Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English

Embracing the Other Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

95 ASNEL Papers 11

Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

ASNEL Papers appear under the auspices of the Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen e.V. (GNEL) Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (ASNEL) Frank Schulze–Engler, President (English Department, J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main) Formatting, layout, and final editing: Gordon Collier

Embracing the Other Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English ASNEL Papers 11

Edited by

Dunja M. Mohr

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2377-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

ix

EMBRACING THE OTHER: AN INTRODUCTION

POETRY SUSAN N. KIGULI

One Wing; Home Floats in the Distance; Floating My Presence; Stories Retold THEORY, WRITING HISTORY,

3 AND

TEXTUALITY

EDWIN THUMBOO

Conditions of Cross-Cultural Perceptions: The Other Looks Back

11

JUDITH DELL PANNY

Benign Xenophobia? The Testimony of Maori Literature

37

RUSSELL WEST–PAVLOV

‘Daft Questions’: Xenophobia, Teaching, and Social Semiosis in Caribbean–British Fiction: Using Intertextuality and Narratology to Analyze a Text by David Dabydeen MIGRANT

AND

49

BORDER NARRATIVES

MALA PANDURANG

How Brave Is Our New World?

63

DANILO VICTORINO MANARPAAC

Desire and Loathing in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido Santos’s The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor

71

VERA ALEXANDER

“Worlds of Disenchantment”: Alienation and Change in Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments

83

DIPLI SAIKIA

Writing From the Border, Doing Away With Margins: Carl Muller’s Sri Lankan Burgher Narrative

97

VIRGINIA RICHTER

113

The Civilized Ape TRANSITIONAL STATES MARTIN GENETSCH

Race and Racism in Contemporary Canadian Fiction: M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land

127

JOCHEN PETZOLD

White Angst in South Africa: The Apocalyptic Visions of John Conyngham

141

NATIVIDAD MARTÍNEZ MARÍN

Nadine Gordimer’s Later Novels: Or, The Fiction of Otherness

153

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY

AND

ALTERITY

MARY E. MODUPE KOLAWOLE

Multicultural Strategies and Alterity: Transgressing the Other in Contemporary Nigerian Women’s Short Stories

169

RAIHANAH M.M.

The Other Within: The Malaysian Experience

193

JÖRG HEINKE

The Resistance to Being (Em)Braced: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and David Malouf’s Johnno

205

SANDHYA PATEL

The Difficulty of Being: Reading and Speaking in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

227

LAURENZ VOLKMANN

The Quest for Identity in Benjamin Zephaniah’s Poetry DIASPORA

AND

245

ORIENTALISM

DAVID S. LA BRECHE

Stereotype, Prejudice, and Illusion in the Austral-Asian Otherworld

267

SISSY HELFF

Desired Exotica: Gendered Spaces in Queer West Indian Diasporic Fiction

279

CANADIAN

AND

SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE

GINNY RATSOY

Dramatizing Alterity: Relational Characterization in Postcolonial British Columbia Plays

295

HENNING SCHÄFER

Disappointing Expectations: Native Canadian Theatre and the Politics of Authenticity

307

HAIKE FRANK

Embracing Oneself and the Other: Overcoming Racial Hatred in South African Drama

327

NOTES

337

ON

CONTRIBUTORS

E MBRACING THE O THER A N I NTRODUCTION

All the people like us are We, And every one else is They. And They live over the sea, While We live over the way, But – would you believe it? – They look upon We As only a sort of They! […] All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They: But if you cross over the sea, Instead of over the way, You may end by (think of it!) looking on We As only a sort of They!1 Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale! It’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person […] on the globe.2

L

I K E P A C K A G I N G , it is the title of a book or article that we first look at; both a lavish and a drab and careless wrapping give a first impression and trigger certain expectations. Neither necessarily delivers what it seems to promise. What, then, do we associate with the ambiguous phrase ‘embracing the Other’ – which, by extension, might be read as

1

Rudyard Kipling, “We and They,” in Kipling, Debits and Credits (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1926): 277–80. 2 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001): 236.

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xenophilia – and with ‘xenophobia’?3 Initially, ‘embracing the Other’ evokes a benevolent image of recognition and acceptance in terms of equality and is associated with a discourse of mutual openness. An embrace is conventionally interpreted as a positive act of good intentions that draws people together. But an embrace is neither necessarily and always welcome; nor is it automatically honest or true. We need only to ask ourselves what motivates Kurtz’s embrace of the Other in Joseph Conrad’s pivotal colonial text, Heart of Darkness? An embrace might be given or offered to stifle, to suppress, to immobilize; it might deny a history of exclusion and inclusion; it might be given to a chosen Other in order to exclude yet another. In its most extreme version, an embrace may become what, with reference to Freud’s primal horde in Totem and Taboo, Angelika Bammer quite aptly calls “the extreme gesture of xenophilia: the devouring embrace that takes the other in until there is nothing left of ‘them’ but us.”4 In addition, to ‘embrace the Other’ deflects the focus of attention from the seemingly absent, yet integrated and acting Self to the thus stressed presence of the apparently passive and isolated Other. It is therefore also an act of power potentially perpetuating the system of binary logic, of us/them, Self/ Other, inclusion / exclusion. Simultaneously, it is neverthe3 ‘Xenophobia’ comes from the Greek words xénos ‘fear’ and phóbos ‘stranger’ or ‘guest’. Interestingly, the second connotation, ‘guest’, has lost its validity. Xenophobia is translated as ‘fear of strangers’. From a cultural anthropologist’s vantage, Michael Banton explains the distinction between xenophobia and racism as follows: “Racism can then be the name for that dimension by which persons assigned to another group are kept at a distance because they are considered racially inferior. Xenophobia can designate the way that others are kept at a distance because they are considered different”; Banton, “The Cultural determinants of Xenophobia,” Anthropology Today 12.2 (1996): 8. Racism implies hostility and extreme hatred, presupposing the superiority of the Self over the Other, whereas xenophobia is chiefly associated with fear of the Other – often fear of the Other within the Self. “Xenophobia is thus the pathological condition that arises when the self is unable to cope with otherness and is destructive of both self and other […] the internal other becomes associated with the external other […] xenophobia can be understood as akin to the logic of reification, by which the other is a fetish for the self”; Gerard Delanty, “Theoretical Considerations on Xenophobia: Cultural Violence, Nationalism and Everyday Life,” Discussion Paper, Workshop “Racism and Xenophobia: Key Issues, Mechanisms and Policy Opportunities,” European Commission, 5–6 April 2001. Also available online, [accessed 7 February 2007]. See also Chapter 7, “The new radical nationalism: globalization, xenophobia and cultural violence,” of Gerard Delanty & Patrick O’Mahony, Nationalism and Social Theory: Modernity and the Recalcitrance of the Nation (London: Sage, 2002): 142–68. For a thorough discussion of the history of Western racism, see George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2002). 4 Angelika Bammer, “Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and No Place to Rest,” in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, ed. Gisela Brinkler–Gabler (Albany: State U of New York P , 1995): 47.

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Introduction

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less the Self that speaks the discourse of the Other, defining who is perceived as the Other. In reality, the very phrase ‘embracing the Other’, then, does not tell us anything about the terms on which the embrace is given (presumably the Self initiates it) or how it is received. Is the embrace an invited one? Is it welcome? Does the Other return the embrace? Who in fact is this apparently homogeneous Other? Surely, otherness is also a matter of various differences. From the point of view of the Other, when the Other indeed ‘looks back’, the tables are turned and the Self becomes the Other. As Edwin Thumboo reminds us, there is a certain (often unacknowledged or suppressed) aspect of interdependence between Self and Other: “we are both Self and Other, depending on who constructs and manages the equation, who does the inspecting, and who is the inspected.”5 Sometimes it is also crucial to resist an embrace and keep a distance. At the same time, on a larger, societal scale, the very phrase denotes and identifies an Other within a relational cultural system who requires integration because of his /her difference(s). In a nutshell, this volume’s title serves as a reminder of the habitual academic focus on the silenced Other while the presence (or in this case the grammatical absence) of the articulate Self is not a matter of debate. In a way, the ambivalence of “Embracing the Other” thus recalls what Mahasveta Devi – the prolific Bengali author and activist known for her unsentimental life stories written in a rather factual style – exemplifies in her famous and so disturbingly drastic short story “Draupadi,” published in Bengali in 1978 and in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation in Critical Inquiry in 1981.6 Although English as the contemporary lingua franca enables us/them to communicate, to read and write, it is also important not to forget the traces of linguistic/ cultural, hence hermeneutical differences contained in any translation. Significantly, Spivak’s translation from the Bengali and tribal dialect into a sometimes jarring English – despite her claim to have used “straight English” with only a few preparatory “items of information”7 – does not gloss over its mediative function as a translated text, “startl[ing] the reader into an awareness that there are words and worlds beyond the English

5

Edwin Thumboo, “Conditions of Cross-Cultural Perceptions: The Other Looks Back,” below, 15. 6 As the social impetus of Devi’s literary work is her activist engagement in India, an important theme of her work is the position and advancement of tribal communities, the “suffering spectators of the India that is traveling towards the twenty first century”; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Author In Conversation,” in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps, tr. & intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995): xi. 7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasweta Devi,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987): 186.

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translation,” as Susan Chacko observes.8 For English-language readers and critics, Devi’s short story thus comes packaged as a linguistically and culturally marked textual Other, unlike, for instance, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, written in an English in which Indian imagery, metaphors, and language feature less prominently.9 In “Draupadi,” Senanayak, an Indian army officer and intellectual subaltern, participates in the subjugation of the story’s female protagonist, Draupadi Mejhen – a Bengali / Santal tribal woman and rebel involved in the Naxalites’ struggle for an agrarian reform in the 1960s – whom he has taken prisoner in the ‘Operation Forest Jharkhani’. Theoretically, Senanayak indeed sympathizes with the tribal guerrillas. As the twisted logic of his watchword “In order to destroy the enemy, become one”10 illustrates, his embrace is an instance of the ‘devouring embrace’ that conflates xenophobia and xenophilia. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Senanayak pretends to embrace the Other, yet only to “(theoretically) becom[e] one of them” (D). Quite logically, his identification with the enemy proves a false one. Caught in a double bind of embracing and rejecting both the Self and the Other, he despises the rebels, who threaten his legitimization and authority, while he prides himself in having successfully internalized their way of thinking – yet only to annihilate them and, consequently, a version of himself.11 In the last analysis, his approximations of the Other remain hypothetical, as Senanayak cannot truly be empathetic with or understand what he can only theoretically have access to – no matter how much he “change[s] color from world to world” (D) – “‘They’ is […] a hypothesis”; unsurprisingly, “the answer is silence” (D). As Bammer notes, Senanayak is “less evil than ill […] suffering from the peculiar illness that Renato Rosaldo has diagnosed as ‘imperialist nostalgia’: the desire to have back that (or those) one has participated in destroying.”12 8 Susan Chacko, “Outcasts and Oppression,” Parabaas Translation Website, http://www .parabaas.com/translation/database/reviews/brOutcaste.html [accessed 10 July 2007]. 9 Cf. also Sandhya Patel, “The Difficulty of Being: Reading and Speaking in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” below, 227–43. 10 Mahasveta Devi, “Draupadi,” tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Muse India: The Literary E-Journal 4 (2005): online. http://www.museindia.com/showcont.asp?id=113 [accessed 15 July 2007]. All subsequent quotes from the short story will be given in parentheses in the main text, using the abbreviation D. As I used the online version, no pagination is given. 11 Conversely, Draupadi has learned to deny her own Self, her identity, “Dopdi! She doesn’t respond. She never responds when she hears her own name,” and not to identify others, “I won’t tell anyone’s name” (D). This linguistic self-annihilation foreshadows Senanayak’s cruel order to the soldiers subjecting her to mutilation and collective rape. 12 Bammer, “Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and No Place to Rest,” 47. Bammer is referring here to Chapter Three, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” of Renato Rosaldo’s Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston M A : Beacon, 1989).

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Notably, Senanayak’s (like Prospero’s) power lies in language. When he questions Draupadi, “no one touched her” as he stages a ‘civilized’ interogation, during which Draupadi is “allowed to sit on a canvas campstool” (D). As he leaves for dinner, he sanctions “to make her do the needful” (D), leaving the very practice of humiliating, degrading, and violating Draupadi, or ‘Dopdi’ in dialect, to his subordinates, who subject her to brutal sexual abuse: In the muddy moonlight she lowers her lightless eye, sees her breasts, and understands that, indeed, she’s been made up right. Her breasts are bitten raw, the nipples torn. How many? Four–five-six–seven [...] Again the process of making her begins. Goes on. The moon vomits a bit of light and goes to sleep. Only the dark remains. A compelled spreadeagled still body. Active pistons of flesh rise and fall, rise and fall over it. (D)

It is precisely this collision between theory and practice that Spivak charges First-World intellectuals or readers with, as she sees them/us as Senanayak’s allegorical Wiedergänger: accomplices of colonialism/imperialism and the First World’s continuing domination of the Third-World (subject).13 Like Senanayak, First-World scholars claim to theoretically ‘know’ the subaltern female, while blending out her reality. For Spivak, the “pluralist aesthete”14 Senanayak, who has an inclination for Western classical culture,15 captures this cruel dilemma of (theoretical) sameness and (functional) difference(s): “Whatever his practice, in theory he respects the opposition” (D). Consequently, Spivak also recognizes herself in Senanayak: “indeed, as I look in the glass – it is Senanayak […] that I behold.”16 This is the dilemma that the present volume – after all, it might “not be able to speak to the women out there,”17 as Spivak cautions in her translator’s foreword – also faces and addresses by studying and theorizing issues of xenophobia and xenophilia in the New Literatures in English. Without intending to make the Other into a mere object of study, and despite all efforts to embrace and respect ‘differences’ and alterity, we (those who work within the Western academy) are still 13

Cf. “in Senanayak I find the closest approximation to the First-World scholar in search of the Third-World” (Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’,” 179). 14 Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasweta Devi,” 179. 15 Cf. “He is like Prospero as well” (D). 16 Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’,” 179. In fact, as Chacko remarks, Spivak herself is not free of falling into this booby trap: “Spivak […] features as prominently in the book [Devi’s Breast Stories] as Devi herself. Each story is accompanied by an analysis of almost equivalent length, described variously as a foreword, analysis, or notes. Their sheer volume makes them impossible to ignore – the deconstruction of the story ‘Breast-Giver’ is, in fact, twice as long as the story itself.” See Chacko, “Outcasts and Oppression,” online. 17 Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’,” 179.

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accomplices in a kind of appropriating systemic violence and need to reflect on our location and situated positionality.18 Time and again, ‘embracing the Other’ turns out to be a Janus-faced notion. In the concluding scene, the abject Draupadi confronts Senanayak with the final truth of her stripped body, “Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds” (D). Standing literally naked before the enemy, her exhibitionistic act is one of defiant resistance to her victimization.19 She confronts Senanayak, us, with the reality of practice – her violated body, claiming subjectivity and humanity, and forcing him to acknowledge what he refused to witness but ordered to be obliterated: What is this? He is about to bark. Draupadi comes closer. Stands with her hand on her hip, laughs and says, The object of your search, Dopdi Mejhen. You asked them to make me up, don’t you want to see how they made me? (D).

Indeed, it is Draupadi who symbolically “counters” her tormentor(s). Exposing her abused and mutilated body, she turns her corporeality and femininity into a powerful weapon by refusing to cover herself – to conceal or erase the signs her body bears; denying his/their masculinity by stepping out of a shared sign system, she thus silences him/them: What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me – come on, counter me – ? (D)20 18

Additionally, as Fredric Jameson has cautioned, we critics might unknowingly be viewing only our own eyeball in the lens of the microscope, inspecting our unconscious self-reflection in the very object of our analyses; cf.. Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1972): 206–207. 19 Here, Devi most obviously aligns the modern heroine Draupadi with her mythical namesake, the princess / Goddess Draupadi of the Mahābhārata, who is protected by the God Krishna when she is threatened with Cheer-Haran, the shameful disrobing of her clothes. Both female characters, the modern and the ancient Draupadi, fight bravely against injustice and challenge the patriarchal claim over their bodies. In Devi’s rendering of the old tale, the symbolic rape turns into an actual violation. For a feminist reading of the mythical princess Draupadi and the tribal woman Dopdi, see Ranjana Khanna, “In Search of a Voice for Dopdi / Draupadi: Writing the Other Woman’s Story Out of the ‘Dark Continent’,” in Women’s Lives / Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography, ed. Trev Lynn Broughton & Linda Anderson (New York: State U of New York P , 1997): 103–20; esp. 109–15. 20 In her foreword, Spivak explains that to “counter” means “to be killed by the police in an encounter.” For a concise analysis of the narrative use of exhibitionism in Devi’s

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Like the naked truth of her exhibitionism, her excessive, “indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand” (D) ruptures the Law of the Father, deriding the colonial / male economy and the phallo(go)centrism that she as the subaltern Other has just experienced in its ugliest form. With the final image of Draupadi “push[ing] Senanayak with her two mangled breasts” (D), Devi accurately captures the blending of xenophobia and xenophilia, the “fear of and desire for the other – between the impulse to destroy and the counterimpulse to embrace.”21 In Spivak’s words, this symbolizes “the menacing appeal of the objectified subject to its politico-sexual enemy – the provisionally silenced master of the subject-object dialectic – to encounter – ‘counter’ – her.”22 This is why Senanayak “is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid” (D), because, although he continues to refuse to acknowledge Draupadi’s subject status, her ravaged physicality punctures his illusory disassociation of theory from practice and “refus[es] the ‘cover-up’ of language.”23 In Devi’s story, it is the abject Other that looks back and rejects the Self’s framework of hierarchical definitions; instead, she questions Senanayak’s patriarchal/ colonial position, exposing it/him as empty (“Are you a man?”). It is this sheer (female) materiality that the intellectual Senanayak cannot comprehend, let alone embrace. Yet it is also her “mutilated body [that] is the price of attaining a new sign, I/i.”24 As Devi’s short story illustrates, the power-relations of Self and Other are enmeshed in irreducible differences. It seems that we cannot escape the processes of othering, just as we cannot and should not do away with differences, because “we cannot think without them.”25 The sign, after all, derives its meaning from what it is not, its difference. The danger is inherent in prioritizing one term as the norm, as the measure of the O/other, as this very “aura of naturalness, ordinariness […] that seems to emanate from any opposition is part of its anaesthetic effect.”26 What we eventually need to embrace, then, is not only the Other but also the gradational slippage of both the Self and the

Draupadi version of the Mahābhārata, see Liz Wilson, “‘There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed’: Resistance to Indian cultural conventions regarding female nudity,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 6.3 (2000): 138–49. 21 Bammer, “Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and No Place to Rest,” 48. 22 Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’,” 186. 23 Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 229. 24 Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, 229. 25 Robyn Ferrell, “Xenophobia: At the Border of Philosophy and Literature,” in On Literary Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Freadman & Lloyd Reinhardt (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991): 143. 26 Ferrell, “Xenophobia: At the Border of Philosophy and Literature,” 144.

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Other, of identity and difference(s), as the contributions to this volume demonstrate. As James Clifford has argued, identity is always relational, and always fictive or “inventive,”27 and the necessary destabilization of (provisional) identities in a transcultural age approaching “new orders of difference”28 in effect dissolves the seemingly clear-cut boundaries between Self and Other. Along the same lines and reiterating Edward Said’s ironic statement about exclusivism operating in cross-cultural contact,29 Spivak also flatly refuses any position of identity and emphasizes our need for irreducible difference(s) in order to produce knowledge and any approximation of understanding: The position that only the subaltern can know the subaltern, only women can know women and so on, cannot be held as a theoretical presupposition either, for it predicates the possibility of knowledge on identity. Whatever the political necessity for holding the position, and whatever the advisability of attempting to ‘identify’ (with) the other as subject in order to know her, knowledge is made possible and is sustained by irreducible difference, not identity.30

As much as it is psychologically fundamental to define the Self in terms of the Other, we need to keep in mind that, paradoxically, the Self is the Other. To paraphrase the quotation from Kipling’s satirical poem “We and They” with which I began, ‘embracing the Other may end by (think of it!) embracing the Self as only a sort of Other’ – and vice versa.

WORKS CITED Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Bammer, Angelika. “Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and No Place to Rest,” in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, ed. Gisela Brinkler–Gabler (Albany: State U of New York P , 1995): 45–62.

27

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988): 10. 28 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 15. 29 Cf. “A double kind of possessive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding outsider by virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature), and second, being an excluding insider by virtue of method (only Marxists, anti-Orientalists, feminists can write about economics, Orientalism, women’s literature).” Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 106. 30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text From the Third World,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics (New York & London: Routledge, 1988): 253–54.

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Introduction

Banton, Michael.“The cultural determinants of xenophobia,” Anthropology Today 12.2 (1996): 8–12. Chacko, Susan. “Outcasts and Oppression,” Parabaas Translation Website, http://www .parabaas.com/translation/database/reviews/brOutcaste.html [accessed 10 July 2007]. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). Delanty, Gerard.“Theoretical Considerations on Xenophobia: Cultural Violence, Nationalism and Everyday Life,” Discussion Paper, Workshop “Racism and Xenophobia: Key Issues, Mechanisms and Policy Opportunities,” European Commission, 5–6 April 2001. online, [accessed 7 February 2007]. Delanty, Gerard & Patrick O’Mahony. Nationalism and Social Theory: Modernity and the Recalcitrance of the Nation (London: Sage, 2002). Devi, Mahasveta. “Draupadi,” tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Muse India: The Literary E-Journal 4 (2005): online. http://www.museindia.com/showcont.asp?id =113 [accessed 15 July 2007]. Ferrell, Robyn. “Xenophobia: At the Border of Philosophy and Literature,” in On Literary Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Freadman & Lloyd Reinhardt (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991): 142–61. Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2002). Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1972). Khanna, Ranjana. “In Search of a Voice for Dopdi/Draupadi: Writing the Other Woman’s Story Out of the ‘Dark Continent’,” in Women’s Lives / Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography, ed. Trev Lynn Broughton & Linda Anderson (New York: State U of New York P , 1997): 103–20. Kipling, Rudyard. “We and They,” in Kipling, Debits and Credits (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1926): 277–80. Said, Edward W. “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 89–107. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth (2000; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Author In Conversation,” in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps, tr. & intro. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995): ix–xxiii. ——. “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasweta Devi,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987): 179–87. ——. “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text From the Third World,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 241–68. Wilson, Liz. “‘There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed’: Resistance to Indian cultural conventions regarding female nudity,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 6.3 (2000): 138–49.

«•»

P OETRY «•»

S USAN N. K IGULI

One Wing These voices that will not speak Make me wish a peak Into being so I can stand On the apex drawing out a land Where sound leaps off other sound Making individuality abound Creating a sense of belonging Which generates no longing For a place where tongues roll And cast the same poll. I wish to be different and free To laugh, be counted and see What wealth diverse feathers bring To be looped together as one wing.

4

Home Floats in the Distance For my sister Elinettie Chabwera

This Child steers the moon, Leaning back It becomes the sail Of dreams unfolding During day and night In territories not home. She is the alien Whose smile opens like The dawning sun Though the sun, here, is much more Spoken about than seen. This child rides the moon, Leaning back It becomes the bow From which sharpened Arrows shoot Into a world surprised by Strangers. Strangers, here, are spoken about Hardly touched. This child pedals the moon, Bending over Her eyes watch the finishing line. She becomes a parachute With voices flapping around. Her feet move soundlessly. She is here. None wants to know; Some knew but have forgotten. Her feet move wordlessly

S U S A N N. K I G U L I

¸

·

Poetry

Not perceiving how to behave. At home she lived with familiar practices. She exists here with a mouth as dry as sisal. At home she understood what to say A whole range of sayings to choose from. This child races the moon Realising colours have changed. Time has exchanged hands. The fold lies empty Even trucks which carried Empty faces to work are bare. No work anymore, Only vacant faces remain Hugging nothing. This child longs to sit home Taking life From wisdom of self.

5

6

Floating My Presence My name writes a vagueness in your mind A blob which pulsates and moves life Yet it eludes you An x-ray image out of reach. I am the blob The floating illusion on your mind Causing you spasms of Anxiety as you pull your Coat closer to leave me space. I do not need space. My soul spreads over many lands I am a conjugation of many skies I fly within the lather of the nimbus clouds And wrestle with the wool of the cumulo-nimbus. I am woven in accents Booming for freedom And will not root in one spot I have no claim to land Geographically fixed In blood and delirium

S U S A N N. K I G U L I

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Poetry

Stories Retold Someone will rewrite our life And interpret the bare huts We built to shelter our bones. Someone will pin together Our suffering telling Clever narratives about Why we bore and brought up These children giving them The stories of our survival. Someone will chant about Why our homesteads were Round like craters Why we were knit Together like the blankets Which keep our blood from Congealing. This life we have lived in earnest Will be twisted into gothic tales. These children we share Will be numbered and separated. Strangers will strive to understand These souls melted into each other, And my sister, Our life will stop meaning What it has meant to us Who have fought for sanity Who have combed for roots To charm hunger Who have hidden in jungles To evade the crash of boots.

7

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Our breath will become Someone else’s story And it will never be restored to us. It will scamper away To create other lives In distant places.

«•»

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T HEORY , W RITING H ISTORY ,

AND

T EXTUALITY «•»

Conditions of Cross-Cultural Perceptions The Other Looks Back1

E DWIN T HUMBOO

1.

W

– whether a national entity or a little village – engages another, an equation of contact is created: we have I/ Self and You / Other. Behind either one is nothing less than their total horizontal (their public, more open) and vertical (their personal, more inward) life. Whether macro / micro, equal/unequal, fraternal / antagonistic, superficial / deep or subtle/ blunt, that contact is shaped, managed, and constantly negotiated on various levels, according to the contesting interests and power of each side. As a literary term, the circumstances of Other applications are generally cross-cultural, colonial to ex-colonial, their continua and subsequent incarnations. Almost inevitably, there are nuances of inequalities, and one-sided understandings, compulsions, urges, preferences, and judgments. These reflect a fundamental difference that defines the Self as content, thus making it a word,2 a metonym for national identity, sustaining

1

HEN ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE

I wish to express my gratitude to Heinz Antor, president of the Association for the Study of New Literatures in English (A S N E L ), and Fritz–Wilhelm Neumann of Erfurt University, the organizer of the A S N E L conference, for the opportunity to test some of my ideas in this essay. I would also like to thank the National University of Singapore for granting leave on this and other occasions, and Dudley de Souza, Tan Bee Kee, Carolyn Chiam, and Maureen Oliveiro for their help. 2 On the micro-level, it – namely, the Self – refers to the values, traditions, and other inheritances and the institutions through which they work, and that sum up the total life of a society, country or nation. See Edwin Thumboo, “Self-Images: Contexts for Transformations,” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu & Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989): 749–68.

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the ‘us’ and ‘we’, as distinguished from ‘them’ and ‘they’, respectively subject and object; put another way, it is a difference between locations that enquire and locations enquired into. In cultural matters, especially when colonialisms are involved, the discussion and judgment are often coloured contrastingly by a sense of inherited rightness and power on the one hand, and recollections of abuse and oppression on the other. In this context, the awakened Other becomes Self, when midnight’s children remember and celebrate their independence. Five hundred years of British expansion overseas provides the main experiential thrust to what follows. While the colonial policies that developed out of European exploration and trading differed in many respects, they shared a great deal. That similarity is a convenience, when our understanding is sharpened by comparison – but a danger when it is not, and we consequently fail to register difference. My first point is that metropolitan approaches to the varieties of English and the literatures that have developed in the ex-colonies, as distinct from dominions, are exposed to a postcolonial temptation: the continuing assumption of a habitual authority even after the passing of raw colonial power.3 That authority was, in part, proprietary: the language was theirs; consequently, in their view, so too the business of its literature. The roots and directions of criticism still radiate from the centre, though both have gradually changed. The language is now equally ours; consequently, that business now includes the creative and critical life of our literatures in the family of World Englishes. These new literatures – relatively speaking, since India’s literature in English started in the 1820s – developed in part from the literary history of their latest language and set against it what they and others worldwide have done, are doing, and are likely to do. The metropolitan centre cannot hold, can no longer exemplify. The canon is appropriated, recharged, loaded with our texts. Of the last seven Nobel laureates who write in English – Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Doris Lessing – not one is primarily from the old centre. The message of this fact should not be lost. Creative achievement and authority that were initially centred in the metropolitan centres are now dispersed throughout the English-language commonwealth and increasingly decentralized. 3 This is a way of speech that reflects the entrenchment of ‘postcolonial’ as a master label, as a mental, doctrinal barrier; hard to cross, or, if one were suspicious, a shifting of the goal-posts, a putting-down. See Edwin Thumboo, “Breaking the Ramparts: Liberating the Study of E(nglish)-Literatures,” unpublished paper given at the conference on World Englishes, Perspectives into the Twenty-First Century, organized by The International Association for World Englishes (I A W E ) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 17– 20 October 2002.

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After decades of independence, the many identities of the Other each has a habitation and a name. While many of these formerly colonized nations have failed to progress, to utilize their – at times – considerable resources, they should not be rendered relatively anonymous by the general embrace of the ‘Other’ as a label. The Other has to be unpacked, individual nations particularized, seen steadily and seen whole, so as to move away from gross generalization. They are individual nations; it is their people, language, culture, identity, history, sociology, myth, religion, and so forth that make each one unique. Here we are referring to each one, to its comprehensive totality. This creates the necessary perspective and distancing that privileges each namenation, whether Nigeria, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and so forth, while remembering that each of these locations often has a subset. Significant examples would be the Tamils in India, the Yorubas in Nigeria, and the Maori in New Zealand. As Edward Said reminds us, To rejoin experience and culture is of course to read texts from the metropolitan centre and from the peripheries contrapuntally, according neither the privilege of “objectivity” to “our side” nor the encumbrance of “subjectivity” to “theirs.” The question is a matter of knowing how to read, as the deconstructors say, and not detaching this from the issue of knowing what to read. Texts are not finished objects. They are, as [Raymond] Williams once said, notations and cultural practices.4

Texts are open-ended, but far less in themselves than we assume. Syntax, semantics, phonology, and so on change, but these factors are the lesser influences in the figuration of meaning, far less important than those changes in us. It is Said, and you, and I, all of us – as reader–teacher–critic – who are open-ended, constantly re-coded by additions, deletions, and revisions in our personal semiotics, in what actively constitutes and motivates the operative ‘I’. We re-read texts and wonder at times what made us say this or that. Here is the innermost hyphen: that which re-organizes our latent and manifest content, what I/ you, we / them bring in negotiation. We all have earlier selves. It is not the same ‘I’ or the same ‘we’. And the present ‘we’ is not likely to have a longer shelf-life, unless we stagnate, a reminder that certain forms of consistency mean death. The distinction is important. So, too, is the idea that this open-endedness links Other, as term and concept, to the humanities and social sciences. Xenophobia5 itself, although the word sounds medical, has had relatively limited 4

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994): 259. ‘Xenophobia’ is defined as “a morbid dislike of foreigners” in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964); as “an unreasonable dislike or fear of foreigners or strangers” in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978); as “a hatred or fear of foreigners” in The Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary (1987) and as “a deep dislike of foreigners” in The 5

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support from the hard sciences to account for its operations. The hard sciences are shaped by the history and development, the tradition and change, of one field, whether it be chemistry, physics, or botany.6 In contrast, the humanities and social sciences are shaped by both the history and development of one field and the experience of many peoples, each with a distinctive ethnicity and way of life. The difference is a factor of one compared to a factor of two, the latter being more complex and open-ended. Disciplines with a factor of two in this sense have, first, a body of general theory, and, secondly, discrete collectives of information, each pertaining to a specific country /nation. The point is crucial because this double connection, the second formed by the extensive variables of life and interpersonal contacts, leads to enormous cultural and other radical separations. The result is difference with a vengeance, one might say. For example, through evolution and revolution, beliefs and doctrines change. Islam and Christianity have sub-groups whose doctrinal dissimilarities can, and do, generate bitter, sometimes deadly, conflicts. And democracy in practice takes many forms. Such variations make and keep societies and nations uniquely Other. It is this Other that studies Others. In so doing, two factors, whose obviousness and permanent importance are assumed, are admitted when raised, and are yet notable by their absence. First is the knowledge-factor, which is: the more we know about ourselves and of each other, the better we are able to understand and judge7 the texts based on life in the precincts of the Other. That seems obvious enough; which explains why we easily forget. Second, there is a sensitivity-factor, which we should use more resolutely, one best revealed in the degree of consideration we show in the way we treat others. The gains and losses in respect to both factors should emerge when discussing Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (1996). The adjective ‘xenophobic’ is defined as “1. fearing foreigners or strangers, nationalist, nationalistic, jingoistic, chauvinistic; isolationist; racist, anti-Semitic. 2. parochial, provincial, regional, rationalistic, small-town, microcultural, Sociol. ethnocentric, insular; limited, confined, illiberal, uncatholic; narrow-minded, small-minded. 3. shy, bashful, unconfident, self-conscious; withdrawn, distant, Inf. introverted, unsocial, unsociable; timid, fearful, apprehensive, anxious; unaggressive, unassertive”; see J.I. Rodale, The Synonym Finder (Emmaus P A : Rodale, 1978). 6 Though their application through technology can and is often controlled to meet political and strategic ends. But physics is, to a large extent, shaped by physics. Boundaries break, new ideas and applications are developed or imported from other sciences, adding to the physics. 7 Criticism is larger than creation in one crucial sense. A critic looks at many texts; many critics look at one text, created by one individual. Moreover, experience is larger than art. However great a writer – or critic, for that matter – his / her calculus falls short of the genius of his / her culture and environment, whose past and present, and vision of / for the future, far exceed his / hers. That genius we study, befriend; the critic is in loco parentis to the writer.

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Eduard Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860), (authored by his alias Multatuli), E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), and K.S. Maniam’s In a Far Country (1993). Knowledge and sensitivity: one is content, the other is an attitude, and both are essential and open-ended. Each one contributes directly and vitally to the equation of contact. The efficacy, the instructive quality of contact so informed, and consequently that much more enlightened, is among the meditations of A S N E L and other associations. To have both knowledge and sensitivity enhances clarity and makes understanding easier as you grasp the necessary back- and middle-ground to texts and contexts. What life, what history (and the specific moments therein), what sense of the function of literature, shapes Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart? Obviously, there are further important questions to ask about this text – and others – and which, in turn, interrogate questions – imaginative statement and re-statement; the midnight of independence, of liberation; the beginning of construction and re-construction; the restoration of maimed cultural and other institutions across the whole of society – these are subjects that distil themes for the writer. So, too, does the search for identity, for political, economic, cultural, and psychological independence, all of which are not easy quests. We need a typology of the Self as much as of the Other. There has to be both if we are to deal fairly with equations of contact. As mentioned earlier, we are both Self and Other, depending on who constructs and manages the equation, who does the inspecting, and who is the inspected. For that we go to the text, testing its experience against ours, remembering it is we who are open-ended. We must also remember that life is lived in details and not in the generalizations of typologies. Unless there is knowledge and sensitivity, there is a whole network of essential subtleties that generalizations miss. For instance, in A Passage to India, the first view we have of a community is of the Muslims. Their shared intimacy is both generated and sustained by banter and exaggeration, in which the literal is subverted, re-directed by the spirit of what is happening on the level of tone. “Do not apologise,” said his host. “You are always late.” “Kindly answer my question. Am I late? Had Mahmoud Ali eaten all the food? If so I go elsewhere. Mr Mahmoud Ali, how are you?” “Thank you, Dr Aziz, I am dying.” “Hamidullah here is actually dead. He passed away just as you rode up on your bike.” “Yes, that is so,” said the other. “Imagine us both as addressing you from another and happier world.”

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“Does there happen to be such a thing as a hookah in that happier world of yours?” “Aziz, don’t chatter. We are having a very sad talk.”8

Tone, varied through verbal gestures, marks the discourse as it uniquely generates meaning and moment. This is only possible because a whole series of cultural, verbal, social, and other subtexts are in place. It is important to get the tone right. But even when the writer does, it is extremely hard to read / decode accurately and fully. One needs to know how the variations are constructed and processed by the enormously wide calculus of culture and experience and environment. In A Passage to India, the typologies of the British – and of the Muslims and Hindus – at home and abroad would help provide a clearer, if not totally clear, basis for discussion and analysis. They would help us to see where and why we agree and disagree to identify Self and Other and the health of their mutual perception. We would be able to place, examine, and assess the relationships within each group, and those across the boundaries /divides separating the groups, to construct nuances of character and thematic significances. In addition, we would be able to see more fully the characters: Hamidullah and Mohammed Latif; the Turtons and the Burtons; and the Hindus, whose modest numbers belie the powerful patterning of spiritual forces associated with Prof. Godbole, the punka walla, and Gokul Ashtami. While doing so, we must remember that typologies are maps, not ‘reality’. Nirad C. Chaudhuri makes the most scathing attack on A Passage to India : Both the groups of characters in A Passage to India are insignificant and despicable […] Aziz would not have been allowed to cross my threshold, not to speak of being taken as an equal. Men of his type are a pest even in free India. Some have acquired a crude idea of gracious living or have merely been caught by the lure of snobbism, and are always trying to gain importance by sneaking into the company of those to whom this way of living is natural […] In regard to the Hindu characters [Forster] relied mostly on the types found in Princely States […] they were so traditional that they did not represent modern India at all […] to those of us who are familiar with the teachings of the Hindu reformers of the 19th century, Godbole is not an exponent of Hinduism, he is a clown.9

Chaudhuri divides the Muslims into the “rank and file” and those with “great strength of character,” such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and M.A. Jinnah, for whom “a colossal Machiavellian game of politics […] could be played with-

8 9

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971): 12. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, “A Passage To and From India,” Encounter 2 (June 1954): 20–21.

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out moral risks.”10 According to this classification, “Aziz and his friends belong to the servile section and are all inverted toadies.”11 We may disagree with these judgments, which reflect a particular point of view, a particular understanding of Indian history and politics, of imperial rule, of the differences between the Princely States and British India, and the impact of various power-arrangements on major communities as well as individuals. But few would doubt the extensiveness of Chaudhuri’s knowledge and passion, the degree of his sensitivity and the reach of his acerbic wit. He knew a great deal about both Self and Other, and the typologies of the British and the Indians. Any attempt to engage his views and judgments demands a mind and sensibility comparably equipped and concerned.

2. Difference is the divide between Self and Other; and the perceived degree of otherness increases with the detailed charting of Self. The process involves both contrast and reinforcement. As we discover our differences, we recover our Self, our identity; as we recover our Self we discover our differences; when we describe our differences, we describe our Self, our identity. Consequently, difference that defines the Self is crucial in any attempt to construct a typology with which to systematize, steady, and deepen our understanding of the Other. In regard to England /Britain,12 and English, I suggest that difference(s), and therefore Other(s), fall into the following twelve categories: 1a) dominant: within one country / nation such as the English / British

bounded by one geography; they subsume(d) the Scots, Welsh, and Irish; 1b) colonized: in the early land empires, e.g., the Roman, in which conquered tribes were treated as such; 2a) settlement: a variation of dominant, starting as settlements which turn colonial as they take charge of, control, and even suppress indigenous people(s); e.g., America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand;

10

Chaudhuri, “A Passage To and From India,” 21. “A Passage To and From India,” 22. 12 The fact is that colonial policies differ, at times considerably, so the actual processes and effects vary. The treatment of Eurasians in Southeast Asia is a case in point. Moreover, the same policy may be applied differently to suit the colonized Other by taking into account the relative strength of each determinant, whether religion or language and literature. 11

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2b) fraternal: Settlements with a common heritage have a special rela-

3a)

3b)

4)

5)

6) 7) 8)

9)

10)

tionship; e.g., white America, white Canada, white South Africa, white Australia, and white New Zealand; colonizer: when the dominant goes intercontinental with trade that develops into colonization, e.g., countries / nations in the West Indies, East Indies, Africa, Pacific Islands, and South and Southeast Asia that constitute the colonized ; the colonized were often themselves dominant prior to the arrival of the colonizer : and for reasons such as strategy or appearance of shortage of manpower, colonized rulers were at times used, functioning through precolonial political, economic, and social structures, e.g., various forms of indirect rule instituted by the Dutch and British; Eurasian: the progeny of cross-ethnic marriage/ liaison, between the white dominant and the colonized; given various names, at times derogatory; examples in Asia are Anglo-Indians in India, Ceylon Burghers in Sri Lanka, Anglo-Burmese in Myanmar, mestizos in the Philippines, and Eurasians in Malaya and Singapore; immigrant: settlements and colonies developing plantations by importing slaves, then indentured laborers, at times of different ethnicities, who did not repatriate, thus creating multiracial, immigrant-formed, immigrant-enhanced colonies, communities and locations, e.g., America, the West Indies, Mauritius, Singapore, Malaya, and Fiji; national: when all colonies, from Aden to Zanzibar, with single or multiple ethnicities, became independent; internal: when the immigrant is absorbed into the body politic; hyphenated-national: when, after independence, the process of consolidation sutures ethnicities to emerging /evolving national identities, e.g., Singaporean-Chinese, Chinese-American, BritishChinese, South African-Chinese, Australian-Chinese; indigenous: as in 2) above, as they emerged through the reassertion of their cultural and political identity, and claims to land, language rights etc; e.g., Black Australians, Maori, Native Americans, and Canadian First Nations, each with their own face and name; related: when settlers and immigrants adapt to local conditions, establish their own sense of community and nation, but retain strong family, cultural, and other links with ancestral locations – for example, China and India;

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11) legislated: e.g., special taxes and exclusion from political office as

in Ireland; White Australia Policy, and South African apartheid; 12) immigrant-Asian: first- or second-generation immigrant to anglo-

phone country / nation, such as the U S A , Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Others are created by a binary, structuring principle. Every Other therefore has its generative counterpart on which its own perceived shape depends. What am I, as Other, when I discuss you, as Other? – this is a question we all should consider in order to test the general validity of the categories. Of these, the dominant was / is national and was the colonizer when it pursued Category 3 activities. In time, settlement became national. So, too, did the colonized, the immigrant, the internal, the indigenous, following political independence. But characterizations are not always straightforward, especially with Categories 7 and 8, which are multicultural. The individual had a choice here, as becomes clear in K.S. Maniam’s In a Far Country (1993), which deals with relativities, not absolutes. Moreover, each category can be divided into subcategories that will, in turn, divide yet again to meet the reality of smaller groups such as community and clan; the minorities. Those living in multicultural or plural societies confront these differences daily. They will also know that these categories are not clear-cut – for example, an octogenarian who started as an immigrant and eventually became a hyphenatednational.13 The next generation in such cases will further the transition from one side of the hyphen to the other. For instance, in Maniam’s first novel, The Return (1981), Ravi, a third-generation Malaysian Indian, is deeply anglicized by a thorough English education, to the detriment of his Indian heritage. The dominant-national Other, bersatu, alias a national Self, thrives within the singularity of one geography, one people, one culture. As we shall shortly see, that locus is the inner circle of any empire, the centre from which the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, to take an early example. The otherness here is a vertical hierarchy from king/ ruler down to serf, from proconsul /senator down to slave. The equalities, on the other hand, have a horizontal orientation. Moreover, this Other is an intrinsic part of the biological, political, economic and social realities and institutions of a single, relatively homogeneous ethnic group, sanctified by nature, time, precedence, religion, and tradition. Whatever the difficulties and however fundamental the disagreements and apparent contradictions experienced by both individuals and groups, they occur within 13

It is essential to remember that terms such as ‘hyphenated-national’, ‘hybrid’, and ‘bicultural’ indicate origins. These terms do not necessarily imply division or, worse, confusion. Although often aware of his / her origins, the individual so placed acts as a single consciousness.

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the context of a shared vision and a common will to work for national cohesion. Loyalties are firmly centripetal. Distinctions of class, wealth, and education are subsumed under the common national experience, especially at times of threat to individual and national identity, national survival. The French Revolution was not meant to destroy France, only to change it in parts. The Chinese communists wanted to save China – the country had been in decline from the last years of Ch’ien-lung (1736–1795); a century of humiliation followed, during which even the weakest of European nations secured concessions. As exemplified in the English / British experience, the dominant-national Other spread through settlement-colonialism, imposing on new locations British culture, institutions, and instrumentalities, the most important being language. In practical terms, these chiefly white locations formed – and still form – a fraternal group. Their history was not colonial in the ordinary sense, but originated earlier as white-dominant. It is perhaps apt to recall the thirteen colonies ‘revolting’ to found America. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a degree South Africa emerged from under their own histories through the protection of England. They brought with them a rich heritage that can still be seen today in towns and villages all over the Eastern Cape. The broad tree-lined streets and buildings of Grahamstown are the legacy of a time when this was the Cape’s second city. Take time to walk through this historic centre and visit the Observatory Museum which houses one of only two Victorian Cameras Obscura in the world – the other is in Bath, England – with a magical mirror that reflects the town onto a large circular table. With Grahamstown at its centre, Frontier Country includes Adelaide, Alicedale, Alice, Bedford, Fort Beaufort, Hogsback, Peddie, Riebeeck East, Salem, Seven Fountains and Sidbury.14

The macrocosm included areas settled and still controlled by a Protestant majority of white men – with the notable exception of South Africa, the Rainbow Nation. Predominantly white, and therefore made at the first opportunity into Dominions, a form of related Other, they were kissing cousins, linked directly by blood and culture. These countries eventually developed a special relationship, especially in threatening times: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War Two, and George Bush and Tony Blair postSeptember 11, 2001. The indigenous peoples became the indigenous Other. But unlike white colonialists, there was no freedom for native people ‘at midnight’, again with South Africa as the exception. These groups include Native Americans and Canadian First Nations, African Americans, Black Austra14

See the official Grahamstown website, http://www.grahamstown.co.za/ [accessed 10 July 2007].

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lians, and Maori. Where plantations developed, slaves and indentured labour were imported, creating ethnic pluralities within a colony / settlement. Yet borders were never watertight. In Imperial Rome, those born in Africa, Syria, Spain and the Balkans became Caesar through ability, power, and opportunity. But an undercurrent of unease invariably remained: the senators resisted the intrusion of provincials […] The Romans were upset at the height and size of the Gauls, Britons, and Germans, and they hated trousers […] Juvenal is full of racial prejudice. The Greeks were born actors and dissimulators, murderers and seducers; worse, they are extremely competitive and will not share any loot. He objects to the way in which ladies of fashion do and say everything in Greek.15

And here is Juvenal (c.55–c.140 A D ) himself uncensored: And now let me speak at once of the race which is most dear to our rich men, and which I avoid above all others; no shyness shall stand in my way. I cannot abide, Quirites, a Rome of Greeks; and yet what fraction of our dregs comes from Greece? One comes from lofty Sicyon, another from Amydon or Andros, others from Samos, Tralles or Alabanda; all making for the Esquiline, or for the hill that takes its name from osier-beds; all ready to worm their way into the houses of the great and become their masters. Quick of wit and of unbounded impudence, they are as ready of speech as Isaeus, and more torrential. Say, what do you think that fellow there to be? He has brought with him any character you please; grammarian, orator, geometrician; painter, trainer, or rope-dancer; augur, doctor or astrologer.16

The following are the main determinants responsible for the divide, the difference: threat of dilution, periphery versus centre, wrong colour/ ethnicity, suspect culture/ lifestyle ranging from customs and belief to language and appearance etc, leading to dismissive stereotyping, indignant moral judgment, and various forms of ‘superiority’. At one point the Roman senate legislated against long hair and bright clothes, which is hardly surprising, given the severity of the dominant as exemplified in the Caesar haircut and the white toga,17 an example of Category 15 Jack Lindsay, The Ancient World: Manners and Morals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968): 233. 16 Juvenal and Persius, tr. G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge M A : Loeb Classical Library, Harvard U P , 1961): 37. On the other hand, the Romans rapidly adapted Greek science and technology, such as siege engines and hydraulics for viaducts. The colonized were another matter when their presence raised issues in the humanities and social sciences, relating to identity, values, and lifestyle. 17 The reaction is understandable. Like any imperial capital, elements of provincial cultures arrived with returning soldiers, prisoners, rulers, and merchants. Moreover, the conquered and the colonized turned into provincials. Some became Roman citizens; others were

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1b at work. This attitude change has not changed with time. Some fifteen hundred years later in the eighteenth century David Hume stated: There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences […] Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.18

We are listening to mentalities, to the conviction that one culture, learning, the totality of one civilization, lock, stock, and barrel, is superior in every respect,19 an assertion without adequate knowledge of Category 3.

3. The positive side of colonialism is the foundation of modernization; its negative aspect is that it distorted, displaced, discriminated, and suppressed the Other, contributing to post-independence traumas by creating entities out of disparate peoples. The manifestations of colonialism that produced negative effects varied, and include a subtlety whose psychological effects undermined the Other far more than did brute force. The more institutions and structures there were, the harder it was for the colonizer to occupy and modify key areas of life and contacts. Moreover, these institutions and structures provided positive alternatives to colonial impositions and misalignments, such as education in English, with all its advantages, as in Category 7. It was not unusual for young Chinese people in 1950s Singapore to attend English school in the morning and Chinese school in the afternoon. Elite Chinese schools, among them Catholic High in Singapore, and Chung Cheng in Penang, Malaysia, produced fluent bilinguals. But whatever the mode, colonialism made deep born free. Thus Paul, in Acts of the Apostles, writes: “I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia” (22:3), “Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, Tell me, art thou a Roman? He said, Yea” (22:27), “And the chief captain answered, With a great sum I obtained this freedom. And Paul said, But I was born free” (22:28). 18 David Hume, quoted in Sarah L. Milbury–Steen, European and African Stereotypes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980): 4. 19 The counter-movement, when the Other talked back, before writing back, is relatively recent, and belongs more to politics than to history. After all, we are comparing eras of five hundred to fifty years, and six major centres of relatively homogeneous colonialism in more than a hundred re-emerging nations, each with its otherness awakened to the challenges of self-awareness, nationalism, self-definition, and identity. The counter-movement occurred despite neocolonialism, a residue of colonialism, whose spirit and rites, thinking and assumptions, structures and institutions, instruments and processes, discourse and judgment and methods, still affect the affairs of others, in an allegedly civilized and equitable century.

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incursions into successive generations, spanning five centuries in the older colonies. The resultant changes affected the lives of both colonizer and colonized, and how one related to the other in political, economic, social, and psychological terms. The outcome was not uniformly tragic, though exceptions were few. How were the Rajas and Sultans treated? To what extent did the people share in the new trade/ economic realities? Was there parity of treatment for all ethnic groups? How was intermarriage viewed? This is a mere sample of the questions relating to life and contacts that go directly to the core of Other matters. These issues affect the whole range of matters treated by the humanities and social sciences of the colonized. The colonized as commodity, combined with oil, ivory, and Dr Livingstone, I presume, helped put Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the centre of discussions of colonialism-cum-race. The topic advanced with the rewriting of black-African history by such writers as Peter Nazareth and in particular following the debut of Chinua Achebe’s counter-statement, Things Fall Apart, as well as his essay attacking the racist views underpinning Conrad’s novella. The early positioning of Heart of Darkness at the centre of Other criticism was unfortunate. This book could not definitively and instructively address the many issues raised by the Other, being far too narrow in scope and relatively incomplete in setting to serve such a large purpose. A more successful attempt, however, had appeared in Dutch almost fifty years earlier: Eduard Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar (1860). This earlier book was much less critical of racism, but was also more focused on difference and, by extension, on the Other. Dekker’s novel was a seminal exploration of a complex colonial situation, involving many Others. As a dedicated servant of the Dutch East India Company, he was not against colonialism; only against its abuses, its lack of basic human consideration. Moreover, the author used a range of techniques, structures, and discourses that highlight the polyphonic life of colonizer and colonized. In this sense, Max Havelaar has a more intriguing and revealing series of perspectives and textures than we find in Conrad’s works. Dekker (using the pseudonym Multatuli) addresses virtually all colonial themes through the invention and manipulation of various first-person voices reflecting three points of view on the colonial enterprise based on commodities: the Dutch in Holland who benefit from this commodities trade, the Dutch in the East Indies who oversee the production of these commodities, and the typology of the Dutch Self and the Javanese/ Indonesian Other. The characters in Holland – Stern, Frits, Louise Rosemeyer, Parson Blatherer et al. – are grouped around Droogstoppel, who is conservative and fastidious, and is dedicated to common sense and truth, apart from coffee and large profits: “I always think of everything,” he states at one point, and “Holland has re-

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mained Holland because our old folks attended to their business, and because they had the true faith. That’s all there is to it!”20 The commercial appetite that drives this world 21 depended on the proper management of the East Indies for a steady flow of produce, spices in the beginning and later coffee and sugar. This drive sustained a society whose core values were those of the Dutch Reformed Church: hard work, the fear of God, a strong faith, and the belief they were a chosen people. Together, these values justified a Category 3 colonial history: The ships of our Holland sail the great waters, to bring civilisation, religion, Christianity, to the misguided Javanese! Nay, our happy Fatherland does not covert eternal bliss for itself alone: we wish to share it with those wretched creatures on those distant shores who lie bound in the fetters of unbelief, superstition, and immorality. (141)

In the book, a hierarchy of Dutch officials ruled directly, and indirectly through native rulers, headed by a Resident whose duty was to maintain peace and stability to ensure the maximum production of spices, coffee, sugar, and other produce shipped to Holland. Consequently, local rulers retained considerable authority. The appointed Regents were responsible for the wellbeing of their people, who thus served two masters, each concerned with their own interests and priorities. The novel’s second narrative concentrates on Lebak in Java, where Max is posted as Assistant Resident. The third is Dekker’s autobiographical narrative in the guise of Multatuli. The situation and the interplay of forces are complex, for here is an indigenous Other with remarkably high culture. The story reveals how colonizer and colonized influence each other’s systems at two important but narrow points of intersection: politics and economics. Dekker was not against colonialism, only the hardship suffered by ordinary people when the system was abused. In theory, the Dutch officials were pledged “to protect the native population against exploitation and extortion” (77, emphasis added). The policy of indirect rule empowered the Regent, as colonized ruler, Category 3b. The peasants suffered greatly because they were taxed by both the Dutch and Javanese nobility-turned-administrators. The labourers worked for the Dutch, and owed ‘voluntary’ service to the Regent and nobility, whose acts of repression and exploitation are cunningly ambiguous, cap-

20

Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, tr. Roy Edwards (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1860; New York: London House & Maxwell, 1967): 57, 20. All subsequent quotations from the novel are given in parentheses in the main text. 21 See Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), for the Dutch devotion to profits.

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able of credible explanation, thus shielding the perpetrators from judgment. The situation creates more difference between Self and Other. Everyone knows that the European official may be called away at any moment to take up another post, whereas the Regent, the powerful Regent, remains. Besides, there are so many ways of appropriating the possessions of a poor, ignorant man. If a mantri tells him that the Regent would like his horse, the animal is soon to be found in the regent’s stable; but this by no means proves that the Regent does not intend to pay a high price for it […] sometime. If hundreds of people are working in a Chief’s fields without receiving payment, it by no means follows that this is being done for his benefit. May it not have been his object to make the harvest over to them, from the purely philanthropic calculation that his land was better situated and more fertile than theirs, and so would reward their labour more liberally? (76)

Acts are thus kept from that closure which would allow assessment and judgment. Delay, in the form of constructed uncertainty, is often the best response to Western directness and desire for issues to be well-defined, supported by evidence, and so resolved with quick, consistent solutions. The West developed physics; the East embraced metaphysics. This rubric is a generalization, but is nonetheless useful in highlighting differences in approaches to the nature of reality, law, evidence, and truth. Hence the wayang, the shadowplay that delays or even prevents the discovery of what is the shadow of a shadow, what is the shadow of reality, and what is reality. The Javanese peasant produced the goods, which the Dutch sold at highly advantageous prices. The peasant had to render service – both free and paid – to his ruler. The well-being of the working class was precariously dependent on the ruler and Dutch official, who were often in league, exploiting the peasant for different reasons. The ruler got free labour to cultivate his fields and took horses and buffaloes without payment; the official obtained high yields at low prices. if any one should ask whether the man who grows the produce receives a reward proportionate to the yields, the answer must be in the negative. The Government compels him to grow on his land what pleases it; it punishes him if he sells the crop so produced to anyone else but it; and it fixes the price it pays him. (73)

This imbalance generates the third narrative strand, Dekker’s autobiography in the guise of Multatuli, the creator of Droogstoppel and the others in Holland including Stern, Havelaar and his wife, Tina, the Dutch officials, Verbrugge and Dulcari, and the Javanese who form the Indies quadrant, as noted in Category 4a and 4b. Another character is Mrs Slotering, a “native woman,”

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whose children therefore were Eurasian liplaps, Category 4, with a sadly marginalized destiny.22 Like the dalang in the wayang, Dekker–Multatuli–Havelaar manipulates the puppets he has created. Droogstoppel provides a picture of how the Dutch see trade, and therefore oversee and manage their colonies. Havelaar/ Scarfman, back in Holland after being dismissed, sends a parcel of manuscripts to his now successful former school friend, Droogstoppel, and asks for help in getting the work published. Droogstoppel does not hear from Scarfman again, and so decides to write a book, Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, as the manuscripts contained “things of a more solid nature, and some of them will go into this book” (37). Havelaar’s parcel included “dissertations and essays,” on subjects as varied as “On Sanskrit as the mother of the German languages,” “On the gravity of light,” “On the power of England outside Europe,” “On prosody,” “On national literature in the form of Javanese rhapsodies,” “On the Laws of Solon, Lycurgus, Zoroaster and Confucius,” “On architecture as the expression of ideas.” We are told that the list of 145 was incomplete, and that there were also poems in several languages. I found a number of small bundles with no titles on them, romances in Malay, war songs in Javanese, and Heaven knows what else. I also found letters, many of them in languages I did not know. Some were addressed to him, others had been written by him; yet he seemed to have some purpose in mind with these, for everything had been signed by other persons as: Certified true copy. In addition, there were extracts from diaries, notes and odd jottings […] some of them indeed very odd. (50)

These papers cover virtually all the mid-nineteenth-century sciences and humanities. We are being persuaded to see Max, and therefore Dekker, as a renaissance man: enlightened, curious, courageous, impartial in the pursuit of his interests, knowledgeable about history, and dedicated to the understanding of the Other. A far more challenging character than either Marlow or Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At the same time, this exposes the insularity of a life securely based on commerce and sanctified by a narrow view of Christianity. The book compares two individuals, Droogstoppel and Havelaar, and their worlds. One is comfortable and smug; the other is restless and progressive.

22

“European society in the Dutch East Indies is rather sharply divided into two parts: the real Europeans, and those who – although legally enjoying the same rights – were not born in Europe, and have more or less “native” blood in their veins […] if I may use a very slangy expression, he is not regarded as “one hundred per cent” (100). Individual attainment and merit did not count: “these poor pariahs, who had to contend from the very cradle with artificial, studied, unjust subordination and with silly prejudice against their colour” (102).

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We are being prepared to meet Havelaar, with a strong sense of his interests and accomplishments before us. He is, we are told, the sort who would take “the weaker fellow’s part” and that he “had a good heart, with a warm corner in it for justice” (85). The description continues: A poet in the highest sense of the word, he dreamt a solar system from a spark, peopled them with beings of his own creation, felt himself lord of a world he himself had called into existence […] and yet, immediately afterwards, he was perfectly capable of carrying on, without the slightest dreaminess, a conversation about the price of rice, the rules of grammar, or the economic advantages of an Egyptian poultry farm. No science was wholly foreign to him. (90)

This is a man who would, and does, officially complain about the Regent because the latter is supposed to treat the peasants decently, but instead abuses his authority and violates his oath by imposing heavy taxes. The Resident is supposed to ensure that the Regent behaves properly, but does nothing when Havelaar complains. Furthermore, where is the European official to find witnesses with the courage to make a statement against their lord, the dreaded Regent? […] what would become of the good opinion of the Government, which gives the official bread for his service but would deny him that bread, dismiss him as incapable, if he should lightly suspect or accuse of wrongdoing one so highly placed as a Tommongong, Adhipatti or Pangerang? (77)

The narrative reveals how colonizer and colonized work each other’s systems at the intersection of politics and economics. Abuses were contained, not corrected. A practical basis for a colonial philosophy and career was to maintain material success without bothering overmuch about principles and justice. The colonizer was concerned with the flow of produce; the colonized, in the person of the Regent, ensured that flow with finely judged acumen. The peasant was caught in-between and exploited by both. The tragedy is compounded by difference. Even if the colonizer were to act on behalf of his charge, there must be sufficient evidence to satisfy Dutch law. Moreover, the peasant does not complain against his ruler; practice and tradition forbade such action, which led to that deleterious combination of respect and fear. Furthermore, the ruler is bound by custom to care for and to maintain the traditions of family and court, the heavy cost of which precludes good intentions. For a combination of reasons, Havelaar is dismissed after his complaint against the Regent fails. Dekker, alias Multatuli, hopes that his exposé will lead to reforms. He unmasks the colonizer, just as he unmasked his characters, to reveal himself:

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Enough my good Stern! I, Multatuli, take up the pen. You are not required to write Havelaar’s life story. I called you into being […] I brought you from Hamburg […] I taught you to write fairly good Dutch in a very short time […] I let you kiss Louise Rosemeyer, who’s in sugar […] It is enough, Stern, You may go! That Scarfman and his wife […] Halt, wretched spawn of sordid moneygrubbing and blasphemous cant! I created you […] you grew into a monster under my pen…I loathe my own handiwork: choke in coffee and disappear! Yes, I, Multatuli, ‘who have borne much,’ take up the pen. I make no apology for the form of my book. That form seemed suitable to me for the attainment of my objective. (317–18)

That objective is a dual one. First, he wanted to leave a legacy for his children; second, he hoped the book would be read by “politicians […] literati […] merchants […] ladies’ maids […] ex-Governors-General […] Ministers in office […] [their] lackeys […] praying preachers […] by thousands and tens of thousands of specimens of the tribe of Droogstoppel […] members of the House of Representatives” (317–18). These potential readers were all Dutch, no doubt, but with different points of view: difference. What is harder to access are unusual circumstances and dictates of custom crucial in the management of people that lead to acts acceptable in one domain but judged wrong in another. Sometimes ‘face’, one’s reputation, is paramount. Moreover, the new economy disrupted traditional tribute systems under which what the Tommongong, Adhipatti or Pangerang received depended on a combination of rank and capacity to give. So a person lower in rank may directly command more resources than a superior, who must nonetheless spend more to maintain custom, ritual, festivals, and other public events on which depend the religious and social welfare of the region: The Javanese is generous […] He would even think he was failing in respect for his hereditary lord if he entered the Kraton without bringing gifts […] this custom might be compared to the homage of a child, who seeks to express his love for his father by offering a small present, than be conceived as a tribute to tyrannical despotism. But […] in this way the existence of a charming custom makes it difficult to abolish an abuse. (75)

What follows is one such charming custom: If the alun-alun in front of the Regent’s house was in a neglected state, the neighboring population would be ashamed of it, and considerable authority would be required to prevent them from buckling to and ridding that square of weeds, putting it into a condition commensurate with the rank of their Regent. (75)

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The acceptance of that custom may lead to the abuse the Regent who mobilizes whole villages to irrigate his rice fields, when the villagers’ own fields are equally dry. The labourers might miss the full planting season, and may not have enough time and energy to ensure a successful harvest. Abuses were contained, not corrected. Moreover, the peasant does not complain against his ruler. The moral terrain between charming custom and straight abuse can either be a well-defined black or white, or an ambiguous gray. All cultures have gray areas; it is a matter of where ambiguity is allowed and to what degree. What is important is that such gray areas be located, contextualized, and understood so that ambiguous actions are judged in terms of Self and not Other. Doing so would help us to grasp better the themes, structuring principles, characterization, and a sense of internal Others in such novels as C.J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Blanche d’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach (1981), and Thea Astley’s Beachmasters (1985), all texts with fascinating Others.

4. I now turn again to Forster’s A Passage to India. It would be useful to start with an observation by Thomas B. Macaulay: a territory inhabited by men differing from us in race, colour, language, manners, morals, religion: there are prodigies to which the world has seen nothing similar. We interrogate the past in vain. The Company is an anomaly: but it is part of a system where everything is anomaly. It is the strangest of all governments, but it is designed for the strangest of all empires.23

Forster would have agreed with Macaulay. It is not India’s exoticism that engages us today, but the opportunity found there to investigate more deeply the Other, in the projection and exposé of the British Self, and the perennial commentary on life, contacts, and spirituality that India offers through the metaphors of art, such as Forster’s novel or Raja Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare (1965). The main Forsterian injunction was to “only connect,” heart and mind, the poetry and the prose of life. His Indian experience, especially the contact with Hinduism, made him see a further need: completion. It is the integrated Self that has the capacity to understand fully. Forster’s theme had expanded, and he returned to India, the source, to explore this new concept.

23

Quoted in Brian Gardner, The East India Company (New York: Barnes & Noble,

1997): 204.

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India was large enough, it was multicultural, multireligious, and multilingual, and it was strongly affected by the colonial setting. The overarching structure of the novel is its division into three sections: Mosque, Caves, and Temple. Proper nouns are a major index of difference, as they possess a tremendous power to identify and encapsulate, especially words relating to religion, ethnicity /race, and politics: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist etc; Chinese, Indian, German, French, Palestinian, Israeli, Maori, Mauritian etc; Liberal, Communist, Democrat, Republican, Shining Path, Maoist, Conservative, Anarchist, National Anthem etc. Nouns can become adjectives and adverbs, forming emotive networks, slogans, and battle cries. They are repositories of history, hopes and traumas, and of significant events. Forster was interested in the values and attitudes that shape and energize each group represented by the three sections and its members, and how the three view and relate to each other. He showed a particular interest in those who see a single humanity, and consequently reach across divisions of race and politics etc that separate the Self from Other. Forster was equally interested, however, in those within the Self-typology who reject the Other, such as Mrs Callendar, who says, vis-à-vis a patient: “Why, the kindest thing one can to do to a native is to let him die.” “How if he went to heaven?” asked Mrs. Moore, with a gentle but crooked smile. “He can go where he likes as long as he doesn’t come near me. They give me the creeps.” (27–28)

At the core of the novel is the challenge of understanding and relating to the Other, as well as questioning whether in the categories that make up the Self there are those who approach completion, and how the rest stand up to judgment: namely, the difference between Ronny Heaslop and Mrs Moore, his mother, the litmus test being the treatment of Indians. We have also heard the special banter of the Muslims. Each group is contextualized to show its likes and dislikes, its predilections and prejudices, its Self. We see what lives on each side of the Self–Other divide; on each side of the Other divide. Fielding is the most liberal British character: he is educated, sensitive, courageous, principled, open-minded, loyal, and understanding. He stands by Aziz, against his own kind. He is also supportive of Adela when she is ostracized after declaring in court that Aziz is innocent. Yet even Fielding fails to understand the Indian experience, as exemplified by Godbole. In the ultimate sense, however, his limitation is not personal: the harmony between the words of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting. Writing picture post-cards to his Indian

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friends, he felt that all of them would miss the joys he experienced now, the joys of form, and that this constituted a serious barrier. They would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not its shape, and though Venice was not Europe, it was part of the Mediterranean harmony. The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all. (275)

The limitations, in this instance religious and philosophical, are those of culture and environment. There is a self-sufficiency that discourages introspection and the assessment of whether the thought-process, the nature and quantity of knowledge, and the nature and range of sensitivity are sufficient and right. The very virtues of Mediterranean harmony are its strengths and limitations, the latter of which includes “reasonable form” and the concept that what does not satisfy is “monstrous and extraordinary.” Fielding tells Aziz that Stella has found something in Hinduism that had improved their relationship. Significantly, she took no interest in its ‘forms’. Forster’s final message is spiritual, for it is the spirit that helps us to understand life, to see what lies behind life’s form, its processes and appearances. “Only connect” helps you see ‘the spirit in reasonable form’ and the ‘harmony’ associated with a particular style, culture, and environment. It is a particular Self that can neither escape its form nor travel to function beyond its culture and circumstances. What it mistakes for a muddle is the absence of form that ought not to be mistaken for an absence of purpose and direction. Recall, for example, the discussion of the transcendant and universal quality of Akbar’s new religion and the fact that Ralph, in addition to Stella, takes no interest in the forms of Hinduism. Furthermore, Stella brings more to her marriage as a consequence of the Indian visit. Aziz is forced to concede that Ralph understands quickly and instinctively. He even anticipates the end of the novel. From this point of view, then, “only connect” is Forster’s most complete, and therefore final, statement.

5. K.S. Maniam’s In a Far Country is set in West Malaysia, and is perhaps the most significant Malaysian novel to date written in English. The main ethnic groups depicted in the novel are the Malays (who enjoy special rights), Chinese, Indians, and Eurasians; the national language is Bahasa Malaysia; Islam is the national religion. The theme is the challenge for the Chinese and Indians of belonging deeply and passionately to such a society /nation. This

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idea has also engaged some other English-language writers, among them the Malaysian poet Ee Tiang Hong: PATRIOTISM Surely by the time one reaches The seventh generation, The seventh heaven, One is no longer subject To all these? The journey is over, The conflicts, the strains, the trails Resolved generations ago In that choice, irrevocable, To cross the seas. And if there was gold In the mines and in the jungles There were also death, hunger and disease. And surely after all these The gates of heaven must open, Unconditional, without question, No question but that All men are equal Under the rain and sun.24

The crux of Maniam’s novel is the challenge of how to integrate into a mainstream society that has its antecedents in a history and a culture not one’s own, while retaining one’s ethnic identity. Rajan, the protagonist, suffers from a mid-life crisis. Although he is successful and has a nice family and home, he is very dissatisfied at work. Rajan feels removed from his country and its people, and is acutely aware of the distance because he had been involved in the nation’s development after Merdeka, its Freedom, Independence. Given the mix of indigenous and migrant peoples, and a colonialism that started with the founding of Penang (1784) and Singapore (1819), Categories 3 and 8 apply. As with many other users of English, Maniam’s identity is hyphenated, in his case with strong Indian roots and a thorough English education. He taught English at the University of Malaya. Only Category 4, Eurasian, does not figure much in the novel. Of the internal Others, each with a powerful Self, the indigenous Malays emerged as the National, the Dominant. The Indians and Chinese are all hyphenated in conjunction with either English or the Bahasa language, the National. Except for Lee Shin, the characters 24

Ee Tiang Hong, Myths for a Wilderness (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann, 1976): 52.

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have a strong, genuine desire to belong to their environment and its life, responding to the politics that seek to balance competing ethnic interests: “Even though we led separate lives, we seemed to be joined together by some deepseated desire for a home.”25 Rajan’s first job took him north, as part of an agricultural development scheme for landless settlers in newly cleared jungle. He observes Lee Shin, who lives in two worlds: one the everyday, multiracial, Malay-dominated; the other an increasing regression into his Chinese heritage. The ‘Lee Shin Study’ that Rajan undertakes is of enormous significance to the thematic strands of the novel. Lee Shin symbolizes the Chinese Self opting for a determined return to roots, to re-creating the culture under uncongenial, somewhat artificial conditions. He does Tai Chi, privately plays the harmonica – which is regarded as a Chinese instrument – and starts to learn the Chinese flute. Lee Shin had taken another step into self-delusion. He had filled his room with furniture from China or Taiwan, which was revealing: it bore no relationship to the dull awakening every morning and taking into your consciousness the unyielding landscape behind the houses. (46)

Not surprisingly, Lee Shin is found dead, in a posture that emphasizes Maniam’s point: He was an aborted foetus, man-like in completeness, but in everything else not formed at all. His thought had had no coherence; his life had had no direction. The shadows and phantoms that had inhabited him had taken over. (63)

Part of Rajan’s problem was that he saw the land as a commodity, not an inheritance. “My land aesthetics grew […] There was land for factories […] There was land for housing estates” (77). He became the Self as successful businessman, who acquired money but did not know its value. It is Zulkifli, a son of the soil, who helps Rajan see the land as inheritance, as home. He wants Rajan to be a full son of the soil, but the latter takes the middle way, keeping his roots and making a commitment. Although obviously Indian, Sivasurian – whose specific origin is not known – spoke, wrote, and moved others with a hidden power. That should not surprise us, for his name is a compound of Siva (sometimes spelt Shiva) and Surian, both major gods in the Hindu pantheon. In Shaivism, Siva is considered the supreme deity and is worshipped throughout India. Surian is the sun god, who according to some accounts is the son of Siva. One of his other names is Kartikeya. Any reader familiar with Hinduism will see his name as 25

K.S. Maniam, In a Far Country (London: Skoob, 1993): 28. All subsequent quotations from the novel are given in parentheses in the main text.

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possessing special potency. In some ways, he is a guide. His book, Not a Story, Not a Chronicle, inspires Rajan’s quest for self-realization within the political, cultural, and sociocultural context of an evolving Malaysia, where Bahasa Melayu and Islam dominate. When the girl returned, there was great rejoicing. Everyone, for miles around, came to the kenduri [wedding reception] given with the money and provisions donated by every quarter. Ah Chong was the chief donator. I’ve never seen such a gathering before or since. It was, for me, the last memorable occasion of the old time. There was so much togetherness, trust and innocence. We didn’t behave like single men or women but more like a people with a common heart and mind. Whoever reads this will think I don’t belong to the world. He may be right. What’s there in the world to belong to? (111) What I saw during that second stay with Murugiah remains still like a nightmare in my mind. I had never seen people become peoples. Yes, I know this is a strange way of saying it. But, to me, words have not the power to be things. People were things; their feelings were things; their ambitions were things. These were too real, if sometimes hidden beneath the surface. (117)

The quest succeeds; Rajan is changed: I’m looking outside these days, without any attempt to colour what I see. Though I feel vulnerable, I’m not afraid. It’s an unseeing I’m going through, that is, removing all the layers of personal prejudice I gave to everything. Mani, the goat, that was slaughtered on that Deepavali eve, keeps coming back to me. What is it about his eyes that still fascinates me? (120)

The categories I propose will not fit every situation and character. Some may require subcategories, such as Godbole, Ralph, and Stella in A Passage and Sivasurian in In a Far Country.

6. With the recovery of cultures, the emergence and re-emergence of national identities, and the expansion of scholarly work in the new literatures, the Other has undergone a broadening of content and application. In an early incarnation of the Other, it formed a firm binary opposition with ‘I’/ ‘Self,’ of which the variations are us / them, we/ they, colonizer/colonized, white/ black /brown / yellow, insider/ outsider. The divisions in each set were based chiefly on clear contrasts /differences created, sanctified, and sustained by colonialism.

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‘To embrace’ the Other immediately suggests a certain tactile fervor, an intimacy, a fraternizing of ‘Other’ with ‘Other’, ‘Self’ with ‘Other’. This shift is relatively recent, connected to a developing globalization underpinned by free trade fostered and made increasingly borderless through a culture of information driven by technology. Power, however, still dictates and controls.26 What directs both context and perception can be summed up in key phrases: national destiny, permanent interests, basic political institutions, group security, individual and national identity, values, beliefs and customs, tradition, ethnicity, prosperity, return on investments, and so forth, working through applicable instruments and institutions. These derive from, as well as support and strengthen, the determinants that ensure continuity, shaping individual and society, microcosm and macrocosm.27 That the information is similarly shaped, promoted, and driven concerns us directly, because we are looking at a process of perception, of looking at Others through a sense, or a definition, of how we see ourselves, what we think we are: Ah, this tangled web; how utterly Malaysian it is! In the shelter of the twin wings of my family I have cousins surnamed Halim, Aziz, Ghani, Wee, Ratnam, Kannabhiran, Arumugam, Marshall, Rodrigues. (And Keese and Kuylaars, for good measure, who were born in Australia and Holland, respectively.)28

The Other represents difference and confrontation, but that association will eventually fade and be replaced by change and acceptance. Not long ago, driving alone westward from the Ring of Kerry, on a morning promising the magic that only the sadness of Ireland can augur, the road dipped towards the sea. Suddenly a rainbow formed, one end away in the hills, the other, closer, dropped into a lake of unbelievable blue just by the sea. I was tempted to reach out and touch the mixed colours lying side-by-side, all compacted and harmonious. Surely this rainbow demonstrates why one fish is 26 Boundaries are taken down, but who is responsible, what their reasons are for doing so, and whether new boundaries should be formed, are questions that turn more perilous if overlooked, underrated or forgotten. Neocolonial impulses now seem more subtle and appropriate, but are nonetheless still exploitative. As with much else, the contexts for the Other are framed and maintained by those newly adapted impulses and their rhetoric. Perceptions are backed by power, and power manipulates. Much as we may wish to deny it, power can and often does make its own rules, which are then imposed upon those outside the precincts of the powerful. Power invents and defines the Other. Unfortunately, ‘might is right’ thrives as a guiding principle for both individual and international action. 27 See, for example, Edwin Thumboo, “Self-Images: Contexts for Transformations,” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu & Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989): 749–68. 28 Rehman Rashid, A Malaysian Journey (Selangor Darul Ehsan: Rehman Rashid, 1993): 41.

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earth-green and another heaven-blue. Surely the vision is a lesson that we should be our neighbours’ keepers, but only after we have learned what is precious to him or her.

WORKS CITED Chaudhuri, Nirad C. “A Passage To and From India,” Encounter 2 (June 1954): 19–24. Ee Tiang Hong. Myths for a Wilderness (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann, 1976). Forster, E.M. A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Gardner, Brian. The East India Company (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997). Juvenal and Persius, tr. G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge M A : Loeb Classical Library, Harvard U P , 1961). Lindsay, Jack. The Ancient World: Manners and Morals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968). Maniam, K.S. In a Far Country (London: Skoob, 1993). Milbury–Steen, Sarah L. European & African Stereotypes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980). Multatuli. Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, tr. Roy Edwards (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1860; New York: London House & Maxwell, 1967). Rashid, Rehman. A Malaysian Journey (Selangor Darul Ehsan: Rehman Rashid, 1993). Rodale, J.I. The Synonym Finder (Emmaus P A : Rodale, 1978). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). Thumboo, Edwin. “Breaking the Ramparts: Liberating the Study of E(nglish)-Literatures,” unpublished paper, Perspectives into the Twenty-First Century: Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (I A W E ) conference, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 17–20 October 2002. ——. “Self-Images: Contexts for Transformations,” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu & Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989): 749–68.

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Benign Xenophobia? The Testimony of Maori Literature

J UDITH D ELL P ANNY

1. The Treaty of Waitangi

E

N E W Z E A L A N D E R S generally associate xenophobia with other parts of the world. Maori, however, would take a different view. In August 2000, Tariana Turia, Associate Minister of Maori Affairs, “wondered why the holocaust suffered by indigenous people, includeing Maori after colonization, had not had the attention focused on Jewish survivors of the Holocaust [...] She asked that the holocaust suffered by many Maori tribes during the land wars be recognised.”1 An uproar ensued. She was asked to withdraw the word ‘holocaust’, but refused to do so. The Maori researcher Irihapeti Ramsden supported Tariana Turia by saying that between 1840 and 1896 “over half the Maori population disappeared. ‘That is genocide. It’s a reality’.”2 Maori writers, in their novels, stories, plays, and poetry, paint a picture of European arrogance, discrimination, and duplicity. Maori literature reveals the effects of xenophobic attitudes brought to New Zealand by nineteenth-century colonizers and administrators. Examples of both short- and long-term effects can be found in Witi Ihimaera’s epic novel The Matriarch (1986). The protagonist, Tamatea, speaks with intense anger: “Maori tribal lands from the very beginning, even before the ink was dry on the document, have been

1

UROPEAN

Bruce Ansley, “Tariana Turia does not talk to Bruce Ansley,” NZ Listener (16–22 September 2000): 12. 2 Ansley, “Tariana Turia does not talk to Bruce Ansley,” 13.

