Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism and Wild Thorns Term Paper

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Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism and Wild Thorns

The novel has something to say about the relationship between gender and colonialism. Discuss the representations of women in the novel and contrast them to the representations of men. Use specific examples. The idea of a boy "becoming a real man" also looms rather large in the novel. But what do you think the author is saying about this process of "becoming a man?" How are masculinity and femininity impacted by colonialism? How might Cesaire address the question of gender and colonialism? How is his treatment of the question different from, or similar to, that of the novel?

In Wild Thorns, the Palestinian boy at the heart of the narrative feels deprived of his identity as a citizen, but also as a man. He lives in a world where he constantly feels the forces of occupation, where Israeli soldiers hold guns, but where he is deprived of the 'privilege' of military resistance. Growing up within a culture where masculinity has such a high priority, this is extremely damaging to the boy's sense of self. Women, it is suggested, simply do not understand how damaging this is to the developing adolescent male Palestinian psyche.

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Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism however, has the potential to offer a slightly less patriarchal view of constructions of identity to the Palestinian protagonist. In Cesaire's implied worldview, Africa has often been construed as the feminine, and therefore the inferior, to the expressed European worldview. Although this is not said explicitly in the text, when Cesaire says that Africa must attempt to reconfigure the current world's binaries of colonial relationships, he means that Africa has always been considered primitive in relationship to Europe, because it is less economically strong than Europe. Similarly women have often been construed as less economically strong than men, because they have been oppressed and denied similar opportunities at economic betterment.

As a caution to too over-zealous an emphasis upon this, though, one must note that this does not mean that women should….....

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