blog 7

“The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were- ordinary people – and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making” (41).

In this passage, the narrator has just spent time with Mustafa hearing his life story and is telling the story of life under colonial rule. This is a story of a conquered people, under rule for so long that indifference has become commonplace.

One of the techniques the passage uses is estrangement. This can be seen through the use of phrases like ‘their language’ and ‘ordinary people,’ which serve two functions. First,
it pulls the reader out of the specific stories being told in the book and forces he/she to consider the broader, social context in which the narrator exists. However, the removing of the reader from the specific stories also serves as a way to highlight the feelings of estrangement that the characters have because of their existence in that broader, social context. This serves a way to encourage empathy. The narrator feels that his language has been marginalized and that he is not an ordinary person, and since the reader has just been pulled out of the main story of the book, he/she is now able to relate to that feeling.

In that sense, I would argue that it is a counterstory, but it does not necessarily oppose/undermine the other story. Rather, it serves as a way to contextualize and thus enhance it. The characters and their stories would not exist without the broader story of colonial rule and that makes the counterstory important.