So I just finished Things Fall Apart, which I haven’t read since high school, and although I really liked it and in particular loved the indigenous perspective on colonization, I thought the ending sucked. Spoiler alert, the main character gives up on fighting the British and kills himself. A lot of other supposedly anti-colonial novels I’ve read have similar lib takes, I guess you could say. Their stories and characters more or less imply that resisting colonialism is hopeless.
Sea of Lentils is beautifully written and really fun but it just sort of describes the Spanish fucking everything up—nobody really fights back. To be fair, that seems to be pretty accurate for the early colonial period it describes. The writer was a Cuban dissident who ran away from Cuba in the 1980s for some reason though.
Either Explosion in a Cathedral or Nostromo I think I’ve read twice and I can barely remember either of them. I’ve also read Heart of Darkness once or twice and know that’s obviously a racist, pro-imperialist novella.
The Good Earth is, in a way, like 1984 set in colonial or late Qing period China, in that the author clearly believes there is just no hope for these poor Chinese people; the moment they get a little money they just turn into oppressors. Pearl S. Buck has sympathy for them but clearly views them as victims and ignorant, hopeless barbarians.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the king of this genre and truly and obviously a great novel but the weird incest is kind of off-putting and everything just sort of flies apart at the end.
I’m including Dune here because SF/F is just cowboys and indians in different clothing and Dune itself is sort of a redo of Lawrence of Arabia. The Red Nation podcast had a good recent episode about all the Orientalism in Dune which I had foolishly failed to notice, most notably the fact that the Fremen can’t beat the bad colonizers (Harkonnen) without the help of the good colonizers (Atreides). I read all of Herbert’s Dune novels and the Fremen more or less disappear by the time Leto turns into a giant sandworm iirc (but maybe this is just some kind of weird dialectical unity of nature-indigenous-colonizer?).
Have to also mention a memoir about Vietnam, When Heaven And Earth Traded Places. The author is a lib and I only read half of it but it was still pretty interesting. She grew up in the countryside and was kind of caught between the Viet Cong and the Americans.
Is there a decent anti-colonial novel out there where the good guys win?
I mean, colonialism generally won, so...
But seriously, off the top of my head:
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen is about the last days of the old Anglo-Irish gentry in County Cork during the Irish War of Independence. Maybe not what you're looking for, since it focuses on the doomed colonizers. But damn I love this book
A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o is about the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. This is not one where the good guys win though, unfortunately
The Stars, The Earth, The River by Le Minh Khue is short stories about the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective. Very good
Maybe not what you're looking for but another good Vietnamese novel is Dumb Luck, which is a modernist satire of the colonial Vietnamese middle class
Fuck yes, I will be checking these out. I’m always looking for Vietnamese perspectives on the Vietnam War because I’m so fucking tired of the “we murdered everyone and we feel kind of bad because we lost but whatever” American perspective that seems to pervade every American work of art on the subject.
The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh is another one in that vein
Seconded, though we also have “our government slipped us LSD just to see what would happen”…
The Stars, The Earth, The River by Le Minh Khue is short stories about the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective. Very good
We need more like that. I gifted that book to a friend's kid (who was interested in newer Vietnamese history (no clue why)) and they were quite impressed by it and changed their perception on what Vietnam might've been and is. Now they are much more interested in contemporary sources from Vietnamese or former Vietnamese perspectives.
Seconding A Grain of Wheat, it's quite good, I'm due for a re-read once I get my books out of storage (recently moved)
It's a novella, but The Word for World is Forest by LeGuin is good. There is sadness where the events leave the natives darkened by the lessons of the insurgency though.
Beauty Is a Wound
Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker (Translator)The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million "Communists," followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.
Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: "One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years…" Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.
It is, I went to a indie bookstore that's covered in books like a maze, and I found that book on a table, I opened the book and went "holy shit".
Great, great book. (Edit - though I’m not sure duderium will like it, as it’s 100 Years of Solitude with the “sexual violence” knob turned to 11.)
I’ve only read the first volume, but for more Indonesian fiction, Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet. It’s my favorite anti-colonial novel - no happy ending, though. To understate things a bit. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
I made sure to write/copy the book description which included all the ugly part. People need to be aware of what they are getting into
Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood? A labor novel where the strikers win against the French. For a more cynical book by the same author, Xala,and his film adaptation of it.
Raja Rao’s Kanthapura? It’s more of a “good will triumph” rather than a “good has triumphed,” though, and it’s more pro-Gandhi than this site is, probably. The language of the book is gorgeous and sui generis. I ought to reread it sometime in the not-too-distant.
Hey this is a little late, but i just saw this thread, and I was surprised at the way you reference Heart Of Darkness. I read it recently for the first time, and it seemed strongly anti-colonialist.
Why would you describe it as pro-Imperialist? The whole point of the book seemed to be to show that the “civilized” aspects of the European colonial project were a paper thin cover for blood thirst and greed.
I haven’t read it in awhile but I think you should pay attention to Conrad’s description of Africans and the East. He basically views the east as this dark abyss of violence and pleasure where nothing ever changes. It sucks because Conrad is an amazing stylist. I would also recommend checking out Orientalism (Conrad is literally Said’s wheelhouse) and Things Fall Apart (since Achebe may have also been reacting specifically to Conrad). The East Is A Podcast is also an extremely excellent resource. I’ve been binging all of this stuff lately because I’m writing a book which takes place in “the east” and I want to avoid orientalism in my work.
I was actually checking out Lord Jim recently and the description on the back of the book says it’s basically a story about a white dude teaching dark savages the wonders of civilization.
