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".

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