Daily Archives: January 28, 2014

Saleem Sinai

This entry was posted in Midnight's Children and tagged Indian male white on January 28, 2014 by Cheryl Turner Elwell

Character: Saleem Sinai

Source Text: Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. 25th Anniversary ed. New York: Random House, 2006. .

Entry Author: Shalyn Hopley

Saleem Sinai is the illegitimate son of William Methwold, a white British officer, and Vanita, a poor Indian street performer’s wife. However, Saleem is born at the same moment as Shiva, the son of Amhed and Amina Sinai, a wealthy Kashmiri family moved to Bombay. Shiva and Saleem are switched at birth by Mary Pereira, and Saleem is raised as the Sinai’s son without them knowing. Saleem is the protagonist and narrator of Midnight’s Children yet his birth and the revelation of his mixed race heritage do not occur until about a fifth of the way through the book. The beginning portion of his story is spent describing his family history. Yet with Saleem’s birth, the audience discovers that this history is not that of his biological family but that of his unwitting adoptive family. Rather than tell the story of his poor Indian mother, his colonizing British father, and their extra-marital affair, he has chosen to tell the story of his Kashmiri family. Saleem interestingly acknowledges his mixed-race heritage and gives it a significant place in the story, including its revelation during one of the turning points of the novel—his birth, which coincides with the partition of Indian and Indian independence (132); still while acknowledging his mixed race parentage, he is privileging a monoracial identity and even discounting the significance of his parentage saying “…there’s something more important than that. It’s this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents.” (131).Saleem’s mixed birth however cannot be so easily discounted in the significance to the story. Saleem’s status as a mixed race character and child who not truly his parent’s child is symbolic of the status of India at the time of his birth. He is the result of colonization, and evidence of an Indian divided by foreign powers who are on their way out. He speaks of himself and the other midnight’s children, “children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents—the children of midnight where also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history.” Saleem, and his mixed heritage, becomes central to Rushdie’s allegorical tale of Indian independence.Saleem and his fellow Midnight’s children usher in a new period in India’s history, and in the novel, are granted with special abilities which destine them to stand out in both society and history. Much of Saleem’s personal history is interwoven with Indian history, his action being key to some of the wars in India. Eventually, his existence and that of his cohorts becomes central to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. She declares the state of Emergency to imprison and sterilize the midnight’s children, draining them not only of their reproductive abilities but their magical abilities and their hope (505). Her actions are tinged with a dark history of sterilizing the racial other, the undesirable elements of society so they and their progeny can no longer contribute to society. The power of the midnight’s children is intrinsically tied to their ability to reproduce, and so without powers and their ability to have children, they cannot affect the story of India. No longer connected to history, Saleem begins to fall apart, supposedly literally disintegrating at the young age of thirty-one.

Niki

This entry was posted in A Pale View of the Hills and tagged female Japanese on January 28, 2014 by Cheryl Turner Elwell

Character: Niki

Source Text: RIshiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.

Entry Author: Victoria Patlajan

“For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her (Niki) a Japanese name, and I—perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past—insisted on an English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it has some vague echo of the East about it.” (9)

“Keiko, unlike Niki, was pure Japanese…” (10)

Niki is the second daughter of the Japanese main character and narrator Etsuko, fathered by her English husband. Niki’s mixed race, out-going personality, and her western influences serve as a foil to Keiko, Etsuko’s first daughter, who is fully Japanese and is seen as reclusive and aloof. Keiko commits suicide before the start of the novel, and the story revolves around the interactions between Etsuko and Niki after Keiko’s death, reflections on Keiko’s life, as well as Etsuko’s storytelling of Sachiko and Mariko—a mother-daughter pair in Japan who lives serve as a parallel between Etsuko and Keiko.

