Some post-colonial versions of the pastoral (David Malouf, Australia, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tanzania, Jamal Mahjoub, Sudan, Beryl Gilroy, Guyana, J. M. Coetzee, South Africa)

David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993), Abdulrazak Gurnah's Pilgrim's Way (1988), Jamal Mahjoub's Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989), Beryl Gilroy's Boy-Sandwich, and J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) describe processes of identity reconsideration of characters who are dissatisfied with (even paralyzed by) the positions assigned to them in colonial, post-colonial, or neo-colonial societies. In their self-quests, these characters literally or metaphorically leave the "city" they are at as the novels open and move towards "nature" in a progression that evokes the pastoral structural motif of flight from the city/retreat into nature/return to the city. During their retreat, these characters question their inherited or assigned notions of self and other, home and colony, metropole and post-coloniality, and when they eventually "return to the city," they have stronger notions of self and are ready to engage in social action. As they create alternative positionalities in between the established categories, and as they embrace hybridity and nomadism, these characters defy the system of Manichean binaries that had them restricted to an awareness of otherness and to marginality.; As their characters propose cosmologies alternative to dialectical oppositions, the novels themselves favor narrative strategies that revise the imperialist underpinnings of some Western narratives. Thus, the novels test the borders between categories underlying narratives such as the story of conquest and explorations or the South African tradition of the plaasroman (farm novel) as well as literary images of the colonies as hearts of darkness or primitive paradises. Because these narratives and images are connected to a rigid, dialectical understanding of the country/city pastoral dichotomy, the novels replace it with renditions that favor the individual and the subjective, with images of urban pastorals, or with the notion of the pastoral garden as a life philosophy rather than a location. Ultimately, the intersection of the post-colonial and the pastoral yields a new, rich version of one of the oldest Western literary traditions.