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illegally taken, granted, sold, leased, and wrongly withheld, misused and misplaced.”3 The document in question is the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. Article Two guaranteed Maori “undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess.”4 It seemed, to Maori who signed it, that it would protect their rights to their land, livelihood, and culture. Clearly, as history shows, it did not. Maori have long historic memories. In their novels and stories, they have shaped and transformed actual happenings or situations. In one section of The Matriarch, there is no transformation at all. Ihimaera’s relative Wi Pere was a Member of Parliament in the 1880s and 1890s. Many of his speeches have been lifted from parliamentary Hansard and placed in the novel, each introduced with a statement like the following, “Parliamentary Hansard: Want of Confidence, August 29, 1884, Mr Pere” (M 316). Wi Pere rails against unfair taxation and confiscation of Maori land, “In the year 1882 the Crown and Native Lands Rating Act was passed. […] The Act I refer to is very hard; after it has been in force a few years, if the rates are not paid, then the government will take our land in payment of those rates” (M 317). Much of the land in question was forested, providing essential resources for Maori, but not developed to produce revenue that would pay the rates imposed by the government. Many Maori are familiar with a range of problems faced by characters in Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki (1986). The most obvious problem relates to a dispute over land. The novel’s main setting is the author’s own ancestral land, a piece of valuable real estate coveted by European developers who have, in fact, repeatedly tried to wrest it from Patricia Grace’s family. The potiki, or youngest child, is Toko. His description of the life of his great-grandmother, a resilient woman in her nineties, draws attention to the consequences of land loss: As a young girl the hills where she had learnt the use of plants and known the trees and birds that lived there, had gone to others. She had lost her most loved and only brother, and later had outlived her husband, all of her children, and some of her grandchildren as well. She had seen grandchildren and great-grand-children leave and not return, or return broken and ill, only to leave again. [...]

3

Witi Ihimaera, The Matriarch (Auckland: Heinemann, 1986): 73. All subsequent quotations from the novel will be given parenthetically in the main text via the abbreviation M. 4 “Texts of the Treaty of Waitangi,” tr. Ian Hugh Kawharu, in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Ian Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1989): 317.

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I really understood for the first time that to Granny, loss and grief were ordinary and expected.5

Much of the tragedy suffered by Maori women like Granny can be attributed to poverty, which followed the removal of all prime, productive land from the Maori by 19006 and an ongoing loss of land over the next seventy-five years. Toko mentions loss of the hills behind the village. They would have been covered in forest that was vital to the traditional Maori way of life, being the source of plants for medication, food such as fern root, and wood for warmth and construction. Missionaries persuaded Maori to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, assuring them that, under its terms, their land could never be taken forcibly. William Hobson, the British Consul representing the Crown, assured the Maori that Queen Victoria “had a loving and protective concern for Maori.”7 Missionaries claimed that the Treaty was “the personal wish of the Queen” and “her act of love.”8 The intentions expressed and the arguments placed before Maori could scarcely have seemed more benign. Most Maori signatories signed a Maori version of the Treaty, little knowing that it differed from the English version. Retention of ‘absolute sovereignty’ by Maori is specifically stated in the Maori version. Only governorship (kawanatanga) is ceded to the Crown. ‘Absolute sovereignty’ of Maori over their land had already been acknowledged by Britain back in 1835.9 In the English version of the Treaty, however, ‘absolute sovereignty’ is transferred to the Crown. The Maori academic Bruce Biggs explains the difficulty of translating certain legal concepts into Maori, but states that the document could have achieved far greater clarity “if definitions of the Maori terms chosen [...] had been included, as is done, for example, with our statutes.”10 Another view is that the Maori version was deliberately made acceptable to Maori; it was “couched in terms designed to convince chiefs to sign.”11 5 Patricia Grace, Potiki (Auckland: Penguin, 1986): 140. All subsequent references to Potiki will be given parenthetically in the main text with the abbreviation P. 6 Tom Brooking, “‘Busting’ Up the Greatest Estate of All: Liberal Maori Land Policy 1891–1911,” NZ Journal of History 26.1 (1992): 78. 7 Robert Consedine & Joanna Consedine, Healing Our History (Auckland: Penguin, 1986): 87. 8 Consedine & Consedine, Healing Our History, 87. 9 Consedine & Consedine, Healing Our History, 84. 10 Bruce Biggs, “Humpty–Dumpty and the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Ian Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1989): 310–11. 11 Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987): 56.

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Nevertheless, the English version could have provided a fair measure of protection for Maori. It could have ensured continuation of the viable economic base vested in land and fisheries, which Maori enjoyed in 1840. Instead, Maori were pushed to the margins to live on the poorest pieces of land. In some cases, they were driven off land that the Pakeha (Europeans) wanted, in direct contravention of the Treaty. Many laws were framed in such a way as to steadily reduce Maori land holdings. The Native Land Court expropriated thousands of acres of Maori land. An Italian Benedictine priest who worked among the Maori in the latenineteenth century observed confusion over native titles created by successive land laws. He commented that “the legal fraternity had no qualms about joining with settlers in their rapaciousness and greed in sucking Maori dry in the Native Land Courts.”12 While Article Two of the Treaty promised that Maori land would be protected, Article Three promised Maori “all the Rights and Privileges of British subjects.”13 This, too, was contravened. Toko’s tribute to Granny makes reference to her suffering in “the bad times after the first war” (P 140): As a young woman she had been robbed and mistreated by those whose floors she had scrubbed. And as a young woman she had seen her children go hungry and cold, because although there had been government payments for others during the bad times after the first war, there had not been such benefits for people of our race. She had watched her children die. (P 140)

During the Depression, only half of the unemployment benefits paid to European men was paid to Maori men.14 A meager Widows’ Benefit, designed to reduce a widow’s working week from six to four days, became available in New Zealand in 1911. The Maori who applied received only seventy-five percent of that paid to European women unless “the applicant could be proved to be living like a European.”15 Prior to 1945, when these anomalies were amended, eighty percent of Maori lived in the country, without the European amenities of sewage and electricity. Most people living in the country pre1945 used outhouse toilets, known as long-drops or dunnies. To explain the willingness of administrators to ignore the Treaty of Waitangi, we have only to consider their fundamental attitudes and beliefs. Wil-

12

Consedine & Consedine, Healing Our History, 93. “Texts of the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, 317. 14 Consedine & Consedine, Healing Our History, 97–98. 15 Margaret McClure, A Civilised Community: A History of Social Security in New Zealand 1898–1998 (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1998): 112. 13

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liam Fox, four times Prime Minister of New Zealand between 1856 and 1873, provides an example.

2. Character and Attitude of the Colonizers In his scornful 1851 observations, Fox judged the Maori and their culture to be barbaric: How little they are removed from barbarism may be judged by the fact, that the fence of the pah, at Waikanae (where a missionary and a resident magistrate have resided for several years), continues to this day disfigured by a series of colossal statues, carved in wood, of the most obscene and disgusting designs.16

Carved statues represent ancestral figures in a culture where lineage and respect for forebears is fundamental. According to Maori protocol, the more ancient figures should be stylized, bearing no likeness to any living person, although legendary attributes may be indicated; the carved features of an orator might include an elongated tongue, while the strength of a warrior might be suggested by powerful thighs and shoulders. Fox was also dismissive of Maori canoes, remarking that the Maori had “purchased a few coastal vessels, but they have never yet attempted to build one, not even a boat,” adding that “they build, or rather scoop canoes out of a tree.”17 Fox seems unaware that canoes scooped out of trees had borne Maori throughout the Pacific, demonstrating the seaworthiness of the craft and the remarkable skill of Maori navigators. The colonizers who hid their xenophobia beneath blandishments and an appearance of concern were even more sinister than Fox. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, founder of the New Zealand Company in 1839, is a prime example. According to his own theory, his policies were designed to civilize “a barbarous people.”18 It was assumed that “vast areas – if possible, every acre – of New Zealand would be bought for a trifle, the real payment to the people of the land being their ‘civilising’ through colonisation.”19 The ‘civilizing’ is described as a “blessing,” given that one party was “immeasurably inferior to the other.”20 Wakefield proposed that land be set aside for Maori chiefs and 16 William Fox, The Six Colonies of New Zealand (facsimile no. 12 from an original edition, London: Parker, 1851; Dunedin: Hocken, 1971): 69. 17 Fox, The Six Colonies of New Zealand, 60–61. 18 Patricia Burns, ed. Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company (Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989): 52. 19 Burns, Fatal Success, 14. 20 Fatal Success, 53.

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held in reserve until they had “learned to estimate its value.”21 English families could “adopt”22 a chief to instruct him in the habits and culture of British settlers. In 1839, while still in England, settlers paid Wakefield for land in New Zealand, which had not yet been purchased from the Maori.23 In his later urgency to gain title to the not-yet-sold land, Wakefield was happy to ‘buy’ it from any Maori. Those willing to ‘sell’ in exchange for ‘trifles’ were not always the owners or those with the right to sell. Wakefield’s scheme is satirized in Patricia Grace’s story “Ngati Kangaru,” published in 1994. She transfers into contemporary times Wakefield’s method of acquiring Maori land. Just as forested and uncultivated areas were regarded by the colonizers as ‘wasteland’, so Grace describes holiday homes, used by wealthy owners for a few weeks in each year, as ‘waste homes’. Her protagonist, Billy, having read an historical account of Wakefield’s exploits, has the idea that ‘waste homes’ should be occupied by Maori from Australia, who are keen to return to New Zealand. Title deeds are drawn up and signed, not by the owners, but by ‘derros’, homeless fellows all too ready to offer a signature in return for a blanket, a coat or a bottle of whisky. “What do you want our signatures for?” they asked. “Deeds of sale for a hundred properties up in Claire Vista,” Billy said. “The only Claire Vistas we’ve got is where our bums hit the benches.” “Well, look here.” Billy showed them the maps with the allotments marked out on them and they were interested and pleased. “Waste homes,” Billy explained. “All these fellas have got plenty of other houses all over the place, but they’re simple people who know nothing about how to fully utilise their properties and they can scarcely ‘cultivate the earth.’ But who knows they might have a ‘peculiar aptitude for being improved.’ It's ‘high and holy work,’ this.” “Too right. Go for it,” the geezers said.24

The attitudes of Fox and Wakefield exemplify a nineteenth-century mind-set, which regarded the white race as the pinnacle of civilization. Maori were thought to be among those belonging to the lower races of humankind, al-

21

Burns, Fatal Success, 53. Fatal Success, 53. 23 Fatal Success, 16–17. 24 Patricia Grace, “Ngati Kangaru,” in Grace, The Sky People and Other Stories (Auckland: Penguin, 1994): 34–35. The phrases in single quotation marks have been taken by Patricia Grace from the writing of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, reprinted in Fatal Success by Patricia Burns. Although not named in the story, this is the book that inspires Grace’s protagonist Billy. 22

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though, in considering the place of the Maori on the social ladder, “there was universal agreement that he was a very superior savage.”25 The mind-set has been responsible for a long-term legacy of institutionalized racism taking many forms. Patricia Grace provides one example in her story “Going For Bread” (1987), set during World War Two and based on an actual episode experienced during her childhood. Her character, Mereana, aged about five, is set upon by two girls, called “dirty,” and overpowered. The girls cut her face with a piece of glass. Later, Mereana’s mother confronts the mother of the culprits: When the door opened Mereana’s mother couldn’t think what to say for a moment. Then she said, “This is my daughter. This is what your daughters did to her. Here’s the piece of glass.” “Get off my steps,” the woman said. “Don’t come here with your dirty daughter and your dirty lies,” and she shut the door.26

The words of Mereana’s mother reflect a prejudice that was widespread when Patricia Grace was a girl in the 1940s. The prejudice expressed itself, not only in overt racism, but in the policy governing the education of Maori children. Because the British believed in the superiority of their race, culture, and the English language, Maori children were not permitted to use their own language at school. The pain of being compelled, without any special tuition, to speak English has been expressed by many contemporary Maori writers. In her autobiography, Mihi Edwards describes what happened after the lunch break on her first day at school. I am called to the front of the class, reminded not to speak a word of Maori at school again. [The teacher] then gives me the strap around my legs. I am really crying by this time. Someone has told tales on me, for the teachers were not anywhere near. [...] The other Maori children had a smattering of English. I did not, because I was from Maketu, a fluent Maori-speaking area where there was no English spoken. My Kui and Koro didn’t speak English.27

To inhibit and forestall children’s first language acquisition is to undermine their progress in second-language learning and to retard their conceptual development. The Maori language, fully developed, carries cultural beliefs and protocols, wisdom, proverbs, songs, and poetry. Rather than fostering their 25

Colin McGeorge, “Race, Empire and the Maori in the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum 1880–1940,” in The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: Routledge, 1993): 64. 26 Patricia Grace, “Going for Bread,” in Grace, Electric City and other Stories (Auckland: Penguin, 1987): 50. 27 Mihi Edwards, “Mihipeka: Early Years (extracts),” in Te Ao Marama, vol. 1, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Reed, 1992): 67–68.

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children’s competence in Maori, parents often tried to help their children’s education by speaking English at home. However, the parental example was frequently faulty and the vocabulary limited. Like their children, the parents had not received appropriate instruction in English.

3. Long-Term Effects of Xenophobic Attitudes Poor school performance followed inevitably from poor English-language skills. Many Maori were relegated to manual labour, forming the most vulnerable socio-economic class. The minority of Maori who have not been economically disadvantaged or have overcome economic disadvantage are represented today in all professions. Throughout the twentieth century, many families struggled to survive with a diminished economic base. The option of continuing to work on ancestral land became less viable as time went on. Ihimaera’s story “The House with Sugarbag Windows” (1977) offers a situation that was typical in the late 1940s and 1950s: The family lived on tribal land, a small patch of thin soil which lay at the periphery of the expanse his people had once held in common. The rich and fertile lowland now belonged to the Pakeha. Only remnants of the ancestral land, like pieces of broken biscuit remained to his father and others like him. On this land his father and mother raised subsistence crops – the kumara, corn, kamokamo [...]. The earth was good to them and kind but even she could not sustain them through all her seasons. Winter, when earth grew old, was the leanest season of all, leaner still if Watene’s father was too long without the paid work which would enable them to have mutton, sugar and other groceries most families took for granted. Then it was a matter of keeping warm, carrying on and waiting for the earth to grow young again.28

The children walked six miles to catch the school bus. Hardship and distance from amenities drove hundreds of Maori families, in the 1960s and 1970s, into the cities, where workers were needed in expanding industries. Potiki demonstrates the next step, historically. Toko’s father, Hemi Tamihana, lost his job at the freezing works, a familiar situation in the late 1970s and 1980s as factories, having become more efficient and highly mechanized, required fewer workers. Hemi’s decision to provide for his family by growing vegetable crops on ancestral land is not typical. The family was fortunate in having retained part of its land in an area not too distant from schools and

28

Witi Ihimaera, “The House with Sugarbag Windows,” in Ihimaera, The New Net Goes Fishing (Auckland: Heinemann, 1977): 160.

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other services. Although there is barely enough acreage, fish and shellfish provide a valuable dietary supplement. The novel deals with the Tamihana family’s battle against Pakeha developers, who want to build a road through the property to gain direct access to the next bay, site of a proposed tourist facility. Family members are persecuted for their refusal to sell part of their land. Their burial ground is deliberately flooded. Later, their meetinghouse is burnt down. Later still, the rebuilt meetinghouse is booby-trapped. The explosion causes the death of a child. In retaliation, the young people of the family sabotage earth-moving equipment belonging to the development company. The parents do not chastize their children for taking the law into their own hands, an attitude that is not, under the circumstances, difficult to understand. Even greater understanding can follow, if the event is placed in its historical context, as Robert Consedine does in the following: since the signing of the Treaty, every generation of Maori has engaged in protest against the colonisation of their country. The protest has taken many forms, including letters and delegations to queens and kings in London; petitions to Parliament; direct challenges to the authority and legitimacy of the government; armed resistance in the Land Wars; passive resistance at Parihaka; a variety of religious and political movements; court cases; appeals to the Privy Council; formation of Maori political parties; the occupation of buildings and land; marches, pickets, blocking roads and bridges; the creative development of Maori systems (often started voluntarily) in language, education, justice, health and the news media. And the message has remained the same: Honour the Treaty.29

Sabotage of road-building equipment can be viewed as one more protest in the context of many, given the repeated failure of legitimate forms of objection. 4. Embracing the Other

There is a Maori proverb that asks, “What are the three most important things in the world?” The answer is “People, People, People.” Respect for people is fundamental to Maori culture. Unfortunately, the respect Maori showed toward the early colonizers was not always returned. In many parts of the world, xenophobia has been overt, with genocide its most extreme expression. But what of the covert xenophobia of colonizers? How many deaths of indigenous people have resulted from the processes of colonization? No-one dares to put a figure on it. If we focus on New Zealand, 29

Consedine & Consedine, Healing Our History, 77–78.

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should we include deaths through impoverishment and hunger resulting from loss of land and loss of an economic base? Should we count deaths resulting from land wars, in which indigenous people tried desperately to retain control of their ancestral land? Should we include those who died in Dunedin, imprisoned without trial in freezing caves, for ploughing their land in Taranaki, land which the colonizers were surveying for their own purposes? “He iwi kotahi tatou. We are one people.” Those words, spoken on behalf of the Crown at the signing of the Treaty, implied that Maori would not be regarded as Other. The words were benign, reassuring, but without substance. It was not until 1987 that Crown and Maori were acknowledged, in a Court of Appeal judgement, to be Treaty partners.30 Maori believed that the partnership had been established in 1840, but that understanding was not shared by the colonizers of the time. The Waitangi Tribunal was established in 1975, and its powers extended in 1985 to examine and settle grievances arising from breaches of the Treaty. It has taken account of both English and Maori versions, also considering reports of intentions and records of explanations given to the Maori by missionaries in 1840. The work of the Tribunal honours the spirit of the Treaty, providing procedures that can lead, in time, to the removal of the burden of grievances. Maori writers have played a crucial part in dispelling racist attitudes like those of the mother in “Going for Bread.” Their novels, stories, plays, and poetry stir a response in non-Maori, engendering a passionate commitment to ensuring a greater measure of justice for Maori, especially through the retrospective honouring of the Treaty through the Waitangi Tribunal. As Patricia Grace has observed, “gaps and discrepancies, in education, health, work and social status will not lessen until the yawning chasm in understanding of the Treaty is breached, until racism in all its forms is [ended].”31 Maori have always welcomed and embraced those who respect their culture. Today, the writers – Maori authors of fiction, together with revisionist historians, both Maori and Pakeha – are fostering greater understanding of New Zealand’s history and celebrating Maori culture and traditions.

30

Ian Hugh Kawharu, “Introduction” to Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Ian Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1989): xii. 31 Patricia Grace, as cited by Consedine & Consedine in Healing Our History, 228.

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WORKS CITED “Texts of the Treaty of Waitangi,” tr. Ian Hugh Kawharu in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Ian Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford UP, 1989): 316–21. Ansley, Bruce. “Tariana Turia does not talk to Bruce Ansley,” NZ Listener (16–22 September 2000): 12. Biggs, Bruce. “Humpty–Dumpty and the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Ian Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1989): 300–12. Brooking, Tom. “‘Busting’ Up the Greatest Estate of All: Liberal Maori Land Policy 1891–1911,” NZ Journal of History 6.1 (1992): 78–98. Burns, Patricia, ed. Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company (Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989). Consedine, Robert, & Joanna Consedine. Healing Our History (Auckland: Penguin, 1986). Edwards, Mihi. “Mihipeka: Early Years (extracts),” in Te Ao Marama, vol. 1, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Reed, 1992): 62–79. Fox, William. The Six Colonies of New Zealand (facsimile no. 12 from an original edition, London: Parker, 1851; Dunedin: Hocken, 1971). Grace, Patricia. “Ngati Kangaru,” in Grace, The Sky People and Other Stories (Auckland: Penguin, 1994): 25–43. ——. Potiki (Penguin: Auckland, 1986). ——. “Going for Bread,” in Grace, Electric City and Other Stories (Auckland: Penguin, 1987): 47–51. Ihimaera, Witi. The Matriarch (Auckland: Heinemann, 1986). ——. “The House with Sugarbag Windows,” in Ihimaera, The New Net Goes Fishing (Auckland: Heinemann, 1977): 153–64. Kawharu, Ian Hugh. “Introduction,” in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Ian Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1989): i– xxiv. McClure, Margaret. A Civilised Community: A History of Social Security in New Zealand 1898–1998 (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1998). McGeorge, Colin. “Race, Empire and the Maori in the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum 1880–1940,” in The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: Routledge, 1993): 63–78. Orange, Claudia. The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

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‘Daft Questions’ Xenophobia, Teaching, and Social Semiosis in Caribbean-British Fiction: Using Intertextuality and Narratology to Analyze a Text by David Dabydeen

R USSELL W EST –P AVLOV

D

D A B Y D E E N – Caribbean-British poet, novelist, and Professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick – when asked by an interviewer if he felt himself to be the object of racist attitudes, gave a significantly nuanced reply: AVID

There has been a deep liberal mood in Britain from Magna Carta days to today. So whilst there is illiberalism, there has always been a liberal mood, and we have to exist in that liberal mood. So I wouldn’t dismiss England as a racist society. That is too simplistic. It is racist, but it also has anti-racist elements.1

Dabydeen’s perspective is not merely that of a privileged upper-middle-class Caribbean, for he grew up in a situation of genuine poverty both in his native Guyana and in South London, and constantly thematizes the tension between poverty and social ascent. Rather, it is that of an observer both passionately engaged and critically distanced. It may be because Dabydeen sees British society in a highly differentiated light, acknowledging both racist and liberal tendencies in the British political and social tradition, that the problem of xenophobia is sketched with such a light hand in his fictional work. It is hardly surprising that Dabydeen’s 1991 début novel The Intended, which recounts a Guyanese adolescent’s struggles to extract himself from 1

Frank Birbalsingh, “Interview with David Dabydeen,” in The Art of David Dabydeen, ed. Kevin Grant (London: Peepal Tree, 1977): 191.

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South London immigrant poverty through education, only ever treats xenophobia very indirectly. Early on in the novel, the protagonist’s Pakistani schoolfriend Nasim is chased through the streets by a group of neo-Nazi thugs until he is run over by a car.2 Nasim subsequently moves to Bradford, where the Asian majority makes the streets safer for immigrants. Violence is everywhere in the narrator’s South London: The sound of breaking glass broke my dream. […] The broken bottle was raised and plunged into someone’s back. I could see its edge glinting in the lamplight, radiating particles of glass as it rose and fell and tunneled into flesh in one prolonged delayed motion, one sensuous curve of hatred. (129–30)

Xenophobia is far more evident in the text in the narrator’s internalized sense of bodily fragility – he describes himself as “ragged […] dark-skinned and ugly” (226) or “meagre and unworthy of attention” (243) – or in symptoms of desolidarization with other immigrants, such as a group of black West Indians on the same bus, “I come from their place, but I’m different really, I’m darkskinned like them, but I’m different, and I hope the whites can see that and separate me from that lot” (177). It is precisely in the interstices of discriminatory and liberal discourses that Dabydeen situates his own teaching as an academic and, significantly for a novel in which education is a major thematic strand, his practice as a writer. Together with Nana Wilson–Tagoe, Dabydeen issued the following programmatic statement at the end of the 1980s: We are particularly interested in promoting an appreciation of these [i.e. African and Caribbean] literatures in secondary schools, thereby reaching a large readership of young minds who are the future’s writers, scholars, workers and next-door neighbours. Our immediate society and larger world are irrevocably multi-racial: the appreciation of literature can be a crucial activity in deepening people’s understanding of each other, of combating ignorance and the violent injustices that spring from ignorance.3

In this context, it is important to read Dabydeen’s work as a cultural intervention within the fields both of literary production and of education. The fact that The Intended speaks of xenophobia, of internalized inferiority, and of the role of the educational system in such structures is an index of its awareness of the complex interrelationships between subjectivity, texts (both literary and

2 David Dabydeen, The Intended (1991; London: Vintage, 1993): 12–14. All subsequent quotations from the novel are given parenthetically in the main text. 3 David Dabydeen & Nana Wilson–Tagoe, A Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature (London: Hansib, 1988): 9.

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social) and the processes that generate such texts, and the determining discourses they transmit or contest. In this essay, I wish to employ two theoretical constructs, the concept of intertextuality and that of narrative levels, to suggest fruitful ways of thinking about Dabydeen’s The Intended in relationship to our own teaching practices. In the postcolonial context, the notion of intertextuality, originally forged by Julia Kristeva to describe the transposition of an element from one signifying system into another, the presence of one text in another,4 becomes an important instrument of theoretical analysis, and, for writers aware of their task, of cultural intervention. In acknowledging the significance not just of debt or appreciation in the relation of one text to another, but also of disturbance or conflict – on the one hand, in relation to the source system, and, on the other, in relation to the target system5 – it can take account of colonial and neocolonial struggles acted out at the level of text. Gérard Genette’s typology of the forms of ‘transtextuality’, of which intertextuality is one variant (the others being metatextuality or commentary, paratextuality or parody, pastiche, etc),6 or models of macro-intertextuality such as Juri Lotman’s typologies of cultural exchange,7 offer the possibility of mapping intertextual relationships within broader cross-cultural configurations. Intertextuality can be located first and foremost as traces and echoes of predecessor-texts in the target text; it must also, however, be located diachronically, in the relationships between a text and its textual antecedents and to potential textual successors; and synchronically in relationship to other texts with which it enters into a ‘dialogue’ within the field of contested social meanings.8 This question of the location of intertextual relations will become important in the second half of this essay, where I will deal with the site occupied by the writer, reader or student in relationship to the literary text and broader social context in which reading takes place.

4

See Julia Kristeva, Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969): 74, 83–112, 194–96, 272–73; Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationelle (The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1970): 139–76; Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du X I X e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974): 59. 5 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford U P , 1973); Laurent Jenny, “La Stratégie de la forme,” Poétique 27 (1976): 261. 6 Gérard Genette, Introduction à l’architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979): 87–88. 7 Juri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, tr. Ann Shukman (London: Tauris, 1990). 8 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981).

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Dabydeen is concerned with the context in which reading, and intertextual reading in particular, is enacted, as his careful indication of the actual conditions of reading in The Intended makes clear: Shaz would come round each Sunday to gain guidance for his ‘A’ level literature exam. […] Joseph would tag along now and again and listen to us analysing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The two of them sat on the bed and I, the professor, took the chair. I would select key passages from the text, read them aloud and dissect them in terms of theme and imagery, as I had been taught to do by our English teacher. (94)

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness figures within The Intended as the principal pedagogic text through which reading skills, and thus access to hegemonic English culture, subsequently endorsed by examination results and university entrance, is transmitted to a young generation of immigrants: I wanted to be somebody and the only way to achieve this was to acquire a collection of good examination results and go to university. Everything was planned: I would try for top grades in my three ‘A’ levels, then I’d do a B.A. degree at Oxford or Cambridge and a Ph.D. I would write books, and one day become a celebrity, or writer. (113)

Clearly, the practice of reading is deeply implicated in the transmission and ‘reproduction’ of cultural values and social relations in Bourdieu’s sense. In The Intended, the reproduction of social values is enacted both through the educational narrative inherent to the novel, and through the intertextual indices of textual production strewn through the text. There are many varieties of intertextuality at work in The Intended. Dabydeen himself has commented on the very deeply personal intertextuality that links him to the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, the Trinidadian Sam Selvon or the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite,9 while Döring has explored the intertextuality that connects Dabydeen to Naipaul.10 Here, however, I wish to explore the intertextual relationship to Conrad, because it is the most explicitly ‘marked’ form of intertextuality, without a doubt intentionally so (whence, perhaps one punning meaning in the novel’s Conradian title The Intended11), and the clearest exemplification of the processes I want to illustrate.

9 Kwame Dawes, “Interview with David Dabydeen,” in The Art of David Dabydeen, ed. Kevin Grant (London: Peepal Tree, 1977): 210–11; Tobias Döring, “The Passage of the I / Eye: David Dabydeen, V.S. Naipaul and the Tombstones of Parabiography,” in Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, ed. Alfred Hornung & Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1998). 10 Tobias Döring, Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (London: Routledge, 2002): 109–36. 11 Döring, Caribbean–English Passages, 115.

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In The Intended, intertextuality, activated in the moment of reading and discussion, becomes the site of cultural contestation. The narrator takes on the pedagogic persona constantly performed in school, and by which he proleptically rehearses his own successful integration into, and thus reproduction of, the dominant cultural and economic system. His Rastafarian friend Joseph, however, persists in asking “daft questions […] which my training in themeand-imagery spotting didn’t equip me to answer fully” (99), thus making intertextuality the site of a ‘conflict of interpretations’, hence of the disrupted transmission of hegemonic white cultural values. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the way Dabydeen employs intertextuality so as to place it in a conflicted social field. The first example occurs during one of the informal after-school reading sessions, when Conrad’s text becomes the theatre of a struggle of interpretative modes. On the one hand, there are the narrator’s docile ‘New-Critical’ close-reading methods, on the other, Joseph’s hallucinatory quasi-mystical Rastafarian mode of eschatological reading, which treats words as ‘things’:12 “But what ’bout the way he talk ’bout black people?” Joseph persisted […] “What black people?” I asked uncertainly. He snatched Heart of Darkness from my hand and peered at the page, unable to decipher the words […] “Where the bit about them lying under trees dying?” he demanded, shoving the book at me. I flicked through, found the passage and read it aloud to him. “That’s part of the theme of suffering and redemption which lies at the core of the novel’s concern,” I stated cogently and intelligently, putting the book down. “No, it ain’t, it ’bout colours. […] The white light of England and the Thames is the white sun over the Congo that can’t mix with the green of the bush and the black skin of the people.” (97–98)

Dabydeen is concerned to make sure that these intertextual passages are clearly marked.13 Indeed, he is simply making explicit, albeit massively so, one of the basic tenets of the theory of intertextuality: namely, that the intertext must be readable, figurable;14 intertextuality must pass via an interpretant, in the words of Michael Worton and Michael Riffaterre, reformulating C.S. Peirce.15

12 See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung [1900], Gesammelte Werke, II.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999): 301–302, 309. 13 See Jörg Helbig, Intertextualität und Markierung: Untersuchungen zur Systematik und Funktion der Signalisierung von Intertextualität (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1996). 14 Jenny, “La Stratégie de la forme,” 257. 15 Michael Worton, “Intertextuality: to inter textuality or to resurrect it?” in Crossreferences: Modern French theory and the practice of criticism, ed. David Kelley & Isabelle Llasera (London: Society for French Studies, 1986): 18; Michael Riffaterre, “Sémiotique

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It is for this reason that the passage contains a clear reference to the Conradian pre-text. Of greater significance, however, are the indices of the activation of that pre-text, which range from the haptic, the physical exchange, to the implementation of an educationally based discourse of interpretation – and its resistance: “No, it ain’t” (98). The thematics of the passage, the ubiquitous question of ‘colour’ can be found in the pre-text: My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within that it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. […] Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair. […] They were dying slowly – it was very clear. […] Then glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined with one shoulder against the tree […]. The man […] had tied a piece of white worsted round his neck […] An ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act?16

In the Conradian phenotext, the thematics of colour, so central to all discourses of racism, is subjected to a further strategy of activation (the hermeneutic mode confronted with a choice between badge, ornament, charm, and propitiatory act), posed however in an uncertain, questioning manner. Thus even the genotext is, it would appear, always already a phenotext processing a prior signifying material,17 a material so resistant that it generates the modernist text in its archetypal mode of self-reflexive query. The second example also includes a clear reference to a prior passage in Heart of Darkness. Once again, the mode of activation of the genotext at the level of the phenotext is foregrounded: we began […] analysing passages in Conrad’s novel. Shaz, the camera focused on him, made strenuous efforts at eloquence. […] Unfortunately it was on one of those frequent occasions when Joseph had pressed the wrong combination of switches so that nothing was recorded on the tape. Shaz broke out in indecent expressions, accusing him of primitive incompetence. “You’re just like one of those savages chewing bones on the river bank and scooting off whenever the white man blows the steamer-horn.” As if to prove the point about Joseph’s incomprehension of white man’s technology, he picked up the book, found the passage about the African fireman and read it triumphantly aloud to the camera, telling Joseph to roll

intertextuelle: l’interprétant,” Rhétoriques, Sémiotiques: Revue d’esthétique 1.2 (1979) (Paris: U G E 10/18, 1979): 128–50. 16 Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” in Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (1899; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 156–57. 17 These terms are borrowed from Julia Kristeva, “Quelques problèmes de sémiotique littéraire à propos d’un texte de Mallarmé: Un coup de dés,” in Essais de sémiotique poétique, ed. Algirdas Julien Greimas (Paris: Larousse, 1972).

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the film […] finally exploding in an outburst about the stupidity of niggers and how unscientific they were. (106)

Analysis, interpretation, reading, performance, are clearly all ways of making the text work in a given social situation – something, Shaz claims with reference to technology, that the African Joseph is not capable of doing. Here, intertextuality is not merely generative of textual productivity; far more than this, it becomes the raw material for the creation and perpetuation of social meanings – in this case patently racist – outside the text. In this way Dabydeen underscores the full significance of reading, against all claims for the irrelevance of literature in today’s world. His protagonist admits “learn[ing] to read the world through novels” (183–84). In Conrad’s pre-text, the African fireman has also undergone a sort of education in reading: I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. […] A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity. […] He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this – that should the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible revenge. And so he sweated and fired and watched the glass fearfully.18

In the last analysis, Conrad’s fireman is also a reader of the world, according to the novel a technological paradigm, but one which is also generated by its own pre-technological phenotext. What these examples show us is that intertextuality is caught up in processes of interpretation which make social life function – literally, which make life go on. Whence the importance Dabydeen attributes to the reading of non-canonical postcolonial literature. At this point I want to move to the next stage of my analysis, and introduce the second theoretical construct, that of narrative levels. As intimated above, I use this notion in order to situate the contestation of cultural meanings, across relationships of intertextuality, as a process of textual production. The traditional concept inaugurated by Viktor Shklovsky, which generated contemporary theories of narrative levels, distinguished between events as chronologically ordered and/ or causally connected (fabula) and their artistic ordering in the text on the page (sujet).19 This is analogous to Genette’s distinction between histoire and discours/récit. Genette, like Shlomith Rimon– 18

Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” 187–88. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher (Elmswood Park I L : Dalkey Archive, 1990). 19

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Kenan, also supplements these two levels with a further level, that of narration as enunciation. Mieke Bal also adds a third level of narration as enunciation, but it already encompasses the words on the page, as does Gerald Prince’s category of ‘narrating’ or Franz Stanzel’s notion of ‘mediation’ by the teller or reflector, whereas for Genette and Rimon–Kenan, the enunciative act commences beyond the material text, presumably in the moment of its activation and reception by a reader.20 The lack of consensus regarding the precise point at which story shades into discourse, and at which discourse in turn modulates into enunciation gives me my mandate to extend the process of text-production inherent in the theory of narrative levels beyond the domain of the text itself into that of its reception and debates about its meaning. I would argue that none of the locations proposed by these various theoreticians is in itself exclusively valid, but that together they make up a collective theoretical recognition that what is discourse in one context can become story – the raw material for a discourse located at a superior level of narration – in another context, with that discourse in turn furnishing the building-blocks for a further site of narrative performance. Thus this slippage in the location of story and discourse embodies the very possibilities of unlimited productivity within a social context that I detect in the theory of narrative levels. The third movement of my theoretical operation in this essay is to combine the concepts of intertextuality and narrative levels to create a theory of social semiosis. Processes of transmission are enacted and rehearsed in the text, based upon the fact that intertextuality is embedded in respective narrative levels. If intertextuality is evidence of the generative history of a text,21 and the theory of narrative levels demonstrates that productive textual processes can be identified within the text’s own levels of enunciation, both concepts can be mapped onto each other to obtain a model of textual production which is both diachronic and synchronic in nature. Every instance of narrative discourse is constructed out of prior story material; every instance of discourse can in turn provide the raw material for a superior level of textual production. Through his emphasis on the social activity of reading, underlined by the sometimes subtle, sometimes massive foregrounding of intertextuality in The Intended, Dabydeen demands that we pay close attention to the interminable processes of textual production. Let us follow the successive levels of text-production in Dabydeen’s novel. The Congo plot, or fabula in the Shklovskian sense, makes up the raw story material which is worked up into Marlow’s sujet, itself a genuine instance of 20

Cf. Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1993): 60–64. 21 Michael Riffaterre, La Production du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1979).

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‘discourse’ and, indeed, a mimetic representation of narrative enunciation. This discourse, however, is merely the ‘story’ which is encompassed by and constitutes the basis for the frame-narrator’s ‘discourse’. His discourse in turn becomes the ‘story’ for Conrad’s narrative discourse in Heart of Darkness as a global work. In Dabydeen’s The Intended, Conrad’s fictional discourse becomes literally the story which the young teenage protagonist is reading for his A-Level exams. The Guyanan immigrant’s story, in turn, is worked up into the fabric of Dabydeen’s narrative voice as discourse. To continue this chain of productive transformations, the reader transmutes Dabydeen’s discourse into the ‘story’ being constructed in the active process of reading. This reading discourse itself can become the story-basis for distanced, critical reflection upon the text and its social significance. Here we have moved well beyond the customary boundaries of the ‘story’/ ’discourse’ distinction, but in the last analysis, the concept itself demands this sort of infinite extension away from the core story. A somewhat looser but analogous process of successive levels of production of meaning can be detected in the text’s thematization of reading as an educational practice. Reading (in particular the technique of ‘close reading’ for theme and imagery) is taught in the protagonist’s school but is then transported into the extracurricular context of the bedsit debates carried on with Shaz and Joseph, and is thereby subject to a process of transformative production. This ‘story’ is, in turn, transformed within the discourse of Dabydeen as writer (and, more shadowly, as educator and teacher-trainer). Dabydeen’s own discourse becomes the story-material for students (many of them teacher-trainees) and their debate in the context of university seminars; a further concentric circle of ‘transformative textual practice’ is constituted by their future professional practice as teachers of English in high schools. Once again, these levels of ‘textual practice’ as ‘productive practice’, which potentially run against the grain of the reproduction of hegemonic structures, can be extended indefinitely. Intertextuality offers a model of text-construction in which available ‘pretexts’ are used as building-blocks for the new text. Further, it also offers a model of reality-construction: texts serve as explanatory templates to deal with social situations. The self-reflexivity of the literary text, by which the text foregrounds its pre-text and thereby reveals its process of production, is mirrored by the movement between story- and discourse-levels of the text: i.e. between the narrative material and the process of narrative construction. Intertextuality thus necessarily entails a process of reflection upon the ways in which the reader is implied within processes of social meaning-making. Furthermore, intertextuality reaches back into the past (into the archive of available texts) and into the future (towards textual and non-textual reactivation

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and dynamization). It is thus a potentially interminable process. As C.S. Peirce writes, Transuasion in its obsistent aspect, or Mediation, will be shown to be subject to two degrees of degeneracy. Genuine mediation is the character of a sign. A Sign is anything which is related to a second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a fourth into relation to that object in the same form, ad infinitum.22

Peirce stresses that “If the series is broken off, the sign, in so far, falls short of the perfect significant character.”23 He explains ‘transuasion’ as the difference within the sign, a sort of resistance or obstinate difficulty which guarantees its productivity and generates the infinite series of interpretations constituting signification.24 Here one must think of Joseph’s ‘daft questions’ which interrupt the smooth reproduction of hegemonic cultural values via docile readings of canonical texts, so as to introduce the possibility of new meanings and thus of novel perceptions of the world. In the context of teaching, understood as the logical extension of this textual productivity, there emerges a situation in which “presentation [is no longer] a (mere) supplement to inquiry” and in which “every pedagogical exposition, just like every reading, adds something to what it transmits.”25 This interminable process of signifying productivity is the semiotic equivalent of the equally interminable process of refiguring of the text that can occur in the process of reading, and in the process of teaching. Such processes fundamentally work against the formation and hardening of clichés and stereotypes. Thus teaching can contribute to the ongoing creativity and ‘difficulty’ of thought in a social context, which is a vital antidote to the rigid structures of identity and identity-ascription that underlie racism.26 Dabydeen himself has commented that “it is our responsibility as immigrant writers to support, sustain and contribute to the anti-racist elements [in British society], by helping to develop the society as a whole, and by contributing our arts and 22 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. I / II, ed. Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1974): 51; see also Antoine Compagnon, La Seconde Main: ou Le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979): 57–65. 23 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. I/II, 51. 24 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. I/II, 50. 25 George L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1985): 162. 26 See Hans–Christoph Koller, “Bildung und Migration: Bildungstheoretische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Bourdieu und Cultural Studies,” in Bildung / Transformation: Kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Umbrüche aus bildungstheoretischer Perspektive, ed. Werner Friedrichs & Olaf Sanders (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2002): 181–200.

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sciences, education and business skills and whatever else to the society.”27 If as readers and teachers / learners we are engaged in a task analogous to writing in its productivity, then the responsibility evoked by Dabydeen is one in which we too share.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). Birbalsingh, Frank. “Interview with David Dabydeen,” in The Art of David Dabydeen, ed. Kevin Grant (London: Peepal Tree, 1977): 177–98. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford U P , 1973). Compagnon, Antoine. La Seconde main: ou Le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979). Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness,” in Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (1899; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990). Dabydeen, David. The Intended (1991; London: Vintage, 1993). ——, & Nana Wilson–Tagoe. A Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature (London: Hansib, 1988). Dawes, Kwame. “Interview with David Dabydeen,” in The Art of David Dabydeen, ed. Kevin Grant (London: Peepal Tree, 1977): 199–221. Döring, Tobias. Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (London: Routledge, 2002). ——. “The Passage of the I/ Eye: David Dabydeen, V.S. Naipaul and the Tombstones of Parabiography,” in Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, ed. Alfred Hornung & Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1998): 150–66. Fludernik, Monika. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1993). Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung [1900], Gesammelte Werke, II.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999). Genette, Gérard. Introduction à l’architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979). Helbig, Jörg. Intertextualität und Markierung: Untersuchungen zur Systematik und Funktion der Signalisierung von Intertextualität (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1996). Jenny, Laurent. “La Stratégie de la forme,” Poétique 27 (1976): 257–81. Koller, Hans–Christoph. “Bildung und Migration: Bildungstheoretische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Bourdieu und Cultural Studies,” in Bildung / Transformation: Kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Umbrüche aus bildungstheoretischer Perspektive, ed. Werner Friedrichs & Olaf Sanders (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2002): 181–200.

27

Dabydeen, in Frank Birbalsingh, “Interview with David Dabydeen,” in The Art of David Dabydeen, ed. Kevin Grant (London: Peepal Tree, 1977): 191.

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Kristeva, Julia. “Quelques problèmes de sémiotique littéraire à propos d’un texte de Mallarmé: Un coup de dés,” in Essais de sémiotique poétique, ed. Algirdas Julien Greimas (Paris: Larousse, 1972): 208–34. ——. La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du X I X e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974). ——. Le Texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationelle (The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1970). ——. Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969). Lotman, Juri. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, tr. Ann Shukman (London: Tauris, 1990). Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers, vol. I/ II, ed. Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1974). Peraldi, François. “Traduire: Application de quelque concepts de la sémanalyse à l’opération traduisante” (Université de Paris VII, Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes, thèse de doctorat de 3e cycle, 1975). Riffaterre, Michael. La Production du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1979). ——. “Sémiotique intertextuelle: l’interprétant,” Rhétoriques, Sémiotiques: Revue d’esthétique 1–2 (1979; Paris: U G E 10/18, 1979): 128–50. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher (Elmswood Park I L : Dalkey Archive, 1990). Ulmer, George L. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1985). Worton, Michael. “Intertextuality: to inter textuality or to resurrect it?” in Crossreferences: Modern French theory and the practice of criticism, ed. David Kelley & Isabelle Llasera (London: Society for French Studies, 1986): 14–23.

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B ORDER N ARRATIVES «•»

How Brave Is Our New World? M ALA P ANDURANG

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N I M P O R T A N T F E A T U R E of the fourteenth A S N E L conference organized at the University of Erfurt in Germany in 2002 was the repeated calls for more pluralistic paradigms while investigating narratives of marginalized and minority groups. This is in keeping with the theme of the conference, Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English. It is heartening to note that the theme of the A S N E L conference at the University of Magdeburg, Germany, in 2003 was Global Fragments, especially since there is an urgent need to problematize globalization theories suggestive of a brave new world order on the one hand, and an impending clash of civilizations on the other hand. It is imperative that, as academicians, we remain conscious that our own theoretical responses are inevitably bound up with location, are paradigm laden, and are far from neutral. There can be no pure response, however universal the concern may be. As critics, we are placed in a paradoxical position. We deconstruct ‘otherness’, while simultaneously positioned along the axes of race, class, gender, and nationality. My own area of interest is migrant narratives. Scholars of the phenomenon of human migration conceptualized under the rubric of Diaspora Studies usually operate with two key terms – that of the homeland (sending territory) and that of the host (receiving nation). To scholars within the metropolitan academic centers of the West, the host or the receiving state is largely the focal point of investigation. The large-scale immigration of a non-white labour force has become a major determinate of contemporary social experience in developed / Western nations, and therefore much analysis is directed towards the emergence of a ‘new world culture’ within these geographical spaces. In the United Kingdom, as Stuart Hall has stated, there is a strong link

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between the diasporas created by colonial and ensuing postcolonial migrations, and the emergence of contemporary cultural hybridities.1 My own geo-intellectual location is from within a women’s university in Mumbai, India.2 My focus is not the host country but the home. In the context of my work, the sending nation is the post-1947 Indian nation. For the home nation, it is the phenomenon of emigration and not of immigration that is of central interest. The West is not the site of enunciation. The Indian is the Self and not the Other. I use the term Indian to demarcate the geopolitical space of the Indian nation state, which is about one-and-a-half times the size of Western Europe, with a population of one billion people, eighteen official languages, about 1,562 dialects, nine practising religions, and a diaspora of approximately twenty-two million people. As a middle-class Indian woman located within this geopolitical space, I am already a mass of hyphens. In much of the theorizing that has emerged from the West from the late twentieth century onwards, there is a certain excitement about catch phrases such as ‘subnational’, ‘transnational fluidity of the contemporary world’, ‘border spaces’, and ‘multiple affiliations’. Multiculturalism, however, is not a newly emerging phenomenon but an operating concept within a syncretic 5,000-years-old Indian civilization. As Kumkum Sangari states, “hybridity need not be an east west binary that is usually privileged by western based writers but should incorporate the complex cultural intersections of regional, linguistic, castes, class and gender affiliations.”3 Equally, what passes for the West – and is internalized by the non-West – is also as much a construct as the Orient. It is important to interrogate how images of the West continue to be as homogenized or fragmented and reductive as Europe’s images of India. I suggest three broad critical locations vis-à-vis responses to narratives of migration from the Indian subcontinent. First of all, there is the category of scholars who are located within Western metropolitan centers of ‘knowledge’. Many of these scholars are themselves participants in the experience of diasporization. It is thus not surprising that the primary focus of these critics should be on narratives that relate female subjectivity to issues of displacement and new states of belonging; and on syncretism and hybridity within a specific cultural-racial paradigm. For the diasporic understanding and the contextualization of the racial Other, it is central to understand the Self. Second1 See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture and Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. 2 The S N D T Women’s University in Mumbai is the first and largest women’s university in India. 3 Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 146.

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generation subjectivities are able to offer an insider’s view of the processes of growing up in a multiracial /multicultural milieu by focusing on processes of translating between cultures and renegotiating traditions. The myth of return is dissected and the discourse of arrival is valorized. The second category of critics are postcolonial intellectuals who have relocated from their ‘home’ country and are now in the First World. As Lavie and Swedenberg point out, these critics tend to concentrate on Western expressive culture.4 The ‘time zones’ of their cultural studies are usually North American or European. These critics define their condition as the transition from an ‘elsewhere’ to the ‘centre’.5 The act of migration magnifies the consciousness of identity, as Meena Alexander explains: “Rendered Other in the new world, one is interrogated who one is, made to respond.”6 These scholars are occupied with issues of empire and ethnicity and are also very attuned to questions of race. One cannot, however, take members of this group to be spokespersons of the migrant experiences of all Third-World peoples – for instance, the economically and politically displaced who occupy a space that Arthur Katerzna refers to as the Fifth World.7 As even Homi Bhabha admits, “caught between worlds that collide as often as they collude, are we representative of anything but ourselves?”8 Privileged by location and favoured by the economics of production and the politics of knowledge-dissemination, these critics inevitably valorize a critical epistemology that operates around terms like ‘edge’, ‘margin’, ‘border’, ‘outside’, and ‘becoming’ – implying there is an ‘inside’ that one is very anxious to enter. The epicentre is, of course, the Euro-centre. The third category is that of the ‘home critic’ who operates from within the Third-World locale, and is often viewed suspiciously as being nativist and nationalistic. I use the term ‘Third World’ primarily as an economic marker of nation-states that geographically constitute the parameters of a non-European developed world. The home critic operates from within the sending nation,

4

See Smadar Lavie & Ted Swedenburg, “Introduction” to Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie & Ted Swedenburg (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1996): 1–25. 5 Lavie & Swedenberg, “ Introduction,” 19. 6 Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival (Boston M A : South End,1997): 153. 7 Arthur Katerzna, quoted in Craig Tapping, “South Asian Writes North America: Prose Fiction and Autobiography from the Diaspora,” in Reading the Literatures of the Asian American, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim & Amy Ling (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1992): 287. 8 Homi Bhabha, “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,” in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis & Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000): 135.

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and therefore is not theoretically preoccupied with racial interaction and definitions of concepts of hybridity that are part of a Western matrix. Susan Koshy characterizes the field of Asian-American studies as “inhabiting the highly unstable temporality of the ‘about-to-be.’”9 I, on the other hand, am a not-about-to-be, I am not ‘an-abroad’, and I am not ‘anxious about being Indian’. The writer in India has other marginalities to contend with; her subject position in her own world locates her differently and the terms of dialogue between the ethnic self and the dominant culture are bound to differ. The Other is not just the racial Other but may be a compatriot of another language, caste or religion. In the recent past, the horrific Hindu–Muslim riots in the State of Gujarat in February–March 2002 have compelled many Indians to question the failure of the Nehruvian vision of secularism, and the assumption that Indian society is inherently pluralistic and tolerant of the Other. My own area of concern is not the analysis of modes of resistance to racial discrimination but, rather, systems of domination with political, economic and discursive dimensions that are linked to the positions of emigrant Indian women. The tremendous pressures of India’s growing population, in combination with the so-called free labour market today, continues to ensure large-scale mobilization of different categories of workforces outside the Indian geopolitical space. India may well have the world’s largest expatriate citizenry by the next decade. If migration from the Indian subcontinent is largely predicated on economic inequities, and male migrants are looking for better opportunities to improve life chances, then one might ask what are the pre-migration expectations of women? I expand this argument further with the hypothesis that an increasing number of young middle-class woman anticipate the possibility of emigration as a given. Working on this assumption, is it then possible to evolve conceptual and analytical tools from contemporary globalization theories that would allow access to the space of a pre-migration state of mind, rather than assuming that the immigrant has a subjectivity that is moulded upon arrival? Mary John comments on work currently available on the migrant experiences of South Asian women, observing that “the language of arrival is truly valorized”; “one comes across less where women have come from, much more about what they have come to.”10

9

Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian-American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism

9.2 (1996): 315. 10 Mary John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories, (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996): 18. I elaborate upon the idea of a pre-emigrant subjectivity in Mala Pandurang, “Conceptualizing Emigrant Indian Female Subjectivity: Possible Entry

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In a second step, I would like to discuss as a case study the literary career of Vikram Seth, whose work has been celebrated as approaching ‘a new internationalist universality’ and a ‘globalization of representation’. I am uneasy about the emerging category of global literature, celebrating a post-national model of belonging (i.e. narratives that explore identity in ways that are not necessarily bound to issues of nationality). How much of Seth’s work is poststruggle? And if his work is post-struggle, then is this to be lauded? Vikram Seth has lived on three continents, Asia, America, and Europe. He has written in a variety of genres, ranging from collections of poetry to a novel in sonnet form, two novels, a travelogue, a libretto. Most recently he has published his semi-non-fictional biography Two Lives (2005). Some of Seth’s earlier poems in Mappings (1981) indicate the ‘psychological violence’ resulting from contradictory constructions of social identity and a desire to record history prior to entry into the West. In The Golden Gate (1986), however, set in San Francisco, and in An Equal Music (1999), located in England and Europe, Seth depopulates the text of ethnic peoples and immigrant dilemmas. His only novel located specifically in India is A Suitable Boy (1993), wherein he employs the political history of the subcontinent in the 1950s. In these novels, Seth neither explores the gaps between the ‘culture of origin’ (India/ home) and the cultures of adoption (U K / U S A / other countries), nor addresses issues of ambivalence or liminality that come from conflicting cultural perspectives. “Today’s identities,” asserts Namita Gokhale, “are no longer about passports and birth certificates. In a world without barriers, you belong to where you are.”11 True, in today’s cross-continental mobility and with growing technological challenges to conventional boundaries of the nation-state, participants within a privileged new global migrancy may redefine the spaces within which they operate. It remains a reality, however, that immigration posts are still used to police identities. Seth’s An Equal Music is the tale of an emotionally volatile musician, Michael Holden, and his gradual recovery of the self. The narrative deals with Michael’s passionate relationship with his music, his deeply moving twelveyear-old attachment to his two hundred and seventy-year-old Carlo Tanoni violin, and his intense love for a woman he loses twice. Set in a London peopled exclusively by white British people, Seth’s work does not convey the feeling of being trapped in an impossible ‘in-betweenness’ wherein he is denied the option of identifying with either an ‘Indian’ or a cosmopolitan /

Points,” in Critical Reflections on Gender and the South Asian Diaspora, ed. Nirmal Puwar & Parvathi Raghuram (Oxford: Berg, 2003): 87–95. 11 Namita Gokhale, “Vikram’s Vocalist Strains on Literary Landscape,” Times of India (4 May 1999): 4.

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metropolitan culture. Are the exclusions deliberate? Can a novel written by an Indian with nothing Indian in it, and set in England with English characters, be considered as the ultimate applecart with which to upset the conventional centre/periphery relationship? Exactly how far has Seth been able to get under the skin of a character from a different cultural background? How does one read problematics of affiliation in a text that totally rejects the theme of cultural displacement? How far is the complexion of the narrative in keeping with a new emergent cosmopolitan transnationalism? Seth defends himself against demands to focus on the experience of immigration: “there’s nothing to be gained by unnecessarily harping on these themes. If they come up naturally, it’s okay. If I write a play set in a shop run by a Gujarati in London, all these questions will come up. These matters used to obsess me once.”12 Alternatively, is there textual evidence of his having partaken, as a creative writer, in a certain ‘migrancy of the mind’ and is he therefore able to inhabit different spaces simultaneously? Under the rubric of diaspora theorizing, critics now suggest a new ethic wherein instead of “a regressive insistence on a homeland,” there is “an increased celebration of heterogeneity and plurality.”13 Paul Gilroy also presents the diasporic framework as “an alternative to the different varieties of absolutism which would confine culture in racial, ethnic or national essences.”14 Seth is vocal about the need for the earth’s environment and ecology to be defended, as in Beastly Tales (1991), but he refuses to commit himself to the Third-World roots of his identity. He remains silent on North–South economic and cultural debates. Timothy Brennan asserts that “there can be no talk of globalism without Americanism,”15 but Seth is not interested in using his position as a popular author to attack U S hegemonic control as the mythic centre of the New World. There were a considerable number of Indian immigrants who came to the U S Pacific coast between 1904 and 1924, largely male farmers from Punjab, but Seth ignores the immigrant history of Asian communities in the San Francisco of The Golden Gate. He also consciously avoids complex problems of identity politics, although he does briefly address issues of white W A S P homosexuality. In the context of the Asian-American 12

Vikram Seth, quoted in Debashish Mukherji, “I am afraid of questions like ‘What do you think of Rushdie?’: An Interview with Vikram Seth,” The Week (9 May 1999): 35. 13 Peter Childs & Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997): 210. 14 Paul Gilroy, quoted in Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994): 13. 15 Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997): 125.

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diaspora, Seth as a writer remains apolitical and refuses to be apologetic about his avoidance of certain issues. As a consequence of this lack of focus on any political assertions of representation, a novel like An Equal Music could be read as an attempt to supersede the restrictive boundaries of nationalism and distinct cultural registers through a philosophy of ‘universal humanism’ and an overriding concern for the ‘human race’. My response is predicated on my location. Even in today’s supposedly transnational world, borders will inevitably develop. We have yet to enter a humanist worldliness wherein passports, Green Cards, and residence permits have been done away with. While Seth may reject the political and celebrate non-commitment, the critic from a region that still experiences pain and conflict from economic and social underdevelopment is compelled to ask if a humane but personal core of cosmopolitanism is enough. For critics such as myself, while assessing Seth’s social contribution as a creative writer, the reality of his geographical roots will remain an intruding factor, whenever and from wherever Seth writes.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Meena. The Shock of Arrival (Boston M A : South End, 1997). Bhabha, Homi. “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,” in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, The Caribbean and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis & Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000): 133–42. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994). Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997). Childs, Peter, & Patrick Williams. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997). Gokhale, Namita. “Vikram’s Vocalist Strains on Literary Landscape,” Times of India (4 May 1999): 4. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture and Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222– 37. John, Mary E. Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996). Koshy, Susan. “The Fiction of Asian-American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 315–46. Lavie, Smadar, & Ted Swedenburg. “Introduction,” in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie & Ted Swedenurg (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1996): 1–25. Mukherji, Debashish. “I am afraid of questions like ‘What do you think of Rushdie?’ An Interview with Vikram Seth,” The Week (9 May 1999): 34–36.

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Pandurang, Mala. “Conceptualizing Emigrant Indian Female Subjectivity: Possible Entry Points,” in Critical Reflections on Gender and the South Asian Diaspora, ed. Nirmal Puwar & Parvathi Raghuram (Oxford: Berg, 2003): 87–95. Sangari, Kukum. “The Politics of the Possible,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 143– 47. Tapping, Craig. “South Asian Writes North America: Prose Fiction and Autobiography from the Diaspora,” in Reading the Literatures of the Asian American, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim & Amy Ling (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 1992): 285–301.

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Desire and Loathing in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido Santos’s The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor D ANILO V ICTORINO M ANARPAAC

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that the U S A fought in the twentieth century, the Spanish–American War of 1898, also known as America’s ‘splendid little war’, was shorter and had many fewer American casualties. This war also resulted in the extension of American suzerainty to the Philippine Islands, several thousand miles away from the American mainland across the vast Pacific Ocean. To be sure, it was not easy to decide to annex the archipelago, which came with a price tag of twenty million U S dollars. The loosely formed anti-imperialist league, for instance, actively opposed any plans to take the islands. But eventually the expansionist politics of the McKinley administration, which was encapsulated in the slogan ‘manifest destiny’, won out over whatever misgivings Americans had. Declaring the Filipinos unfit for anything but perhaps the barbarity of guerrilla warfare, the American colonizers promptly embarked on their own brand of civilizing mission, as they violently quenched Filipino resistance to American occupation, which continued well into the twentieth century. The U S A sent, among others, some 600 teachers to the Philippines in 1901 to implement an overhaul of the colony’s educational system. Through the Pensionado Act of 1903, the U S A also provided government-sponsored education of specially qualified Filipinos at American universities, a short-lived programme that served as a model for various other scholarships that existed until the end of American colonial rule of the islands in 1946. Meanwhile, an acute shortage of labourers on American farms in Hawai’i, also a newly acquired territory, and on the West Coast opened another avenue for Filipinos to go to the coloOMPARED TO THE OTHER WARS

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nizer’s country. Coming mostly from the arid Ilocos region in the northern Philippines and consisting mostly of unmarried young men, the first wave of Filipino migrant workers in the U S A came to be known as the manongs, from the Ilocano honorific for ‘elder brother’. It is estimated that some 125,000 Filipinos entered the U S A during the colonial period, forming the pioneer generation of what is now referred to as the Filipino American community.1 From this sociohistorical milieu emerged the Filipino writers Carlos Bulosan and Bienvenido Santos, who painstakingly recorded the travails and minor triumphs of their contemporaries.2 They were born in the Philippines roughly a decade after the Americans usurped control of the archipelago, Santos in 1911, Bulosan two years later in 1913. The two grew up in a country that was undergoing not only political tutelage but also a systematic americanization of social institutions. Formal education in particular was instrumentalized to generate colonial subjects who would assist the colonizers in the quotidian affairs of government and were willing to emulate the values of American society and thereby preserve the colonial status quo. Thus Bulosan, although he received little formal education in the Philippines, was immersed in American culture and owed his ideas about democracy and social equity to American intellectual tradition. He joined his brother in Seattle in 1930 to labour on the farms and in the canneries of the West Coast, carrying with him this American brand of idealism. But the harsh conditions on the so-called ‘harvest trail’ made him an even more dedicated labour organizer and a socially critical writer, who decided “to give a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States, Hawaii, and Alaska.”3 This lifelong mission was evident in the modest corpus of poetry, fiction, essays, and letters that he left behind when he died in 1956. Santos “found [himself] deeply in love with the sound of the English language”4 as early as grade school. In 1941, with nothing more 1

E. Jr. San Juan, Allegories of Resistance: The Philippines at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 1994): 18. 2 For a comprehensive history of Filipino immigration to the United States, see H. Brett Melendy, Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (New York: Hippocrene, 1977); Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1989); and Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston M A : Twayne, 1991). Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Quezon City: Tala, 1975) and Teodoro A. Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People (1960; Quezon City: Garotech, 1990) are good references on Philippine history, despite their nationalist bias. 3 Quoted in E. Jr. San Juan, “Introduction,” Amerasia Journal 6 (1979): 26. 4 Bienvenido Santos, “The Filipino Writer in English as Storyteller and Translator,” in Asian Voices in English, ed. Mimi Chan & Roy Harris (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 1991): 45.

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than a college diploma in his pocket, he went to the University of Illinois on a government scholarship and was stranded there when the Second World War broke out in the Pacific. He eventually started a career as a writer, acknowledging the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sherwood Anderson, and a host of other American writers, even as his writing remained oriented towards his compatriots in the U S A or back in the Philippines. In an interview that he gave a few years before he died in 1996, he admitted to being intrigued by “the secrets locked behind [the manongs’] eyes.”5 Both Bulosan and Santos were drawn to the plight of the manongs, despite the differences of the circumstances of their immigration to the U S A . Whereas Bulosan’s stories chronicle the day-to-day struggles of the youthful generation of Filipino migrant workers during the Great Depression, Santos’s narratives delve into the psyche of the same ‘oldtimers’, now in the twilight of their lives, taking stock, wondering whether all the struggle has been for naught. Thus in Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946), he recounts the numerous instances of humiliation, harassment, and physical assault that the manongs had to endure in the 1930s and 1940s. Although his protagonist–narrator becomes convinced that “in many ways it [is] a crime to be a Filipino in California” (121),6 the novel nonetheless ends with a reaffirmation of the narrator’s unconditional faith in America. In The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor (1983), Santos continues the narrative of the life and times of the manongs, focusing on the pathetic figure of Solomon King, who manages to deny his own individuality by identifying with a Hollywood icon. In lieu of physical violence, Santos foregrounds the psychological devastation of years of solitude and alienation that result from American society’s disavowal of the Filipino migrant worker. Differences in setting, plot, and character notwithstanding, America and Robert Taylor share an awareness of the complexity of the response of colonized subjects to the inhospitable reception accorded to them in the colonizer’s country. In both novels, the ambivalent relationship between the first generation of Filipino migrant workers and the host country finds expression in the migrants’ oscillation between the desire to be accepted by white society and a loathing for that society’s negation of their humanity.

5

Roger J. Bresnahan, Conversations With Filipino Writers (Quezon City: New Day,

1990): 94. 6 Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946; Seattle: U of Washington P , 1973): 121. All subsequent quotations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the main text.

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America tells the story of Allos, an itinerant worker from the Philippines who immigrates to the U S A to escape a life of privation, only to end up as a contractual worker doing agricultural ‘stoop’ labour and other menial jobs on the West Coast. It is the height of the Depression, and the stiff competition for work aggravates the already uneasy relationship between the white population and the newly arrived coloured workers. Exploitation is the order of the day. After Allos and other Filipinos get off the boat in Seattle at the end of a long journey from Manila, they are put into a taxi, deposited at a decrepit hotel, robbed of their belongings, and sold to a labour contractor who promptly delivers them to cannery operators in Alaska. After toiling there under inhumane conditions, they go back to Seattle, where they learn that their already meagre pay has been skimmed to offset expenditures supposedly incurred during the season, leaving them with almost nothing. Soon they go into debt that can only be paid from their earnings in the next season. Trapped in this vicious cycle of indenture, they are further exploited by owners of gambling dens, whorehouses, and dance halls, who know only too well how to take advantage of the workers’ desperation and solitude. The manongs are forced to live by themselves in nomadic camps outside the cities, not only because of the nature of their jobs but also because of white society’s refusal to integrate them into its own communities. The outcome is further isolation and victimization. On one occasion, for instance, Allos and his fellow labour organizers are abducted, beaten up, and tarred and feathered by a group of white men hired by farm owners who are loath to see their workers acquire bargaining power. Later, police barge into a party organized by Filipino expatriates for a visiting compatriot, search the guests for concealed weapons, and warn the proprietor not to let white women into the place. On yet another occasion, Alonzo, a student, is dragged from the house of the white woman with whom he is living, and thrown into jail by police officers who are enforcing the state’s anti-miscegenation law. Allos finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile these acts of cruelty with the positive images of America that he has somehow managed to nurture since childhood. Finally, Allos is overcome with a “nameless anger” (163) and fights back when the proprietor of a café fires him from his dishwashing job for attacking a customer who hurled insults and a half-filled bottle of whiskey at him. Beaten up and dumped into a dark alley, he nonetheless feels triumphant even as he regrets having compromised his sacrosanct image of America in the process: I had struck at the white world, at last; and I felt free. Was my complete freedom to be fought for violently? Was murder necessary? And hate? God forbid! My distrust of white men grew, and drove me blindly into the midst of my own people; together we hid cynically behind our mounting fears

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hating the broad white universe at our door. […] Was it possible that coming to America with certain illusions of equality, I had slowly succumbed to the hypnotic effects of racial fear? (163–64)

These questions recur, especially in moments of extreme anguish, and betray the innate anxiety that informs the protagonist’s life. To be sure, there are white characters in the novel, mostly women, who represent an America that is humane and compassionate. There is Marian, a complete stranger who lets Allos into her house in the middle of the night after he has managed to escape his would-be executioners. Later, when Allos contracts tuberculosis and spends his time writing poems in bed, Harriet Monroe, the real editor of the real little magazine Poetry, publishes some of his work. This leads to Allos’ meeting the Odell sisters, who visit him in hospital, bringing him food and books. But such encounters are fleeting and tend to rehearse a biblical encounter with the good Samaritan. This becomes very clear when a Filipino worker, who is being chased by Pinkerton detectives on a moving train, jumps from one boxcar to another and misses his step. With both feet cut off and bleeding profusely, the worker passes out on the side of a highway, as Allos and others frantically hail passing motorists who simply “looked at them with scorn and spat into the wind” (147). Later, at the county hospital where they are brought by an old man, Allos tries to make sense of the harrowing incident and to reconcile the seeming inconsistency of American society: Walking down the marble stairway of the hospital, I began to wonder at the paradox of America. José’s tragedy was brought about by railroad detectives, yet he had done no harm of any consequence to the company. On the highway, again, motorists had refused to take a dying man. And yet in this hospital, among white people – Americans like those who had denied us – we had found refuge and tolerance. Why was America so kind and yet so cruel? Was there no way to simplifying things in this continent so that suffering would be minimized? Was there no common denominator on which we could all meet? I was angry and confused, and wondered if I would ever understand this paradox. (147)

Clearly this perplexity betrays the protagonist’s desire for understanding, communion, and solidarity. Seen within the context of the history of Filipino migrant labour in the U S A , the sporadic appearances of supportive white women, in particular, mark the absence of a community from which the manongs could draw emotional and spiritual sustenance.7 7

For a contradictory reading of Bulosan’s America that criticizes the novel’s valorization of fraternal ties and the consequent exclusion of women, see Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999).

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At the end of the novel, Allos leaves for yet another camp to rally support for the union movement. Passing by a gang of pea-pickers toiling in the early-morning sun, he is inspired to reaffirm his steadfast belief in the ultimate goodness of America in a brief valediction that seems to run against the grain of the novel: I glanced out of the window again to look at the broad land I had dreamed so much about, only to discover with astonishment that the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me. I felt it spreading through my being, warming me with its glowing reality. It came to me that no man – no one at all – could destroy my faith in America again. It was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land, digging my hands into the rich soil here and there, catching a freight to the north and to the south, seeking free meals in dingy gambling houses, reading a book that opened up worlds of heroic thoughts. It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines – something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever. (326–27)

This conclusion appears inconsistent, if not entirely out of place, in view of the numerous accounts of exploitation, racism, and hostility that make up the bulk of the narrative. As Marilyn Alquizola insists, however, the ambivalent conclusion of America results from the tension between the novels’ two narrative voices; the credulous optimism of the protagonist Allos, who represents the entire generation of manongs in the 1930s and 1940s; and the analytic didacticism of the author Bulosan, who censures the marginalization of these men. Such a distinction, she argues, is the key to unlocking the “surplus of meaning and complexities in the text,”8 which in turn precludes any final judgement of the narrative as assimilationist: Bulosan’s strategy lies not just in the dialectical nature of his narrative style, which juxtaposes both positive and negative responses to America, but also in his dialogic interweaving of different narrative voices. In an authorial voice, Bulosan speaks from the standpoint of awareness of class structures, both in the Philippines and the United States, along with the interdependence between both countries. In the naïve and bewildered voice of his protagonist, Bulosan attempts to create an empathy for the Filipino immigrant’s situation in the United States.9 8 Marilyn Alquizola, “Subversion or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America Is in the Heart,” in Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives, ed. Shirley Hune, Stephen S. Fugita & Amy Ling (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1991): 204. 9 Alquizola, “Subversion or Affirmation,” 208.

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This insistence on a double narrative perspective accounts for the discrepancy between the often sentimental musings of the protagonist and the informed authorial interventions that punctuate the novel in the form of historical explications, political commentaries, etc. To the extent that this “dialogic interweaving of different narrative voices” is an integral part of the narrative’s own dynamic, the novel’s conclusion can be understood as an ironic undermining of the author’s sharp critique of the various cruelties of American society. Alquizola hints at another form of doubling in the novel, when stating that “the narrator is also split as he vacillates between his naïve and politicized stances.”10 She fails to elaborate on this ambivalence, however, exploring instead the split between author and narrator and the resulting subtext that allows for a subversive reading of the novel. In contrast, Albert Memmi’s classic account of the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized is more useful for elucidating the character of Bulosan’s protagonist. Indeed, Memmi’s observations about “the doubts of the colonial himself, the inadequacy of the aggressiveness of a vanquished who admires his conqueror despite himself, [and] the long maintained hope that the almighty power of the colonizer might bear fruit of infinite goodness”11 describe the predicament of Allos more compellingly. Despite the numerous setbacks that Bulosan’s protagonist encounters, he holds onto his dream, even though his hopes depend on the labour movement, and he dedicates his entire life to realizing an egalitarian society which, for the time being, remains locked up “in the hearts of men” (314). A similar ambivalence is displayed by the main character in Santos’s Robert Taylor, albeit camouflaged as a metaphoric response to ostracization and disavowal. Solomon King, the novel’s protagonist, has survived the Depression and has risen to the position of supervisor in a Chicago slaughterhouse. But the price he pays for this success is a life of self-delusion and denial. At sixty-two, King is suddenly confronted with the news of the death of Robert Taylor, the Hollywood actor he has tried to emulate all his life in America. King believes there is a fated link between the matinee idol and himself, and he begins to feel pains that “travel” (29)12 all over his body, 10 Marilyn Alquizola, “The Fictive Narrator of America Is in the Heart,” in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, ed. Gail Nomura, Russell Endo, Stephen H. Sumida & Russell C. Leong (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1989): 212. 11 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfeld (1957; Boston M A : Beacon, 1965): 127. 12 Bienvenido Santos, The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor (Quezon City: New Day, 1983). All subsequent quotations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the main text.

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convincing him that his own death is imminent. He takes indefinite leave from work, and makes plans for a “real vacation” (5). King had been destitute in his early days in America, and had learned to be frugal, faking his vacations but enthusiastically boasting of his ‘trips’, as is customary in the American way of life: In years past he took his vacations as everyone else in the stockyard was supposed to do, particularly in the lean months of July and August. After Labor Day, work started picking up and everybody had stories to tell of fishing in Spirit Lake, boating down the Mississippi, camping in the Black Hills or simply travelling around the country, secure in their old reliable cars with their fantastic mileage per gallon; ecstatic over the gorgeous sights along the way in Boulder, Colorado, or in upper Michigan, unseasonable skiing in Vermont south of the Canadian border. Sol had been to all these places – and more – that is, he had read all the literature about them. He sounded very convincing as he raved over nights under the stars at Lake Tahoe and Yosemite Park, trout fishing in Lake Okoboji, midnight swimming in Higgins Lake in Roscommons, camping in Hiawatha country, although everything he knew about these places came straight from travel folders, advertisements and special travel numbers in magazines and newspaper supplements. (6)

Now King has a newfound resolve to spend his savings and what little time he has left. He searches through piles of old pictures, address books, and travel brochures and tries to make an itinerary. In the process, he reminisces about a life that is as fake as the plastic flowers and the kitschy paraphernalia adorning the two-room apartment he rents in the section of the city inhabited by Polish immigrants. Again King’s identification with Robert Taylor is evident as he recalls his many affairs with white women, a foible that he shares with his biblical eponym. Strangely enough, King’s former lovers have the same names as the women who have been linked with the actor. Jaime An Lim observes that this seemingly pathological coincidence becomes especially significant when analyzed in respect to available biographies that describe the Hollywood star as “a man whose sex life was clouded over with rampant allegations of homosexuality.”13 Despite this possible homosexual subtext, Sol uses these women to get the recognition and acceptance that he craves. On one occasion, for instance, while having sex with a woman he calls Morningstar, she comes close to telling him what he has always wanted to hear: Okay, I’m handsome, he said, I’m beautiful, but let’s go on, shall we? Wait, wait, please, she said, let’s make it longer, just now, just this very

13

Jaime An Lim, Literature and Politics: The Colonial Experience in Nine Philippine Novels (Quezon City: New Day, 1993): 92.

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now, you look like… like… there’s an actor you look like, what’s his name? Sol held his breath. Like whom, he asked. She was regarding his face, studying it curiously. Sol’s body had grown limp and she felt it. Like whom, tell me, like whom? He kept repeating. (58–59)

But Morningstar does not humour Sol, instead chiding him for believing that he could look like anyone but himself. On another occasion, he casually remarks to the woman with whom he is sleeping that Robert Taylor’s wife is also called Ursula. Sol needs the affirmation and goes after it, even if it hurts him. And it does: “Robert Taylor is a beautiful man.” “He sure is. Have we talked about this before?” “I’m not sure.” “Maybe we have.” “So you like Bob?” “I like Sol. I think he’s better looking than Bob.” “I better be.” “Say, have you ever thought of becoming an actor?” “No. And stop kidding.” “I’m not. Look at you. Why, you could be a handsome, romantic leading man. Like Robert Taylor.” “What did you say?” “Aha! He’s biting. I said you could be an actor like Robert Taylor.” “Oh.” Sol’s disappointment was deep, bruising. It was the flaw in an otherwise perfect day, but he asked for it. Couldn’t it be, though, that it was what she meant, that he looked like Robert Taylor? (97)

The tenacity with which he has clung to that delusion of semblance or, indeed, to that belief in “lives that are extensions of other lives” (55) calls to mind Memmi’s dictum: “the first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid model [of the colonizer] and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.”14 True, Sol’s modest wage keeps him from mimicking the lavish lifestyle of the Hollywood actor. But his idolatrous regard of and self-effacing identification with the Other indicate an acute state of denial, the final rupture of which is as foreseeable as it is tragic. Towards the end of the novel, after a couple of false starts, Sol finally embarks on his very personal tour of the U S A . He travels by bus, stopping by places he had visited in his younger days, looking up people he used to know, former friends and lovers. In a scene that underlines the metaphoric significance of the movies in the protagonist’s life, Sol sees fragments of his life in review as if on film. He dreams about familiar people, places, and times, but the elements of the dream are a series of incoherent images or, as he himself describes it, 14

Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 120.

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a cameraman’s error of a dream, the same film used twice, slides of scenes and events superimposed twice over and developed into a disconcerting montage, a weird combination of places and differing times and people out of the present and the past. (154)

The dream ends with Sol glancing towards the White House, which is surrounded with barbed wire and marked by a sign that warns: “O F F L I M I T S , N O T R E S P A S S I N G , U . S . P R O P E R T Y ” (156). The message is unmistakable. Arriving at the heart of America, the protagonist realizes that he is not welcome; the warning sign sums up America’s rejection of his efforts to belong. He might have become used to “throwing away paper cups and paper tissues after each use […] explain[ing] it away to himself as part of the assimilation process into the American way of life” (6–7), but he lives in an immigrant ghetto where people are “always talking of home, of the old country, […] [but] making no move to return” (8). True, he has a job and some money stashed in the bank, but he is as alone as when he first came to America thirty years before. His relationships with (white) women have all ended the way of melodramatic movies, so that he now cynically refers to them as “re-runs with one major change, the female lead” (62). Oddly enough, it is his last affair, with a young mother whom he encounters in a Greyhound bus depot, that makes him realize how miserably he has failed in his desire to be taken for someone he is not: “You’re funny. You remind me of a Mex I knew. You’re not Mex. I thought not. But you talk like one. You look like one I could’ve sworn.” “I don’t look like nobody,” he said, a weariness in his tone. The implication of what he had just said was not lost on him. (140–41)

Thus the dream recapitulates this earlier realization that, despite honest effort and hard work, he has been barred entry to American society. Sol’s awakening from the dream implies his final awakening from the delusive identification with Robert Taylor. In the words of Memmi, “the colonized […] understands and admits that this path is dead and assimilation is impossible.”15 America and Robert Taylor both depict the experiences of the colonized as he negotiates his position in the colonizer’s space, but the stories certainly describe differential strategies and outcomes. While both novels rely on a convolution of desire and loathing, they locate the complex responses of their protagonists on various parts of the infinite continuum between these two motivations. Thus Allos in America stubbornly clings to his dream of a society that is yet to be born, described in utopian terms by his brother Macario as “a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering” (189). On the other hand, Sol in Robert Taylor aspires to a different identity to compensate for 15

Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 125.

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“his marginality and insignificance,”16 only to wake up from the delusion with barely enough time left to embark on a symbolic farewell tour of the country that has shut its doors to him. At the end of both novels, the protagonist experiences “a recovery of self and of autonomous dignity”17: Allos discovers an invigorated sense of purpose, and Sol is at peace with himself. There is no “giv[ing] in to the intoxication of fury and violence” nor an “assum[ing] [of] hostile intentions.”18 Indeed, Memmi’s “period of revolt,”19 at least in these two novels, is an extremely remote possibility.

