In an effort to create an identity for themselves within a postcolonial context, people from colonized cultures occasionally fall into bad faith. Bad faith, a notion invented by Jean-Paul Sartre, refers to a lie that one tells to oneself in an effort to hide from one's freedom, responsibility, anguish, transcendence, humanity, and sociality. Bad faith, in other words, treats the self as substance, as something fixed and without freedom or consequent responsibility. According to Sartre, because human beings always try to create themselves in relation to others, every person's existence is a project. The choice to continue living keeps each person alive. Characters such as Deven from Anita Desai's In Custody, Stevens from Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Jake from Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors define themselves by the people and dominant practices that surround them; this influence dissuades them from acting out of their own will. They live inauthentic lives because they hide from being human beings and from their ability to chose. Deven, Stevens, and Jake exhibit the "incapacity to recognize ourselves [themselves], to constitute ourselves [themselves] as being what we [they] are" (Sartre 62). As they fall prey to their inauthentic thoughts and actions, they fail to fulfill their familial and social responsibilities.
As members of colonized cultures, Deven and Jake are trapped in the past glory of their nations; they cannot in good faith transfer their nation's past glory to the present. Unlike Deven and Jake, Stevens comes from England, a colonizing power. Because he cannot abandon English custom to become his individual self, he creates himself as a colonized subject. Deven, Stevens, and Jake act in bad faith as they negotiate their cultures' heritage within a Postcolonial context; they construct masks to hide from the realities of their social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances.
Carey, Peter. Oscar and Lucinda. New York: HarperPerennial, 1988. Desai, Anita. In Custody. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors. New York: Vintage International, 1995.
Gordon, Lewis. Bad faith and Antiblack Racism. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage International, 1988.
Mo, Timothy. Sour Sweet. New York: Aventura, 1985.
Rushdie, Salman. Shame. New York: Vintage International, 1989.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
West, Cornel. Race Matters. New York: Vintage International, 1994.
