Before addressing some remarks on the poem mentioned in the title of this essay, I would
like to stress that T. S. Eliot's life and work provide us with a compelling doubt about his status
quo in the western literary history once he is regarded as a traditionalist, id est, anglo-catholic in
religion, monarchist in politics and classicist in literature and art, but his formation and work
point towards, among other directions, to some multicultural paths.
In spite of being born in America and made England his home, Eliot's formation exhibits
a solid comprehension of the eastern philosophy and languages, and this fact allowed him to
write on issues related to the imperial adventures in India, Africa and elsewhere with a subtle
criticism.
In fact, tradition and rupture run side by side in Eliot's work and thought. His legacy is so
complex and dynamic that it set up the basis for the movement of New Criticism as well as it
provided support for determined concepts inserted into the breast of some postmodern theories as
we can find out in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, a text which evokes Eliot's
postulations in order to criticize the American foreign affairs, as it informs below:
Even if we were to allow, as many have,
that the United States foreign policy is
principally altruistic and dedicated to such
unimpeachable goals as freedom and
democracy, there is considerable room for
skepticism. The relevance of T. S. Eliot's
remarks in "Tradition and The Individual
Talent" about the historical sense are
demonstrably important.
In his paradigmatic book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot argues that
the regional culture, which he nominates as satellite culture, has two remarkable reasons to avoid
being absorbed by the prevailing culture of a nation. The first is the proper instinct of survival
which generates in part of the people of the peripheral area a feeling of inferiority or failure. The
second reason for the maintenance of the peripheral cultural dwells in the fact that an advance of
that condition would produce a rupture, a cut that leads to the split of the nation and this is only
valid in the case of secession.
On the other hand, part of the same population can go towards the opposite direction if
those individuals believe that the absorption by the stronger culture can provide them with greater
power and prestige. In this case the status quo of those members will be considered affiliated to
the colonizer mentality, what presupposes a reactionary position which does not contribute to the
process of cultural identity of a region or a nation.
Due to these considerations, we can take into account that Eliot's postulations fit the
process of colonization of a country but not the process of imperial colonization once it is known
the desire of the majority of the people of the colonized lands to break their ties with the
metropolis and to build their own history and cultural identity. I believe this is exact the
predominant feeling in the hearts and minds of those people from Africa and Asia that were
colonized by the British.
It is also important to underscore that the English colonizers used to take people from one
colony and displace them into another, in an operation which set colonies against colonies and
protected the English from the direct involvement with the natives. This kind of process usually
ends in abrogation whose outcomes just favored the colonizer.
Thus, it is based on the belief that T. S. Eliot's work and thought anticipate some points
which would be current in the postmodern era that some of his minor poems can be reread under
a multicultural approach. This is the case of "To the Indians Who Died in Africa", a poem whose
content depicts the enterprise of the English Empire in the colonized lands of India and Africa.
In the opening lines of the poem, Eliot records that it attends the request of Miss Cornelia
Sorabji for Queen Mary's Book for India (Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1943), what means that his
conceptions in the poem stand for a view from the inside of the empire, an English or Western
optic.
The first verse points towards many different possible readings, but I will outline two
contrasting views. One addresses to a possible universal wish related to the human beings and
consists in being brought up and live in his/her own birthplace. On the other hand, such a verse
allows an interpretation that a man's destination is not the migration, and avoiding this
movement, the foreigners would not knock at the first world societies' doors.
The ambiguity of the verse is here a profit if we take into account that whether "a man's
destination is his own village", then, we can figure out that Eliot was saying to his fellow
Englishmen: it is time to bring back "our boys" from India, Africa, etc. I do not have any
evidence to support my arguments on Eliot's thought except the opening for inference provided
by the text itself as I emphasized in the former paragraph.
The second verse must be divided for an accurate analysis once the first part of it presents
dignity and honor of being the master of his own fire, which implies that it was acquired through
independent work, and not as a concession purveyed by the colonizer or anyone else, whilst the
second part of the verse is very depreciative for the woman's condition.
