Novel Liberation: The Humble Postcolonial Wisdom of E.M. Forster

"If I have had any influence, I would be very glad if it induced people to enjoy this wonderful world into which we're born, and of course to help others to enjoy it too."

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

“They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.”

E.M. Forster (the last quote is from A Passage to India)

The British Raj and the Indian Independence movement of the 1920s provide the setting for a poignant story between two principal characters in E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel, A Passage to India. The lives of Aziz, a Muslim doctor and Mrs. Moore, an older Englishwoman, represent themes of social constraint, in contrast with personal relationship. Constrained by title and culture, these characters manage to relate under unique circumstances. Aziz learns to respect Mrs. Moore unlike any Englishwoman he has ever known, while Mrs. Moore is, at first, captivated with the pride of knowing an endearing local closely.

Mrs. Moore, as with Miss Quested, is captivated by Aziz because he represents something of the “real India”, to use the words of Miss Quested. “Try seeing Indians” was the reply of the schoolmaster at the Government College, when Miss Quested asked how one might see their colony in its native authenticity. There is always room for remiss under the social umbrella of Indian-English relations; whether in the surprising first encounter between Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz in the mosque, or the arranged party at the tennis lawns, the tea gathering at Fielding’s or the excursion to the Marabar Caves, which, finally, proved more disastrous than any one had expected.

“May I know your name?” Aziz asks to Mrs. Moore, cautiously, in the mosque. His demeanor is one of near-desperation, as someone both protecting his native sphere, as well as struggling to see British humanity. “She was now in the shadow of the gateway, so that he could not see her face, but she saw his, and she said with a change of voice, ‘Mrs. Moore.’” This very revealing sentence emphasizes the obscurity of English presence from local, Indian eyes. In that moment, Mrs. Moore felt safe enough to share her name, the most important object of her title and superiority. Aziz remembers her generosity, as her fitful capacity to speak the truth becomes the apex of her story, truly a minor character in A Passage to India.

When after Dr. Aziz stands on trial for the assault of Miss Quested in the Marabar Caves, Mrs. Moore is decidedly frank in her stance on Aziz’s innocence. “Of course he is innocent,” says Mrs. Moore as Miss Quested begins to question her disillusioned experience on the excursion, all the while Mrs. Moore is quite fed up with India entirely. “She was by no means the dear old lady outsiders supposed, and India had brought her into the open…” writes Forster, who depicts her as a typical elder, uninhibited by the dramas of youth, and quick to speak the truth, even if it is unwanted. At this point, Mrs. Moore is on her way out of India, and the novel, where she soon dies in transit.

Regardless, Mrs. Moore is immortalized by the groundswell of Indian support for Aziz, who soon finds reprieve, as legends of “Esmiss Esmoor” soon manifest in the appearance of folk shrines in dedication to Mrs. Moore’s role in saving Aziz’s life. It is important to add that throughout the entire novel, Aziz is addressed by his first name only, while Mrs. Moore solely by her surname. Mrs. Moore’s name transforms when said by Indian voices. “It was revolting to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess,” thought Ronny, Mrs. Moore’s son, whose experience of India remained superficial, or, more accurately, guarded, throughout

Aziz and Mrs. Moore fail to truly connect in person, because English colonial formalities (and informalities) were too firmly laid beneath the foundations of imperial culture. During a scene of characteristic tension between the colonial masters and their subjects, Forster writes, “Aziz flamboyant, was patronizing Mrs. Moore.” The direct interactions between Aziz and Mrs. Moore are brief and sparse, as they are interceded by English formalities, typically mediation by a male authority – Mr. Fielding in this example. The scene, where Aziz and Mrs. Moore meet in more conventional circumstances, for a tea gathering at Mr. Fielding’s, reveals Aziz’s character (and Forster’s impeccable prose) as someone unable to speak on behalf of India. The scene also reveals the seemingly adventurous minds of Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore, on their search for the “real India” as a mere surface-level novelty.

Mrs. Moore, although agreeing to accompany Miss Quested on her excursion into the “real India” is soon overcome with the fundamental truth of her presence in the faraway land. As the excursion comes to a bitter close, it is said of Mrs. Moore, “…since her faintness in the cave she was sunk in apathy and cynicism. The wonderful India of her opening weeks, with its cool nights and acceptable hints of infinity, had vanished." While, from Aziz’s perspective, “…he agreed that all Englishwomen are haughty and venal.” Mrs. Moore is the stereotypical colonial British woman, whose curiosities for the rare and exotic life of India prove ineffectual to satisfy her experience of authentic India.

Their relationship reveals the meaning of liberation in colonial India, where Aziz’s fate becomes Mrs. Moore’s very undoing from India. For Aziz, he would come to know “…that an Englishwoman's word would always outweigh his own.” Generally, both characters speak well of each other, even if their personal, physical interactions are constrained. Conclusively, such is the larger relationship between the colonial British with India; ideal and positive on paper and second-hand experience, yet up close, absolutely ruinous.

This essay, entitled, "The Relative Liberation of India", was written for an acquaintance as part of his school curriculum. Consequently, I was reintroduced into the magnificent literary treasure troves of E.M. Forster's richly imaginative prose. 

