LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:12 December 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

Language in India www.languageinindia.com is included in the UGC Approved List of Journals. Serial Number 49042.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2016
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

From Self-Negation to Self-Enrichment:
A Sense of Self in Petals of Blood by Nagugi

Aisha Maqsood


Abstract

This article is a psychological exploration of mentally subjugated individuals, who are confused and mesmerized by the hands of black opportunists after the end of colonization. African people are living a life of abjection bestowed on them by British masters and are going through a Manichean experience in order to recover a lost self. Ngugi puts these characters in a journey, showing how they are trying to achieve the lost self in adverse circumstances. These people are going through this journey on both physical and metaphorical levels, in order to get restored. This article will explore the characters with their complex and mutilated selves and how they have become hindering in order to get a sense of their selves.

Keywords: Manichean, Abjection, Black opportunist, Automaton, Subjugation, Submission

Battle of Self

“Sometime there is no greatness in the past. Sometimes one would like to hide the past even from oneself” (154), Petals of Blood talks about characters going through a battle of self both on individual level as well as on community level. These characters are going through a menachian experience after British masters have left their lands. They are confused, mesmerized and are unable to locate themselves in the realms of their own self. Kristeva addressed this negation under abjection, “The abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other (“Modules on Kristeva”). Kristeva in her book Power of Horror (1982), places such condition as being “not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support…” (qtd. In. Roudiez), it has only one quality and that is contrary to I. It is an ego which merges with the superego of the masters (English), it lies somewhere out in a realm which is not I. In the very beginning of the novel Petals of Blood, Munira Godfrey, a primary school teacher in Ilmorog, states his land as a “waste land” (4). The conditions of these lands give a macrocosm for the psychological conditions of every person living in it.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Aisha Maqsood
Department of English
Lahore college for women university
Lahore
Pakistan
aishamaqsood01@gmail.com

Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.