ENGL 4310

I have so many ideas about postcolonialism which I find contradict each other at times and I can not seem to understand fully what the whole deal is. There are so, many complex arguments about postcolonialism that no matter how many times I form an opinion, there is something else out there that defeats it. With that in mind I tried to read "Flowering Judas" keeping what I know about postcolonialism in my mind, and after our discussions about postcolonialism I read the following passage from "Flowering Judas" a couple of times:

Some day this world, now seemingly so composed and eternal, to the edges of every sea shall be merely a tangle of gaping trenches, of crashing walls and broken bodies. Everything must be torn from its accustomed place where it has rotted for centuries, hurled skyward and distributed, cast down again clean as rain, without separate identity.

What I found particularly interesting was the last three words, "without separate identity." What I find so interesting about postcolonialism is while it serves an important purpose in helping us to understand not to "other" people, it also creates a problem in my mind. While I agree that literature should not be defined with the assumption that all people would agree, I can't understand why there is an insistence on being so separate in our identity. What if I said,"I am a white middle class female and insist on being treated like I am"? I guess in certain situations I would insist on being seen as what I am, but I don't want to be shoved into the same group as everyone else. On the other hand I sometimes want to be seen as something more than my identifying group or nationality of something. It seems so important but only on the surface. I mean, I guess it is easy for me to say this in my position as a "colonizer." And this may not make any sense whatsoever and I apologize for that. I'm not saying postcolonialism is wrong, in fact I completely understand why some issues are brought up in this theory.

I feel like Porter takes the above passage as an opportunity to explain how "separate identities" of people are less important than the whole of our existence as a community. Of course, I am an individual and no doubt want to be treated as such. Literature should be defined with diversity in mind, but diversity should not be defined by one group.