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An expanse over the marshland floodplain. The drifting current sways gently through sap-lined pine trunks and decomposed maple leaves. Ahead, the riverbanks motion with unspeakable gratitude, bittersweet, enjoined to the drunk swell of an upraised wetlands. 

Sunset over wetlands by Julian Falat

He speaks, a guide of the ancient St. Lawrence river basin, to reinvigorate the ground with the renewing tides of Mother Earth. She beckons the swallowing of a forgotten landscape. The land is to be reclaimed. Indigenous nationhood reinstated over the American-Canadian divide. 

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Featuring a lyrical evocation from the collection, Sketches of Style and chapbook, Muse for the Wounded, Guise of the Beloved expresses thematic tides of visceral belonging amid landscapes both supernatural and inhuman in an age when the human body is more and more experienced only in its violent rending apart.

Yet, musical undertones, both electronic as acoustic, ring clear throughout, simultaneously presenting the source of human life, as our fate. In the commotion of bewildering psychic momentum, there the muse stands patient and waiting to receive the wounded, who with eyes of intoxication and skin of vulnerability, senses a way beyond and through the immense and spectacular Fear of Being.


The six poem chapbook, Muse for the Wounded, is comprised of selections from the larger collection, Sketches of Style. Here, the archetype of the wounded healer is redefined, wherein the muse becomes the healer in the mind of the poet-seer. The one poem, Guise of the Beloved is also featured as a sounding the artful designs of a musical elaboration on the Sketches of Style album

A Muse for the Wounded

Liberation in the Unconscious Embodiment of the Archetype

“The last dream of that series, I can not tell you all the dreams, was that I was out in nature, I stood in a field of wheat. An enormous field of wheat, that was ripe for harvest. I was a child and I held her in my arm like a baby. The wind was blowing over that field of wheat, now you know when the wind is blowing over a wheat field those waves over the wheat field, and with these waves I swayed like that, putting her as if were to sleep. She felt as being in the arms of a god, of the Godhead. I thought, now, the harvest is ripe. I must tell her. I told her, you see, what you want and what you project into me because you are not conscious of it, you have the idea of a deity you don’t possess, therefore you see it in me. That clicked…It was a hedonist god, it was a god of nature, of vegetation, he was the wheat himself, the spirit of the wheat, the spirit of the wind. She was in the arms of that numen. That is the living experience of an archetype…instantly it clicked…it is as the dream says, she is in the arms of that archetypal idea. Now that is a numinous experience and that is the thing that people are looking for, an archetypal experience that gives them an incorruptible value. They depend on other conditions, their desires, their ambitions, they depend on other people because they have no value in themselves, they are only rational, they are not in possession of a treasure that would make them independent…that is a sort of liberation.”   

- C.G. Jung, from "Matter of Heart" 

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"What primitive African stirring is this? What crowd of blundering hippos gawking and feeling for life in this mildew maw parade!" 

"No, this is a wisdom gathering, a hapless ruse, to stun the oceans in a violent gaze of electric natural law. This is a spectral breeding ground for the insane and loose, those wilderness souls born of less indication about human truth than one would suspect from a life lived in the rut. Theirs is a tribal howl, a martyr’s plea, scintillating rasps into the smoked down calling of witchcraft and group camaraderie through spirit, through visceral tongues." 

I am drowned in a haze of strident intensity, pulsating with every leap from the vibrating mud. The trickster’s love emanates with personified blood from the livid sky teething for human thought and supernal desire in this mundane autochthona of self-engendered lust, detoxified in a laughing rite with the living dream of mystery, hatching from this circle of African might. Their clothes, wooly, with animal fear still stretched in the discolored hair. Their homes, perfect and ingenious with seamless appropriation from this their exploited grounds, invoked to newborn life again in their visible joy, communal through and through.

I escape along the brush torn paths, bitten with stings of lightning and the swatting touch of snakeskin and the feline tail, scattering an infinitesimal infinitude of insects grouping. The countryside folds past over the close horizon, a dense lush grows as by sight. A beast moves, unknown. Feathers, white and tall scatter in the noiseless round. I can sense auspicial animation as the forest glows and rumbles ever slightly. The bird is infamous for its glaring foresight, its strength and unearthly demeanor is its hallmark to fruition in surviving this drunken dreaming landscape of danger without forewarning. I follow the animal beyond the gates of our natural boundary, or has it followed me? Can we both be following? There is no end. 

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Africa

"To dream that you are in Africa surrounded by Cannibals, foretells that you will be oppressed by enemies and quarrelsome persons." (iDream)

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Branded with the seal of history.
Final and rushed.

“Oh, this is dramaturgy for the sentimental boorish audience of the mob,
who critique and pander with total, serious divorce from the actuality of the place
an energy, which creates law from reason and implements cost
with soul in the spiritual night of the living ghosts.

Do we haunt you?”

“You are my foreboding reminder
behind the veil that shivers with end of day
returning only for the antipodal colour
resembling rust,
yet focused in bottom-up vines that reach to an endogenous planet.

It is leaving earth. We are going with it.”

- excerpt from "Brimming with Dissatisfaction"