WORKS CITED Agoncillo, Teodoro A. History of the Filipino People (1960; Quezon City: Garotech, 1990). Alquizola, Marilyn. “Subversion or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America Is in the Heart,” in Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives, ed. Shirley Hune, Stephen S. Fugita & Amy Ling (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1991): 199–209. ——. “The Fictive Narrator of America Is in the Heart,” in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, ed. Gail Nomura, Russell Endo, Stephen H. Sumida & Russell C. Leong (Pullman: Washington State U P , 1989): 211–17. An Lim, Jaime. Literature and Politics: The Colonial Experience in Nine Philippine Novels (Quezon City: New Day, 1993). Bresnahan, Roger J. Conversations With Filipino Writers (Quezon City: New Day, 1990). Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946; Seattle: U of Washington P , 1973). Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston M A : Twayne, 1991). Constantino, Renato. The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Quezon City: Tala, 1975). Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999). Melendy, H. Brett. Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (New York: Hippocrene, 1977). Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfeld (1957; Boston M A : Beacon, 1965). San Juan, E. Jr. Allegories of Resistance: The Philippines at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P , 1994). 16 17 18 19

An Lim, Literature and Politics, 90. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 128. The Colonizer and the Colonized, 139–40. The Colonizer and the Colonized, 141.

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——. “Introduction,” Amerasia Journal 6 (1979): 3–29. Santos, Bienvenido. “The Filipino Writer in English as Storyteller and Translator,” in Asian Voices in English, ed. Mimi Chan & Roy Harris (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 1991): 43–50. ——. The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor (Quezon City: New Day, 1983). Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1989).

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“Worlds of Disenchantment” Alienation and Change in Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments

V ERA A LEXANDER

1. The Global Condition of Xenophobia K H A N ’ S N O V E L Seasonal Adjustments,1 published in 1994, portrays xenophobia as a global condition influenced by such factors as displacement, cultural alienation, religion, and education. In my analysis of this novel I examine the various rivalling ‘othernesses’ the novel constructs and describe their functions in relation to change as a result of postcolonial migrancy. In Khan’s début novel, an expatriate returns to his homeland Bangladesh in order to visit his family after eighteen years of residence in Australia. Iqbal Chaudhary, the novel’s middle-aged protagonist, returns to his family home in

A 1

DIB

Adib Khan, Seasonal Adjustments (St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin). All references to Seasonal Adjustments will be given in parentheses in the main text. Khan, who is himself a migrant, has published three further novels to date: Solitude of Illusions (St Leonards N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 1996), The Storyteller (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), and Homecoming (Sydney: Flamingo, 2003). Solitude of Illusions likewise portrays an encounter between South Asians and Australian culture, although here the focalizer is an elderly protagonist, which highlights the issues of generational conflicts and changing living conditions. While his third novel, The Storyteller, also focuses on the concerns of South Asians as represented by an Indian dwarf, Homecoming constitutes a new departure, in that it describes the tribulations of a Western Vietnam veteran. In his writing career, Khan has thus undergone a transcultural transition from depicting the imaginary world of South Asian immigrants in Australia to other ‘othernesses’.

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order to recoup after the failure of his marriage.2 He is accompanied by his young daughter, Nadine. While the family eagerly embraces the child, Iqbal’s own welcome is lukewarm at best. His move from Bangladesh to Australia in 1971 is generally regarded as selfish by his family and former friends and sometimes even by himself. He has ‘deserted’ his country at a critical moment, having emigrated during the 1971/1972 independence wars that resulted in the former East Pakistan becoming the state of Bangladesh. On top of that, in Australia he has married a white Catholic woman. As a result, his relatives feel let down by his failure to marry within his social community and accuse him of betraying both the national cause and Islam. To make matters worse, Iqbal is a rather disappointing émigré figure. He has only managed to become a schoolteacher, and consequently his emigration is not the kind of success story that might have redeemed him in a society where an expatriate relative resident in a Western location is regarded as a social asset.3 After years of living as a visible Other in Australia, Iqbal now finds himself regarded as a stranger in his former home. Seasonal Adjustments thus

2 Iqbal’s story is at least partly autobiographical, as the following self-description of Adib Khan suggests: “I was born in Pakistan, with familial connections in India, had a rebirth in Bangladesh without ever believing in reincarnation, and now I was an Australian in possession of a certificate and an associated document of sixty-four pages, valid for ten years, to prove who I was”; Adib Khan, “In Janus’ Footsteps,” Australian Humanities Review, (20 January 2004): online, http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/copyright.html [accessed 7 July 2007]. 3 Another problem is implicit in Iqbal’s choice of Australia as his new home. While anglophone and predominantly white, Australia is nowhere near Europe or North America. Geographically as well as conceptually it constitutes a problematic ‘Western’ location that challenges binary conceptions of East versus West, as I have argued elsewhere; see Vera Alexander, “Beyond Centre and Margin: Representations of Australia in South Asian Immigrant Writings,” in Australia: Making Space Meaningful, ed. Gerd Dose & Britta Kuhlenbeck (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2007): 153–75. For Iqbal, Australia is a choice dictated, as always, by ambivalent desires. He dislikes America, which he associates with his teenage interests (89), but feels unable to face Great Britain, towards which he harbours a secret hate–love: “No Chaudhary had been to Australia. It was an opportunity to be different. There was more than a touch of stubborn individuality in my thinking. Unlike Hashim and some of my cousins, I was firm in my resolution not to head for the privileges of that remote island which was an obsessive ideal with the older Chaudharies. I wasted time by being angry with history. I despised the British for humbling us, using us and creating the political mess before they left. – ‘I never want anything from them,’ I declared brashly, even as I secretly admired British culture and its institutions. They enslaved my imagination like a powerful drug. At school I had attempted to emulate the American way of life and failed miserably in a tragicomical sort of way. I did not wish to be like the Yanks, I decided later. In my dreams of insufferable snobbery I revered all things British – the B B C , test match specials, their literature, the universities, even the pinstriped suit, the umbrella and The Times” (233).

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deals with the role of otherness in the context of an identity crisis experienced by a postcolonial migrant. In this essay, I would like to use the example of Khan’s portrait of a migrant anti-hero in order to draw attention to a crucial discrepancy between migrancy as referred to in critical discourse and migrancy as represented in fiction. The condition of migrancy is often described in postcolonial discourse and in debates about Third World intellectuals as an enabling state. For instance, in his essay “How Newness Enters the World,” Homi K. Bhabha claims that “a transnational, ‘migrant’ knowledge of the world is most urgently needed.”4 He reads the migrant’s location of being poised on cultural borderlines as an avant-garde one: The migrant culture of the ‘in-between,’ the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability; and in so doing, it moves the question of culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream, or the racist’s nightmare, of a ‘full transmissal of subject-matter;’ and towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity that marks the identification with culture’s difference.5

Elaborating on the role of postcolonial migrants, Bhabha locates them in a Third Space of enunciation that is constituted in, for instance, writing: It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial and postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory – where I have led you – may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing and international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.6

While acknowledging the discomforts and insecurities inherent in the position he describes, Bhabha discounts these in favour of the innovative potential a migrant has, having access to several cultures and being on the front-lines of change. This is largely true, though not uncontested for Salman Rushdie, whom Bhabha deals with in this passage, as Rushdie is a writer who has 4

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 214. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 224. Bhabha goes on to write: “Migrants are thus cast as agents of innovation and translation, mediators between the cultures. For the migrant’s survival depends, as Rushdie puts it, on discovering ‘how newness enters the world.’ The focus is on making the linkages through the unstable elements of literature and life – the dangerous tryst with the ‘untranslatable’ – rather than arriving at ready-made names” (The Location of Culture, 227). 6 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38. See also Paul Goetsch, “Funktionen von ‘Hybridität’ in der postkolonialen Theorie,” Literatur für Wissenschaft und Unterricht 30.2 (1997): 135–45; see particularly 142–43. 5

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worked the in-betweenness of cultures and literatures into a recipe for success and whose productivity has inspired many positive evaluations of migrancy.7 In this reading, migrants are rendered special by their hybridity, and ‘hybrants’ of this kind are cast as agents of innovation and translation, as mediators between the cultures and creative inventors in various domains, as Edward Said suggests: Much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule. It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists, chess players, political activists, and intellectuals. Each of these occupations requires a minimal investment in objects and places a great premium on mobility and skill. The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction.8

Moving between cultures and across cultural divides, migrants who have successfully imbibed their hybridity can, according to this line of reasoning, become key figures who facilitate a transcontinental interaction. Khan’s novel, by contrast, forms part of a growing body of anglophone texts that express a definite reluctance to engage with the issues of representation as defined by postcolonial theory and criticism. The ‘hybrant’, conceived in theory and able to glide optimistically across the practical difficulties involved in migration, according to his novel, is too good to be true. Despite the abundance of differences and transcultural controversies depicted in his book, Khan refuses to celebrate either the hybridity or the in-betweenness of his protagonist. His novel suggests a counter-discourse that explores the constraints imposed by migrancy and argues for a reconsideration of migrants in their specific individual cultural (or transcultural) contexts. His alter ego, Iqbal Chaudhary, is in no way a vanguard migrant, and he is unadorned by magical-realist elements or faculties. Realistic in his portrayal, Khan uses his case to transmit a comparatively grim pedagogic message about migration and the difficulties of migrant individuals. Rather than focusing on the migrant’s process of adaptation, Khan uses his protagonist’s problems of communication with his former home to illustrate an individual’s struggle against cultural stereotyping. Iqbal Chaudhary is a vaguely rebellious anti-hero without a clear aim in life, who is defined largely by his inability to adjust to any single culture and his unwillingness to allow himself to be fixed in a single narrow social role. Settling in Australia, Iqbal is assigned the role of a

7

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991): 15. 8 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh–Ha & Cornel West (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990): 363.

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humble, coloured immigrant who ought to be meekly grateful for being granted asylum from a Third-World country, a role he categorically refuses to play. He is equally a misfit in his Muslim–Bangali family, in his white Catholic Australian environment, and even within the Muslim diasporic community in Australia, which is mostly Pakistani and where Bangladeshis constitute a minority within a minority. Pressured from all sides to assimilate and give up his individuality, Iqbal almost obsessively asserts his right to ‘unbelong’.9 Xenophobia is a key issue in migrant narratives, and in this regard Seasonal Adjustments stresses the omnipresence and universality of racism, (negative) stereotyping, and xenophobic attitudes. In Khan’s novel, paradoxically only at first glance, racist prejudice is the one striking attitude shared by Bangladeshis and Australians. Both Bangladeshi and Australian culture are portrayed as being strongly marked by anxiety about the disorder associated with strangers in general. Xenophobia is even constructed into a meeting-ground, a universal language, which enables a comparison of, and even a dialogue between, the various racist cultures. Ironically, Iqbal experiences one of his few moments of camaraderie at a party in Australia, when he joins his white colleagues in their drunken exchanges of xenophobic jokes, adding to them a local flavour of his own: A repository of racist jokes about Italians, Greeks and the Aborigines surfaced and fuelled the party along toward an inebriated silliness. I contributed a few about Sikhs and Hindus and was immediately embraced as a rare foreigner, a damn good bloke able to take it all in the right spirit. We made pathetic efforts to be clever and witty and succeeded admirably in creating a zoological din. (241)

Because of the generalizing nature of xenophobia and the traitorous flexibility of the processes of constructing otherness, Iqbal’s life in Australia is a series of lessons that teach him about the danger of becoming the Other. This theme is illustrated when Iqbal steps in to defend a Muslim woman in Australia against racist abuse: My first visit to the mosque in Preston was a forgettable experience. It began badly with an unpleasant encounter on the footpath. A red-haired man, who had deliberately pushed a burqa-clad woman against a fence and was taunting her with racist abuse, did not see me coming up behind him. I am 9

This particular migrant stance has been associated with immaturity and is often portrayed in novels about migrant adolescents, as in the U K -Caribbean Joan Riley’s novel The Unbelonging (London: Women’s Press, 1985). The protagonist’s in-betweenness can be compared to the predicament of post-adolescents; see Vera Alexander, Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels (Trier: W V T , 2006).

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convinced my language startled him into a speedy getaway. In his scheme of life, dark-skinned foreigners were probably meant to subject themselves passively to verbal insults and physical abuse in return for the privilege of living in his country. They were not supposed to retaliate and yell, “Fuck off, you diseased convict dick!” at the tall, white residents of the land. He will never know how scared I was of his size and how I loathed myself for stooping to his level of obscenity. (196)

Throughout the novel, as demonstrated by the two last quotations, the examples of xenophobia given – complete with stereotypically unflattering portraits of white Australians – are immediately followed by self-reflexive passages in which the protagonist comments on his horrifying realization how easy it is to change, to turn into the Other, and therefore to become what he despises and, in the process, lose his individuality. And once Iqbal has literally fought his way through Australian prejudice, once he is at the mosque, he is confronted with more antagonism when he realizes that, being a fellow believer from Bangladesh, he is not welcomed by the Pakistani majority group (196–97). Many postcolonial novels depict the consequences of a multi-dimensional identity crisis. They counterpoise theoretical concepts of migrants who succeed in keeping an overview over several cultures and sail competently across all boundaries – material and conceptual – with characters who tend to experience migrancy as a condition with particularly severe limitations.10 Caught in self-analysis, such characters have insufficient energy left over to perform Hamlet-like “enterprises of great pitch and moment” of the kind envisaged in theoretical texts. At the same time, their struggles to make sense of their particular predicament give access to more concrete, even applicable, fictional designs of what the globally increasing group of migrants may be able to achieve. Adib Khan’s protagonist Iqbal Chaudhary exemplifies a type of migrant who considers himself “trapped between polarised worlds of disenchantment” (8), imprisoned in the very space that allegedly is supposed to grant him creative freedom: There are occasions when I regret my exposure to the diversity of cultural radiation which has bleached my individuality. I think I know how a travelling performer might feel in his private moments. Effortlessly I can slip into cultural roles. I am a variable without a constant to measure myself against; a changing shadow whose exact composition cannot be determined. I should be grateful for the stability in my life, people tell me. 10 For example, in Memories of Rain by Sunetra Gupta (New York: Grove, 1992), Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (London: Virago, 1990) and M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), the characters either suffer from dislocation and nostalgia and cannot move forward or back for fear, or they are paralyzed by the conflicting expectations of both their host countries and their diasporic communities.

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How secure would I be in a third-world country? I have a house. A job. A country ... let’s say I possess a passport. What I lack is the weight of emotional anchors. There is nothing which binds me to a place. (9)

Seasonal Adjustments revises the figure of the postcolonial migrant as envisaged by Bhabha. According to Khan’s portrayal, migrants are exposed to more forms of racism and xenophobia than anybody else. While confronted with cultural differences wherever they go, they nonetheless gain insights into the overall similarity of such differences and their functions in different societies. They undergo an emotional and possibly a spiritual risk, not a category that features very prominently in theoretical views on migrants. Moreover, migrants are forced to accommodate themselves within the limitations imposed by the majority.11 In most cultures, every mature individual is to some extent forced to act a part; nonetheless, the specific constraints operating in the case of migrants – as explored in Khan’s novels – call into question how, to what degree, and under which considerations such processes take place. While a special chronic case, Khan’s migrant figures derive their poignancy and meaning from the fact that they are uncannily familiar with (and to) members of different cultures. Their stories highlight problems of identity more clearly and overtly than those of non-migrant characters do, but in the process of stressing change these migrant figures cast similarities into the shadows.

2. External versus Internal Exile Seasonal Adjustments contrasts the two themes of omnipresent xenophobia and change, simultaneously addressing who or what is different and how one becomes different. At the beginning of Iqbal’s visit to Bangladesh, he is sure that nothing has changed in his place of origin (cf. 4–9). He is able to revisit sites and people that feature in his memories, and the inefficiency of infrastructure has remained the same, or has got worse: Travelling beyond Dhaka is like taking a giant leap back in time. The countryside is steeped in superstition and quaint customs which fascinate

11 Iqbal’s consciousness of having to act a part in order to fit in with his surroundings becomes particularly obvious in a passage where he rehearses conversational elements for another Australian party: “What shall I say? I am up with the cricket and the tennis. I am in conservative territory. That rules out politics. Cars do not interest me. Discuss the stock market? Auctions and house prices? Renovations? Antiques? Furniture restoration? Beach houses? I could manage to look interested, perhaps nod in the right places and make a few ambiguous remarks. I have memorised the recipes for pork vindaloo and beef korma. I could talk about the Taj Mahal or Kashmir. I promised Michelle not to say anything about the Kama Sutra” (145).

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me much in the same way as a museum might strike a romantic chord in a present-day technocrat ruled by the precision of the microchip. The pucca roads, radiating from the city like the arms of a starfish, are the only enduring symbols of a marginally successful invasion of modernity into the otherwise impenetrable depths of an ancient way of life. (10–11)

Lack of change is paired with general backwardness, not only in terms of technology. His family members have all followed predictable pathways, at least outwardly. In Iqbal’s touristy phase of arrival, Bangladesh does not even live up to the name of a developing country. Change can only be located in himself, and it is associated with the exposure to a foreign culture. Change is not only an alien concept, as Iqbal learns on his arrival; it is the subject of fear and resistance, because change produces difference, as an argument between him and his old friend Iftiqar, whom he visits, illustrates: “Tradition is such a common word, isn’t it?” Iftiqar muses aloud, kneeling on the floor to fill the kettle. “Yet when you think about it, the concept is not easy to understand. It can impute stagnation and exclude change. It may suggest fear and insecurity. The desire of clinging to a past may be an admission of an incapability to change, or it could indicate a wish to escape unhappiness by reverting to a world we once knew. It is so easy to evoke the past as a stable routine of familiar practices and call it tradition.” “It’s more than that. Tradition has to do with a sense of belonging,” I say stiffly. I am unimpressed with his comments. He has encapsulated my crisis. “There is a lingering foreignness about Australia that I find disturbing. I don’t have anything to hang to with conviction, nothing I can really call my own. I don’t feel passionately for anything that happens there.” (116–17)

Confronting Iftiqar, Iqbal encounters not simply the problem of alienation but its opposite. Iftiqar understands Iqbal’s predicament too well for his liking, and their discussion reveals that suffering from change and loss of cultural identity is no longer strictly a migrant’s prerogative. Once again, overt difference is only a mask for similarities Iqbal does not wish to acknowledge. Alterity serves the function of establishing an order of differences, whereas to face up to the underlying familiarities and similarities between himself and his non-migrant peers presents the danger of emotional involvement. In the course of his visit, however, Iqbal gradually discovers that he is not, after all, the only one who has changed. Khan’s portrayal of the Chaudhary family corresponds to Salman Rushdie’s observation, “the past is a country from which we have all emigrated.”12 Iqbal gradually discovers that there are few among his Bangali peers who are not estranged from tradition and seeking ways to circumvent it. Both his sister, Nafisa, and his brother, Hashim, are 12

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 125.

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having secret affairs, whereas his college friend, Iftiqar, has gone to ground and become a hermit who all but lives in and through books (118–19). Others, for example his cousin Mateen, establish order and security by clinging fanatically to the ways of the past and ignoring the present. These forms of internal exile constitute options which Iqbal could have chosen if he had not opted for external exile. Faced with these insights, it seems as if he is not as isolated as he feels or likes to feel. The difference between his own search for individuality and that of his peers is one of manner, not of essence. At the same time, his overt challenge to tradition is liberating. in that it opens a dialogue and changes the subject of direct communication, at least in his family. His provocative stance raises questions and underlines the complexities of cross-cultural interaction.

3. Knowledge versus Belief: Education as a Hotbed of Prejudices Iqbal traces the development of his internal alterity and, by corollary, that of others back to the double constraints of his Christian and Muslim education. Coming from a relatively well-to-do zamindar family of landowners, Iqbal has been given an English-medium education that includes Christian instruction. To counteract anglicization and to infuse him with the basics of Muslim culture, he is in addition put in the care of a Koran instructor. Once again, this double exposure to several cultures would be an enabling condition according to postcolonial theory, but this is not how Khan’s protagonist experiences it. In fact, Iqbal’s resentment of Christianity, which has destroyed his relationship with his wife and in-laws, has its roots in an education that was a double dose of threatening experiences: Caught between Catechism and Koranic lessons, I was like a young Everyman in a variation of a morality play. Instead of the good and bad angels fighting for my soul, the principal antagonists were the Brothers of the Holy Cross and the Peshawari mullah whose job was to indoctrinate us at home after school had ended for the day. (88–89)

While both religions lay claim to purist elements, both are watered down by factual hybridities. Both countries are represented as plural cultures in which conflicting pressures operate. Iqbal is simultaneously exposed to a Muslim and a Christian education in Bangladesh, and there are mosques in Australia, which have to accommodate Muslim immigrants from various, potentially antagonistic countries. Throughout the novel, xenophobia is linked to religion and to the power of religious beliefs that create rules about right and wrong, inside and outside, Self and Other. Religious education is portrayed as an oxymoronic concept as

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Iqbal experiences belief as the antonym to knowledge. In Bangladesh as well as in Australia, racists as well as religious fanatics are ignorant people who aim for simple and clear ways of categorizing people and the comfort of unchanging safeties, perpetuating a naive, binary view of the world. While Iqbal despises such attitudes, his mid-life crisis and self-disgust stem partly from the realization that he shares them to some extent. He finds that all people are racist, bigoted, and prejudiced in varying degrees, and he comes face to face with his own bigotries when he finds out that his sister is a lesbian. As far as Khan’s protagonist is concerned, his postcolonial education is the root of cultural schizophrenia, and, by extension, of xenophobia.13 It is both a blessing and a curse to him, as it leads to a loss of stability and to emotional indifference. Having experienced education as a frightening form of contest or conflict, Iqbal is ill-prepared to make a success of his own teaching career. He becomes engulfed in ambivalences and paradoxical demands rather than being on a higher ground to survey them. The sheer over-exposure to cultural input drives him into one of his coping mechanisms, introspection, sarcasm, rationalization or a combination of all three. In general, he compensates with rationalization, and his teacher’s role supports this process, as he conceives of his border-crossing position as a place from which he is able to teach each culture about its respective Other. However, he is in two minds about his teacher’s stance and the minimum of authority, power, and recognition it grants him. As a teacher in Australia, Iqbal again finds himself inextricably enmeshed in a system from which he cannot escape: I am a school teacher. I have no idea why I chose to teach. I sort of walked into it. I now feel as though I have undertaken an extended exercise in masochism, a desperately contrasting alternative to the unbearable privileges of a zamindar. I wanted to erase the past and assume a more humane identity. [...] But what a price I have to pay! Teaching has become a painful interlude between two holidays. There is little to recommend it. it is stressful and unrewarding. The idea of gentle scholars dedicated to the intellectual advancement of motivated students has been destroyed by the frightful realities of a pseudo-academic jungle where we are simultaneously the predators and the victims. [...] The guts has gone out of learning. The curious young mind is a rarity. The young have to be entertained (122)

13

The paradoxical influence of several cultures being imposed on young characters has been criticized, often satirically, by many South Asian authors. See, for instance, Jayabrato Chatterjee, Last Train to Innocence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); Amit Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime Address (London: Minerva, 1994); Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994); and Meera Syal, Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1997).

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To swim with the flow and to accommodate himself to the prejudices of the majority is Iqbal’s guide to survival in his Australian exile, a guiding line which he cannot always follow. Racist antagonism is dormant unless provoked by a show of unexpected education on the part of foreigners, who are perceived as unthreatening and may be tolerated within the limits of the given frame of prejudices. Iqbal’s immigration story is full of incidents showing rebellion to racist ignorance on the grounds of his degree of education, as the following encounter with a racist policeman demonstrates: “Put you blokes in the driver’s seat and you are a bloody danger!” He sneers. “You darkies are all the same, aren’t you?” “No we are not.” I reply. “There’s mahogany, walnut, teak, ebony. The variety is great.” – He stares at me with watery eyes. The rudiment of a conditioned mind slowly absorbs the fact that I have spoken in English. (144)

Iqbal feels superior to the place assigned to him by Australian prejudice; at the same time, he does not feel powerful enough to fundamentally change the stereotypes and racist categorizations he encounters. What is left to him are small and relatively immaterial confrontations on a one-to-one basis; and it is not surprising that this is the tool he employs to define his otherness when he returns to Bangladesh. As far as belief goes, fighting over the one true religion with his Australian in-laws crystallizes in the question of how Nadine, Iqbal’s daughter, is to be educated. While his in-laws wish to make Nadine into a white Australian according to their idea of the dominant culture and religion, Iqbal wants to keep her free from religious instruction. He intends to give her a choice later in life, regarding her as a new hybrid specimen of culture, as he explains to his father-in-law, Keith, when refusing to sanction her Christian baptism: “Nadine will be among a slowly growing minority which will learn how to combine traditions. It won’t be easy.” – “No.” Keith shook his head as if the idea were repulsive to him. “No. That will only confuse her. She must grow up with a clear understanding of who she is and where she belongs. If she lives here, it is only right that she be brought up in the mainstream of Australian life. There is no advantage in being a fringedweller.” – “Like myself?” I felt my pulse quicken. Like most first-generation migrants, I was sensitive about the uncertainty of my place in the community. [...] “This is a Christian society. Even you cannot deny that. My grand-daughter must not be deprived of a place here.” [...] “By the time she is an adult, the narrowness of life within a single tradition may become a handicap.” (85)

Iqbal projects onto Nadine his hope that the in-betweenness that he himself experiences as incarcerating may indeed become something akin to the enabling potentiality conceived of in postcolonial theory. Nadine represents a future he would like to affect in a positive way, once again on a one-to-one

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basis, given that he feels he cannot convey much to his schoolchildren by way of transcultural experience. What he fails to acknowledge is that his plan to shield Nadine from religion is no less an act of appropriation than those intended by both sets of grandparents. For Iqbal, it is indeed an unpleasant case of déjà vu when his Bangladeshi relatives prepare for a Muslim aqeeqa ceremony, in which Nadine will formally be named and introduced into their community. When she contracts a tropical disease in the course of this celebration, this is a dramatic climax of conflicting choices in the novel.

4. Conclusion In Seasonal Adjustments, the processes of alienation and Othering at work in both cultures are depicted as ambivalent and inconclusive but fundamentally similar. Their underlying driving forces, fear of a loss of identity and of control over one’s life, are at work in both Bangladesh and Australia. Change is an inevitable occurrence in both cultures, but Iqbal is forced to acknowledge that he is better able to decode the coping strategies of people in his homeland than in Australia. So when, at the end of his visit, Iqbal is invited to stay for good, to take a part in the management of his father’s grounds, and to marry back into his community, he takes this into serious consideration, despite his many misgivings about his culture. By revisiting his place of origin, Khan’s protagonist reviews all the factors that have contributed to his sense of identity – family, education, social status, religion – many of which have been overshadowed by race, the one most salient feature by which he is identified in exile. Iqbal’s confrontation with his family forces him to acknowledge his own complicity in perpetuating facile, binary concepts. Khan’s protagonist thus moves from his earlier ‘disenchantment’ to a moderate optimism by addressing his own ‘alterphobia’, fear of the Other, and also his internal processes of Othering. His visit to Bangladesh involves an individual’s dismantling of childhood fears and dreams and a coming-to-terms with the realization that all others have broken identities and burdens to carry. As a migrant he is not unique, but a permanent return is not possible for him, because “the womb was there all right, except that I could not fit there any more” (294). Seasonal Adjustments thus uses xenophobia, combined with fear of change, as a global phenomenon with which to negotiate the large-scale dimensions of migration with respect to individual concerns. Khan’s protagonist cannot resolve transcontinental problems, but he does manage to define his individual voice, and to escape protocols of behaviour imposed on

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him both by the different societies portrayed in the novel and by the postcolonial ‘hybrant’ script.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Vera. Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels (Trier: W V T , 2006). ——. “Beyond Centre and Margin: Representations of Australia in South Asian Immigrant Writings,” in Australia: Making Space Meaningful, ed. Gerd Dose & Britta Kuhlenbeck (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2007): 153–75. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Chatterjee, Jayabrato. Last Train to Innocence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Chaudhuri, Amit. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991; London: Minerva, 1994). Goetsch, Paul. “Funktionen von ‘Hybridität’ in der postkolonialen Theorie,” Literatur für Wissenschaft und Unterricht 30.2 (1997): 135–45. Gupta, Sunetra. Memories of Rain (New York: Grove, 1992). Khan, Adib. Seasonal Adjustments (St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 1994). ——. “In Janus’ Footsteps,” Australian Humanities Review (20 January 2004): online http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/copyright.html [accessed 7 July 2007]. Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine (London: Virago, 1990). Riley, Joan. The Unbelonging (London: Women’s Press, 1985). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991). Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh–ha & Cornel West (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990): 357–66. Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy: A Novel in Six Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994). Syal, Meera. Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1997). Vassanji, Moyez G. No New Land (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994).

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Writing From the Border, Doing Away With Margins Carl Muller’s Sri Lankan Burgher Narrative

D IPLI S AIKIA

Authors between cultures [find] themselves in the “pure potentiality” of the borderlands, scrutinizing the social milieu they [confront].1 The Burghers [are] a people becalmed by history, neither European nor Sinhalese. The Western connection during colonialism bestowed a certain status and some crumbs from the imperial table, and to retain their few privileges, they had to perpetuate their “separate” Burgherness.2

T

H I S E S S A Y explores the formation of a canon of writing defined at the border rather than from the centre, looking at the impact on Sri Lankan literature of sociocultural borders within the island. Taking its cue from Abril Trigo’s premise that “the border is the mark of history”3 and applying it to the particular context of Sri Lanka, this paper focuses on the ‘border culture’ of the Burgher community, comprising the descendants of those who bridged the distance between native Sri Lankans and the erstwhile colonizers: Portuguese, Dutch, and English, respectively. This community, 1 Noreen Groover Lape, West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers (Athens: Ohio U P , 2000): 9. 2 Charles P. Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” World Literature Today 71.3 (1997): 532. 3 Abril Trigo, “Frontera de la epistemología: Epistemologías de la frontera,” Papeles de Montevideo 1 (June 1997): 71–89. Quoted in Debra A. Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” in Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 184.

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“politically and culturally, stands as figure and metaphor for the transition between nations and the complex of connections which continue to exist.”4 The literature it produces, studied here within the analytical framework of border theory, might be read as a narrative of, and commentary on, the community.

1. Border Theory not so much a geographical place as zones of culture contact and conflict in which writers negotiate their position between cultures.5

The term ‘border theory’ has thus far been employed chiefly in the analysis of works by border artists from the U S –Mexico border, both Chicanos and nonChicanos. Border theorization, says Debra A. Castillo, requires a transcultural dialogue between two dominant cultural discourses.6 Bearing in mind the fact that a highly mixed border community like the Burgher community negotiates a considerable amount of inter-group accommodation, I would like to appropriate the dynamics of border theory for the purposes of this present study. The Burgher writer Carl Muller creatively negotiates his position within just such a hybrid culture which itself is positioned between two dominant cultures. He is one of the “‘threshold people’ who are socially marginal because of their mixed identities.”7 Today, the Burgher community occupies an ambiguous space between the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority and, in Muller’s words, continues to “mix with enthusiasm, intermarry with almost boisterous abandon and remain an object lesson of how a tiny minority can live in […] freedom and security.”8 “Freedom” is the operant word here, as etymologically relevant to the community as it is characteristically reflective of it, and of its literature. For, once the Dutch had replaced the Portuguese in Ceylon, the United Netherlands East India Company (or the V.O.C., as it was better known) became the sole employer, displacing the Portuguese military, and Batavia replaced Goa as the administrative centre. Over time, the Europeans and their descendants were classified either as “servants of the company” (i.e. soldiers 4 José David Saldívar, “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1991): 170. 5 Groover Lape, West of the Border, 3. 6 Debra A. Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” in Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 180. 7 Groover Lape, West of the Border, 7. 8 Carl Muller, The Jam Fruit Tree (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993): 137. Further page references are in the main text, with the abbreviation JFT.

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or merchants), or as “free burghers”9 (vrijburgers), former servants of the company who had decided to marry locally, had been granted the freedom to do so, and had then settled locally in the colony. It is precisely this intermixing that, to this day, makes this border community paradigmatic of what Castillo calls a “floating signifier for a displaced self.”10 It is in the crucible of such frontiers that these descendants of the colonizers were “liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English [Dutch, or Portuguese] in neither nationality nor characteristics.”11 As Sarvan says, the Burghers in ethnic, political, and cultural terms [occupy] not so much a homeland as a nebulous borderland; they [are] a liminal people, neither there nor here, fully at home only within their created Burgherhood. Theirs [is] an attempt at exclusivity, but an exclusivity at the fringes rather than at the centre: they [are] ex-centric and, as portrayed in Muller’s trilogy, also eccentric in the common use of the word.12

Thais abandon and intermixing constitute a defining quality of Burgher writing today, inverting – as does border theory – the dominant culture’s traditional stereotyping of the border as an “intellectual and creative vacuum.”13 Border communities such as the Anglo-Indians in India and the Burghers in Sri Lanka are often associated with a similar depravity. One of the ways in which Burgher literature inverts such stereotypes is by celebrating Burgher lives, in whatever light dominant communities may continue to view them. Muller then dedicates his contribution to this celebration, The Jam Fruit Tree (1993), to “all the Burghers in Sri Lanka and in their adopted countries the world over” (JFT 210). In other words, a ‘border writer’ such as Muller “[opens] an alternative cultural space, a heterogeneous world, within which [his] protagonists no longer act as ‘unified subjects,’ yet remain confident of their identities.”14 I will explore the marked presence in Burgher literature of what Castillo has called the “shadowtext”: the echo – from a space ambiguously inside/ outside the dominant discourses – of those issues (for instance, incest and infidelity to name but two) that the dominant discourses uneasily repress. 9 Dennis B. McGilvray, “Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.2 (1982): 239. 10 Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” 182. 11 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1894; New York: Dover, 1996): 23. 12 Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 530. 13 Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” 182. 14 Renato Rosaldo, “Fables of the Fallen Guy,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1991): 85.

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Muller’s von Bloss trilogy – The Jam Fruit Tree, 1993; Yakada Yaka, 1994; Once Upon a Tender Time, 1995 – offers itself as an exemplar of such a shadowtext.

2. The von Bloss Trilogy The Jam Fruit Tree, which opens Muller’s trilogy, is set in early-twentiethcentury Sri Lanka and tells the story of Cecilprins and Maudiegirl von Bloss – a middle-aged Burgher couple whose humble means diminish neither their sense of Self nor their idiosyncrasies – and their boisterous, hot-blooded brood of thirteen children: “all in all a robust, bawdy family, praising the Lord, church-going, singing their Aves with the same gusto as they would eat, drink and fornicate” (JFT 7). Two of their girls spend time with sailors, take to cigarettes in long holders, and are the first in the neighbourhood to wobble forth on the new high heels, paint their lips red, and then “do the la–di–da” (JFT 7–8) with the sailors before disappearing with them altogether. All of this occurs in the 1930s. Every time the family faces a moral crisis, all of Boteju Lane – where they live – is to be found jammed against their gate. On the day their daughter Leah’s suitor is thrashed by their youngest son Sonnaboy, “the neighbours [applaud] vigorously. [For] this [is] better than the Bioscope” (JFT 25). And, while one delinquent son molests his sisters, another makes capital of his position as tally clerk in a shipping firm, a third sets up home with the illegitimate daughter of a Pentecostalist, while still another – in a drunken haze – falls in love with a slatternly woman who, when offered a drink, wants nothing less than a glass of the local arrack, the lowly drink matured from the toddy of the coconut flower and procured for servants at Christmas. As Muller puts it, [A perfect] ding-a-dong, ring-a-bell roundelay. Every blood infusion and transfusion [making] them stronger, more virile […] [And no longer] as fussy […] as they were at the turn of the century. Cecilprins’ father would have fed him rat poison if he sought to marry a Sinhalese or a Tamil. The intermixing [had] become quite fierce. A whole generation of Nathanielszes with Aryan eyes and Dravid lips [bearing] witness to the undoubtedly Sri Lankan connection. (JFT 29)

These characteristics are evident in Opel. Married to one of Cecilprins’s and Maudiegirl’s boys, Opel grows up to be “the worst of that funny mixture that is the result of grandpa running off with the Sinhalese bicycle-repair man’s daughter” (JFT 37–38). The tree in the title, growing in the von Bloss garden, serves as a code and a calendar in the life of the family. It accommodates the children’s rites of

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passage: climbing its branches and looking up at those above them, they come to an awareness of each other (JFT 20); it provides a marker of development in one daughter’s relationship with her partner. Elsie’s and Eric’s taking chairs out of the house to sit under the tree is read by a worried Cecilprins as a sign of progress: “Now not even talking in the house. Putting chairs under jam fruit tree and who knows what he’s telling to her? Putting ideas in her head, must be. Everybody going on the road can see also. Tell, will you, to be like normal” (JFT 16). It brokers an armistice between Leah’s suitor George and Cecilprins, when the former’s acknowledgement of the tree helps Cecilprins forgive George for declaring his intention of taking Leah to the ship where he works instead of asking Cecilprins if he may do so. “George never knew, but it was his chance remark about the jam fruit tree that made him more acceptable. Old Cecilprins thawed enough to even offer him a ‘small sip’” (JFT 20). Finally, the tree is the site of reckoning for George and Sonnaboy. When George’s written proposal for Leah’s hand is rejected by Cecilprins, after the family has accepted all his gifts in all innocence, George arrives with a hulk of a man who flees at the first sight of Sonnaboy, leaving the latter to reduce George to pulp against the trunk of the tree (JFT 24). The tree, then, bears witness to the strengths and weaknesses of this synthesis of cultures and to their bridging of polarities, peaceably or otherwise. Itself a synthesis of opposing roles, the tree shelters childhood activities even as it allows these innocent activities to lead to a loss of innocence. The shade of the tree offers Elsie and Eric a sense of privacy from the rest of the family while exposing the pair, from that shaded border of the von Bloss compound, to the rumour-mill of Boteju Lane. And finally, the tree defines in widely opposing ways key moments in George’s interactions with the family, bringing him to reparation and resolution with Cecilprins, only to expose George at a later date to Sonnaboy’s wrath. In its accommodation of this sense of duality, the jam fruit tree embodies the energy of a border zone, where opposing forces meet. This zone can be seen to become what Castillo, speaking of geopolitical borders, calls a “space of physical crossing and cultural translation.”15 This “crossing” and “translation” is as evident in a grand Burgher funeral with a band and two Tamil women paid fifty cents each to wail at the cemetery (JFT 16), as in their food, their feasts: the Portuguese sweet bola folhado (pronounced ‘fi-a-dho’), was as much a Burgher speciality as was the true Dutch Lampries (from the Dutch word ‘Lomprijst’, for rice cooked in stock and baked in a wrapping of banana leaf). As far back as the eighteenth century, the founding members of the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon felt that the celebration of Dutch Burgher holidays 15

Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” 191.

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and customs was a major justification for its existence. Yet what these Dutch Burgher historians and antiquarians then discovered and acknowledged was that many of their most characteristic traditions were not Dutch at all, but Portuguese, and that other practices had been borrowed from the Sinhalese and the Tamils.16 And if this history of cultural translations has left the Burghers with a sense of what border theorists call “a free-floating unanchoredness,”17 then the occasional resistance to intermixing – especially on the religious front – might be seen as an attempt to overcome this. When Cecilprins’s daughter Anna brings home her Sinhalese beau Richard, Maudiegirl chooses to counter the perceived threat of his Buddhist background by simply rearranging the pictures in her house. Thus, a large Victorian print in the living room titled “Two strings to her Beau” is replaced with a picture of “Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” a picture of St Cecilia playing the organ is brought from the bedroom to a spot near the altar, while a calendar advertising Brand’s Gravy and Giblet makes way for a shocking picture of St Lawrence being roasted on a gridiron by a bunch of unshaven Roman soldiers. “Must show we are good Catholic family,” says Maudiegirl (JFT 44). Yet, had tolerance not been an abiding characteristic of the Burghers, might they still have been such an intermixed community? Says Muller: Tolerance among the Burghers […] has been their strongest survival factor […] their over abiding sense of ‘living together’ has made them merge and meld with the fabric of the island in a manner that is wondrously enlightening to know and behold […] They […] remain an object lesson of how a tiny minority can live in absolute freedom and security and be accepted by the majority without bias, envy, malice, or any of those miserable attitudes that are the harbingers of ethnic rivalry, intolerance and strife. This is why, wherever the Burghers live in Sri Lanka, one could well hear them say with pride: “What the hell, men, if I can live in this country and work and support my family and educate my children and be reasonably comfortable, what’s wrong with these other guys who are going around throwing bombs and demanding separate states? We are Sri Lankans, no?” (JFT 137)

We see here how Muller’s “cavalier non-conformism” challenges the values and preoccupations, if not obsessions, of other ethnic groups, how his easygoing attitude is a contrast to, and corrective of, the racial and religious intensities of the other communities.18 Like ‘mestiza’ or ‘mixed’ people in other 16 McGilvray, “Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka,” 250. 17 Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” 184. 18 Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 532.

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parts of the world, the Burghers “sustain contradiction,” “tolerate ambiguity,” and “operate in a pluralistic mode.”19 Perhaps the strength of Muller’s narrative lies in the celebration of the Burgher community, in the fact that he does not seek an identity resembling that of the dominant cultures/ nations, in his unapologetic rendering of it all. Muller’s “works are description and defence, a celebration and a valediction.”20 Some of the tolerance in the narrative movement of the book is evident in Maudiegirl’s eventual and wise acceptance of Anna’s Richard. When told by a not-too-happy Cecilprins that Anna was “doing the dance with Sinhalese fellow” (JFT 43), Maudiegirl replies: So never mind. You thinking we are special or something? Good to go to top market buying bombili from Sinhalese man. Good to get children’s bicycle made by Sinhalese man. Good to eat rice and curry and stringhoppers like Sinhalese man […] Firewood bringing Sinhalese man. Plucking coconuts who? Dhoby who? All over people Sinhalese no? Father telling in church love the neighbour. See, will you, who neighbour is. Sinhalese, no? (JFT 43)

In Maudiegirl’s words, and in Muller’s reflections on Burgher tolerance, we see a shadowtext that concentrates minds. Here, from a space ambiguously outside the Sinhalese/ Tamil discourses, we see the echoing of “those issues that both societies uneasily abject or repress, or, curiously, celebrate.”21 One of these is the issue of cultural differences. The other, equally palpable, shadowtext in Muller’s work is that constituting what to the other societies on the island would be taboo. As Muller says in Once Upon a Tender Time (1995), the concluding part of the trilogy, “This is not a social study in any sense of the word, but too often Society tends to keep a lid on what should be dragged out, debated” (OUATT 70).22 Muller writes that lid off, and we become privy to some of the fault lines opened up along this border. We see a world where Cecilprins’s son Dunnyboy commits the “unspoken, unsung, family sin” (OUATT 64) that robs his nieces and nephews of their innocence; where Sonnaboy’s wife Beryl’s “alley-cat” ways drive her son Carloboy to cry, “Shame to call you my mother!” (OUATT 232); and where the von Bloss grandchildren discuss the ethics of incest, subjected to it as they are by their apparently harmless uncle

19 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987): 86. 20 Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 527. 21 Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” 181. 22 Carl Muller, Once Upon a Tender Time (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995). All subsequent quotations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the main text, using the abbreviation OUATT.

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Dunnyboy (OUATT 230). Once again, Muller collapses the private with the public in an almost therapeutic manner when he says: one had little doubt that thousands of today’s upright citizens could say – if they have a mind to, that is – that childhood sexual encounters were, at the worst, rather messy, quite shameful at the moment, but never physically hurtful. Mental degradation, oh yes, but never physically hurtful. (OUATT 69)

By doing so, Muller has stirred the ire of his own community, one of its most indignant spokespersons being his cousin, Maureen Seneviratne, a successful activist known, among other things, for her dismissal of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy as filth. Some of the indignation directed at Muller stems from the fact that he and his publishers chose to present his bawdy account as a “faithfully comprehensive account of the Burghers,”23 which came as a shock to a community previously portrayed in literature as genteel and proper. Sometimes, however, the echoes that constitute the shadowtext are less subtle, and the ideal of ‘tolerance’ is negated. Early in the book, when Opel’s Pentecostalist father informs their neighbour of Opel’s impending marriage to Cecilprins’ son, the neighbour says his son would marry Opel any day. This kind offer brings on the following unkind exchange: to the neighbour’s offer, Opel’s father says of Opel’s fiancé, “But this good Burgher fellow, no? [meaning Cecilprins’ son] After all, we also Burghers” (JFT 38). This prompts the neighbour to later tell his wife: “See how now getting big for the boots, saying they are Burgher. Only name. Thuppahi [meaning half caste] Burgher. Never mind. Can find our son good girl. Better than that half-caste next-door one” (JFT 38). So there Muller has it out at last, that term of contempt border communities like the Burghers often find flung at them by those in the dominant communities: half-caste. Proving to us in this instance that, ‘separatist’ though the Burghers might not have been as a social group, neither were they entirely unified. What we have in the exchange above is a glimpse into the internal divisions that exist within this community. As McGilvray records, it has been a common practice to distinguish between Burghers of Dutch descent, the “Dutch Burghers,” and those of Portuguese descent, the “Portuguese Burghers” or, more derogatorily, the “Portuguese Mechanics.”24 A stratum of successful middle-class Dutch Burghers had come to form the more articulate segment of the Burgher community, seeking special recognition of their 23 Rajiva Wijesinha, “Aberrations and Excesses: Sri Lanka Substantiated by the Funny Boy,” Miscelena: A Journal of English and American Studies 18 (1997): 354. 24 McGilvray, “Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka,” 243.

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Dutch ancestry and special protection of their political and economic interests, while the Portuguese descendants have always been commonly depicted as the great Burgher residuum: poorer, darker, more numerous, less European. What is even more curious, however, is that on an island where these sociocultural boundaries still stand, sometimes it is members of the Sinhalese majority who find themselves on the defensive. Such is the case when Richard first asks Cecilprins for Anna’s hand: “[But] you are ... you are Sinhalese,” her father croaks. To which Richard replies: “But I am like you people. Educated good and Cambridge Senior also. Not like other yakko fellows who are waiters ... and peons. My parents have paddy fields ... and coconut and ... buffaloes also.” “But my daughter cannot marry a Sinhalese. We are Burgher people, no? How to face if I gave our Anna to a Sinhalese? Funny thing, no? Walking in sarong all over house and putting wooden clogs and going to temple ... my God, going to temple! You are Buddhist, no?” (JFT 35–36)

Richard’s innocuous words, “But I am like you people,” bring us to a further aspect of border theory. The Burgher community, descended as it partly is from the colonizers, has negotiated a different relationship with its colonial past from that of the other communities. And its literature invites us to reconfigure our understandings of the legacy of colonialism.25 The nature of this relationship is evident as much in Richard’s reply above as in Sonnaboy’s reflection that “because the British nabobs favoured the ‘educated’ Burghers, he knew that someday he would become a locomotive apprentice and actually ride the rails” (JFT 7), and in Muller’s acknowledgement that “the Burghers found immense favour with the British because their mother tongue was English” (JFT 27). With irrepressible irreverence, Muller records facts and, occasionally, the truth behind them. So, just as we are told about the grace and favour bestowed by the British nabobs upon the Burghers we are also told of the latter’s “usefulness” (YY 11)26 to the same British nabobs, as the Burghers spoke their language and could thus be easily manipulated. For, unable to rely on the Sinhalese and the Tamils, whom they had conquered, the British saw how the Burghers with their European blood, however diluted, could be made complicit.27 That this has been a pattern in history is evident in the fact that, 25

Walter D. Mignolo, “Posoccidentalismo: El argumento desde América Latina,” (“Postoccidentalism: The Argument from Latin America”), Cuadernos americanos 12.67 (1998): 143–65. Quoted in Debra A. Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” Post-Colonial Literatures, 183. 26 Carl Muller, Yakada Yaka (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994). All subsequent quotations from this novel will be given in parentheses in the main text, using the abbreviation YY. 27 Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 528.

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despite the visibility and success of the middle-class Dutch Burghers in nineteenth-century Ceylon, there was no overwhelming British sympathy for the Burgher’s cause.28 The British confined them to the middle and lower rungs of administration. It was under the British that the term ‘Burgher’ was eventually applied to all the inhabitants of Ceylon of mixed European ancestry. Some of the Burghers rose to positions of responsibility and prominence in government and in the professions with the encouragement of certain officials, such as Sir Alexander Johnston, a colonial official and judge in nineteenth-century Ceylon. The greatest number of Burghers, however, served in the clerical services, which they dominated; in the transportation and communication services, an instance of the transportation services making up the core of Yakada Yaka, which looks at Burgher life in the Railways; and in the various technical departments. The irony, however, lies in the fact that while Castillo identifies in the works of border writers what she calls a “doubled linguistic and historical heritage,”29 and Rosaldo speaks of “a border zone peopled with multiple subjectivities and a plurality of languages and cultures,”30 border communities like the Burghers and the Anglo-Indians consider English to be their mother tongue, thus privileging their European ancestry over their local ancestry. So pronounced was the Burghers’ ignorance of the native languages at times that in Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a group of Burghers listening to a man singing Italian opera think at first he is singing a Sinhalese folk song.31 Thus in former colonies, while the unmixed dominant cultures might be bilingual, the ‘mixed’ border communities remain largely monolingual, although it is the border communities who have a “doubled […] historical heritage.” This departure might be summarized thus: USA

TIJUANA

CENTRAL MEXICO

Monolingual

Bilingual

Monolingual

SINHALESE

BURGHERS

TAMILS

Bilingual

Monolingual

Bilingual

28 McGilvray, ”Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka,” 243. 29 Castillo, “Border Theory and the Canon,” 190. 30 Rosaldo, “Fables of the Fallen Guy,” 85. 31 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984): 46.

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3. Reading the Miscegenated Text A close reading of Muller’s works reveals a miscegenation of tones and registers that seems to reflect his description of Burgher speech thus: “they thought Dutch and spoke English, which did nothing to phraseology or syntax” (JFT 27). That “abandon and intermixing” Muller speaks of, in particular, is especially evident in the plurality of vocal registers he employs in his work, ranging from a phonetically vibrant Burgherspeak to detached reportage. What we find in his work, then, are characters speaking in a transcription of Burgher speech without a phonetic transcription of the same. This is interspersed by a narrative voice that is markedly measured and self-assured in its varying of tones and registers. During British rule and up until the passing of the Sinhala Only Language Act in 1956, English was the medium of instruction in schools. It was also the language used in day-to-day living – in the university, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary – apart from being the link language between the different communities. For many Sinhalese and Tamils, while it may not have been the language first acquired, English remained a tongue they were comfortable in. For the Burghers, of course, it was their first language. That is perhaps what has always given them the confidence to adapt it to their own unique register and Muller a sense of ease in the depiction of those registers, resulting in a linguistic fidelity and an unmistakable clarity. He says, “I am part of this polyglot Burgher clan” (JFT 29), and then proceeds to show us how. Thus we have structures such as “I gave her tight” (JFT 10), “doing the dance” (JFT 43), “come go” (JFT 83), “put a party” (JFT 210), and “put a bloody slap” (YY 137) alongside instances of slippages back into the vernacular, either through the use of certain everyday Tamil–Sinhala exclamations, such as “Aiyo,” “Anney,” “Chickay,” “Sothiya,” and “Apoi,” or through the use of indigenized idioms, such as “have to cut with cloth that have, no?” (JFT 109). A perfect example of this split is evident in the following passage, delineating the beginning of Maudiegirl’s physical decline: Maudiegirl had taken to medicating herself. Anna had, over the past two weeks been told to bring all manner of things from the pharmacy. Maudiegirl would mix compound camphor liniment with soap liniment and rub the mixture on her chest and then rub a flannel, thick with the stuff, around her neck. “Touch of the quinsy,” she would croak and lower herself into the lounger groaning “Uppaday” and digging out her rosary. At other times she would heat up camphorated oil and keep massaging it into the base of her neck. What is more, she had the bed moved from its position between the doorway and the window. “What for you moving the bed, woman?” Cecilprins would want to know.

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“Getting draught. Air coming from doorway. Some more coming from window. Bad, no?” (JFT 40)

Here, Muller encapsulates an entire linguistic spectrum in an episode that conveys the mixed energy of a community: from the narrator’s straightforward third-person account of Anna’s and Maudiegirl’s management of a situation, to Maudiegirl’s ‘touch of the proper’ usage, to an epic list of homegrown remedies, to Maudiegirl’s ‘lowering herself’ into the comfortable fold of an idiomatic Sinhala expression and ending with a phonetic exchange that brings us back to the Burgher-centric structures. This range raises the question of whether miscegenation is a figure for language, or language a figure for miscegenation.

4. The Burgher Narrative One of the social functions that literature fulfils is that of creating personal or social paradigms that serve as models for the reader.32

We see in Muller’s works a positive yet critical rendition of a bicultural experience,33 the Burgher experience. Such a rendering can be interpreted as a ‘resistive measure’ against Tamil–Sinhalese domination. This resistance, in turn, would invest the body of Muller’s work with an ideological agency that defines the contours of a distinct community. In his work we come closer to the Burgher community, seeing it as a psychosocial / sociocultural locus of moral, social and ethnic strivings. It is this energy that constitutes here what José David Saldívar calls, in another context, “the political and ideological rhetoric of the text.”34 Steven Mailloux, in a study of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, argues that a text can either be a topic in [a] cultural conversation, or it can be a participant who is motivated by and has effects on the conversation. As a participant, a literary text can take up the ideological rhetoric of its historical moment – the rhetoric of political speeches, newspaper editorials, book reviews, schol-

32

Luis Leal, “Beyond Myths and Borders in Mexican and North American Literature,” in Common Border, Uncommon Paths: Race, Culture, and National Identity in U.S.-Mexican Relations, ed. Jaime E. Rodriguez & Kathryn Vincent (Wilmington D E : Scholarly Resources, 1997): 143. 33 Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar, “Editors’ Introduction: Criticism in the Borderlands,” Criticism in the Borderlands, 4. 34 Saldívar, “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique,” 167.

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arly treatises, and so forth – and place it on a fictional stage. Readers thus become spectators at a rhetorical performance.35

Muller’s trilogy is a “participant” in a cultural conversation that focuses on the identity politics of a minority community. The trilogy is motivated by, and gives direction to, this conversation by taking up the ideological rhetoric of border politics and poetics. In his work, there is a rhetoric made up of the following elements: — sociological treatises on Burgher customs: weddings, funerals, birthdays, Christmases, and a predilection for free alcohol and free living; — socioeconomic narratives of border living: the kinds of employment Burghers were allowed to pursue or were excluded from; their ‘usefulness’ to the British: the trades and accompanying nicknames with which the Burghers were associated – the most common being “shoemaker” and, for some unknown reason, “cockroach” (JFT 27); the existence of a Burgher “social step-ladder” (JFT 97) and the “Burgher bowl of cherries and its Burgher pits” (JFT 99); — demographic accounts of upheavals and their sociopolitical origins: where they originated from, settled in, or left for, and why (YY 229); — their position within the island: the Burgher’s relationship with the colonizers and with the two dominant communities, the recognition of growing competition from the Tamils, Sinhalese, and Malays for the position of “preferred one” (JFT 162), and finally the different professions pursued by the Tamils, the Sinhalese, and the Burghers. The result is the individuation of a community. While the issue of “reaching conclusions and making judgements about a real community on the basis of fictional works”36 is indeed a valid one, one must also take into account Muller’s admission that his fiction is close to fact (JFT 149). This allows Noni Przybylski to read The Jam Fruit Tree as an introduction to the Burgher community.37 As Terry Eagleton states, The moment when a material or intellectual practice begins to ‘think itself,’ to take itself as an object of intellectual inquiry, is clearly of domi-

35 Steven Mailloux, “Reading Huckleberry Finn: The Rhetoric of Performed Ideology,” in New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Cambridge U P , 1985): 108. 36 This is a question Charles P. Sarvan addresses in his essay “The Writer as Historian: With Reference to the Novels of Peter Nazareth,” Toronto South Asian Review 10.1 (1991): 15–24. 37 Noni Przybylski, “The Jam Fruit Tree by Carl Muller,” unpublished paper, 10 May 1996. Mentioned in Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 528.

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nant significance in the development of that practice; it will certainly never be the same again.38

Sarvan supports the idea that the communal identity of the Burghers has been determined, to a large extent, by such acts of self-reflection, maintaining: What […] finally made the Burghers a community was their desire and determination to be seen as Burghers, their consciousness of forming a distinct group. It was a state of mind and feeling: they were Burghers because they thought of themselves as Burghers.39

Muller’s depiction of society is no more critical of the dominant communities than of his own community. Yet history has shown how dominant groups condemn minority communities such as the Burghers in Sri Lanka and the Anglo-Indians in India. The “rigidity and unkindness [of] traditional cultures” has been recorded by the Burgher poet Jean Arasanayagam, who was “unkindly and persistently rejected by her Tamil in-laws.”40 Muller’s balanced representation might validate his claims about the tolerance of the Burghers, once more confirming the role of text as performed ideology. However, the ideal of the forbearance of the Burghers in Sri Lanka is open to some questioning, as the Burghers today make up 0.8 percent of the total population of the island, a size that leaves them with few options. In other words, their forbearance may be the result of sociocultural necessity and historical circumstances and less a self-evident truth. More importantly, the ideological drama in Muller’s work is played out, to a large extent, through his use of humour and irony, and relies on the occasional unobtrusive reflection upon individual members of an otherwise rambunctious group. Upon Cecilprins’s death, Muller reflects: It was the case of the fabulous one-horse shay. Cecilprins was as tough a Burgher as the best of them. […] and had taken all that life threw at him and tossed it back. A stubborn man, warm, loving, set in many of his ways, yet his was the triumph of the ordinary and the enduring. Joy and sorrow had washed over him many times. He never sought after success or looked for favour. He never asked, never begged. He fathered thirteen children and never railed against Heaven for the trials he endured and the losses he bore. Quick to anger, quick to love, no pretensions, pride or pomp. (JFT 190)

Here, a quiet moment in a raucous home marks the investment of this world with a measure of dignity. The narrator de-emphasizes propriety even as he 38

Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London:

N L B , 1976): 17. 39 40

Sarvan, “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 528. “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” 530.

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punctuates the worth of the ordinary, bringing us to the core of a community without romanticizing it. As with other border narratives, we see Muller invent “the very possibility of a narrative community, a complete and legitimate […] persona, whose life of struggle and discord was worthy of being told.”41 This reminds us of the truth behind the words of the bilingual writer María Lugones, “The more fully this playfulness is appreciated, the less broken I am to you, the more dimensional I am to you.”42 One might read Muller’s work as exemplifying a discourse of recognition, transvaluation, reparation, celebration, democratization, and acceptance. More importantly, his narratives – sociological, historical, demographic, and political – run along one main axis, the personal, thus obviating their reduction to mere data. It is therefore appropriate that Muller should call his trilogy a work of “faction” (JFT 149). More importantly, it is the author’s description of his work in this manner that allows one to move beyond fiction, despite Christopher Rezel’s argument that The Jam Fruit Tree is a novel and should not be read as a sociological study.43 By collapsing autobiography, history, social commentary, and fiction, Muller draws our attention to the relationship between cultural representation and self-representation. The various echoes generated by the narrative mode of ‘faction’ invest the trilogy with a pattern of intertextuality that facilitates this enfolding of the personal, the historical, the cultural, and the social.

WORKS CITED Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). Calderón, Héctor, & José David Saldívar. “Editors’ Introduction: Criticism in the Borderlands,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1991): 1–7.

41

Ramón Saldívar, “The Form of Texas–Mexican Fiction,” in The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction, Folklore, History, ed. Don Graham, James W. Lee & William T. Pilkington (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1983): 141. 42 María Lugones, “Hablando cara a cara / Speaking face to face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990): 46. 43 Christopher Rezel, “The Jam Fruit Tree and Ceylonese English,” Weekend Express (Colombo; 6 April 1996): 3.

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Castillo, Debra A. “Border Theory and the Canon,” in Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 180–205. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: N L B , 1976). Lape, Noreen Groover. West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers (Athens: Ohio U P , 2000). Leal, Luis. “Beyond Myths and Borders in Mexican and North American Literature,” in Common Border, Uncommon Paths: Race, Culture, and National Identity in U.S.-Mexican Relations, ed. Jaime E. Rodriguez & Kathryn Vincent (Wilmington D E : Scholarly Resources, 1997): 143–65. Lugones, María. “Hablando cara a cara / Speaking face to face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990): 46–54. Mailloux, Steven. “Reading Huckleberry Finn: The Rhetoric of Performed Ideology,” in New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Cambridge U P , 1985): 107–33. McGilvray, Dennis B. “Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.2 (1982): 235–63. Muller, Carl. Once Upon a Tender Time (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995). ——. Yakada Yaka (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994). ——. The Jam Fruit Tree (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993). Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984). Rezel, Christopher. “The Jam Fruit Tree and Ceylonese English,” Weekend Express (Colombo; 6 April 1996): 3. Rosaldo, Renato. “Fables of the Fallen Guy,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1991): 84–93. Saldívar, José David. “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1991), 167–80. Saldívar, Ramon. “The Form of Texas–Mexican Fiction,” in The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction, Folklore, History, ed. Don Graham, James W. Lee & William T. Pilkington (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1983): 139–44. Sarvan, Charles P. “Carl Muller’s Trilogy and the Burghers of Sri Lanka,” World Literature Today 71.3 (1997): 527–32. ——. “The Writer as Historian: With Reference to the Novels of Peter Nazareth,” Toronto South Asian Review 10.1 (1991): 15–24. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History (1894; New York: Dover, 1996). Wijesinha, Rajiva. “Aberrations and Excesses: Sri Lanka Substantiated by the Funny Boy,” Miscelena: A Journal of English and American Studies 18 (1997): 347–56.

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between ape and man has always been difficult to tell. In both allegorical and real terms, the ape has traditionally been the mirror image of man, both his Other and his brother.1 ‘The human’ was without a doubt a central category of early modern thought in particular, lending its name to the most important intellectual movement of the time, humanism. But the meaning of the term ‘human’ was contested and unstable: inclusion in the category of the human shifted, depending on “contrasting border-figures, partly human – or, rather, intermittently human and inhuman according to their context.”2 Due to its anatomical similarity and its proverbial capacity to imitate man, the ape has always been, and still is, a privileged border figure, a figure that represents the impossibility of drawing a stable, unequivocal border between the animal and the human.3 1

HE DIFFERENCE

As Susan Wiseman maintains, not even a classical text of comparative anatomy such as Edward Tyson’s Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris (1699) succeeds in establishing a clear-cut boundary between ape and human – Wiseman, “Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape– Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Tyson,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert & Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002): 215–38. The structural impossibility of separating human from animal is confirmed by Erica Fudge’s comprehensive study of early modern theological, scientific, legal, and political discourses on animals – Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 2 Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert & Susan Wiseman, “Introduction: The Dislocation of the Human,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert & Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002): 2–3. 3 For a survey of recent representations of the ape as a figure of alterity, including the Asian Hanuman tradition, see Julika Griem, “Monkey Business: Postcolonial and Popular Figurations of the Ape in Theory, Literature and Film,” in Common Ground? Crossovers

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This epistemological uncertainty was reinforced as travel reports following the great voyages of discovery replaced the medieval images of two-headed antipodean monsters with more reliable descriptions of New-World inhabitants. From the beginning, these reports forged a link in European consciousness between human and simian ‘natives’. The blurring of categories was, as Manfred Pfister argues, a necessity of colonial discourse. If coloured people were alternately defined as human, sub-human or non-human, they could be treated accordingly: i.e. missionized, subjected or killed, as need be. This ‘flexibility’, however, led to a paradoxical complication: The definition of the savages as sub-human animals dissolved any clearcut distinction between man and animal. It not only put savages at a distance from human beings, it also had, paradoxically, the contrary effect of bringing man and animal closer to each other. If savages are regarded as some higher kinds of animals, certain animals could come to be regarded as some quasi-human species.4

Consequently, it became increasingly problematic to draw a line between the human and the non-human from the fifteenth century onward. As eye-witness reports accumulated and specimens were brought to Europe, the ape featured repeatedly as the chosen animal to figure as trope for the human Other. With the rise of modern biology in the nineteenth century, we can observe that apes are not only increasingly used as metaphors for the human condition, but also become literally – on the factual levels of anatomy and genealogy – related to humans, thus further eroding the always already shaky demarcation line between humans and animals.5 As Erica Fudge has argued, texts about animals are always about the human. Since it is impossible to represent animals without anthropomorphizing them, however, the desire to posit the animal as the antithesis of the human is always folded back on itself, in a paradoxical rhetorical loop, so that Between Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Bernhard Klein & Jürgen Kramer (Trier: W V T , 2001): 81–99. 4 Manfred Pfister, “‘Man’s Distinctive Mark’: Paradoxical Distinctions between Man and his Bestial Other in Early Modern Texts,” in Telling Stories. Studies in Honour of Ulrich Broich, ed. Elmar Lehmann & Bernd Lenz (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1992): 28. This does not necessarily imply that ‘savages’ are absolutely denied human status; in some contexts their humanity – e.g., the possession of a human soul for the purposes of conversion and salvation – is an indispensable presupposition. 5 Although the common descent of all species including humans was implied in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the argument was made explicit only in his later book The Descent of Man (1871). See Darwin, The Descent of Man, ed. James H. Birx (New York: Prometheus, 1998): esp. 5–26. The relation between apes and humans was taken up more specifically by Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863).

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the separation between the species becomes both unprovable and unrepresentable: By centralising the human, making the human vision the only vision, the separation of the species is impossible. At the heart of the debate about animals lies a debate about humanity which has social and political ramifications. If an animal can beg, then is a (human) beggar also an animal? The implications of this question are played out in the sense that in order to assert human status writers have to make exclusions. Some humans are aligned with animals: in fact, some humans are not human at all.6

Concomitantly with the exclusion of some human groups – the poor, the mad, the alien – from the family of man, some groups of animals are represented as close to the human, as border figures between beast and man. As symbolic representatives of alterity, these liminal creatures negotiate the status of the human Other: i.e. of the groups excluded from the status of rational man, but also of the non-human Other – man’s relation to animals, things, and nature.7 One such figure that recurs in numerous literary texts is the ‘civilized ape’. The civilized ape is positioned on the border between natural ferocity and civilization, treading the precarious demarcation line between nature and culture, otherness and belonging, animal and human. It is situated in a double tradition. On the one hand, Rousseau’s homme naturel, the good, unspoiled man of nature; on the other hand, the strange monster of medieval and earlymodern discourse which is transformed under colonialism into the horrible savage, the killer, and man-eater. Consequently the ape, like the ‘noble savage’, can either represent the ‘true values’ of enlightened European culture8 – human rights, equality, rationality – or can pose a threat to that culture. An example of the first case would be Thomas Love Peacock’s satire Melincourt (1817), in which the civilized orang-outang Sir Oran Haut-ton, a candidate for parliament, is not only a perfect personification of chivalric spirit and natural simplicity, but is also associated with a campaign to abolish slavery through a boycott of sugar. Despite his convincing mimicry of the man of feeling, Peacock’s orangoutang is also marked by his muteness and superhuman strength as Other, not only on an anthropological level, but more specifically as a stranger, as someone whose origins are not known and whose belonging to the community 6

Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 8. For an analysis of the spectrum of the non-human, see Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996). 8 In this sense, the noble savage is employed in, for example, Voltaire’s L’Ingénu (1767) and Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, or Man as He Is Not (1796). In both cases, the man of nature is not only a vehicle of moral critique directed at a spoiled society but also a political figure standing in opposition to a corrupt political system. 7

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remains dubious. But his otherness is contained, in part by the success of the civilizing process to which he is subjected, in part by his innate benevolence. More troubling are those instances where the civilizing process goes wrong. In the following, I will take a closer look at three texts that depict the civilized ape as violent, as a threat to civilization and order: Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Frank Challice Constable’s (i.e. Machiavelli Colin Clout) satirical novel The Curse of Intellect (1895), and, finally, the late Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (1923) by Arthur Conan Doyle. In all three cases, the representation of the civilized ape is inseparably bound up with a fear of the Other. The most conspicuous – and, to the police, the most inexplicable – aspect of the double murder in the Rue Morgue is its excessive violence. Mme L’Espanaye and her daughter were not only killed but severely mutilated, the daughter’s corpse stuffed head-down into a chimney, the mother’s head cut off. To the mind of Poe’s master-analyst Dupin, this very excess points to the perpetrator. Another clue that will finally lead him to the correct solution is the strange voice overheard by several witnesses – in Dupin’s summing-up: The witnesses, as you remark, agreed about the gruff voice [the owner’s voice]; they were here unanimous. But in regard to the shrill voice [the ape’s voice], the peculiarity is – not that they disagreed – but that, while an Italian, an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Hollander, and a Frenchman attempted to describe it, each one spoke of it as that of a foreigner. Each is sure that it was not the voice of one of his own countryman. Each likens it – not to the voice of an individual of any nation with whose language he is conversant – but the converse. [...] Now, how strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited! – in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar!9

The solution is, of course, that the voice is not human at all; it is the gibberish of an ape, more precisely of an orang-outang from Borneo which escaped from its owner, a sailor. But the emphasis put on the strange sound of the unknown voice is quite striking. Indeed, the witness reports are spread over several pages. Through the repeated insistence that the voice was not that of a fellow countryman, the ape is marked as a stranger, as a stand-in for the exotic foreigner. Its identity is constructed in purely negative terms, as not belonging to any known nation. Consequently, the ape is in two senses an ‘Other’: as non-European, and as non-human. On both counts, the otherness is linked to excessive violence and 9 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), in Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, intr. by Graham Clarke (London & Melbourne: J.M. Dent, 1984): 429– 30. Further page references to the story are in the main text.

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irrationality (since no ‘rational’ motive for the murders, such as a desire for gain, can be detected). The acts perpetrated at the Rue Morgue are themselves marked as alien. No common Parisian criminal could have committed them, and, as Dupin proves at the end, no human being did commit them. The relation between the human and the Other, however, is more complex than the ordering work of the detective makes it appear. Having made all the correct deductions, Dupin sets a trap for the sailor and makes him confess. The incident that spurred the ape to its rampage was apparently trivial; one night, the sailor finds the animal escaped from its closet: Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet. Terrified at the sight of so dangerous a weapon in the possession of an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use it, the man, for some moments, was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed, however, to quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the use of a whip, and to this he now resorted. (442)

In trying to shave, the orang-outang enacts what has become the proverbial attribute of its kind: it apes. The imitation of its master’s habitual action thus reinforces, on the one hand, its ape-ness, its beastliness. The very incongruity of its anthropomorphic action – the juxtaposition of “so dangerous a weapon” in the hands of “an animal so ferocious” – is threatening: the danger emanates from the in-humanness of the ape. On the other hand, it is not just any random action that is imitated. The ape tries to remove its facial hair – the sign of the beast – and thus not only to act, but to look like a human. By seizing a manmade tool, the ape crosses, albeit briefly, the human–animal boundary. Consequently, the established means of keeping it under control are bound to fail; the captured animal is no longer to be cowed by the whip and revolts against its gaoler. The source of danger is, in fact, the ape’s semblance of, and aspiration to, humanity – its un-beastliness. Although the story refers to colonialism only obliquely, it is possible to see in the ape’s imitation of its master an instance of colonial mimicry. In Bhabha’s sense, colonial mimicry is always excessive; the excess is a sign of difference and recalcitrance in the colonial subject even as the subject tries to erase this difference through perfect imitation.10 The ape in Poe’s story certainly displays signs of excess and recalcitrance when it tries to shave Mme L’Espanaye and, in doing so, cuts her throat. In analogy to the mimic man, the ape both tries to be human and subverts its gesture of imitation by exaggerating it. The ape is both human and inhuman. Although the restorative work of 10

Homi K. Bhabha, “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994): 85–92.

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the detective is directed at re-establishing the collapsed boundary, the ape’s liminality cannot be successfully erased due to its prior excessive and reiterated designation as a foreigner, a designation that was possible only in anthropomorphic terms. The two movements of exclusion cancel each other out. The difference between human and animal remains elusive. The liminal figure of the civilized ape is again taken up in some late-nineteenth-century texts. After the intervention of Darwinism, ape and man are closely linked genealogically – as the descendants from a common, lower form – and physiologically. Difference can no longer be based on descent or anatomy, but on cultural distinction – mainly, the ability to speak. Whereas Poe’s orang-outang was marked as inhuman by its ‘strange’ language, later apes – culminating in Kafka’s Rotpeter – can take even this last entrenchment of human difference. In this sense, the ape in Constable’s novel The Curse of Intellect achieves a state of almost-humanness, since it can communicate with its master by spoken language and with others by signs and gestures. The first-person narrator of The Curse of Intellect, Colin Clout, encounters one night, during a performance of Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, his old college friend Reuben Power accompanied by a strange creature who is hissed at and attacked by the audience: “The clothes and boots were covering the body of a monkey. The hair of the head and on the face was admirably cut and arranged, but the face was undoubtedly the face of a monkey.”11 As is later explained, Reuben Power had tamed and educated the monkey for an experiment: to test whether intellect or emotion forms the basis of human happiness. Power himself is a post-Darwinian atheist “absorbed in a theory of utter degradation, the lost state of man” (6). In order to prove his hypothesis that the intellect is man’s highest faculty, Power needs “some independent source” (12), a neutral, unbiased observer – a non-human being. The inherent paradox ensuring the ultimate failure of his experiment is, evidently, that the non-human observer must be able to communicate: i.e. must leave behind his state of nature and achieve at least a semblance of humanity – and consequently, abandon the neutral point of view. The experiment as such is partly successful – the ape learns to speak with Power, albeit only in “a painfully grotesque parody of man’s speech” (26)12 – and, after the initial hostility pro-

11

Machiavelli Colin Clout [= Frank Challice Constable], The Curse of Intellect (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1895): 22. All subsequent quotations will be given in parentheses in the main text. 12 Constable’s formulation is reminiscent of Huxley’s description of apes as man’s “blurred copies” and “insulting caricature[s],” beings closely resembling yet different from humans (Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, 59). Apes are thus uncanny in the Freudian sense, both too familiar and too alien.

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voked by its appearance at the opera, becomes a darling of fashionable society. Whereas the dressed monkey at the opera is felt to be threatening because of its simultaneous similarity to and difference from humans, its social success is achieved through its perfect imitation of human behaviour, and thanks to the colossal blindness of the members of high society. In the latter’s view, the ape’s function as a mirror figure is totally misinterpreted as a confirmation of human (i.e. aristocratic) difference: One cannot believe a monkey in its native state, unclothed, ignorant even of the existence of tailors, leading a selfish, foolish life of eating and drinking, and swinging by its tail, as I believe they do, from tree to tree, can have a soul! But this dear Mr. Power’s Beast! So different in every way. Living, really, like those in the best society! (35)

In this pronouncement of a leading society lady, all distinctions are unintentionally subverted. On the one hand, ‘the unclothed’ – ‘natives’, but by implication also members of the working class who are equally “ignorant […] of the existence of tailors” – are arraigned with the dumb, soulless beasts. On the other hand, the assumed “selfish, foolish life of eating and drinking” of creatures in the ‘native’ state perfectly mirrors the way of life of the aristocracy, indeed the useless existence of the speaker, Lady Champernowne, herself. The fact that “Mr. Power’s Beast” can imitate the manners of “those in the best society” proves what Lady Champernowne set out to contest, that the idle rich are on a level with – indeed, below – the beasts. The ape’s social success is only possible because society itself lacks a soul and has replaced human affections with mercenary transactions. The ultimate moral of the narrative is that love is the highest faculty in human beings, and that the overvaluation of intellect leads to abject misery. Salvation through love, however, remains an unfulfilled ‘utopia’. In the end, the ape kills first its master, then, unable to live without him, himself. The structure of bondage can be reversed, but not overcome. The social satire of Colin Clout’s narrative is interrupted by the ape’s firstperson tale of his capture and education by Power. A return to the state of innocence before language is impossible, however: I remember vaguely, and as a former life, the time before Reuben Power found and took me away. A life in the forest, of perfect health and virgin strength, with many of my kind; a life taking no thought for the morrow, a life above thought; free from the conscious restraint of any law, the daily sufficient food gained by daily sufficient labour; a life of perfect, of pure happiness – instinctive happiness from reasonable life and the unaffected intercourse of living creatures. But above all was the divine happiness – lost to me now, scarcely felt in my after-life of misery till the end was near

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– from conscious unity with, part in nature herself, under the Great unknown being who pervades all things animate and inanimate. (95–96)

The ape’s description of the educational process itself remains rather vague; as in the case of Poe’s orang-outang – and, later, Kafka’s Rotpeter – the chief civilizing instrument is the whip. Through fear, the ape is forced to lose its “part in nature” and to develop a consciousness of individuality, the first step towards civilization. In becoming self-conscious, the ape crosses the demarcation line separating the animal and the human. It becomes aware of its separation from and superiority to nature but “inferiority to man, whom I then recognised as a distinct, superior being” (96). Henceforth, the ape strives for knowledge and power, aspiring to become like its master. But like Frankenstein’s creature – and in a strikingly similar scene – the speaking ape has to realize that it is an outcast from human society, unique and hence monstrous. This feeling of isolation results in rage directed, again as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, against its creator. The obvious difference between Poe’s and Constable’s apes is that the orang–outang in Poe’s tale remains mute and is represented from the outside, whereas the monkey in The Curse of Intellect acquires reason and language, thus making the transition from ‘zombie’ to agent,13 and is able to tell its own story. The murders it commits are deliberate acts of revenge: i.e. motivated and rational. In its evil deeds, the civilized ape achieves equality with the human. In Constable’s narrative, the Cartesian distinctive mark of humanness, reason, fails to operate as a sign of difference, since the monkey is able to attain it; in addition, intellect, the specifically human, is placed below instinct, the common property of all creatures: The boast of man, that by his reason he is the king of all beasts, is empty and false. His life is mean and ignoble by comparison with that of others, though conquest of the material may have given him physical command. [...] Even man’s latest example of a great philosopher, unhealthy in body, querulous and repining in mind, is less enviable, less worthy of imitation, than that of a cow peacefully and contentedly chewing the cud. (134)

Although in parts The Curse of Intellect approaches a biocentric position14 that evinces empathy with the animal perspective, the novel remains locked in 13 In Kenan Malik’s terminology, the zombie is an automaton without free will, as opposed to the agent who can act autonomously; Malik, Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature (London: Phoenix, 2000): 219–21. 14 According to Margot Norris, biocentric understanding involves the writer’s own animality and is critically aimed at the human being as a cultural creature, a position Norris connects with the emergence of modernist literature; Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1985): 3.

