Post-Colonial Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s All Summer in One Day
While ‘All Summer in One Day’ does not fit the conventional historic nature of postcolonial literature -being science fiction- Ray Bradbury’s story can be viewed as an allegory of the true experiences of colonialism.
“ Diaspora refers to people who have been displaced or dispersed from their homelands, and who possess and share a collective memory and myth, and the nostalgic reminiscence of ‘home’”.
Mambrol
Margot alone “remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio” (2). The effects of displacement were physically and mentally profound for her; “[s]he was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years” (2).
Migrants like Margot “often struggle to be accepted in their new homes as cultural differences and economic competition are perceived as a threat by local residents” (Campbell, MacKinnon, & Stevens, 2010, p.63). Margot was a cultural outcast to the Venus-native children; she didn’t sing most of their songs, and she didn’t join in their games; “[i]f they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow” (2).
On top of this, “[t]here was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year”, a move that would cost “thousands of dollars” (2). At night, the other kids stirred as they dreamt of the beautiful sun, but that’s where it ended for them; “they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof,[…] and their dreams were gone”(1). But for Margot, it was more than a dream.
“dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different
(2)
and they knew her difference and kept
away”
Her privilege and her difference caused her to be perceived as other. ‘Othering’ is a term created by Gayatri Spivak to discuss “discursive and other processes used by the colonizers to create and sustain the negative and inferior views and assumptions about the colonized natives”.
In this video, Dr. Masood Raja explains how colonizers stabilize their own identity by establishing the inferiority of the ‘other’ and comparing it to themselves. The kids in the Venus colony used this process to mask the true pain and longing they felt towards the Earth by villainizing the girl who was born there.
The term ‘colonizer’ does not come with a good connotation. It is always shadowed by pain, suffering, destruction and cruelty. In Earth’s history, the victims have always been the colonized people. But what happens when humans colonize a blank slate like a planet? Who bears the brunt of suffering? Ray Bradbury hints in this story that the children may be the ones to pay the price for the sake of colonizing new worlds…
A Jillian Ideas 