Postcolonial Literature "Everytime I Think Essay

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There is the feeling that Rushdie is toying with the concept of freedom of speech in this story as well as destroying the concept of the East as mysterious. Rushdie uses English to tell his story, but he incorporates the Indian oral tradition without any kind of chronological structure to the story. He deconstruct the binary opposition of East and West. He himself is between the Orient and the Occident and he chooses to use both structures, combining Britain and India (Buran 10).

The factors of race and gender complicate the relations of class in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation," and Jean Rhys "Let Them Call It Jazz" in various ways. In Heart of Darkness, the story is centered on the typical male experience, which tends to alienate the female reader from the very "mannish" story. There is some speculation that Marlow and Kurtz's sexist views are part of the "horror" that Conrad was conveying as Marlow reveals a world that is very clearly split into two different realms -- male and female, "the first harboring the possibility of 'truth' and the second dedicated to the maintenance of delusion" (Moore 198-199).

In "Telephone Conversation," the narrator has a conversation with a landlady concerning an apartment for rent. The first sentence of the poem reveals a pun that incites curiosity and the reader is made aware that things aren't as they seem. "The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent" (Soyinka, lines 1-2).

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Indifferent can be read as unbiased, rather than neither good or bad, which foreshadows the landlady's biasness toward the narrator. Through description of the landlady (which comes forth as positive), the reader is indelibly aware that there is a difference in class between these two individuals, and the narrator reacts to her inquiries as to the color of his skin in a rather apologetic manner. She uses her good manners to implicitly tell him that the color of his skin is a problem, and he seems almost grateful for her polite candor, even if it is only a facade for her true ugly nature.

In "Let Them Call It Jazz," Rhys makes it obvious that gender is not something that brings people together in a society; rather Rhys is suggesting that race and class trump gender. This is seen in the landlady's betrayal, which ultimately, the reader views as more of a betrayal than the fact that Selina is alienating us with her incorrect and vulgar use of the English language.

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