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the satirical tradition of ‘noble savage’ novels: i.e. it is really about the shortcomings of human society, not about the plight of the captured creature. The text’s engagement with the uncertainty of the ape’s status – and, conversely, human status – is contained by the transposition of the initial violence, the cultural displacement inflicted on the ape, onto the violence committed by the ape. By contrast, in Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” the danger of apeness – the threat of degeneration – comes from within. Man himself reverts to an ape, whereas real apes figure only as a residue, in the form of a serum extracted from monkey glands. Sherlock Holmes’s latest client, the assistant of the eminent professor Presbury, describes the strange behaviour of his employer: I could see that something was coming along the passage, something dark and crouching. Then suddenly it emerged into the light, and I saw that it was he. He was crawling, Mr. Holmes – crawling! He was not quite on his hands and knees. I should rather say on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands. Yet he seemed to move with ease. I was so paralyzed by the sight that it was not until he had reached my door that I was able to step forward and ask if I could assist him. His answer was extraordinary. He sprang up, spat out some atrocious word at me, and hurried on past me, and down the staircase. I waited about for an hour, but he did not come back. It must have been daylight before he regained his room.15

Apart from his recent infatuation with the young daughter of a colleague, the professor was always a pillar of rectitude. His increasingly odd actions – which include his crawling up a wall in bat-like fashion – are at first inexplicable; they seem, however, related to a secretive trip to Prague, and the ensuing reception of mysterious letters and parcels. The only other clue is his increase in energy and vitality. As Sherlock Holmes correctly deduces, all of these changes were caused by a rejuvenating drug the professor obtained from the Prague scientist Lowenstein,16 a drug which was based on langur serum. The monkey drug succeeded in restoring Presbury’s youth, but it also instilled in him the characteristics of the langur. As a cross between a professor and a langur, Presbury is not, like Poe and Constable’s apes, a purely metaphorical 15

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” in Conan Doyle, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981): 1074. Further page references are in the main text. 16 The scientist’s name and the location are, of course, reminiscent of Rabbi Löw, the creator of the Golem. Together with the references to Count Dracula, the text thus constructs a space of the uncanny Other which is situated in Eastern Europe, but from which subversive missiles can intrude, germ-like, into the ordered English realm. The space of the Other is pushed even further to the East by the specific designation of the Langur’s extraction, “the Himalayan slopes” (1082).

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border figure, but a literal, biological hybrid.17 Consequently, the civilized ape as a representation of liminality is displaced from the symbolic level to that of biology. The sign of difference is no longer a cultural practice – the acquisition of speech – but physical transformation, Presbury’s ‘creeping’ and climbing. The partial loss of the erect gait signifies the ‘patient’s’ moral degradation and physical reversion to a lower state – he creeps down the evolutionary ladder. As the detective points out, similar manipulations may recur and lead to widespread degeneration: There is danger there – a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become? (1082–83)

In Sherlock Holmes’s assessment, the negative meaning of degeneration is apparently clear, but in fact, the cultural value of the term is quite ambivalent. As in Professor Presbury’s case, the regression to an animal state is equated with increased vigour, vitality, and agility.18 Indeed, “the survival of the least fit” is a paradox. The fittest: i.e. those best adapted to their environment, will always survive. If an urban, industrialized environment demands the resurgence of buried animal characteristics, then those who are able to access their animal side are the fittest. The possible price of this regeneration through degeneration is indeed that the world may become a “cesspool.” In a world ruled by brute strength, ethical and cultural refinement would have to be abandoned; in this sense, Professor Presbury’s radical method poses indeed “a very real danger to humanity,” in the word’s meaning of ‘humanist values’. In Doyle’s story, the border figure is positioned differently from the ape in the two earlier texts. Here, the ape-man is no longer an ingenue who has been culturally alienated and who questions Western society in cultural terms. The professor-turned-ape resides at the colonial centre from where he can pull the strings of international science to gratify his personal inclinations. In addition, Presbury’s desire for physical rejuvenation raises the issue of the biological depletion, as opposed to moral corruption, of humanity. On the surface, Presbury’s return to animality is certainly repudiated. His apeness is linked with sexual perversion, as the possibility of incestual desire for his daughter is evoked. Finally, he is brought down in the most degrading fashion, not by Holmes’s superior intellect, but by his own dog. Although Presbury’s story is 17 For a study of the Victorian fascination with hybrid animals, see Harriet Ritvo, “Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996): 37–57. 18 This positive connotation of regression also holds true for a later ape-man, Tarzan.

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the story of a fall, his acceptance of passion: i.e. of his own animality, seems rather attractive compared to the prim propriety of those who are concerned with containing his excesses. In particular, the contrast with the latent deathwish of intellectuals – as Holmes puts it, “The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher” – raises the question of degeneracy in a new way. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the racist and xenophobic implications of his writing, Doyle can be aligned with the ‘theriophilic’ (animal-loving) tradition in Western literature that affirms “the ineradicable and salutory animality of man,”19 albeit with the qualification that Sherlock Holmes declares human animality to be anything but salutory. However, the opposition between reason and instinct, intellect and animality is far from clear-cut in Doyle’s detective stories. Professor Presbury is also a man of the mind who retains his intellectual vigour despite his physical transformation. Sherlock Holmes, by contrast, is not just the mastermind protecting society against crime but a drug-abuser, a wasted decadent whose success depends on his brain’s resemblance to that of a criminal. In “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” the civilized ape achieves the highest possible ambivalence and consequently fulfils its destiny as a liminal figure. The category boundary between the human and the animal is finally subverted by the shift from the symbolic to the biological; in the biological register, the human prerogative fades away. In addition, the trajectory of the civilized ape is reversed. The beast’s dream of becoming human is replaced at the turn of the twentieth century by the human desire to become animal. At stake in this shift from ape-becoming-human (Poe and Constable) to humanbecoming-ape (Doyle) is the definition of the human based on reason. In Doyle’s story, rational agency is replaced by frenzy, which bears both positive and negative implications. The professor’s loss of self-control is simultaneously debasing and empowering. While in the end Presbury is thoroughly humiliated, his regression to an apish state is effectively opposed to the depletion and constraint characterizing his fellowmen. Although in most respects Doyle can be claimed only with some difficulty as a precursor of modernist literature, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” foreshadows the revaluation of emotion, instinct, the body, and the animal realm that takes place in modernist movements such as primitivism. Doyle’s story thus prefigures the possibilities fully explored in twentieth-century literature, beginning with Kafka’s “Report to an Academy.”

19 Jennifer Ham & Matthew Senior, “Introduction” to Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham & Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997): 4.

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WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994): 85–92. Clout, Machiavelli Colin. The Curse of Intellect (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1895). Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, ed. James H. Birx (1871; New York: Prometheus, 1998). Fudge, Erica. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Fudge, Erica, Ruth Gilbert & Susan Wiseman. “Introduction: The Dislocation of the Human,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert & Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002): 1–8. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” in Doyle, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981): 1070–83. Fuss, Diana, ed. Human, All Too Human (New York: Routledge, 1996). Griem, Julika. “Monkey Business: Postcolonial and Popular Figurations of the Ape in Theory, Literature and Film,” in Common Ground? Crossovers between Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Bernhard Klein & Jürgen Kramer (Trier: W V T , 2001): 81–99. Ham, Jennifer & Matthew Senior. “Introduction,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham & Matthew Senior (New York, Routledge, 1997): 1–8. Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863). Malik, Kenan. Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature (London: Phoenix, 2000). Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1985). Pfister, Manfred. “‘Man’s Distinctive Mark’: Paradoxical Distinctions between Man and his Bestial Other in Early Modern Texts,” in Telling Stories: Studies in Honour of Ulrich Broich, ed. Elmar Lehmann & Bernd Lenz (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1992): 17–33. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, intr. by Graham Clarke (London & Melbourne: J.M. Dent, 1984): 411–44. Ritvo, Harriet. “Barring the Cross: Miscegenation and Purity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996): 37–57. Wiseman, Susan. “Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape–Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Tyson,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert & Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002): 215–38.

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T RANSITIONAL S TATES «•»

Race and Racism in Contemporary Canadian Fiction M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land

M ARTIN G ENETSCH

1. Introduction

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will address some of the issues connected with racism in a multicultural context. Canada is a country that has institutionalized multiculturalism as a policy since the late 1980s and as such constitutes an interesting object for an investigation of the nature of racism. The question of how the migrant is viewed in a society that prides itself on allowing indigenous traditions to flourish is at the heart of much of contemporary Canadian multicultural or ethnic fiction. Examples are the narratives of Rohinton Mistry, Neil Bissoondath, and M.G. Vassanji. At the centre of my analysis will be Moyez Vassanji’s novel No New Land (1991). I will argue that this text views Canadian multiculturalism critically; despite the respect officially to be accorded to the immigrant. In reality, xenophobia – or the fear of the foreign – is very much a part of society. On the other hand, it becomes evident that ‘race’ as a conceptual tool is not only relied upon by the host country, but is also reflected in the migrant’s behaviour and discourse. This, in turn, means that race in Vassanji’s narrative should not merely be conceived of as an instrument of marginalization, but should also be subjected to a functionalist analysis. HIS ESSAY

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2. Context No New Land is a short novel1 that focuses on a small community. At the centre of No New Land is the Indian Shamsi community, Vassanji’s fictional rendering of the Shia sect of the Ismailis.2 Historically, the Ismailis were a colonial elite that supported British as well as German colonial rule in East Africa. Starting out as shopkeepers and businessmen settling in the British and German colonies on the coast of East Africa, they possessed the necessary linguistic and political inside knowledge to assist the colonial administrations in ruling an inaccessible and unruly hinterland. Their role as marginal men lent them the necessary flexibility to operate as cultural translators and to function as “a buffer zone between the indigenous Africans and the colonial administration.”3 In postcolonial times, the position of the Indian communities in East Africa became untenable. Because of their affiliation with the former colonizers, the postcolonial regime marginalized the Asians of East Africa. With the nationalization of rental properties in Uganda and Tanganyika, the former German East Africa, the Indian colonial elites of East Africa were forced into the international diaspora. The Ismailis suffered the same fate. While their esoteric religious orientation as a Shiite sect had already been regarded as “somewhat unorthodox, hence insecure”4 in colonial times, the relationship of the Ismailis to the former colonizers was deemed politically suspect by the new postcolonial establishment. By narrating the story of the Shamsi community, Vassanji gives voice to an immigrant experience that hitherto has not found its way into Canadian literature and public awareness. No New Land illustrates the community’s fate in Toronto, to which city Nurdin Lalani, one of the protagonists, emigrates with his family. Nurdin, a simple and average man, hopes to escape from both the control of a dominant father-figure and a depressing (post)colonial reality. 1

No New Land was planned as a short story. The reason why it became a novel that, in its economy, resembles a short story is explained by the lack of historical weight of its subject-matter. Vassanji maintains that “if you wrote a novel that was entirely Canadian content then, yes, it would be thin.” Shane Rhodes, “M.G. Vassanji: An Interview,” Studies in Canadian Literature 22.2 (1997): 114–15. See also Chelva Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview with M.G. Vassaji,” World Literature Written in English 31.2 (1991): 32. 2 Vassanji’s models are the so-called Khoja Ismailis. The reason Vassanji invents a community is that such a choice permits a greater degree of artistic freedom. See Rhodes, “M.G. Vassanji: An Interview,” 116. 3 Amin Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji,” World Literature Today 67.2 (1993): 277. 4 Moyez G. Vassanji, No New Land (1991; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997): 13. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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However, as the title of the novel indicates, his migration to Canada is troublesome; Vassanji shows this by detailing “the ironies, the pathos and the hardships of having to live between two worlds, neither of which provides the harmony of a life that the mind imagines and craves for.”5 It will be argued that the hardships (but also the ironies) of the Lalanis’ cultural dislocation are the result of assumptions based on race as a conceptual category.

3. Aggressive Racism No New Land features two major instances of racism. The first concerns a minor character, Esmail, who is discriminated against by youths and is eventually beaten up in a Toronto subway station (94–96). The violence of this event attracts the attention of the media, and Esmail becomes a celebrity. Cynically enough, not until he is victimized does he receive any recognition from Canadian society. Prompted by the racism of an allegedly non-racist Canada, Esmail begins to paint indigenous masks, thereby making ethnic difference his one and only artistic theme. Racial violence triggers a return to indigenous art as a means of coping with aggressive othering. Talking about the inspiration for Esmail’s coming-out as an artist, his friends sarcastically remark that “‘Dar didn’t do it – Canada did.’ ‘By breaking his legs, you mean’” (164). By being violently discriminated against, the hitherto apolitical Esmail is politicized. He leaves Canada for the country of his birth, Tanzania, while continuing to paint. His return to his origins is not only an aesthetic endeavour, it also has a sociological dimension, in that it brings about a valorization of (his) community as well as a valorization by his community, the Shamsis. Not only has his art benefitted from his return to Dar es Salaam, Esmail’s apocalyptic self-expression is also better understood by the members of the community to which he belongs than by a Canada that rejects his works as aesthetically inferior. When connected to their sociocultural context, the masks acquire additional layers of meaning because they have a particular cultural / ritual function within Tanzanian society. The fact that Esmail’s art has not been understood by Canada not only reflects how impoverished his art may have appeared in a host country but also demonstrates how rootless he himself has been in the North American diaspora. Thus it could be argued that his new role as an artist preoccupied with a community’s culture and collective memory has a therapeutic function for him. 5 Chelva Kanaganayakam, “Don Mills and Dar es Salaam: A Review of No New Land,” in Floating the Borders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism, ed. Nurjehan Aziz (Toronto: T S A R , 1999): 200.

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Esmail comes to terms with his confusion and disorientation by giving up the struggle to make Canada his home. Whereas his story is that of an adaptation thwarted by the failure of Canadian multiculturalism, he nevertheless succeeds economically – something that invests his story with irony. As a human being, Esmail is rejected in Canada because of his racial difference; as an artist in Africa, however, he is eventually embraced by an international postcolonial art-history establishment eagerly responding to the cultural difference reflected in his art: “Students – American students, nice pretty girls – go and study this art” (163). While Canadian culture has failed him by constantly foregrounding his difference, racism – cynically enough – proves a blessing in disguise money-wise. Thus, involuntarily, Esmail discovers the cultural capital inherent in the very difference constructed to marginalize him. While Canada has operated on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of Esmail as the archetypal outcast, Esmail’s enthusiastic welcome by his country of origin echoes (albeit for different reasons) the worshipping of his ancient namesake within an Islamic tradition.6 The allusiveness of his name makes evident that Esmail’s fate is encoded in two different ways that, in turn, correlate with two different cultures. Inherent in his name is the diaspora’s promise of a double vision, which, however, is denied to him. Admittedly, his fate, unlike that of Nurdin, does not end in an impasse in-between cultures; however, nor does the multiplicity of cultural experience result in a hybrid existence either. Esmail’s return to East Africa, as well as his traditionalist understanding of art, may signal a new belonging beyond dichotomies and ambivalence. In the perspective of the novel, however, the new awareness of difference underlying Esmail’s success is problematic. Esmail’s choice is the underside of an aggressive politics of othering that becomes a beacon in its critique of multiculturalism. Difference, enacted in the realm of art, becomes a strategy of survival that, in spite of its inarticulateness, speaks eloquently of a Canadian society from which respect for otherness has been ousted.

4. Systemic Racism While Esmail’s fate provides the dramatic climax of the novel’s plot, Vassanji also narrates the fates of those who experience racism on a lesser scale. A case in point is Nurdin Lalani’s desperate search for employment. In spite of 6

For Muslims, Ismail founded the Ka’ba in Mecca. See Peter Calvocoressi, Who’s who in der Bibel, tr. Angela Hausner (1990; Munich: dtv, 1996): s.v. “Ismael.” See also Adel Theodor Khoury, Ludwig Hagemann & Peter Heine, Islam-Lexikon: Geschichte, Ideen, Gestalten, 3 vols. (Freiburg, Basel & Vienna: Herder, 1991): s.v. “Ismael.”

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being sufficiently qualified as a shoe salesman, the novel’s protagonist is offered only menial jobs, in which – ironically – he as an Other is discriminated against by other immigrants, this time those of East European and Asian descent (86–87). This means that Toronto’s multicultural reality does not foster solidarity among those on the margins of society but turns out instead to be a site of competition. Compared to the racial discrimination experienced in multicultural East Africa, Canada does not appear as a new land. In addition to other immigrants’ prejudice, Nurdin is faced with institutional racism: i.e. a racism that is part of the system of Canadian society. Thus the futility of Nurdin’s humiliating quest for a job is epitomized in the employers’ recurring demand for “Canadian experience” (48). For Nurdin this is a Catch-22 situation. Like Joseph Heller in Catch 22 (1961), Vassanji goes to great lengths to outline the absurdity of his protagonist’s endeavour to obtain something that is the prerequisite of itself: Canadian experience becomes a “trump they always call, against which you have no answer” (44). Nurdin’s search for a job becomes a low-key quest that turns in on itself. And it is the circular trajectory of his endeavours that causes Nurdin’s despair. Canadian experience takes on a new quality; it does not translate as work experience in new cultural surroundings, but as constant exposure to racial discrimination. Needless to say, this is a feature of Canadian society that makes it particularly hard to achieve integration of any kind. Nurdin’s failure to acquire a respected occupation forces him into a vicious circle. Being without a job erodes his identity as breadwinner and head of the family; the fact that his wife does find a job erodes his identity as husband and father. Thus the new land alienates him from those that have hitherto provided an antidote against alienation – the members of his family: Out of this world Nurdin would wander in search of a job and return dejected, plunged into deeper despair. Sometimes he took daily jobs, invariably menial, loading and unloading with fellow Dar immigrants, and would come home and lie and say ‘filing,’ until that became a joke. Everyone knew what ‘filing’ meant. Sometimes he simply refused to go out to these humiliations, watching game shows and talk shows at home, and joining the ‘A-T’ crowd of idle men who met for chitchat and tea downstairs in the lobby in emulation of Dar’s famous A-T shop. On his idle day, in the afternoons he would clean up at home, sweeping away evidence of any degeneracy, giving the television time enough to cool. You could be sure that Fatima on one pretext or another, or when you were not looking, would detect any telltale residual warmth on its body. And when she did – did the girl show contempt already at this stage. (65–66)

No New Land illustrates the fact that what to the racist looks like culturally ingrained laziness is in fact socially instilled depression. Rejection causes dejection, marginalization leaves self-consciousness where integration should

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foster self-confidence. All in all, the disappointments and humiliations that Nurdin experiences bring about his reluctance to adapt. He must remain an alien because he is profoundly alienated by a new land that marginalizes him on account of his skin colour, but does not acknowledge his ethnic difference.

5. Racism and Racialism A further indicator that Nurdin’s otherness is in fact socially produced is the second climax of the novel. In addition to the violence experienced by Esmail, the (suspicion of) rape Nurdin is charged with constitutes another major instance of racism.7 Nurdin offers to help a Canadian girl whom he encounters on his way home from work: As he approached the small lobby facing the two elevators, he saw in front of him a girl in blue jeans sitting on the floor, leaning against the side wall. Her legs were drawn up in front of her, her hands hung limp on the raised knees, and her head was lowered. Obviously she had been crying, the blonde hair was dishevelled, the face – what he could see of it – was puffy and red. Instinctively he hurried towards her, parking the trolley on the way. “Madam – Miss – is anything wrong? Can I be of any help?” There was no response. He looked up again, turned round, there was no one coming. He tried again. “Miss, shall I call a doctor?” He was almost squatting beside her now, his hand was on her shoulder. He realized he had never been so close to a white woman before. And he realized he had become aware of her femaleness. He caught, quite strongly, the whiff of creamy makeup. Her blouse was white, embroidered at the neck. A button was open and he could see the curve of a breast. The skin there was pale, almost white, and dull. He was waiting for her to respond to his offer of help. (178)

The fact that the Portuguese-Canadian girl tries to sue him for attempted rape is indicative of Nurdin’s vulnerable status as a member of a visible minority. Not only does Nurdin (as seen above) fail to accommodate to Canada, Canada also fails to accommodate Nurdin. The lack of acceptance impedes integration into Canadian society. Hence, for Canada, Nurdin is merely a threat and thus a burden at this point. Canadian society seems to overlook that Nurdin’s different ethnicity is also a cultural resource, which is a remarkable failure for a country that prides itself on its multicultural policy. As a matter of fact, Nurdin’s skin colour becomes the target of lower-class racism propelled by frustration and greed. Not only is the girl’s attempt at

7

Nurdin’s ‘rape’ was the subject of the short story Vassanji intended to write before he decided to compose a longer prose narrative; Rhodes, “M.G. Vassanji: An Interview,” 114.

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blackmail deliberately racist, but the reactions of Nurdin’s colleagues immediately establish a connection between sexual desire and racial / ethnic difference that is also informed by racist prejudice: “I’m not going to serve this rapist!” she [i.e. Nurdin’s colleague] said, running away. “I thought in this country a man was innocent until proved guilty,” said Romesh, to no one in particular. “Where he comes from, both his hands would be chopped off,” announced Mrs Broadbent. “Yes, and –” “And his marbles, too,” added Romesh. (180)

Although there is no evidence supporting the Portuguese woman’s accusation, she is regarded as a credible witness. One is forced to conclude that people suspect Nurdin of the crime because his outward appearance as a member of a so-called ‘visible minority’ suggests racial difference. This assumption, however, triggers irrational fears. It is, in fact, fitting that Nurdin should be accused of rape, for the crime he is associated (and charged) with reflects fantasies of infiltration and disintegration already circulating within colonial discourse. Mrs Broadbent articulates a moral panic that establishes a connection between visible difference and orientalism.8 Nurdin’s difference becomes uncanny because it is assumed that the Other: i.e. in this context the African– Indian and Muslim, is lewd at heart and, additionally, cannot contain his lewdness. Ironically, in her call for punishment, Mrs Broadbent is convinced she has understood the Other on his own terms. She suggests that Canada is just, in that it prevents the criminal from having to suffer traditional punishments. What she really does, however, is ‘understand’ Nurdin along lines dictated by racist discourse. The punishment that Nurdin would allegedly have to suffer “where he comes from” is informed by the anti-modernist, biased beliefs of the West about Islam. Chopping off a person’s hands is the punishment that the Koran prescribes for rape; more importantly, it has not even been inflicted as a punishment for thieves for a long time.9 Thus in a perfidious if unconscious move, Mrs Broadbent’s claim displays racism and not retribution for injustice. Her racist attitudes contain rather than embrace otherness. The same holds true for the police officer who questions Nurdin and also suspects him of being responsible for a variety of other crimes (181). The 8

“The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as alien.” Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995): 207. 9 See Konrad Dilger, “Tendenzen der Rechtsentwicklung,” in Der Islam in der Gegenwart, ed. Werner Ende & Guido Steinbach (Munich: C.H. Beck, 4th ed. 1996): 204–208 and 832.

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fact that Nurdin is almost brought to court reflects a multiculturalism underpinned by prejudices and a desire for segregation. A society capable of invoking the law to act out hidden fears of the Other is anything but tolerant and pluralistic. By virtue of the variety of pressures and prejudices that the Other is exposed to, multiculturalism rears its ugly head as “multivulturalism” (111). Figuratively speaking, Nurdin falls prey to a multicultural reality that is indeed voracious. Vassanji’s novel is complex, in that it endows Nurdin’s story with an ironic twist. While Nurdin’s offer for assistance is characterized by genuine empathy, the event is also suffused with ambivalence. His initial impulse to help the apparently injured girl is accompanied by a disconcerting sexual attraction. Ironically, Nurdin’s desire is characterized by what I would term racialism: i.e. an unconscious manifestation of racism. It is not, or not merely, the attractiveness of the girl that fascinates Nurdin; the novel leaves no doubt that for him her attractiveness is connected with the colour of her skin. Thus the adjectives “white” or “pale” surface several times in Vassanji’s description of the event, and testify to Nurdin’s hidden fantasies, barely checked by a superego overtaxed in the face of an alien culture. The nexus between sexual tension and skin colour is also reminiscent of an event in the life of Nurdin’s father that involved a similar encounter with a German woman in Tanganyika: One day a young fräulein stopping over at the mission came into the shop to look for gifts for her servants in the European settlement of Wilhelmstal up north, whence she came. She carried a parasol and had the most delicate features. As she stepped in from the glare of sunlight outside, it took a while for her presence to materialize in the relative darkness inside the shop, where Haji Lalani sat with his servant. The girl was accompanied by one of the fathers, who stopped at the doorway to chat, and a servant girl who carried her shopping. As the fräulein raised her arm to point to a string of beads hanging from a nail, Haji found himself staring at her – she was flushed with the heat, her face lightly perspiring, and her armpit a delicate wet patch – and he felt the faint stirrings of a desire inside him. They did not go very far, in fact he would have quashed these forbidden thoughts there and then had not his face been brought alive by a stinging slap from the girl’s hand. (14)

Nurdin is clearly unaware of this episode and the ironical implication for him as someone who has not managed to sever his ties to his father and is thus perpetually and self-consciously plagued by guilt. The irony inherent in the novel’s structure implies that the sins of the father come to haunt the son regardless of time and place. Both Nurdin and Haji are fascinated by whites in a way paradigmatically outlined by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. In his psychoanalytical post-

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colonial analysis of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, Fanon – who implicitly calls for conceiving of the colonial encounter in terms of sexual difference – writes about the relationship between the black man and the white woman: “I [i.e. the black man] marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.”10 For Fanon, the black man’s desire is the result of an inferiority complex. Thus desire is symptomatic and compensatory at the same time. Racial difference becomes sexually attractive precisely because it becomes metonymic of a perceived cultural superiority that the Other wants to experience. Summing up, Vassanji shows that both Nurdin’s environment as well as Nurdin himself is not free from an understanding of otherness informed by race as a category of difference. While society is to blame, in that it does not pay attention to the individual but to his skin colour, Nurdin is also partly responsible for his situation because he operates on inadequate and unacceptable cultural assumptions. While Canada is racist: i.e. does not refrain from violent assertions of racial difference, Nurdin is at least racialist: i.e. he thinks in terms of race even if he does not act aggressively because of race. The ambivalence constituted by the ubiquity of race as a concept instrumental in ordering the world enhances the irony of Vassanji’s novel. For Nurdin and Canada to draw on race as a conceptual tool closes the gap between Self and Other precisely where one would not have wished for it. To paraphrase Blake, race becomes the axis of a symmetry that is fearful because it reflects the worst of both worlds: i.e. an inadequate perception of alterity. Moreover, it is a symmetry that in its fearfulness no-one in No New Land dares to frame. Unless racism and racialism are contained, Vassanji seems to suggest, otherness will not be (wholly) embraced.

6. Strategic Racism No New Land does not merely detail the calamities and personal tragedies epitomized by or caused by racialism or racism. As a matter of fact, Vassanji’s text is much more radical and provocative. By connecting immigration and generation, the novel also questions one marker of difference – race – by way of a second: age. Shrugging off “the restraints of ethnicity,”11 it is the young who manage to find a way for themselves in the diaspora far easier than do 10 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; London: Pluto, 1986): 63. 11 Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 1994): 111.

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Nurdin and his wife. Nurdin reflects on the means Fatima uses to accomplish this feat: For the crime of being her father when he wasn’t anything like what she had in mind. She was ashamed of this little Paki-shitty-stan of Don Mills, as she called it. She didn’t belong here, she would pull herself out of this condition: everything about her attitude suggested that. She would rise to where they had neither the courage nor the ability to reach. Where had she picked up this abrasiveness, this shrillness, this hatred of her origins? (167)

By drawing on racist prejudice, Fatima not only turns away from the Shamsis but also against them – or, vice versa, only because she turns against her community can she distance herself from it. Ironically and sadly, the strategies Fatima employs signal her difference from her community and display strong affinities with what I have termed aggressive racism. Notwithstanding these parallels, Fatima’s discourse is different from either aggressive racism or racialism. Fatima uses what might be termed strategic racism to free herself from the constraints of her community.12 Vassanji demonstrates that the diaspora debases the importance of collectives. Fatima turns against her community because she feels that it is no longer hers, but also because she feels that belonging and subscribing to a cultural community can be a personal limitation. This is an implicit refusal of (Canadian) multiculturalism as a policy that takes it for granted that the community as a cultural matrix will provide the immigrant with orientation in the diaspora. For Fatima, Canada is not a country where identity hinges upon belonging to a community and a tradition. As identity in Canada is dynamic for her, it can become a matter of construction defying cultural paralysis.13 For Fatima, identity in Canada relies on affiliations rather than on stable and unchanging traditions. While, anthropologically speaking, the orientation provided by culture is still flexible enough in the young to shift with a change of surroundings, the old in No New Land can only compensate by a conscious effort. Interestingly, there is one other group of people that succeeds in Canada apart from the young generation – those who have occupied marginal positions in the homeland and thus have an advantage in the diaspora. Outsiders like Jamal, who is not a Shamsi, or Sushila, a Hindu, are the new marginal men and women: i.e. 12

Strategic Racism is a term that is inspired by Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism. See Elizabeth Grosz, “Criticism, Feminism and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Thesis Eleven 10–11 (1984–85): 175–87. 13 Cf. Neil Bissoondath: “It is unjust, to individuals and to the communities from which they emerged, to require it [i.e. immigration] to be about stasis. To do so is to legitimize marginalization; it is to turn ethnic communities into museums of exoticism”; Selling Illusions, 111.

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those flexible enough to be open to and eager for innovation. In the context of the novel, the marginal men and women are those who have less trouble rejecting the culture in which they have been brought up because they have less to lose. After her husband’s death, Sushila, who has lived in London, does not go back to Africa but chooses Canada as a new home instead, because she is sure that it allows her a distancing from traditional gender roles: “I was not going to slave for my fat mother-in-law and the fat aunts and grandmother. And I would not choose that life for my daughter either. So by and by we heard about Toronto” (154). Jamal can prevent the new land from becoming the old because he values the new over the old. He pays attention to the conventions of the old society only when it is to his advantage. While Jamal cannot risk offending the community’s spiritual leader, his affiliation is only temporary and thus strategic (189). Like Fatima, he turns against the community; the leitmotif of racial prejudice against the Shamsis in calling them Pakis is also reflected in his discourse. Referring to the Shamsis cooking in Don Mills, he complains about “these Pakis! Cooking twenty-four hours a day!” (71). Like Fatima, Jamal accomplishes a switch of ethnicities by functionalizing race and racism.

7. Conclusion No New Land demonstrates that xenophobia is a reality even in the context of Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism. In the novel, fear of the foreign manifests itself in the form of racism. The analysis put forward in the preceding pages yields three distinct results, of which, in turn, two conclusions might be drawn with respect to the role of race and racism in Vassanji’s novel. (1) No New Land charts a typology of racism, demonstrating that racism can take on a variety of aspects. The kinds of racism depicted in Vassanji’s novel differ with respect to their quality. No New Land features a blatant, aggressive type of racism (cf. Esmail) as well as a sly, systemic or institutional form of racism (cf. Nurdin). (2) Not only the quality of racism varies in Vassanji’s text but also the site of articulation. No New Land plays off a spectrum of racisms that is not distributed along a Manichaean Self–Other divide. Nurdin, Fatima, and Jamal are former colonials who in Canada display racialist or racist attitudes in their discourse or their consciousness. The novel suggests that race is a complex conceptual category.

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(3) While race is conceptualized in different ways in Vassanji’s novel, it is the purpose for which it is employed in each case that must be considered. In the novel, Nurdin’s involuntary and unconscious racialism contrasts with Fatima’s and Jamal’s deliberate and strategic racism. While Nurdin’s racialism is symptomatic but not functional, Fatima and Jamal rely on racism in order to construct a postcolonial identity for themselves in a diasporic situation. Paradoxically and perversely, they make use of the same kind of racism that had been responsible for an erosion of indigenous identities under colonialism. The purpose to which racism is employed raises important questions for multicultural societies in general. No New Land explores the usefulness of difference as the paradigm of postcolonialism and multiculturalism. While the example of Nurdin reveals how two categories of difference (sexual and ethnic) overlap and mutually corroborate each other, Fatima and Jamal demonstrate how one category of difference (age) may deconstruct another (racial difference). The thrust of the latter – strategic racism, in contrast to racialism – is assimilation. There is evidence that No New Land advocates assimilation rather than a multicultural politics of recognition. A case in point is Nurdin’s futile endeavour to replicate his Tanzanian role in Canada. He fails to perceive that a new land can only be prevented from turning into the old by a conscious effort. However, whether Vassanji wants us to interpret this conscious effort in terms of adaptation or transculturalism depends on the respective angle of vision. In the final analysis, the crucial question as to how the role of difference is to be evaluated in No New Land can only be settled unambiguously if one values the experiences of one generation over the other. In general, the perspective of the novel – and this is its main artistic achievement – remains characterized by a profound ambivalence. This ambivalence results from two mutually exclusive understandings of difference. While Nurdin is marginalized on account of racial difference and, ironically, himself discriminates against people on the basis of skin colour, it is the young for whom race is replaced by ethnicity.14 Describing a person’s cultural upbringing in terms of language, community, and subculture, ethnicity differs from race because it is a dynamic concept. When Fatima misrepresents her father’s community as Pakistani, she deliberately misconstrues her origins because she has become aware of the fact that one’s ethnicity, in contrast to one’s race, is open to modification and change. Racism in No New Land suggests that race be aban14 For the differences between race and ethnicity, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): s.v. “Race,” “Ethnicity.”

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doned in favour of ethnicity as the central category of postcolonial studies, but also – more importantly – of multiculturalism. It is with respect to ethnic rather than racial difference that difference can be said to constitute a resource rather than an encumbrance for a society.

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 1994). Calvocoressi, Peter. Who’s who in der Bibel, tr. Angela Hausner (1990; Munich: dtv, 1996). Ende, Werner, & Guido Steinbach, ed. Der Islam in der Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 4th ed. 1996). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; London: Pluto, 1986). Grosz, Elizabeth. “Criticism, Feminism and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Thesis Eleven 10–11 (1984–85): 175–87. Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “Broadening the Substrata: An Interview with M.G. Vassanji,” World Literature Written in English 31.2 (1991): 19–35. ——. “Don Mills and Dar es Salaam: A Review of No New Land,” in Floating the Borders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism, ed. Nurjehan Aziz (Toronto: T S A R , 1999): 200–203. Khoury, Adel Theodor, Ludwig Hagemann & Peter Heine. Islam-Lexikon: Geschichte, Ideen, Gestalten, 3 vols. (Freiburg, Basel & Vienna: Herder, 1991). Malak, Amin. “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji,” World Literature Today 67.2 (1993): 277–82. Rhodes, Shane. “M.G. Vassanji: An Interview,” Studies in Canadian Literature 22.2 (1997): 105–17. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Vassanji, Moyez G. No New Land (1991; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997).

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White Angst in South Africa The Apocalyptic Visions of John Conyngham

J OCHEN P ETZOLD

S

‘ W H I T E A N G S T ’ and ‘apocalyptic visions’ in connection with contemporary South African literature may at first sight seem somewhat outdated in the new millennium, more than fifteen years after the racist and repressive system of white minority rule known as ‘apartheid’ came to an official end early in the 1990s. My emphasis on ‘white angst’ also runs counter to the observation made by the South African writer Ashraf Jamal, who perceives a tendency in recent criticism that establishes a ‘liberal teleology’ at work in South African fiction – a teleology that postulates an increase in liberal open-mindedness and literary sophistication culminating in post-apartheid literature.1 Yet fears of a black rebellion, civil war, and imminent doom were certainly important issues treated in South African novels of the 1970s and 1980s, as a number of critics have pointed out.2 According to David Attwell and Barbara Harlow, “anxiety about the future fuelled a number of writers” since the 1960s,3 and many South Africans had PEAKING OF

1 Ashraf Jamal made this comment repeatedly during the proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held at the University of Erfurt, 8–11 May 2002. 2 For example, see Elmar Lehmann, “Katastrophe oder Versöhnung? Beobachtungen zu südafrikanischen Romanen der Gegenwart,” in Current Themes in Contemporary South African Literature, ed. Elmar Lehmann & Erhard Reckwitz (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1989): 9– 25; John Povey, “English-Language Fiction from South Africa,” in A History of TwentiethCentury African Literature, ed. Oyekan Owomoyela (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P , 1993): 85–104; Theodore Sheckels, The Lion on the Freeway (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). 3 David Attwell & Barbara Harlow, “Introduction: South African Fiction After Apartheid,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000): 4.

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seen the country on a road towards civil war. This becomes apparent in novels like Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972), Sipho Sepamla’s A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981) or Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981). In the 1970s and 1980s, especially among white South Africans, the future was frequently imagined as an apocalypse, as in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981); a South Africa after apartheid could only be thought of as post-apocalyptic, as in Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature (1987). While the literature of the ‘new’ South Africa has brought forth texts that are much less pessimistic – André Brink’s Imaginings of Sand (1996) would be one example – I will focus on a South African author for whom apocalypse remains a predominant theme, even after the end of apartheid. Examining John Conyngham’s first novel, The Arrowing of the Cane (1986), and his most recent one, The Lostness of Alice (1998), a pattern of anxiety and apocalyptic visions becomes apparent that is only interrupted by a small flicker of hope expressed in The Desecration of the Graves (1990).4 In all three novels, but particularly in the first and the third, an unspecific threat from ‘outside’ is utilized to create an atmosphere of violence and utter hopelessness. It is this form of a ‘negative embrace’ of the Other that strengthens white fears of black South Africans and reinforces xenophobic tendencies. If apocalypse was a common theme for white writers in the mid-1980s, John Conyngham’s first novel, The Arrowing of the Cane, is a typical representative of such writing. Interweaving the story of a sugar-cane farmer’s personal decline into loneliness and alcoholism, and mounting threats from arsonists’ attacks in the cane fields of Natal, Conyngham creates a dense atmosphere of fin du monde. The title already hints at decline: when sugarcane ‘arrows’ (i.e. produces seeds), its sugar-content is reduced; hence it loses in economic value;5 thus, the arrowing cane represents a (natural) development that threatens a sugar farmer’s survival. Two aspects of the novel are important for my discussion: its setting on a farm; and the narrator’s insistence that danger comes from ‘outside’. The farm is a setting that is highly charged with political and emotional implications in South Africa. As J.M. Coetzee points out in White Writing, for “two decades of this century, 1920–40, the Afrikaans novel concerned itself

4 John Conyngham, The Arrowing of the Cane (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1986); The Lostness of Alice (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1998); The Desecration of the Graves (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1990). Quotations from the three novels will be marked in the main text as AC, LA, and DG respectively. 5 See “Saccharum officinarum,” http://www.fao.org/AG/AGP/agpc/doc/GBASE/data /Pf000310.htm [accessed 5 February 2007].

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almost exclusively with the farm and platteland (rural) society.”6 Also referring to texts from this era, Malvern van Wyk Smith, in a paper delivered at a conference in Pretoria in 1999, stated that these novels “thematised the nexus of the ‘boer’ and his ‘plaas’ as a timeless icon of national and numinous identity, not only validating an unquestioned right to the land but expressing also the very soul of the Afrikaner’s being.”7 While the farm as a symbol figures most prominently in Afrikaans novels, it is also important in South African fiction written in English, as can be seen in novels such as Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Disgrace (1999).8 Farms continue to play an important role in contemporary South African literature as a symbol for white identity, particularly Afrikaner identity. Van Wyk Smith points out that although “less than 5% of South Africa’s white population can still be described as farmers, their iconic status in white ideology is not only substantial but still foundational.”9 This continuing importance is at least partly due to the fact that the farm can be read as a microcosm of South Africa as a whole. The link is particularly strong where the issue of land-ownership is concerned. A claim to the farm is established through a discourse of working the land, of turning wasteland into farmland, which postulates an African idleness that forms the basis for the white claim to South Africa in general.10 In this framework, giving back land automatically spells ruin and chaos, on the level both of individual farms and of the country at large. This basic fear is clearly at the heart of The 6

J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven

C T : Yale U P , 1988): 63. 7

Malvern van Wyk Smith, “From ‘Boereplaas’ to Vlakplaas: The Farm from Thomas Pringle to J.M. Coetzee,” typescript, Exploding English: Annual Conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa (A U E T S A ), University of South Africa, Pretoria, 12–15 July 1999: 2. 8 Farms also play an important role in many novels by André Brink. Other post-apartheid examples of farm-novels by anglophone South African writers are Rayda Jacobs’s Eyes of the Sky (1996) and The Slave Book (1998), W.P.B. Botha’s A Duty of Memory (1997), Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney (1997), and Jo–Anne Richards’s The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996). For a more detailed analysis of the farm-motif in Brink’s recent fiction, in The Devil’s Chimney, and particularly in The Innocence of Roast Chicken, see Jochen Petzold, Re-Imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past: History in South African Novels of the 1990s (Trier: W V T , 2002). For an analysis of the importance of farms in J.M. Coetzee’s novels, see Jochen Petzold, “Das Motiv der Farm bei J.M. Coetzee: Dekonstruktion eines südafrikanischen Mythos,” in Normen, Ausgrenzungen, Hyridisierungen und ‘Acts of Identity,’ ed. Monika Fludernik & Hans–Joachim Gehrke (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004): 95–114. 9 Van Wyk Smith, “From ‘Boereplaas’ to Vlakplaas,” 3. 10 See Coetzee, White Writing, 18–20.

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Arrowing of the Cane, as becomes apparent in the following example. James Colville, the first-person narrator, is on an outing with his girlfriend when they reach a place that once was “a flourishing homestead-cum-trading business” (AC 88) before it was integrated into KwaZulu (one of the pseudoautonomous ‘homelands’ for blacks created by the apartheid system). Colville describes this place as a wasteland: At a T-junction I point out to Andrea a crumbling building and the foundation slabs of several others amidst erosion slashes and tussocks of dry grass. A black youth lies in the shade of a single gum sapling while his charge, a straggle of piebald goats, bleat and crop among the remains. (AC 88)

As no explanation is offered, the destruction of the buildings seems utterly senseless, and the implications are that blacks are unable to make use of the land, and, more generally, unable to govern themselves. Obviously, giving back the land is not an option within the novel, but simultaneously the white hold on the land is only tenuous. Anticipating the readers’ critical reaction to his chronicle, Colville asks “Why must the creator of the charred sheets in the asbestos cylinder harp on about belonging? Doesn’t the fact that this farm has always been my home give me a real claim to it?” (AC 118). Colville, who calls himself a half-hearted liberal, of course realizes that the claim is highly problematical, founded as it is on conquest and dispossession. Furthermore, he is aware of his vulnerability: “A solitary white in a big house on the hill cannot, despite his familiarity with his surroundings, know everything about his labour force which, in such a labour-intensive enterprise as sugar farming, is essential” (AC 27). This is the basic problem in the perverse logic of apartheid politics: true apartheid – a separation of the ‘races’ – was never aimed at, since South Africa’s economy was dependent on the exploitation of cheap black labour.11 Yet this dependency automatically creates the possibility of a rebellion amongst the oppressed labour force and leads to anxieties among the white oppressors. Colville’s analysis of his own vulnerability is at the basis of what I call ‘white angst’: the realization that things cannot go on as they are, because the black majority will not be cowed into submission indefinitely. Yet none of the whites in this novel is able to imagine a future for South Africa under a black government: the black majority is viewed as Other and perceived as a potential danger. The racist paradigm, however – which is at the basis of the apartheid system – is not the only reason for white angst in Conyngham’s novel. It 11 See Shula Marks & Stanley Trapido, “The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks & Stanley Trapido (London: Longman, 1987): 9.

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is reinforced by the nagging insecurity about the issue of ‘belonging’ in South Africa and a vague fear of forces from abroad threatening the status quo.12 Secure in the delusion that they could control their own workforce, the farmers fear “outsiders” (AC 27) who could ‘infiltrate’ and ‘indoctrinate’ their employees (cf. also AC 67). Distance from the white centre of power equals danger; Colville still sees himself in relative safety while the farms “in the distance bordering KwaZulu begin to glow” (AC 25) with the arsonists’ fires. And already his fragile safety is being undermined, from the outside of course: Times have changed more than most people realise. And so have the arsonists. With outside help they have developed ingenious methods. Timing devices ensure that they are far away when the fields go up. It’s no use waiting and then reacting. One has to attack in defence. Like the attempts to exterminate locusts, one has to attack their source before they spread. Ideological feelings aside, it is the only way to defend one’s property. (AC 37)

This is probably the most blatant display of xenophobia in the novel. Colville, who likes to call himself a ‘liberal’, not only argues for pre-emptive use of force, he also links arsonists and their outside helpers to insects and thus effectively dehumanizes them. The comparison is particularly telling. If blacks are like locusts – one of the biblical plagues and a natural enemy to all sugar-cane farmers – they have to be destroyed. The symbolic relationship between the microcosm of the farm and the macrocosm of South Africa also becomes apparent in this passage. ‘Outside’ has connotations both on the level of the farm – infiltrators who do not belong on the farm, from other areas within South Africa – and on the level of the state – infiltrators from abroad. In the latter sense, the metaphorical ‘source of the locusts’ that has to be attacked is Angola, and the malicious insects are the soldiers of the South-West African People’s Organization (S W A P O ) – a military organization at the time – and their Cuban advisors. Significantly, James Colville took part in South Africa’s undeclared war on the so-called communist terrorists of the S W A P O , and he describes his memories at some length (cf. AC 125–34). Colville is unwilling or unable to imagine a positive future, either for his farm or for the country at large. In The Arrowing of the Cane, all political change is necessarily for the worse: Things are so volatile in Africa: banned movements undermine covertly for years and governments fall overnight. A visa is suddenly needed to 12 On the importance of the issue of ‘belonging’ in Conyngham’s first two novels, see J.A. Kearney, “‘Haunted by Dispossession’: A Study of John Conyngham’s Novels,” English in Africa 19.1 (1992): 67–87.

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travel there. Certain passport holders are no longer welcome and holiday cottages are abandoned. Faithful servants are paid a remittance to look after them in the vague hope that one day things will return to what they were. They never do. Our capacity for deception is vast. Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia – what was such fun last year no longer exists. [...] And yet we are still here. (AC 12)

Despite his insistence that ‘we’: i.e. the white South Africans, are still in the country, Colville does not remain on the farm. ‘White angst’ – the fear of violent rebellion and ultimately a black government – drives him away. And the outlook is bleak. While the last sentence of the novel, “I must be going now” (AC 151), is structurally open, it is clearly not a happy ending. Nowhere in the text are there indications that Colville will lead a good life somewhere else. Quite the contrary: his departure may well be read as a euphemism for suicide. Conyngham’s second novel, The Desecration of the Graves, is much less pessimistic; here I will only draw attention to some of the parallels between Conyngham’s first two novels in order to highlight the shift in tone and atmosphere. In both novels, the narrators have an historical hobbyhorse that is significant in its implications. While Colville is intrigued by the British defeat in the Anglo-Zulu war at the battle at Isandlwana, Cranwell (in The Desecration of the Graves) tries to write a biography of General Gatacre, a British general in the Anglo-Boer war. Thus, the emphasis is shifted from the war between black inhabitants and white intruders onto the struggle for domination amongst white colonizers. Antithetical parallels abound between the two novels. Whereas Colville’s relationship with Andrea disintegrates, Cranwell and Katie draw closer together; Colville hides his manuscript, Cranwell is sending it off for publication; while Colville departs into pessimistic uncertainty, Cranwell’s “inner voice is dancing with optimism” (DG 151) at the end of the novel. Consequently, the issue of ‘belonging’ in South Africa is treated with much more confidence in Conyngham’s second novel. As an anonymous review in the South African Daily News sums up, “there is a place for whites in South Africa” in The Desecration of the Graves.13 More precisely, the novel suggests, there is a place if whites are willing to support ‘the struggle’ against apartheid even in the smallest way.14 The changes in tone are 13

Anon., “A Powerful Meditation on Being White,” The Daily News (17 April 1991): 9. Tony Morphet is highly critical of this novel, which he reads as a weak attempt to meet “the terms of the solidarity contract” in which “even the weakest set of signals would suffice, so long as they carried the simple message ‘join the struggle’”; Morphet, “After Solidarity,” Current Writing 3 (1991): 170. His criticism rests mainly on Conyngham’s unimaginative use of the stock character of a violent black activist: “Everyone knows what activists do and who they are. The moral crisis is a trumped-up sham resting as it does on this old grotesque pattern” (170). 14

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obvious. Scepticism and anxiety play a much smaller role in The Desecration of the Graves than they did in The Arrowing of the Cane, and the final outlook is optimistic. Interestingly, the pendulum swings back, as it were, in Conyngham’s third novel, The Lostness of Alice, published well after the transition to democracy and at a time when the worst of the politically motivated violence that preceded the first free elections in 1994 had abated. Like its two predecessors, it is a story told by a first-person narrator who claims to have written what we read. It is, again, a novel set, at least in part, on a farm in Natal, and the issue of whites ‘belonging’ in South Africa is again central. Significantly in terms of the farm’s symbolic meaning, the narrator Chris does not own the dairy farm he works on; it belongs to his girlfriend’s family. Thus, he has no direct claim to the land and his ties to South Africa are weaker than Colville’s. Chris’s girlfriend Sally is a reporter for the local newspaper, and she is covering the disappearance of a white girl, Alice. This disappearance works as the symbolic centre of the novel: “for Sally, it seemed, Alice had become almost a mythical symbol. She was Innocence personified, and her loss was a triumph for Evil. Only her safe-and-sound return could rebuff the powers of darkness” (LA 50). The actual reasons for Alice’s disappearance are never revealed; it even remains unclear whether the disappearance is connected to any crime at all, but it sparks a large number of racist letters to the editor that take the criminal background for granted: Many whites were convinced that she had been abducted by a black. Conversely, blacks, if they wondered at all, asked themselves why such a fuss was being made about Alice when murders and abductions had long been a feature of black township life. [...] A number of letters, Sally told me, were too offensive to publish, each in its way saying more about its writer than about Alice’s disappearance. Some were stridently anti-black while others heaped abuse on the police whom they accused of incompetence. Some even denigrated the state president for a political climate in which whites were no longer safe. The smell of freedom, they said, was too heady for blacks – hence the sharp escalation in violent crime. (LA 22–23)

While the incident is, of course, fictional, the reactions seem only too plausible, as they voice common fears of and prejudices against blacks held by many whites, fears of and prejudices that had not simply disappeared by the early 1990s. Latent white racism aside, the black perspective in this quotation is interesting: “Why is such a fuss being made about Alice?” is their question, and, disregarding the possible criticism of an absence of empathy, the political implications are telling. In fact, they seem to run counter to Conyngham’s agenda of focusing exclusively on white characters, since the letter suggests that blacks are still the real victims of violence, an assessment of the situation only too appropriate for the ‘real’ South Africa outside fiction.

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South Africa’s transition to democracy was not brought about by civil war, but the country remains plagued by violence. For example, Johnson and Schlemmer quote the Natal Mercury for the figure of “over 20,000 murders in South Africa” in 1993, and they point out that “across the whole province of KwaZulu-Natal the murder rate was double that of New York City.”15 As the fictional letters written by blacks imply, this violence is – in reality – mainly a ‘black-on-black’ phenomenon. In this context, it would make sense to criticize the police for paying too much attention to the disappearance of a single white girl. However, this alternative reading of Alice’s disappearance is silenced and the fear that this violence could spread to the white communities is at the heart of what I call ‘white angst’ in The Lostness of Alice. This fear takes on a form of xenophobia that is again doubly inscribed. The black, by virtue of his16 skin, is already marked as Other. And he is located elsewhere, on a periphery, in the black townships that still exist and which represent complete otherness to white suburbia. Explaining – or rather, excusing – the violent behaviour of soldiers towards a solitary vagrant, Sally’s father sums up this fear: The troops, said Will, were aggressive because they were frightened. The vagrant was a thing of the forest. [...] Although apartheid had been brushed aside and the suburbs were no longer exclusively white, said Will, perceptions hadn’t changed. Suburbia was comfort at the rastaman’s expense. He was still the beast condemned to the periphery, a man with nothing, and therefore with nothing to lose. (LA 21)

Once again, the black man is dehumanized (a “thing of the forest”), and the situation described is virtually identical to the one described in The Arrowing of the Cane: now it is white suburbia that is threatened, not the farms, but the symbolic significance is the same. It is not the individual life, or even the individual town that is at risk, it is the future of the whole country that is endangered. As Will explains, with apartheid gone, all of Africa wanted a piece of white suburbia. A piece like Alice, perhaps. With so much to lose, each trooper knew that the rastamen were advancing and many saw themselves as the final line of defence. It was the same situation which had swept through Africa over the last four decades – Algeria, Kenya, the Congo, Mozambique and Angola, Rhodesia, and now the Deep South. (LA 21)

15 R.W. Johnson & Lawrence Schlemmer, “Introduction: The Transition to Democracy,” in Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994, ed. R.W. Johnson & Lawrence Schlemmer (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1996): 9. 16 The black Other when perceived as a threat is usually male.

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Again, the enemy comes from the outside and threatens ‘white civilization’ in southern Africa. The novel makes it very clear that an ‘africanization’ of South Africa could only lead to chaos. At various points in the novel, Chris comments on what he terms the ‘real Africa’, and this real Africa is marked by incompetence, corruption, and decay. When visiting Kenya, Chris and Sally are told that “Africa [...] is a bloody cock-up. But you chaps down there are still all right” (LA 29). Nowhere in the novel is there an indication that Chris, or any other white character, thinks otherwise, nor is there any indication of ironic distance that would invite the reader to question the validity of Chris’s point of view. Most blacks who are mentioned are perceived as a threat, and this stands in stark contrast to the fact that in two of the three cases of murder actually described in the novel, whites are the perpetrators. While emigration was not really an option in The Arrowing of the Cane, it is a strong lure in Conyngham’s last novel. Chris takes musings of leaving the country to a violent climax in a “doomsday vision” of a “scorched-earth exodus by whites and Indians” (LA 66) in which he “fire[s] out of the passenger window” (LA 67) while Sally drives. Colville was presented as a ‘semi-liberal’ who was not free of racist stereotypes and a degrading use of language. Similarly, Chris describes himself as a “semi-pacifist” (LA 67) despite his visions of violent escape. But his ‘semi-pacifism’ is a thin veneer of restraint that can hardly cover the anger and violence within him. This violence almost breaks to the surface when Chris does leave the country, deeply disappointed because Sally has cheated on him: With the revolver on the seat beside me, I willed every passerby to be reckless enough to attack. [...] So great was my agitation that watershed day that I was looking for trouble. The opportunity of blowing somebody away was exciting beyond description. (LA 89)

And when the girl he is travelling with at the time is actually attacked much later in the novel, his fuse finally blows. Having disarmed the robber, Chris “[spins] into a fearful overdrive, kicking the fallen man repeatedly in the head and torso” (LA 131) until the girl intervenes. When they leave, the man is motionless and there is a strong suggestion that he may be dead. If there is irony in the novel, it is possibly this: that the real ‘beast’ is the white male, trained to react with excessive violence to actual or perceived threats. However, there is little to substantiate this self-subverting reading on the level of the text and no indication that Conyngham wants his readers to condemn Chris. It is, after all, his voice we are willing (or willing ourselves) to listen to over the course of the novel. But even if we read Chris as an extreme example, the political analysis that Africa, particularly South Africa, is heading towards disaster, is never contested. All the characters in the novel who voice their opinions agree that

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changes are for the worse. The lostness of Alice becomes the bleak symbol of lostness that stands for all of Africa. This becomes devastatingly clear at the end of the novel. After some wanderings, Chris has settled down at Gibraltar. At New Year, a bonfire is to be lit on the rock, which “will be one of a thousand beacons lit across Europe as a symbol of goodwill and urge us all to play our part in the kinship of mankind” (LA 153). Chris records cheers as the fire is kindled and the symbolic network of humankind is enacted. The network is strictly limited to the European continent, however: “In the distance in Spain, the next beacon is visible. But across the straits, Africa is lost in darkness” (LA 154). The final pronouncement is devoid of all hope. Africa is not only on the decline, it is already lost in the darkness of barbarism and violence. Almost exactly 100 years after the publication of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, this is the primal fear expressed in both The Arrowing of the Cane and The Lostness of Alice: that South Africa will become a part of the ‘real’ Africa and will ultimately fall into ‘darkness’. John Conyngham is certainly not one of the so-called ‘great’ authors who should be canonized; his latest novel in particular is simply not well-written. The texts are interesting, however, because they give voice to some of the deep-rooted fears that still hamper South Africa’s development. They present a gloomy and violent alternative to overly optimistic texts that celebrate a ‘Rainbow Nation’, such as André Brink’s Imaginings of Sand (1996), but also to those texts in which white protagonists accept a new role of white subservience, such as Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me (1994) or J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). Rather than trying to shape any form of mutual future, Conyngham’s novels are pessimistic in the extreme, and the negative force that brings on decline is always externalized, attributed to a menacing black presence that has its basis in an unspecified ‘outside’. It is this latent xenophobia that remains unresolved in Conyngham’s novels and marks his representation of Africa as one of a ‘lost continent’.

WORKS CITED Anon. “A Powerful Meditation on Being White,” The Daily News (17 April 1991): 9. Attwell, David, & Barbara Harlow. “Introduction: South African Fiction After Apartheid,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000): 1–9. Coetzee, J.M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1988). Conyngham, John. The Arrowing of the Cane (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1986). ——. The Desecration of the Graves (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1990). ——. The Lostness of Alice (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1998).

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Johnson, R.W. & Lawrence Schlemmer. “Introduction: The Transition to Democracy,” in Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994, ed. R.W. Johnson & Lawrence Schlemmer (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1996): 1–15. Kearney, J.A. “‘Haunted by Dispossession’: A Study of John Conyngham’s Novels,” English in Africa 19.1 (1992): 67–87. Lehmann, Elmar. “Katastrophe oder Versöhnung? Beobachtungen zu südafrikanischen Romanen der Gegenwart,” in Current Themes in Contemporary South African Literature, ed. Elmar Lehmann & Erhard Reckwitz (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1989): 9–25. Marks, Shula & Stanley Trapido. “The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks & Stanley Trapido (London: Longman, 1987): 1–70. Morphet, Tony. “After Solidarity,” Current Writing 3 (1991): 166–70. Petzold, Jochen. Re-Imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past: History in South African Novels of the 1990s (Trier: W V T , 2002). ——. “Das Motiv der Farm bei J.M. Coetzee: Dekonstruktion eines südafrikanischen Mythos,” in Normen, Ausgrenzungen, Hybridisierungen und ‘Acts of identity’, ed. Monika Fludernik & Hans–Joachim Gehrke (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004): 95–114. Povey, John. “English-Language Fiction from South Africa,” in A History of Twentieth-Century African Literature, ed. Oyekan Owomoyela (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P , 1993): 85–104. “Saccharum officinarum,” http://www.fao.org/AG/AGP/agpc/doc/GBASE/data/Pf000310 .htm [no date; accessed 5 February 2007]. Sheckels, Theodore. The Lion on the Freeway (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). van Wyk Smith, Malvern. “From ‘Boereplaas’ to Vlakplaas: The Farm from Thomas Pringle to J.M. Coetzee,” typescript, Exploding English: Annual Conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa (A U E T S A ), University of South Africa, Pretoria, 12–15 July 1999.

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Nadine Gordimer’s Later Novels Or: The Fiction of Otherness

N ATIVIDAD M ARTÍNEZ M ARÍN

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.1

T

H I S S T A T E M E N T by the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, which Gordimer uses to open her novel July’s People (1981), seems well suited for describing the new transitional situation South Africa is undergoing after the abolition of apartheid. In the current South African interregnum, the old prejudices of apartheid are still dying and the new cannot be born because those prejudices are still deeply rooted in the subconscious of many. Nadine Gordimer’s later fiction insists on denouncing this persistence of racism even though apartheid has been politically and legally buried. Racism is nothing but the rejection of the Other created by colonial rule, and that is the reason why Gordimer still conceives of this racism as the struggle of the white Self against the black Other. The fact that even nowadays many South Africans reject the Other really worries Gordimer, as she points out when talking of the big difference between the newly achieved rights of equality and the segregationist mentality that still exists:

En Afrique du Sud, nous sommes aujourd’hui vraiment sortis de la logique coloniale car les Noirs et les Blancs sont enfin égaux devant la loi, ils ont les mêmes institutions sociales et jouissent des mêmes libertés. Je ne parle pas de l’aspect psychologique qui est une autre paire des manches. Cer1 This epigraph precedes Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People. It is taken from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Books; see Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).

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taines personnes ne cesseront jamais d’être coloniales dans leur mentalité […] la décolonisation intellectuelle est un long processus.2

Gordimer’s post-apartheid literature focuses on this problem, the theme that she repeats over and over again throughout her later fiction. And although racism is not so easy to erase, there is a clear evolution in two of Gordimer’s later novels – from the depiction of a more racist attitude in The House Gun (1998) to the description of a more tolerant attitude in The Pickup (2001).

1. The struggle of the Self against the Other has always been critical for an understanding of colonialism and thus colonial literature. The fact that the relationship between Self and Other has always been so problematic derives from the conception of both terms as a dichotomy, for each is defined in opposition to the other. Thus, in colonial literature we discover that colonizers are always regarded as the Self, while the colonized are referred to as the Other. Much criticism has been written about this; from this corpus I would like to draw particular attention to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), in which the Palestinian critic already argued, as Gareth Griffiths phrases it, “that colonialism created non-mutual and hierarchic relations in which the colonizer was always and inescapably the Self to the marginalized Other of the colonized.”3 The hierarchy indicated by Said is based on the concept of a position of superiority on the part of the colonizer – only those who consider themselves as superior are able to apply a system of hierarchy based on this alleged quality. The colonizer despises the Other, and s/he justifies his or her attitude by creating a demonic image of that Other, as Rosemary Jackson states: The concept of evil, which is usually attached to the other, is relative, transforming with shifts in cultural fears and values. Any social structure tends to exclude as ‘evil’ anything radically different from itself or which

2 “In today’s South Africa, we have finally left the logic of colonialism behind us; at long last, blacks and whites are equal before the law, they have the same social institutions and enjoy the same freedoms. I’m not talking about the psychological aspect, which is another kettle of fish. Certain people never stop being colonials in the way they think” (tr. Gordon Collier); Tirthankar Chanda, “Nadine Gordimer: ‘La décolonisation intellectuelle est un long processus’,” L’Humanité (7 August 1998): online. http://www.humanite.presse.fr ./journal/1998/1998-08/1998-08-07/1998-08-07.049.html [accessed 12 December 2000]. 3 Gareth Griffiths, “The Post-Colonial Project: Critical Approaches and Problems,” in New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (1996; Oxford: Clarendon, 2000): 165.

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threatens it with destruction, and this conceptualisation, this naming of difference as evil, is a significant radical difference.4

In apartheid South Africa, all of the evil Jackson describes as characteristic of the Other was presumed to be incarnated in black people; as Anette Horn puts it, “the black becomes the Other in Gordimer’s writing, for whom she must speak.”5 The official policy created the image of the black as an outlaw who committed all kinds of crimes, thus justifying its attitude of rejection as one of protection against evil, hence using fear of that threat as the perfect excuse to justify segregation. The Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie cunningly describes this fear of the Other as a reformulation of the old fairytale of “Beauty and the Beast”: Great White sharks, killer bees, werewolves, devils, alien horrors bursting from the chests of movie spacemen: the popular culture of our fearful times has provided us with so many variations on the ancient myth of the Beast, the ‘something’ lurking out there that hunts us and is hunted by us, as to make it one of the defining metaphors of the age. […] The haves and the powerful, fearing the uprising of the have-nots and the powerless, dream of them as monsters. […] White South Africans have no need of dreamogres: it is reality that they fear, and the something out there is the future.6

This typical colonial rejection of the Other became the creed ruling the lives of South Africans under apartheid. It supports what Gordimer has stressed on countless occasions: that colonialism did not cease to exist with the abolition of European colonial rule in 1910, the year when the Union of South Africa was proclaimed, but that it continued during apartheid. In fact, the apartheid government did nothing but perpetuate all the prejudices of the former colonizers: the cultural domination of the North–South axis was imposed by colonisation–cum–Europeanisation (the latter persisted even when South Africa was no longer a British colony, but the white-ruled independent Union of South Africa).7

Thus, from all that has been said up to now, one could have hoped that the end of colonialism might have ushered in the end of segregation or, in other 4

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981; London: Routledge,

1998): 52.

5 Anette Horn, “Ethics and Aesthetics in Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction,” (1995): online. http://www.uct.ac.za/projects/poetry/reviews/gordimer.htm [accessed 15 October 2006]. 6 Salman Rushdie, “Nadine Gordimer,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1990; Harmondsworth: Penguin / Granta, 1992): 187. 7 Nadine Gordimer, Living in Hope and History (1990; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 212.

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words, the end of the rejection of the Other. Instead, it is not very surprising that Gordimer’s post-apartheid writings still face this problem, drawing attention to the fact that mental colonization is not so easily eradicated as social colonialism. As the writer herself points out in an interview.8 This is precisely what we can witness in Gordimer’s novel The House Gun. 2. the literary and existential equivalent of the politics of apartheid: thou shalt not consort with the Other. Thou shalt not trust thine own experience of the Other. Thou shalt deny the Other, even that part of the Other which thou findest within thyself, and that of thyself which thou findest in the Other.9

This list of commandments by André Brink summarizes the colonial policy of rejecting the Other that is imposed by apartheid, and the fact that this can still be felt in contemporary South Africa becomes the axis around which The House Gun is built. In this novel, Nadine Gordimer describes her contemporary native South Africa as a society that is still divided, as it used to be during apartheid. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s protagonist in William Wilson (1839) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886), the ensemble of characters Gordimer depicts is not split due to psychological problems, but mainly because of the legacy of the old segregationist policy, which has left its imprint in the form of the persistence of the binary opposition of Self and Other. Gordimer insists that the South African social landscape has changed very significantly since apartheid was abolished. She recognizes that there are still psychological traces of the former colonial mentality that can only be overcome after some generations have passed. She alludes to this mental legacy of apartheid when, talking of the documentary The Wall in the Mind,10 which she made along with her son and in which she contrasts the German and the South African historical situation, she affirms that “In fact our documentary is called The Wall in the Mind, and that obstacle that sometimes rules people’s behaviour could remain for various generations.”11

8

See fn 2 above. André Brink, Reinventing a Continent: Writing and Politics in South Africa (1996; Cambridge M A : Zoland, 1998): 14. 10 Nadine Gordimer & Hugo Cassirer, The Wall in the Mind (New York: Felix Films, 1999). 11 Nadine Gordimer, “En homenaje a Octavio Paz,” Infosel website, http://comunidades .infosel.com/libros/articulos/entrevistas/3170 [accessed 12 December 2000]. 9

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This mental inheritance of segregationism is treated from a double perspective in the novel. On the one hand, it is described in the form of racial prejudices the whites have against the blacks. On the other, it can be inferred from the violence haunting contemporary South Africa, and which is still based on fear of the Other. The title of the novel explicitly represents this. The house gun serves as the symbol of an unstable society that is still afraid of the unknown. The House Gun narrates the story of Duncan, a young man who kills another man after having discovered that he made love to Duncan’s girlfriend. Both men are white, and at first glance it seems as if racial conflict is absent from this novel, although in fact such conflict permeates its pages. As Rob Kinsman rightly points out, in The House Gun “we are shown a post-apartheid South Africa where colour isn’t directly an issue any longer, but where the undercurrents of years of prejudice surface from time to time.”12 From the very beginning, Gordimer presents us with a white couple, Harald and Claudia, seemingly representatives of the absence of any kind of racial prejudice. However, we can deduce from the small details that are so critical in this writer’s fiction that racism is deeply rooted in their subconscious.13 For instance, Gordimer describes Claudia as a doctor who, even in the new politically egalitarian post-apartheid society, still shrinks from touching black patients’ skin, and who still considers blacks to be intellectually inferior: “She is not one of those doctors who touch black skin indiscriminately along with white, in their work, but retain liberal prejudices against the intellectual capacities of blacks.”14 Concerning Harald, we are told that All the years he was, as the convenient phrase goes in praise of private enterprise, ‘climbing the corporate ladder,’ he had accepted without questioning that black people could not be granted housing bonds; they could not afford to meet their payments. A bad risk. That was the fact. The government of the time should house them, so he voted against that government, who did not do their duty. (HG 88)

All these small details are proleptic of what is to come afterwards: the discovery of the subconscious racism that both Harald and Claudia keep hidden deep inside. In fact, we must understand the novel as the revelation of their suppressed, internalized prejudices. When they learn that their son has mur12

Rob Kinsman, “Nadine Gordimer: The House Gun” (1998): online. http://www .purefiction.co.uk/newrev/reviewsh/gordimer.htm [accessed 15 October 2006]. 13 “In a short story, you’ve got to find significant detail”; Jill Fullerton–Smith, “Off the Page: Nadine Gordimer,” broadcast by Thames Television P L C in the series “Off the Page,” 1988. 14 Gordimer, The House Gun (1998; London: Bloomsbury, 1999): 33. Subsequent quotations from this novel are in the main text, along with the abbreviation HG.

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dered a young man, they are forced to look for a lawyer to defend him, and they are urgently referred to the black lawyer Hamilton Motsamai. The process of making up their minds about whether or not to retain him reveals the racism that they were not yet consciously aware of. Harald tries to justify his hesitation in rational terms; one example can be seen in a conversation between Harold and a legal adviser in his company’s employ. They discuss whether black lawyers are not trusted because they are inexperienced, having been previously excluded from the legal profession, and insist that the bias has nothing to do with skin colour. As the legal adviser states, You’ve had doubts about your son’s defence being conducted by a black man. There it is. Laid out before them, Harald and his distinguished mentor. But it is presented as what might be expected, a simple regression, belched up from the shared dinners of the past. We don’t have to attribute that doubt to racial prejudice, because it is a fact, incontrovertible fact, that due to racial prejudice in the old regimes, black lawyers have had far less experience than white lawyers, and experience is what counts. They’ve had fewer chances to prove themselves; it’s their disadvantage, and you would not be showing racial prejudice in seeing that disadvantage as yours, if entrusting defence to most of them. (HG 38)

Harald’s and Claudia’s initial racist attitude towards Motsamai must be understood within the context of the racist climate imposed by apartheid. As the author points out, “Many compromises with stereotype attitudes easily rejected in their old safe life were coming about now that the other values of that time had been broken with” (HG 145). It is their erstwhile segregationist education that has made them adopt this racist attitude of rejecting the Other: “a liberal education – whose liberalism did not extend to admitting blacks, like Motsamai, they realized now” (HG 69). They finally agree to have Motsamai defend their son, but their acceptance of this black Other is based mainly on their interest in their son’s welfare, as can be inferred from the scene when the trial is taking place. In this scene, Harald and Claudia see everyone but Motsamai through the old lens of apartheid, and the fact that Motsamai is the only exception stems from sheer personal interest: It is impossible – because of the past, and even more because of the changes in the present – not to see them first as an impression of their colours. A black woman with the high cheek-bones and determined mouth of one of her race who has succeeded against odds, a black man with the heavy-set head in thick shoulders of traditional dignity turned academic (only he – Hamilton – has ceased to appear on the inner retina, of the mind, as black; dependency on him has taken his persona out of perception by colour). (HG 135)

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In this way, Harald and Claudia begin to accept Motsamai, as indicated by such details as the manner of naming. It cannot go unnoticed that naming is vital for Gordimer: “Names are very important. [...] It is a question of milieu as well as the personality of the character.”15 The manner in which the white couple and Motsamai address each other tells us it is not only that Gordimer dismantles apartheid’s traditional hierarchy of whites occupying the upper positions and of blacks occupying the lower ones, but that she goes even further by reversing this hierarchy in the very instant that – as she had already done in July’s People – the whites become dependent on the blacks. Hamilton Motsamai demonstrates his position of authority when he calls Harald and Claudia by their first names: “The fact that he himself was prepared to address Harald by first name was licence granted. He has the authority. […] Motsamai, the stranger from the Other Side of the divided past. They are in his pinkpalmed black hands” (HG 86). Similarly, the way Harald and Claudia address Motsamai is equally representative of their subordination to the black lawyer, for they call him by his surname, which was precisely the way that blacks used to refer to whites, as a sign of respect. As Gordimer puts it, It’s very different with Motsamai Hamilton. Servants used to be known to their employers only by first names, everyone knows now it was intrinsically derogatory. This use of a black man’s first name is a sign of acceptance of you, white man, of his allowing him unintimidated access to his power. (HG 88)

Little by little, if only out of personal interest, Harald and Claudia move towards accepting the black Other that Hamilton represents: Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side. […] The truth of all this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety – that other form of segregation – could change their status. (HG 127)

Thus, in Harald’s and Claudia’s case, we cannot speak of a real recognition of the Other, since their changed attitude is not rooted in a real conviction, but only in self-interest. There are other examples in the novel that clearly reflect a lingering segregationalist attitude. The saddest aspect of this persistence of racism is that it does not end with Claudia’s and Harald’s generation, but is still alive among the younger ones. For instance, we are told that Duncan has shared his life with other guys, all of them homosexual, two whites and a black. Neverthe15

Pat Schwartz, “Interview: Pat Schwartz Talks to Nadine Gordimer,” in New South African Writing (Hillbrow, S.A.: Lorton, 1977): 76.

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less, it is evident that even though they are supposed to be transgressing against the rules of the past (in this case in terms of sexuality) and are thus allegedly above the racial conflict, since one of the men is black, in the end it is always the black man who does the hard work for the rest, “of course they had the black man Petrus Ntuli to do the dirty work for them” (HG 73). This image of the young people who still continue to practise the racist politics of apartheid is clearly a proof of racism’s still being alive, and the same is suggested in the author’s descriptions of other, broader social rejections of the Other. For instance, Gordimer tells us that the Civil Service is still in the power of whites and not open to blacks: At this level the civil service is still the preserve of these white men and women, the once chosen people, old men wheezing out their days as janitors, the younger men and women belonging to the last generation whose employment by the State when they left School was a sinecure of whiteness. (HG 133)

Likewise, certain menial jobs are only done by blacks, “black men [are] working on a hole where some installation, water or electricity, is exposed for repair” (HG 138). Another proof that the Other is still seen as strange, dangerous, and evil is the fact that people still protect themselves against that alleged potential enemy as they used to during apartheid. In her apartheid writings, Gordimer repeatedly depicts the white paranoia of having to defend themselves from the Other. Short stories such as “Six Feet of the Country,”16 “Once Upon a Time,”17 and “Something Out There”18 are good illustrations of the white 16

The opening of this short story written in the 1960s is clearly representative of this: “When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a black man won’t stand aside for a white man.” Nadine Gordimer, “Six Feet of the Country,” in Gordimer, Six Feet of the Country (1956; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 8–9. 17 Nadine Gordimer, “Once Upon a Time,” in Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 23–32. In this short story, Gordimer reformulates the traditional structure of the fairytale in order to insinuate a moral. She attempts to warn us of the inhumanity of the whites who protect themselves against the blacks. She describes the way in which a white family creates a complex system of protection that in the end kills their son, which constitutes a punishment in fairytale fashion. 18 Nadine Gordimer, “Something Out There,” in Gordimer, Something Out There (1984; London: Jonathan Cape, 1984): 117–203. This novella has the rejection of the Other as its main theme. Here, Gordimer describes how the whites live in constant paranoia. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a series of mysterious events, which are not easily explainable, make people think of a public enemy, who in this case is the black Other. In the end, as in Poe’s short story, it turns out that it was a baboon that caused

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mania for possessing weapons and for protecting their houses so that they will not be attacked by the Other, the black enemy. The fact that this mania is still present in contemporary South Africa shows the persistence of that fear of the Other to which I have repeatedly referred. In fact, street violence becomes one of the leitmotifs that reverberate in The House Gun. As Michiko Kakutani states, And Harald wonders whether the inhumanity of the old regime’s assault upon body and mind has somehow survived beyond its time: not only in ‘the hut burnings and assassinations of atavistic political rivalry in one part of the country’ but also in ‘the hijackers who take life as well as the keys of the vehicle, the taxi drivers who kill rivals for the patronage of fares,’ giving ‘license to a young man to pick up a gun that’s to hand and shoot in the head a lover.’19

It is in this context that Duncan’s action must be understood, for his is just one more violent deed among the many other killings that take place daily, as was customary in the old apartheid days: There were so many; in a region of the country where the political ambition of a leader had led to killings that had become vendettas, fomented by him, a daily tally of deaths was routine as a weather report; elsewhere, taxi drivers shot one another in rivalry over who would choose to ride with them, quarrels in discotheques were settled by the final curse-word of guns. State violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it. People had forgotten there was any other way. (HG 49–50)

Taking this into consideration, we can understand the relevance of the title of the novel, The House Gun. This weapon becomes the symbol of all this fear of the Other that is still present in contemporary South Africa: A house gun. If it hadn’t been there how could you defend yourself, in this city, against losing your hi-fi equipment, your television set and computer, your watch and rings, against being gagged, raped, knifed. If it hadn’t been there the man on the sofa would not be under the ground of the city. (HG 157)

all the strange events. The whole story describes how the whites arm themselves and the way in which they arm their houses against the Other with all kinds of security systems. 19 Michiko Kakutani, “The House Gun: A Fatal Triangle in the Long Shadow of Apartheid,” New York Times (1 February 1998): online. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11 /daily/gordimer-book-review.html [accessed 15 October 2006].

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3. Now there is a new phase of liberation to be sought in our country. The need for the reconciliation of cultures.20

The struggle of Self vs. Other in Gordimer’s novel The Pickup differs in two ways from that in The House Gun. First, Gordimer broadens the terms of the conflict by, for the first time in her literary career, omitting the dichotomy ‘black’ vs. ‘white’ and turning to another binarism, that of the illegal immigrant vs. the white bourgeois. Secondly, acceptance of the Other is not determined by personal interest, as it had been in Harald’s and Claudia’s case, but just the opposite: it comes from love and self-conviction, two issues that must not be underestimated, for only these feelings can really overcome racism. There are still, nevertheless, remnants of racism, but the overcoming of that phenomenon in this novel is far more optimistic than in the earlier one, as it is now the white protagonist who tackles racism. Again, as in The House Gun, we are shown a hypocritical white middle class that only accepts the black Other to the extent that it can further white, middle-class goals. Julie, the white protagonist, is amazed that her father is getting used to the names of the Other simply because, as a banker, it is necessary for him to get new customers: There was already a black couple among the guests – amazing: the innovation showed how long it must have been since she came to one of the Sunday lunch parties in that house […] Her father’s pragmatic selfassurance knew easily how to deal with half-grasped names now common to the infiltration of the business and professional community by those who bore them. She might have realized by now that her father, as an investment banker in this era of expanding international financial power at home, must have to add such names to the guest lists for a balance of his contacts.21

Nevertheless, her parents’ true racist feelings are clearly shown when she decides to flee with Ibrahim, her Arab boyfriend, and her father tells her all his racist thoughts: Who is he where does he come from? What does he do there? What kind of family does he belong to? What do we know, everyone knows, is that the place is dangerous, a country of gangster political rivals, abominable lack of health standards – and as for women: you, you to whom independence, freedom, mean so much, eh, there women are treated like slaves. 20 Nadine Gordimer, “The Lion, the Bull and the Tree,” in Gordimer, Living in Hope and History (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 53. 21 Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (London: Bloomsbury, 2001): 41. All subsequent quotations from this novel are in the main text, referred to as P.

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It’s the culture, religion. You are out of your mind. What more can I say. (P 98)

As in The House Gun, apart from Julie’s father there are other incidents that illustrate or prove the persistence of the old segregation – for instance, when we learn that even today there are still jobs which are typically meant for blacks, “people like her have a black woman who comes to clean and wash and iron” (P 61). But, in contrast to The House Gun, in The Pickup there are more characters who distance themselves from segregation, such as Julie’s uncle, the gynaecologist Dr Archibald (who will even help her economically after she has moved to her husband’s country), and Julie herself, whose desire for self-definition leads her to the discovery that the Other is essential for (if not part of) the Self. Julie perfectly fits the image that André Brink draws of the new, postapartheid South Africa as a disoriented country, since now white South Africans can no longer define themselves in opposition to the Other: How disturbingly intimate the relationship between the oppressed and his/ her oppressor, the self and the other. And when that other begins to disintegrate and become diffuse, amorphous, inchoate, one is threatened, suddenly, by the discovery of a loss of something that has become indispensable to one’s definition of oneself.22

Julie clearly fits this image of disorientation as described by Brink, as she is constantly looking for her own Self. The definition of the Self and the Other is one of the most crucial themes in the novel, and from the very beginning, Gordimer formulates this question openly: “To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?” (P 47). This is precisely what the female protagonist fights for throughout the whole novel. But in order to redefine her ‘Self’, she will have to undergo a dual process. First, she must get in touch with the Other, which she does from the beginning of the novel by starting a relationship with the illegal immigrant who is to become her husband; secondly, she must relocate herself not as the Self, but as the Other. When the love story begins, Julie seems interested in defining what it means to be Self and Other. At first, she rejects any image of the Other as the foreigner, and in criticizing this criterion, she goes so far as to reverse this logic in one scene in which she identifies the lawyer Motsamai – who reappears in this novel, although in a secondary role – as Self, and she conceives as Other everyone else who settled in this country afterwards:

22

Brink, Reinventing a Continent, 15.

