Tongue-Tied: Writing Post-Colonial History in Coetzee’s Foe and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Colonialist and post-colonialist discourse wants to tell the story of colonization and its aftermath. While colonialist forces have the tendency to side with the imperial projects while the post-colonial forces wish to rewrite the story, putting forth the issues of the subaltern. But in both the cases it is often observed that the subaltern and his tale is ‘adjusted’ and ‘accommodated’ into the norms of the two competing discourses. The ‘true’ subaltern has no voice in the story or history in fiction. Even if it gets a chance to speak, it is pre-conditioned. J.M. Coetzee in his novel Foe and Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children deal with this problematic of writing history from the post-colonial or colonial perspective. Foe deals with the impossibility of telling the colonizer’s tale without the story of the subaltern. If the story of the subaltern or the colonized is not told, it creates a void in the story of the colonizer which cannot be filled. Foe also illustrates the resistance offered by the subject in writing his tale, even though the author may sympathize with his situation. The definitions offered by both the discourses do not suffice the tale the native wishes to tell. Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children deals with the problematic of giving meaning to a text which has only a single author or text. Meaning making in the post-colonial sense points to the impossibility of accommodating history to fit any purpose. The tale belongs to none and it belongs to everybody, it is personal and universal at the same time. History writing fails to come to any conclusive meaning when the author asserts his authority over the text.

This paper proposes to study the problems raised by history writing in post-colonial literature in the two novels by Salman Rushdie and J.M.Coetzee. it tries to bring out the similarities in the texts and how both of the fail to come into meaning owing to the disagreement amongst the different voices in the tales.