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?