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Giles Yelverton. Hein Straus. Mario Marini. Debby and Glen Horwitz. Top (nickname) Ivanovic. Sandy and Alison Glen McLeod. Owen Williams. Danielle (née Le Sueur) and Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his daughter Julie. Generations have buried this category of theirs along with the grandfathers but all these are immigrants by descent. Only the lawyer Motsamai, among them, is the exception. He was here; he is here; a possession of self. (P 48)

As mentioned earlier, colonizers always regard themselves as the Self, and Julie, as the daughter of colonizers, has grown up with this conviction. But her contact with Ibrahim makes her realize this dichotomy is a false one, created by the power system in order to perpetuate itself. When the immigrant rules, s/he is the Self; when the immigrant is ruled, s/he becomes the dangerous Other. However, Julie not only defies the traditional conception of the Self and the Other, but goes a step further by reformulating it. For her, the Self and the Other must not exclude each other; on the contrary, they must include each other. Her affair with Ibrahim becomes the best tangible proof that this is possible. Throughout the narrative, the two worlds that are traditionally contrasted – his Arabic, male, illegal; hers white, female, legal – finally coalesce. Some of the lines of a poem by William Plomer that are cited in the novel are critical for understanding this: “Let us go to another country / Not yours or mine / And start again” (P 88). Further on, this country will be defined as their love: i.e. their union: “They make love, that unspoken knowledge they can share; that country to which they can resort” (P 130). Hence, the new definition of the Self comes from coalescence with the Other, not from its rejection, thus following the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, who, as Elsa Linguanti puts it, sees “the Other not as revealed from the splitting through of the Ego but as a presence, an inflowing world, penetrating and fructifying the world of the ‘I’: ‘a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the other, from I to Thou.’”23 Thus, Julie can only be herself in conjunction with Ibrahim, and he can only be himself in conjunction with her: “In her body he was himself, he belonged to nobody, she was the country to which he had emigrated” (P 193). But there is a second step Julie must take in order to locate her ‘Self’: she must also become that downtrodden Other in order to better understand this dichotomy, and this she learns as soon as she moves to his country, as the narrator, Julie Summers, tells us: In the human press of the airport, in the eyes of the man made out with difficulty in his cave of a shop, in the faces turned in curiosity to study her, 23 Elsa Linguanti, “Introduction” to Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti & Carmen Concilio (Cross / Cultures 39; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 5.

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close by in the bus, it came to her that she was somehow as strange to herself as she was to them: she was what they saw. That girl, that woman had lived all her life in the eyes of black people, where she comes from, but never had had from them this kind of consciousness of self. […] If she was strangely new to them, she was also strangely new to herself. (P 117)

Eventually, she has become the Other in his country, just as he was in hers: “here, here in his home, she was what he had been at The Table in EL-AY Café with her friends,” (P 152), but instead of being rejected by the rest, little by little Julie finds her position among the people in this new unknown country, and she defines herself not in opposition to but in conjunction with them, as Levinas suggested. The strongest proof of this ‘osmosis’ is her final decision not to accompany him to the U S A . She has decided she belongs here, in this Arabic-speaking country whose name we do not know. In other words, she finally gets the answer to the question that Gordimer posed at the beginning of the novel, “where to locate the Self?” (P 47), and her answer is that the Self can only be located in relation to the Other. 4.

In conclusion, Gordimer’s two novels are clearly a testimony of the ongoing process of accepting the Other in a society such as the South African; one that has always defined itself in terms of a Self/ Other opposition as a consequence of the apartheid mentality. While the depiction in The House Gun is a more negative one, showing the remnants of racism as being strongly rooted in the minds of most South Africans, in The Pickup the vision of the problem is far more optimistic. Even though there are still many shadows of the old exclusive binary, Julie embodies the hope that this dangerous dichotomy may be reformulated by including the Other in the Self instead of confronting it.

WORKS CITED Brink, André. Reinventing a Continent: Writing and Politics in South Africa (1996; Cambridge M A : Zoland, 1998). Chanda, Tirthankar. “Nadine Gordimer: ‘La décolonisation intellectuelle est un long processus,’” L’Humanité, online http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/1998 /199808/1998-08-07/1998-08-07.049.html [accessed 12 December 2000]. Fullerton–Smith, Jill. “Off the Page: Nadine Gordimer,” broadcast by Thames Television P L C in the series “Off the Page” (1988). Gordimer, Nadine. “En homenaje a Octavio Paz,” Infosel website, http://comunidades .infosel.com/libros/articulos/entrevistas/3170 [accessed 12 December 2000]. ——. The House Gun (1998; London: Bloomsbury, 1999). ——. “How Should We Look at Each Other Then?” in Gordimer, Living in Hope and History (1990; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 139–45.

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——. July’s People (1981; London: Longman, 1991). ——. “The Lion, the Bull and the Tree,” in Gordimer, Living in Hope and History, 49–54. ——. Living in Hope and History (1998; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). ——. “Living on a Frontierless Land: Cultural Globalization,” in Gordimer, Living in Hope and History, 207–13. ——. “Once Upon a Time”, in Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 23–32. ——. “Our Century: Jawaharlal Memorial Lecture,” in Gordimer, Living in Hope and History, 214–36. ——. The Pickup (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). ——. “Six Feet of the Country,” in Gordimer, Six Feet of the Country (1956; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 7–20. ——. “Something Out There,” in Gordimer, Something Out There (1984; London: Jonathan Cape, 1984): 117–203. ——, & Hugo Cassirer. The Wall in the Mind (New York: Felix Films, 1999). Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). Griffiths, Gareth. “The Post-Colonial Project: Critical Approaches and Problems,” in New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (1996; Oxford: Clarendon, 2000): 164–77. Horn, Anette. “Ethics and Aesthetics in Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction,” (1995): online. http://www.uct.ac.za/projects/poetry/reviews/gordimer.htm [accessed 15 October 2006]. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981; London: Routledge, 1998). Kakutani, Michiko. “The House Gun: A Fatal Triangle in the Long Shadow of Apartheid,” New York Times (1 February 1998): online. http://www.nytimes.com/books /98/01/11/daily/gordimer-book-review.html [accessed 15 October 2006]. Kinsman, Rob. “Nadine Gordimer: The House Gun,” (1998), online http://www .purefiction.co.uk/newrev/reviewsh/gordimer.htm [accessed 15 October 2006]. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini (Pittsburg P A : Duquesne U P , 1961). Linguanti, Elsa. “Introduction,” in Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti & Carmen Concilio (Cross / Cultures 39; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 1–8. Rushdie, Salman. “Nadine Gordimer,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Lands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1990; Harmondsworth: Penguin / Granta, 1992): 187–95. Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Schwartz, Pat. “Interview: Pat Schwartz Talks to Nadine Gordimer,” in New South African Writing (Hillbrow S.A.: Lorton, 1977): 74–81. Smith, M.W. “Embracing ‘Other’: Dialogism and the Carnivalesque in Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature,” Critique 39.1 (1997): 41–48.

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Multicultural Strategies and Alterity Transgressing the Other in Contemporary Nigerian Women’s Short Stories

M ARY E. M ODUPE K OLAWOLE

A

F R I C A N L I T E R A T U R E has exemplified the complex hybrid outlook of postcolonial literatures right from its beginning. Many African critics are calling for the decolonization of African literature by making it more indigenous, as we see in the theories of Chinweizu. While others, especially Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, advocate shifting the cultural centre through multiculturalism, many other writers and critics recognize the inevitability of hybridization. Rather than diminish the qualitative status of African literature, other critics maintain that this corpus has enlarged the diversity of values characteristic of literature in English by postcolonial and other writers. The problem of otherness, however, remains ubiquitous, and how to deal with it in positive ways continues to occupy the forefront of African and other postcolonial literatures. This essay is an exploration of how emerging new writers in Nigeria are coping with the problem of xenophobia through alterity and cultural agency. New Nigerian women’s writing can be located in the interface of writing back to the colonial reading of African literature and to male writers’ exclusionary literary creativity, both of which efface women’s visibility and dynamic space. These writers confront otherness from two perspectives by adoptingmultivocal dialogic approaches. They also demonstrate positive alterity while acting as cultural and change agency. Many critics have recognized the quantitative productions of African literature that has been described as the “African Renaissance” by Agostino Lom-

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bardo, borrowing his terminology from F.O. Matthiessen.1 This critic, like several others, has also revisited the qualitative texture and structure of African literature by acknowledging the importance of the ‘complex social machinery’ that constitutes the crucible that has moulded the imagination of African writers. The multicultural exposure has inevitably created what Lombardo describes as “an autochthonous culture, having in orality, visuality, gestuality, its main forms of expression.”2 What makes Lombardo’s critique especially relevant to this discourse is his apt identification of the fact that African literature, like other literatures, transcends the rewriting of history and the re-creation of cultural agency; instead, it is a complex of values, both specific and transcendental, both national and transnational: The great merit of the modern African artist, like the main reason for his strength and maturity, is the fact of his having given his writing in English the substance of that heritage, that wealth, the fact of not having passively accepted the English and European tradition but of having engrafted it in the African fabric, so that what was a limitation has become an addition, an enlargement, and we have, in a sense, two voices speaking at the same time.3

This dialectic of double voices is a manifestation of the double consciousness and multicultural identity of African writers and the doyens of Nigerian literature; Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Kole Omotoso, Flora Nwapa, and Zulu Sofola have validated the verbomotor culture that produced their works. The dialogic nature of much of Nigerian literature has its roots in this social environment. However, women writers have had to contend with an additional layer of identity that makes theirs not a double voice but multivocality. African women’s literature has occupied a contested site right from the outset. Emerging to confront diverse binaries, African women’s literature has been even more of a literature of the twilight zone. The issue of otherness has continued to engender many epistemological negotiations with these women’s literature as they confront otherness in contested sites, dealing with not only postcolonial binaries, the Manichaean allegory, but also challenges in gendered locations. Nigerian women writers of literature written in English belong to an important literary sub-group, being, in the words of Trinh T. Minh–ha, women, native, and Other. As a result of these layers of difference, they have been even more sensitive to the need to centre and problematize the question of otherness while facing the challenges of alterity and cultural 1

Agostino Lombardo, “Wole Soyinka: the Artist and His Tradition,” in Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English, ed. M.T. Bindella & G.V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 9; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1993): 94. 2 Lombardo, “Wole Soyinka: the Artist and His Tradition,” 94. 3 “Wole Soyinka: the Artist and His Tradition,” 94.

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agency. Perceiving the Self as the Other, however, calls for relocating the discourse from a contested site and a twilight zone. Confronting otherness has therefore become the sine qua non of speaking back for and by these women. Theirs is the experience of double otherness, as women and as Third-World or postcolonial subjects. In Women, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh–ha articulates the challenge facing these women in their multiple layers of otherness: A group of mighty men attributed to itself a central dominating position vis a vis other groups, overhauled its particularities and achievements, adopted a protective attitude toward those it classified among the out-groups and wrapped itself up in its own thinking, interpreting the out-group through the in-group mode of reasoning while claiming to speak the minds of both the in-group and the out-group.4

She problematizes the necessity for redefinition as a legitimate strategy by Third-World and postcolonial women. Not to do so is to “falsify your own reality.”5 These women are thus faced with the challenge of resisting selferasure and self-negation. While many Nigerian male writers de-centre women’s space, the women re-centre the very same. As Minh–ha affirms, these women locate themselves in the front space to write back to men or assert themselves as mainstream feminists, “either by rejecting the position of ‘Other’ ascribed to them by dominant discourses or by claiming their ‘Otherness’.”6 The oppositional nature of the politics of otherness creates inevitable polarization of strategies. This is at the heart of Minh–ha’s claim that “a concept of other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self’s dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal.”7 Others, like Leela Dube, identify the root of the inevitable self-writing strategy of women in new English literature as the “ethnocentric bias of western feminist scholars who tend to interpret data from other cultures in the perspective of the experiences acquired in their own cultures and their understanding of female–male relations from them.”8 4

Trinh T. Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989): 1. 5 Minh–ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 1. 6 Juliana Makuchi Nfah–Abbenyi, “Calixthe Beyala’s Femme-Fillette: Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering,” in The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 101. 7 Trinh T. Minh–ha, “Not You? Like You; Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 71. 8 Leela Dube, “Introduction,” in Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development, ed. Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock & Shirley Ardener (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1986): xiv.

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The Cameroonian literary critic Juliana Nfah–Abbenyi has observed, quite rightly, that sometimes the construction of Other is not a clear-cut boundary, as an individual or a fictive character can experience otherness along an indefinite border by maintaining that the protagonist can “experience self-ness and other-ness separately”9 and simultaneously. The Manichaean allegory that is celebrated by hegemonic writers and critics forces these women to subvert many existing boundaries in order to claim their own space. New Nigerian women writers have recognized the need to transcend the existing binaries and are re-inscribing women from locations of strength instead of within previous social peripheries of tragic heroinism. Moving Nigerian literature from Mount Lamgbodo has been a major objective for these women. Lamgbodo represents a male domain, the object of a quest for an ideal society in Yoruba cosmology as presented in the works of D.O. Fagunwa, one of the earliest writers of Yoruba-language literature. The Lamgbodo metaphor refers to a mythic location where a society can obtain the master-key to social problems, peace, and a utopian welfarism. But the seven people, brave, wise hunters, sent on the quest to Mount Lamgbodo are all men. The road to Lamgbodo is precarious and not all the seven men got to Lamgbodo. This suggests that the solution to the myriad of society’s problems resides in men. The problematization of knowledge has assumed new dimensions in Nigerian women’s literature, however. By an act of transgression, the literary scene has been dominated by young emergent female writers while young male writers are on the creative periphery. Many of the strategies by these new women writers are liberatorial strategies which quite often subvert the moral codes of society and create a ‘homo-social’ that reverses socially constructed gendered spaces. This is visible in many of the short stories in Toyin Adewale–Gabriel’s Breaking the Silence: An Anthology of Short Stories (1996), co-edited with Omowunmi Segun. In the story “No Sweetness Here” by Nike Adesuyi, the heroine, Efe, kills her husband, Onome, in angry reaction to her husband’s behaviour. He has a child by the other woman and she is forced to bring the child into Onome’s home to get money for critical medical attention. Memory is an important strategy here, with Efe recastings the tragedy in a monologic flashback. There is an obvious shift between the past and the present in the women’s works. The style is often fragmentary as dislocation is mapped out in terms of the fragmented body as well as of the fragmented mind / memory. An example is the story “Our Best Years” by Vera Osuokwu, a recounting of the happy days before a marriage went sour. The themes are highly contem9

Nfah-Abbenyi, “Calixthe Beyala’s Femme-Fillette: Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering,” 101.

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porary, and the strategies adopted by the protagonists rewrite woman not as a victim but from positions of strength. These women represent and re-present a new emphasis in Nigerian literature. While still revealing an autochthonous inclination, these women have added new emphasis to Nigerian literary creativity. In rewriting their identity we also have multiple layers of self-inscription on the social periphery. We see the normalization of African women’s reality to replace the exorcizing of women as they attempt to transcend postcolonial subjectivity and the subaltern space. They map new strategies of voicing from a strong periphery. Reversal of the mode of textuality and an overhaul of literary structure and style are additional hallmarks of their works. In this process they are presenting transparent texts in transparent context. They are more overt in “the insertion of history […] into a text and of this text into history.”10 Their works continue to be socially symbolic in the Jamesonian sense, as they rewrite history from women’s angles of vision. As Homi Bhabha gave the metaphor of the location of culture to postcolonial literary studies, new Nigerian women writers are dealing with the location of gender. They are interrogating many existing conceptualizations, including gender, towards a shift from conventional speaking-back and in a postfeminist mode. I wish here to affirm that the time is now ripe to move into new arenas that dissolve existing binaries; some of these new women writers are doing just that. The dialogic nature of African literature has produced some interesting trends in the last two decades. The dismemberment of the fictional personal by replacing conventional narratology with multivocality is a significant development in the region’s literature. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Matigari (1989), Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Flora Nwapa’s Women Are Different (1986), and Akachi Ezeigho’s The Last of the Strong Ones (1996) are vivid exemplars of this trend. Women’s oral genres have been described as the subtext of women’s literature. Many oral genres by women in particular reveal the predominance of ‘voice-throwing’, as we see in the concept of ‘sani baat’ in the Sene-Gambian region.11 In earlier studies I have enunciated women’s oral genres as a site for 10

See Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and the Novel” (“Le mot, le dialogue, et le roman,” 1969, tr. Thomas Gora et al.), in Desire and Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U P , 1980): 69. 11 Mary Ebun Modupe Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1997), and Mary Ebun Modupe Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa (Lagos: Arrabon, 1998). Sani Baat is a traditional philosophy in the Sene–Gambia area of West Africa. It is the concept of forcing your voice to be heard or making yourself visible against the grain. It is an expression of the transgression of existing restricted space that fits the relocation of rights and women’s attempts to be heard.

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self-expression as a process of talking back.12 Examples of such oral genres include thesatirical nzema genres of Ghana, swati bridal songs, and numerous gender myths and proverbs.13 Much work has been done in the area of images of women in African proverbs by Minekke Schipper, Helen Mugambe, Kehinde Yusuf, and Juliana Nfah–Abbenyi, among others. More recently, Susan Arndt has done much work in the area of folktales. It has become a well-established fact that in the African situation intertextuality means there is no clear boundary between orality and écriture.14 In gender discourse, women are transcending many frontiers towards a postfeminist and postwomanist (re)location. The majority of critics have for diverse reasons inscribed their ideologies on the bare body of the African woman. It is time to face the challenge of shifting from celebrating the spirituality and sacredness of the African mother or Mother Africa, of mothering and (m)othering, to a secular vision. Indeed, this accounts for the way African women writers in the last twenty years have recognized the need to shift ideological positions, assertions, roles, spaces, and the very focus of their literary production. This also touches on the flexibility required in defining and redefining African identity, Self, and Other that we have witnessed in the affirmations and disclaimers of African writers, especially women. Some critics consider this redefinition of identity and space as a lack of consistency and seek to subsume it under the usual essentializing and universalizing process that has confronted African literature and writers. The issue of selfdefinition remains unfinished business in African literary studies because of the criss-crossing of theories with new emergent exigencies. This essay is premissed on a re-reading of Nigerian women’s works as postcolonial texts designed to (em)brace otherness by speaking back to Western eye-view and men’s perception of women’s reality. Otherness here is confronted from postcolonial and gender perspectives. The objective includes revealing new women’s texts as transcending gender manifestoes in remapping African neo-identity and postcolonial allegories. They exemplify the position of John Ashcroft in his observation that Third-World texts are allego12

Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa. For additional details on these women’s genres, see Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness, 73–93. 14 Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London & New York: Routledge, 1994); Juliana Makuchi Nfah–Abbenyi, Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1997); Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness; Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa; Susan Arndt, African Women’s Literature, Orature and Intertextuality: Igbo Oral Narratives as Nigerian Women Writers’ Models and Objects of Writing Back (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies 1998). 13

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rical, in terms of both postcolonial and gender discourse. A remarkable pattern of ‘subversive manoeuvres’ is revealed in their preference of a womanist as opposed to a feminist ideological framework, and this is one of the ways in which these women confront otherness. On African women’s search for a vortex for their gender focus, Susan Arndt rightly presents the challenges: But just as in the gardens of African women not only fruits and vegetables grow, but also weeds, overshadowing the useful plants, the narratives which flourish in the gardens of the mothers arouse in African women authors not only admiration but also criticism.15

I agree with Obioma Nnaemeka and others that the task confronting African writers is located in the ‘live and let live’ space.16 This means that each writer has to strike the juste milieu in a balancing act at many levels by transcending the outcry, ‘ngambika’.17 She needs to balance the load she carries: the desire to africanize on the one hand, the need to decolonize on the other. Obioma Nnaemeka reiterates the centrality of “cultural imperatives and shifts.”18 Similarly, Juliana Nfah–Abbenyi underscores another challenge for African women, averring that “marginal positions are reclaimed and often shown as spaces of strength within and between which they fluctuate, the position of the Other being reversed and sometimes inverted.”19 African literature is a dialogue between Self and Other, body and spirit, ancient and modern, male and female, theory and praxis, and the dialogic dispensation creates a less conflictual pattern of postcolonial discourse. Womanism has become a preferred option that touches the hearts of African women as postcolonial subjects. It deconstructs feminism by de-emphasizing the male– female dichotomy, being more inclusive and conciliatory, and embracing the struggle by carrying along other levels of struggle based on race, class, and other categories. In her critique of feminism, Liselotte Glage has revealed the crux of the concerns of many postcolonial women writers as being self-referential, disregarding recent histories and social change in postcolonial nations.20 By not over-centering gender and by contextualizing it, a womanist 15

Arndt, African Women’s Literature, 9. Nnaemeka has made this philosophy her baseline in most of her recent writings. 17 ‘Ngambika’ is a term that means ‘help me balance this load’ and it was popularized by Carole Boyce Davis and Anne Adams Graves. For further information, see their critical collection Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 1986). 18 See Nnaemeka, “From Orality to Literacy.” 19 Nfah–Abbenyi, Gender in African Women’s Writing, 150. 20 At a roundtable discussion and in my subsequent interview with Glage at the A S N E L conference, Erfurt, Germany, in 2002, Glage made this statement. 16

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approach becomes a more composite channel for postcolonial discourse. Womanism avoids an inward-looking feminism by emphasizing the positive side of difference, historical specificity, and cultural contextualization. As many critics have observed, textuality is more transparent in women’s works, and this is directly related to the search for gender affiliation by these women. Textuality has been overtly transparent as women deploy literature to map out gender ideological loyalty. But the strategies adopted have created contradictory statements about personal and collective experience in real-life responses. The challenge to transcend transparent texts in transparent contexts is already being resolved by many writers. One of the major strategies is multivocality, as we can see from the works of many female texts; now, as Florence Stratton underscores, men are locating women in the forefront of more recent works.21 This is a cross-cutting issue in the critical work of Stratton on African literature. There is a self-conscious effort to resolve and reconcile gender contested borders. Textuality and intertextuality reveal the cross-currents of influences and the centrality of cultural context in African literary production and critique of the same. Some theoretical issues raised by Julia Kristeva are valid to this discourse; her delineation of opaque texts and transparent context is of interest here. But many African texts as postcolonial writings are transparent texts in transparent contexts. Kristeva’s conceptualization of the ‘vertical axis’ which emphasizes the importance of text and context is therefore significant. Literary text as a mediator always points to the significance of context to support Kristeva’s position. In African literature, this context is both historical and cultural. Her concept of ambivalence is appropriate to the African situation and to the issue of “the insertion of history […] into a text and of this text into history.”22 History has been described as the hero of African literature, and the colonial encounter as part of this history inheres in much African literature without any conscious attempt to insert or impose it. The visibility of history, including colonialism or postcolonial conditions, in African literature is often without apology, because these writers see it as a mark of Africanness and self-reflexivity. A shift from singular vision and monovocality is one of the characteristics of new women’s literature in Nigeria. Alice Walker’s womanist definition centres the imperative for black women writers to search for strength in their mother’s garden. Many recent Nigerian women writers maintain that they have to look in their mother’s garden for empowerment but critically. Uproot21

Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). 22 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and the Novel,” 69.

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ing, weeding, plucking, sieving, trimming, and winnowing are wholesome strategies. One needs to recognize that xenophobia in the African context transcends racialized otherness, as women are also speaking back to African men and to their societies. Multivocality and dialogism have become aspects of self-reflectivity. It is also a mark of the continuous search for African identity as a process of decolonizing the mind. This is at the heart of the shifting positioning on the gender ladder by Emecheta and Nwapa among other African women writers. Identity is inevitably shifting in the face of social determinants. Women’s self-definition is often based on motherhood, and (m)othering becomes a major issue that is being confronted by younger writers. The early phase of Nigerian literature underscored the problems of motherhood that created tragic heroines like that of the Nigerian writer Flora Nwapa in her novel Efuru (1966). So many songs are still being sung, drums beaten, on the issue of mothering and motherlands, spirituality, and the power of African women. This was a strategy that was intended to make motherhood an aspect of defining African womanhood. But as younger writers are shifting from an over-romanticization of motherhood as basic questions are raised about the joy of motherhood, I pose the following questions. Does identifying with goddesses like Osun or Ihamiri solve the problems of the new millennium when men are forging ahead in cyberspace and abandoning African women in motherspace? Does the ability to be biological mothers resolve the tensions of the divided personality and the split identity of a colonized people? Motherhood emphasis becomes an internalized form of othering; women are defined by the ability to be mothers, and the corollary is tragic heroism caused by barrenness. New Nigerian writers are revisiting motherhood to redefine women’s space, but this is not unique to Nigeria – other African women writers are embracing otherness by creating alternate ways of selfdefinition and womanhood by rejecting self-denial based on the barren woman as the Other. Ama Ata Aidoo tries to resolve this tension in Changes: A Love Story (1991). The heroine’s identity is located in the twilight zone between tradition / culture and modernity, change and alterity, self-definition and social definition. Yet Aidoo relocates the heroine Esi Sekhi in a site at the dawn of a new era as she recognizes the need to strike a balance. This heroine becomes the type, the exemplar, of a changed identity in a changing society. Significantly, she is an individual voice and her strength is diminished by her individuality, almost to the point of being subsumed. Nonetheless, she emerges whole. This is where the multivocality adopted as a strategy is superior as we see in the works of Flora Nwapa and Akachi Ezeigbo. In a womanist manner, one needs to recognize that men also adopt these devices effectively to create gender balance as we see in Achebe’s Anthills of the

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Savannah and to bridge other gaps and shift many borders in Ngũgĩ’s Matigari. It is essential to revisit the issue of subtexts in African literature because many critics wonder why the same subtext persists in women’s imaging of men and men’s imaging of women. I wish to address the fact that what is being encoded has changed considerably and writers are decoding their previous subtexts to create new hypertexts and links. This accounts for the erosion of previous boundaries as women writers shift from women’s stories as subtexts and men do the same. Florence Stratton and a host of others have acclaimed the rewriting of women not on the social periphery but at the centre of sociopolitical actions, not as muted femme fatale but as transgressive voices challenging the many mountains hindering African women’s wholesome development. Significantly, the classic example, Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, was published a year after Nwapa’s landmark novel Women Are Different. Simultaneity of self-re-creation can be seen as a corollary in the works of other women writers, as exemplified by Akachi Ezeigbo’s writing back with a difference. Unlike her predecessors, Nwapa and Emecheta, Ezeigbo rewrites women working within a unified social setting along with men in a womanist manner. Although Ezeigbo does not see herself as a womanist, preferring to see feminism as the umbrella concept for African women’s struggle, her literary approach in The Last of the Strong Ones shifts the gender boundary in a conciliatory and more true to life fashion. In a similar vein, the gap between orality and the written literature of Africa continues to be narrowed down in new modes of fictionalization beyond intertextuality. This is often a reaction to critiques of Manichaean allegorical structures and binaries that pervaded much of African literature until recently. Florence Stratton, among a host of others, has emphasized the fact that men are now inscribing women into their creative agenda.23 Women are equally reinscribing masculine images in later or more recent works. Textuality is criss-crossing traditional boundaries. I will revisit texts by four writers that are cardinal to the thesis that writers, in crossing borders, are moving African literature forward to new inclusive frontiers. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari is the maximum-case scenario for the presentation of multiple voices, as he grants heteroglossia unfettered centrality. He allows an incredible range of voices, including Matigari’s, to probe history and the truth about the eponymous hero’s identity. The central question, ‘Who is Matigari?,’ resonates throughout the novel, and the enigma persists. Unlike earlier works, such as Petals of Blood (1977) and Devil on the Cross (1980), however, Matigari transcends many boundaries – but not those of gender. 23

See Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender.

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Many critics of African literature have continued to treat the binaries as the norm while others try to force gender allegiance on writers who in their confusion either treat feminism as problematically superfluous or as an anomaly in African cultural contexts by beating the old drums and reiterating the socalled ambivalence and the Manichaean allegory. This trend is indicative of the way reality presents shifting identity in postcolonial conditions. Many of the postcolonial issues that remain cardinal in theorizing African literature are sinking into the quicksand of history and reality; this fact becomes both the cause and the effect of identifiable contested frontiers that still exist. African literary discourse has, rightly, moved beyond structural virtuosity and cultural explication, but it has stayed too long upon Mount Lamgbodo, the mountain of traditional wisdom and ideals. In Yoruba cosmology, this mountain is the object of a quest for ultimate wisdom and the acquisition of the ideals that will resolve many societal tensions and create an ideal, just, and humane society. D.O. Fagunwa, a Nigerian writer whose works pre-date Wole Soyinka’s, ironically thematized this quest in many of his works written in Yoruba. Mount Lamgbodo itself is a contested site, as all the questers who travelled to Lamgbodo are male. Women writers need to re-create new positive myths of women in the future, as I have posited in my works on gender myths.24 The gender question has, however, continued to revolve around the axis of identity as writers resist cultural negation and hold on to cultural appropriation. Many women writers are engaged in a dual task, simultaneously as cultural and as gender agents. Culture or cultural context remains an anomaly to many non-African critics, yet it is a necessary progressive voice in these women’s self-definition and decolonization. Postcolonial discourse needs to transcend the Manichaean allegory and speaking back. The attempt to create alternative gender concepts by African women has been so thoroughly enunciated that it will be cumbersome to reiterate the arguments. Yet recent African women writers are transcending this level of literary production based on contested boundaries and binaries. One needs to revisit texts that are moving into a postfeminist and postwomanist site in their search for resolution of traditional binaries. It is more crucial to move African women forward; many women writers are already leaving the critics behind to do just that. But I maintain that the diversity of gender perceptions is a unifying, not a divisive, approach. It increases the options of gender identification.25 However, we cannot gloss over the fact that many other criteria of motivation borrowed from personal, collective, and historical experiences combine to create gender 24

See Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa. See Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness, and Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa. 25

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consciousness in Africa. This has been the focal point of my thesis and metatheoretical studies. This is why the life-story approach remains important in the region’s literature, and most African women writers have confirmed the impact of their own lives or those of role models within their family or in society generally. When Homi K. Bhabha gave literary scholarship the metaphor of “the location of culture,” he was not thinking specifically of African literature but of Third-World literary critique and postcoloniality in general.26 This metaphor is one of the most apt in pinpointing what is most desirable today in African literature. The revision of the history of critical theory rests […] on the notion of cultural difference, not cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is an epistemological object – culture as an object of empirical knowledge – whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable’, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability, and capacity.27

It is significant that many of the women in this region are celebrating cultural difference rather than effacing it. The process of differentiating and discriminating between cultural diversity and difference is thought-provoking as far as the politics of appropriation and canonization is concerned. The centrality of culture and cultural context in postcolonial criticism is still an important critical canon for Nigerian women writers, African authors, and many postcolonial writers. Many postcolonial scholars are relocating and revisiting the place, validity, and relevance of culture, especially in the events surrounding the United Nation’s decade of culture. This event drew attention to the need to redefine culture and the definition that emerged from the World Conference on Cultural Policies in Mexico City in 1982 fits into the theoretical thrust of the present essay: Culture may now be said to be the whole complex of distinctive and intellectual features that characterize a society or social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs.28

26

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Homi K. Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” New Formations 5 (1988); repr. in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 206. 28 Verbalized at the World Conference on Cultural Policies, Mexico City, 1982. 27

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Ali Mazrui’s theory of culture is also relevant to the issue of contextualizing cultural productions and the relocation of culture. He identifies culture as an important tool in world politics in his functionalist theory of culture, maintaining that both ideology and technology are rooted in culture. He identifies seven functions of culture: perception and cognition; the provision of motives for human behaviour; evaluation; a basis for identity and mode of communication; a basis for stratification and production.29 These constituents of culture touch on the focal points of conceptualization and amplify the revalidation of culture as the basis of postcolonial identity. One needs to look at culture through the perspective of change, cultural agency, and alterity in Nigerian women’s literature. But culture itself plays itself out on a contested terrain and needs to be unpacked. The question that is often overlooked is: “Whose culture/ tradition?” Much of the time, male culture is equated with women’s culture. In another study, I have identified how culture is in many ways not women-friendly, which accounts for the inability of many African women writers to be categorical in defining identity as gender advocates.30 Redefining African women’s audibility is one of the challenges facing Nigerian women writers in trying to avoid the entrapment of gendered otherness. The dialogic emphasis encourages the opening of minds and transformation of mind-sets. This highlights their positive alterity as agents of cultural change. They have shifted from the premise of rejecting everything foreign as a mode of challenging otherness. Hybridity is celebrated as the negative side of culture, or tradition is decried in the new literature from Nigeria. This alterity can be viewed through a Yoruba proverb, the metaphor of the arere tree. Arere is a tree that emits a very strong but unpleasant odour and is never allowed to grow around residential places. The proverb dramatizes the tension between conservative voices of women’s mutation and the struggle against voicelessness by younger women: ‘Ile ti obinrin ti nse toto arere, igi arere ni hu nibe’– ‘Any home that allows women’s vocality and the role of a woman as a mouthpiece will have the offensive arere tree growing in the compound’. A conservative interpretation of this proverb celebrates women’s silence as culturally correct. But the reality in many Yoruba communities reveals a strong visibility and audibility that defie this philosophy. Many young Nigerian women are fictionalizing this audibility, revisiting women’s voices to foreground the same and reveal the transgression of silence or ‘voicethrowing’ by the younger generation of Nigerian writers. The arere metaphor in a modern context becomes superfluous and these women emphasize sub-

29 30

Ali Mazrui, Cultural Forces in World Politics (London: Heinemann, 1990): 7. See Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa.

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versive maneuvers and strategies to relocate the voices of women as a mode of confronting gender otherness. Nigerian women writers are therefore searching for a reconceptualization of gender and the way gender relations are structured. There is a yearning for a revisiting of gender theories that decolonize the mind, but this involves deconstructing or unpacking culture. This is a defining moment for these writers, and they seem to be speaking back to Western criticism that disregards cultural difference by universalizing postcolonial people’s experience. But they are also speaking back to tradition and to African men. Male African writers have for too long presented a world of male heroism that inscribes women on the social periphery. The image of Lamgbodo, the site of traditional wisdom, is relevant here as a place that hosts the solution to human problems. Lamgbodo is not only symbolic of perilous challenges in the search for human ideals, it is also an exclusively male domain. The belief that only men can secure wise solutions for society’s problems exemplifies the male focus of African men’s postcolonial writings. But the younger women challenge the status quo by speaking back to men: “You have stayed too long on Mount Lamgbodo.” Women are more openly fictionalizing their visibility and audibility, not only as a depiction of a slice of reality but as a way of confronting otherness and xenophobia. Women writers in particular are speaking back to male writers and older generations of women writers as they relocate the African woman’s social space. They are equally interrogating culture, especially the culture of silence and marginality imposed on women by tradition. There has been a shift away from presenting women as the victims of tradition; the new heroines, diverse archetypes of power and empowerment, engage in dialogue with the tradition. Many African writers have closely linked the myth of power with selfexpression. Until the turn of the last millennium, the quest for power was the fulcrum of postcolonial issues in African literature. With new consciousness, gender became foregrounded and the search for empowerment through literature gave rise to a predominantly female literary production on the Nigerian scene. Whereas older Nigerian writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Kole Omotoso, and Ben Okri have continued to be productive in literary, critical, theoretical, and even activist writing, there has been a noticeable dearth of new male literary productions. Instead, the last decade of the last millennium witnessed the advent of a third generation of women writers as well as increased energy in the writings of second-generation women writers such as Tess Onwueme, Ifeoma Okoye, and Zaynab Alkali. On the critical and theoretical scene, voices of power have emerged to present the views of

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African women, especially on gender issues, within a specifically African cultural context.31 A new wave of female voices emerged as a timely intervention even as some of the first generation of women writers is quitting the scene. The gap being created by the death of two foremothers of African women writers, Flora Nwapa and Zulu Sofola, is being filled by the unprecedented emergence of new and young female writers. Osonye Tess Onwueme, who belongs to the second phase of women writers, has consistently relocated women in a dynamic way in her prolific literary productions. Her play Tell It to Women: An Epic Drama for Women (1997) encapsulates the reconceptualization of African women’s roles in a radically post-feminist style. She creates rural women who challenge the middle-class Nigerian women who claim to be initiating development programmes on behalf of rural women in the ‘Better Life for Rural Women’ syndrome. The play is a thought-provoking challenge to many ideological positions, traditional and modern. The third generation of Nigerian writers has shifted the focus by re-creating heroines who confront the status quo in manifold ways. There are over a dozen new writers who are younger women. With the formation of the Women Writers of Nigeria organization, these women are reconstructing new myths of power, creating heroines who confront a social milieu that stifles them. With Toyin Adewale as a motivator, other young voices include Nike Adesuyi, Biodun Sowemimo, Dupe Dosunmu–Clement, May Ifeoma Nwoye, Mobolaji Adenubi, Maria Ajima, Bunmi Oyinsan, and Omowunmi Segun. Their thematic preoccupations in the anthology of short stories Breaking the Silence reveal a deliberate rejection of women’s voicelessness and the culture of silence. These writers focus on contemporary issues including new subversive attitudes to women’s empowerment, marriage, women’s space in the family, and new myths of power structure. History, tradition, and the challenges of modernity, as these impact on women, are major issues of interest to these new voices. The style and structure of the new writing by emergent Nigerian women provide new vistas to social change, modernism, and women’s space as well as new myths of power to enrich Nigerian literary production. Like Achebe’s reconstruction of female power in Nigerian society in Anthills of the Savannah, these new writers are fashioning new models and concepts of heroinism. Their perceptions of gender power are vividly presented in Breaking the Silence.

31

See also Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness, and Kolawole, Gender Perception and Development in Africa.

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The heroines created by these writers are a clear subversion of the traditional muting of women’s voices in many parts of Africa. The aforementioned Yoruba proverb provides a traditional ideological basis for the culture of silence imposed on women: ‘Ile ti obinrin ti nse toto arere igi arere ni hu nibe’ – ‘Any home where women are vocal will have the arere tree growing there’. This can be further explained as an anomaly in any home that grants women a voice. The role of a woman as a mouthpiece will have the offensive arere tree growing in the compound. The arere tree gives off an offensive smell and grows only in the wild. It would be an anomaly for this tree to grow in a residential area. So, traditionally in many parts of Africa, women’s vocality is an anomaly. But the young writers are subverting such ideologies by creating new heroines that are dynamic agents of social change, development, modernity, and empowerment. It is noteworthy that many of the writers focus on themes that dominated the first phase of African literature, including marriage and related problems. Yet the heroines are presented differently in order to reflect the relocation of African women. The visibility of some traditional themes reveals a womanist mode of gender representation. Womanism is a growing version of gender theory in African literary criticism. An important question emerges in the ongoing literary discourse: is womanism a version of feminism or a subversion of it? A critique of the play and the short stories mentioned in this essay should serve to provide some elucidation. One of the best depictions of the ways in which otherness is confronted is Osonye Tess Onwueme’s epic drama Tell it to Women. This play is a critique of postcolonial conditions of Nigerian women and the attempt to westernize them by moving rural women from poverty to improved modernized conditions. Onwueme’s play is an excellent allegory of “Better Life for Rural Women,” a programme pioneered by the wife of one of the military rulers of Nigeria, Mariam Babangida. Onwueme turns her searchlight on the programme’s pretentious objectives and false claims. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o admits in his foreword to this play, “Tradition is often associated with rural culture, and it is contrasted with modern culture, which in turn is linked to urban and Western cultures. In such schema, tradition and modernity are […] two polarities, always at war.”32 The dialectic of tradition and modernity as polar manifestations of postcolonial conditions and hybridity remains at the forefront of African literary criticism. In Tell it to Women, Onwueme goes beyond the surface of the two polarities to examine their manifest realities in postcolonial Africa. Simon Gikandi revisits this in his recent research, maintain32

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Foreword” to Onwueme, Tell it to Women: An Epic Drama for Women (Detroit M I : Wayne State U P , 1997): 7.

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ing that modernity still haunts African literature as an externally imposed theory with a postcolonial mark.33 Onwueme dramatizes the conflictual responses of rural women to an attempt to force modernism down their throat. What makes the tension pathetic is, for instance, the initial enthusiasm of the rural women of the Idu village as they receive the news of a plan to launch “Better Life for Rural Women.” When the news is brought to the village by Daisy, the Director of Women’s Affairs in the relevant government, and her friend Ruth, a feminist scholar, the rural women rejoice at the prospect of improved conditions. This warm reception is juxtaposed with the condescension of Ruth and Daisy, who view the village women as crude people: These people are just so crude, so senseless, and so irresponsible that the best thing to do is just not to bother with them. It’s best to leave them as they are in the darkness. You’ll break your arm trying to show them the light […] rural maids are nothing but stubborn pigs.34

Onwueme exposes the falsehood and hypocrisy underlying the attempt ostensibly to improve the life of rural women. The play reveals the personal gains that will accrue to the pioneers of the programme in the city, including advancement and enrichment. They believe that rural women are “so backward that even if the hand of the clock was turned back a century, they wouldn’t know the difference” (TW 17). Yet Ruth and Daisy are in the vanguard of the modernization and humanization project. So when Yemoja, the semi-literate representative of the village women, is uprooted from the village to become a model of the “Better Life for Rural Women” transformation, massive conflict results. Yemoja leaves her family and friends to follow Daisy to the city as a servant. There she experiences front-on the contempt of urban women for rural people. Her life becomes one of drudgery: as Daisy instructs her, Your duty is to cook, not steal the meals […] By three o’clock in the morning, you are up. You start each day by ironing my daughter’s clothes, mine and my husband’s. Clear? (TW 17)

No wonder Yemoja, the village queen, becomes disillusioned about the authenticity of the better-life project. Lamenting her bondage, her submission to a new kind of enslavement, she castigates women and ‘development’, see-

33

Simon Gikandi, “Revisiting Tradition and Modernity,” keynote lecture, Versions and Subversions: International Conference on African Literature, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 1–4 May 2002. 34 Osonye Tess Onwueme, Tell it to Women: An Epic Drama for Women (Detroit MI: Wayne State UP, 1997): 17. Further page references are in the main text (marked with TW).

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ing herself as ideological bait. She decries the deception of a call to a new way and picks holes in a feminist bonding that is more of a bondage, “First steps to woman’s freedom […] So this is it […] my bondage in freedom? […] How am I to know that women are not the same? How am I to tell the difference?” (TW 17). Onwueme’s allegorization of modernity and development strategies in Nigeria is a clear attack on postcolonialism as revealed in the unending attempt to ‘civilize’ the rural women. Tell it to Women is also an extended satire of feminism, especially as this is grafted unto African societies without proper cultural contextualization. The epic drama is thus in many ways an extended post-feminist metaphor. After the village forerunner Yemoja has had a bitter dose of the better-life pill, a group of Idu women arrive in the city for the launching of the programme. This journey becomes one of self-awareness and a moment of revelation for Adaku, Sherifat, Tolue, and others. The village women provide the collective voice for exposing the paradox of social change, especially when their real needs are not taken into account. They pillory a development programme that is ‘designed’ for them but fails to take them on board. The women identify the root cause of modern women’s bonding with materialism, capitalism, and westernization. They articulate the positive worth of African values and traditions, ultimately rejecting the imposition of alien ways. Railing against communal betrayal, they call for modern comforts that do not entail the loss of cultural roots and values. Adaku becomes the spokesperson for the rural women, posing the key question: The more I hear you people talk the more I want to look inward […] into our lives to see how this new life is better. I am yet to be convinced. They may be far ahead of us in terms of money. But values […] especially things to do with the spirit, moral values and the community? Hmm […] these modern people have yet to show me their humane essence. (TW 18)

Sherifat maintains that they will take the grain and leave the chaff of the new ideology. Onwueme’s post-feminist aesthetic allows male voices to criticize feminism. In addition to the powerful voices of the Umuada or women leaders, Yemoja’s husband, Koko, attacks feminism: “And now our women are embracing a new religion: F E M I N I S M ! Ugh! Must our women take on the ways of women from other lands to become better women?” (TW 20). The women reject urbanization, westernization, and social change that lack a human touch. ‘Development’ cannot be imposed and has to have an inwardlooking aspect – this seems to be the ultimate position of the rural women of Idu.

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In The Last of the Strong Ones, Akachi Ezeigbo recasts Igbo history as a direct act of speaking back to Achebe’s dramatization of male heroism in Things Fall Apart (1959). She rewrites the history of colonial encounter through the multiple voices of four women leaders who are also community leaders and symbols of cultural agency. She transgresses gender borders as she uses the same subtext that Achebe used in Things Fall Apart. Ezeigbo allows the four women witnesses to narrate their life stories to highlight women’s heroic roles, resilience, and refusal to be sidelined by men or by tradition. The voice of Ejimnaka, the female protagonist, is a radical one. The subtext of her personal life corroborates women’s dynamism at the collective level. But she is at the same time a communal allegorical figure. She is a pacesetter in her community, respected by men and women and representing all, not only women. Her story is a celebration of womanhood, heroinism, and the role of Igbo women as agents of cultural preservation without being tragic heroines. The other women as witnesses listen to Ejimnaka as she fills them with “the detail of the unequalled story of her life.”35 Her first marriage was an unequal yoking, but she had her own reasons for choosing an old man: I did not consider any of my young suitors attractive or intelligent enough. In addition, I hated being any man’s appendage […] My independence meant everything to me, indeed my very life, and I guarded it fiercely. (LSO 21).

She was not disturbed by remaining single when all her mates were married. This portrait of a woman on the eve of colonial encounter is a rewriting of the African woman. She was alienated by her friends for remaining single when they were all mothers, and they even alienated her from social interaction for being too old to attend the meeting of the maidens. When her desire for freedom was frustrated by the possessive attitude of her husband, Alagbogu, she gave him only two years and returned to her father’s house to resume her mat-making business. When she remarries, this time her choice is a handsome young man, Obiatu. She has no male children and her daughter decides to remain single and bear male children for her father, in accordance with Igbo tradition. She transgresses the spaces that cause the tragedy of many women in her society at that point in history and her daughter, Eziagba, is like her in radical ways. Ejimnaka’s story is paradigmatic, and Ezeigbo’s creation of three other strong women reinforces the thesis implied. Onyekozuru, a widow, cherishes female bonding in her relationship with Ejimnaka and in her role as a member of the women’s group, alutaradi. She had wished to marry Ejimnaka’s hus35

Akachi Theodora Ezeigbo, The Last of the Strong Ones (Lagos: Vista, 1996): 20. Quotations from the novel in the main text will be marked with LSO.

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band through the Leviratic tradition or nkushi, but instead finds a compromise by befriending Ejimnaka and keeping herself busy and active in the umuada group and as a community leader along with men. Chieme recasts the Efuru image. Rejected by her husband, Iwuchukwu, for infertility, she becomes a successful trader and oral artist respected everywhere in the community. There is a strong sense of female bonding with her artistic precursor, Nwakaku, but her fame and respect make her a heroine among both men and women alike. The fourth testifier, Chibuka, towers above her husband, an anti-hero. In her patience, devotion, diligence, and humane nature, she transcends the space of her unhappy marriage. Unlike Nwapa’s Unu Ego, Chibuka finds joy and comfort in her seven sons and daughter-in-law. All these women are not only members of women’s groups and women leaders, umuada, they are also members of the community leadership, oluada, where they all make their mark. In reinscribing women at this point in history, Ezeigbo uses multivocality to enable the women to tell their stories, thus generating a collective rewriting of history. There is mutual reconciliation of roles between the men and the women to make the point about shifting gender borders. Flora Nwapa demonstrates a general shift in awareness about major issues in African literature, but it is her recognition of a changing space for women that is the hallmark of her best work, Women Are Different. This, her prime articulation of women’s vocality, enlists as its central focus the life history of three women (Agnes, Rose, and Dora) from childhood to adulthood. Nwapa’s portrait of the ‘three musketeers’, as they call themselves, is one of radical heroinism. As schoolgirls in colonial times, they are presented as rebels and girls whose future will be a radical departure from their rural conservative upbringing at a mission school. All three have visions and dreams of happy marriages that are thwarted in diverse ways. The remainder of each story is a revelation of different ways of coping with men’s treachery, betrayal, and fraudulent exploitation of women, abandonment in various ways, and misery and desertion in general. But all these women and their close school-friend, Comfort, renegotiate their identities through shifting relationships with husbands, lovers, and workmates, very often scarcely managing to escape from contested terrains. At times, the battle is with other women whose husbands are lovers in and out of marriage relationships, as in the case of Agnes’s stepmother, who is in love with Agnes’s husband. At other times, they face a threat to life in their marriage relationships, as we see when Ayodele, the father of Agnes’s children, dies. Rose’s story is even more moving: hers is a story of abandonment by Ernest, her childhood friend, of neglect, attempted reconciliation, and false hopes. He returns after many years, only to desert her again. Dora is a victim

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of cruel exploitation on the part of Chris, who ran off to England for further studies, leaving her with five children and selling her property without her knowledge. She traces him to Europe, only to discover that he has married a German girl. Dora renegotiates her life by hard work, economic success, and taking care of her children. All in all, Nwapa proves that these women are not only different from but more humane, forgiving, and responsible than the men. These writers have, however, a meeting-point beyond transgressing the male–female, vocal and muted group boundaries. They have subverted traditional modes of fictive narration in its symmetrical structuring. These texts represent increasingly predominant strategies in African literature’s counterdiscursive framework and are a testimony to multivocality. This is another aspect of what Chiweizu and others would consider to be the decolonization of African literature. In many modes of African orature, multivalent voices are dominant, and speaking back is an accepted African mode of negotiating the question of identity. The dialogic tendency comes out here to conflate the absences in univocal narratology that characterize accommodationist– assimilationist literatures. Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah presents many witnesses, including two female voices, Beatrice and Elewa, to foreground the ideology of Nwayibuife, which means that women are also something. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o mounts an assault on traditional narratology in his numerous voices – a polyvalency that allows for a diversity of voices to troubleshoot the identity of Matigari. The two women also subvert narrative decorum in no less radical ways in order to inscribe female voices and speak back to male writers. But, like Achebe, Ezeigbo makes her texts conciliatory frontier-shifting novels. In speaking back to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by rewriting Igbo women on the eve of colonial implosion, Ezeigbo goes further, to create a conciliatory teaming-up between men and women. This is ironical, since she rejects the validity of womanism (which is precisely the crux of a womanist ideology). In conclusion, these women writers can be seen to challenge a salient postcolonial viewpoint which Florence Stratton has succinctly posited: We might note that these models operate on the assumption (and give the impression) that African and other post-colonial literatures lack an internal dynamic, that they are unable to generate their own experience.36

These new writers, and older writers in their more recent works, revisit postcolonial conditions of women to affirm that African literature has an internal dynamic that cannot be ignored in postcolonial and gender theorizing. The 36

Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, 111.

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historical changes they give testimony to, and their increasing visibility and more insistent voices, also need to be placed in their proper cultural context. Women’s voices are becoming increasingly liberatorial as women writers see themselves not simply as gender mouthpieces but as agents of cultural change in the process of social decolonization. Confronting otherness entails encountering the Self and embracing the community and universal canons of otherness. These women writers are engaged in the communal task of concurrently confronting postcolonial, gender, cultural, and other ideological determinants of African women’s self-definition.

WORKS CITED Adewale–Nduka, Toyin & Omowunmi Segun. Breaking the Silence: An Anthology of Short Stories (Lagos: W R I T A , 1996). Adesuyi, Nike. “No Sweetness Here,” in Breaking the Silence: An Anthology of Short Stories ed. Toyin Adewale–Nduka & Omowunmi Segun (Lagos: W R I T A , 1996): 1–9. Aidoo, Ama Ata. Changes: A Love Story (London: Women’s Press, 1991). Arndt, Susan. African Women’s Literature, Orature and Intertextuality: Igbo Oral Narratives as Nigerian Women Writers’ Models and Objects of Writing Back (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies 1998). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). ——. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” New Formations 5 (1988). Repr. in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 206–209. Davis, Carole Boyce, & Anne Adam Graves, ed. Ngambicka: Studies of Women in African Literature (Trenton N J : Africa World, 1986). Dube, Leela. “Introduction” to Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development, ed. Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock & Shirley Ardener (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1986): xi–xliv. Ezeigbo, Akachi Theodora. The Last of the Strong Ones (Lagos: Vista, 1996). Gikandi, Simon. “Revisiting Tradition and Modernity,” keynote lecture, Versions and Subversions: International Conference on African Literature, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 1–4 May 2002. Kolawole, Mary Ebun Modupe. Womanism and African Consciousness (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 1997). ——. Gender Perception and Development in Africa (Lagos: Arrabon, 1998). Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue, and the Novel,” (“Le mot, le dialogue, et le roman,” 1969, tr. Thomas Gora et al.) in Desire and Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U P , 1980): 64–91. Lombardo, Agostino. “Wole Soyinka: the Artist and His Tradition,” in Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English, ed. M.T. Bindella & G.V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 9; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A , 1993): 93–98.

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Mazrui, Ali. Cultural Forces in World Politics (London: Heinemann, 1990). Minh–ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989). ——. “Not You? Like You; Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 71–77. Nfah–Abbenyi, Juliana Makuchi. Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1997). ——. “Calixthe Beyala’s Femme-Fillette: Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering,” in The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 101–13. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “Foreword” to Onwueme, Tell it to Women: An Epic Drama for Women (Detroit M I : Wayne State U P , 1997): 7–10. Nnaemeka, Obioma. “From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re)Inscription of Womanhood,” Research in African Literatures 25 (April 1994): 137– 57. ——, ed. The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature (London & New York: Routledge, 1997). Nwapa, Flora. Women Are Different (Enugu: Tana, 1986). Onwueme, Osonye Tess. Tell it to Women: An Epic Drama for Women (Detroit M I : Wayne State U P , 1997). Osuokwu, Vera. “Our Best Years,” in Breaking the Silence: An Anthology of Short Stories, ed. Toyin Adewale–Nduka & Omowunmi Segun (Lagos: W R I T A , 1996): 19–22. Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London & New York: Routledge, 1994).

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The Other Within The Malaysian Experience

R AIHANAH M.M.

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H E F O R M A T I O N O F T H E M A L A Y S I A N S E L F , given its heterogeneous landscape, rests on two paradigms. The first is the ethnocentric attachment individual Malaysians feel towards individual ethnicity, whether Malay, Chinese, Indian, Bajau, Kadazan, Sikh, which consequently colours the social and cultural mind-set. The second is the nationalistic sense of belonging to the land and the nation at large that the individual shares with other nationals. The latter homogenizes people of various social and cultural standings with a view to reaching similar goals, including the achievement of national unity and sociocultural tolerance. The former, however, presents certain conflicts in the formation of the Malaysian Self. When individuals of strong ethnic ties want a piece of the economic, political, and social pie, the true dynamic of ethnic relations materializes. The political concerns of one ethnic community may become an obstacle to another’s progress. Likewise, the social priorities of one community might well be immaterial to another. It is in this highly demanding social context that the true dialectic of the Malaysian Self and the Other is played out. Each community plays both Self and Other within the Malaysian context, mediating between their own concerns and those of the others. This essay considers the issue of Self and Other in multicultural Malaysia by means of an examination of a work by one of Malaysia’s eminent anglophone novelists, Lloyd Fernando. Fernando’s novels present a nation coming to terms with its colonial legacy and postcolonial reality, a reality loaded with intercultural tensions that highlight the true issues of ethnic relations and identity formation in the Malaysian experience. I shall be utilizing the sociological framework of the cultural continuum as presented by J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele, which places cultures and individuals on a concrete–abstract continuum towards

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creating greater cross-cultural interactions and understanding. Using the relational continuum, I propose that in the Malaysian context the Other is to be located within rather than beyond the nation’s boundaries. Postcolonial literatures present the issues and concerns of countries coming to terms with the colonial experience and rediscovering their particular identity and nationhood. The colonial legacy, which was once the identity of the former colony, has now to be exorcized to allow a ‘new’ and ‘native’ identity to be formed. As most postcolonial nations have discovered, however, such a radical step of purging the old ways is not easy, and, in fact, is not always the best way. The colonial legacy for Malaysia, among many former colonies, included “the highest expression of the colonial inheritance – the modern state.”1 The other inheritance of colonialism, however, also includes the bitter aftertaste of racialized ‘divide and rule’ policy. As J.S. Furnivall observed of the colonial practice, the creation of the pluralist nation found its genesis in colonial times: Everywhere a native social order, with the plural features characteristic of a society based on personal relations, has been converted into a definitively plural society with three or more component sections, living side by side but separately and with no common social life. The plural society has a distinctive plural economy, and a characteristic political constitution.2

The pluralistic society of Malaya was also a time-bomb waiting to explode. Each ethnic community maintained its own quite separate and segregated lifestyle and culture. The interactions between them were minimal, partly owing to the ingenious imperial policy of placing each community in different locales. The main community, the Malays, who were already in Malaya when the British arrived, was left in the villages to maintain their livelihood as paddy farmers. When tin was discovered in Malaya, the British brought in migrant mining labourers from mainland China. And to tap the rubber, indentured labourers from South India were installed on the rubber estates. Over the years, the tin mines grew to be important social and economic centres controlled by the Chinese migrant community. Meanwhile, the native population was left in rural areas with very few opportunities for social and economic advancement. The lack of interaction between the races meant that Malaya, over time, became a country divided. Even if there were not any significant racial clashes, as Mahathir Mohamad states in his highly controversial book The Malay Dilemma, “People who live apart need not like each other. If there was 1

T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge M A : Cambridge U P , 1999): 2. 2 Quoted in Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 3.

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no conflict, it was because there was no occasion for confrontation. There was only a consciousness of each other’s existence, and this consciousness was sufficiently unpleasant to prevent any desire for closer relations.”3 This was Malaya on the eve of independence in August 1957. The new leadership of independent Malaya was faced with a great challenge to unite a nation of multiracial, multicultural people who neither understood nor appreciated each other. As Mahathir Mohamad states, There was a lack of inter-racial strife. There was tolerance. There was accommodation. There was a certain amount of give and take. But there was no harmony. There was in fact cacophony, muted but still audible […] Racial harmony in Malaya was therefore neither real nor deep-rooted. What was taken for harmony was absence of open inter-racial strife.4

The inevitable – though muted – interracial clash finally came on 13 May 1969. This bloody conflict, which saw the races – especially Malays and Chinese – act out their true mind-set, was a turning-point in the young nation’s history. Government policies from then on took a drastically racial slant, in particular the positive-discrimination policy favouring the Malays in order to boost their social and economic standing. The establishment of the National Language policy and the National Culture policy, which are both based solely on the Malay race, heightened the us-vs.-them tension faced by the people in the country.5 In present-day Malaysia, the us-vs.-them attitude is still not uncommon. Malaysians are still contesting issues of identity based on their ethnicity, separated as they are from each other by a plurality of viewpoints, as well as on the notion of their being homogenized members of a nation. On the literary scene, the us-vs.-them syndrome is again apparent, this time between literatures written in the national language, which is Malay, and those written in English, Chinese, Tamil, and other vernaculars. The former is given the status of national literature while the others have sectional or vernacular status. The 3

Mahathir Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma (Kuala Lumpur: Times Book International,

1970): 6. 4

Mahathir Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma, 4–5. The separatist attitude of the authority that ironically echoes the colonial legacy is not without basis. As stated earlier, the social and economic disparities between the majority Malay community and the former migrant communities were some of the baggage of colonial encounters, and the government feels it suited to address the issue through its racial policies. This, however, does not assist in the creation of homogeneity within the nation. In fact, some critics have expressly labelled such governmental policies as new forms of racial hegemony. See P. Ramasamy, “Nation-Building in Malaysia: Victimization of Indians?” in Ethnic Relations and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia: The Case of the Ethnic Chinese, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 2004): 145–67. 5

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situation becomes more acute when the majority of the national writers are Malays, and the majority of first-generation Malaysian writers in the English language are non-Malays. The tension between the majority Malay population and the minority ethnic groups colours ethnic relations in the country. Concerns of each group vary according to their political, social, and economic interests. The contestation of ‘space’ within the nation, given the pluralistic landscape, becomes an important concern for many first-generation anglophone writers, and such images are prominent in their writings. These members of the new literatures in English or the postcolonial canon use their talents and creativity to raise both ethnocentric and national interests in addressing the postcolonial nation. Postcolonial literature, Malaysian literature in the English language being an example, was formed “out of the experience of colonization and [the literature] asserted [itself] by foregrounding the tensions with the imperial power, and by emphasizing [its] differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre.”6 The binary of centre and margin thus became an important relationship in reading most postcolonial literature. Trinh T. Minh–ha goes on to suggest that the binary opposition of centre and margin is intricately designed and that such binaries seem to merge, existing as “margins within the center and the centers within the margin.”7 To better understand one’s sense of identification, one needs to be aware of the existence of both the ‘centre’ and the ‘margin’ within one’s life. It is this Self/Other dichotomy that creates the postcolonial sense of identification. Or, as Vincent Crapanzano states, “one’s sense of self is always mediated by the image one has of the other.”8 Hence, the notion of the Other is a crucial phenomenon in the discussions of identity. Homi Bhabha extends this notion of the Other a step further. He suggests that we rethink our sense of Self not just in relation to the Other, but also in how we behave owing to the existence of the Other. The current relationship between centre and margin or oppressed and oppressor within a community or nation has to be reconsidered in order to understand better the predicaments of its members. Only through the double consciousness of the Self and the Other can each member of the nation learn to exercise the roles of “individuated agent of change” and socio-political member of the nation.9

6

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989): 2. 7 Trinh T. Minh–ha, “No Master Territories,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 216. 8 Quoted in Minh–ha, “No Master Territories,” 217. 9 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 65.

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The position of the Other in relation to the centre or the Self is also an important point of debate. In a dialectical context, where does one find the Other for oneself? According to J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele, “One need not travel far to seek out the ‘other,’ there is an ‘other’ already within oneself and within one’s group.”10 By contrast, Chua Beng Huat, a Singaporean writer, makes the point that the Other for Singapore is in fact located outside the country: i.e. in Australia.11 However, D’Cruz and Steele argue that such a perspective needs re-examination, as it ignores the potential Other within the country. As they state, “one should rather first seek the ‘other’ within Singapore itself.”12 In the explication of the Malaysian identity, my response of the Self/ Other dialectic for Malaysia corresponds to the position taken by D’Cruz and Steele. Ample points of reference exist within the country, especially given Malaysia’s multicultural, multi-ethnic landscape, indicating for a Malaysian that the Other exists in his / her society. By understanding the projection of each ethnic group’s sense of identity as a Malaysian, the others – the Malays, Chinese et al. – can begin to have a new sense of appreciation and understanding of their own Malaysian-ness, one that is relational to the Malaysianness of the Indians. Hence, to follow this line of thought, each ethnicity can then be the Other of another ethnic community. My contention is that using the binary of “the center itself is marginal,”13 the notion of Malaysian identity is one that is made up of a sense of dichotomy, one identity being the accumulation of all that one has acquired of one’s ethnicity: i.e. cultural heritage (which includes language, tradition, religion etc), and the other identity being the cultural heritage of the other ethnic groups in the country one is, and has been, in contact with, which has coloured one’s sense of identification, directly or indirectly. In other words, one’s sense of Malay-ness, Chinese-ness, Indian-ness or X-ness is not just in relation to one’s understanding of ethnicity, but also in relation to the Other: i.e. those who do not share one’s awareness of one’s own ethnicity. Through such an introspective awareness of the national identity, Malaysians will gain a better appreciation of their sense of identity, both ethnocentrically and collectively, as a nation. D’Cruz and Steele also argue that the essence of identity-formation lies in the values and orientations that govern our lives. These values can be concep-

10 J.V. D’Cruz & William Steele, Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia: Politics, Neo/Post-Colonialism and Fact / Fiction (Bangi, Malaysia: Penerbit U K M , 2000): 204. 11 Quoted in D’Cruz & Steele, Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia, 204. 12 D’Cruz & Steele, Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia, 204. 13 Minh–ha, “No Master Territories,” 216.

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tualized as the two metaphors14 of concrete and abstract cultural orientation, which can be visualized on a bipolar continuum. One end constitutes the more abstract cultural orientation that stresses the importance of the individual, and is highly egalitarian in nature. Values pertaining to the individual – including freedom of speech, freedom of choice, emphasis on privacy and, in a nutshell, complete autonomy at any cost – are placed at the more abstract pole. The opposite pole, which represents the more concrete cultural orientation, places great emphasis on communal culture and hierarchical social order. In such a culture, group loyalty and group privacy are highly valued, and problems are solved through face-to-face interactions, which oftentimes involve mediated “interpretation of the unsaid.”15 Between the two poles, individuals and cultures find their locales. One is neither all abstract nor all concrete in cultural orientation, for, as D’Cruz and Steele argue, both aspects of the concrete and abstract exist within us. Some features of one cultural orientation may be more pronounced than others, however. In other words, one’s sense of identity is reflected by the prominent cultural orientation one maintains: To be centred, for the abstract person, is to celebrate forms of independence and autonomy. […] To be centred, for the more concrete person, would be to celebrate even forms of dependence […] and/or interdependence, a sense of kindredness, of belonging, but not without individual or group agency.16

One does not stay fixed at one point on the continuum, either, because constant oscillation between the two cultural orientations takes place at different times, given the circumstances and people one encounters. To promote greater cross-cultural interaction, one needs to be aware of the values and cultural orientation one likes and of those appreciated by others. By tapping into the commonalities shared by two people, each is better equipped to tolerate and relate to the other. Using the relational continuum, I propose that the true differences that exist among people of variant cultures and traditions reside not in tradition or in geographical location but in the values and cultural orientation they choose to live by, be that the more concrete or the more abstract. In the context of literary criticism, the continuum can be utilized to read fictions that experiment with multi-ethnic landscape. An important contri14 The metaphors of concrete and abstract relate closely to the interpersonal relationship that takes place in both types of culture. In the more abstract culture, lack of face-to-face tangible dealings lead to a more generalized sense of the Other, whereas the more concrete culture’s emphasis on face-to-face interaction presents a more immediate and present Other. 15 D’Cruz & Steele, Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia, 193. 16 Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia, 199–200.

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butor to such a genre in the Malaysian literary scene is Lloyd Fernando. This retired university professor-cum-barrister – and a member of the first generation of new writers in English in independent Malaysia – has so far produced two crucial novels.17 The first, Scorpion Orchid, was published in 1976 and the other, Green is the Colour, came out in 1992. In Scorpion Orchid, Fernando revisits colonial Malaya, specifically the island of Singapore. His protagonists are four university friends of different racial heritage, a Malay, a Chinese, an Indian, and a Eurasian. Their closeness, which might seem apparent in the opening chapters, begins to wear off as the nation faces the political and social uncertainties of imperialist rule. In Green is the Colour, Fernando revisits history through the depiction of post1969 Malaysia, the year of the bloody ethnic riots. His protagonists are again a colourful spread of men and women of Malay, Chinese, and Indian origin, and their relationships with one another during those trying times are central to the theme of the novel. Fernando constantly positions his multi-ethnic characters in relation to one another, be that in friendship circles, intimate male– female relationships or even their relationship to the public domain. In this essay I wish to focus on his second novel, Green is the Colour, and attempt to unearth issues pertinent to ethnic relations in independent Malaysia.18 In Green is the Colour, Fernando experiments with interracial friendship through two characters, the Malaysian Malay lawyer Dahlan and the Malaysian Chinese civil servant Yun Ming. Yun Ming and Dahlan’s friendship has evolved, not necessarily for the better, from their university days. Their first meeting, many years after their graduation, did not bring back fond memories of their fraternity. The mutuality of thinking and interest on which their friendship was based is now in the past. The following excerpt signals the true tension that exists between them. When Yun Ming reprimands Dahlan for his behaviour towards the former’s employer, Dahlan scorns Yun Ming’s blind loyalty.

17 Fernando’s literary corpus includes the two novels, a short story, and a play. The play, Scorpion Orchid (2003), was based on the first novel, of the same title. 18 The terminology of race is undoubtedly problematic. The debate on the choice of diction between ethnicity and race is justifiable: see Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and The Allures of Race (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). For the purpose of this essay, however, I have chosen to use the words ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ interchangeably. This is because the term ‘race’ or the Malay word ‘bangsa’ is used in the novel Green is the Colour. In addition, ‘race’ or ‘bangsa’ is also used to refer to one’s cultural origin in Malaysia. One is still asked to define one’s ‘bangsa’ in formal documents in the country such as birth certificates, identity card, and marriage certificates, to name a few. Some of the ethnic communities in the country include the Malay, Indian, Chinese, Bajau, Iban, Kadazan, Sakai, and Sikh. Each community has its own cultural and religious practices and festivals.

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Yun Ming said, “You’re already in trouble, don’t make things worse.” “What do you mean?” “Why talk back to the Secretary–General? Let him talk, why make him angry?” Dahlan shook his head in an exaggerated gesture of despair. “Ay, I heard you were working in that guy’s Ministry. But you’re really gone man. I didn’t know how far.”19

Yun Ming reflects on the changes in Dahlan and begins to uncover for himself Dahlan’s sense of individualism, stating: “Just criticize everything we do. Dahlan was going on as if there had never been any change. There was no originality in him. He was just an imitation radical. A colonial product to the end” (8). Yun Ming and Dahlan’s friendship fails due to the clash of values. The former’s communally centred Self, which values group loyalty and preservation of hierarchy, does not accord with the latter’s individualism. Fernando paints Yun Ming as a man conscious of his responsibility to preserve the harmony and unity of his land. His sense of belonging to Malaysia and his willingness to abide by social hierarchy demonstrate clearly his sense of Self. His employer, Panglima, views Yun Ming as a Malaysian Chinese who is not ethnocentric but nationalist, who would do anything “for the country and the nation” (21). On their first meeting, Panglima understood the eagerness in Yun Ming and decided to make him an important mouthpiece in the governmental racial policy. Yun Ming’s commitment to accommodating the government’s one-nation, one-language, one-culture policy can be seen in his own dialogue with Panglima: “Yun Ming found himself saying with fervour that the Chinese and Indians had to forget where they came from. They must follow one way of life, have one way of doing things. He caught himself in time before being swept into saying they should have one religion” (21). His homogeneous / collective attitude is the opposite of his friend Dahlan’s individualized Self, autonomous in the face of all societal expectations. Yun Ming’s sense of Self is shared by another Malaysian Malay, Sara. His relationship with Sara, a lecturer, seems to flourish even in such a racially tense atmosphere, thanks to their shared cultural orientation. They both appreciate strong family ties, and, in fact, braved the odds by introducing the other to their respective fathers. In addition, Yun Ming’s sense of loyalty, in particular to the tradition of the young nation, is equally shared by Sara. Sara’s communally oriented nature can be seen when she tells Dahlan of the need for Malaysians to “use our own ways. We’ve used other people’s ways long enough” (2–3). Later in the story, as she reflects on the acute colo19

Lloyd Fernando, Green is the Colour (Singapore: Landmark, 1993): 4. All subsequent quotations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the main text.

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nialist mentality still present in the country even after independence, the omniscient narrator tells us Sara’s thoughts: “She had to find a way of reasserting what was native and true. The past clung to her, a large scab that had to be shed so that normal growth would be hers again even though a scar might remain” (35). The strong us-vs.-them dialectic is evident in Sara’s psyche, as it is in Yun Ming’s. Sara craves the direct involvement with the nation that Yun Ming has. As she says, she wants “real social involvement […] Providing people with the mental equipment to fight the decadence that was swamping the towns” (34–35). Sara’s orientation is not wholly communal, however. At times she chooses not to assert her individuality. Her visit to her village, a highly communal centre, does not stop her from continuing to be true to her sense of Self, in particular her way of dressing. A fellow villager stops Sara during one of her walks around the village. Seeing her clad in jeans, the young man reprimands her, “I speak to you like your brother. Dress properly, don’t bring shame on your father and mother” (27). And it is with this strong sense of autonomous Self that Sara is able to disregard the cultural and societal restrictions, and her marital commitments to her husband Omar, a fellow Malay, and engage in an intimate relationship with Yun Ming. Another interracial couple in Green is the Colour are Dahlan and the Malaysian Indian, Gita. Very much like Yun Ming’s and Sara’s relationship, Dahlan and Gita tap into their more abstract side to appreciate and understand each other. Gita’s sense of individualism, especially the strong mark of agency, is obvious when she walks out on her autocratic father even when her married brothers want her to care for him after their mother’s death. As she reflects on the challenges she has faced with her family, she tells Sara, “why did my father have such power? You know why? Because I gave it to him that’s why. Well, I’ve taken it back” (49). However, Gita does appreciate a close intimate and interdependent relationship, unlike her partner Dahlan. As stated earlier, Dahlan is a more abstract character. He tells Gita of his motto in dealing with the current racial problems faced by the country: “All of us must make amends. Each and every one of us had to make an individual effort. Words are not enough. We must show by individual actions that we will not tolerate bigotry and race hatred.” (67)

The importance he places on the individual is obvious in his speech. It is due to his strong abstract side that in his relationship with Gita, which is a personal face-to-face contact, Dahlan faces problems. He is able to stand on street corners and speak his mind but finds it difficult to conduct an intimate relationship, as Gita discovers: “you do these grand things like a hero – it’s so

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easy. Have you thought about us? Now that’s hard. That you won’t dare” (67). Another character who plays a minor yet significant role in Fernando’s experimentation with issues of ethnic relations is Omar, Sara’s husband. Omar’s xenophobia, in particular his fear of anything outside of his mindset, is obvious in his every remark. His decision to move to the rural town of Jeranggu in order to be with his fellow Malay Muslims and lead a reclusive life away from the secularization and modernity that are invading the country reflects his extreme monocultural sense. He takes the us-vs.-them dialectic to its extreme, even with his wife, who he considers has deviated from the true path and is in need of spiritual healing. As he says of Sara, Her western education had blinded her […] She didn’t know her own heritage but went and learned the white man’s. She had taken a path deviated from true knowledge. She actually belittled the learning and spiritual accomplishment of her own tradition. What was needed was disciplined living to realize it once again. Here we have all the immoral publications, television and imitation life-styles, but no thinking, no reflection. Rather than be swallowed up by these, better to go and find a quiet place to restore oneself to serenity and spiritual peace. (39)

Omar’s obvious detachment from his fellow Malaysians of different cultural and religious heritage can be seen in the way he treats his old college friend, the Malaysian Indian Sabapathy (Saba). When Saba approached him with a petition for government funding that the Malaysian Indian community is gathering for the enlargement of their temple, Omar refuses to sign, stating that such an act is not allowed by his superior. Even though Saba assures him that supporting the petition is a positive sign of promoting tolerance and would be a “good gesture for unity” (51), Omar declines, saying that he should not get involved. And when his wife agrees to contribute to the petition, Omar takes a defensive stance and accuses her of having a relationship with Saba: “‘Answer me. Is Saba the man you’re going out with? […] you are going with that fellow right? That’s why you are behaving like this?’” (52). His paranoia drives him to take Sara forcefully and abusively. Omar is locked in a claustrophobic mindset. His consideration and appreciation of others lie purely in his sense of value and worth. He is both very individualistic, in that he can disregard others, including his wife’s self-worth, and very communal in respect to his group members. To conclude, in Green is the Colour Omar and his fellow characters present the reader with personalities who, on initial encounter, appear racially stereotyped. Upon closer reading, these initial stereotypes begin to give way to deeper representations. In presenting people with all their aspirations and complexities, Lloyd Fernando has succeeded in raising awareness in readers

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of the true dialectic of the multiracial society. In addition, the writer leaves readers little doubt that an intercultural relationship like that of Yun Ming and Sara, or even that of Dahlan and Gita, is bound to face problems. Nonetheless, he also presents couples with similar cultural backgrounds facing grave relationship hurdles. Ethnicity does not curtail automatic understanding and tolerance between people. Sara and Omar go their separate ways at the end of the story due to their different senses of Self or values. Each one is centred differently with regard to the more concrete and more abstract sides. Conversely; Sara’s and Yun Ming’s intercultural relationship has a better chance of succeeding because of their mutuality of cultural orientation. Humankind is a very diversified lot, and no one would argue otherwise. All the same, within this heterogeneous population of billions there is still a unifying thread, which is that we all wish to be understood and accepted for our individuality. Before we can expect this of another, however, we must admittedly begin by consciously seeking to better understand the Other in our midst, not so much looking for the differences the Other harbours but recognizing the commonalities between us. The essence of our differences resides not in the rituals we perform or the clothing we put on or even the food we eat, but in the values we uphold. We are all in variant degrees individualistic and communally centred; we want privacy and at the same time need to feel some sense of belonging to a group; we value independence but not without companionship and interdependent relationships. Once we see each other in this light, the marked differences we see at first glance – be they of ethnic origin, colour or creed – can in many instances wither away to show the true essence of our humanity. An important resolution that can be reached in facing such challenges in a multicultural society is well summed up by Farish Nor, a Malaysian columnist and social critic: “It is only by emphasizing the common humanity that we share with others that we can begin to construct an ethics of inter-communal relations which would force others to see us as they see themselves.”20

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). D’Cruz, J.V. & William Steele. Australia’s Ambivalence Towards Asia: Politics, Neo/ Post-Colonialism and Fact/Fiction (Bangi, Malaysia: Penerbit U K M , 2000). 20

Farish Nor, “Muslim causes must have global appeal,” New Straits Times (13 April

2002): 5.

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Fernando, Lloyd. Green is the Colour (Singapore: Landmark, 1993). ——. Scorpion Orchid (1976; Singapore: Times, 1992). ——. “Scorpion Orchid,” in Petals of Hibiscus: A Representative Anthology of Malaysian Literature in English, ed. Mohammad A. Quayum (Petaling Jaya: Pearson Longman, 2003): 190–238. Gilroy, Paul. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and The Allures of Race (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Harper, T.N. The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge & N Y : Cambridge U P , 1999). Mohamad, Mahathir. The Malay Dilemma (Kuala Lumpur: Times, 1970). Minh–ha, Trinh T. “No Master Territories,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995): 215–18. Nor, Farish. “Muslim causes must have global appeal,” New Straits Times (13 April 2002): 5 Ramasamy, P. “Nation-Building in Malaysia: Victimization of Indians?” in Ethnic Relations and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia. The Case of the Ethnic Chinese, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 2004): 145–67.

