Colonial Encounters: Understanding the Complex Relationship Between Colonizer and Colonized

 « Does the colonial exist? » Is the title of the first chapter of Albert Memmi’s book Portrait of a Colonizer and a Colonized, in which he endeavors to understand the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. He posits and raises questions that propound and shed light on this complicated relationship. The Analysis offered by Memmi helps us, readers, understand how did the colonizer “succeed not merely in creating a place for himself but also in taking away that of the inhabitant?” how did the latter interpret his existence in relation to the colonizer? And how colonized writers interpreted their humanness within this world and in relation to the ‘Other’? The question of interpretations here is very important in our study of the context of post-colonial literature and Anglophone literature. And to grapple this sophisticated interaction between two different and opposite elements; we need to have an insight into the way of thinking of these two subjects, the colonizer and the colonized.

In fact, this binary opposition dates back to the Greek times, when the conflict was between the Greek and the Barbarians; a logic established by the Greek community that demands a single center; intellectual, economic, cultural and geographic center, from which all knowledge and meaning stems, and from which Truth emanates. In her book “Beyond Unicentricity”, Carol Boyce Davie demonstrates and explains the notion of “Unicentricity” as One-Centeredness, or the logic of core and periphery, the center and the margin; the center is the origin, the beginning, the authentic. It is in this sense that Unicentricity functions, it operates with one single center that is further widening, stretching out and it is expanding the set of peripheries that orbits around it; a spatial invasion that goes hand in hand with the colonization of the identity, the white man as a travelogue with his classical library with central premises to enlighten the space. In modern terms, this is the colonial project and colonial practice. What is centered then becomes the most important, the proper, the legitimate and hence the dominant, in a dominant/subordinate or master/slave dichotomy. 

This authority had to be elastic and emerge from its spatial cocoon and reinforce its power by border-crossing to not only contain the ‘other’ which represents the ‘unknown’; the different, the exotic, the unfamiliar, the uncivilized, but also to transform ‘it’ and translate ‘it’. In Gayatri Spivak’s words, this is “epistemic violence”; a colonial hegemony, as Gramsci, Puts it, or symbolic violence that aims at emptying the mind of the colonized of all native form and content and filling it with the ideology of the colonizer.

In this respect, Frantz Fanon asserts that all systems of oppression and all sources of exploitation resemble one another, they are all applied against the same “object”: man. This view is supported also in The Wretched of the Earth, where he argues that “Colonialism is a total process, […] and is not satisfied merely with holding people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.” This is plainly seen in Things Fall Apart, in which events take place in Nigeria. And in order to understand the novel as it should be understood, we have to look into the history of Nigeria before and during its colonization. In fact, this colony resembles its colonized inhabitants, living in a perpetual state, in a “back and forth movement”, or “the no longer… the not yet” state, between the culture of the colonizer and its own culture, between its future and its past. In fact, Chinua Achebe is introduced to both cultures, the British and the Nigerian, he was raised in a family whose parents are Christians due to religious circumstances imposed by the British; however, his grandparents didn’t convert and didn’t abandon their traditional beliefs and culture.