Name: Gayatri Nimavat & Riddhi Solanki
Roll No: 36 & 47
Class: T.Y B.A (English) Batch: 2017-2018
College: R.M.D Mahila Arts and Commerce College.
Ø INTRODUCTION
‘The bluest
eye’ by Toni Morrison is the story of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who
lives in a society which doesn’t offer any reflection of her beauty and
subjectivity. This study tries to examine this novel based on theories of
post-structuralist critic, Homi. K. Bhabha. In his work Bhabha challenges the
notions of fixed identities, undermine the binary opposition between colonized
and colonizer, and emphasizes the role of discourse and language in identity
formation of both the
colonizer and the colonized.
Ø Colonizer v/s colonized
Colonizer believed in spreading their education and religion because of
the belief that it was superior and also from their idea that the English way
of life was the best and only way of life. All other forms were regarded and
unholy and less advanced.
The
natives were very different from the English and their way of life was
completely different, because for the first time they had only just come into
contact with people outside of the Americas, and so there was no relation
between the cultures at all. Unlike in Africa and Asia where trade had been
established for years and connection had been made for centuries before
colonization took place.
Colonization often results in poor power relation between the colonizer
and the colonized, which is likely to lead into negative stereotypes against
the colonized. This in turn affects the colonized identity construction. The
article discusses about the colonial construction of beauty to analyze to novel
written by Toni Morrison, ‘The Bluest Eye’ [1970]. Moreover, here also supports
the analysis of three important concepts of colonial problems, including
constructed concept of beauty by colonizer, power of
dominance and also concept of inequality, in order to address the incapability
of both main characters in constructing their beauty concept.
The
colonizer wants to get the blacks internalize themselves as ugly and cannot be
equally compared to the whites. The conclusion of the analysis shows that both
main characters cannot successfully construct and resist their own beauty
concept which they hold for a quite long time; however, they are successful to
be different from their ex-colonizer. This is because no one could be
identically the ‘Same’ both physically and psychologically because the nature
of adopting the white ethic will be never very far from mockery.
Frantz
Fanon states that the aim of colonization is not only to take almost all
control of the colonized people’s life, but also to try to blank colonized
people’s mind from all ‘From and content’. Which at last keeps the colonized
people down ‘Disfigure’, and ‘Destroys’ them. By destroying the history and
culture of the colonized people, the white colonizers has successfully made a
new set of values for these colonized. Ashcroft claims that colonial discourse
tends to exclude the exploitation of the colonized and define the colonized
society as ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Uncivilized’ which justifies the colonizer
intervention to improve it.
Toni
Morrison was one of the Afro-American writers who dared to speak out and
challenged the white dominant cultures and the domination of these cultures. In
this article, I choose to analyze novel ‘THE BLUEST EYE’ to show the position
of the ex-colonized and their relation to the ex-colonizer. This novel is Toni
Morrison’s first novel and written when she taught in Harvard university.
The white colonialist strategy is to get the colonized black to undergo
a process of epistemic violence, a process whereby the colonizer’s myths, to
begin to see her identity through the paradigm of white supremacy.
