Read Majed hamed Aladaylah’s Postcolonial Reading of a Colonial Text and write on a 1 – 2 page/s
essay your explanation on how Europeans describe or conceive the Eastern people.
Colonialism is a system of dominance that entails the enslavement of one people by another.
Colonialism is not a recent phenomena. There are several cases throughout history of one culture
steadily expanding by absorbing adjacent territory and placing its people on newly captured land.
Environmental degradation, disease spread, economic instability, ethnic conflicts, and human rights
violations are all consequences of colonialism—issues that can continue far beyond one group's
colonial power. Colonialism influenced how the world viewed Eastern people because of
the Europeans, and it had a greater detrimental impact than a favorable impact. During colonialism,
the West was full of stereotypes about the East, which perpetuated the idea of a gap between the
two. Perhaps the people of the East were unable to represent themselves to the Europeans, and as a
result took on this burden. As a result, negative and stereotype-filled depictions of the East evolved.
Because the Western worldview at the time was steeped on imperial ideology, the East was distorted
instead of being represented, sometimes consciously and sometimes unintentionally. Facts were
skewed, and the East was distorted in the eyes of the rest of the world. We, the eastern people, were
judged and misunderstood in every way, from our physical traits to our mental, psychological,
spiritual, and emotional, our whole being was misinterpreted. Europeans were shown as superior,
civilized, advanced, clever, brave, rational, and intelligent, whereas the natives were depicted as
bloodthirsty, stupid, slaves to customs, irrational, lazy, and so on. The East is portrayed as a place
where people age rapidly, and the Malays and Chinese are depicted as opulent, murderous, and
gambling aristocrats. A list of negative attributes was used to describe us, the eastern people. In one
story, a murder occurs, while in the other, a person goes missing and is later discovered dead. The
Malayan jungle is the setting for each of these catastrophes. As a result, Maugham's depiction of the
Malayan forest comes to symbolize horror, death, and savagery. And they claimed that the killings
were carried out by eastern people simply because it suited their character as thieves, gamblers, and
murderers, as they have described Non-Europeans. The colonizer saw the colonized people as socially
inferior and ranked them at the bottom of the human civilization level. To ensure that tangible
disparities between the East and the West are preserved, colonial discourse is loaded with such
negative portrayals of the colonized country. These obnoxious stereotyped pictures served to further
the imperial objective. The imperial ideology used to justify colonial control was a derogatory
representation of colonized peoples in discourse. We, the eastern people, were seen as second-class
humans, and we were trampled on because they believed we were weak and that they were superior
to us. But the unfortunate part is that the colonizers must have felt superior because we allowed
them to do so; we lacked confidence and supremacy, so even if we had the ability to fight back, we
might still lose because we lacked the will and courage to do so. The colonizers took away our rights
and freedom to know our true selves, our capabilities; they described us negatively in order to hide
our true and positive aspects; they did this so that the world would misunderstand and believe that
we were nothing but slaves; they did this so that everyone would believe that they were superior to
us; and the world would see the colonizer as the only one with positive and beautiful aspects. But we