At the start of the novel, readers are given implicit references of Niki’s mixed-race heritage through descriptions of family dynamics, yet her brusque personality aligns more with western traditions rather than her Japanese lineage. While many mixed-race characters struggle between the two worlds of their races, Niki seems to drop her Asian background for a more “white-oriented” life, though Etsuko attempts to demonstrate Japanese life through Sachiko and Mariko’s story. Niki’s character seems to have much more urban, western qualities that Etsuko criticizes, such as Niki’s fast-paced walking, where Etsuko says ‘Niki, one supposes, has yet to learn the pleasures of walking for its own sake” (47) . Niki is also argued to be more selfish and “You mean you didn’t come to her funeral because she didn’t come to your father’s? Don’t be so childish, Niki” (52), though Niki retorts with explaining that Keiko was never truly part of their family due to her lack of involvement. While her child-like reactions aren’t necessarily “western”, Niki does not seem to have a grasp of her Japanese culture. While Etsuko attempts to show life in Japan through her storytelling to Niki, it is not clear if this truly changes Niki’s perspective of her lineage.

Interestingly, while the physical appearances of Niki and Keiko are not explicitly described in the story, they are shown as looking strikingly similar to one another, despite their different fathers and races. In an uncomfortable moment, Mrs. Waters, a family acquaintance, actually mistakes Niki for her late sister Keiko, saying “’Why hello, Keiko’—she touched Niki’s sleeve—‘I did not realize it was you’” (50). While Niki politely corrects Mrs. Water’s mistake—though without telling her of the suicide of her sister—this one and only physical description is powerful in that readers can understand that, physically, Niki must still look clearly Japanese, and may be subject to any societal constructs and judgments that Asians must deal with, even if they aren’t explicitly noted in the novel.

Antoinette Cosway

This entry was posted in Wide Sargasso Sea and tagged Creole female white on January 28, 2014 by Cheryl Turner Elwell

Character: Antoinette Cosway

Source Text: Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton &, 1998. Print. Norton Critical Edition.

Entry Author: Lauren Cyr

Antoinette Cosway’s mixed race serves the purpose of alienating her from her peers, and contributes to her eventual confinement in the end of the novel. Antoinette’s father, a white man from England named Alexander, was a former slave owner who ran a plantation in Jamaica. He fathered many other illegitimate children with his slaves. Antoinette’s mother is a creole woman from Martinique, living on the Jamaican plantation with Alexander.

Antoinette and her mother are unable to fit in with the other white people in Jamaica. This is due to the fact that they are from Martinique originally, a French colony, rather than the Jamaican English colony. Antoinette is, however, also unable to relate to the non-white villagers as well. The villagers refer to Antoinette as “white cockroach,” in reference to her creole/white race. Antoinette is also the daughter of a former plantation owner; her class sets her apart from the other slaves.

Antoinette’s European heritage puts her into contact with her eventual husband, Mr. Rochester, a white man from England. He comes to Jamaica in order to marry Antoinette. He continually tries to subdue the Creole side of her, which he associates with madness. For example, he decides to rename Antoinette (her mother’s Creole name) “Bertha,” a more English sounding one.

In addition to changing her name, Rochester also seeks to change Antoinette’s language, further fragmenting her identity. Antoinette’s language contains remnants of her Creole heritage, a heritage that Rochester believes to be inferior. When Antoinette speaks to him, Rochester is reminded of her “inferior” background. To him, not only is Antoinette Creole, she is also the wrong type of Creole. When Antoinette speaks, she does so by “chattering in patois,” the patios a blend of the language of the colonizing with the colonized. Antoinette’s heritage stems from Martinique, a country colonized by the French. Thus her language is a combination of French and a native tongue, twice removed from Rochester’s English.

Rochester devises a plan to move Antoinette to England, in order to further suppress her Creole heritage. In a move that symbolizes the influence of white English men over the Caribbean people, Rochester takes ultimate control of Antoinette by locking her in attic for the rest of her life. He sees Antoinette as a source of madness, and hopes that by locking her away in England, he will be able to put her aside and forget about her. Antoinette is rejected by the blacks on the island for being too white, and by her husband for being too Creole. Her fragmented identity and struggle for finding a sense of place leads to her eventual madness at the end of the novel.