How does your understanding of Postcolonial Theory inform your Essay

How does your understanding of Postcolonial Theory inform your interpretaion of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Condition - Essay Example Post colonial theory was based on the two theoretical concepts of the time, related to identity, i.e. ‘otherness’ and ‘hybridity’. The colonized people were diverse in their nature and tradition .They are ‘other ‘to the colonizers but are different from one another also. Such a drastic situation was meticulous to India and Africa. Both the countries had shared the common pain of identity and tradition. A comprehensible understanding of the political and cultural aspects of the countries is needed to unravel the stories in its full meaning. ‘Midnights Children’ and ‘Nervous Condition’ are such great novels of the time dealt successfully with the postcolonial theory and there by the self search of the natives Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s children’ is a novel about Indian independence, the partition and their aftermath. The novel is Rushdie’s interpretation of a period of about seventy years in India’s modern history dealing with the events leading to the partition of India and beyond .The novel encapsulates the experiences of three generation of Sinai family living in Srinagar, Amritsar and Agra and then in Bombay and finally migrating to Karachi. Tsitsi Dambengara’s Nervous condition’ is set in the post colonial Rhodesia of 1960s. The narrator and the main character, Thambu, expresses her experience with colonization, as a child growing up from a poor African community, with tremendous correctness and detail. She is anything but typical. A great deal of the novel reveals the development of Thambu as she becomes a young lady and the relationship with her cousin Nyasha .As they mature we can identify the difference in their characters . Tsitsi also adopt the method of narration as Saleem in ‘Midnights children’ .Saleem works in a pickle factory by day and records his experiences in the night hoping that one day the world would taste the pickle of history. Alongside of