By choosing to write about an interracial relationship in colonial Africa, Anna tries to offer the reader something they would not have otherwise considered. She explains her fears of growing social isolation and political divisiveness, but she hopes that fiction and art can be of some use in creating unity. Anna, pg.57Īnna is talking about her novel Frontiers of War here. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. ![]() The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. This ability to be a keen observer and notice tensions and contradictions in political movements foreshadows the challenges Anna will face in the Communist Party. Anna is able to stand outside of the colonialist ideologies and see what is flawed about them. The tensions in the African colony are such that no one is willing to give weapons to the Africans. However, they are now going to fight Hitler's armies on the grounds that the ideology of a superior race is wrong. White British colonists in Africa assume that they are a superior race, and they use this assumption as justification for exploiting and dominating the Black Africans. This quote appears in the black notebook and reveals Anna's shrewd observations on colonial politics and the inherent absurdities of war. It was decided, quite rightly, that it was not safe. Right through the war, the correspondence columns of the papers were crammed with arguments about whether it was safe to put so much as a pop-gun into the hands of any African soldier since he was likely to turn it against his white masters, or to use this useful knowledge later. ![]() They enjoyed the sight of the white baases so eager to go off and fight on any available battle-front against a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil-those Africans with any education at all. Anna is upset when she finds out that Tommy has been reading her notebooks because he gets the chance to observe her constructing and editing her impressions rather than simply writing freely. However, in this quote, Tommy hits on Anna's deep fear that she is never really writing authentically, and that her fear of vulnerability is holding her back. ![]() Anna often tries to maintain a detached and analytical position, believing that this serves her as an artist and thinker. This may be because Anna knows that what Tommy says to her is true. He makes Anna afraid, tense, and anxious. Tommy, Molly's son, plays the role of Anna's critic when he accuses her of being unwilling to reveal her true identity in her writing. You are afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone. Yes I know that sounds funny, for you, because of course you choose to be alone rather than to get married for the sake of not being lonely. The quote also shows how, initially, Anna has an optimistic view of the relationship between language and experience: she believes that changing the way she feels about words can change the way she sees herself. This quote shows Anna choosing to reject shame and actively be proud of her unconventional life. The reference to Mother Sugar implies that the two women wrestle with emotional responses such as shame or guilt in relation to their personal choices to live unconventional lives. They know that many of the ways in which they live their lives, such as being single mothers and having affairs with married men, are considered taboo by wider society. 9ĭespite Anna and Molly seemingly enjoying being free women, they acknowledge that states of being insecure and unrooted typically have negative connotations. But Anna had recently been learning to use these words in a different way, not as something to be apologised for but, but as flags or banners for an attitude that amounted to a different philosophy. ![]() That they were both "insecure" and "unrooted," words which dated from the era of Mother Sugar, they both freely acknowledged.
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