels, both pieces of literature successfully intertwine to portray the estrangement and hardships dealt with through the main characters in settling within a separate environment apart from their origins; culture and adopting the colonial mentality which is imposed upon them. There is a negative portrayal of the colonial mentality that manifests onto the African society. There are three major categories within these two texts displaying the characters that forget that they play these roles within society as puppets of colonialism, those who rebel against the invading culture that seems to threaten their sense of identity and lastly those who choose these roles and carry them out. These categories bring emphasis upon the very distinctions and gaps that are created because of colonialism and the immense impact that two cultures can bring upon individuals. The main characters within both novels compose of Nyasha, Tambudza, Maiguru, Babamukuru, Olunde, Elesin, Joseph and Amusa. Nervous Conditions and Death and the King’s Horseman brilliantly convey the immense differences between the English and the African culture and the negative impact that adopting these differences can have on the human conscious. This assimilation towards colonialism can also consume the characters and drive them to the brinks of insanity, as they cannot escape this tragic fate when they are aware of their circumstances and their surroundings. The intensity of the agitation felt from the characters to the readers ascends to a point where the inner and outer conflicts of the characters struggles are made clear. Both these writer’s works are complimentary to one another as they cleverly articulate and demolish the idealism that was created that the colonialists were good for the country and there are other perspectives presented through the protagonists. It is critical for some of these characters to cling onto their culture as a means to get in touch with their past and a sense of fixed identity that they can call their own.
It is easy to forget the circumstances of a situation when an individual’s life revolves and becomes assimilated into a new lifestyle and adopts a new culture. These are the tragic characters that have fallen deep into the colonial mentality that is constantly imposed upon ...
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... are able to combine the two cultures together in order to receive these benefits despite extraneous factors.
Within Wole Soyinka’s and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s intricately weaved novels, both pieces of literature successfully intertwine to portray the estrangement and hardships dealt with through the main characters in settling within a separate environment apart from their origins; culture and adopting the colonial mentality which is imposed upon them. An important theme in Nervous conditions and Death of a King’s horseman is of remembering and forgetting ones own identity. There are three major categories within these two texts displaying the characters that forget that they play these roles within society as puppets of colonialism, those who rebel against the invading culture that seems to threaten their sense of identity and lastly those who choose these roles and carry them out. It is like tradition versus modernism whereas the English society is modern and the African society is portrayed as rural and past traditions. The split within the mental states of these individuals portray the immense impact that colonialism and origin can create within the mind state of an individual.
Imagine your culture being thrown aside and a new one was all that was taught to you? How would you react to it? In this story the author, Jamaica Kincaid, is talking about how she reacted to this and what happened to her. The author grows up in a place where England colonization had taken place. She grew up in Antigua, a small island in the Caribbean. She is taught all her life about England, a place she has never seen. At an early age she started to realize that the English had taken over her culture. After many years of hating this country she had to see the place that had taught her a different culture and ideas. When she arrives there the hate for the country tripled and she starts to pick apart the entire place and everywhere she goes. As she moves through the countryside her feelings of hate start to show them self’s in her thought and words. The feeling of deja vu, she has been there before, starts to come in after all of the years of maps and description of the foreign land.
In those years, the race question, not explosive yet, begins to appear to the consciousness of the children and grandchildren of the first English settlers. The little girl is the daughter of English colonists who grow her in the fear and hate against African native considered like faceless multitude to be treated as slaves. But one day she meets the Old Chief Mshlanga who is “wearing dignity like an inherited garment,” and, especially after visiting his Mshlanga 's village, she realizes, little by little, of the groundlessness of white prejudice and discovers the unbearable loneliness to which the racial barrier condemned her. Also, the little Nkosikaas realizes that she is walking in those lands “as a destroyer”—a destroyer of her own country. The story highlights the plight of African natives, defrauded from the lands and forced to watch helplessly at the disintegration of their tribal
Aron’s education deeply affects him, and he becomes divided between the world of books, the distant lands and the rhythms of his environment. “Mahaica was a womb out of which I had been wrenched and I did not want to return it… On one hand the language of book shad chalked itself on the slate of my mind, and on the other the sun was in my blood, the swamp and river, my mother, the amber sea, the savannahs, the memory of self and wind closer to me than the smell of my sweat” (Carew 42). Through Aron, the reader gains a sense of cultural fragmentation that accompanies his loss of cultural root in a colonized land. He is an alien to his own homeland and to those who own it, and Aron begins to use his sexual relationships as a way to discover his own identity.
Why do we have nursing theories? Well, in the early part of nursing’s history, knowledge was limited. Nursing theories provide a structure for communication between nurses and other health care team. It assist in the discipline of nursing to determines beliefs, values, and goals, and help to contribute to the care of the clients. Because the world of health care is evolving on a daily basis, the field of nursing needs to continue to expand its knowledge. In doing so, the nurses will be able to meet the various needs of their patients. Nurses should continue to work towards protection of their responsibility of caring for patients. Nurses play a vital role in their patients life and performing caring behaviors to help the healing process. This theory focuses on caring about the whole patient and understanding the power of a therapeutic relationship. This theory also introduces ten carative factors which help guide nurses towards caring behaviors. Jean Watson’s theory of caring provide a insight in achieving this goal.
To be called a nursing theory, the theory has to include these four concepts: the person (patient), the environment, health, and nursing. These four concepts differentiate nursing from all other professions and provide specific ways to care for the patient. Imogene King’s Theory of Goal Attainment and Conceptual Systems perceives nursing and its concepts as systems that all correlate and have an effect on the patient and their goals.