It is known that paradox is a figure of speech which is the mark of this verse considering
that its beginning confers decorum and nobility but it could have formatted a more just
postulation for the second part of the verse if it had inserted woman at man's side in work and did
the same directing man at woman's side in the kitchen.
The first two verses clearly show that they were made up as a reflection on the issues
concerning the British domination abroad, especially in India and in Africa. They express what
should be, and this idea goes deeper in the following verse: "To sit in front of his own door at
sunset", in which a time for contemplation is demanded, and the sunset's presence points out the
possibility of communion with nature. The only way to fulfill this wish consists in the
preservation of the environment, and it is necessary a strong opposition on the industrial and
large scale trade that devastate the Natural Resources.
The end of this stanza addresses to family, tradition, and memory, all of them fitting
Eliot's ideology. Moreover, a multicultural view is of paramount importance for postmodernism,
and consequently, these verses exhibit the neighbors sharing the same space under the security
guaranteed by the progeny and the feeling of being together in a harmonious process of alterity.
It is remarkable to emphasize that the last verse: "grandson playing in the dust together" is
read now with a sense of nostalgia once the children of postmodern era do not play in the dust but
before the computer's screen in the privileged centers while the children of the devastated areas
of the peripheral nations, especially in Africa and in the Middle-East, roam under debris of their
destructed cities and countries.
Another important point to stress on those final verses of the first stanza is their concern
with space. It is supposed that the "dust" in which "his grandson" and "his neighbors' grandson"
are playing belong to the natives and it is a fruit harvested from a negation, id est, the denying of
displacement, the refusal to migrate, and whose primary cause is the individual identity that is
blended with the space, and in the case of the Indians and the Africans, their identity turns into a
post-colonial one, once it is only a wondering in the poem and can be only put into practice after
the departure of the empire.
All these conjectures came to light from a poem written by a poet whose profile is
regarded as conservative, but I will defend the bard arguing that Eliot's ideas are close to those of
the American literary movement of the 1930s entitled New Criticism which was born from an
intention of establishing a new pattern in the American literary theory and criticism, and it is
known that the New Critics aimed at forging something different from those eurocentric
conceptions in the making of poetry and poetical criticism that were vogue until the emergence of
the Southern School.
In spite of being relegated, in the Western Civilization, to a peripheral position, social
history of the non-europeans is the destination of the first verse of the second stanza expressed in
"... he has many memories...". In reality, those memories have their origin in the process of
colonization when their culture, identity, security and hopes were all confiscated. The following
verses denounce that the memories, which are resulted from the scar, are shared by the whole
community, and the fact that the conversation carries on independently of the weather not only
ratify the scar but exhibits its speech with all emotional charges in the minds of those who lived
under imperial rule.
The whole second stanza turns around conversation and memory, two psychological
instances which tie together the argument, the experiences, and the ingredients of history which
are stored in the individual as well as in the collective minds of the colonized people. Then, the
records on oppression, domination, subjugation contribute to shape the resistance of the local
culture before the imperial agency, and the passage of the seasons metaphorizes the passing time
and the transmission of the cultures from generation through generation.
The stanza closes with the presence of "foreign men" in "foreign place", and the emphasis
Eliot gave to the word "foreign" displays the empire in action. This policy consists in displace the
human beings and turn them into invaders of the foreign lands. This process forced different
peoples, who spoke completely different languages, to face and deal with the other colonized and
their constraint meetings ended, generally, in conflict, whose result favored only the colonizer.
"A man's destination is not his destiny" opens the third stanza pointing towards the
Eliotian point of view that man's destiny is his reunion with God, and for those who take this
mentality for granted that verse states that man is not the master of his own future, of his own
history. On the other hand, the mark of the ambiguity, which characterizes the poem, allows a
reading based on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.