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The Resistance to Being (Em)Braced Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and David Malouf’s Johnno 1

J ÖRG H EINKE

1. Introduction

I

N D I S C O U R S E A N A L Y S I S , any interpretation is criticized for being a comment. Foucault significantly remarks that “commentary questions discourse as to what it says and intended to say; it tries to uncover that deeper meaning of speech that enables it to achieve an identity with itself, supposedly nearer to its essential truth.”2 Understood in Foucault’s terms, in a comment on the discourse, the centre of the discourse is already inherent. Thus, the centre of meaning is always present in a comment without having to be stated. This overemphasis on the signifier over the signified, however, restricts interpretation, as it secretly binds: i.e. prescribes meaning to the centre of discourse when it only meant to describe. In that understanding, interpretation has to be regarded as exclusion and a constraint on meaning. The discourse of ‘embracing the Other’ appears as such a constraint. The openly favoured understanding of the term is that it implies providing a secure environment for communication, shelter and comfort and offering recognition and acceptance on an equal basis. I want to suggest that while emphasizing 1 Page references are from Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), and David Malouf, Johnno (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1975). Further page references are in the main text, using the abbreviations JM and JO. 2 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, tr. A.M. Sheridan (Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du régard medical, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; tr. London: Tavistock, 1976): xvi.

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the existence of an ‘openly favoured understanding’, this discourse also has implications that are not openly stated. The ‘embrace’ could mean holding someone but also patronizing him/ her, or worse, containing him/her, robbing him/ her of his/ her ability to move freely. The results are various forms of exclusion either of someone who due to his /her physical, ethnic, social or other attributes is not accepted as being worthy of an embrace, or of someone who does not want to be embraced. On a social level, the embrace emphasizes society’s insistence on integrating the Other according to that society’s dominant values, social roles, and cultural codes. Therefore, ‘embrace’ has to be understood as a comment, as a cultural interpretation of a relation. With the statement ‘embracing the Other’, we imply the existence of someone who is identified as an Other. This plain remark has consequences for the discourse of ‘embracing the Other’: If discourses operate via inclusion and exclusion, such as healthy / sick, sane / insane, just / unjust, true / false, male / female, then what is excluded is not different in neutral terms but is denigrated, isolated. In that sense discourse is a manifestation of power.3

Although cultural entities are likely to present themselves as homogeneous, cultural stereotypes and auto-stereotypes rarely show the coded subtexts that would reveal on what grounds someone is embraced or excluded. On the contrary: stereotypes speak about an emotively felt, not cognitively reflected upon essence of existence, and the strange thing is that this existential essence ought to be searched for in those who use the stereotypes and not in those about whom the stereotypes speak.4

Thus the term ‘Other’ tells us more about the one who uses it than about the one who is called the Other. Consequently, when the term Other is attached to someone who is defined by the discourse as an Other, it is only because s/he fits the hetero-stereotype of a culturally determined ‘Other-image’. This definition means that the personal, cultural, social, and political embrace is an

3 Dorothee Kimmich, “Diskursanalyse und New Historicism,” in Texte zur Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart, ed. Dorothee Kimmich, Rolf Günter Renner & Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996): 229. “Wenn Diskurse nach dem Prinzip der Aus- und Einschließung operieren, also z.B. nach krank / gesund, normal / verrückt, gerecht / ungerecht, wahr / falsch, männlich / weiblich differenzieren, ist das Ausgeschlossene nicht einfach neutral anderes, sondern das, was diffamiert und isoliert wird. Diskurs wäre somit Manifestation von Macht.” My translation. 4 Anton C. Zijderveld, “On the Nature and Function of Clichés,” in Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, ed. Günther Blaicher (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1987): 27.

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embrace on the embracer’s terms. What if the Other – for reasons neglected, ignored, suppressed or excluded – does not want to be embraced? What if the Other resists the embrace altogether? In Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) and David Malouf’s Johnno (1975), the title characters appear as Others who are judged to be renegades outside society. The dominant questions scrutinized in this essay are thus: What features and behaviour mark them as Others? How do cultural discourses contain and control their deviance? And how do the protagonists manage to resist the discursive embrace?

2. Resisting the Imperial Embrace Jack Maggs, a postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61),5 shifts its focus from Carey’s snobbish, ungrateful, and ignorant version of Dickens’s Pip, Henry Phipps, to the Magwitch stand-in Jack Maggs, the illegally returned Australian convict. After Maggs announces he will visit Phipps, Maggs finds Phipps’s house (which Maggs actually owns) empty. Phipps has fled the place in order to avoid possible legal consequences and feelings of shame. As Maggs cannot enter the house, he turns to the building next door and more or less accidentally becomes second footman for his neighbour, Mr Buckle. The Buckle household is presented as a mockery of an ideal, sophisticated nineteenth-century household. Its owner is a former fishmonger who – in Dickensian fashion – has come into an unexpected fortune but remains a grocer at heart; the aged and deaf butler of the place, Mr Spinks, is only a shadow of an English gentleman’s housekeeper; Mercy Larkin, Mr Buckle’s personal maid, serves the sexual needs of her master but is otherwise totally incompetent; the housekeeper, Mrs Halfstairs, is only interested in the fictitious characters of a contemporary novel and the matching height of the two footmen. Moreover, there is Jack Maggs’s stepmother, Mary (ironically 5

In Dickens’s novel, the young orphan Pip is brought up by his sister and her husband. One night in a churchyard Pip rescues an escaped convict, Magwitch, from starvation. Despite this effort, Magwitch is recaptured and send to Australia. After he served his sentence, Magwitch turns into a successful businessman in the colonies and anonymously initiates and financially supports young Pip’s education. After a few years, Magwitch illegally returns to England because he wants to spend the rest of his life with his “adopted son.” In Dickens’s story, Pip is totally unaware of the unknown benefactor. In Carey’s re-writing, however, his Pip-character, Henry Phipps, despises the origin of the money but benefits from it all the same. In Dickens’s novel, Pip wants Magwitch to escape to the continent, but the convict is captured again and dies in jail. In Carey’s version, it is Henry Phipps who wants to kill Jack Maggs, as he fears being found out for having been supported by an excriminal.

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called Ma Britten), who has made a fortune selling abortion pills, metaphorically slaughtering England’s future generation. So he can familiarize himself at last with his next-door property, Jack Maggs climbs over the roof into his own house at night and writes letters to Henry Phipps in order to prepare him for their first meeting. Jack’s disguise as a footman works only until he collapses from a painful attack of nervous facial irritation on his first night on duty. Tobias Oates, a writer (a persiflage of Charles Dickens) and amateur scientist, relieves Jack’s pain and uses the opportunity to try out his latest fancy, mesmerizing. Under hypnosis, Jack reveals some of his past. Buckle and Oates, who “attempt with varying degrees of fervour – and success – to be ‘real’ gentlemen,”6 immediately see the usefulness of Maggs. Oates, who is chronically short of cash, believes that Maggs is an unlimited source of information about the “the criminal mind,” (JM 48) and hopes Maggs’s story can be turned into money. Buckle offers Jack Maggs as an object of scientific scrutiny to Oates, thus underlining his aspiration to be a supporter of the arts. Hesitatingly, Jack agrees to a number of hypnosis sessions after Oates promises to heal him from “the Phantom” (JM 56) that torments his dreams, and to organize a competent “thief-taker” (JM 29) who can find Phipps. Before Jack’s past is revealed, he is offered a position as a footman, inheriting the duties, hairdo, uniform, and shoes of his predecessor, the recently deceased second footman, who was of a different stature. This is Maggs’s first taste of physical restrictions: “His shoes pinched him. The plaster-hard white hair felt like a steel clamp on his brow” (JM 27). The “clamp” on the head is further extended by restriction on his movement: Jack Maggs was famously fast upon his feet, but now he was half-crippled by his dead man’s shoes. God damn, but they cut him. They squeezed his toes in their vice. They cut his heel with their hooks. He took them off, but then suffered another wound on account of this: so he had no choice but to stop and put them on once more. […] His shoes torturing him at every step. It was only pain, or so he told himself. He had suffered worse. (JM 42)

This brief passage shows that the embrace of the English class system via manners, social status, and professional position physically restricts the individual’s freedom of movement. Maggs’s English upbringing prepares him for this strategy of fitting the individual into society. As a child he was trained to enter houses through narrow chimneys and to unlock the doors from within. Here, the movement is into the heart of British values, into the body of

6

Sigrun Meinig, “An Australian Convict in the Great English City: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs,” Southerly 60.3 (2000): 64.

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the English house.7 When not occupied with his criminal work, young Jack was housed at Ma Britten’s place, which underlines the restrictions of education and upbringing, showing both aspects of the embrace: shelter and control. Between his two occupations in England are the twenty-four years as a convict and as a successful emancipated business man in New South Wales, Australia. There, the physical control is most obvious and brutal, and for Maggs, the harsh living conditions and the floggings are the most violent forms of physical embrace by the Empire. On another level, the embrace can be understood as legal ownership. Mr Buckle sees the footman Jack Maggs as his property. Tobias Oates, in turn, sees himself as “possessing a memory” (JM 95), being the “owner” of that “Criminal Mind,” “this Australian of ours” (JM 97). In using scientific analogies – “archaeologist of the mystery,” “surgeon of this soul” (JM 59), “cartographer of the Criminal mind” (JM 98) – Oates implies the cultural legitimacy of his mesmerizing activities. Both Buckle and Oates think that they own Maggs’s life because one word would send Jack to the gallows. What functions on this individual level of ownership works as an embracing force for all of society’s classes, employer relations, etc, especially when ownership is expanded to cover possessing the right position on the right side of the law. The legal system of accusation and conviction not only punishes the criminal who has acted against the law, but also sets standards for what is within the confines of the law, and for who is the criminal, the deviant character, the Other. The judicial system, therefore, sets the legal frame for who is welcomed into a securing embrace and who remains outside. Everyone who is legally tried, however, suffers the embrace of being labelled a deviant, an ‘out-law’. Despite that outcome, these outlaws nevertheless remain within the linguistic and legal system, from which they are physically excluded by being punished and sent away, and, at the same time, from which they cannot escape, because it is their (only) cultural point of reference. At first, Jack Maggs is the perfect example of this phenomenon. Although Maggs was convicted and punished by the English penal system, he still refers to England as his mother country.8 When Maggs secretly enters Oates’s house in order to find out more about him, he compares his Sydney dwelling with the writer’s home:

7 Ma Britten’s illegal and violent entry into and destruction of the Englishwoman’s body would support this reading on another physical level. Every movement inside is forced and illegal: Jack as a thief, Ma Britten with pills, Tobias Oates with mesmerism, and, later, Jack Maggs’s “Phantom,” which “had broken the locks and entered his life” (JM 353). 8 One could, of course, argue that Maggs has never known any other maternal behaviour in his life, and is therefore not disappointed and will not turn his back on ‘Mother England’.

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In the place Jack Maggs had most recently come from, the houses had been, for the most part, built from wood. They strained and groaned in the long hot nights, crying out against their nails, contracting, expanding, tugging at their bindings as if they would pull themselves apart […] This was a house that would never scream in the dark, nor did it reek of sap or creosote. Its smells were English smells – polished oak, coal dust, Devon apples. The intruder breathed these strange yet familiar odours. (JM 45)

Although Maggs’s memory of Sydney houses reflects the tone of physical damage seen in his treatment in the colony, his idealization of England and rejection of Mr Buckle’s proposal to return quietly to New South Wales is nonetheless understandable: “‘I know. God damn. I do know, Sir. But you see, I am a fucking Englishman, and I have English things to settle. I am not to live my life with all the vermin. I am here in London where I belong’” (JM 140). His romantic idealization of England as his home shows the subtlest form of embrace: Maggs’s memories of England enable him to transcend the agonies of convict life, and construct a sense of place in which England is synonymous with the concept of home. Whilst reliving the flogger’s lack of mercy in New South Wales, the hypnotised Maggs demonises the Australian landscape, but associates England with redemption and freedom.9

The semantic and literary aspect of the embrace is important for a postcolonial reading of Jack Maggs. The descriptions of Maggs as ‘criminal’, ‘convict’, and, after his return, as ‘footman’ and ‘somnabulist’ place him in a hierarchically inferior position and define him as an object of legal, social, scientific, and imperial discourses. His legal sentence rests on yet another discursive comment, this time the interpretation of the written law. In the terminology of deconstruction, this practice would value speech over writing. Speech, however, only supports the discourse when it is applied deliberately. That stipulation is why Jack Maggs’s ‘discourse of the Self’ leads him to suspect that he has been robbed after the first hypnosis by Oates. The object that has been stolen, however, is not a material substance but, rather, an existential part of his identity: memory. This loss causes fear and anger in him, as it is another unwanted incursion on his self-determination: “It was not a horror of anything, or about anything, but a horror so profound that a certain time elapsed during which he hardly knew where on earth he stood” (JM 32). “He was burgled, plundered, and he would not tolerate it” (JM 35). Oates composes an altered account of Jack’s confessions to allay Jack’s suspicions of what was discovered about him. In postmodern narratological fashion, Maggs’s stories are told from multiple, changing perspectives: the authorial 9

Elizabeth Hardy, “Peter Carey, Jack Maggs,” Westerly 43.2 (1998): 135.

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narration of the main plot, Jack Maggs’s first-person narration in letter form, Maggs’s account under hypnosis, Tobias Oates’s version of these revelations, and the story he invents to appease Maggs. In addition to these stories, there are Maggs’s letters to Henry Phipps, which are written backwards in disappearing ink and therefore cannot be read without other ‘devices of interpretation’, candle and mirror.10 The multiple destruction of arbitrary constructions of meaning supports Maggs’s resistance to being embraced in a system of presentation. Oates’s fictional writings are instruments of imperial power. He has no desire to empathize with Maggs and his predicament; instead his intention, right from the outset, is to use him as a symbol of demonic energy, of colonial wickedness and fervidity.11

The multiple versions Oates composes of Maggs’s life show the writer’s attempt to control the discourse of the Other. What appears here as pure artistic inventiveness means, on a cultural level, the replacement of the individual’s experience with altered, discursively corrected, censored, and channelled information. All personal experiences are suppressed and only find their existence in Jack’s subconscious. Oates uses this altered account for his own, imperial fiction of the story. Oates has to cope with different sets of information to conceal his knowledge: There were, as in all crooked businesses, two sets of books, and had Jack Maggs seen the second set he might have recognized scenes (or fragments more familiar to him: a corner of a house by London Bridge, a trampled body in a penal colony). But even here the scenes were never very clear. For the writer was stumbling through the dark of the convict’s past groping in the shadows, describing what was often a mirror held up to his own turbulent and fearful soul. (JM 99–100)

Oates attempts to fix parts of Maggs’s experience into a new version adapted to his own perspective. This version is, in turn, dominated by cultural heterostereotypes, because the description of the convict follows culturally accepted ‘Other-images’. In another hypnosis session, Oates, Buckle, and members of the Oates household discover the flogging marks on Jack Maggs’s back. These relics of penal practice are rudimentary carvings and empty spaces that Oates uses to construct his version of Maggs’s life. He interprets these spaces and fills them with stereotypical elements of imagination, directing the past 10

Despite the light that is shed by a candle, its diffuse brightness supports the blurring aspect of this construction of meaning, as does the mirror, which shows reality in another reverse angle. 11 James Bradley, “Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs,” Meanjin 65.3 (1997): 661.

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events into the form of a story that is culturally coded and easy to tell, hence marketable. Controlling Jack Maggs means having knowledge about him. His status as an ex-convict, his confessions under hypnosis, Mr Buckle’s inquiries into sentencing records and real estate records represent the strongest form of control over him. Jack must react against the openness of information that place him in an inferior position, and he responds with a plea: “But God help me, Mr Buckle, I have just arrived. I came into the country with the most careful plans. I had a man at Dover in my pay, and when my papers were presented, he turned the other eye. Everything was as it should be. Everything was on the wink, but now here is a household full of busy-bodies all wanting to talk about my life.” “It was you who came to us, not we to you.” Jack Maggs shook his head slowly. It was true. It was not, looked at that way, their fault, and he looked from Mercy to Buckle with a countenance that was infinitely sad. “What am I to do with you all?” he said. “That is the question.” (JM 141)

At this point in the story, Jack Maggs as a postcolonial subject self-consciously begins to act in resistance to the imperial embrace. In analogy to the restrictions imposed upon Maggs earlier on, he now physically limits the movements of the household members in order to control and intercept any further information. He locks up Mercy Larkin, injures Mr Buckle with a dagger, takes over his master’s office, and nails the doors and windows into their frames. The fear he causes is grounded on partial knowledge about convicts and about his former trade, and on rumours that he might also be a murderer, all aspects of the discourse of convict-otherness. These fears seem to some extent justified, as Buckle and Oates have witnessed Jack’s violent outbursts under hypnosis. When Maggs forces Oates to accompany him to meet the informant who is supposed to tell them the residence of Henry Phipps, the writer imagines “Jack Maggs strangling him and throwing him from the coach. Indeed as the darkness approached, he began to imagine himself stabbed, cudgelled, suffocated. He saw his broken bloodied body in a ditch” (JM 256). During the whole enterprise, Maggs is frequently described as “tall,” “strong,” “bold,” as a “broad and powerful figure [who] soon occupied the embrasure of the windows, thus blocking out the light” (JM 268). When the false thief-taker is found out and then stabbed by Maggs in a fight, Oates once more witnesses Jack’s superior strength, to which Oates falls victim after having given away his knowledge about Maggs’s earlier life: a moment later he was crushed. His head was banged. His breath pushed out of him. He lay pinned, half-winded with the great weight of the convict’s body on his chest, the deck and thwart pressing painfully against his spine. (JM 291)

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For Oates, their flight on a small boat down the Severn river means being captured (a) in a miserable situation, (b) in a small place, (c) in the power of a violent ex-convict, then (d) being injured and unable to escape, and (e) being found out as a liar and beneficiary of Jack’s story. On a cultural level, traditional English self-images, their cultural codes, manners, the highly formal language, standardized and long-winded, and the rational and ordered ways of communication and behaviour are presented as a disadvantage countering Jack Maggs’s personal determination, his sense of action, and his superior physical strength, dexterity, and endurance. Consequently, Jack’s resistance to the others’ control of his body and his story – and, with that, his life – gradually and successfully increases. First, he makes Oates throw away the instruments for altering his life (ink and quill) and later forces him to burn all the papers that contain any version of his story. The story remains inside Tobias’s head, though lost in written form, and is finally written down again years later after Jack’s death. It is very striking that, after overcoming physical and institutional embraces, Maggs does not rid himself of the positive images he had of England. These images work as the subtlest and most persistent forms of embrace. The unnoticed forms of the cultural embrace are revealed because of Maggs’s adherence to the ideal of the gentleman and to materialist thinking, and because of the emotional attachment to his former environment and his firm bond with the picture of his so-called ‘adopted son’ Henry, actually a portrait of King George IV as a child. All these forces end up imploding, in the very last scene in London. When Jack and Mercy finally confess their love to each other, two figures enter Maggs’s house: Jack’s hair bristled on his naked neck and, as the door swung open, he reached for the tarred twine handle of his dagger. A spectral figure entered the room, holding the candle high. There, in the firelight, he beheld his nightmare: long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment. The Phantom had broken the locks and entered his life. The apparition held a heavy pistol. Jack Maggs saw this instrument very clearly, yet he stayed rooted to the spot, his gaze fixed upon the spectre’s uniform. The firelight flicked on the line of horrid buttons, each one embossed with the number 57. He smelt the bad meat smell of the yard at Morton bay, felt the soft supple leather bind his wrists and ankles again. He could see the great dull gape of the pistol’s barrel, and the firelight twinkling on the bright brass hammer which was fully coked. (JM 353)12

12

The Fifty-Seventh Foot Regiment was in charge of overseeing the convicts in New South Wales.

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All of the fears and reactions that have tormented Jack’s memory for years are repeated in this scene: the imagery and memory of the physical effects of the flogging, the authorities and instruments of physical violence and control personified by vague images of dread, such as “spectral figure” (JM 353), “Phantom” (JM 90, 121), and “apparition” (JM 353). Here, the different levels of the discourse of the embrace are unveiled to show the subtext of Maggs’s fear: physical harm, legal prosecution, and institutionalized torture. Strangely enough, however, despite his resistance to the embrace of the Empire, his deepest fear is that he might be rejected by it altogether. This fear is now embodied in Henry Phipps, who, encouraged and supported by Percy Buckle, has enrolled in the Fifty-Seventh Foot Regiment, and, dressed in his uniform, confronts Jack Maggs, accusing him of having burgled Phipp’s house. Phipps represents the King and the daemon, which have both come to claim Maggs’s life. Additionally, the accusation is a repetition of his earlier conviction for having burgled British houses. In contrast to Oates, the imperial power is not claiming just the story of Maggs’s life but actual physical life, thus taking away his only advantage over the imperial discourse. The beneficiary of his material success, who he assumed would offer him acceptance, rejects him. Being a convict is a cultural mark of Cain from which Maggs cannot rid himself. Whereas Pip in Great Expectations shows compassion, Phipps acts out the imperial logic of control and containment, which leads to the extinction of negatively connotated and deviant parts of society. Jack’s deviance is his defiance and challenge of the law, property, hierarchy, and social status, his disregard for manners and coded forms of communication. Finally, after the physical and the historiographical, the imaginative embrace is destroyed. Henry Phipps, the longed-for son, fires his pistol at Maggs, with this act transforming the latter’s ideal of the gentleman into a haunted image. The last ideal of Britain is thus destroyed, and Maggs is finally freed from the vocabulary of identification with Britain: When the English language Maggs has dreamed about becomes the setting for betrayal, disappointment and mortal danger, New South Wales metamorphoses form a land of exile into a sanctuary, where Maggs can live without fear as a free man.13

Both the embrace of rational thought and imperial logic and the embrace of the subconscious and of cultural ideology are broken, and Jack Maggs returns to Australia. But why do the English fail? With Maggs as adversary, the imperial embrace has to fail, because the English are themselves embracers of their own cultural values and codes. The English violate their own system under the sur13

Hardy, “Peter Carey, Jack Maggs,” 136.

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face of the traditional, refined, and intact society that is taken at its surface value and held as valid: for example, the adultery of Tobias, Mr Buckle’s relationship to Mercy, and Ma Britten’s flourishing business. The English characters, without the experience of the colonies, remain passive and are unable to use the instruments of imperial discourse against Jack Maggs’s physical superiority, his ability to think and to act in a straightforward manner, and his disobedience towards authority. This outcome, however, can only be called a failure if we disregard the last chapter of the novel, where Maggs and Mercy lead a middle-class life in Sydney with all the commodities that are valued in Britain. Maggs’s family is portrayed as sophisticated, prosperous, and influential; “away from the bad influence of Sydney” (JM 357) Jack is president of the Cricket Club in Wingham, with a grand mansion and servants. Is this a counter-text meant to criticize the postcolonial subject? Does England remain the normative system in an Australian guise? The cultural embrace would then remain intact despite Jack’s initial resistance to a dominating upper-class English propaganda and an altered concept of colonial identity. The only embrace that is convincing, in the end, is Mercy’s emphatic embrace of the convict. As she throws herself at the shot fired by Henry Phipps, she is not only resisting the cultural embrace with her own body, but she is also the only female character who saves a life, in contrast to Ma Britten, who snuffs out the lives of others, or Mary Oates, who is eager to kill her sister’s unborn child. Thus Mercy represents the possibility of a loving embrace. In Australia she is well-known for her hospitality and for providing a good education for her children. In fact, the loving embrace is the key to why the English fail. Mr Buckle insists on his social status because ownership and property ensure him status and the satisfaction of his libido (with Mercy). Oates fosters his artistic ambition, which provides him with money for his wife – the official image of the writer’s life – and his lover, Lizzie. Finally, Ma Britten stands for the conservative element in capitalism; she uses the longing for physical love as the basis for her economic success, hence her reputation as a lady. But libido in nineteenth-century England is a taboo, and violating it is punished: Jack and Sophina were in love when they were teenagers (Sophina and her baby were killed by Ma Britten’s pills), Oates and Lizzie have an adulterous affair (Lizzie is also killed by Ma Britten’s pills when both Oates and his wife give her the poison). Only Jack and Mercy escape the consequences of being found out, as they go to Australia. They both bear the physical marks of their resistance: the missing fingers on their hands (which also stands for the punishment for thieves). They end their lives in a ‘Britain transported’ but with fewer taboos, which constructs Australia as an idealized version of colonial society.

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3. Resisting the Postcolonial Embrace In Jack Maggs, the reader can observe the discrepancy between traditional English values and counter-images of a newly emerging construct, which might be called ‘Australian identity’. David Malouf’s Johnno is set in midtwentieth-century Brisbane at a time when those counter-images had already developed into the normative ideal of the ‘Australian type’. Malouf’s first novel is the story of Edward Athol Johnson, called Johnno, and Dante, the otherwise nameless first-person narrator. Dante discovers an old photograph of his school’s Stillwater Lifesaving Team while going through his old belongings after the death of his father. Among the team members in the photo Dante recognizes his friend Johnno, wearing glasses although he never needed any, and bringing the count to thirteen boys where there should have been only twelve. Johnny was “staring diagonally out of the frame” (JO 10) in contrast to the earnest and stiff-looking members of the team. His being in the picture fundamentally questions the purpose of the picture as a record of reality and of the team as a means of identification for the school. The narrator tries to formulate an explanation: So the camera had lied. Or Johnno had. Those glasses, if one could check them, would turn out, I was certain now, to have nothing in the frames. They were a disguise, a deliberate bending of the facts. A trick set up as carefully that afternoon as Mr. Peck’s camera, to preserve something other than the truth, and to make someone like me, nearly twenty years later, stop and look again. A joke with a time fuse. How like him. (JO 11)

This disruption of order prepares the observer for Johnno’s life-long resistance to Australia’s cultural icons and social values. These cultural selfimages are personified in Dante’s parents. His mother stands for the British roots of Australian society: she “was reproducing for us her own orderly childhood as the last of a big family in pre-war (that is, pre-1914) London – though it was no different from the life that was lived in other houses” (JO 32). This is particularly obvious in the significance the Second World War has for the characters. The battles in Europe are common knowledge and although the war is 15,000 miles away their emotional impact is strong: I see myself sitting at school one morning, aged six. I am sobbing bitterly. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?” one of my schoolfriends asks, settling beside me on the little form and putting his arm across my shoulder. I look shocked. “Haven’t you heard?” I say melodramatically. “B E L G I U M ’ S F A L L E N . ” (JO 24)

Even though Belgium has neither military nor political significance for Australia, its fall is a symbol of the threat against an old order – the Empire – and, following colonial logic, the outcome is also a threat for Australia. The fear of

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the destruction of colonial ties intensifies the identification with stereotypical Australian national symbols as personified by Dante’s father: My father was one of the fittest men I have ever known. A great sportsman in his day, boxer, swimmer, amateur footballer, he was still bull-shouldered and hard even at sixty, though a good deal of his muscle had gone to fat. He didn’t drink. He hadn’t smoked since a day during the First War when he’d accepted a bet and thrown a whole packet of Capstans over Victoria Bridge. Except for the occasional cold, he had never had a day’s illness that I could remember. (JO 1)

Dante’s description of his father employs culturally dominant and positively freighted attributes that accord with Russel Ward’s account of the typical Australian.14 From the very beginning of Johnno, the Australian self-images are deconstructed: Two weeks before his death he [Dante’s father] had been examined for a new insurance policy. When the report arrived, on the morning of his funeral, it declared him to be A1 in every respect. (JO 1)

His father’s seemingly physical superiority is grounded solely on culturally dominant ideals and ideology. His death exemplifies the invalidity of propagated ideals in the face of personal fate. Just as the ideal of the physical endurance and unlimited strength of Dante’s father is destroyed, and as the significance of Europe for Australia becomes merey an empty symbol, Dante’s friend Johnno embodies the struggle to resist culturally prescriptive Australian auto-stereotypes. At school, Johnno appears as a clever but disobedient student who defies authority and socially accepted behaviour, showing no respect for property or institutions. Although a renegade, he is forgiven, as he

14

“According to the myth, the ‘typical Australian’ is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others. He is a great improviser, ever willing ‘to have a go’ at anything, but willing, too, to be content with a task done in a way that is ‘near enough’. Though capable of great exertion in an emergency, he normally feels no impulse to work hard without good cause. He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on occasion. Though he is ‘the world’s best confidence man’, he is usually taciturn rather than talkative, one who endures stoically rather than one who acts busily. He is a ‘hard case’, sceptical about the value of religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally. He believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle, probably a good deal better, and so he is a great ‘knocker’ of eminent people unless, as in the case of his sporting heroes, they are distinguished by physical prowess. He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen. Yet he is very hospitable and, above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be in the wrong”; Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1958): 1–2.

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easily fits the image of the ‘larrikin’ – another Australian auto-stereotype – which is in turn constructed as a positive feature of Australian identity: We were all awed, I think, by his sheer recklessness. [...] He gave our class, which was otherwise noted only for its high standards of scholarship, a dash of criminal distinction. (JO 15)

Johnno’s deviant behaviour is not restricted to school alone. Observers are doubtful when Johnno seems to change, because they are used to his regular quarrels in Brisbane’s brothels, the frequently enacted pretence of being chased by the police, his sudden changes in fashion, behaviour, and personality from larrikin to sceptical existentialist and religious fanatic, from bludging demi-criminal to disciplined sportsman: Was there really a change? We watched him closely, waiting for the new Johnno to crack, waiting for him to give up this silly pretence that he wasn’t what we had long since accepted him as, our very own Tamburlaine and Al Capone, the one among us who could be depended upon to reject everything that was decent, respectable, sensible even, and take off on his own extravagant parabola that would lead who-knows-where? Was he about to settle, after all, for the predictable? (JO 47)

This technique of coming-to-terms with the Other not only shows the method of evaluating the unknown by using known features, “the predictable,” but furthermore stresses the need for consistency and stability. But Johnno is the one who is eager not to be judged, not to fit in. Every time his otherness is defined, when he is classified by yet another name or description, Johnno feels not that he has been found, but found out. This conviction comes not because the description approaches any possibility of truth but because it restricts him to this description. For him, classification means being a verbal property of the one who defines him. He is, for example, embarrassed, even hostile, when Dante tries to impress him with goods stolen from a supermarket. The only statement Dante makes is not about Johnno but about himself, about his own way of seeing and judging: His embarrassment was for me. What I had done was utterly out of character – all I had revealed was my low opinion of him. That was what I felt ashamed of now. That I had shown him so openly what I thought of him. (JO 44)

In labelling Johnno, Dante betrays him. In this betrayal, Dante stands for the whole of Australian society, because the only way to be judged is on the basis of shared self-images, expectations, cultural semantics, and their manifestations in verbal forms and cultural connotations. Consequently, Johnno’s resistance is first of all verbal. For him, Brisbane is “absolutely the most ugliest place in the world” (JO 82). “‘What a place!’

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Johnno would snarl […]. ‘This must be the bloody arsehole of the universe!’” (JO 83). What Johnno means by ugliness is not the way Brisbane looks but, rather, what it symbolizes: familiarity, ordinariness, nothing that disrupts the well-ordered, monotonous, but also predictable and secure environment. Johnno also acts according to his verbalizations, and is therefore seen as an outsider, an Other. Society knows, of course, the reason for Johnno’s nonconformity – the absence of his father: Johnno’s father was one of those who stayed missing. And the reason for Johnno’s wildness, it was universally agreed, was that he was a war child. In the years when it really matters he had lacked the benefit of a restraining hand. Our own father was too old for the war, so we did have the benefit of his restraining hand. (JO 22)

The “restraining hand” of the father represents the process of integrating the younger generation into the order of the older generation. The combination of power and paternal authority guarantees the validity and perpetuation of social and cultural rules. The restricting embrace of the discourse sanctions and corrects any deviant behaviour. But why? Foucault offers ‘fear’ as a reason: But, it seems to me, a certain fear hides behind this apparent supremacy accorded, this apparent logophilia. It is as though these taboos, these barriers, thresholds and limits were deliberately disposed in order, at least partly, to master and control the great proliferation of discourse, in such a way as to relieve its richness of its most dangerous elements; to organise its disorder so as to skate round its most uncontrollable aspects.15

In this sense, Johnno’s deviance is his resistance to being embraced by culturally fixed definitions of Australian self-images. The threat he evokes is that he, as a part of that culture, challenges not only the stereotypes as such but the stability of self-images. Sanctions and restrictions are discursive attempts to combat social and cultural fragmentation. Fear of diversification, unpredictability, and uncontrollability is cloaked by the propaganda of the discourse as a fear of being deprived of help, subsistence, and security. In Australia the discursive installation of these levels of fear was relatively simple, since the strange and hostile land with its even stranger indigenous population constituted easily identifiable threats. Johnno, then, personifies resistance to the network of embracing discourses in Australia of church, legal institutions, materialist society, class ethics, and cultural auto-stereotypes. In contrast to his 15 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1969; L’Ordre du discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; tr. New York: Pantheon, 1982): 228.

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friend Dante, who aims at positioning himself within constructs of Australian cultural identity, Johnno aims at an explanation of Self that is beyond traditional conventions of order and identity. How does he do this? First of all, he uses physical metaphors for getting rid of Australia: “I’m going to shit this bitch of a country right out of my system,” he told me fiercely. “Twenty fucking years! How long will it take me, do you think, to shit out every last trace of it? At the end of every seven years you’re completely new – did you know that? New fingernails, new hair, new cells. There’ll be nothing left in me of bloody Australia. I’ll be transmuted. I’ll say to myself every morning as I squat on the dunny, there goes another bit of Australia. That was Wilson’s Promontory. That was Toowong. Whoosh, down the plughole! And at the end of seven years I’ll have squeezed the whole fucking continent out through my arsehole. I’ll have got rid of it forever. All this.” (JO 98)

His next step is to defy traditional epistemological explanations of meaning and to ascribe them to a group of old men in the Brisbane public library who, according to Johnno, are the great conspirators of the world: “World Jewry, the Church, the Masons – all three of them working together!” (JO 76). Next, he plans to develop the individual instances of resistance into a personal ideology, putting himself through a crash course in the disintegration of consciousness. It was a systematic programme. You began with something simple, like an act of theft, then went on step by step to the end. Destroying the myth was a process like any other. (JO 86)

The myth is Australia and its conservative middle-class ideology. Johnno needs to destroy the symbolic order for him to have any hope of being recognized as an individual. Another of Johnno’s strategies is to defy conventional modes of communication. He tries this tactic on Dante, when – without warning – he cries out: “It’s all lies!” – then [he would] swivel on his heel and stare at me as if I had said it. It was a trick that never failed. I was always left on the kerb, spluttering, red-faced, trying to clear myself or explain. (JO 11)

The irritation of the moment equally disturbs and fascinates Dante. Johnno constructs Dante as the ‘uttering instance’ even though Dante has not said anything. The connection between speaker and utterance is shattered. Understood in this way, “‘It’s all lies’” is no longer a neutral statement but questions the utterance as such, and it questions the speaker as a source of truth. The turning-around could also be read as the disappearance of a distinct source of utterance. This would wholly undermine the practice of prioritizing speech as in discourse, because the authority of utterance would disappear. Both ways –

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the multiplication or annihilation of sources – deconstruct traditional conventions of communication, interpretation, and meaning. Dante’s composure is broken and he becomes open to other possibilities of seeing the world only when Johnno is able to trick him out of his relatively fixed ways of perception. Johnno’s strategy aims at questioning modes of communication that imply a fixed discourse. Johnno does not want to be seen as the personification of a cultural hetero-stereotype but as an individual with his own reality, an individuality who cannot be described in traditional terms without violating them. Johnno dies close to a mineral site in North Queensland under strange circumstances. The investigation of his death and the funeral service reveal once more that the discourse of ‘embracing the Other’ is not prepared to give in so easily: What the minister was doing now was forcing him into that splendid company. Johnno too was to be a golden youth cut off in the fullness of his promise. I realized with a shock, as I considered the faces here, their seriousness, their response to what the minister was creating out of Johnno’s ribald, heavy-in-the-flesh reality, what dying really means. It means no longer to exist in the mind of the living as a real presence, intractably solid and unique, but to suffer metamorphosis into a pale, angelic figure in whose company we would never raise our voice or giggle or take off our clothes; an insubstantial abstract of such empty recommendations as ‘devoted son,’ ‘loyal friend,’ ‘splendid example to us all.’ (JO 157–58)

Everything Johnno was fighting against – commodities, symbols, and myths – is now used to force him back into the cultural discourse. But, as if he had foreseen this, his response is that of an improbable death. He is found at the Condamine river, which is “only the ghost of a river for two seasons of the year, a few glittering waterholes in a channel of ridged white sand“ (JO 151). It is a place where no one can drown in the dry season. A friend of Johnno’s reports to Dante the result of the inquest: “It’s what the inquest decided. I was there, I gave evidence. An open and shut case. It’s also, incidentally, where the medical evidence points. So there you are.” […] “And that’s all?” “N-no, it’s not all. It was also an accident that couldn’t have happened. Impossible, in that particular place.” So there we were again. (JO 163)

The embrace has come full circle despite the uncertainties. Johnno’s death is institutionalized, explained, verified, verbalized, and made official in order to fit the legal, medical, patriotic, and religions aims of the discourse. Those areas that could not control him during his life claim him after his death. From Dante’s point of view, the understanding of Johnno fails as he resists, long after his death, any definite description. Johnno perceives any act of cul-

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tural identification as the verbal, semantic, and institutionalized control of his life. Shortly before the events resulting in his death, Johnno writes a last letter to Dante: Dante, please, please come. Or we could go to Stradbroke for the weekend. Why don’t you ever listen to what I say to you? I’ve spent years writing letters to you and you never answer, even when you write back. I’ve loved you – and you’ve never given a fuck for me, except as a character in one of your funny stories. Now for Christ sake write to me! Answer me you bastard! And please come. Love Johnno. (JO 154)

Despite Johnno’s plea, Dante – while narrating – is still writing a book about him, saying “the book I always meant to write about Johnno will be written after all” (JO 11). He adds, “I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met” (JO 12). The presentation of Johnno in Dante’s narrative reveals his technique of ordering the world. As related from a temporal distance, the story about Johnno reveals the constructive and fictional character of any narration. Dante’s metafictional reflections unveil the necessary incompleteness of telling something akin to ‘reality’ or ‘truth’: “It’s all lies,” Johnno would say. And in the end, perhaps it is. Johnno’s false disguise is the one image of him that has lasted, and the only one that could have jumped out from the page and demanded of me these few hours of my attention. Maybe, in the end, even the lies we tell define us. And better some of them, than our earnest attempts at the truth. (JO 170)

The lie stands for what cannot be said, for the avoidance of definition. The lie is thus not simply the opposite of truth, but symbolizes an escape into vagueness before stating a misunderstanding. The lie evades the function of a signifier on multiple levels but stands at the same time for meaning in a space of non-definition. The power of the discourse is shown in this last sentence of the novel. Rationality and the insistence on the existence of truth keep the discourse inside its own margins. A behaviour, event or person that lies (pun intended) beyond those margins is stigmatized as ‘strange’ or Other. Johnno’s otherness, however, resides not in his opposition to traditional values but in his resistance to being fixed into any function. He can resist the embrace because he resists embracing.

4. Conclusion In Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, the colonial embrace works on various levels. On the physical level, it restricts and suppresses the body. On the cultural level, it prescribes dominant forms of thinking in jurisdiction, the economy, science, patriotism, manners, and language. On the historiographical and lite-

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rary level, it reconstructs deviant versions of individual experience, which oppose imperial thinking, into a controlled history and culturally accepted fiction. Jack Maggs’s resistance vehemently questions the ‘natural’ superiority of the British, and their historical, cultural, and literary self-images of superiority. Maggs resists the gaze of colonial self-images on colonial Other-images by means of superior physical strength. One consequence of the blindness of embrace is certainly that Maggs is never considered to have a life outside colonial discourse. Although the possibility of the legal emancipation of convicts existed, it was not considered possible that convicts might either want to return to England or that they could accumulate a fortune in the colony. Apart from that, it was also not considered possible that socially stigmatized groups of people could develop into members of a new colonial middle- or uppermiddle class who end their lives in comfort and are socially accepted. This view can in part be repeated for Malouf’s Johnno. The novel depicts and deconstructs traditional Australian stereotypes, to show them as arbitrary. Johnno, the antagonist to post-war Australian society, does not want to be recognized and accepted as a figure of the larrikin, the sportsperson, or any other traditional Australian concept. He wants to be accepted as an individual. What Dante, the narrator, does, though, is to categorize Johnno, applying meaning to him from his own experience in the semantic field of Australian identity. Johnno resists categorization, first by changing roles, then by leaving Brisbane, and, in the end, by returning to Australia. His progress is marked by movements from the provincial centre of Brisbane to the centres of early human life in Africa, to the cultural centres in Europe and back to the ‘dead’, sandy centre of Australia. This is not only a movement from boredom to excitement and a multitude of people, and from there to the solitude of the outback. For Johnno, it is also a journey from a provincial creation of meaning to a highly philosophical place and back to where the “desolateness of place fills the mind with perspectives,”16 to a place where meaning for him lies in the land, in the body, and in individual survival. Both novels have shown that discourses – be they imperial or postcolonial – are strong when it comes to maintaining the status quo, because beneath institutions, manners, language, and auto-stereotypes exist strong ties that contain the discourse within its limits. Though some of those dominating ties have not been named – for example, male, ethnic or religious domination – these ties additionally ensure the perpetuation of the embracing discourses. The centres of those discourses remain invisible unless they are challenged. If ‘postcolonialism’ is a term denoting resistance to the colonialization of the body, history, language, and literature, then Jack Maggs and Johnno are 16

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (Sydney: Picador, 1992): 15.

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certainly postcolonial novels. These examples demonstrate what conclusions have to be drawn regarding the act of (em)bracing any Other. If the interpreter of postcolonial literature defines anyone as an Other – even if the embrace is a favourable reading – it would only be legitimate to ask whether this scrutiny from the interpreter’s or commentator’s point of view does not also imply the Other’s position as an object of the embrace in the interpreter’s terms. Another question to be asked again is whether the term ‘postcolonial’ as such does not also have a centre that directs the interpreter’s view. Johnno shows that the character of Johnno as a postcolonial subject resists being read as ‘subject to’ a postcolonial condition in Australia. This novel can be interpreted as criticizing the discursive practice of marginalizing postcolonial individuals against the background of creating a postcolonial (national) identity. Johnno resists this postcolonial embrace and remains an enigma for the narrator. In Johnno, the Other remains a phenomenon of otherness that cannot be described in words, because in his lifetime the protagonist eluded encapsulation through definition. The Other can only be experienced and circumscribed. From this point of view, Johnno is not a liar. Rather, he identifies lies as deviant versions of codes that are collectively agreed upon. He appears as an individual beyond coded versions of identity, and this stance poses a fundamental threat to any discourse.

WORKS CITED Bradley, James. “Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs,” Meanjin 65.3 (1997): 657–65. Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1969; L’Ordre du discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; tr. New York: Pantheon, 1982). ——. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, tr. A.M. Sheridan (Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du régard medical, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; tr. London: Tavistock, 1976). Hardy, Elizabeth. “Peter Carey, Jack Maggs,” Westerly 43.2 (1998): 134–36. Kimmich, Dorothee. “Diskursanalyse und New Historicism,” in Texte zur Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart, ed. Dorothee Kimmich, Rolf Günter Renner & Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996): 225–32. Malouf, David. An Imaginary Life (1978; Sydney: Picador, 1992). ——. Johnno (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1975). Meinig, Sigrun. “An Australian Convict in the Great English City: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs,” Southerly 60.3 (2000): 57–65. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1958).

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Zijderveld, Anton C. “On the Nature and Function of Clichés,” in Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, ed. Günther Blaicher (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1987): 26–40.

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The Difficulty of Being Reading and Speaking in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

S ANDHYA P ATEL

R O Y ’ S The God of Small Things (1996) is set in India and addresses concerns that inform a whole body of postcolonial literature in English, be it from India, Australia, Canada or New Zealand: namely, issues of dislocated and displaced identities, intercultural homelessness, hybridity, and persistent racism.1 The novel tells the tale of seven-year-old Rahel and Estha, girl and boy twins, whose childhood is dramatically disfigured by intolerance and injustice. The children, growing up in the 1970s in Aymenem, a town in Kerala, face social ostracism because their mother, twenty-seven-year-old Ammu, leaves their abusive Hindu father, Baba, to go back home to her Syrian Christian family. Ammu’s mother, Mammachi, lives in the old family home with her anglophile son Chacko (Ammu’s brother) and her sister-in-law, Baby Kochamma, a bitter, jealous spinster. Ammu’s return sets in motion a tragic series of events that end in death. Chacko’s English ex-wife, Margaret, comes to India with their daughter, Sophie, to get over the death of her second husband, Joe. Events reach a critical point when Estha, Rahel, and Sophie run away to an abandoned house on the other side of the Meenachal River. Their tiny boat overturns during the crossing and Sophie drowns. Ammu has taken a lover, Velutha, an Untouchable, and they are found out that same day. Mammachi confronts Velutha, insults him, and orders him off her property. Baby Kochamma is ostensibly motivated to save the family’s reputation, but in fact she is jealous and wants

A

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Monika Fludernik, “Cross-Mirrorings of Alterity: The Colonial Scenario and its Psychological Legacy,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 30.3 (1999): 53.

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to wreak revenge on Ammu and her children. Baby Kochamma vindictively claims that the children have been kidnapped and accuses Velutha of the crime, although she knows that the children have run away of their own accord. The police set out to find the children and track down Velutha. When the police find Velutha, they beat him brutally. The terrified children are harassed into identifying Velutha as their kidnapper. Velutha dies in custody from his injuries. The twins are separated, Estha is sent away to Baba, and Ammu leaves Aymenem and dies alone. The novel opens with the adult Rahel’s return to Ayemenem twenty-three years later. The first in a sequence of retroversions begins with the reference to various priests’ visits to the house, then to Rahel’s and Estha’s childhood together. The reader is plunged into the past through a series of chronological deviations via retroversions and anticipations. In the final paragraph of Chapter One, after all the main characters have been introduced in chronological chaos, the utmost importance of this narrative structure becomes clear: it is to be associated with the power of the past and the ruthlessness and usefulness of memory, which are shown to be inextricably linked to complex issues of the construction of collective and individual identity.

The Syrian Christian Family Tree2 Reverend E. John Ipe + Aleyooty Ammachi

Navomi Ipe (or Baby Kochamma)

Benaan John Ipe (or Pappachi)

+

Ammu + Baba (Hindu) (separated)

Estha

Rahel (twins)

Soshamma (or Mammachi; embittered spinster)

Chacko + Margaret (English) (divorced – later marries Joe, who dies) Sophie + Larry (divorced)

2 Added to this family structure are: Kochu Maria (Syrian Christian) is the family cook; Velutha (Untouchable) is the odd-job man; Comrade Pillai is the local Communist Party leader, and disloyal to Velutha, with tragic consequences; Inspector Thomas Mathew is the uncouth policeman who interrogates Ammu, leads the brutal investigation into Velutha’s whereabouts, and with his cohorts beats him to death.

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In thematic terms, resentment against and attraction to the residual but viselike grip of colonialism are obvious in the book.3 This ideological content is also identifiable in the rhetoric, in the way in which language is used. Language in this novel may be understood as a site of cultural hybridity, and splits where the swings from hate to love of the language demonstrate the assured mixedness of being. Xenophobia etymologically derives from xeno ‘strange, foreign, guest’ and phobia, from phobos ‘fear’. Today, the term usually signifies a morbid and illogical fear or hatred of foreigners. Xenophobia and racism are therefore almost synonymous terms. Different forms of xenophobia – colour prejudice or religio-racism, for example – are overtly examined in The God of Small Things. This essay will focus on hostility in its linguistic dimension, in keeping with postcolonial preoccupations. Charles Sarvan suggests that this type of hostility be called ‘linguoracism’.4 In the context of linguo-racism, the Other is not the colonized subject but, rather, the colonizer’s language, concurrently foreign and familiar. In the novel, the colonizer’s language, a powerful but uninvited guest, is approached with feelings of caution, fear, and even contempt that border on the xenophobic. Linguo-racism here is possible through, for example, authorial voice and licence. The concept is also expressed through the linguistic depiction of the sway that the English language holds over Estha and Rahel, who are subjected to its pulls, whims, and fancies. Berthold Schoene–Harwood identifies children – along with women and ethnic and social minorities – as being the most vulnerable to situations of unresolved or irresolvable hybridity, ultimately leading to what he labels “a total collapse of self.”5 What characterizes Roy’s novel, however, is the special relationship of love as well as hate between the insider’s and the outsider’s language. In his study of Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Schoene–Harwood defines the relationship between the two main characters, the white schoolgirl Anita Rutter and her friend Meena Kumar, as also being one of love and hate. This complex emotion is representative of Meena’s unresolved identity-crisis, enacted in England in the 1960s and stemming from her struggle to reconcile thoroughly different private and public spheres, her Punjabi home-life and English school and social life. The love-aspect of the linguistic question in Roy’s The God of Small Things is interesting, as love is here diametrically op3 Roy’s sarcastic treatment of Chacko’s reverence for Oxford is just one example of this attitude, as is the family’s racism, which leads to the tragedy of Velutha’s murder. 4 See Charles Sarvan, “The Term ‘Racism’ and Discourse,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.2 (2000): 129–39. 5 Berthold Schoene–Harwood, “Beyond (T)race: Bildung and Proprioception in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 164.

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posed to the ideological strain, which rejects and ostracizes the colonizer’s influence in India, creating what may be labelled a situation of conflictual hybridity. The fact that these two positions are found within the host or colonized community, and that the colonial scenario is not the only one, seems to be a feature of Indian writing in English. As Monika Fludernik suggests, “the colonial scenario is attacked and inverted in nationalistic counter-colonial discourse [... and] effects of hybridity are produced.”6 One of the most striking features of the novel is the protean fervour with which the various characters and the author indulge in English, on the love side of the equation, and in instances of colonial discourse. This may be contrasted with the hate-factor referred to earlier, and is analogous, in its intensity, to the linguistic fascination. There is, then, a difficulty with classification, which runs as deep as, if not deeper than, the jam/jelly question.7 This dichotomy can be understood in terms of the approach taken in Biman Basu’s analysis of African literature in English. He suggests that postcolonial writers “inhabit a Western intellectual structure, all the while questioning and ejecting the very structure they inhabit.”8 Roy conducts this expression of the edges, beginnings, and depths of intimate assimilation of, and aversion to, the Other’s language through her manipulation of the language itself, which she performs in a variety of ways. These traits are undoubtedly factors in determining the problematic nature of aspects of postcolonial identity or being. As Elaine Stratford points out, “Language is critical to how we view ourselves, each other, and the world; in a very real sense, language speaks us.”9 Examples taken from The God of Small Things will show how love of English precludes hate, which is consciously and conscientiously cultivated, building a halfway house between what is imitation and repudiation, engaging thus in a construction of cultural identity that is characterized by ambivalence. In The God of Small Things, this tension is more obvious at other levels – in terms of plot, for example. These see-sawing ‘them and us’ and ‘love and

6

Fludernik, “Cross-Mirrorings of Alterity,” 34. The jam / jelly question in Roy’s novel is ostensibly about the appellation of Mammachi’s culinary creations. There is a debate about whether her banana condiment should be called jam or jelly, as “it was too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said” (30–31). The jam / jelly question serves as an appropriate metaphor for the postcolonial dilemma as a whole, in terms of one or the Other (culture, language, history) as a basis for identity building. 8 Biman Basu, “Trapped and Troping: Allegories of the Transnational Intellectual in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 28.3 (1997): 7. 9 Elaine Stratford, Australian Cultural Geographies (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 6. 7

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hate’ dichotomies surface in the trials and tribulations of an Indian–Syrian Christian family, a plot in which the region of contact is of “high intensity.”10 The narrative centres on a group that is not religiously Hindu but Christian. These anglophiles feel ‘justified’ in their attempt to aspire to Otherness because of their embrace of the colonizers’ religion. This aspiration constitutes the love in the relationship. This Syrian Christian family nevertheless suffers from a hybrid cultural identity at the crossroads of Christianity and Hinduism, and whiteness and blackness. The family has integrated the most racist, divisive aspect of Hinduism, their disgust at the Untouchables, which is putatively at odds with the precepts of Christianity. The family members project colonial stereotypes of Indians – black, foul smelling, uncouth, sly – onto the Hindu Indians, thus reproducing white-supremacist discourse. This behaviour is a pathetic attempt to belong to an ideal white society, which is non-existent in Aymenem, and the clan is fundamentally separated from that essentially virtual group. Chacko’s and Margaret’s relationship fails, as does that between Rahel and Larry and between Baby Kochamma and Father Mulligan.11 Half-white/ halfblack Sophie dies. The gap is unbridgeable – an indication of the hate-factor in the identity-equation. There are other examples of divided discourse in terms of colonial subjects. On the one hand, the colonial scenario is quite obvious in the exoticism of women, their beauty and sensuality waiting to be conquered and penetrated. Ammu, Rahel, and young Baby Kochamma fit this description. Far from cultivating feminist feelings, Roy has built on Western victim/ monster stereotypes of native women.12 On the other hand, from the opposing nation10 Patrick Colm Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa and the Caribbean (Albany: State U of New York P , 2000): 4. 11 At the age of eighteen, Baby Kochamma becomes infatuated with Father Mulligan (an Irish monk who, after a year, leaves both Aymenem and Baby Kochamma) and converts to Roman Catholicism. She takes her vows and enters a convent. After a year of being a novice nun, she realizes Father Mulligan will never be within her reach, so she convinces her father to withdraw her from the convent. She remains single all her life. 12 Baby Kochamma, once a seductive young woman, turns into an obese monstrosity. The physical descriptions of Ammu (in Chapters Two, Eleven, and Twenty-One) should be compared to the image of her just before she dies, swollen with cortisone, moon-faced, her skin like scar tissue, her hair like a dull curtain. She coughs up phlegm, like the tramp Rahel sits across from in a train in New York, where she moves to after having married Larry. Ammu belches, has a deep, unnatural voice, and strange thick hair like palps. Rahel has absurdly beautiful collarbones and a nice athletic run; no counter-description is offered. But she is the one who initiates the incest, watching her twin brother Estha undress in the bathroom and drawing him down to the bed. Even Comrade Pillai’s wife, who dies of ovarian cancer, is lush and beautiful, with golden brown skin.

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alistic perspective, Fludernik suggests the integration in the text of representations of women having economic – and not only familial or sexualized – roles to play, which in this novel is manifested in the entrepreneurial talent demonstrated by Mammachi in starting up a pickle factory in her own kitchen in Aymenem.13 This study, however, will focus on the dichotomous, hybrid, split focus on language and on the ways in which Roy elucidates the two contradictory stances that reading and speaking the English language represent. In this case, it may thus be argued that language is a site of ambivalence. The most palpable instance of absolute love of English is apparent in the author’s style, in her diction, and in the glorious descriptive passages, displayed at their very best on the opening page. Here the explosion of words and images translates the exotic into glorious alliterative English. There is a quality of normative literariness14 that characterizes or standardizes Roy’s language. In general, the language in the book is not a mesolect, which is an English that is fashioned by local languages but is not considered literary in character. Nor may it be considered an acrolect, the type of English in which translations of native terms are deliberately incorporated to differentiate the dialect from the standard. Neither is the author’s use of the language adapted as in Chinua Achebe’s work. Achebe uses paratactic sentence structure and copia to translate the flavour, as Abdul JanMohamed15 puts it, of Igbo society, and not just to convey the orality of Igbo culture but also to indicate its values and modes of representation. Similarly, the Indian novelist R.K. Narayan deconstructs his own style and identifies the use of unobtrusive Indianisms and translations. Other writers also point to the specifics of the language they use, the decolonization of language being for most of these authors a necessary development. If Roy had been dealing with factors other than postcolonial issues, this lack of characteristic language use in the novel could pass without comment, but such is not the case. The author’s embrace of the linguistic Other is complete here. Devindra Kohli argues that whereas an Indian English is emerging as a medium of communication, the new tendency in creative writing is just the opposite: British English is being used to address Indian themes or philo-

13

Fludernik, “Cross-Mirrorings of Alterity,” 36. Tariq Rahman, “Linguistic Deviation as a Stylistic Device in Pakistani English Fiction,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25.1 (2000): 2. 15 See Abdul JanMohamed, “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literary Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 5.4 (1984): 19–39. 14

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sophy.16 This is obviously the case with Roy, who delves into British diction in her descriptions in the Queen’s English. Only rarely does she use similes and metaphors with specifically Indian imagery. The language itself is entirely literary in the conventional Received Pronunciation sense. There is little opposition of form, except on two very specific occasions, which will be examined in due course, and that resemble Achebe’s use of an ethnicized English language. Roy also uses solemnly muted phrases with classic, almost biblical, overtones and imagery – the gold breastplate, the reed basket floating away on a river, the charioteer – to translate the quintessential visualness of the Kathakali dancers in Chapter Twelve. The narration and dialogue do not possess any distinguishing features to portray adequately a specifically Indian form of drama from Kerala. Reginald Massey insists on the visual quality of Indian dance and drama: “if Christians believe that in the beginning was the word, according to Hindu thought in the beginning was sound.”17 With pronounced authorial voice and licence, Roy expounds at length on the utter originality of Indian storytelling, its importance for Indian being. But then her recounting of this rather ideological stance is stylistically ‘poor’, surprising us with a simile that likens the effects of the kiss of the God Karna’s mother to “an egg travelling down an ostrich’s neck” (233). Tonal shift is significantly absent. Roy juxtaposes in similes images that belong to the two separate worlds, Eastern – diverse though it may be – and Western. For example, in Chapter Twelve, a temple priest’s brass platter of coins is likened to a comic-strip illustration of his dreams. She also describes the sky as the rose bowl, which evokes the American football stadium as well as a blushing dawn sky – rather jarring in this particular chapter, in which Roy attempts almost militantly to defend and portray an aspect of Indian culture. Similarly, and to move away from this consideration of authorial presence, licence or voice, at the very beginning of the novel, Inspector Thomas Mathew apparently speaks a coarse Kottayam dialect of Malayalam,18 but Roy’s English translation of his direct speech is lacking in local colour. She then uses indirect reporting to further dilute any linguistic or cultural position or specificity. There is none of the public-school slang in the elaborate, formal diction which supposedly characterizes Indian English along with other fea16

Devindra Kohli, “A Tragic Love Affair? The Contemporary Indian-English Literary Scene, Aspects of Commonwealth Literature,” Collected Seminar Papers 1.39 (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London 1990): 4. 17 Reginald Massey, “From Bharata to the Cinema: A Study in Unity and Continuity,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 23.1 (1992): 62. 18 Malayalam is the official language in Kerala, and the Inspector speaks a “coarse dialect” (8) of Malayalam spoken in Kottayam.

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tures that Devindra Kohli lists in his article. Similarly, Mr Hollick’s spoken English is no different from conversations between Syrian Indians. Which language these latter speak remains unknown; it could be Malayalam or English, though their conversations are transcribed in standard British English. In general, there is a curious lack of any quality but correctness in direct and indirect speech. In the letter from Rahel’s and Estha’s father in Chapter One, it is not clear whether the note is in English or in Malayalam. When conversations are in Malay, they are often transcribed into middle-class spoken English, which robs the text, in a sense, reducing it to Roy’s perfect mastery of the language. When Ammu and her children are on their own, they often speak English, which is rather puzzling. The conversation between Sophie and the children is reported in Standard English even though the latter have been practising their spoken English under duress. Almost all the conversations between the Syrian Indians are in this same identity-crushing Standard English, whereas their alterity is repeatedly represented as pronounced. On the other hand, the two conversations between Rahel and Chacko and Comrade Pillai are reported in a different way, which seems rather derogatory to the Hindu Indians, and in turn reproduces colonial racist attitudes, in that higher-class, Christian Indians speak English properly in the novel but the others do not. Monika Fludernik argues that this stance is typical of several Indian novels where a latent desire to be white means denigrating Indians, an internalized racial discrimination. Here, in terms of the language, Roy chooses to adapt Comrade Pillai’s English. For example: “My sister Sudha met with fracture sometime back […] so she is alone at in-laws place” (274). Here the indefinite articles are missing, and this pattern is repeated, as are mistakes in pronunciation and grammar, “one mint” (134), “the Trivandrum response was much more better” (277), and, when speaking of Rahel, “His daughter’s daughter is this in Amayerica no” (129); and, questioningly, “Any issues” (130); “Die vorced” (130). Another example of this type of linguistic distinction occurs when the ‘Orangedrink Lemondrink man’19 speaks to Estha: the few words he says in English are mispronounced or grammatically incorrect – for example, “Porket munny” (102) and “non mention” (109). Roy posits linguistic specificity as a character marker, and thus introduces a correlation between what Tariq Rahman calls linguistic deviation and moral deficiency. Rahman, however, analyzes linguistic deviation as an artistic device for purposes of characterization, and not as a strategy for relaying cul19 The Orangedrink Lemondrink man sells soft drinks at the cinema and sexually abuses Estha behind the counter when the unattended boy enters the men’s room. The drink man is thus a ‘bad’ character, like dishonest Comrade Pillai.

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tural authenticity. On the other hand, Philip Holden, in a study of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, argues that this type of English evokes a lack of control or science that British English does not.20 Roy’s linguistic differentiation between the Syrian Indians and the Hindu Indians, and lack of distinction between Syrian from British English, may be understood as generating a discourse that reproduces the racially discriminatory attitudes of the colonizer but which are this time divisive among Indians themselves. Roy does not defamiliarize English or uses ostranenie – a making-strange of objects – although the subject-matter seems to demand such treatment, perhaps indicating a mimic instinct based on an unequivocal love of language that skirts the untranslatable words, which according to Salman Rushdie unlock a culture.21 For Steve Carter, the ready intelligibility of a text may be construed as part of an ostranenic initiative by sudden interjections of, for example, Hindi words, and this creates a cultural landscape and cultural statements, ideologically speaking.22 Reed Way Dasenbrock posits the opposite: “If everything is translated into our Western terms and made readily intelligible then our cultural categories will be reinforced.”23 Roy does use without explanation Hindi words such as toddy, dhobi, brinjal sari, bhajan, dhoti, but these are non-italicized and are also easily understood.24 A few words are translated, such as mol and mon,25 but this does not seem to unlock culture. At other times, Chacko uses Malayalam words, apparently to calm the ‘natives’ down. The rare occasions on which the children use Malayalam are when speaking to Velutha, the Untouchable. Kochu Maria shouts Malayalam at the dog. There does not seem to be any ostranenic intent at work here, unless it is directed toward all that is not Syrian Indian. Thus, mimeticism in diction comes at the expense of characterization and ideological sub-content, and with ample proof of the author’s and the characters’ embrace of the English language. This position is not sensitive to the hate issues or the politics of otherness concerning language that the novel nevertheless raises in other manipulations of written and spoken English.

20 See Philip Holden, “Halls of Mirrors: Mimicry and Ambivalence in Kipling’s Boer War Short Stories,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 28.4 (1997): 91–111. 21 Minoli Salgado, “Tribal Stories, Scribal Worlds,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.1 (2000): 141. 22 Steve Carter, “Narrative Ostranenie in R.K. Narayan’s The Painter of Signs,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.2 (1994): 111. 23 Dasenbrock, quoted in Carter, “Narrative Ostranenie in R.K. Narayan’s The Painter of Signs,” 111. 24 All these words are contained in, for example, Chambers English Dictionary. 25 Mol means ‘little girl’ and Mon ‘little boy’.

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Achebe is consistent, but Roy is not, which is perhaps representative of the postcolonial predicament. Additionally, in a personal and perhaps subconscious display of integrative ambition, Roy peppers the texts with English literary and Western cinematographic references. In some cases, these references may be understood as expressing resentment of the colonialists’ language. But in other examples, Rahel’s and Estha’s lives are unquestioningly influenced by literature, and in this case reading, speaking, singing, and understanding in English are undoubtedly important in the constitution of their cultural identities. Rufus Cook posits that works of art – and here he means novels, plays, murals, and tapestries – are primary means of self-definition.26 In The God of Small Things, anglophone music and cinema could be added to the list. There are also flippant non-linguistic examples of this familiarity with Western art that could be considered cases of appropriation and are perceptible in the prevalence of books. Ammu hits her husband on the head with a Reader’s Digest World Atlas, and resists an impulse to twiddle nipples à la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. References to films such as Sinbad’s Last Voyage, Meet Me in St Louis, The Bronze Buckaroo, and Mutiny on the Bounty all attest to a hybrid visual adult and child culture in English that is presented in the novel in a matter-of-fact and rather unquestioning way. Inversely, in her distinctively parallel way, Roy is highly critical of The Sound of Music. The most recurrent literary reference is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ultimate colonial text. Roy weaves this title into the narrative in different contexts, sometimes appropriating it despite its connotations. The first reference is to the Black Sahib (52) and his home, the place where the ‘Heart of Darkness’ throbs.27 The children – Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol – find refuge there, as does Velutha when he is turned out by Mammachi and disavowed by Comrade Pillai. Inspector Mathews and the policeman find him there asleep. Roy names this place of transgression, escape, eroticism, and death the ‘Heart of Darkness’, as if endorsing the idea of the primal instincts of colonized peoples and those who go native. Another controversial author whom Roy adopts is Kipling. The children grow up reading Kipling’s Jungle Book, thus learning about their own country 26

See Rufus Cook, “Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 30.4 (1999): 35–51. 27 The Black Sahib, the owner of a rubber plantation across the Meenachal River, was the Englishman “who had gone native […] and shot himself in the head ten years ago when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school” (52). Ammu and Velutha meet secretly on the Black Sahib’s abandoned property (called the “History House”) to make love.

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through (imperialist) British children’s literature, yet there is no hint of Roy’s ideological stance. Ammu even uses Kipling to “love her children” (163) as she reads the twins his stories at bedtime. Nayantra Sahgal qualifies Kipling’s œuvre thus: stories about Europeans in the proverbial heat and dust of a dangerous land where the lesser breeds were wilfully hell-bent on obstructing the progress of empire and good natives were the ones who showed a dog-like devotion to the white man.28

The children are taught Shakespeare at the age of seven, and quote the Bard. They despise books written for seven-year-old children, even in English. These cultivated young children are symbols of reverence for the colonizers’ language. Rahel quotes Dickens to herself in rural India in the 1970s. Could there be a more blatant example of a pro-English language stance than this? Estha is pure British public school when spouting Latin and manipulating the words to make fun of Kochu Maria, the cook. Furthermore, adult Rahel finds young Estha’s exercise book and his summary of The Odyssey, which is written in schoolboy English. This highly symbolic text, a recurring reference in postcolonial literature to the “finding of one’s origins and roots,”29 is here introduced as a piece of homework in English, and in spite of the spelling mistakes, the implication is that the faltering road to cultural location will get better through time and correction, and passes inevitably through the Latin and Greek classics, the basis of a publicschool English education. The children’s joy in the sounds and forms of English words is an example of this almost unrequited love of the language.30 The awestruck discovery of the scientific beauty of English is shown through short paragraphs, with “cufflink” (51) as the starting-point. On several occasions, the children almost caress English words, investing them with particular qualities. For example, Rahel in particular relishes words. She thinks ‘boot’ is a lovely word, but ‘sturdy’ is a terrible one; ‘old’ is a strange funny word for the older Rahel, who is still academically in love with the language. Thinking in English rhyme and song also seems to come naturally to these half-Hindu children. Estha’s ‘Elvis puff’ of hair and his singing of songs, in28

Nayantra Sahgal, “Some Thoughts on the Puzzle of Identity,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28.1 (1994): 5. 29 Annick Hilger, “And this is the World of Nomads: The Odyssey as Intertext in M. Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.1 (1998): 6. 30 The twins’ love of the language is a sterile love; when they actually try to communicate with an English counterpart, their first cousin Sophie, they are at a loss. Their knowledge of English is academic and inadequate.

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cluding reproducing Elvis’s accent, are to be understood as an integral and endearing aspect of this clever little boy’s character. Estha’s sensitivity is a direct result of his reading, speaking, singing, and writing in English. Overall, the children learn to read and speak English, but they seem not to be conscious, to use Basu’s term,31 of these effects of colonialism. But alongside this assimilation of the Other’s language there is awareness, an authorial intention perhaps, which is at odds with the internalized and possibly subconscious admiration of English just described. Roy adopts another fervent position from which she rejects and questions the surrounding colonial structures, especially a language that fashions Indian being yet, being in an alien context, is emptied of its meaning and loses authority.32 This conception is made clear in Chapter 6 when, on their arrival at Cochin airport from London, Margaret and Sophie find themselves at a loss when faced with the rest of the Ipe family speaking English. Communication and understanding grind to a halt, despite the fact that they are all speaking English. Estha and Rahel are confused. They love the English language and literature, but do not understand what it means to be called “Sophiekins.”33 Their English is not acceptable, something exemplified when Sophie recites a trite Indian-English sentence that is appropriately indianized but is nonetheless meaningless to the children. Here Roy brings to the fore these huge linguistic gaps that leave the children at a loss. The Atwoodian34 Siamese-twin imagery is largely representative of this love–hate dichotomy regarding language. An example of this imagery can be found in a description of Estha and Rahel, a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities. This leitmotif could in the context of this essay symbolize the postcolonial desire for freedom and an inverse hunger for English verbs. The recurrence of words such as ‘them’, ‘us’, and ‘we’ and asides such as “she thought she spoke much better English than everybody else. This made her lonelier than ever” (25) attest to the annihilating and hated power of English. Figuratively, Estha’s tongue is taken. 31

See Biman Basu, “Trapped and Troping: Allegories of the Transnational Intellectual in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 28.3 (1997): 7–24. 32 Kateryna Arthur Olijnyk, “Between Literatures, Canada and Australia,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 19.1 (1988): 3. 33 “-kins” is an affectionate suffix added to the end of first names. 34 In her Two Headed Poems, Margaret Atwood addresses the postcolonial issues of two languages (French and English), two cultures, and the obstacles inherent in the construction of Self and Other in postcolonial contexts. In spite of obvious differences in Indian and Canadian colonial histories, Roy chooses to engage with the twin metaphor, apparent in Atwood’s work, which expresses the postcolonial predicament of identity-building as her characters experience it.

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The implied criticism of Baby Kochamma’s clumsy efforts to instil English into Estha and Rahel is clear. This negative view of the command the English language exerts, however, has been paradoxically juxtaposed with the author’s literary technique, which may be understood as an attempt to integrate Western modes of authorship, as argued above. Baby Kochamma’s English is a punishment, an obligation, a sign of civilization, an imposition as she calls it, a tax and an intrusion into the mindsets of the children. Just as song and rhyme in English express reverence for the language, so does it become a chore when correct “Prer Nun Sea Ay Shun [pronunciation]” (154) becomes imperative. Here it is obvious that appreciation of English is not viable if it is not autarchic. Estha’s private Elvis-Presley English is pure pleasure; but in the face of real English as spoken by the English, words become mere sounds; “re” and “jOice” (154), for example, are phonetically accurate but devoid of meaning. Similarly, private delight in speaking and reading is subject to acid but oblique criticism when the English language is rooted in English culture. Chacko’s assimilation of formalized or Oxford English – described as “Oxford moods” and “Reading Aloud voices” (54) in the book – is pompous and illogical, inappropriate and entirely Other. His outbursts of quotation are represented as being ridiculous, excessive, and eccentric. Here English from England is seen as issuing from Oxford, and is a subject of perhaps facile negative stereotyping that is racially motivated and is almost but not quite xenophobic. Also apparent in the novel is a further undermining of the English language in a more methodical way, representing the hate element in the equation. In this case, Roy uses linguistic techniques to convey a more negative, damaging view of the English language, particularly of its effect on children. One of these techniques is Roy’s systematic disfiguring or remoulding of the English language, creating a sort of gibberish that reduces words to sounds, empty of meaning, systematizing a reductive process that diminishes English and highlights its inadequacy. Malayalam, by contrast, makes sense when read both from left to right and right to left (60). The first example of this process, which then increases in intensity, occurs at Sophie Mol’s funeral, when “dust” loses its ‘t’ (7; also 189), and becomes just slightly garbled as the words run together, losing their significance and displaying their impotence.35

35 The most obvious occurrence of this is in Chapter Fourteen, when ‘combative’ Latha, Comrade Pillai’s niece, recites “Lochinvar” while Lenin, Comrade Pillai’s son, recites Shakespeare. Roy is quite able to reduce this scene to its essentials – misplaced ambition and contextual absurdity – how Indian society aspiring to erudition relies on inappropriate colonial cultural values, even though Lenin was only six and did not understand a word of

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Roy then portrays the English dictionary as exacting a terrible price on the children. The definitions of specific English words have to be looked up in the dictionary, and then are used as defining concepts that exclude the children. For example, Rahel is forced to look up ‘depravity’ in the Oxford English dictionary and finds the following definition: “a perverted quality, moral perversion,” which is a summary of colonial discourse being imposed on the colonized through language such as the much despised Oxford English. Similarly, the children look up the word ‘Anglophile’ in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary and learn to classify themselves, inside and out. They look up ‘despise’ and are further subjected to taxonomic treatment by the English language. “Oxford moods” and “Reading Aloud voices” are here denigrated and reduced to ridicule. Roy communicates through Ammu this diminishment (56) by the language (54). The Sound of Music is ruthlessly exposed as a hymn to whiteness and illustrates the damaging effects of anglophilia on the children. Roy’s sarcastic, caustic handling of this episode is intensely resentful of the colonialist legacy, and is particularly revealing because it nevertheless reflects her linguistic love-and-hate dilemma. Roy, however, pokes fun at Chacko’s voicing of this same case, which is presented as being ridiculous. This burgeoning hate factor is also apparent in another device that Roy uses. The children take to reading words backwards, almost creating what the French call Verlan, the reversed syllables of l’envers. Verlan is a specific use of oral French by young people born in France of North African descent, Algerian or Moroccan, for example. Verlan inverts the syllables of words, turning spoken French into a methodical slang. It may be understood as an identity-marker, through appropriation of the colonizer’s language in the colonizer’s own country. The situation in the novel is different, obviously, in that the colonized subject is in his/her own country, but the English language is still influential. So perhaps Roy does not go so far as systematizing this use of backward English in speaking, for example, as the children only read backwards, but this act may still be construed as highly symbolic of a deep resentment. Importantly, one of the first examples of this technique is Estha’s reading aloud and backwards of ‘Be Indian’, ‘Buy Indian’, the signified paradoxically at odds with the signifier, which is in English and then is turned around into the nonsense that it signifies. The second occasion is when the ‘missionary’ friend, Miss Mitten, decides to introduce the children to standard seven-year-old English in the Adventures of Susie Squirrel. First they read it forwards and then they read it aloud to her what he was saying. This position is in direct contradiction to Roy’s ‘sympathetic’ treatment of the twins’ cultural paraphernalia, including Shakespeare, Dickens, and Kipling.

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backwards in an open display of defiance, which naturally disappoints Miss Mitten. Backward English does not mean a thing, but of course Malayalam backwards makes perfect sense. The children’s linguistic prowess is interpreted by the Miss Mitten caricature as evidence of possession by the devil. Roy makes her point, however, and Miss Mitten’s death is an appropriately brutal end to any future impositions that English might make. Despite Roy’s embrace of the Other’s language, her resentment of it is expressed in the way she fashions her terminology, as Sarvan puts it, her wordchoice, use of capitalization and dichotomized neologisms.36 For example, Roy’s use of capital letters is a visual breaking-free of boundaries that is unheard, not really a phonetic middle space, because it is visual. Thus the rhythms of varieties of Indian English are lost, but here Bhabha’s Third Space of linguistic reconfiguration is not heard and cannot be spoken, though it is nevertheless written. In this case, the love for and hatred of English, as Patrick Hogan points out, may result from indocentric education as well as an implicit eurocentric one that guides the writer’s literary decisions from genre to diction.37 Here, Roy seems to have wholeheartedly adopted the authorial function of the colonizer, but in her double stance, as demonstrated above, she nevertheless offers a distinctly negative dialogue, in anger and disgust at the foreigner’s intrusion. Thus the importance of reading and speaking in The God of Small Things is one of the many foundations of being, the construction of postcolonial cultural identity, even though there is a contradictory deriding of the Other’s language, indicative of the tension between Self and Other in postcolonial contexts. The God of Small Things may then be understood as a glance into the complex process of postcolonial identity-building. There are other obvious splits in the novel, apart from those that characterize the language question briefly discussed here, and which are metaphors for the processes involved in constructing an inevitably multifaceted, hybrid Indian identity. As Schoene– Harwood states, however, “hybridity does not miraculously release the self from its position of (post-colonial) inferiority – it is prone to disturb and weaken [...] [the] potential of self,”38 which is what actually happens as Rahel and Estha surrender to incest. The God of Small Things proposes a somewhat biased middle space in terms of language and not really what Clement Wyke calls a merging of standard language and local dialect, a part of what Derek Walcott terms “a drama36

Sarvan, “The Term ‘Racism’ and Discourse,” 133. See Patrick Colm Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa and the Caribbean (New York: State U of New York P, 2000). 38 Schoene–Harwood, “Beyond (T)race,” 160. 37

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tic ambivalence.”39 Roy’s middle space could well be symptomatic of other realities. Roy tries but does not quite manage to overcome the former rulers by using their own rules, as Srivastava judges Rushdie to be doing.40 She fails because of her unquestioning love of the English language. The novel is paradoxically both linguistically hegemonic and non-hegemonic at the same time. Walcott described himself as a split writer – “divided to the very vein” 41 – with one tradition inside him going one way and another going in a different direction. Just as mirror imagery is often associated with this parallelism, the twin or dizygotic symbolism in Roy’s novel is the expression of the politics of otherness, or, as Wilson Harris claims, the difficulties in building “a [...] harlequin cosmos at the heart of [...] existence.”42

WORKS CITED Arthur Olijnyk, Kateryna. “Between Literatures, Canada and Australia,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 19.1 (1988): 2–13. Basu, Biman. “Trapped and Troping: Allegories of the Transnational Intellectual in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 28.3 (1997): 7–24. Brydon, Diana. “Troppo Agitato: Reading and Writing Cultures,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 19.1 (1988): 13–32. Carter, Steve. “Narrative Ostranenie in R.K. Narayan’s The Painter of Signs,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.2 (1994): 109–17. Cook, Rufus. “Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 30.4 (1999): 35–51. Fludernik, Monika. “Cross-Mirrorings of Alterity: The Colonial Scenario and its Psychological Legacy,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 30.3 (1999): 29–63. Hilger, Annick. “And this is the World of Nomads: The Odyssey as Intertext in M. Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.1 (1998): 5–23.

39 See Clement Wyke, “‘Divided to the Vein’: Patterns of Tormented Ambivalence in Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.3 (1989): 55–71. 40 See Aruna Srivastava, “The Empire Writes Back: Language and History in Shame and Midnight’s Children,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (1989): 62–79. 41 Wyke, “‘Divided to the Vein,’” 56. 42 Diana Brydon, “Troppo Agitato: Reading and Writing Cultures,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 19.1 (1988): 13.

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Hogan, Patrick Colm. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa and the Caribbean (New York: State U of New York P , 2000). Holden, Philip. “Halls of Mirrors: Mimicry and Ambivalence in Kipling’s Boer War Short Stories,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 28.4 (1997): 91–111. JanMohamed, Abdul. “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literary Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 5.4 (1984): 19–39. Kohli, Devindra. “A Tragic Love Affair? The Contemporary Indian-English Literary Scene; Aspects of Commonwealth Literature,” Collected Seminar Papers 1.39 (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1990): 1–13. Massey, Reginald. “From Bharata to the Cinema: A Study in Unity and Continuity,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 23.1 (1992): 59–71. Rahman, Tariq. “Linguistic Deviation as a Stylistic Device in Pakistani English Fiction,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25.1 (2000): 1–12. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997). Sahgal, Nayantra. “Some Thoughts on the Puzzle of Identity,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28.1 (1994): 3–16. Salgado, Minoli. “Tribal Stories, Scribal Worlds,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.1 (2000): 131–47. Sarvan, Charles. “The Term ‘Racism’ and Discourse,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.2 (2000): 129–39. Schoene–Harwood, Berthold. “Beyond (T)race: Bildung and Proprioception in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 159–68. Srivastava, Aruna. “The Empire Writes Back: Language and History in Shame and Midnight’s Children,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (1989): 62–79. Stratford, Elaine. Australian Cultural Geographies (London: Oxford UP, 1999). Swinden, Patrick. “Hindi Mythology in the Guide,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999): 65–85. Wyke, Clement. “‘Divided to the Vein’: Patterns of Tormented Ambivalence in Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.3 (1989): 55–71.

