Although an entirely different experience than someone in the Caribbean, I still know how the aftereffects of colonization can be complicated and painful. I grew up in southern Ireland, which fought and won its independence from Great Britain. The top bit of the Island is still part of the United Kingdom, and until recently the bitter division colonialism caused left a trail of blood and misery. Even today, any peace that exists is always on a knife edge. But I did think of a glaring difference between Ireland’s struggle with colonialism and somewhere like the Caribbean. Ireland has always had a voice. In the field of humanities, Ireland, historically, had some of literature’s finest promoting its freedom.
Take people like W.B Yeats and Oscar Wilde. Yeats passionately promoted Irish culture and literature, and Wilde believed in his country’s “evolution of a nation” free from the UK. It helped that they wrote in English, but there is a difference between people like Yeats and Wilde from my ancestors and me. They were born into Anglo-Irish families. It didn’t make them any less Irish, but their background is closer to the colonizers and mine to the colonized. The anglo Irish were the minority in numbers and the majority in wealth. They had nicer everything, and their children achieved more out of life. So, as proud as Irish people are of Yeats and Wilde, it can also be tainted with a sense of inferiority. We want to ‘own’ gifted people who said lovely things about the land of our birth, but deep down, you know that their existence was very different. And these mental contractions contribute to the inferiority complex of a country post-colonialism.
I thought of this concerning our DH readings these first weeks. There is a general desire to speak on behalf of marginalized groups within DH. But I believe we can never honestly know someone else’s experience, even with the best intentions. I think that one of DH’s primary goal’s should be to find ways for people to tell their own stories, particularly if they have an inferiority complex.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