A man's destination in a colonial society is designed according to the imperial rule that, in
general, forces the local citizen to search for shelter in one out of two possible ways, in other
words, or he/she goes to the colonizer's side and becomes affiliated or he/she digs trenches for
resistance, and I used the noun trench in the plural form so that the cultural resistance can be read
as an amalgam of manifestations that includes politics, religion, science, music, thought,
literature and the arts, added to those daily cultural habits peculiar to each region of the globe.
Still dealing with that verse, it is suggestive that its echoes are heard in the second and in
the first part of the third verses which introduce the dichotomy expressed by the condition of
being at home or into the exile. Here, it is clear that Eliot had in mind just the process of
immigration based on the experience caught from the movement of the colonized, who were not
yet writing back, but being displaced from India, Pakistan, Africa and other parts of the former
British empire.
But Eliot did not consider, consciously, the process of internal colonization, in spite of his
verses permitting us to address to such a question. The internal colonization occurs when a part of
the nation overcomes the others in economical and political power and cultural influence, and one
of the consequences is the internal migration which provides a kind of inner exile, a figure of
speech I am coining to express the feeling of nostalgia and homesickness of those who are
compelled to adhere to an internal displacement, a situation which is easily observable in large
countries such as China, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Australia, and the United States, to quote only
the largests, but we know that it comes about everywhere.
One of the main reasons for pulling the trigger of this process is the economy. People
from the peripheral areas inside those countries are forced to migrate to the most developed
centers hunting for job and better way of life and this fact always contributes to the social
disarrangement in both, the place of origin and the place of destiny.
This inner exile is also observable in the behavior of the migrants who are always
making attempts in order to reconstruct the natural landscape of his/her homeland through some
cultural activities which bring memories from home, as we can see in the Brazilian Northeast Fair
in Rio de Janeiro City, and whose opportunity provides the migrants from that region to celebrate
their identity through music, food, costume, and regional literature written in craft book that they
call "cordel literature".
If the place is, as the eliotian poem declares, the location of the two cultures, the local and
the displaced one, thus it should be the place for the otherness, the alterity between the regional
and the cross-culture in movement, and this is what would confer a special status to the place.
But, this meeting has resulted much more in a clash of cultures than in the possibility of turning
the place into a making one with hybridity as its id card.
The poem redeems itself in the following two verses when it points out that "Where a man
dies bravely / At one with his destiny, that soil is his", and addresses to the spiritual reality that
man does not pursue the place, but the opposite. So, man could call his home where his heart and
spirit are, and this feeling rescues the citizen from his/her displacement position and places
him/her in the new soil.
In spite of the conceptions of universal truths have been under attack, it is remarkable to
stress that such a verse deconstructs the idea of nation, and claims, unconsciously, for the
abolishment of the boundaries and frontiers, what can be understood as the absence of the
processes of internal and external colonizations.
The last verse "Let his village remember" fits Eliot's clamor for tradition and for a return
to the first arena, the village. However, the invitation for reminding implies that the narrative on
his deed is part of the history, and it also implies the emergence of the voice and the memory of
the village itself that is inserted in the new cultural order and registered in a new cultural map,
besides being a record which circulates and passes from one generation through another as a
treasure shared by the villagers.
"This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands, / And one in the Five
Rivers, may have the same graveyard" are altruistic verses that sound senseless in a colonial
situation where the midlands, the five rivers and the graveyards are all under imperial control and
the native is deprived of any right concerning on the management of his own country and its
natural resources.
The same contradiction appears in the following lines once the linear reading of the verses
"Let those who go home tell the same story of you:/Of action with a common purpose, ... what is
the fruit of action" is not possible, taking into account that the story the colonizer is telling on the
colonized people is the one which hierarchizes the people through a division set up according to
the predominant binarism of the Western Culture that categorizes the colonized cultures as
inferior, underdeveloped and, sometimes, barbarous.
The propositions sound a kind of "treasure to share" if the colonized people take for
granted the european values as universal truths and turn them into their own view of the world
otherwise the opposite attempt should be consider as an insurrection that will demand a strong
answer from the imperial power.