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The Quest for Identity in Benjamin Zephaniah’s Poetry L AURENZ V OLKMANN

Nach der ersten Heimat ist ihm die zweite zwitterig und windig1

1. Caribbean Poetry and the Literary Canon

A

S A V I B R A N T P A R T of postcolonial literature, Caribbean writing has become an integral part of many anthologies of the New Literatures in English. No anthology is without its representatives from the West Indies; Caribbean literature has been popularized, is appreciated by the academic world, and has won international acclaim in the form of prestigious awards and prizes, which in turn has stimulated an interest in many a discerning ‘common reader’. Of course, the artists that first come to mind are Caribbean poets and masters of the long poem such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) and Derek Walcott (St Lucia), or important novelists such as George Lamming (Barbados), Wilson Harris (Guyana), and V.S. Naipaul, an Indian from Trinidad who refuses to align himself with any ethnic group. In presenting himself as a citizen of the world who amalgamates various literary traditions in an act of universal syncretism, Naipaul exhibits a cultural hybridity that is the hallmark of so much of postcolonial identity-formation.2

1

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duineser Elegien” (1923), http://www-lyrikrilke.de/elegien_texte .html [accessed 13 March 2007]. 2 For an introduction, see, for example: Paula Burnett, “Introduction” to The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Burnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): vii–xix; the “West Indies” section of Anglistentag 1997 Giessen: Proceedings, ed. Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes & Andres H. Jucker (Trier: WVT, 1998); and Voices of the Crossing:

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Given this success of writing from the Caribbean, how does literature of the Caribbean diaspora, produced by West Indian minorities in Great Britain, fare? Or, more specifically, how has the literary genre preferred by its members – oral poetry, performance poetry, and dub poetry – been received?3 This poetic genre is performed live on stage, sometimes improvised, sometimes accompanied by reggae music, either played by a band or recorded. Its usual language is that of the Caribbean vernacular, creole (or patois), a variety of English spoken by immigrants from the West Indies. Can this poetry also be categorized under the admittedly controversial rubric of ‘canonized literature’? Has it achieved a canonized status of any sort? An answer to these questions may be found by consulting one of the various anthologies of anglophone literature, which, as we all know, reflect the current status of literary credibility. On looking through one of these collections of literary texts, the 1578-page Arnold Anthology of British and Irish Literature in English, a surprising discovery can be made. As expected, in it we find the English classics from Chaucer to Yeats and on to contemporary writers. What is less expected, though, is the last-but-one entry in this Who’s Who of English literature, which is something out of the ordinary. It is a poem by Linton Kwesi Johnson, born in 1952 in Jamaica, who came to London in 1963. Together with other artists such as Benjamin Zephaniah (born in 1958), Adisa, Jean “Binta” Breeze, Ahmed Sheik and Moquappie Selassie, Johnson – who is both a celebrated writer and a live performer, having been on tour with a reggae band, performing in front of 5,000 people – belongs to the first guard of dub poets. There is also a reggae version on one of Johnson’s albums of the poem from the Arnold Anthology. An early example of dub poetry, it includes some of the key elements, both in form and content, of Caribbean poetry in Great Britain that were expanded on by the ensuing generation of dub artists, such as Benjamin Zephaniah. The first two stanzas are quoted below: “Inglan Is a Bitch” w’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun mi use to work pan di andahgroun but workin’ pan di andahgroun y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun’

The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis & Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000). 3 For an introduction to Caribbean life and writing in Great Britain, see, for example: Jonathon Green, Them: Voices from the Immigrant Community in Contemporary Britain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990); Christine Römer, Us and Them: Zur Einwanderungsproblematik in Großbritannien in den achtziger Jahren: Das Beispiel der Migranten aus dem karibischem Raum (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998).

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Inglan is a bitch dere’s no escapin’ it Inglan is a bitch dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it4

What is most striking at first is, of course, the fact that the poem reads like a transcription of the utterances of an uneducated ‘non-native’ speaker of English, whose language sounds like ‘Pidgin English’ or is sub-standard, to say the least (according to the standards of the mid-1980s, when this poem/ song was first released). In using creole, or ‘Patwa’, the sort of English spoken by Jamaican-born Black British immigrants, Linton Kwesi Johnson takes on the persona of a penniless, rather uneducated immigrant who has just come to London; he is treated like many other unskilled blue-collar workers who try to make a living doing odd jobs. As he complains throughout the text, he cannot get a decent job to make ends meet, being subjected to the cruel rules of the labour market for members of ethnic minorities: last hired, first fired. In the poem, he rather confusedly gives vent to his feelings of discontent and frustration, which culminates in the repetition “Inglan is a Bitch.” This much-anthologized example of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem may serve to illustrate how three strands of black British identity-formation are tightly interconnected. First, there is the importance of a distinctly black vernacular, creole, which shapes identity by means of deviation from standard or generally accepted forms of English. Second, there is the use of artistic expressions originating in black Jamaican and African traditions, with reggae, dub and performance poetry functioning as cross-medial forms of expression. Dub poetry has its roots in the work-songs of the West Indies, especially in the folklore of Trinidad and its calypso, which is presented extempore in English or French creole, stemming from musical contests at African courts.5 Third, dub poetry is shaped by the minority experiences of exclusion and marginalization. In it there is an explicit or implicit distancing from the values, norms, and general experiences of the white majority. If in “Inglan is a Bitch” this is an ‘inarticulate’ utterance of the grievances of a social underdog, a first-generation immigrant trying to come to grips with his bewildering experiences in London, other artists such as Benjamin Zephaniah demonstrate a heightened pride in their own ethnic origins, in being black in Britain.

4

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Inglan Is a Bitch,” in The Arnold Anthology of British and Irish Literature in English, ed. Robert Clark & Thomas Healy (London: Arnold, 1997): 1569. 5 See Commonwealth-Literatur, ed. Jürgen Schäfer (Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1981).

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2. Caribbean Poetry as Postcolonial Literature This experience of otherness, of being separated as a black minority in the diaspora, is one of the main characteristics that connects dub poetry with all of postcolonial literature. Postcolonial studies have become a major section of literary studies in Great Britain, the U S A , and Germany, providing old institutionalized approaches to literature a much-needed new impetus. Their relative success underlines what Gayatri Spivak has called the new orthodoxy of a “centrality of marginality” in recent literary and cultural theories and the transformation of established canons through their impact.6 As part of a first stocktaking it may be stated that postcolonial studies have evidenced how colonial literature of the West operated by means of ‘othering’: i.e. the attributing of the foreign, exotic or primitive to non-Western people. Postcolonial studies have shown how this strategy not only depicted colonized people as a faceless mass, its members de-individualized as “half-devil and half-child” (as Rudyard Kipling had it),7 but projected suppressed and rejected human aspects onto the Other. Thus, in fictions by authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and sometimes Joseph Conrad, a superior image of Western identity was fashioned as distinct from that of indigenous people, “the lesser breed.”8 To outline a by now familiar story-line further, after the collapse of the European colonial system and its ideological superstructure: i.e. eurocentrism, in the wake of World War Two, various forms of postcolonial literature evolved. This kind of literature has gained popularity with authors as varied as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro or Hanif Kureishi; simultaneously, postcolonial theories, originating mainly in the 1970s, have been established most forcefully with the ubiquity of the twin pillars of postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin.9 The enduring success and importance of postcolonial literature and postcolonial studies is reflected in an ocean of publications, with the established ‘Holy Trinity’ of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha as the new grand theorists. Postcolonial studies are so influential that Bart Moore–Gilbert recently dis-

6

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York & London: Routledge, 1993): 18. 7 Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” in Kipling, Selected Poetry, ed. Craig Raine (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 127. 8 Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” 127. 9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989).

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cerned a moment of crisis, of stagnation, even of identity-crisis, in postcolonial studies and lamented the absence of new provocative ideas.10 With a view to my topic – black British dub poetry and, specifically, its use by Benjamin Zephaniah – a brief discussion of two controversial issues in postcolonial studies is important. First, the question of how white, European readers read postcolonial literature; second, the complex topic of hybrid identities as debated most prominently by Homi Bhabha. Markedly, Lothar Bredella11 has pointed out in several publications that insurmountable differences exist in theoretical discussions of how members of a majority read or understand texts written by a member of a minority. On the one hand, supporters of essentialist positions stress the ethnic particularities of postcolonial literature and minority literature. They negate its applicability to a universal, transnational ‘human condition’, disparaging any act of reading or interpreting through the white majority as an act of appropriation, a neocolonial act of subordination. Accordingly, even postmodern readers embrace the Other in order to shape their own (ever so multiple) identities. As radical as they may appear, these positions need to be taken seriously, when taking into consideration bell hooks’s theories of “co-optation” and how the appropriation of the Other continues to exist in new guises in postcolonial times: In a white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal state where the mechanisms of co-optation are so advanced, much that is potentially radical is undermined, turned into commodity, fashionable speech as in ‘black writers are in right now.’12

In her critique, hooks also aims at the proponents of literary criticism from the other end of the spectrum. All too often, an anything-goes mentality is exhibited here, a cavalier gesture towards poststructuralist theories of the absence or loss of centre and the inadequacy or impossibility of finding correct criteria for literary quality. Rejecting any sense in literary texts, these interpreters piece together their own idiosyncratic canon, often with a penchant for postcolonial authors. Given the ‘hybrid’ status of the postmodern subject, the “multiple encoding of personal and collective identity,”13 a close affinity of 10 Bart Moore–Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London & New York: Verso, 1997). 11 For an introduction, see Lothar Bredella, “Intercultural Understanding between Relativism, Ethnocentrism and Universalism: Preliminary Considerations for a Theory of Intercultural Understanding,” in Anglistentag Eichstätt: Proceedings, ed. Günther Blaicher & Brigitte Glaser (Tübingen: Carl Niemeyer, 1994). 12 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist – Thinking Black (London: Sheba Feminist, 1989): 14. 13 Elisabeth Bronfen & Benjamin Marius, “Hybride Kulturen: Einleitung zur angloamerikanischen Mulitkulturalismusdebatte,” in Hybride Kulturen: Beiträge zur anglo-

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the postmodern and the postcolonial subject is recognized: “Both postcolonial and the postmodern subjects experience themselves as intersections of a plurality of discourses in a hybrid world of numerous contexts.”14 Thus we are faced with a dilemma: ethnical essentialism or particularism on the one side, which rejects any notion of universalism, and, on the other, the dissolving position of postmodern laissez-faire, which uses anything as long as it serves its own purpose of creating momentary sense. A path out of this double bind has been indicated by cultural and literary critics such as Lothar Bredella or other critics influenced by Hans–Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics or M.M. Bakhtin’s dialogism, as demonstrated in the volume English Literatures in International Contexts, edited by Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer.15 In probing the differences between one’s own horizon of expectation and the horizon of the text, an ongoing, interactive process is opened up. Rather than leading to a Horizontverschmelzung (“fusion of different horizons”), to use Gadamer’s terminology,16 this opens up the reader’s mind and asks him or her constantly to question and revise his or her position. Thus a continuous grappling with conflicting positions is set in motion.17 The resistance to homogenizing interpretations and interpretative closure can also be detected in Homi Bhabha’s exhortation to switch from cultural diversity to cultural difference in the postcolonial debate. These cultural differences, as seen in the varying elements of the postmodern and the postcolonial subject, cannot be made congruous. This becomes apparent in the case of Caribbean writers in Great Britain. Following Homi Bhabha again, a double identity of black Caribbeans in Great Britain can be discerned, which can be described with the oxymoron ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’: It is th[e] double life of British minorities that makes them ‘vernacular cosmopolitans,’ translating between cultures, renegotiating traditions from a position where ‘locality’ insists on its own terms, while entering into amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius & Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997): 7. 14 Bronfen & Marius, “Hybride Kulturen,” 23. “Das postkoloniale wie auch das postmoderne Subjekt erfährt sich als Knotenpunkt einer Vielzahl von Diskursen in einer hybriden, polykontexturalen Welt” (tr. L. Volkmann). 15 English Literature in International Context, ed. Heinz Antor & Klaus Stierstorfer (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000). 16 Hans–Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960; Tübingen: Mohr, 1986): 311. 17 For a detailed discussion, see Laurenz Volkmann, “Universal Truths or Ethnic Peculiarities? On Tensions Inherent in the Reception of Post-Colonial and Minority Literature,” in Intercultural Encounters: Studies in English Literatures; Essays Presented to Rüdiger Ahrens on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Heinz Antor & Kevin Cope (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1999): 131–52.

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larger national and societal conversations. To occupy [...] an ‘in-between’ space is often the result of oppression and inequality. Those who occupy marginal or minority positions within cultures and societies often have no option but to occupy such interstitial spaces.18

Using similar images, Paul Gilroy describes this existence as ”neither Jamaican, nor fully English,” marked by a “double consciousness” forged by the experience of African-Caribbean presence in Great Britain.19 In addition, a further point of reference is to be considered – the link to Africa: People in the African diaspora, despite the historically violent rupture with Africa, remain connected with the African past in ways often unrecognised, often only in practice, often unreflected, often not knowing that people were practising within a tradition.20

Thus a double disruption or alienation can be found in people from the West Indies living in the diaspora. First, the dissociation from the West Indies, the place of their “imagined community.”21 Second, West Indians in Britain (being one step further ‘removed’ from Africa) live under the impression of an enforced historical tradition of slavery and deportation. Like African Americans, they exhibit a tendency to cherish dreams of returning to Africa. In general, their quest for identity is directed towards an often beautified or at least idealized image of Africa, their imagined place of cultural origin.

3. Benjamin Zephaniah: Charismatic Personality and Versatile Artist Benjamin Zephaniah first became known to a wider audience in 1988 when he was shortlisted as Oxford Professor of Poetry, a position he did not get partly because of a campaign in the tabloid press against him as a black British writer with a checkered past.22 Tabloids such as The Sun dug up some dubious details of his troubled youth, seething in headlines such as “Would you let your daughter near this man?”23 18

Homi Bhabha, “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,” in Voices of the Crossing, ed. Ferdinand Dennis & Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000): 139. 19 Quoted in Attia Hosain, “Deep Roots, New Language,” in Voices of the Crossing, ed. Dennis & Khan, 27. 20 Quoted in Attia Hosain, “Deep Roots, New Language,” 28. 21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). 22 All the factual information is from the internet; see the sources given at the end of this article. 23 See http://www.mystworld.com/youngwriter/authors/ben_zephania.html [accessed 1 March 2005].

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Figure 1 (Picture of Zephaniah from the Internet)

In the meantime, Benjamin Zephaniah has become a celebrated poet, musician, performer, and specialist in creative writing. Tony Blair called him his favourite poet and in 1999 he was seriously tipped for the role of poet laureate of Great Britain. His career was not always that smooth; indeed, his biography by itself is worth a closer look. It almost resembles the old from-rags-to-(literary)-riches cliché but also hints at the problematic fact that in Great Britain, too, sports and the entertainment industry remain the two major fields of professional success for blacks. Born in Black River, Jamaica, in 1958, Benjamin Zephaniah came to England with his family when he was two years old. Living in a large family with eight brothers and sisters in Handsworth, Birmingham, he had a childhood that was not without incident. He was expelled from school, later sent to a borstal at age fourteen, where he was deemed “a born failure.”24 He got into trouble with the police, culminating in a prison sentence for a crime he did not commit. On release in 1979, he moved back to Handsworth and from there he went to London, working first as a reggae D J , then as a musician, and finally 24

See http://www.mystworld.com/youngwriter/authors/ben_zehpania.html [accessed 1 March 2005].

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as a poet, when he published his first booklet of poetry with the help of a workers’ cooperative. Specifically, he took to ‘performance poetry’, making a strong impression leading to wide media coverage. During the 1990s, he frequently acted and performed at festivals and appeared on television and radio; he toured for the British Council, continued with his publications, and was finally asked to contribute to a government task force dealing with creativity within the National Curriculum. It is not an overstatement to say that he has become one of Britain’s major poets and performance artists. The opposite of an ivory-tower artist, he propagates his art, and with it a pride in black British identity, on the Internet, using various websites on which his poetry can also be listened to. The gist of his self-image as an artist can be found in one of the poems from the Internet, which also deals with his favourite topics, the questioning of prejudices and poetic self-reflexivity. In allowing free access to a number of his writings, he also supports the idea of poetry for the masses – a democratization of art both in its apparent simplicity and its easy accessibility. WHO’S WHO

I used to think nurses Were women, I used to think police Were men, I used to think poets Were boring, Until I became one of them.25

4. Zephaniah’s Poetological Programme: Poetry Off the Page Benjamin Zephaniah calls himself “the people’s poet,”26 and his personal experiences, his social and ethnic background are reflected in his poetry. Being a black George Bernard Shaw of sorts, he is a socialist, a pacifist, and even a vegan, who refuses to consume dairy products. He supports the rights of minorities, as well as the rights of the elderly, of animals, and of children. He is a Rastafarian (though he does not appear to be a true believer of the faith), an environmentalist, a male feminist – you name any alternative lifestyle and you will find it reflected in Zephaniah’s poetry. With the exception of a few complex texts, most of his poems are easily accessible. Their language is simple, playful, sometimes like nonsense poetry. They are often aimed at 25 26

Source: http://www.oneworld.org/zephaniah/poems5.html [accessed 9 October 2005]. See http://www.benjamin.zephaniah.com/ [accessed 3 March 2005].

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children or the child in his readers, and they are always an affirmation, even a celebration, of life. Apart from the universal appeal of his poems, they reflect a pride both in his ethnic roots and in the language spoken by Jamaicans in Great Britain. Zephaniah’s career as an artist is marked by a shift from a politically committed beginning during the Thatcher era to an ‘opening up’ to gain a wider readership, especially in poems for children and adolescents. This trend is not only reflected in Zephaniah’s move from Bloodaxe publishers to Penguin / Puffin, it can also be seen in the cover designs of his poetry collections.

Figure 2: Cover of City Psalms (1992).

Similarly, the cover of Inna Liverpool (1992), a collection of poems Zephaniah wrote as writer-in-residence for the Africa Arts Collective in Liverpool, features the author’s personal emblem as his political maxim. It consists of three elements: the microphone of the performance artist; the African spear as a symbol of fight and resistance (as part of Rasta iconography); and the pen of the poet – all connected by the microphone cord.

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Figure 3: The artist’s emblem (detail from cover of Inna Liverpool, 1992)

Although more recent publications continue to highlight the topic of black British minorities and occasionally the plight of being black in Britain, there is a tendency towards actively supporting multiculturalism, a stress on cultural diversity and its merits. This can be seen in the lively cover of a recent collection of children’s poetry (see following page). In sum, Zephaniah’s poetological concept rests on the principles of orality and performance. In it we recognize what Paul Gilroy has called the bridge connecting black identity today with the African tradition. It is above all in these performances that black Britain has expressed the improvization, spontaneity and intimacy which are key characteristics of all new world black musics (!), providing a living bridge between them and African traditions of music-making which dissolve the distinctions between art and life [...].27

Orality, or oral poetic style and the communal presentation of art, is closely related to performance. Texts are performed, taken off the page, and put on stage; they closely resemble rituals, ceremonies, and other stylized acts of expression, that foster and create communal feelings. Performance is about discovering the body’s language and bodily aspects of language such as voice and gesture. Language is freed from its status as an abstract referential system; it is opened, expanding through creativity and spontaneity. Temporary meaning is negotiated, for example, in the poem “Body Talk,” which Zephaniah enjoys performing on stage and before a camera. An audio-C D version 27

Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Routledge, 1993): 165.

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of this poem, which likens every part of the body to a text (“I’ve got a sonnet / Under my bonnet / […] In my fat chin / There is art”),28 can only give an inadequate rendition of the original Gesamtkunstwerk, which has to be seen to be appreciated in its entirety.

Figure 4: Cover of Funky Chickens (1996)

To reach a larger audience, not all of Zephaniah’s poems are in Jamaican English. To be sure, his self-reflexive approach to language and what it can do – whether used by a black poet or by a white reader – permeates his poetry. Increasingly the artist has entered the realm of concrete poetry or selfconsciously focuses in his lines on questions of language, text, and representation. A seemingly whimsical, playful poem such as “According to my mood” thus raises questions of authority and hierarchy, be they of a textual, semiotic

28

Compare (or rather, listen to) “Body Talk,” track 1 on the C D Funky Turkeys (Elstree, Herfordshire: Audio Book & Music, 1997).

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or political nature. The author’s rejection of accepted norms of writing (as defined by ‘white’ standards) thus clearly becomes a political statement. “According to my mood” I have poetic licence, i WriTe thE way i waNt. i drop my full stops where I like…….. M Y C A P I T A L LetterRs go where I liK E , i order from M Y PeN, i verse the way i like29

In implicitly inviting his readers to follow suit, the author retreats as an artist to leave the stage for his readers, whom he would like to experience a similar joy in poetry and in performance. In Zephaniah’s poetry, the everyday world is elevated to the status of art, of something aestheticized. Moreover, in his overt political writing the reader or listener encounters the contours of a black ‘aesthetic of resistance’. What connects the apolitical with the political is a common stance against generally accepted norms and barriers, be they of a political, ethnic, cultural or linguistic nature.

5. Negotiating Black Identity in Selected Poems In focusing on two poems by Zephaniah in the following brief remarks, we need to remember that they are actually only texts in a secondary form. These poems were transcribed and printed after many performances; they are ‘frozen’ versions of texts performed live by the artist. To get an impression of what is lost in this process, Christian Habekost, who has written the standard study of dub poetry, should be quoted here at length. In the following, the original wholeness of the performance is captured impressively: When Benjamin Zephaniah recites his famous “Dis Policeman” on stage, then one can see what is meant by ‘power.’ Of course, it is possible to get the meaning of the poem when reading it, the Black experience of ‘law and order’ inside the ghettos of democratic England. Listening to the recording of the poem, one can even get an oral impression too, the provocative rhythm and the different shades of the voice come across. But these are not the poet on stage with his flying dreadlocks, an angry impression on his Black face, murderously kicking into the air with his motorbike-boots just as the police boots kicked him. Only then does one realize what is really going on: Like a thief in de dark he take me to de place Where him just left

29

Benjamin Zephaniah, “According to my mood,” in Zephaniah, City Psalms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1992): 25.

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And when him get me in der He is kicking me to death.30

The two poems I have chosen here, “Speak” and “Neighbours,” both operate with sudden changes of perspective. They pit a ‘white’ perspective against a ‘black’ perspective, presenting two opposing stereotypes. It is this relativization of positions, especially that of white prejudice, that highlights the very nature of racial animus, clichés, and stereotypes. Both positions share the built-in message that the Other, the white reader or white person apostrophized in the poems, is reminded that the black Other can give or is already giving something the white person needs in order to achieve completeness. Often the white person needs to be persuaded of this. Both poems comprise a variation on one theme: the quest for black identity turns into an exhortation of the white Other to incorporate ‘black’ traits in order to become a more complete human being. “Speak” Yu teach me Air Pilots language De language of American Presidents Of a green unpleasant land. It is Authorized Approved Recycled At your service. I speak widda bloody tongue, Wid Nubian tones Fe me riddims Wid built in vibes. Yu dance.31

In “Speak,” both British and American English are rejected as standardized, clinical forms of language: The imposition of white concepts of ‘proper language’ results in a mechanism of alienation, suppression, and loss of identity, a sort of neocolonial rape of the soul leading to enslavement, where the black person is “at your service.” Down to line eleven of the poem, the white English of the educators is presented as a soulless, cold, sterile linguistic instrument. Language shapes human consciousness, as the speaker continues to elaborate, but with a sudden twist. In line twelve there is a caesura, after 30

Christian Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African / Caribbean Dub Poetry (Cross / Cultures 10; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1993): 36. 31 Benjamin Zephaniah, “Speak,” in Zephaniah, City Psalms, 18.

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which the speaker juxtaposes his original, powerful, rhythmical, and musical English with that of white speakers. Referring to clichéd images of black English (“bloody tongue” or “Nubian tones”), he creates an associative cluster of primitivism, even animalism. Likewise, the speaker toys with clichés of black musicality and physicality – blacks are said to have “built-in vibes.” In the last line, the conclusion is reached in a sort of self-advertisement: blacks give whites music, vibrations, the untamed, while white people, often without being aware of it, soak it up through black music or generally through popular music, which had its origins in black music. In a similar manner, the second poem I have chosen, “Neighbours,” can be seen as an illustration of Elisabeth Bronfen’s remark about the patterns of white identity-formation: White identity is constructed by means of excluding the dark Other, by a particular blindness towards the Other’s specificity. This specificity can only come into focus by means of an appropriating semantics of threatening difference, of fascinating exoticism, of a retrospective nostalgia projecting authenticity.32

“Neighbours“ illustrates this by creating a critical incident. It is about a black person moving into a white neighbourhood. The speaker first weighs the responses he would have to expect – prejudices, fear, even hatred. Then he turns the argument around. “Neighbours” I am the type you are supposed to fear Black and foreign Big and dreadlocks An uneducated grass eater. I talk in tongues I chant at night I appear anywhere, I sleep with lions And when the moon gets me I am a Wailer. I am moving in Next door to you So you can get to know me,

32 “Weiße Identität konstituiert sich durch den Ausschuß des dunklen Anderen, durch spezifische Blindheit gegenüber dessen Eigenheit, die nur vermittels einer vereinnahmenden Semantik der bedrohlichen Fremdheit, des faszinierenden Exotismus, der nostalgisch projizierten Authentizität in den Blick treten kann” (tr. L. Volkmann); Bronfen & Marius, “Hybride Kulturen,” 5.

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You will see my shadow In the bathroom window, My aromas will occupy Your space, Our ball will be in your court. How will you feel? You should feel good You have been chosen. I am the type you are supposed to love Dark and mysterious Tall and natural Thinking, tea total. I talk in schools I sing on TV I am in the papers, I keep cool cats And when the sun is shining I go Carnival.33

Again, this is a poem with a twist. First, the black speaker puts himself inside the thoughts of his future white neighbours, recounting the white horizon of expectation. Here, again, he uses hyperbole, which belongs to the categories of the foreign, exotic, and primitive as mentioned in the quotation from Bronfen above. “I sleep with lions” is a poignant image, or “I am a Wailer,” a reference to animalism, but also the reggae group “The Wailers.” And again, in this poem an unexpected turn of thought takes place, accompanied by a shift in perspective. This happens in the black speaker’s apostrophizing of his white neighbour, the almost haughty gesture of congratulating him, “You have been chosen.” Now, becoming the neighbour of the black speaker, he is among the elect, with the opportunity to be exposed to a black lifestyle characterized by natural feelings, authenticity, enjoyment, and ‘coolness’ – the tables are turned. This poem plays with a typical postcolonial theme: in this poem, Man Friday turns out to be Robinson’s teacher and / or lifestyle consultant. Thus the quest for identity in the poetry of Benjamin Zephaniah always entails an active, reader-oriented element, aimed at a white readership, with the black artist fashioning himself as a partner, if not guide, in this quest for identities. Or, to put it differently: this quest for identity, as presented by Zephaniah, can be interpreted as a testing of human and ethnic interstices, of

33

Benjamin Zephaniah, “Neighbours,” in Zephania, Propa Propaganda (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1996): 42.

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the ‘spaces in-between’, which, as Homi Bhabha has phrased it so admirably, might help us “to emerge as others of our selves.”34

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Antor, Heinz, & Klaus Stierstorfer, ed. English Literature in International Context (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Bhabha, Homi K. “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,” in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis & Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000): 133–42. ——. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 206–209. Borgmeier, Raimund, Herbert Grabes & Andres H. Jucker, ed. Anglistentag 1997 Giessen: Proceedings (Trier: W V T , 1998). Bredella, Lothar. “Intercultural Understanding between Relativism, Ethnocentrism and Universalism: Preliminary Considerations for a Theory of Intercultural Understanding,” in Anglistentag Eichstätt: Proceedings, ed. Günther Blaicher & Brigitte Glaser (Tübingen: Carl Niemeyer, 1994). Bronfen, Elisabeth, & Benjamin Marius. “Hybride Kulturen. Einleitung zur angloamerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte,” in Hybride Kulturen: Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius & Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997): 1–30. Burnett, Paula. “Introduction” to The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Burnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): vii–xix. Dennis, Ferdinand, & Naseem Khan, ed. Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000). Gadamer, Hans–Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960; Tübingen: Mohr, 1986). Gilroy, Paul. ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Routledge, 1993). Green, Jonathon. Them: Voices from the Immigrant Community in Contemporary Britain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990). hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist – Thinking Black (London: Sheba Feminist, 1989).

34 Homi K. Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 209.

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Hosain, Attia. “Deep Roots, New Language,” in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, ed. Ferdinand Dennis & Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000): 19–28. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. “Inglan Is a Bitch,” in The Arnold Anthology of British and Irish Literature in English, ed. Robert Clark & Thomas Healy (London: Arnold, 1997): 1569. Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden,” in Selected Poetry, ed. Craig Raine (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 127. Moore–Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London & New York: Verso, 1997). Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Duineser Elegien” (1923), http://www-lyrikrilke.de/elegien _texte.html [accessed 13 March 2007]. Römer, Christine. Us and Them: Zur Einwanderungsproblematik in Großbritannien in den achtziger Jahren: Das Beispiel der Migranten aus dem karibischem Raum (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). Schäfer, Jürgen, ed. Commonwealth-Literatur (Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1981). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). Volkmann, Laurenz. “Universal Truths or Ethnic Peculiarities? On Tensions Inherent in the Reception of Post-Colonial and Minority Literature,” in Intercultural Encounters: Studies in English Literatures; Essays Presented to Rüdiger Ahrens on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Heinz Antor & Kevin Cope (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1999): 131–52. Zephaniah, Benjamin. “According to my mood,” in Zephaniah, City Psalms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1992): 25. ——. “Neighbours,” in Zephaniah, Propa Propaganda (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1996): 42. ——. “Speak,” in Zephaniah, City Psalms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1992): 18.

Useful Websites on Benjamin Zephaniah http://www.benjamin.zephaniah.com/ http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth105 http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/bios/benjamin_zephaniah.html

Selected Publications by Benjamin Zephaniah Inna Liverpool (Edinburgh: A K , 1992). City Psalms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1992). Propa Propaganda (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1996). Funky Chickens (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1997). Funky Turkeys C D (Elstree, Herfortshire: Audio Book & Music, 1997).

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Face (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Wicked World! (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 2000). Too Black, Too Strong (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2001). Gangsta Rap (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

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Stereotype, Prejudice, and Illusion in the Austral-Asian Otherworld D AVID S. L A B RECHE

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A U S T R A L I A N S has always been an Other, a double-edged metaphor for that which is both good and nurturing, and evil and devitalizing. An idyllic ‘Botany Bay’ for some, it was the point of final debarkation for many others who were transported there, by the harsh courts or even harsher living conditions in Europe. The bipolar image of a picturesque garden reminiscent of Eden and a desolate wasteland reminiscent of Hell has contributed to the development of a parallel ambiguity in the Australian sense of Self. The roots of this self-image reach back to the very beginning of British interest in the continent, but its most bittersweet fruit have ripened as Australian growth has been cut free of its old and rotting colonial trellis. Australians have taken to reconsidering past attitudes concerning the country’s most important demographic groups – whites, Aboriginals, and Asians – and there has been special interest in the contact between white Australians and the peoples of the wider region which would be postcolonial Australia’s own, the Asia-Pacific. David Tacey notes how Australians have taken nothing for granted as they re-explore the meanings of the Other, the ‘abnormal’, and the ‘aberrant’, and come up with corresponding revelations about “resonances, depths, and insecurities about ‘normal’ people.”1 These probes and re-evaluations have perhaps been pursued too enthusiastically, for, he writes, the “once-simple topic of national and personal identity has been exploded, everything is complex and complicated, refracted, distorted. Otherness has hit us with enormous cultural force; we are awash in 1

HE WORLD FOR WHITE

David J. Tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformations in Australia (North Blackburn, Victoria: HarperCollins, 1995): 114.

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a sea of otherness.”2 Too much otherness can surely leave little space for selfness, leading to a malady Tacey diagnoses as the ‘postmodern condition’, and for which he prescribes a radical “attempt to discover, perhaps perversely, the ‘joy’ within this confusion and ontological chaos.”3 This essay will briefly outline how Australians have historically learned to shield themselves from the contradictions of their national and individual identities, and how three contemporary Australian writers have been turning those defence mechanisms back on their wielders, in effect putting Tacey’s method to the test in the disputed land that had once so neatly separated Self and Other. The Austral-Asian Otherworld which the essay proposes is this opened-up middle ground between white Australians and the peoples of South and Southeast Asia. It is not so much a geographical place. Although the novels discussed here are set mainly in India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the Otherworld could just as easily be in Darwin or Sydney or any location where Australians and Asians can come together. It is, more precisely, a psychological region, simultaneously Paradise and Hell, where Australians and Asians not only see each other as Others but recognize the Other within themselves and the Self within the Others, where the pat trust in their uninspiring concepts of selfness and otherness becomes suspect, and a switch or merging of attitudes – with the consequential reorientation (or loss) of perspective – becomes possible or even inevitable. This investigation of prejudices, stereotypes, and illusions is limited to the point of view of white Australians as exemplified in the Asian novels of Blanche d’Alpuget, Gerard Lee, and C.J. Koch. This limitation, however, generates an apparent faux pas in the use of generic terms, thereby committing the very sort of orientalist indiscretions that belong to the old colonialist world-view being discussed: namely, the use of the non-differentiating adjective ‘Asian’ to refer to the many peoples of various racial, ethnic, and religious origins of this region. This is unfortunate and yet not without purpose. Non-differentiation of the Other is a fundamental tool in maintaining the barrier between Self and Other. When the Other is that which is unknown and non-defined, the Self becomes automatically well-known and well-defined. Whatever the Self is, should, can or cannot be, the Other can be applied as its foil. The ‘Asian’ stereotype is especially apt among those who “would recognize the absurdity of talking about ‘European’ ones,” for they are fed not just by “unfamiliarity with the signals”4 but also by ‘deliberate reserve’, leaving 2

Tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformations in Australia, 114. Edge of the Sacred: Transformations in Australia, 115. 4 Peter Fitzpatrick, “Asian Stereotypes in Recent Australian Plays,” Australian Literary Studies 12.1 (May 1985): 36. 3

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‘Asian’ characters typically inscrutable and inarticulate. At the same time, the opposite of non-differentiation, a hypersensitivity to differentiation, might be defended by de-orientalizing critics as more open and compassionate towards the Other, but, by stressing divergences, can also be a force opposed to bringing Self and Other to reconciliation. Even the popular compromise of hybridity is more useful for examining than for resolving these problems. D’Alpuget, Lee, and Koch aggressively manipulate these antagonistic tendencies, all of which belong to the Australian cultural toolbox, and show how differentiation, non-differentiation, and semi-differentiation are all built upon prejudice, stereotype, and illusion. Generic terms such as ‘Asian’ lack real meaning, yet whether they should be or are avoided are separate questions. Such terms reflect the white Australian tendency toward non-differentiation of ‘Asia’, and will therefore be used here except when differentiation is appropriate. The original impressions of what was known as Terra Australis Incognita were that it was a uniquely pristine laboratory where the earliest eighteenthcentury English voyages confirmed the pre-Darwinian system of natural science in which each species of life occupied a specific place in a long, unbroken though incompletely described, natural chain. Richard White describes how the zoophytes were found to occupy the position linking animals and plants, and the Aborigines were seen to be the link between the apes and the highest order in the chain, men. Western Europeans, not incidentally, were considered the very highest link in this natural chain. Asians, along with Africans, American Indians, and Eastern Europeans, apparently were somewhere in-between.5 A century after James Cook explored the eastern coast of the continent which he named ‘Botany Bay’ in 1770, Charles Darwin would redirect the thinking of Western science, but in the popular Western conception Australia remained a land that, apparently due to its sheer distance from Europe, defied expectations. Richard White writes: Much play was made of the idea that in Australia there was an inversion of natural laws, an old idea but one that was popularised by Australia’s zoological oddities. So Australia was the land which was upside-down, topsyturvy, where it was day when it should have been night, summer when it should have been winter, where, it was said, grass grew on trees and rivers flowed uphill. It was an idea that continued to have a certain popular appeal for long afterwards.6

5

Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (The Australian Experience 3; Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981): 1–8. 6 White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, 9.

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As scientific interest waned, Botany Bay suddenly took on importance as a penal colony, and the chaotic image lost its whimsicality. It was now the land of depravity, of monstrous convicts and, worse, wardens, where ‘virtue became vice and vice virtue’. Deterring crime with the threat of extraordinarily severe punishment seemed easier than actually catching lawbreakers, and so this hell-on-earth image was vigorously disseminated to the public: The lowest element of British society was to be cast out among the lowest form of human life; unnatural vice was to be exiled as far from home as possible, where nature itself was inverted and nakedness knew no shame; thieves were to be condemned to a land where there was nothing at all of value.7

The penal colony survived only to 1840, but the image of a place of hopeless ostracism would not disappear with a change in the law, and the West would continue to use Australia as a repository for its unwanted populations until well after World War Two. The settler colony, opened in the first half of the nineteenth century, rehabilitated Australia in a backhanded sort of way. As an ‘outpost of civilization’, Australia was neither part of the world which its Eastern geographic setting suggested nor very much empowered by its eurocentric culture and politics. Still, the settlers learned to cherish living on their far end of the globe, for it offered them otherwise unattainable land and opportunity, even if it did not give a clear sense of who they were or where they belonged. When Lewis Carroll first published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1863, he has Alice pondering many of the enduring mysteries that distress the Australian self-consciousness – questions about place, identity, and appropriate behaviour – as she falls helplessly through the rabbit hole: “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The antipathies, I think –“ (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) “but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?”8

Alice knew that she was heading to an Otherworld. She also sensed that she was an Otherchild. Australians, who call themselves Ozzies and their country Oz, are hardly any different, and, like Alice, it seems to suit them. The difference began to matter at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Australia gained dominion status. A growing sense of identity distinguished them from 7

White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, 16–17. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Oxford U P , 1971): 11. 8

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the British and led to ‘The Coming Man’. Hardier, fitter, more democratic and courageous than his Old World cousins could ever have become, this idealized bush worker was uniquely worthy of the destiny that the most moral and hardworking men and women should inherit this, the strangest and hardest and most promising of continents. Nature was showing her paradisiacal side again, apparently creating a colonial archetype that would be the inheritor of the already weakening British hero who had in his youth created an empire out of the savage world. The new hero was nevertheless steeled in the forge of otherness – neither Aboriginal nor Asian, he now was becoming less British. Australia also continued to renew its Western conviction that nature is evil, and it was only logical that a continent where the forces of nature were strongest would be the harbour of the most evil of all. Australia was always either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. It was a land of no return which could entice a man with its promise, and then destroy not just what he had built but his spirit as well. Settlers poured in but never seemed able to satisfy the needs of transforming the vast continent into an efficient, productive member of the Empire, much less one capable of earning its dream of true independence. There were strong aspirations to re-create Western society without the indelible blemishes found in England and Europe. The stiff “determination to keep out an Asian minority for social and cultural reasons was because they did not fit the ideal plan Aussies had for their society,”9 and yet the economic ambitions that seemed to lie at the end of the new society were unavoidably dependent on Asian labour. Being so far from England, Australia was inevitably bound to Asia. To some, this was highly regrettable. To others, Australia and Asia were, in any case, just one Otherworld. Two things reassured white Australia’s sense of place and identity, for better and for worse: the British Empire and the tenets of orientalism. Imperial limitations on direct contact with the East kept Asians out of Australia, but also kept Australians out of Asia. The Empire’s naval and military forces protected Australia, and made clear that Australia was not Asia, but also kept Australia dependent politically, economically, and psychologically on the policymakers in distant London. The Empire also encouraged Australians to look at the East as a zone “of retardation, as a potential menace to the world which Westerners seemed divinely destined to make over in their own image.”10 White Australians bought into orientalist prejudices, which existed only to prove the superiority of Western man and civilization, and which justi-

9

Werner Levy, Australia’s Outlook on Asia (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1958): 15. Yasmine Gooneratne, “Asia and the West: Perceptions of Asia in Western Literature,” in Text – Culture – Reception: Cross-Cultural Aspects of English Studies, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens & Heinz Antor (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992): 339. 10

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fied the ethnocentric contrast which systematized Australia’s diverse population. If the Chinese were innately dirty, diseased, conservative, and backward, then white Australians must just as well be clean, healthy, democratic, and progressive.11 Depicting the Indian male as “exotic, gentle, feminised: if at all masculine, a boy, rather than a man” conveniently supported the Western conviction that “the East was weak, justifying Western colonialism over Asia.”12 To fulfil their function, however, the orientalist stereotypes had to be just as polarized as Australia’s view of itself. Ouyang Yu’s series of articles – concerning perceptions of Chinese immigrant workers (1993), Chinese women (1994), Chinese invasions (1995), and the views popularized in the nineteenth century by the influential Australian journal, the Bulletin (1995) – confirms the versatility of orientalist imagery in Australian literature. Asian philosophies and religions were lauded for their wonder and wisdom, but those who celebrated them were barbarians. Some Asian men were elegant, cultured, and handsome but also effeminate and frivolous, and the rest were animalistic sexual predators. The women were either far more practical than the men but tyrannical, or else they were beautiful, quiet, and willing companions to Western men. Picturing Asians as vindictive and vicious reassured Australians who had enough difficulty with their own severe Christian virtues. Asian thieves were greedy and cunning cowards while whites fitted the heroic image of unselfish, resourceful, and courageous robbers; and the archetypal image of the Asian – comically incapable of walking without bouncing, of talking without exchanging his Rs and Ls, or of wearing his hair without a childish pigtail – only supported the self-image of Australian settlers as civilized, cultured, and mature. And yet, projecting these images on Asians was a trap for Australians, who remained somehow less worthy than the British who ruled over them and the rest of the Empire. The orientalist prejudices forever reminded Australian men of the masses of Asians lusting over Australia’s women and land, and its women of their responsibility to ‘populate or perish’. The Australian Self was clearly defined only because the Asian Other was such a clear antithesis, and the Austral-Asian Otherworld had become a no-man’s land which was Other to Asians and Australians alike, and existed only to keep Australians and Asians apart. When the Empire retreated from the Asia-Pacific, a long and troublesome process that took up the first half of the twentieth century, the foundations of

11

Ouyang Yu, “The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes: 1888 to 1901,” Southerly 55.2 (Winter

1995): 138. 12

Cheng Khoo Gaik, “Multivocality, Orientalism and New Age Philosophy in Turtle Beach,” Hecate 22.2 (1996): 40.

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the eurocentric view caved in. Australians turned for a time to the U S A , but finally realized that their national interests were unique to themselves, and that, while their natural place was not quite East, nor was it entirely West. It was just a question of figuring out who the Australians were. The phenomenon of asianization was an attempt to respond to this question, furthering the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual ties with what was now called ‘The Near North’, a term that signalled a new optimism in Australian confidence to deal with its own concerns as well as a shift from eurocentrism to australocentrism. Australians felt sympathy for independence movements in India and Southeast Asia, and identified with the region’s decolonization, but the love affair was difficult from the start. Fledgling Asian democracies resembled old-style dictatorships; Asian capitalism ignored the roles of the free market and the middle class; and the new neighbours all looked a lot like the atheistic Communists, who emboldened the ‘yellow menace’ by bleeding it red. Asia was still Australia’s favourite Other, but Australia was at last capable of defining the terms of the otherness. The ramparts between the two had finally been breached. Businessmen and politicians worked the region, and the cultural community involved itself in de-orientalism, a part of the push for multiculturalism and political correctness that endeavoured to rewrite, or just forget, the whole orientalist dogma. But asianization soon provoked a backlash. After all, Australia’s popular knowledge of Asia was still deeply founded on orientalist imagery. Asianization did not change any of the realities behind the perceptions of an aggressive and overpopulated Asia looming over a sound but listless Australia, and the stereotypes of Asia were still needed for defining Australia. Some Australian writers have exploited the social and political repercussions of renewed nationalistic feelings to produce texts that resemble the racist works popular before the multicultural movement, but others have found in the clash between attitudes the tools to explore the new accesses to the Otherworld. Lee, d’Alpuget, and Koch have sometimes been taken for the former, but their novels indicate just how powerful the combination of antagonistic perceptions can be. In Troppo Man (1990), Gerard Lee has explored the de-orientalizing images projected about Asia to the Australian public; in this case, of the Balinese, who are living in perfect harmony with the earth on their island-cathedral.13 The protagonist’s whole existence is a bulwark of psycho-defensive, culture-factory stereotypes so overwrought that it is crumbling under its own 13

Gerard Lee, Troppo Man (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1990): 96. Further page references are in the main text, with the abbreviation TM.

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weight. Matthew Walker travels to Bali to find the true meaning of life, which he is convinced will confirm his preconceptions about both the richness of the Balinese and the destitution of the Australian cultures. He anticipates “one of the world's most refined and spiritual cultures,” but is confronted with a Bali that has been “corrupted totally” (TM 3) by the rampant tourism that feeds off orientalist stereotypes and of which he is a self-denying yet enthusiastic participant. Matthew is so closed-minded that he ignores the realities that would prove wrong his views about Bali, Australia, and himself, and searches ever deeper for some elusive proof that he is right. The carefree surfer-tourist Pete, meanwhile (whose only preconception of Bali is that it has good waves), awakens to some truths that really are to be found there – for example, that life can be more than beer and surfing yet still retain its humanity, already quite an accomplishment for an Australian man in his early twenties. But it is in Matthew and his extreme ascetic resistance to reality that Gerard Lee demonstrates how the confrontation of stereotypes in the AustralAsian Otherworld might lead to cathartic, spiritual renewal. Matthew resembles Shiva, the god entrusted with distributing the world’s creative energy. Shiva is the quintessential ascetic, however, and when he gets frustrated with his Others, he goes into a deep trance, holding back his energy until all creation is threatened with extinction. The other gods send Parvati, the Great Mother Goddess and Perfect Wife, to coax him to release his pentup energy, thus saving the universe. Matthew Walker fully expects that his own mounting frustrations will incinerate him, until a woman is sent to him to draw out his physical and emotional energy. He was hoping for a goddess, too, but when he realizes she is but a village woman, an occasional prostitute, and not even native Balinese, yet still capable of accomplishing Parvati’s task, he is delivered from his self-delusions, and begins forming a more humane and flexible view of himself and his world. Gerard Lee’s black comedy was well accepted by the critical community for its use of stereotypes, but de-orientalizing critics have attacked other writers for exhuming orientalist prejudices. In her Asian novels Monkeys in the Dark (1983) and Turtle Beach (1983), Blanche d’Alpuget explores how the individual manages to deny complicity in the inconsistent stereotypical prejudices by claiming to see Asia from both sides. D’Alpuget also recognizes how contemporary society has been taught to suppress its stereotypical representations of the East as xenophobic. This suppression is powerless against xenophobia, and may even worsen it, yet it is an unspoken tenet of asianization. D’Alpuget’s method is different, meant to expose the latent stereotypes to the reality of the world. Her privileged and isolated expatriate characters, and the occasional ordinary tourist, give expression to various stereotypical sentiments. Asia itself is reduced to an array of photos and sound bites of the

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type known from the journals of Marco Polo, the stories of Rudyard Kipling, and the latest issues of coffee-table travel magazines. This subtle expression of cultural and racial prejudice seems inevitable at first view, but, while it gathers some critical disfavour, d’Alpuget wants to lull her readers into a sense of normality. D’Alpuget lets her readers share gleefully in her horror stories of humans dehumanizing each other and themselves in the Asian setting. Such stories prove that Asia and Asians are brutal. Yet even the Australians in Asia, with whom her readership can identify and who seem to be fighting against the forces of brutality, must finally also be seen as weak, manipulative, prejudiced, and dispassionate: i.e. brutal. The reader has been secretly enjoying the neo-orientalist stereotypes, but suddenly finds himself to be the dupe. He ought to recognize himself in the weak, prejudiced characters, and detect the psychological barriers thrown up by his own latent stereotypes. D’Alpuget gives the reader the same choice that she gives her protagonists: either to retreat from the psychological confrontation for the comfort and safety of the old social order, as does Judith Wilkes of Turtle Beach, or to struggle towards a new consciousness, as does Alexandra Wheatfield of Monkeys in the Dark. De-orientalizers have criticized d’Alpuget for reviving old orientalist stereotypes, and they similarly find Christopher J. Koch’s novels particularly nostalgic for the old imperial order and generally disparagement of Asians, women, and even short people. Koch’s Otherworld, however, is truly where heaven and hell, so long held apart in the Western consciousness, come crashing together, and where his characters have no choice but to confront and challenge their stereotypes. Koch is concerned with the preoccupation with illusions that enables the West to ignore anything other than a superficial sense of reality. The Western world, he believes, has traded its central system of belief for an illusion it has been fed in film, television, and literature.14 The problem is not with the world of imagination, but in the delusion that comes from a “permanent attraction to illusion.”15 Across the Sea Wall’s Robert O’Brien suffers a physical and emotional breakdown following the disappointment of his ego-driven relationship with the mother-lover-destroyer figure Ilsa Kalnins. In The Year of Living Dangerously, Billy Kwan’s crisis follows the realization that his heroes Sukarno and Guy Hamilton, on whose coattails he has pinned his own ambitious ego, cannot live up to his superman fantasies about them.16 Hamilton, meanwhile, is overwhelmed by inhibitions born of his fixations on the past 14 15 16

Michael Hulse, “Christopher Koch in Conversation,” Quadrant 29.6 (June 1985): 21–22. Hulse, “Christopher Koch in Conversation,” 23. Hulse, “Christopher Koch in Conversation,” 21–22.

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and on seeing himself in the context of a James Bond novel. Mike Langford in Highways to a War, the man of light who is usually so calm, collected, and capable at analyzing the psychological games that others play, is catastrophically unable to get on with his life after the fall of Cambodia and the loss of his girlfriend to the Khmer Rouge. Koch’s protagonists are burdened by their illusions of the Other and of themselves, but are also armed with a bag of mythical tools formed of Koch’s eclectic Otherworld pretexts, from Alice’s Wonderland, Orwell’s dystopia, and the Gaelic land of faery, to the sacred worlds of the Gospels, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad Gita. Once in the Otherworld, when Koch’s characters find that their expectations no longer hold true, and that nature itself fails to obey its own laws, they must either force their world to fit the old stereotypes or else jettison the stereotypes and reconsider how the old myths can fit the new circumstances. It is perhaps in The Year of Living Dangerously that Koch best expresses his metaphor of moving between worlds, when he draws on the wayang kulit, the Javanese Shadow Theatre, where leather puppets project shadows on a screen. Koch begins by letting his readers and protagonists watch the epic performances from the side of the puppet master, but this is the angle from which one experiences only the mechanical workings of this natural world. Koch then moves to the other side of the screen, where one can experience through the shadows the magical and divine events of the heavenly realms. The novel is indeed concerned with how the protagonists are caught in the maelstrom of the battle between Communists and Muslims for power in the newly independent Indonesia, but the reader must cross to the other side of the screen to perceive the truer battle in the soul of Billy Kwan and the spiritual awakening of Kwan’s counterpart, Guy Hamilton. By moving from one side of the screen to the other, from one world to another, and being given the opportunity in the Otherworld to view both sides at once, Koch’s characters are allowed to see how the stereotypes obscure their perception of reality. They also learn that all earthly conflicts – their own included – are manifestations of the eternal cosmic struggle between the order of dharma and the chaos of adharma. The choices they make, therefore, have universal relevance. Koch is delving into the Brahmanic concept of the Self, that all natural phenomena are manifestations of the formless, timeless soul, the true Self, the ultimate, unknowable, and unique reality. The natural universe exists through the medium of maya, illusion, the vocabulary of all creation. And yet the illusion of maya is reality. Rejecting any aspect of this metaphoric, natural reality

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as an Other, then, amounts to rejecting the reality of the transcendental Self.17 What Koch’s characters must reject, consequently, is their inhibiting cultural baggage, which creates the distinction between their Selves and their Others and keeps the two apart. Koch describes his characters as living on the edge of a volcano. The description, which evokes the paradise/ hell duality, would also be appropriate for d’Alpuget’s and Lee’s figures. Many slip into the volcano, but others find that having stood on the edge and seen both worlds at once has freed them from the delusions that have clouded their view of the world. Prejudice, stereotype, and illusion form a substantial part of any individual’s worldview. Without the basis for analysis and interpretation that these preconceptions give, dealing with the world would be a far more cumbersome task. And yet, as Lee, d’Alpuget, and Koch indicate, the assistance of biases comes at a high cost. In appearing to be a reality that they are not, these preconceptions must be constantly reaffirmed and reconstructed, for there will always be new information that contradicts the ever-deepening crater of delusion. At some point, profound self-deception becomes the only means left of seeing the Self, and by then one is not just on but over the edge. Until white Australians manage to resolve these problems born of their visions of Self and Other and come to terms with those they consider the Others in their land – Aboriginals and Asians – they are not likely to come to terms with themselves and will remain trapped in an infernal cycle of reformulating their national myth, sometimes embracing their Asian and Aboriginal neighbours, other times shrinking from them in fear. It is not an unusual problem in today’s world, but David Tacey contends that Australia, given its rich mix of Western, Asian, and Aboriginal mythological resources, possesses a unique opportunity for cultural and spiritual development of the sort that defines humanity.18 In view of Australia’s political and social engagement in the Asia-Pacific region, and of such cultural works of which the novels of Gerard Lee, Blanche d’Alpuget, and Christopher J. Koch are just a few examples, there is every reason to suspect that Australia is developing a new, special way of perceiving its world. If Australia does not succumb to internal and external conflicts, it could well have the extraordinary opportunity to fuse the antagonistic elements of its paradise and hell into a complete and truer Australian sense of Self, one that allows the sense of Other to flourish and be understood as another face of the selfsame and multifaceted reality.

17

Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (Bollingen Series

X X V I ; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1969): 575. 18

Tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformations in Australia, 112.

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WORKS CITED Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (1865 and 1872; London: Oxford U P , 1971). d’Alpuget, Blanche. Monkeys in the Dark (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1983). ——. Turtle Beach (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1983). Fitzpatrick, Peter. “Asian Stereotypes in Recent Australian Plays,” Australian Literary Studies 12.1 (May 1985): 35–46. Gaik, Cheng Khoo. “Multivocality, Orientalism and New Age Philosophy in Turtle Beach,” Hecate 22.2 (1996): 31–48. Gooneratne, Yasmine. “Asia and the West: Perceptions of Asia in Western Literature,” in Text – Culture – Reception: Cross-Cultural Aspects of English Studies, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens & Heinz Antor (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992): 331–49. Hulse, Michael. “Christopher Koch in Conversation,” Quadrant 29.6 (June 1985): 17–25. Koch, Christopher J. Across the Sea Wall (London: Angus & Robertson, rev. ed. 1982). ——. Crossing the Gap: A Novelist’s Essays (London: Hogarth, 1987). ——. The Year of Living Dangerously (London: Random House, 1995). ——. Highways to a War (London: Michelin, 1996). Lee, Gerard. Troppo Man (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1990). Levy, Werner. Australia’s Outlook on Asia (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1958). Tacey, David J. Edge of the Sacred: Transformations in Australia (North Blackburn, Victoria: HarperCollins, 1995). White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (The Australian Experience 3; Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981). Yu, Ouyang. “All the Lower Orders: Representations of the Chinese Cooks, Market Gardeners and Other Lower-Class People in Australian Literature from 1888 to 1988,” Kunapipi 15.3 (1993): 21–34. ——. “The Other Half of the ‘Other’: The Image of Chinese Women in Australian Fiction,” Australian & New Zealand Studies in Canada 11 (1994): 74–90. ——. “Australian Invention of Chinese Invasion: A Century of Paranoia. 1888–1988,” Australian Literary Studies 17.1 (1995): 74–83. ——. “The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes: 1888 to 1901,” Southerly 55.2 (Winter 1995): 130–43. Zimmer, Heinrich. Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (Bollingen Series X X V I ; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1969).

«•»

Desired Exotica Gendered Spaces in Queer West Indian Diasporic Fiction

S ISSY H ELFF

Either [the role of heterotopias] is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space […] as still more illusory. Or else […] their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as our is messy, ill constructed and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of general organisation of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias.1

1. Introduction

T

H E A B O V E L I N E S illustrate Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia: a simultaneous process of reflection and representation of real places which impinge on the creation and organization of real and imagined spaces. While pointing to the connection between social and imaginary spaces and an intertwined reception of both, Foucault moves a step further when he addresses the ambivalence of colonial imagination that to him echoes a longing for compensation on the side of the colonizers. In a way, this refers to the imaginary power of an orientalist mythmaking that was in great detail first addressed in Orientalism (1978) by the Palestinian critic Edward Said.2 Orientalist mythmaking, as a key concern in postcolonial studies, is often associated with exoticism, as in Robert Young’s important study Colonial De-

1

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces (1967): Heterotopias,” tr. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics

16.1 (Spring 1986): 27. 2

See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

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sire (1995).3 In his book, Young discusses the role of exoticism and desire within a theoretical framework of hybridity. Young is certainly right to see colonial ideologies and cultures as integral to exoticism and exoticist discourse. He is also right to point out the constructed nature of culture and its antithetical mode of operation – that “culture is never liable to fall into fixity, stasis or organic totalization,” but always “participates in a conflictual economy acting out the tension between sameness and difference, comparison and differentiation, unity and diversity, cohesion and dispersion, containment and subversion.”4 However stimulating and intriguing these ideas are, Young’s approach seems too ‘securely fixed’ in a colonial/ imperial–postcolonial nexus to be ready to analyze the ambivalences and complexities underlying modern West Indian (diasporic) worlds and societies. Certainly, this is also true with respect to West Indian (diasporic) literature, because many contemporary literary texts vividly fabricate imaginary lands beyond colonial/ postcolonial mediating processes. In Fear and Temptation (1989),5 Terry Goldie discusses another important dimension of exoticism, when he analyzes orientalist discourse, exotica, and desire against the backdrop of the semiotic field of the indigene as represented in the literatures of the white dominions. Goldie is doubtless right in pointing out a ‘pervasive autogenesis’ of the image of the indigene which was, and to some degree still is, semiotically controlled by the ‘invaders’. This image is textually defined through an extended intertextuality that works diachronically and synchronically on both a national and an international level.6 While his study has its merits in addressing exoticism within national contexts, his critical agenda restricts itself to a “strategic” textual and literary realm in which the indigene represents the “symbol of national essence” in discourse.7 Read in this light, Goldie runs the risk of generating a static concept of culture that remains untouched by and effectively isolated from the social world. In this way, Goldie’s reflection on discursive worlds does not endorse the pursuit of the connection between the literary and extraliterary world, so that writing 3 See Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 4 Young, Colonial Desire, 53. 5 See Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, Montreal & London: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1989). 6 See Chapter One of Fear and Temptation for an introduction to Goldie’s methodological design and how he seeks to apply the vocabulary of cultural semiotics to examine the commodities that characterize ‘indigeneity’ in literary texts such as sexual temptation in connection with the fear of violence and mystical connection to nature, etc. 7 See Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 3–18.

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and literature could be understood in terms of modern social and cultural practices.8 The connection between political ‘worldliness’ and discourse is convincingly established in Graham Huggan’s discussion of exoticism and desire in his fine book the Postcolonial Exotic (2001). Here, Huggan argues that the colonizer’s need for compensation manifested itself in an overwhelming desire to domesticate, incorporate, and conquer the exotic. Thus, exoticism becomes in one way “a control mechanism of transcultural translation.”9 However, to fully incorporate the exotic and to ascribe a familiar meaning to the formerly unfamiliar neutralizes one’s own excitement and therefore represents the death of any desire. On the other hand, the sensual experience to desire the undesirable – the exotic – easily turns in a matter of disgust and anxiety. This exoticist dynamic works in multiple directions while serving different needs on an exoticist rhetorical continuum: The exoticist production of otherness is dialectical and contingent; at various times and in different places, it may serve conflicting ideological interests, providing the rationale for projects of rapprochement and reconciliation, but legitimising just as easily the need for plunder and violent conquest. Exoticism, in this context, might be described as a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity. Within this circuit, the strange and the familiar, as well as the relation between them, may be recoded to serve different, even contradictory, political needs and ends.10

To locate such a continuum, however, in a discourse that is rooted in a centre/ periphery scheme becomes more and more problematic. If, as Huggan and other critics suggest, exoticism has arrived at the ‘centre’, then not only is the location of exoticism hard to determine but the imaginary, as such, is in flux. This view is frequently echoed in postcolonial fiction that addresses the emerging friction between being in constant flux and being simultaneously connected to a specific geographical and historical framework. These narratives, hence, frequently reflect societal norms and values against the backdrop of a particular moment in history, while the narrative techniques utilized point to an almost limitless creative horizon.11 Such ‘radical’ diasporic fabrication might be referred to as transcultural imagination.12 8

For a discussion of writing as a cultural practice, see the first two chapters of my Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Writing (forthcoming). 9 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (London: Routledge, 2001): 14. 10 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 13. 11 James Clifford has made a most influential contribution to the understanding of culture and migrancy in the global age: “This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, migrant labour, immigration, urban sprawl. More and more people ‘dwell’

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2. Migration, Societal Transformation, and West Indian (Diasporic) Imagination Certainly, the connection between sociopolitical transformation and imagination demarcates the centre of contemporary literary and cultural studies, while the precise bonds between the social world and the realms of the imaginary often remain hard to grasp. Obviously, literature does not merely reflect the social world but creates and presents multiple worlds, worlds that at times offer ‘buffer zones’ where uncompromising truth might translate into written words. In the context of a distinctively West Indian imagination, David Dabydeen and Nana Wilson–Tagoe make the point that “the common experience of colonisation, displacement, slavery, indenture, emancipation and nationalism has shaped most West Indian environments, creating a unity of experience that can be identified as particularly West Indian. West Indian literature is in the main, a product of this experience.”13 While the colonial heritage has become a major theme in West Indian (diasporic) writing and criticism, some authors started discovering migrancy – in the sense of travelling-to-find-work – as their literary subject in the 1950s.14 However, at first, some eminent intellectuals perceived this change of topics as a literary blind alley.15 Interestingly enough, it would not be long before migrancy turned into a major trope, no longer ignorable by authors and critics.16 In Great Britain, for inwith the help of mass transit, automobiles and airplanes […] Conversely, there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of ‘modern’ products, media, and power cannot be felt. An older topography and experience of travel is exploded. One no longer leaves home confident of finding something radically new, another time or space. Difference is encountered in the adjoining neighbourhood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth. […] ‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matter of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt.” Clifford, “Introduction: The Pure Products Go Crazy,” in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988): 13–14. 12 For a detailed discussion of the thematic and aesthetic dimensions of transcultural imagination in literature, see Helff, Unreliable Truths. 13 David Dabydeen & Nana Wilson–Tagoe, The Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature (Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo, 1987): 13. 14 George Lamming’s novel The Emigrants (1954) and Sam Selvon’s London novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) represent early literary works dealing with experiences of migration and deterritorialization. 15 See, for example, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Sir Galahad and the Islands,” Bim 25 (1957): 8–16. 16 For a discussion of migration as a trope within Black British writing, see in particular Chapter Six “‘Going Back Home’ – eine Antwort auf die Migration?” of Sissy Helff, Die Erfahrung der Migration in der Black British Frauenliteratur (Frankfurt: Sulimma, 1999).

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stance, this development stimulated the emergence of the vibrant field of Black British literature.17 Although nobody could foresee the upcoming and never-ending migration flows from the Caribbean to the West, and how these movements would eventually permeate West Indian literature, it is interesting to note that some Caribbean authors already perceived themselves as cosmopolitan in those early days.18 To some extent, however, this shift paved the way for another very programmatic move, a progressively open approach to gendered identities and queer19 and gay life-worlds. Indeed, this is notably reflected in contemporary West Indian literature as well.20 In the light of this statement, it is important to keep in mind the fact that since the late 1980s an increasing number of literary texts have been published that depict gay and queer identities and experiences. Like earlier West Indian diasporic women’s literature,21 contemporary West Indian queer literature as well as literature from the diaspora concentrates on the representation of the domestic sphere and its public/ private

17

For a detailed discussion of the emergence of Black British literature and its thematic framework, see Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Ohio: Ohio State U P , 2004); Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Susanne Reichel, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: W V T , 2002); and Helff, Die Erfahrung der Migration in der Black British Frauenliteratur. 18 See C.L. Innes, “Wintering: Making Home in Britain,” in Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto, 1995): 21–34. 19 Annamarie Jagose provides the following definition of queer: “Once the term ‘queer’ was, at best, slang for homosexual, at worst a term of homophobic abuse. In recent years ‘queer’ has come to be used differently, sometimes as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identification and at other times to describe a nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies”; Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York U P , 1996): 1. For a detailed discussion on the term queer in dissociation from homosexual, lesbian or gay, see Chapters Seven and Eight of Jagose. 20 For further representations of gay and lesbian identity in Caribbean fiction, see Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984) and her No Telephone to Heaven (1987); H. Nigel Thomas’s Spirits in the Dark (1993); Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982); Patricia Powell’s novels My Dying Trial (1993), A Small Gathering of Bones (1994), and The Pagoda (1998); Makeda Silvera’s short-story collections Remembering G and other stories (1991) and Her Head a Village and other stories (1994), and Má–Ka’s Diasporic Juks (1997, ed. with Debbie Douglas, Courtnay McFarlane & Douglas Stewart); and Lawrence Scott’s Ballad for the New World and Other Stories (1992) and Witchbroom (1992), as well as Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1990), The Predicament of Or (2001), and He Drown She By the Sea (2005). 21 See, for example, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1983), Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), and Cliff’s Abeng.

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dichotomy, since this space serves as a testing ground where new subject positions are negotiated. The domestic space also features strongly in the acclaimed novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1990)22 by the Indo-Trinidadian, Irish-born, and now Canada-based writer-cum-video-artist23 Shani Mootoo. The fictional world evoked crystallizes against the backdrop of transnational and transsexual realms. This challenging literary scenery serves as a foil against which colonial fates as well as ethnic and gender experiences are narrated and negotiated. And, as if to add further complexity to this already convoluted content, the novel lays particular emphasis on modern conditions of migrancy together with sexual and sensual experiences of encountering ex / rotica. Probably thanks to her own background, Mootoo feels the need to translate experiences of ‘multi-sited’ belonging and emotional entanglement into her work. Thus, Cereus Blooms at Night vividly illustrates how multiple social and gendered spaces can be put on a fictitious map. This is also true for her second novel, He Drown She in the Sea (2005), and her collection of poetry The Predicament of Or (2001), both of which discuss migrancy and queerness within a world that is still struggling with its colonial and postcolonial past. In doing so, her work circumscribes a critical negotiation of exotica. It is not at all surprising that Cereus Blooms at Night is set in a mysterious world somewhere ‘in’ the Caribbean Sea – an island in the middle of nowhere, and a place whose infrastructure and daily life are to some degree still entangled in the island’s colonial legacy on the one hand and the more recent diasporic migratory movements on the other. Thus it comes as no great surprise that Tyler, the protagonist–narrator, should refer to life on the island as follows: You grow up here [in Lantanacamara] and you don’t realize almost everybody in this place wish they could be somebody or something else? That is the story of life here in Lantanacamara. (237–38)

The island symbolizes migrancy and transformation. The lantana bush and its ability to adapt to most soil types can be found almost everywhere in the world today. Its beautiful pink flowers, however, should not distract the viewers’ attention from the bush’s dangerous, thorny undergrowth. Reading 22

Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996). Further page references are in the main text. 23 Mootoo’s videos Lest I Burn (1991), English Lesson (1991), A Paddle and a Compass (1992; with Wendy Oberlander), Wild Woman in the Woods (1993), Her Sweetness Lingers (1994), and Güerita and Prietita (1996; with Kathy High) also deal with the construction of sexual identity, language, place, and displacement. See Heather Smyth, “Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 30.2 (April 1999): 146.

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the title in the light of this explanation, the island’s exotic beauty should be handled with care: not only can the flowering plant be easily destroyed, but an atavistic power might linger beneath its enchanting surface. Arrivals and departures structure all life on the island. Accordingly, the story sets in and the island’s micro-world starts to turn when the homodiegetic narrator Tyler arrives on the tiny Caribbean island in the fictional town of Paradise after spending several years in the Shivering Northern Wetlands24 in order to be educated as a nurse. Tyler, the transsexual narrator–protagonist, embodies a cosmopolitan multiperspective which serves as an intertextual reference to Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven (1987). In this text, Cliff creates the transsexual nurse Harry /Harriet, who becomes politically radical and fights for the poor and oppressed. Mootoo’s figure embodies similar ideologies. The crucial combination of Tyler’s sex, gender, and profession situates him on the margins of society. He is the only male nurse “not just in Paradise but in all of Lantanacamara” (6). One of his patients is the old and insane Mala Ramchandin, whose story is told in retrospect by Tyler in the course of the novel. Mala, the main female protagonist and the daughter of the Indian Chandin Ramchandin, is subjected to prolonged childhood abuse by her father until she finally murders her torturer. After killing him, Mala drags the body into the sewing room and barricades the house. She never lights a lantern in that house again, nor does she pass a night inside its walls. After this horrifying incident, Mala retreats into insanity. She starts living in the garden, which is shrouded in the odours of the decaying body. Finally, Mala is brought to the Alms House, where Tyler takes care of her and starts writing down her story. As we learn from this brief summary, Mootoo installs three main spaces against the background of the fabricated island setting. In the confrontation of these spaces and their metaphoric inscriptions – the ancestral house: the colonial, male-dominated society; the garden: the postcolonial lesbian world; and the Alms House: multicultural and transsexual/ queer space – characters face different threshold situations. And it is against this plot development that Cereus Blooms at Night stresses the importance of gender and sexuality on identity24

Although some critics read the Shivering Northern Wetlands as a symbol of Canada – see, for example, Coral Ann Howell, “A Shared Queerness: Liminal Identities in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” in Articulating Gender: An Anthology Presented to Professor Shirin Kudchedkar, ed. Anjali Bhelande & Mala Pandurang (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2000): 164 – my reading suggests that the Wetlands presumably symbolize Great Britain, since Tyler differentiates between those two places when he refers to Mala’s sister, who is supposed to be either “in the Wetlands or in Canada” (243; see also 249). Mala also receives a letter from her sister in which the latter writes: “Long ago I left one country and now am leaving this one [the Wetlands] too. I am crossing the ocean and going to Canada” (246).

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formation. This becomes obvious when the representation of racism is shifted into a side plot telling the tragic life of Mala’s father, the Reverend Ramchandin. However, when Mala finally moves out of her father’s house, the novel suggests that race and racism are subordinate to homophobia in Lantanacamara society. It is this paradigm shift (from xenophobia to homophobia) that illustrates Mootoo’s perspective on processes of individualization. Her move from racism to gender, which in fact underlies the whole novel, suggests the importance and even necessity of a critical shift in perspective. In the light of these statements, one could also read the novel on a metatextual level as a fictional description of transsexual and homosexual emancipation and individualization processes.25

3. Imaginary Social and Gendered Spaces Cereus Blooms at Night combines a fairytale plot with a gender and political tale, while challenging the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and imagination. Since literature generates its own version of reality, it offers the possibility of creating and representing an open space of possible worlds. Literature thereby points to existing restrictions and offers different ideas of what reality can be. As an autonomous medium, literature – in the sense of fiction – is far from being a self-sufficient medium.26 And though fiction sometimes very eagerly approaches reality in great detail, it always represents a sphere different from and separate from reality. Fiction interconnects individual perceptions of reality, be they literary, psychological, anthropological, social, political or geographical. Consequently, various people might perceive a space differently. In Raumsoziologie, published in 2001, the German sociologist Martina Löw elaborates on the connection between created space and the initial position of the agent: The possibilities of constituting spaces are dependent on the symbolic and material factors that are present in the given situation for action, on the disposition of those who act, on in- and exclusions organised through structures as well as physical potentials.27 25

For a ‘queer reading’ of Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, see Sissy Helff, “The Queer – A Part of Oneself: Representations of Queerness in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Muse India: The Literary E-Journal 7 (2006): online. http://www.museindia .com/showcont.asp?id=263 [accessed 15 July 2007]. 26 See Paul Goetsch, “Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen in der Literatur aus der Perspektive des Lesers,” in Grenzgänger zwischen Kulturen, ed. Monika Fludernik & Hans– Joachim Gerke (Würzburg: Ergon, 1999): 63–74. 27 “Die Möglichkeiten, Räume zu konstituieren, sind abhängig von den in einer Handlungssituation vorgefundenen symbolischen und materiellen Faktoren, vom Habitus der

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Consequently, one always has to perceive a created space, be it in literature or in other forms of articulation, in its meta-structure. Viewing literature from this perspective, the act of inventing and creating spaces interconnects common notions of perceived reality while at the same time shifting the boundary by fashioning a new and re-evaluated space. As stated above, Cereus Blooms at Night fashions three important spaces: the ancestral house, the garden, and the Alms House. A closer look reveals that the ancestral house is a space that is important traditionally, and the two others are constructed as alternative experimental grounds for devising new forms of gender relations, cultural living, and socializing. While the ancestral house symbolizes patriarchal society, the garden mirrors a kind of matriarchate, whiled the Alms House depicts a transforming society that is finally ready to overcome xenophobia as well as homophobia and to accept all forms of gender roles and relationships.

4. The Ancestral House: No Room for Desire The literary motif of the ancestral house is an often-used metaphor that comprises and interconnects different spheres: on the one hand, a private and individual space; on the other, a social collective space that often describes a zone of teaching and experimentation where many discussions and crises take place. Furthermore, the house is a metaphor reflecting the complicated social, racial, and sexual dimensions of the families involved. This notion is expressed in the plot and through the architecture of a house. While some protagonists (e.g., Tyler) leave their homes in order to invent their identities, others (e.g., Mala) stay at home, struggling with traditional ideas of racial, social, and gender identities. These attempts to experience the Self while challenging traditional gender roles and values of diasporic Asian communities in the Caribbean represent a modern self-reflexive way of perceiving identity and addressing xenophobia as well as, in Mootoo’s example, homophobia. The motif of the ancestral house is Mootoo’s starting-point for examining the colonial heritage in connection with class, race, gender, culture, place, and belonging. This becomes obvious when Tyler tells the story of Mala’s father, the Reverend Ramchandin, who was born in India and migrated with his parents to Lantanacamara, since “in Lantanacamara it was easier to slip out of caste” (26–27). Chandin Ramchandin, who was adopted by an English family, the Thoroughlys, when he was still a small boy, embodies the prototype of a colonial ‘assimilated’ subject who feels an “immense distaste for his backHandelnden, von den strukturell organisierten Ein- und Ausschlüssen sowie von den körperlichen Möglichkeiten” [tr. S. Helff], Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001): 272.

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ground and the people in it” (31–32). Consequently, Chandin studies every gesture and tries to copy every word of his white male Wetlandish friends (38). His mindset, deeply ingrained in a colonial value system, is echoed in the architecture of his house: Using the hardy wood, he [Chandin Ramchandin] contracted them [the workers] to build a two-storey house typical of modest dwellings in the area. The house stood atop mudra stilts. On the top floor was a drawing room, an ample kitchen and two bedrooms, the smaller shared by the two children and the larger by the adults. Porches ran on the front and back sides of the upper storey, each with a stairway leading to the ground. Between the bedrooms was a doorway leading down an enclosed stairway, the only access to a storage space that occupied a quarter of the downstairs, commonly known as the sewing room, whether or not it was used as such. The other three-quarters was open air. At home Chandin, who took no interest in the house itself, was invariably to be found lying on his side in the hammock, rocking on the back porch, reading until the sun went down and blackness fell. (50)

While the narrator engages in the task of recording Mala’s story, he utilizes the fictitious monopoly of stored information that empowers him to read the psyche of all the characters to the greatest possible extent. He invests in the retrieval of almost lost stories when he narrates the tragic life story of Chandin, who experiences a nervous breakdown when he realizes that his love for his white adoptive sister, Lavinia Thoroughly, is unrequited. Chandin’s condition worsens when he marries Lavinia’s Indian friend Sarah. Reading this plot development against the background of an exoticist discourse, it can be argued that the novel challenges a colonial discourse of the exotic when it moves Chandin’s desire for an exotic, white woman into the plot’s centre. Chandin’s unfulfilled longing finally not only kills him but also destroys his whole family. In one way, the Reverend Ramchandin’s story presents both a failed process of individualization within a colonial subject and the destructiveness triggered by exoticism when desire turns into disgust. Ramchandin’s dream of domesticating the desired object remains nothing but a figment of his own imagination (38). His overwhelming desire for the exotic Other begins to control his daily routine; step by step, he transmogrifies into a dehumanized subject. Indeed, Ramchandin’s dawning punishment seems only consistent when he is murdered by his daughter and his house is finally set on fire.28 Interestingly enough, Levinia does not rejected Ramchandin because of his ethnic and cultural background, but because she has a lesbian love interest. 28

This twist plays with a common narrative trope in Victorian narratives, such as Rochester’s fate in Charlotte Brontë’s bestseller Jane Eyre (1847). Nevertheless, it has to be stated that in Victorian texts it was mostly women who were punished for their unconventional dreams and desires.

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By utilizing such rich imagery and intertextual references, Mootoo refers to colonialism, postcolonialism, and racism, but at the same time challenges the idea that these discourses represent the main constituent of identity-formation. How powerfully these re-evaluated discourses impinge on the plot of the novel becomes obvious when the author establishes the garden as a countermotif to the ancestral house. Mootoo highlights homosexual as well as transsexual emancipation as new perspectives on life. Through this focus she aligns her work with the literary and critical tradition of queer Caribbean artists who address homophobia in the Caribbean, while at the same time claiming their particular spaces and homes within Caribbean culture and society.

