Restoring my faith...

I felt that Woolf was a much more honest writer than Orwell was, and he presented the dilemmas colonial masters faced in a much clearer light. Woolf highlighted the performative aspects colonialists had to play but at the same time, demonstrated to the reader his attempts at negotiating between the performativeness and truthfulness.

I think part of the reason why I felt that Growing was more real than the other works we have read on the course is because he does not adopt this high and mighty imperialist attitude towards the colonized. There were several instances where we see him as who he is, another human being in an alien land. When he wrote about the death of an Arab man, the description was simple and sad:

The four men “waded back slowly; the feet of the dead man stuck out, toes pointing up, very stark over the shoulders of the men in front. The body laid on the sand. The bearded face of the dead man looked very calm, very dignified in the faint light (95).

Woolf did not dehumanize the Arab man, did not try to impose strict binaries but rather his description of the man as ‘dignified’ touched me. Just when I had lost all faith in colonial masters as humans and saw them as just greedy and self-absorbed men, I’m glad Woolf came along to restore some faith in them. And I thought it was hilarious how he said he was ‘infuriated when I saw a rather unpleasant looking white man introduced into my room by the peon without my permission’ (129). Where he said ‘[t]he longer I was in Ceylon, the more prejudiced I became against “white men”’ (129), for me, it’s the more empire writings I read, ‘the more prejudiced I become against “white men”’ (129).