Unfortunately, the Indians who were kidnapped and used in some African nations, could
not "sit in front of his own door at sunset", nor see "his grandson, and his grandson's neighbor's
playing in the dust together", once the agency of the colonialism forces the colonized Indians to
face the colonized people from Africa in a conflictuous position in favor of the imperial affairs.
In fact, the scars from the colonial times are still in the memory of those who lived under
imperialistic domination or migrated from that condition to become a voice against the new
forms of colonialism.
Eliot's ambivalence in this poem is analogous to that one of Shakespeare in The Tempest,
a play which received a host of interpretations, analyses, appropriations, and recreations in the
postmodern era by the writers and critics from the former colonies in Africa, Caribs and Asia,
demanding the independence of their countries from the European centers. That process was the
materialization of what the Indian writer Salmon Rushdie called "the empire writes back".
T. S. Eliot, as poet, critic, and man lived under postcolonialism in his native America, but
he provided himself with an expatriate experience before turning to the center of the empire
through the process of naturalization and making himself an interpreter and voice of the English
empire. Nevertheless, Eliot's poetry, as all great poetry in history, points towards many directions
and it is the task of the critic to discover what his art is addressing us in a specific time, and I do
believe in a reading under different approach, the one that brings up to date and aids to shape a
new look to the future through poetry and theory.
Based upon these arguments, it is quite important to conclude that T. S. Eliot's work and
thought expressed, among others, in some of his "minor" poems are not only meaningful to the
modern poetry and social criticism but they are still very important for the art and criticism of the
multicultural era and once approached together with Eliot's great poems and critical theories,
they allow the name of T. S. Eliot to be included among the main poets and critics of the
literature of the English language in all times.
So, in these multicultural days we are living, it is significant to stress that so important as
to deconstruct the great canon of the English Literature, an operation proposed by theoreticians
like Mishra and Hodge, is to put the canonical authors and works under multicultural microscope.
I think that the dichotomy colonial/postcolonial is dissolved in the Eliot's poem approached here
and transformed into a kind of message to the central voices inserted in his most famous poem,
The Waste Land, as a kind of refrain: "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME".
"T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Waste Land' contains a reference to an Indian who died in Africa, symbolizing the impact of colonization and the loss of cultural identity. The line 'Here is no water but only rock' highlights the harsh conditions faced by the Indian in a foreign land, representing themes of displacement and alienation in the modern world."
No body dies in his or her own land where they were born
dency
Eliot's poem is a memorial to the Indian soldiers who died during the British Empire's African campaigns during WWII.The key lines in the poem are:Where a man dies bravelyAt one with his destiny, that soil is his.The message of the poem is that perhaps India never 'belonged to' Britain (even though it was for several centuries a part of the British Empire), and that Africa never 'belonged to' Britain either. So a casual or shallow analysis would ask why Indian troops were fighting in Africa to defend the British Empire.But Eliot says that this is the wrong question. The North African campaign was a 'just war' (it was fought against Hitler - whose deep-seated racism would have been as damaging to India as to Africa) - so it is right that anyone should have fought it anywhere (including Indian troops fighting in Africa).Eliot is saying that where you come from is important:A man's destination is his own village,His own fire, and his wife's cooking;but who you are is much more important than this:A man's destination is not his destiny,Every country is home to one manAnd exile to another.Eliot is saying that we should not ask why Indian troops were fighting in Africa. They were heroes - they died in a just and necessary war. They died, and were buried, alongside English heroes:This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.Where they came from, where they died - these things may be important.But the most important thing is that they died as heroes. They were heroes first, Indian nationals second.
Samuel Eliot died in 1898.
Jared Eliot died in 1763.
Eliot Janeway died in 1993.
Eliot Zborowski died in 1903.
Eliot Slater died in 1983.
Richard Eliot died in 166#.
Eliot Stannard died in 1944.
Eliot Stellar died in 1993.
T.S. Eliot was 76 when he died.
Sonny Eliot died on November 16, 2012, in Farmington Hills, Michigan, USA.
Martha May Eliot died in 1978.