A Mercy: Florens’ Appropriation and Abrogation of Language

Abstract

From its very beginning, colonialism, i.e. “the state of being a colony” (Pope: 141), has shaped the lives of the oppressed and has had to do with the destruction of these people’s culture and the elevation of the language of the colonizer. These enslaved and conquered people have produced a vast variety of literature in order to oppose the Empire whose main objective has been to impose their own language and suppress the native language of the colonized. Literature is one of the main means through which these marginalized people have expressed their realities, their feelings and their experience of colonialism. As Ashcroft claims (2002:2) “what each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre.” These literatures have all sought their natural identity. They are known as post-colonial literatures and their main focus has been to assert what Ashcroft (2002:4) considers “difference from the imperial centre.”