Imperialism in The Waste Land
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Imperialism has an overbearing ring and an even harsher connotation in our day and age. We treasure diversity, and even more importantly, we take very seriously our responsibility to speak for the abuses, the oppressions, and the offenses of our ancestors. Where imperialism was once seen as a divine appointment, a sovereign duty for an advanced, powerful nation to spread its civilization, its culture, and its laws, today it has become a byword and an insult. An imperialist is labeled intolerant, bigoted, arrogant. And why shouldn't he be? He advocates his own beliefs, invades the spaces of others in order to impose his own systems. Imperialism, in this sense, for the most part deserves its reputation. | Imperialism has an overbearing ring and an even harsher connotation in our day and age. We treasure diversity, and even more importantly, we take very seriously our responsibility to speak for the abuses, the oppressions, and the offenses of our ancestors. Where imperialism was once seen as a divine appointment, a sovereign duty for an advanced, powerful nation to spread its civilization, its culture, and its laws, today it has become a byword and an insult. An imperialist is labeled intolerant, bigoted, arrogant. And why shouldn't he be? He advocates his own beliefs, invades the spaces of others in order to impose his own systems. Imperialism, in this sense, for the most part deserves its reputation. | ||
| − | However, The Waste Land seems to introduce and even advocate | + | However, The Waste Land seems to introduce and even advocate an odd sort of imperialism, in that Eliot finds himself pacing through the deadened landscapes of his own London, the throne rooms and ruins of Europe and the Mediterranean, and finds himself eventually seeking a land even further away, on the outskirts of the British Empire, in order to coax forth a new meaning and a new life for the blasted landscape he is faced with. Rather than trample over civilizations and institute his own, however, he draws in the culture, the words, certain fragments of this distant land in order to supplement and revitalize his own—these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Ahead of his time, Eliot takes a keen interest in finding what can be learned and gained from strangers, rather than what must be changed. |
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| + | Where the rest of the poem has been largely quite English, even in its examinations of Egypt and Greece (Eliot references very English depictions), something different emerges in "What the Thunder Said." The imagery, the mythology—all this begins to take on a very Eastern edge. Biblical references are present, but they are less recognizable as western Christianity than as the early, pre-Catholic church. The institutions of the ordered, liturgical church have yet to be seen at this point in time. While not Jewish, the depictions here are distinctly Middle Eastern in flavour. | ||
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| + | From there, the poem moves even further east, speaking of the Ganges river and the Himavant, referring to the mountains of India. Ethnic words begin to be incorporated into the texts of Shakespeare and Dante, not as something rough, uncouth, foreign, or dangerous, but as in a repetitive manner comparable to a singsong or a lullaby. This, of course, leads ultimately to shantih, shantih, shantih—a sort of ultimatum of peace. | ||
