Can There Be a Postcolonial "Children of the Land"?

(Please excuse the wonky formatting—I'm still figuring out how this works!)

Considering that my primary text is a postcolonial novel about a Zanzibari asylum seeker in England, you may have expected me to write about Mbebe’s “Necropolitics” article. However, I was intrigued by Chakrabarty’s questions regarding the confrontation of postcolonial and climate change studies: “If, indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, How do we bring them together in our understanding of the world?” (Chakrabarty 200). Industrialization and colonization, both processes effected by powerful human agents, are intricately connected. They are involved in a feedback loop, in that human subjugation of other humans has powered the industries that have fueled globalization, which in turn has threatened this very mode of existence—“human life as developed in the Holocene” (Chakrabarty 213)—at the same time that it has reinforced the inequalities upon which it is based. Because climate change threatens all people, Chakrabarty impels us to consider humans as a universal species—it is at this level that we have become a geological agent and inaugurated the Anthropocene. He admits the value of the postcolonial “critique that sees humanity as an effect of power,” but “[does] not find it adequate in dealing with the crisis of global warming” for that reason (Chakrabarty 221). I was motivated to seek in By the Sea not an answer, but perhaps a hint, a response of any kind, to the question posed by Chakrabarty: “How do we relate to a universal history of life—to universal thought, that is—while retaining what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal?” (Chakrabarty 220).

This of course requires me to read against the grain. By the Sea is set during the Anthropocene, but its concerns are clearly postcolonial. While the environment—especially the sea—plays an important role in the novel, it does not address human “geological agency”—and not even indirectly. However, I think my unconventional reading is in line with Chakrabarty’s call to action; he hopes to “[probe] the limits of historical understanding” (Chakrabarty 220).

There is a brief moment in the novel that seems to me to get at Chakrabarty’s question. An overarching theme in this text about refugees is home and homelessness, place and dislocation. After being imprisoned in Zanzibar for many years, the protagonist, Saleh Omar, is moved to a tiny island where he and a few other prisoners are being held along with deportees waiting to be sent back to Oman. One day, the ship comes to take the deportees, and the prison’s commanding officer encourages Saleh to board with them. Saleh, however, is committed to his memory of home and to returning to his wife and daughter (whom we know, because this is a flashback, are likely dead by this point), so he remains on the island to stay out his indefinite prison sentence. For the next few days, the troops are more lenient with the prisoners left on the island, and one night at dinner, Saleh has this conversation with the commanding officer:

“You should’ve gone with your brothers,” the commanding officer said.

“They’re your brothers too,” I said, though I said it mildly for fear of offending our ruler, so mildly that I had to repeat it before he heard me.

“Yes,” he said laughing. “The Omanis fucked all our mothers.”

“And this is as much their home as it is mine, as it is yours,” I said.

“Sote wananchi,” he said satirically, booming with his knowing laughter. All of us are children of the land. (Gurnah 228)

Here the notion of “brotherhood” or universality is understood by the characters as ironic and “satiric.” Politics and history have differentiated Omanis from Zanzibaris, just as they have differentiated prisoners from members of the military. The idea of there being a universal “children of the land” is a ridiculous platitude. Yet, with Chakrabarty’s encouragement, we can see how all of these people’s dislocation indeed represents a commonality. Perhaps we can see them as children of the same negative space or fellow children of dislocation. The prisoner eating and joking with the commanding officer, surrounded by the sea on an island that is home to neither of them and with no sense of how long they will be there, are also in this moment stripped of the characteristics that give one power over the other, that differentiate them.

Nevertheless, even in this brief moment the possibility of universality is disregarded and enmeshed in sarcasm. We can look for a sense of species that is not biological or ecological — that accepts dislocation and disconnection from the land as its basis — but this too will face resistance.