Caroline Rody
Abstract Chapter 9, “Postcolonial Palimpsests: Great Literary Houses Indian, South African, Irish, and Black British,” elaborates a paradigm for the Anglophone postcolonial literary great house: the historical palimpsest, a structure that time makes capable of containing many more than one meaning. Examples from four literatures show the layering technique of palimpsest to be a capacious, potent metaphorical device, rendering a house a spectacle of the past persisting amid an unresolved present. Poet A. K. Ramanujan catalogs all that has entered and exited an Indian family house over many pre- and postcolonial generations, and novelist Arundhati Roy renders a British Indian colonial “History House” the fascinating site of both nature’s power to reclaim manmade structures and human history’s ongoing, traumatic violence. An André Brink novel dramatizes the coming of South Africa’s post-Apartheid order through the metamorphoses of an eccentric house of generations of settler colonial Afrikaaners. A section on the Irish Big House novel examines three representative twentieth-century texts by Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, and Edna O’Brien, about historically layered English Ascendancy houses. Amid plots that parallel the anticolonial and inter-religious violence of Irish history, these houses become aging, mutating emblems of a changing nation. The chapter closes with a postcolonial vision of the great English house by Nigerian English poet Patience Agbabi set in an English country house nested inside a Caribbean slave plantation house—or vice versa. Agbabi’s speaker offers a guided tour of an intricate, sugar-sweet miniature mansion infused from top to bottom with the horrific enslavement that built it.