Shooting an Imperialist…

(I hope all we have to read is "Shooting an Elephant" the short story, rather than the anthology!)

Every time I read "Shooting an Elephant" I find myself hoping it's ironic rather than faithfully autobiographical. If it's the latter, Achebe should switch targets, because for an 'anti-imperialist' text, "Shooting" is sure racist. Perhaps Orwell was aware that serial imperialists could probably be best persuaded to drop the 'white man's burden' by considering that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys," but the sheer negativity of Orwell's portrayal of the Burmese makes you wonder why his narrator even bothers to mention his imperialist "guilt." For all his anti-imperialism, his words embody the white supremacist's ideology - that "an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie" is reflected well in his respective descriptions of the "preoccupied grandmotherly" animal he hated to shoot, and the "sea of yellow faces above…garish clothes" that "[push]" him "to and fro" like an "absurd puppet," of whom he was "very glad the coolie had been killed."

It reminds me very much of the revisionist case Chatterjee covers, where historians such as Washbrook, ostensibly attempting to "restore the 'Indianness' of this historical narrative and 'recover the subject from European history,'" (30) put forth a history that "can with such ease spirit away the violent intrusion of colonialism and make all of its features the innate property of an indigenous history." (32) Of this and Orwell, as a postcolonial subject I can't help but think, 'if you're on our side, I'd hate to see who's against us.' If we recall that imperialism is, as Chatterjee points out, predicated on the "mark[er of difference [that] is race," (19) in replicating this racist presentation with no recourse, "Shooting" technically replicates too imperialist ideology, and is thus, despite its claims, ultimately a text that testifies to the 'truth and justice' of imperialism.

(P.S. Dr Koh, a thousand - nay, million - apologies for erroneously bothering you about the readings! The corrective email had totally slipped my mind through, er, post-mid-term amnesia doubtlessly fuelled by vain hopes of not having to read another article for my presentation week… *kowtow, kowtow, grovel*)