Tambu prevents herself from being completely overcome by western culture. Babamukuru is a successful school headmaster that has granted many opportunities to his kids, seemingly without concern. Nyasha received a world-class education in England only to realize that it uprooted her from her culture. Regardless of who benefits and who becomes victims of colonialism, it pushes aside the native languages, culture and ideas and replaces them with the those of the colonizers. The characters and readers share the same fate. We are all either victims or perpetrators of colonialism. To her credit, in Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga brings the issue out into the
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the most prolific of the contemporary Kenyan writers. He has been an outspoken critic of colonial rule, Christianity and neo-colonial abuses of Kenyan authorities. Ngugi wa Thiong’o began his literary career in English, but then he decided to reject English and write solely in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. His work, Decolonizing the Mind, explains how he came to write in Gikuyu and is also an exhortation for the African writers to write in their native tongues instead of paying tribute to the foreign languages. Ngugi and his supporters were opposed by several African writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka among others. But Ngugi is of the view that by writing in foreign languages like English, French, and Portuguese, the African authors are continuing to enrich the alien cultures at their own expense. It is truly said that Ngugi speaks for the continent. In his non-fictional work Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o proposes a program of radical decolonization. In this
A powerful instrument of control used by the colonizing powers is the instrument of language. Language forms a huge part of the culture of a people - it is through their language that they express their folk tales, myths, proverbs, history. For this reason, the imperial powers invariably attempted to stamp out native languages and replace them with their own. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out, there are two possible responses to this control - rejection or subversion. (The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1995. 284) While Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is famous for advocating outright rejection of the colonialist language, believing that this rejection is central to the anti-imperialist struggle, Chinua Achebe has chosen the idea of subversion rather than rejection. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, his writing “displays a process by which the language is made to bear the weight and texture of a different experience. In doing so it becomes another language.” In The African Trilogy, Achebe uses the language of the colonizer to convey the Igbo experience of that colonization. The idioms, proverbs and imagery of these books all invoke his Eastern Nigerian culture, forcing the reader to accept on Achebe’s (linguistic) terms, the story he has to tell.
Divided in four parts – “The Year of Our Loves and Friendships”, “The Year of Her Passion”, “The Years of Betrayal”, and “Homecoming- The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a bold attempt at telling the epic of Asian people in Africa. It is a novel concerning themes of love, passion, commitment and more importantly, identity. The narrator, Vikram Lall, is a Kenyan born Indian who grows up in an era where rebellion, confusion, and disruption were all prevalent. In this journal, you will learn about the characters, themes, and settings in the first half of this book.
Authors had written many books on nursing theories which classifies them into various categories. Meleis (1996) had mentioned that nursing theories is a system that integrates holistic and behavioral that have and interaction on human being, environment and nursing interventions. On the other hand, Parse (1987) stated that nursing theoretical
Among the literary artists of that period, Achebe can be singled out for his imaginative recreation of Igbo society in Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964). But during the post-colonial era, “the post-independence mood of disillusionment” is also reflected in our literature. During this period, Nigerian literature was forced to move from cultural affirmation to social criticism as our writers could no longer neglect contemporary social and political problems (Ker, 2004). Soyinka was among the first set of Nigerian writers to admonish and warn his society in his plays The Road (1965) and Kongi’s Harvest (1965). Achebe also did the same in his novel
Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.
The definition of the theory in Theoretical Nursing: Development and Progress (Meleis, 2012) is that “Theory is an organized, coherent, and systematic articulation of a set of statements related to significant questions in a discipline and communicated as a meaningful whole.” The purpose of theory is to provide a meaningful foundation for the development of nursing practice and guiding further studies. The functions of a theory are guiding nursing profession to form the
In Wole Soyinka’s 20th Century play The Lion and the Jewel, there is a constant battle between tradition and modernity as well as a post-colonial struggle seen both in a exhibited in the play's village of Ilujinle. Soyinka published this play at the time Nigeria was battling for independence and freedom under the British control around the 1940’s and 1950’s. Due to this, Nigeria was struggling with whether or not it was prepared for independence and able of conducting a modern western civilization. A few Nigerians perceive that it was the ideal opportunity for change while others questioned whether they should move past their present culture. I portray modernity to the domination of British culture during 1940’s and 1950’s on Nigeria’s lifestyle
Wole Soyinka’s involvement in the political history of Nigeria and his coming face-to-face with the struggle for independence can be seen as the inspiration behind his works. He stands out to politically represent his native Yoruba culture as a part of the unending resistance struggle. The inclusion of political oppression in his works can be related back to the period of his imprisonment for twenty seven months for his involvement in the events at the Biafran War. Torn between the Yoruba culture of the black man and the white man’s culture of British imperialism, Soyinka, through his works merges the western elements with the elements of Yoruba culture and brings to light the problems of culture, tradition and politics. He not only emerges as a figure of resistance, to remain opposed to the tyrannical political order, but also protests against the suppressive voices of this order. Using his native Yoruba culture as the backbone of his writings and with the help songs, dance, in a way becomes a symbolic representation of the status of the tribe. Soyinka in Myth, Literature and the African World states that music “is the intensive language of transition”. This statement can be seen working in Soyinka’s Death and the king’s horseman and The Bacchae of Euripides. Through dance and music, he not only focuses on this transition but also presents its essentiality in upholding the African culture. The usage of Yoruba proverbs along with the language of the colonisers and the placing of the language of the colonised and the coloniser on the same pedestal determines Soyinka’s stance to wipe out the hierarchization of the imperial language. He, thus, tries to reclaim the with...