Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Postcolonial Literature and its Transformative Impact on Cultural Understanding: Unveiling the Power of Narratives
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

Everything I Thought I Knew About the World Was Wrong—Until Postcolonial Literature Burned It Down and Rebuilt It in Stories

Let’s just say this outright: postcolonial literature isn’t just about colonization. Or maybe it is, but not in the way your high school curriculum flattens it—like, colonizers bad, resistance good, the end. Nah. This stuff doesn’t just point fingers; it rewires your mental infrastructure. Reading it is like realizing your GPS has been calibrated to a lie. You’re not lost. You were never even on the right map.

Honestly, postcolonial literature should come with a warning label: “Side effects may include existential whiplash, historical rage, and severe empathy overload.”

And I’m not talking about those sanitized syllabi-approved texts, where you read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for one week, then bounce back to Dickens like nothing happened. I mean actually sitting with these narratives—Achebe, yes, but also Arundhati Roy, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tayeb Salih, Jamaica Kincaid, Bessie Head, Kamel Daoud, and all the writers who throw a lit match into the dry grass of empire and say, “Here. Watch this burn.”

Because here’s the thing: Postcolonial literature doesn’t just tell a story—it dismembers your entire worldview with surgical precision. And the knife? That’s narrative. Story. Voice. The tiniest detail of a character’s shame, their hunger, their sweat-soaked shirt in the desert heat. That’s where the empire dies. Not in the history books. In the emotional grain of a sentence.

“Postcolonial” Sounds Like Homework Until It Smacks You in the Chest

Let’s de-academic this for a second. “Postcolonial” sounds like something you’d mumble in a seminar to look smart, maybe while furrowing your brow and nodding at Judith Butler quotes. (I’ve been there. We’ve all been there.)

But when you read it—really read it—it stops being a genre. It becomes a lens. Like someone swapped out your eyes and now you can see how Disney movies are mini imperial manifestos. How the English language carries ghosts. How “good intentions” often ride in on the backs of gunboats and missionaries.

This genre—if you can even call it that—is about the rupture, the break between worlds. Colonization isn’t just about flags and borders. It’s about the colonization of mindset. And what postcolonial literature does—brilliantly, maddeningly, emotionally—is show what comes after. After the soldiers leave. After the anthem changes. After the white people go home and leave the mess behind.

And suddenly, you start noticing the cracks in your own foundations. Your favorite books are suspect. Your language is borrowed. Even your sense of self might be stitched together with foreign thread.

Let’s Talk Achebe (Because We Have To) — But Also What We Don’t Talk About

Yeah, okay, Things Fall Apart. It’s the starter drug. It’s the one they assign to prove they’re “diverse.” But if you read Achebe and only think, “Wow, colonialism was bad,” you’ve missed the part where Achebe is also calling out Western literature for its aesthetic imperialism.

Like, Heart of Darkness? He shredded that book. “A bloody racist,” he called Conrad, with his whole “Africa is a dark, unknowable jungle” aesthetic. And it’s not just ideological. Achebe exposes how even narrative form—who speaks, how, to whom—is political. When Okonkwo’s world collapses, it’s not just personal tragedy. It’s a whole cosmology collapsing under the pressure of an imported epistemology. (Yes, I said epistemology. Sue me.)

But we get stuck there. Achebe, Rushdie, maybe Roy if your syllabus is feeling generous. What we miss are the messy, weird, unclassifiable voices. The narrators who contradict themselves. The protagonists who are neither victims nor heroes. The books that don’t give you the satisfaction of resolution. Because that’s the actual postcolonial condition: permanent dislocation. No clean arc. No tidy “and then we healed.”

Take Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. It’s one of the most haunting, sultry, psychosexually charged novels I’ve ever read, and it never once lets you rest. It’s about a Sudanese man returning home after years in England—and discovering that colonial trauma isn’t something you shake off like a coat. It’s in your blood. In your fantasies. In your violence. It’s an infection that rewrites love and shame and masculinity itself.

Who Gets to Tell the Story? Who Gets to Be Complicated?

One of the things that slaps you hardest in postcolonial literature is how it fights for the right to be morally ambiguous. Western lit loves its morally gray white men—think Don Draper, Walter White, Jay Gatsby. But characters of color? They’re either perfect victims or cautionary tales.

Postcolonial writers say: fuck that.

They give us complicated, contradictory, self-sabotaging, sometimes unlikeable narrators. Think Tambu in Nervous Conditions, who wants so badly to escape poverty and patriarchy that she doesn’t even question what she’s internalizing along the way. Or Biju in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, a man drifting through New York kitchens, barely visible, collecting disappointments like parking tickets.

These characters don’t exist to teach you something. They exist to live. And in doing so, they demand that you question your expectations. Why do you need them to be noble? Why do you need their pain to be dignified? Why can’t they just be human?

Narrative as Violence / Narrative as Recovery

Here’s where it gets wild: the way a story is told is itself a form of power. Colonialism didn’t just conquer land. It conquered narrative. It told the world who was civilized and who was savage. Who had history and who had folklore. Who was a subject and who was an object.

Postcolonial literature flips that script. Not just by changing the characters—but by breaking the narrative rules themselves.

Like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things—that book doesn’t move forward. It spirals. It wounds you, then rewinds. It’s structured like memory, like trauma. Because the colonial legacy isn’t linear. It’s recursive. You’re always walking in the ruins of something that once thought it would last forever.

Or Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which rewrites Jane Eyre from the perspective of the “madwoman in the attic.” That’s not just clever intertextuality. That’s literary sabotage. Rhys takes the British canon and buries a bomb in its foundation. She shows how madness is not innate but imposed. How white narratives pathologize the Other to protect their own coherence.

And that’s what postcolonial literature does again and again. It shreds the master’s house with the master’s tools—and then rebuilds with whatever is left: scraps of language, dialects, oral histories, hybrid forms, half-memories.

It's Not About Guilt. It's About Seeing What’s Already There

Let me be clear: postcolonial literature is not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt is boring. Performative. Useless. What it’s asking is something far harder: attention.

It’s asking you to read differently. To question what you’ve always taken for granted. To realize that every story you consume carries assumptions about the world. Some of those assumptions were smuggled in with a Union Jack and a smile.

But here’s the real kicker: these books aren’t just critiques. They’re acts of world-making. They’re imagining futures that haven’t been colonized yet. They’re remembering pasts that official records tried to erase. They’re translating pain into power. They are, in a very real sense, magic.

Why It Hits Different Now

In 2025, with algorithm-fed content, soft nihilism, and late-capitalist burnout simmering under everyone’s eyelids, postcolonial literature feels less like a genre and more like a lifeline. We’re all caught in systems we didn’t create. We’re all haunted by histories we can’t name. And this literature—these voices—it’s not just about empire anymore. It’s about survival. About how to stay human in a world that wants you to be a product, a number, a narrative asset.

Which means it’s also about us.

You don’t have to be from a colonized country to feel the dissonance. To feel the pressure of speaking in someone else’s language. To feel how history keeps glitching in your head like a broken reel. Maybe you’re the child of immigrants. Maybe you’re queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, or just weird in a way the system doesn’t reward. Maybe you’re tired of being told to write “relatable” characters.

Postcolonial literature says: You’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’re part of a much bigger story. One that’s messy and unfinished and still fighting to be heard.

And that’s the thing. These stories don’t fix anything. They don’t close the wound. But they do name it. They touch it. They say: this happened. We were here. We still are.

And maybe that’s enough.

Or maybe that’s everything.