5. The Garden: A Space for Transformation Mootoo plays with the sentimental motif of the English garden as represented, for instance, in The Secret Garden (1911) by the English-American playwright Frances Hodgson Burnett. Unlike Burnett, Mootoo fashions an ambivalent motif that shows the garden with its birds, insects, snails, and reptiles as a ‘counter-society’. For Mala, the garden represents a retreat in which transformative processes are daily business. Hence, the garden with its hybrid spirit becomes the space for a fresh arrangement of society and culture: Mala’s companions were the garden’s birds, insects, snails and reptiles. She and they and the abundant foliage gossiped among themselves. She listened intently. With an ear pressed to the ground she heard ant communities building, transporting food and breeding. She listened to worms coiling arduously from place to place. She knelt on the ground and whispered to the grass and other young plants, encouraging them to grow, and then she listened as they stretched up to her. She did not intervene in nature’s business. When it came time for one creature to succumb to another, she retreated. Flora and fauna left her to her own devices and in return she left them to theirs. (127–28)

Nonetheless, Mootoo depicts the impossibility of the garden as a new living space, since it stands too close to the ancestral house with the decaying body of the father. The ambiguity of the garden motif is carried further as Mala starts relaxing when the “huge, white cereus buds” begin to bloom while the moon shines: It was one of the brightest moonlit nights Mala had ever witnessed. Every evening for the past week she had descended to the cereus patch and checked the state of the buds. Their time had arrived, and the long-awaited event coincided, as she interpreted it, with another blooming, that of the moon. As night fell she dragged her rocking chair down the back stairs and

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into the yard under the fringes of the giant murda tree. She sat upright like a concert director in front of the wall. As the night unwound she witnessed the slow dance of huge, white cereus buds – she counted sixty-two – trembling as they unfold against the wall, a choreography of petal and sepal opening together, sending dizzying scent high and wide into the air. The moonlight reflected off the blossom’s pure whiteness and cast glow over the yard. Mala basked. (134)

Quite fittingly, in Mootoo’s novel the connection of the beautiful white buds of the cereus and the full moon symbolizes sexuality, love, and madness. It is the full moon and the dominant smell of the cereus buds that make the protagonists start their crazy attempts to piece together new relationships. Burnett’s garden metaphor is deconstructed when the English fairytale garden that promises shelter becomes a place of human decline. This lost jungle with its odours needs to be left in order to find a place for an equal and a humane gender relationship where the protagonists can live up to their natures and desires. The representation of Mootoo’s realization of this idea finds its spatial articulation in the Paradise Alms House.

6. The Paradise Alms House: A Space for ‘Ex/rotica’ The Paradise Alms House is not en route to anywhere. To get there one must leave the main road, cut through a cane field and carry up a lane that ends at the top of a small hill. The home with its excellent view of the cane fields is in the shallow valley below. There is nothing beyond. (122)

Though depicting a rather ambivalent place, symbolizing the paradisiacal end including the metaphor of death, the Alms House with its garden offers a new space and with its inhabitants also a new tolerant society. The guiding principle of a tolerant and more humane society, it turns out, cannot be found in an unquestioned acceptance of patriarchy, but in the conscious search for more humane living realities that include a strong self-reflexivity. But again neither the name of this home nor the initial description of it reveals the true nature of this space. The Alms House can only be created through a deconstruction of the common notion of the ancestral house and the garden. The representation of these motifs suggests that their literary function is limited because they are overloaded with colonial and postcolonial ideologies. While the ancestral house accommodates the body of the patriarch, the domesticated garden as the motif of femininity is too close to the patriarchal zone to be able to provide a real, alternative space. Consequently, it is the Alms House that represents society as an experimental ground for processes of sexual emancipation. The nursing home offers enough space for all forms of relationships, hence could be labelled a ‘Third Space’. Although ambivalent, it symbolizes a

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new beginning where everybody has the social and cultural space within which to live up to his or her own ‘ex / rotic’ nature.

WORKS CITED Burnett, Francis Hodgson. The Secret Garden (1911; New York: HarperTrophy, 1990). Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Sir Galahad and the Islands,” Bim 25 (1957): 8–16. Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven (1987; New York & London: Plume, 1996). ——. Abeng (1984; New York & London: Plume, 1995). Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). Dabydeen, David, & Nana Wilson–Tagoe. The Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature (Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo, 1987). Douglas, Debbie, Courtnay McFarlane, Makeda Silvera & Douglas Stewart, ed. Má– Ka: Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writings by Queers of African Descent (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1997). Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces (1967): Heterotopias,” tr. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Lecture (March 1967) originally published as “Des Espace Autres: Hétérotopies,” Architecture / Mouvement / Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46–49. Goetsch, Paul. “Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen in der Literatur aus der Perspektive des Lesers,“ in Grenzgänger zwischen Kulturen, ed. Monika Fludernik & Hans–Joachim Gerke (Würzburg: Ergon, 1999): 63–74. Goldie, Terry. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, Montreal & London: McGill– Queen’s U P , 1989). Helff, Sissy. Die Erfahrung der Migration in der Black British Frauenliteratur (Frankfurt am Main: Sulmmia, 1999). ——. “The Queer–A Part of Oneself. Representations of Queerness in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Muse India: The Literary E-Journal 7 (2006), online http: //www.museindia.com/showcont.asp?id=263 [accessed 15 July 2007]. ——. Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Writing (forthcoming). Howell, Coral Ann. “A Shared Queerness: Liminal Identities in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” in Articulating Gender: An Anthology Presented to Professor Shirin Kudchedkar, ed. Anjali Bhelande & Mala Pandurang (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2000): 163–70. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Innes, C.L. “Wintering: Making Home in Britain,” in Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto, 1995): 21–34. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York U P , 1996). Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John (1983; London: Vintage, 1997).

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Lamming, George. The Emigrants (London: Allison & Busby, 1954). Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (Freedom C A : Crossing, 1982). Löw, Martina. Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996). ——. He Drown She in the Sea (New York: Grove, 2005). ——. The Predicament of Or (Vancouver: Polestar, 2001). Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Powell, Patricia. Me Dying Trial (Oxford: Heinemann, 1993). ——. The Pagoda (San Diego C A : Harcourt, 1998). ——. A Small Gathering of Bones (Oxford: Heinemann, 1994). Riley, Joan. The Unbelonging (London: Longman, 1995). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Scott, Lawrence. Ballads for the New World and Other Stories (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992). ——. Witchbroom (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992). Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners (1956; Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1995). Silvera, Makeda. Her Head a Village and Other Stories (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1994). ——. Remembering G and Other Stories (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991). Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Ohio: Ohio State U P , 2004). Smyth, Heather. “Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean–Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 30.2 (April 1999): 141–60. Thomas, H. Nigel. Spirits in the Dark (1987; Toronto: Anansi, 1993). Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

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C ANADIAN

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S OUTH A FRICAN T HEATRE «•»

Dramatizing Alterity Relational Characterization in Postcolonial British Columbia Plays

G INNY R ATSOY

A

D I S C U S S I O N O F A L T E R I T Y in the drama of Canada’s westernmost province is particularly multifaceted if we believe, with the theatre scholar Alan Filewod, that “there is a sense in which Canada is a postcolonial fiction that provides legal and intrastructural cohesion to a country that has never succeeded in enlisting its citizens in a common national principle,”1 and if we view British Columbia, as the historian Jean Barman does in her book The West Beyond the West, as an entity that “still hovers on the edge”2 of the imaginary nation of Canada. As George Bowering has asserted, “People in British Columbia really think of their place differently. […] People in B.C. have to be taught to be Canadians.”3 Barman constructs the province as “not so much a place as a state of mind”4 with distinguishing features far beyond geographical marginalization. ‘Non-Native settlement’ is relatively recent; B.C. has a strong history of both resource plunder and environmental activism; its lively, populist, and extremist politics have been well documented; it has experienced heavy and distinct immigration patterns, and “the province remains the only one in Canada where new-

1

Alan Filewod, New Canadian Drama 7: West Coast Comedies (Ottawa: Borealis,

1999): vii. 2

Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1991): 352. 3 George Bowering, Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History (Toronto: Viking, 1996): 21–22. 4 Bowering, Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History, 22.

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comers outnumber locally-born residents.”5 Such a heterogeneous and constantly shifting – unstable – milieu is fertile territory for indecision regarding the identity of the Other. The mainstream is elusive; the lines, if not elided, are blurred. Evidence in dramatic texts of the complexities inherent in British Columbia’s marginalization is the subject of this essay. I will be arguing that two plays, Joan MacLeod’s “The Hope Slide” (1992) and David Diamond’s “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” (1991), co-written with Hal B. Blackwater, Lois G. Shannon, and Marie Wilson, in their respective approaches to alterity, embrace conventions of documentary as they eschew many of the practices of traditional theatre. Each work utilizes the theatrical forms associated (by Alan Filewod and others) with Canadian documentary as they revision historical events. They subvert traditional theatrics by embracing the Other and giving new form to what Filewod calls “the typical Canadian documentary,” which he characterizes as “rejecting colonial standards,” “defining culture in terms of community and community in terms of shared experience,” employing presentational theatricality, and carrying an “implicit critique of Canadian culture as the expression of a colonized mentality.”6 At the same time as each work borrows from what, if we accept Filewod’s generalizations, might be called the unconventional traditions of Canadian postcolonial drama, it revisions those traditions as it revisions the respective historical events it reenacts. Specifically, both plays – rather than underscoring clear delineation between racial or ethnic majority and ethnic minority – present and interrogate the mainstream (represented by authoritarian figures such as various levels of elected politicians, government employees, and police) in an abstract mode but focus on a more relational characterization, a community of the displaced. In these plays, British Columbians are constructed as marginalized, and that marginalization is refracted as non-conformity. The Other – as represented by a racial or ethnic minority – becomes a tool of identification and an impetus for self-recognition for the ethnic majority. Joan MacLeod’s “The Hope Slide” borrows its title from a natural disaster. In January 1965, near the town of Hope, a mountainside came loose and crashed into the valley below. Three kilometres of highway were destroyed, the road was buried to a depth of up to seventy-nine metres, and four motorists were killed. MacLeod’s one-person play has more to do with unnatural disaster, however.

5

Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 352–69. Alan Filewod, Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1987): 184–86. 6

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Through the prism of one of the victims of the mountain slide, “The Hope Slide” interrogates the harmful actions of the British Columbia government towards marginalized groups. The Other is a religious minority, the Doukhobors, who emigrated from Russia near the beginning of the twentieth century and originally settled in Saskatchewan. The group practised communal living and professed pacifism. By 1908, most had moved to the Kootenays in southern British Columbia, where they eventually established a self-contained community of about 5,000. A small splinter group of the Doukhobors, the Sons of Freedom, used nudity and arson as forms of protest against materialism. The Sons of Freedom have, over the years, been imprisoned for nude group protests and for burning schools in reaction to the British Columbia government’s forcing their children into the public system, and while in prison, they have engaged in hunger strikes. In the 1950s, the government sent in Royal Canadian Mounted Police (R C M P ) to their communities to forcibly remove their children (sometimes in the dead of night) and place them in schools that resembled prisons. The children were forced to abandon their language and culture, and parents were granted only brief bimonthly visits. While the dramatic methods of protest employed by the Sons of Freedom have been much in the news over the past four decades, the facts of the enforced schooling have not attracted a concomitant amount of media attention. In an interview I conducted with her when working on Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000, Joan MacLeod related the genesis of her play: I was doing a reading tour of the Kootenays [when] I realized I had started to look for Doukhobor houses. All of a sudden I remembered a lot of false, negative information about the Doukhobors from my childhood. When I returned home and started researching, I began uncovering stories that I found just amazing – stories that were quite different from the newspaper articles and books I remembered.7

MacLeod, in the consciously revisionist monologue “The Hope Slide,” puts the one-person play to uses that, according to the Canadian drama scholar Renate Usmiani, typify Canadian solo performances. Usmiani asserts that the solo performance has historically enjoyed popularity in Canadian theatre for several reasons, among them its ability to foreground both isolation and the search for identity, its complementarity with plays which do not follow a traditional linear narrative pattern, and its particular ability to convey a political message. In sum, Usmiani states, “the monologue represents an effective

7

Joan MacLeod, personal interview, 3 November 2000.

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tool in the struggle of post-colonial literatures to reflect the dilemmas of their society.”8 MacLeod yokes the natural disaster with the Doukhobors’ plight – and the private with the public – through Irene, her middle-class, Anglo-Saxon protagonist, who is performed in two temporalities. In the 1960s, Irene is a rebellious teenager who identifies with the marginalized Doukhobors; in the 1990s, she is a middle-aged actress touring a play about three historical Doukhobor figures – each a former student in the aforementioned institutions, and each of whom meets tragic ends, through natural disaster (one of them, Mary Kalmikoff, was a victim of the Hope Slide) or during arson protests or hunger strikes. In fact, MacLeod carries the use of the monologue further than Usmiani’s discussion suggests. In addition to underscoring Irene’s isolation through the non-linear narrative, she uses the monologue as a tool to embrace the Other. Further, the play, which alternates between the past and the present, embraces alterity by foregrounding meta-theatrical performativity. A substantial portion of the play has the character of Irene as a character; in the 1960s she performs a class presentation about the Doukhobors to her fellow students; in the present time, in character as an actress, she performs the three historical Doukhobor figures. Paradoxically, by creating removes – by distancing – MacLeod creates identification. At the same time, the meta-structure elides character, performer, and audience distance from the Other. The following passage, taken from near the end of the teenaged Irene’s class presentation – as it employs the first-person and second-person point of view, the present tense, and a demonstrational mode – identifies both Irene and her audience (in this case, the fictional class as well as the theatre audience and play reader) with the Doukhobors: Basically, this is how it all works: you want me to send my kids to school and I say no because I know school is evil and that you are going to teach my children a load of crap. So. You have this early-morning raid of truant officers in my village and gather my children and take them to the government school in New Denver […] I steal my kids back and just as a little insurance, I burn down the local school […] If my Doukhobor neighbours are getting a little too greedy I might burn down their house too so that they can get back to basics. If you have still missed the point I might just take all my clothes off or blow up a bridge. These are called the “upside down” days, demonstration to follow now. Because the R C M P , disguised as Doukhobors – fat chance – infiltrated their meetings, the leaders would wear their clothes in weird ways and this meant reverse all statements I am telling you – i.e. (slowly building to a frenzy): If I am telling you to go out 8

Renate Usmiani, “Going it Alone: Is Canadian Theatre the Sound of One Voice Talking?” Theatrum 28 (April 1992): 14.

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and love your brother and our principal Mr. Miller in particular, you know because my shirt is on backwards that I really mean, burn, go on, do it, light a fire under this school or perhaps under Mr. Miller’s house.9

The audience of high school students is encouraged to rebel against the principal (who, along with the R C M P , represents the mainstream) by adopting the practices of the Sons of Freedom as dramatized by Irene. The scene culminates in Irene stripping to her underwear just as the bell signals the end of class. Acting, acting out, and acting up: these modes permeate the play and reflect both the dramatic actions of the Doukhobors and Irene’s identification with them. Patently, the dramatic construction of the public Doukhobors – those in the newspaper headlines and photos – underlies Irene’s emulation of them. The young Irene is at once fully individuated and representative of both distinct British Columbia stereotypes and the postcolonial situation. In equal measure jaded and idealistic, she is non-conforming yet seeking a community. Idealizing the marginalized group, she is rejected by them and disillusioned when, inevitably, the reality of their life-style does not meet her expectations: I went all the way up there, to the Kootenays […] but the Doukhobors were not all that happy to see me […] they ordered me off their land which is a complete joke because they aren’t supposed to own it in the first place […] But I just keep banging on the door, I am crying and making a fair amount of noise. Probably when they can’t stand it any longer, they do let me in […] They are not proper Doukhobors. They are eating canned ham and watching “Car 54” on television. The world is full of phonies. These particular phonies have phoned the police to come get me. (HS 433–34)

Clearly, what Irene is attempting to embrace is not so much the Other as her projections of the Other. She professes rebellion against mainstream society, as represented by the high school; that mainstream is a vital component in her impulse to perform, however. The mass of contradictions that is the adolescent Irene is, in part at least, reconciled in the adult Irene through her ‘legitimized’ performance as an actress and through her recapitulation of her – and the Doukhobors’s – story. The adult Irene does find her community – a community not of an ethnic or religious minority, but a marginalized community nevertheless – and one also vulnerable to government policy: “I have a community now, I have the theatre, and my community is under attack. The Minister of Revenue has just suggested a more ‘hands on’ approach to fund-

9

Joan McLeod, “The Hope Slide,” in Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000, ed. Ginny Ratsoy & James Hoffman (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2002): 427–28. References to the play are given in parentheses in the main text, abbreviated to HS.

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ing the arts. I suggest we all lay our hands directly on the Minister of Revenue” (HS 426). MacLeod’s revisionist history lesson on the mistreatment of the Doukhobors – a lesson on the Other – is imbued with both sympathy and empathy as her character identifies with the marginalized position of her subject. Yet the distance remains. The Other is experienced through performativity – emulated – but, as the adult Irene comes to realize, such an identification can go only so far. At the same time, it is through the teenaged Irene’s acting out that the adult Irene finds her community, and the Doukhobors provide the impetus for that acting out. Thus, when the Doukhobors’s experience is transferred to stage (and thus transformed), a syncretization is achieved; through performativity comes connection. In a further nexus of the personal and the political, the play ends with the adult Irene, significantly not in character, coping with the death by A I D S of her long-time friend Walter by taking inspiration from the resilience of the Doukhobors. Her hope, which has been eroding, is rekindled as she “removes her shirt,” and “fire comes up through a grate in the floor” (HS 435–36) as she performs a personal ritual to protest the death of Walter and other kindred spirits. Although Irene and the Doukhobors remain separated and distinct in their marginalization, Irene is purged of hopelessness by a borrowed act of symbolic significance. Through appropriation and re-enactment, the historical marginalization of a group becomes an inspiration for the personal integration of an individual dramatic character. The focus of the integrative approach of “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” is on collective rather than personal integration. Once again, however, both the ethnic majority and minority cultures are marginalized, and, from its title onward, the play foregrounds erasure of boundaries between the Self and the Other and between the personal and the political. The play was initiated by David Diamond, Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Headlines Theatre, which from its inception in 1981 has worked to effect change through a focus on contemporary issues. The company’s “Theatre for Living” philosophy is a direct outgrowth of Diamond’s study in 1984 with Brazilian Augusto Boal. Under the influence of the principles of Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed,” Headlines, as its website indicates, moved from making theatre for communities to making theatre with communities. The community with which this play was created is in the Gitxsan– Wet’suwet’en territory of northwestern British Columbia, a nation that has had an ongoing struggle for control of its hereditary lands. As early as the 1880s, a delegation of Chiefs from Northwest British Columbia approached the provincial legislature to press for a treaty for the return of their traditional lands. They were turned away. In 1991, in the Delgamuukw et al. vs. The

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Queen court case, the B.C. Supreme Court Justice Allan MacEachern dismissed the claim of the Gitxsan–Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs to Aboriginal rights to an area of their traditional territories. However, he did find that the Gitxsan were entitled to the use of unoccupied crown land in the territory they claimed for aboriginal subsistence activities. Although the subsequent appeal of the case was unsuccessful, in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged Aboriginal title in the Delgamuukw Decision, ordered a new trial, and ruled that oral history should be accepted in court. The Supreme Court also encouraged the B.C. government and the Gitxsan–Wet’suwet’en to negotiate settlement outside the court system. The First Nations struggle for land continues, and some of the Gitxsan–Wet’suwet’en’s neighbours – notably the Nisga’a – have built on the gains of the Gitxsan–Wet’suwet’en. Like “The Hope Slide,” “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints),” first produced in 1987, operates from multiple temporalities. The play conjoins pre-contact, initial contact, and a period in the 1980s during which the group erected a blockade in an attempt to receive redress. The approach, from inception through production, of Headlines Theatre illustrates its respect for and sensitivity to First Nations cultures. Diamond’s philosophy of collaboration was pervasive. He engaged audiences usually alienated from mainstream Canadian theatre, relied on extensive interviewing, and decidedly embraced the Other. The research, initial writing, and subsequent rewriting for new tours were done in Kispiox in association with the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and other local individuals. Authorship is attributed to David Diamond with Hal B. Blackwater, Lois G. Shannon, and Marie Wilson. The sets, properties, and costumes also originated in the area. Furthermore, according to Alan Filewod, who first anthologized the play, the troupe respected elders’ wishes that one sacred song, which they received permission to sing in performance, be omitted from the written text, and “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” met with the approval of tribal elders, a representative of which attended each local performance and toured Canada and New Zealand with the show.10 Fittingly, given its explicit theme about the importance of all peoples acting in harmony with each other and the earth, this collaborative effort was performed by Native and non-Native actors and is a harmonious fusion of elements of Aboriginal and Western cultures. Before the performance proper commences, the audience hears the taped voices of elders singing in their language, sees the indigenous designs on the various properties on the set, and is soon sprinkled with feathers as some of the actors enter through the aisles. The fourth wall is further defied when the first words are spoken: the exposi10

Alan Filewod, New Canadian Drama 5: Political Drama (Ottawa: Borealis, 1991): xi.

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tion, interwoven with a salmon dance performed in full mask and robe, is provided by a Gitxsan chief in a presentational mode. Like drama by such First Nations playwrights as Daniel David Moses, Marie Clements, and Margo Kane, “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” rehearses such ills of post-contact as environmental devastation, the residential school system, the reserve system, land grabs, and population decimation by disease. As the play proceeds, its central characters, two couples played by the same actors in early contact and the present time – one of whom, dispossessed of their land in Scotland, are settlers and the second of whom are Gitxsan – befriend each other but come into conflict over the blockade. Each speaks in both his or her ‘own’ words and those of various historical figures; the play fuses written documentation and First Nations oral testimony. The fusion is pervasive; the traditions are hybridized not only in the play’s structure, but also in the plot: ultimately, the play is more about commonalities than differences. As the text emphasizes the dispossession inherent in the narratives of both the Aboriginal and the settler group, it points to similarities in the creation stories of the two cultures and bestows upon the female representatives of each group the role of conciliator. “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” underscores the injustices and deficiencies in the status quo to Native and non-Native alike. Like “The Hope Slide,” “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” employs the conventions Filewod ascribes to Canadian documentary to embrace alterity. The Headlines play also (in places) adopts the first-person monologue, and in keeping with traditional native storytelling – which, as Penny Petrone states, employs “a loosely episodic and discursive structure” and “tend[s] not to be told sequentially” – disrupts patterns of linearity.11 Further, “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” like MacLeod’s play, questions Western beliefs in, for example, ownership, the primacy of economic growth, and material progress. In much the same way as Irene’s rebirth is facilitated by the performance of a Sons of Freedom ritual, the conflict within and between the two couples is resolved through their participation in the rituals of the Gitxsan feast hall as a symbolic reclamation of First Nations culture is played out. “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” is the fuller integration, however. Its collaborative approach takes it past the boundaries of a European play that reaches out to the Other; it moves beyond connection to harmonization. Interestingly, because it employs collective creation, it is an example of what Filewod sees as one of “the most notable features of Canadian documentary.”12 But, in 11

Penny Petrone, Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1990): 183. 12 Filewod, Collective Encounters, 182.

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contradistinction to the plays Filewod examines in his study of Canadian documentary, “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints),” because of its multi-ethnic dimensions, moves from collaboration to hybridity. Further, the play’s ending embodies both Aboriginal beliefs in the circularity of existence and Headlines Theatre’s belief in direct audience involvement. In a device that erases conventional barriers between art and audience, audience members are invited to speak and ‘act on’ the message of the production; the play carries on beyond the script. William Morgan’s observation on Aboriginal blending of ritual and theatre is pertinent to this collaboration: In contrast to traditional ritual, which is fully comprehensible only to the culturally initiated, theatrical performance (dialogue and body kinesics) can select eclectically elements from aboriginal culture along with elements from western world culture and integrate them into a performance that will touch the sensibility of both aboriginal and non-aboriginal audiences.13

While a level of hybridization is apparent in the relationship of ethnic majority to ethnic minority culture in both plays – the representative of the dominant culture is clearly identified with the member of the minority culture – the result is quite the opposite from the dissolution of the minority culture. It is, rather, a strengthening of the minority culture that is underscored. The difference remains, but the majority representative is spiritually strengthened by the contact with the minority culture. This imbrication is thus an affirmation rather than an assimilation. The remarks of Filewod about the Headlines production could easily be adapted to “The Hope Slide”: it “rests on the premise that the white colonizer can participate in and learn from native traditional culture.”14 In their discussion of settler histories in postcolonial drama, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins observe: History is a particularly fraught issue for settler societies because of their ambivalent positioning in the imperial paradigm as both colonizers and colonized […] Settler histories do not simply replicate the master narrative’s characteristic tropes; instead, they are often concerned with establishing authenticity for a society dislocated from the imperial centre.15

Perhaps the layers of hybridity and complexity that encompass these two British Columbia plays are a reflection of both the fact that British Columbia 13

Per Brask & William Morgan, ed. Aboriginal Voices: Amerindian, Inuit, and Sami Theater (Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1992): x. 14 Filewod, New Canadian Drama 5: Political Drama, xi. 15 Helen Gilbert & Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996): 113.

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writers are operating within multiple postcolonial traditions – including the tradition of the Canadian documentary – and their awareness of the marginalization of their province within a settler nation. The complex attitudes to alterity evinced in the two plays might be said to be a natural response of a people acutely cognizant, not only of their marginalization and displacement, but also of the fact that, as the historical geographer Cole Harris states, “we are here [in British Columbia] most of us because we have imposed ourselves.”16 The racism each play questions is a racism perpetrated by the outsider on, respectively, another group of outsiders and the people indigenous to the area from which they have been displaced. Neither play subsumes the injustices it highlights. Both “The Hope Slide” and “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints)” evince an acute consciousness of the displacement of the more marginalized group, but, through both the identification of the more empowered characters with the marginalized group and their respective structures, the plays underscore an awareness of the relativity of concepts of otherness. Thus each work becomes a complex syncretism that highlights, rather than adumbrates, the strength of differences and thereby establishes an authenticity to drama at least twice removed from the centre of empire.

WORKS CITED Barman, Jean. The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1991). Bowering, George. Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History (Toronto: Viking, 1996). Brask, Per & William Morgan, ed. Aboriginal Voices: Amerindian, Inuit, and Sami Theater (Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1992). Diamond, David. “NO’ XYA’ (Our Footprints),” in Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000, ed. Ginny Ratsoy & James Hoffman (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2002). Filewod, Alan. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1987). ——, ed. New Canadian Drama 5: Political Drama (Ottawa: Borealis, 1991). ——, ed. New Canadian Drama 7: West Coast Comedies (Ottawa: Borealis, 1999). Gilbert, Helen, & Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996). Harris, Cole. The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Changes (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P , 1997). Headlines Theatre Website. http://www.headlinestheatre.com [accessed 3 April 2002].

16

Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Changes (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P , 1997): xii.

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MacLeod, Joan. “The Hope Slide,” in Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000, ed. Ginny Ratsoy & James Hoffman (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2002): 419–36. ——. Personal interview (3 November 2000). Petrone, Penny. Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1990). Usmiani, Renate. “Going it Alone: Is Canadian Theatre the Sound of One Voice Talking?” Theatrum 28 (April 1992): 13–18.

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Disappointing Expectations Native Canadian Theatre and the Politics of Authenticity

H ENNING S CHÄFER

of Native1 Theatre in Canada, Native playwrights have had a tendency to disappoint the expectations of their (mostly non-Native) audiences. In 1977, the play October Stranger by George Kenny (Cree),2 one of the very first Native Canadian plays ever to be produced, was invited to an international theatre festival in Monaco. Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway) describes what happened:

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They took it to Monaco and unfortunately it was a bit of a fiasco. It seems people in Europe were expecting buckskin, feathers, and beads, and then these contemporary Native youths in their mid-twenties came in doing a serious play about a person leaving the Reserve to go and live in a city, and becoming urbanized. This was not what the people of Monaco and of this theatre festival expected to see.3

The Monaco audience wanted to see what they thought was authentic Native culture, an expectation most likely derived from Western movies or possibly 1

A note on terminology: I will in general use the term ‘Native’ when referring to the indigenous population of North America, since it is the term most widely accepted in Canada. There does not seem to be a word that everybody is happy with, and clearly all terms have their problems, but it is not possible here to address that dilemma in detail. For a humorous take on the question, see Drew Hayden Taylor, “An Indian by any Other Name,” in Taylor, Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (Penticton, B.C.: Theytus, 1996): 53–55. Wherever possible, I will insert the writer’s nation in parentheses at its first mention. 2 George Kenny & Denis Lacroix, October Stranger (Toronto: Chimo, 1978). 3 Drew Hayden Taylor, “Storytelling to Stage: The Growth of Native Theatre in Canada,” Drama Review 41.3 (Fall 1997): 145.

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Karl May’s novels. And the audience was disappointed, because what they got was a more actual representation of contemporary Native life in Canada. In this essay, I will show how our expectations of both the dominant culture(s) and the Native community shape, influence and restrict Native Theatre in particular and minority literature in general. As I will argue, the question of authenticity is a political one; thus we are in the realm of power and its (uneven) distribution. The claim to authenticity can be a powerful tool in both directions and is in fact widely used as such. We, as Western, non-Native, ‘dominant-culture’ critics, have to consider carefully how we use our power and find new ways of writing about minorities, indigenous peoples and the ‘subaltern’4 all over the world. As a starting-point, I will discuss three Native plays that subvert the expectation of authenticity in particular ways. In the second part, several theoretical approaches towards authenticity will be examined along with the question of who is expecting what for what reasons. To conclude, I will try to describe a way out of the dilemma of authenticity and towards a possible form of critical responsibility in dealing with minority cultures.

2. Subversion: Three Plays Yvette Nolan’s Blade Yvette Nolan’s (Métis) first play, Blade (1995),5 tells the story of a woman, Angela, who was murdered by a serial killer preying on Native prostitutes, and is narrated by the woman’s ghost. Because Angela fell victim to this ‘hooker–killer’, everybody wrongly assumes she was a prostitute. The play is based on an actual case of prostitute killings in Winnipeg. It opened very successfully in Winnipeg in 1990, and then was invited to the ‘Women in View Festival’ in Vancouver. The programme announced it as a play “about a Native woman being killed by a hooker killer,”6 and the audience was astonished to see that the actress playing Angela was white: This audience, this very full very attentive audience had come to see a Native woman killed. Well, the problem was, the woman who played 4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1988): 271–313. 5 Yvette Nolan, “Blade,” in Nolan, Blade, Job’s Wife and Video: Three Plays (Toronto: ArtBiz Comm, 1995): 1–15. Subsequent quotations from the play in the main text are referred to via the abbreviation B. 6 Yvette Nolan, “Selling Myself: The Value of an Artist,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 19.1 (1999): 78.

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Angela, the woman, is not Native. She’s white, she’s blond. She bleeds red, but she’s not Native, and this audience was expecting Native blood, and they were angry. After the performance, there was a Question & Answer [...], and the audience wanted to know why I hadn’t cast a Native woman in that role. I explained that I had not intended the character to be Native, and then they got really mad. Why, as a Native woman, didn’t I write about Native women? Didn’t I feel it was my responsibility to give my voice to the Native community? There was an expectation of what kind of story I would tell, as a Native writer. And the story this audience came to hear was about Indian as victim.7

Although the audience in Vancouver expected something different from the Monaco audience at the October Stranger premiere, in principle the two cases are very similar. The expectation was again one of authenticity, only of a different kind. The stereotype of buckskinned savages conveyed by early westerns is now replaced by another stereotype, the ‘poor Indian’, ‘Indian as victim’. Furthermore, Nolan was supposed to be a representative of ‘her people’, and her people were supposed to be Natives. As a Métis, however, she has roots in both cultures and grew up knowing nothing about her Native side, so it would be difficult for her to speak for the entire Native community.8 The play does in fact address Native problems, but in a more subtle manner: What is ironic is that BLADE is very much about aboriginal invisibility – the central character, who was white, is the last of the women killed by the man who is killing prostitutes, because, you see, she is white.9

The way Blade was received supports the case Nolan makes about the relationship between Natives and non-Natives. At the beginning, Angela tells the story of a Native student who was also murdered and taken for a prostitute, even more so because she was Native: When Cindy Bear got killed by the hooker-killer, some people at school said “Oh, I never knew she was a prostitute – I never would have guessed,” and others said “I always thought she was a whore – where else would she get the money to go to school? They usually are, you know.” I thought it was a little funny that Cindy Bear should be a hooker because I knew she was going to school through some special program, and she was always prepared for class, so when did she have time? (B 3) 7

Nolan, “Selling Myself: The Value of an Artist,” 78–79. Concerning Nolan’s Native roots (or lack thereof) and also those of Moses and Taylor, see Albert–Reiner Glaap, “Margo Kane, Daniel David Moses, Yvette Nolan, Drew Hayden Taylor: Four Native Playwrights from Canada,” Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Verbandes deutscher Anglisten 7.1 (March 1996): 5–25. See also Yvette Nolan, “Losing My Tradition,” Prairie Fire 16.3 (Autumn 1995): 115–19. 9 Nolan, “Selling Myself: The Value of an Artist,” 79. 8

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The stereotype of ‘Indian as victim’ is also at play here: Indians as prostitutes, unable to live in a white society, too poor to pay for their education. The (fictional) public’s assumptions about Cindy Bear are not far removed from the (real) audience’s preconceptions about Nolan’s play. Daniel David Moses’s Almighty Voice and His Wife While Nolan’s Blade disappointed expectations about the kind of story it would tell, another play disappointed expectations about how a tale should be told. Almighty Voice and His Wife (1992)10 by Daniel David Moses (Delaware) is also based on a true story. Almighty Voice was a young Cree man who shot a cow and was thrown in jail. One of the guards played a prank on him, saying that the punishment for his crime was hanging, so he broke out of prison and was hunted by the police. Almighty Voice refused to surrender, shot a policeman, and in the end was killed by the cavalry in a dramatic shootout. It is a classic tale of ‘Indian as victim’, where Native history is seen as a tragedy that inevitably leads to death, ultimately even to extinction; the ‘vanishing Indian’ stereotype. Moses, however, refuses to tell the story by adhering to the tragic mode. He offers two different interpretations of the classic tale that he merges in the end. The first act of Almighty Voice and His Wife recounts the story in a realist manner, focusing on Almighty Voice’s relationship with his wife, White Girl. The second act then turns into a grotesque minstrel show, featuring the Ghost of Almighty Voice and White Girl as the (white) Interlocutor. Together they act out a bizarre sequence of songs, bad puns, and racist abuse. At the end, the Interlocutor changes back into White Girl and is reunited with her husband. Moses wanted to “stop telling the tragic story before the tragic event happened,” to “go beyond what I found was an insufficient closure that tragedy gave”11 and to see “who the people who were pursuing him were.”12 When the Interlocutor, representing white racism, addresses the audience, they (we) are made accomplices of the crime committed against Almighty Voice. The play is about racism in everybody, not just in those policemen and soldiers. The angry humour of the second part exposes the audience’s prejudices and unsettles their fixed notions about Native people.

10

Daniel David Moses, Almighty Voice and His Wife (Stratford, Ontario: Williams–Wallace, 1992). 11 Quoted in Rob Appleford, “The Desire to Crunch Bone: Daniel David Moses and the ‘True Real Indian’,” Canadian Theatre Review 77 (Summer 1996): 22. 12 Quoted in Appleford, “The Desire to Crunch Bone,” 24.

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This disturbing effect of the play is best demonstrated by comparing two opposing reviews of its premiere. Mark Czarnecki begins his article with the advice “Don’t leave at intermission!” followed by “Brilliant second act redeems Almighty Voice,”13 whereas Geoff Chapman’s title reads “Powerful tale ruined by ending.”14 Czarnecki, obviously not very pleased with the first act, writes: The language is stilted and ponderous, like an opera without music. The emotions are melodramatic – the offstage whites are all blackguards, the onstage natives are innocent victims. It is, one supposes, the ‘official’ native version of the story, but related in curiously inept and tedious manner.15

Interestingly, this supposedly Native version is probably what a white audience would expect: the tragedy of the poor Indian. Not so Czarnecki. He goes on to praise the “brilliance of Moses’ second act” and the playwright’s “keen intelligence and surreal wit,” and says: “the mood in the [second] act is bitter, hilarious and heartrending. The performances are potent and inspired.”16 For the most part, Czarnecki focuses on White Girl’s identity crisis, symbolized by her transformation into a white man and vice versa. He finds that Moses “offers the possibility of native healing” through this transformation, this “acting out” of the “white inside the native”:17 namely, White Girl’s education by nuns. Apart from that, Czarnecki’s praise mainly points towards Moses’s artistry and the play’s aesthetic value. Chapman, by contrast, arrives at completely different conclusions. He sees the first act as an “exercise in educating us about how native people have reacted to white attitudes,” a “cleverly spun weave,” a “stiffly told, romantic tale about the wooing, wedding and worries of Almighty Voice,” “handled adequately by the actors,” and goes on to praise the “traditional chants, drumrolls,” and “brilliant use of lightning.”18 He even compares it to the movie “Dancing [sic] with Wolves,” apparently also meant approvingly. As it seems, Chapman expected to be educated by the play: he wanted Moses to be the Native informant, the teacher, and the sage, another widely-used stereotype. In other words, Chapman was also looking for an authentic (and romantic) re-

13

Mark Czarnecki, “Brilliant Second Act Redeems Almighty Voice,” Eye (20 February

1992): 30. 14

C7. 15 16 17 18

Geoff Chapman, “Powerful Tale Ruined By Ending,” Toronto Star (16 February1992): Czarnecki, “Brilliant Second Act Redeems Almighty Voice,” 30. “Brilliant Second Act Redeems Almighty Voice,” 30. “Brilliant Second Act Redeems Almighty Voice,” 30. Chapman, “Powerful Tale Ruined By Ending,” C7.

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presentation of Native life and history. The first act seems to satisfy this desire well enough, but, Chapman continues, Unfortunately there’s an Act 2, a strange fantasy begun with a classical overture wherein White Girl becomes a male music hall emcee apparently presenting a stereotype special, a show meant to shower withering contempt on non-native civilisation [...]. The satiric message is obscured by the awkward and surreal juxtaposition of bizarre events in an over-long masquerade, cheap jokes and puns [...]. It is a colorful conceit for an author bent on playing with words, and it effectively wrecks the potentially-powerful case made beforehand.19

For Chapman, the second act is nothing but an insult levelled at non-Natives and destroying the educational potential of the first act. Native theatre, it seems, is not supposed to be a work of art but, rather, a history lesson – a reductive view. What both reviewers fail to see is that it is precisely the juxtaposition of the two acts that conveys the play’s message. There is no such thing as a ‘true real Indian’, and non-Natives have no right to define what is authentically Native. Drew Hayden Taylor’s alterNatives The third example addresses the questions of authenticity and expectations more directly. alterNatives (2000) by Drew Hayden Taylor20 is a play about a dinner party going horribly wrong, with an interesting array of characters: Angel, an Ojibway author who wants to write science fiction instead of the ‘Great Native Canadian Novel’, as his girlfriend urges him to do; Colleen, Angel’s Jewish girlfriend, the stereotypical ‘wannabee’, who teaches Native literature at the university and knows more about Ojibway culture, history, and language than Angel, whom she tries to educate in Native ways; the white couple Michelle (a vegetarian veterinarian) and Dale (vegetarian only to please Michelle), who both know nothing about Native culture other that what they learned from Kevin Costner-type movies; and, finally, the Native couple Yvonne and Bobby, old friends of Angel’s and self-proclaimed ‘alterNative warriors’, who want Angel to join them again in their fight for Native rights. Colleen invites the two couples over for dinner without asking Angel first, and she even cooks moose for the occasion. Several conflicts occur soon after the guests arrive. Angel is accused of doing nothing for the Native cause, and Colleen is attacked for her ‘going Native’ and for trying to push Angel into 19

Chapman, “Powerful Tale Ruined By Ending,” C7. Drew Hayden Taylor, alterNatives (Burnaby, B.C.: Talon, 2000). Subsequent quotations from the play are referred to parenthetically in the main text via the abbreviation aN. 20

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the ghetto of minority literature. A collection of Native stories that Colleen teaches in class does in fact contain stories that Angel and Bobby made up when they were children, because visiting anthropologists offered them money for ‘authentic tribal tales’. Angel argues that they are responsible for this false representation, and that Bobby never cared whether his actions hurt anybody. Michelle is charged with coercing Dale into become a vegetarian, and Bobby actually tempts Dale into eating a slice of moose. The play ends in a big commotion, and everybody but Angel rushes out of the apartment, although Dale returns to finish the moose. Taylor raises several important issues in his play, mostly centred on questions of authenticity and the expectations Native writers have to endure. It also asks what is really Native. Yvonne is in the process of writing a thesis called “Selective Traditionalism and the Emergence of the Narrow-Focused Cultural Revival” (aN 75): In their hurry to recapture the old days of our Grandfathers [sic] and grandmothers, these people are being very selective about which traditions they choose to follow, often excluding many ancient practices that would not be considered politically correct in today’s society. [...] Centuries ago there were arranged marriages, frequent inter-tribal warfare, slavery, and in some cases, rumours of cannibalism. These are not even mentioned at Pow wows or Elder’s conferences. It’s become a form of cultural hypocrisy. (aN 75–76)

Later in the play, Yvonne mentions an actual case, the Peterborough Petroglyphs: The Petroglyphs were carved somewhere between five hundred and a thousand years ago. And in recent years, the province gave the nearest Native settlement, Curve Lake, and the Native Studies Department at Trent University shared management of the site. [...] But Curve Lake was settled back in the 1820s by Ojibways that had migrated into Central Ontario. And Trent was built in the 1960s. COLLEEN

I see. And neither place has any authentic connection to the Petroglyphs, yet both claim it as their own. YVONNE

Nobody really knows who carved those rocks. The Ojibway certainly weren’t here. It’s a mystery. (aN 77–78)

So the question is who defines Native culture, who decides what is authentic and what is not. In the case of the Petroglyphs, the criticism is aimed at the local government, but the ‘narrow-focused cultural revival’ is a reproach of the Native community itself. Similarly, the collection of ‘authentic’ stories makes fun of anthropologists but also reproves the Native children who have invented these tales. Bobby’s and Yvonne’s expectations of Angel, as Taylor

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shows, are no less reprehensible than Colleen’s. Angel is sitting on the fence. The same can be said about Drew Hayden Taylor himself. His play did not meet with general approval, as he recounts in the foreword: While writing this play, I was fully expecting to become the Salman Rushdie of the Native community, for I’m sure there’s something in this play to annoy everybody. Part of my goal was to create unsympathetic characters right across the board. And to do this, as the saying goes, I had to break some eggs. A close friend, a Native woman, came up to me quite angry and said, “So this is what you really think of Native people!” Then some time later, one reviewer referred to it as “witless white-bashing.” Evidently I have become a racist! Further proof that you never know how your day is gonna end. But oddly enough, most people come up to me after the play and congratulate me on exploring subjects and issues they felt were long overlooked. Then there was that little incident of the bomb threat in Vancouver, but overall, the response has been more than positive.21

Obviously, Taylor has broken several taboos and offended critics on both sides, showing that the problem of authenticity is a sensitive issue. The political implications of this hard-fought issue and possible reasons for the emotional reactions the playwrights have received will be discussed in the following section.

3. Expectation – Two Sides The expectations of Native theatre are various, but in the end the most important factor remains the expectation of authenticity. To understand this problem, we have to look for reasons why authenticity should be so important, and these reasons fall in two categories that need to be examined separately. The first category encompasses the expectations of the critic or recipient from the dominant culture, by which I mean people of Western / European origin that I will label ‘Western’ for lack of a more precise term.22 The expectations of the Native community are the second category.

21

Drew Hayden Taylor, “Foreword” to Taylor, alterNatives (Burnaby, B.C.: Talon,

2000): 6. 22 ‘Caucasian’ is used frequently, but since it refers more widely to people with fair skin, including inhabitants of North Africa and Southwest Asia, I will try to avoid it. ‘White’ is the term that most often serves as the antonym of ‘Native’, followed by ‘non-Native’, which would also include immigrant minorities. Nevertheless, I do at times recur to these terms, whenever they fit. Other terms such as ‘W A S P ’, the White Anglo–Saxon Protestant (Male), are too specific to be exact. As I am in fact a ‘Western’ critic, I will also use ‘we’ or ‘us’ as synonyms.

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Western When looking at the expectations of Western recipients, it becomes clear that Native literature is treated differently from non-Native texts. Daniel David Moses makes a point of this differential treatment: The idea of presenting something that someone will decide is authentically ‘Native’ seems absurd to me. I can remember asking an interviewer, because I wanted to try and understand what they meant by authentic and Native, “Does that mean that Margaret Atwood is authentically Caucasian?”23

In the following, I will summarize theoretical approaches to this problem and show the different standards applied to Native and non-Native literature. As Ulrike Erichsen points out, regarding minority writing “there is often an implicit suggestion that narrator and author can be assumed to be identical,”24 and so the narrator’s voice is thought to be recounting experiences of the author. However fictional the text in question might be, it is not interpreted as fiction, but “as a testament of authentic and unmediated reality,”25 as an anthropological artefact rather than literature,26 not in aesthetic but in political terms.27 Native writers are still seen as Native informants, educating us about their culture, as can be seen in the case of Almighty Voice and his Wife. We expect to learn something about Native people and therefore tend to confuse works of art with historical records. As seen in the discussion of Nolan’s play, Native writers are often automatically assumed or expected to be “spokespeople for the entire aboriginal population,”28 the Native community. It is mostly overlooked or ignored that this Native community is very diverse, comprising hundreds of different nations and people with varying degrees of Native ancestry. The notion that someone like Yvette Nolan, half-Algonquin, half-Irish, who in her youth had no connection to her Native side, should be a cultural representative of all Native Canadians is clearly ridiculous. As Margery Fee says, “This is increa23

Quoted in Appleford, “The Desire to Crunch Bones,” 21. Ulrike Erichsen, “A ‘True-True’ Voice? The Problem of Authenticity,” in Being/s in Transit: Travelling – Migration – Dislocation, ed. Liselotte Glage (Cross / Cultures 41; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000): 198. 25 Alan Filewod, “Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity,” Theatre Journal 46.3 (October 1994): 364. 26 Susan Hegemann, “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of Authenticity,” American Quarterly 41.2 (June 1989): 266. Although here she refers to oral narratives, her observation also holds true for contemporary written texts. This is confirmed by Wendy Rose, “American Indian Poets and Publishing,” Book Forum 5.3 (1981): 402. 27 Erichsen, “A ‘True-True’ Voice? The Problem of Authenticity,” 200. 28 Rose, “American Indian Poets and Publishing,” 402. 24

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singly a world where so called ‘mixed relationships’ produce children who are nonetheless constrained by the dominant discourse to conform to concepts of racial / ethnic purity and authenticity.”29 Authors who are only part-Native are only measured against their Native heritage, because this is how they supposedly differ from the mainstream.30 The mainstream, it is assumed, has no heritage or identity. To further complicate matters, many Native writers are also marginalized in their own community.31 The voices that we hear most often belong to someone from an internal elite or caught between two worlds and accepted in neither, as are many writers of mixed ancestry.32 In addition to this, not all Native writers have equal knowledge of their cultural roots. Many Natives have been raised by white parents, in residential schools, or by Native parents suppressing the Nativeness they had been taught to be ashamed of. It is only recently that Native people in Canada were able to re-learn what they had been forced to forget, and to get in touch with their culture again. Nevertheless, it is assumed “that the matter of race imparts to the Native writer a tribal understanding of the universe, access to a distinct culture, and a literary perspective that is unattainable by non-Natives.”33 Because they are born Native or even part-Native, these authors are expected to write in a particularly Native fashion, whatever that may be. As Ulrike Erichsen puts it, “it is neither adequate nor safe to assume that writers born in a certain place will necessarily write in the aesthetic tradition associated with that place,”34 and one could easily substitute ‘race’ for ‘place’ in that statement. Authenticity is also used for passing aesthetic judgement. In the extreme, literature that is considered authentically Native will automatically be taken for good literature.35 The flip-side, of course, is that only authentic Native lite29

Margery Fee, “What Use is Ethnicity to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada?” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (September–December 1995): 683. 30 Robert Berner, “What Is an American Indian Writer?” in Native American Values: Survival and Renewal, ed. Thomas Shirer & Susan M. Branster (Sault St. Marie M I : Lake Superior State U P , 1993): 128. 31 Jana Sequoya–Magdaleno, “Telling the ‘Différance’: Representations of Identity in the Discourse of Indianness,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo–Liu (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1995): 91. 32 See, for instance, Drew Hayden Taylor, “Introduction: Pretty Like a White Boy,” in Taylor, Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (Penticton, B.C.: Theytus, 1996): 9–14. 33 Thomas King, “Introduction: An Anthology of Canadian Native Fiction,” Canadian Fiction Magazine 60 (1986): 4. 34 Erichsen, “A ‘True-True’ Voice? The Problem of Authenticity,” 200. 35 Hegemann, “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of Authenticity,” 269.

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rature is good literature. This is the stereotype of the ‘Noble Savage’ at work. This concept also devalues Native literature, as if it cannot stand alone as a work of art but has to gain additional merit through authenticity. To quote Ulrike Erichsen again, “there are, at least, two different standards of literary evaluation: one for Aboriginal writing and one for non-Aboriginal writing. The obvious conclusion is that Aboriginal writing is valued on a lower scale than non-Aboriginal writing.”36 Apart from the sheer injustice of authenticity as a standard of evaluation, it remains questionable how authentic Native literature can be, when it is written in English and adheres to European ideas of genre. There simply is no going back to pre-contact times and to a pure Native culture. Everything written by a contemporary Native writer is in some way or other influenced by the immigrant culture, if only because the market is dominated by non-Natives. To attract readers or audiences from the dominant culture as well as their own people, who have of course been accustomed to white literature, Native writers have to adhere to the conventions of the oppressor’s literature. In the words of Muriel Schulz, “Literature is, after all, whatever the dominant culture decrees that it is.”37 Native While the last section concentrated on Western expectations of Native literature, it is now necessary to turn to Native people’s expectations and their views about authenticity. Tomson Highway (Cree), one of the major Native playwrights in Canada, has defined Native theatre as follows: “By ‘Native Theatre,’ I mean theatre that is written, performed and produced by Native people themselves and theatre that speaks out on the culture and the lives of this country’s Native people.”38 This definition would rule out many of today’s Native plays. Yvette Nolan and Daniel David Moses have written plays without Native characters. Drew Hayden Taylor frequently works with nonNative actors, simply to see some new faces in his plays. And Highway himself has worked with non-Native directors and producers. It is hard to judge whether a Native play “speaks out on the culture and the lives of this country’s Native people.” Of course, Highway wrote this article fairly early in his career and has expressed different views since then. Others, however, are even more rigorous in their assessment of Native literature. Gerald Vizenor 36

Erichsen, “A ‘True-True’ Voice? The Problem of Authenticity,” 197. Muriel Schulz, “Minority Writers: The Struggle for Authenticity and Authority,” in Language and Power, ed. Cheris Kramarae, Muriel Schulz & William M. O’Barr (Beverly Hills C A , London & New Delhi: Sage, 1984): 212. 38 Tomson Highway, “On Native Mythology,” Theatrum 6 (Spring 1987): 29. 37

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(Chippewa) denies writers their right to call themselves Native if they do not take on responsibility for their people: But for our purposes in literature, community engagement, it’s the choice of taking responsibility for history, for colonial circumstances, for trouble and pleasure and pain and engaging in that directly. I can even argue that if you haven’t been part of community organization, if you haven’t argued some issues, if you haven’t taken a position in the name of history and your experience, you don’t have a right to claim tribal identity or to write about it. That’s pretty strong but it’s important.39

This statement can also be read as a demand for authenticity. Vizenor claims that only writers who have been active in community work would really be able to write about Native life, so again Native literature is taken for a representation of reality or for a historic record. Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) takes a similar stance. For Ortiz, it is “the struggle against colonialism [...] which has given substance to what is authentic.”40 For him, one of the major means for that struggle is the oral tradition, and through the oral tradition and continued resistance, Native literature gains authenticity. Others insist even more on the connection to Native traditions. There is a small faction on the Canadian Native Theatre scene that completely refuses to work with non-Natives. In an online discussion about “What is Native Theatre,” one playwright expressed the view that Native Theatre should be secret, as it was based in ritual, and rituals had always been secret. For him, Native Theatre would only be possible on a reserve, non-commercial, detached from the Canadian mainstream, and not open to the (non-Native) public. This playwright thus discredits nearly all of today’s Native theatre. Such self-imposed exile would lead directly into the literary ghetto, an “invented, splendid isolation.”41 Of course, it is not really possible to escape outside influences. Native people have been too long exposed to and shaped by the dominant culture and its standards and conventions, and cannot return to an untainted, authentic Native life-style and literary production. The literary genres such as ‘theatre’, ‘novel’ or ‘poetry’ are already a cultural import, as is the language that most 39 Helmbrecht Breinig & Klaus Lösch, “Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” in American Contradictions: Interviews with Nine American Writers, ed. Wolfgang Binder & Helmbrecht Breinig (Hanover N H & London: U P of New England, 1995): 161. 40 Simon J. Ortiz, “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” M E L U S 8.2 (Summer 1981): 9. 41 Wolfgang Hochbruck, “Cultural Authenticity and the Construction of Pan-Indian Metanarrative,” in Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, ed. Winfried Siemerling & Katrin Schwenk (Iowa City: U of Iowa P , 1996): 18.

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Native writers use. However, there are good reasons for these calls for purity, an essentialist idea of identity and literature which we should not dismiss too easily. These reasons, and the question of how a Western critic can or should write about Native literature, will be addressed in the next section.

4. Solution? Authenticity as Political Strategy It is fairly easy to deconstruct concepts of authenticity as essentialist and unscientific. The conclusion that there is no such thing as authenticity, certainly not in any kind of literary production, is an obvious one. Every kind of writing or aesthetic representation is naturally already mediated, filtered, and subjective, at least one step removed from reality. Yet the knowledge of the inadequacy of authenticity as a form of judgement does not leave us the freedom to dismiss all claims to authenticity. On the other hand, we are in no position to insist that Native literature should be authentic or to define what this authenticity would be. Urging Native writers to address only Native issues would be a neocolonialist restriction of minority rights. As Margery Fee says, “The demand for ‘authenticity’ denies Fourth World writers a living, changing culture.”42 Gareth Griffiths calls this demand “an act of ‘liberal’ discursive violence.”43 In other words, using authenticity as a standard of evaluation would trap indigenous cultures in an unchanging, frozen state and hinder any kind of development. Their artistic production would always be compared to some untainted primordial condition, and the pre-contact culture would forever be set as the standard they had to live up to. Yet quite often this frozen state is a matter of choice on the part of indigenous cultures. As Jana Sequoya–Magdaleno (Chikasaw) puts it, “strategic identity-in-difference is adopted as the political basis for nationalist claims to ‘self-determination’ and tribal ‘sovereignty’.”44 So authenticity becomes a means for survival, for reclaiming Native traditions and a distinctively Native identity, a tool in the struggle for power. For a Western critic to deconstruct this essentialist concept of identity would be to take away this political tool. As Alan Filewod writes,

42 Margery Fee, “Why C.K. Stead Didn’t Like Keri Hulme’s the bone people: Who Can Write as Other?” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (1989): 17. 43 Gareth Griffiths, “The Myth of Authenticity: Representation, Discourse and Social Practice,” in De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin & Alan Lawson (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 71. 44 Sequoya–Magdaleno, “Telling the ‘Différance’,” 88.

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the proposition by a white writer that there is no essential aboriginal culture is unacceptable; even if we reject essentialist notions of ethnicity, we cannot deny claims to authenticity by cultures that we – as products and agents of ethnically divided societies – have been complicit in suppressing. [...] The essentialism found in the works of aboriginal writers can in these terms be seen as a defensive strategy which implies that ethnicity is a category of power, not biology.45

This is what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism.”46 Even though Spivak is in general strongly opposed to essentialism, she also sees it as a valid tool for regaining a national, postcolonial identity. This implies that we, as postcolonial critics, should in some situations subscribe to the essentialism of Fourth-World cultures to support them in their struggle. So the question of authenticity is a double bind for the Western critic. For the time being, we are in a position of power in relation to these colonized cultures; we have the power of definition and should be careful not to abuse this power. Herein lies the problem with concepts such as ‘invented tradition’,47 because it is only from a position of power that we can label elements of indigenous cultures ‘invented’. Characteristically, Hobsbawm’s famous introduction does not refer to Fourth-World cultures. It is merely a question of terminology, and not that the content of Hobsbawm’s work are questionable. But the vocabulary, in dealing with Fourth-World cultures, is inappropriate and potentially degrading.48 Other concepts, such as hybridity, syncretism, etc, are similarly problematic because they stress the impurity of cultures, their interdependencies, and criticize the idea of clear-cut differences. Who has the authority to call a culture or some of its elements hybrid or syncretic? Who would even want to? Of course, the ‘strategic essentialism’ for minority cultures is only one way of achieving their goals. There is much discussion within these cultures about questions of identity and possible forms of coexistence with the colonizers in 45 Filewod, “Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity,” 365. 46 Elizabeth Gross, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution. An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” in Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York & London: Routledge, 1990): 1–16. 47 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm & Terrence O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983): 1–14. 48 For a clarification of the content, see Dell Upton, “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Invented Traditions,” Historical Archaeology 30.2 (1996): 5; “Rather than treating ethnicity as something that can be held and nurtured, invented traditions reveal the process by which ethnic groups form themselves by choosing to commodify their identities and to attach them to equally consciously chosen material signs. The connection is arbitrary rather than ‘authentic’.”

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the future. Different ethnic groups have found different solutions. Whatever solutions are found, however, they should for the most part come from the oppressed minorities themselves, and we as Western critics ought to listen to them and write about them in a respectful manner. To conclude, I will briefly mention one possible way of writing about minority cultures that might meet the requirements of ‘responsible criticism’.49 James Clifford abandons the terminology of invention, resorting instead to Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation50 and revising it for his own purposes: namely, his ethnological studies in the Pacific. Clifford describes this approach in an interview with Robert Borofsky: [In articulation theory] one sees a continuous struggle over a terrain, portions of which are captured by different alliances, hooking up different elements in different ways. There is a lot of middle ground and a lot of political and cultural positions which are not firmly anchored on one side or the other but, instead, are up for grabs. Articulation, of course, suggests discourse or speech. But more importantly, it also suggests connections in the sense that a joint is an articulation. Something that is articulated or hooked together can also be unhooked, disarticulated. So that when you look at something like a cultural formation, looking at it as an articulated ensemble does not allow you to fall into an organic model – the notion of a living, persistent body that is continuous and growing through time. The whole is more like a cyborg, or a political coalition. The elements are more contingent. [...] In articulation theory, the whole question of authenticity or inauthenticity is set aside. There is no problem in picking up and re-hooking to your structure something that had either been blown off, forgotten, or had been taken off for tactical reasons. You can reconstruct yourself. This is to me a more historically precise way of talking about what is often termed ‘invention.’ It avoids the whole language of invention, in fact. It also avoids the language of hybridity. Hybridity has an organic sense built into it, even though it is about mixing differences, different forms. Articulation is more tactical and political.51

49 For the term ‘responsible criticism’, see Renate Eigenbrod, “Can ‘the Subaltern’ be Read? The Role of the Critic in Postcolonial Studies: An Epilogue to a Workshop,” in Can ‘the Subaltern’ be Read?, ed. Tobias Döring, Uwe Schäfer & Mark Stein (A C O L I T Special Issue 2, 1996): 97–101. 50 See Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Commonwealth Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60; Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley & Kuan–Hsing Chen (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 112–27. 51 Robert Borofsky, “Valuing the Pacific: An Interview with James Clifford,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 2000): 97.

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Clifford acknowledges the political dimension of the issue of cultural identity. He suggests that the formation of cultural identity is deliberate and adjustable to any given political situation. Rather than calling elements of a culture ‘invented’, articulation theory sees culture as a compound of a variety of elements that can be picked and chosen from. Thus it is no longer necessary to talk about authenticity, as every culture has a large repository of cultural elements at hand that are more or less useful in any given situation and are strategically incorporated or abandoned. Perhaps the best way to address the problem of authenticity from the position of the Western critic is to simply avoid it and work around it. After all, if we do not expect authenticity, we cannot be disappointed.

5. Conclusion To return briefly to the subject of Native Canadian Theatre, the theoretical musings above have implications, of course. It remains inappropriate to use authenticity as an indication of value, at least for Western critics. It is not possible to decide whether one play is more Native than another, and thus to exclude certain plays from a certain ‘canon’ of Native theatre because they do not meet our expectations. I would suggest treating everything that is written by a Native playwright as Native theatre, with Native playwrights being defined as persons who consider themselves Natives, have Native ancestry, and are recognized as Native by their people.52 Native theatre is so rich, so diverse, that we should not develop blind spots towards writers like Yvette Nolan whose identity is not as clearly defined as we might hope for. The difficulty lies in the fact that writers like Taylor, Moses, and others are challenging concepts of identity within their own society as well as in the dominant culture. There is no single Native theory about these issues but, rather, a variety of approaches. We have to remain careful not to take too much for granted and to constantly question our own methodology so that we do not become disrespectful of these cultures that have suffered from colonialist oppression for so long and are just beginning to regain their own heritage.

52 For similar definitions, see Joseph Bruchac, “Returning the Gift: An Introduction,” in Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival, ed. Joseph Bruchac (Tucson & London: U of Arizona P , 1994): xx; Brian Swann, “Introduction: Only the Beginning,” in Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, ed. Duane Niatum (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988): xx.

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WORKS CITED Appleford, Rob. “The Desire to Crunch Bone: Daniel David Moses and the ‘True Real Indian,’” Canadian Theatre Review 77 (Summer 1996): 21–26. Berner, Robert. “What Is an American Indian Writer?” in Native American Values: Survival and Renewal, ed. Thomas Shirer & Susan M. Branster (Sault St. Marie M I : Lake Superior State U P , 1993): 124–35. Borofsky, Robert. “Valuing the Pacific: An Interview with James Clifford,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 2000): 92–99. Breinig, Helmbrecht & Klaus Lösch. “Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” in American Contradictions: Interviews with Nine American Writers, ed. Wolfgang Binder & Helmbrecht Breinig (Hanover N H & London: U P of New England, 1995): 143–65. Bruchac, Joseph. “Returning the Gift: An Introduction,” in Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival, ed. Joseph Bruchac (Tucson & London: U of Arizona P , 1994): xvii–xxi. Chapman, Geoff. “Powerful Tale Ruined By Ending,” Toronto Star (16 February 1992): C7. Czarnecki, Mark. “Brilliant Second Act Redeems Almighty Voice,” Eye (20 February 1992): 30. Eigenbrod, Renate. “Can ‘the Subaltern’ be Read? The Role of the Critic in Postcolonial Studies: An Epilogue to a Workshop,” in Can ‘the Subaltern’ be Read?, ed. Tobias Döring, Uwe Schäfer & Mark Stein (A C O L I T Special Issue 2, 1996): 97–101. Erichsen, Ulrike. “A ‘True-True’ Voice? The Problem of Authenticity,” in Being/s in Transit: Travelling – Migration – Dislocation, ed. Liselotte Glage (Cross / Cultures 41; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000): 193–203. Fee, Margery. “Why C.K. Stead Didn’t Like Keri Hulme’s the bone people: Who Can Write as Other?” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (1989): 11–32. ——. “What Use is Ethnicity to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada?” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (September–December 1995): 683–91. Filewod, Alan. “Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity,” Theatre Journal 46.3 (October 1994): 363–73. Glaap, Albert–Reiner. “Margo Kane, Daniel David Moses, Yvette Nolan, Drew Hayden Taylor: Four Native Playwrights from Canada,” Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Verbandes deutscher Anglisten 7.1 (March 1996): 5–25. Griffiths, Gareth. “The Myth of Authenticity: Representation, Discourse and Social Practice,“ in De-Scribing Empire. Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin & Alan Lawson (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 70–85. Gross, Elizabeth. “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York & London: Routledge, 1990): 1–16. Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Commonwealth Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60.

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Hegemann, Susan. “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of Authenticity,” American Quarterly 41.2 (June 1989): 265–83. Highway, Tomson. “On Native Mythology,” Theatrum 6 (Spring 1987): 29–32. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm & Terrence O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1983): 1– 14. Hochbruck, Wolfgang. “Cultural Authenticity and the Construction of Pan-Indian Metanarrative,” in Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, ed. Winfried Siemerling & Katrin Schwenk (Iowa City: U of Iowa P , 1996): 18–28. Kenny, George, & Denis Lacroix. October Stranger (Toronto: Chimo, 1978). King, Thomas. “Introduction: An Anthology of Canadian Native Fiction,” Canadian Fiction Magazine 60 (1986): 4–10. Martin, Calvin. The American Indian and the Problem of History (New York & Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987): 3–26. Moses, Daniel David. Almighty Voice and His Wife (Stratford, Ontario: Williams– Wallace, 1992). Nolan, Yvette. “Blade,” in Nolan, Blade, Job’s Wife and Video: Three Plays (Toronto: ArtBiz Comm, 1995): 1–15. ——. “Losing My Tradition,” Prairie Fire 16.3 (Autumn 1995): 115–19. ——. “Selling Myself: The Value of an Artist,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 19.1 (1999): 74–84. Ortiz, Simon J. “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” M E L U S 8.2 (Summer 1981): 7–12. Rose, Wendy. “American Indian Poets and Publishing,” Book Forum 5.3 (1981): 400– 402. Schulz, Muriel. “Minority Writers: The Struggle for Authenticity and Authority,” in Language and Power, ed. Cheris Kramarae, Muriel Schulz & William M. O’Barr (Beverly Hills C A , London & New Delhi: Sage, 1984): 206–17. Sequoya–Magdaleno, Jana. “Telling the ‘Différance’: Representations of Identity in the Discourse of Indianness,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo–Liu (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1995): 88–116. Slack, Jennifer Daryl. “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley & Kuan– Hsing Chen (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 112–27. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1988): 271–313. Swann, Brian. “Introduction: Only the Beginning,” in Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, ed. Duane Niatum (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988): xiii–xxxii. Taylor, Drew Hayden. “Storytelling to Stage: The Growth of Native Theatre in Canada,” Drama Review 41.3 (Fall 1997): 140–52.

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——. “Introduction: Pretty Like a White Boy,” in Taylor, Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (Penticton, B.C.: Theytus, 1996): 9– 14. ——. “An Indian by any Other Name” in Taylor, Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (Penticton, B.C.: Theytus, 1996): 53–55. ——. “Foreword” to Taylor, alterNatives (Burnaby, B.C.: Talon, 2000): 5–6. ——. alterNatives (Burnaby, BC: Talon, 2000). Upton, Dell. “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Invented Traditions,” Historical Archaeology 30.2 (1996): 1–7.

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Embracing Oneself and the Other Overcoming Racial Hatred in South African Drama

H AIKE F RANK

A

T O P I C F R E Q U E N T L Y A D D R E S S E D in South African plays written during the apartheid era is the relationship between characters of different races living in a society in which a hierarchy of racial difference is institutionalized and processes of inclusion and exclusion dominate in daily life.1 This essay proposes a reading of two anti-apartheid plays, The Blood Knot (1961; Blood Knot, revised 1985) by Athol Fugard and Sophiatown (1986) by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, in which characters attempt to bridge the gap between different races in order to define a new identity for themselves. The success of such a plan depends largely on the nature of the exchange between the Self and the Other. The German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels has examined this relationship between the Self and the Other, and has developed a philosophy of alterity on which this essay is based.2 Waldenfels suggests ways in which the other can be approached phenomenologically. He is concerned with a central question or what he calls a

1

Apartheid ideology was based on binary oppositions and a Manichaean world-view, differentiating between the ‘white’ ruling class and the ‘black’ or dispossessed and oppressed class. Apartheid society was, however, also based on gradation, dividing the population and its accorded roles into a racial hierarchy. ‘Whites’ belonged to the superior race whereas racial inferiority was attested for all ‘black’ groups. ‘Indians’ were considered superior to ‘coloureds’, who were defined as superior to ‘Africans’. 2 This approach has already been applied to South African literature: Nicole Cujai offers a reading of the construction of female identity in South African narratives based, among other approaches, on Waldenfels’s philosophy of alterity. See Nicole Cujai, ‘And I too am not myself’ – Konstruktionen weiblicher Identität in Werken der englischsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur Südafrikas (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001): 44–46, 86–89.

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“meta-question”:3 “How to question the other without falsifying the phenomenon of the other by the manner in which we question it?”4 This means that instead of just asking “What is the other,” he analyzes the question “How do we acquire or experience knowledge of the other?”5 He renounces preconceived notions of the Other, focusing instead on conceptions drawn from experience itself. In this sense, phenomenology is interested in the moment of the appearance of the Other as such, and the situation where its “otherness becomes questionable.”6 Waldenfels uses the German terms ‘fremd/Fremdheit ’ to signify the idea of alterity. There are several English expressions for ‘fremd ’: ‘alien’ in the sense of the Other; secondly, ‘foreign’ meaning coming from the outside, ‘strange’ in the sense of looking or sounding curious; and finally, ‘Other’, which Waldenfels uses as a contrast to “the self and its own.”7 He prefers the terms ‘alien’ and ‘Other’, and attempts to respect these different nuances in meaning in his arguments.8 Waldenfels argues that we perceive the alien as a provocation or as something that makes us uncomfortable. The alien shows us that there is something else that exists outside of the Self. This creates both fear and desire in us, fear because the alien is a kind of competitor for the Self, and desire because the alien allows us to consider possibilities that are not part of our order of life.9 Waldenfels examines different methods of dealing with this experience of the alien. In the extreme, the alien can be considered as hostile and requiring elimination.10 Another strategy for coming to terms with the alien is that of appropriation and domination. Waldenfels criticizes these typically Western approaches, because they adapt the alien to the Self, take away its otherness or alienness, and reduce it to an extension of the Self.11 By contrast, he argues 3

Bernhard Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, ed. Gisela Brinker–Gabler (Albany: State U of New York P , 1995): 35. 4 Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” 35. 5 “Response to the Other,” 35. 6 “Response to the Other,”35. Waldenfels follows the ideas of Edmund Husserl. Waldenfels distances himself from theories of communication and language that focus on the Other, because these approaches often take common rules and goals for granted, elements which must be questioned in their own right. 7 Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” 36. 8 “Response to the Other,” 36. 9 Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997): 44. 10 Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden, 45–48. 11 Waldenfels criticizes the act of appropriation, which derives from Western thought and practice, because it atomizes the world into individuals. He adds, “and from the struggle of

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that we can learn to cope with the alien without dominating or controlling it, developing instead a more objective or neutral strategy that preserves its otherness. This requires a change of attitude vis-à-vis the alien. Instead of approaching it by asking what it is or what purpose it serves, he suggests that we should answer it and respect it in its alienness. Or, to put it differently, instead of speaking of the alien, we should speak to the alien.12 Following Edmund Husserl, Waldenfels describes the experience of the Other as a paradox. It is the “‘verifiable accessibility of what is originally inaccessible’.” He explains that “to define the alien by its accessibility means that the way of approach belongs to its own being.”13 This allows us to interact with the Other without appropriating it. It can remain alien and thus true to itself. Waldenfels argues that our life world (Lebenswelt) is divided into a home world (Heimwelt) and an alien world (Fremdwelt).14 These two worlds stand in relation to one another and meet at certain intersections, in an in-betweenworld (Zwischenwelt). In this state of limbo, the Self becomes unfamiliar, and the alien is recognized as an Other. It is here that the process of speaking to or answering the Other can take place, and that the possibility of intercultural dialogue arises. The interaction of characters from different racial groups in The Blood Knot and Sophiatown can be analyzed as encounters between the Self and the Other as defined by Waldenfels. Both plays feature characters who would like to escape from their own racial group: a coloured man who attempts to pass for white in order to improve his chances in life, and a white woman who decides to move to a multiracial township because she does not identify with the pro-apartheid attitude of her ethnic group. The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard is about two coloured brothers whose difference is defined as racial in the most obvious way. Morrie is light-skinned while Zach is black-skinned.15 This contrast is accompanied by differeach of them for self-preservation arises a strong barrier between the spheres of ownness and alienness.” Different forms of centrism exercise appropriation – for example, egocentrism, which “reduces the alien to the own” and turns it into the alter ego of the own. Ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, and logocentrism are seen as collective forms of egocentrism. See Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” 38. 12 Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” 35. 13 “Response to the Other,” 36. 14 He emphasizes that otherness does not come from the outside or constitute a special phenomenon, but that “a dimension of otherness” pervades our inner and familiar world. He adds: “The ‘alien’ begins at home” (Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” 36). 15 Morrie and Zach have the same mother; however, it is not clear whether they have the same father. The play itself gives no definitive clue to solve this puzzle. While Fugard himself thinks of them as biological brothers (Athol Fugard, Notebooks 1960–1977, ed. Mary Benson [London: Faber & Faber, 1983]: 10), Russell Vandenbroucke takes for granted that

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ences in psychological, social, and cultural terms that define the brothers’ characters as a stereotypical version of the poor, white Afrikaner and the lifeaffirming African man. Morrie, who made use of his fair skin to pass for white in apartheid society in the past, eventually returns to live with his coloured brother. He feels ashamed of himself for having denied his own blood-brother’s identity and thus his own coloured identity, and believes he learned that whiteness is a social quality that he as a coloured lacks. “The clothes will help, but only help. They don’t maketh the white man. It’s that white something inside you, that special meaning and manner of whiteness. [...] They look at things differently. [...] It’s even in their way of walking” (BK 103–104).16 He adds, “Haven’t you seen their eyes when they look at you?” (TBK 100; emphasis added).17 He presents ‘whiteness’ as a fixed and absolute category that is acquired in the process of socialization, but that cannot be convincingly learned by others who do not grow up in this specific social group. He defines the South African coloured and black population as the Other in terms of white society. He has been successfully indoctrinated by apartheid’s view of the world and made to believe that as a ‘non-white’ he is socially inferior. It also becomes clear in Morrie’s reflections that the insistence on racial difference is a strategy that whites have implemented to cope with their fear of the racial Other. Morrie tells Zach about the time he followed a man walking ahead of him on a deserted road: When I was even nearer he saw me coming and stood up, but when he saw me clearer he picked up a stick and held it like a hitting stick, stepping back for safety and a good aim [...] so what could I do but pass peacefully. (TBK 103)

As Waldenfels argues, when the alien is considered hostile, it must be eliminated in order for the Self to be preserved. Here, the man on the road suspects Morrie of transgression, an act that represents a menace to the predominance of white power. From the perspective of the man, Morrie is no longer the coloured alien who has been appropriated and dominated by whites and thus placed in a clearly defined category. Instead, he is seen as the coloured-cum‘wanna-be-white’ who has escaped from his ‘coloured world’ and now actively threatens to undermine white identity. Therefore, the man believes that

they are only half-brothers; see Vandenbroucke, Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985): 39. Many critics comment on this topic but leave its outcome open. 16 References to the revised version Blood Knot are flagged as BK. 17 References to the original version The Blood Knot are flagged as TBK.

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Morrie must be excluded from white society and sent back to his own racial group. When dark-skinned Zach pursues an epistolary relationship with the white woman Ethel, who believes that her pen-friend is white, he too dreams of passing, despite Morrie’s warning and pleas to stop this game of racial transgression. Yet, in the long run Morrie makes Zach understand and accept the fact that his black skin will always keep him in his place in apartheid society, no matter how deceptive his letters may be. Morrie forces Zach to exorcize his desire for Ethel by acknowledging and accepting the limits imposed by his skin colour. Zach exclaims: Ethel is so ... so ... snow white. [...] And I am too ... truly ... too black. [...] She’s too white to want me anyway. [...] The whole, rotten stinking lot is all because I'm black! (BK 44)

Race again proves to be the marker of identity for white society’s Others. Zach, however, is not one to deplore his racial stigma for long and quickly changes his attitude: Black days, black ways, black things. They’re me. I’m happy. Ha Ha Ha! Can you hear my black happiness? [...] after a whole life I only seen myself properly tonight. You helped me. I’m grateful. (BK 45)

He can embrace his own identity and accept his life as it is. It is for ideas such as this one that Blood Knot has been severely criticized. Lewis Nkosi, for instance, condemns Zach’s easy acceptance of his place, as well as the fact that this play does not question whiteness as a standard.18 The lack of proper dialogue between white and black society in both Morrie’s and Zach’s experiences shows that apartheid does not offer the meeting-place of home world and alien world that Waldenfels calls for, because the attitude necessary for achieving such an encounter contradicts the essence of apartheid ideology. In the end, Zach is left with the task of making Morrie accept the fact that he, too, is coloured. Zach plays a racist role game with his brother which he titles “Baas Morrie and his boy, Zach” (BK 64). Zach forces Morrie into the stereotypical role of the brutal white man who must first learn to degrade the black garbage-man disturbing him during his visit to a whites-only park: “What did you mean crawling around like that? Spoiling the view, spoiling my chances! [...] I hate you, do you hear? Hate!” (BK 70). This outcry not only comes from the white man who fears the black man, but from a selfloathing Morrie who can escape neither Zach nor his own true identity in a society based on race. What makes the brothers’ game so heated is the fact 18

Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile and Other Selections (London & New York: Longman,

1983): 144–45.

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that they both translate the hatred they feel for themselves into hatred of the Other.19 Zach does not accept these insults without taking revenge, and emotionally intensifies the game to test Morrie’s limits. He takes on another stereotypical black role, that of the disobedient, dangerous, and rebellious native, and forces Morrie to confront him. Morrie’s façade crumbles; he is unable to keep up the role of the racist white, an important step towards embracing his own identity. It can be argued that this role-playing game may even turn whiteness into something alien or Other for him. Before, it was a quality or an attitude that was familiar to him and that he understood, but now this experience is like an epiphany which makes him realize that he actually wants to distance himself from whites. Thus his Self is clearly affected by this experience, and he accepts his coloured identity and excludes whiteness. A real compromise between whites and non-whites is not possible. The only remaining option is for the brothers to continue playing games of passing-off in the privacy of their home, but they cannot transgress the racial boundaries in society. They refrain from deluding themselves with dreams of escape, and pursue their hobby as an end in itself. Instead of offering a solution for how to create an in-between-world that makes an intercultural dialogue possible, Athol Fugard demonstrates in The Blood Knot how binarisms can be (re)enforced, and how difference can become absolute. The play makes clear that the apartheid system is responsible for the lack of exchange between the races, not the individuals per se. Sophiatown (1986) by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company tells the story of an (illegal) experiment of multiracial cohabitation in Sophiatown in the late 1950s, a mixed township that attracted “bohemians of all colors,”20 and came to symbolize what Loren Kruger calls “a fragile moment of racial tolerance and cultural diversity.”21 Jakes, a boarder at the local shebeen queen Mamariti’s house and journalist for Drum magazine, has placed an advertisement for a white Jewish woman to live with them in the township and soon welcomes Ruth to the household. The experiment is threatened by the government’s resettlement policies in the name of separate development. At the end 19

Similar observations are also made by Coplan, Goetsch, Vandenbroucke, and Wertheim. See David Coplan, “Retying the ‘Blood Knot’: Fugard on Broadway,” South African Theatre Journal 1.1 (1987): 116; Paul Goetsch, “Erziehung zu Toleranz: Das didaktische Drama Athol Fugards,” in Erziehungsideale in englischsprachigen Literaturen: Heidelberger Symposium zum 70. Geburtstag von Kurt Otten, ed. Dieter Schulz & Thomas Kullmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997): 302; Vandenbroucke, Truths the Hand Can Touch, 40; and Albert Wertheim, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2000): 32. 20 Loren Kruger, “The Uses of Nostalgia: Drama, History, and Liminal Moments in South Africa,” Modern Drama 38 (1995): 60. 21 Kruger, “The Uses of Nostalgia,” 60.

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of the play, the characters are forced to part. Ruth must leave the black community, which is removed to Meadowlands, a newly created all-black township located at a ‘safe’ distance from white Johannesburg. Ruth, the English-speaking Jewish girl from the white Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville, comes from a part of South African society that sees all nonwhite members ideologically, politically, economically, and culturally as a collective Other. The alterity of the Africans is the necessary prerequisite for the successful development of a racist white identity and view of the world based on notions of superiority and exclusivity. This is an example of what Waldenfels calls the ethnocentric appropriation of the Other.22 By moving to Sophiatown, Ruth believes that she can develop her own identity. She refuses to play the role of a supporter of apartheid, and defines herself as an individual other to the state. From Ruth’s point of view, her otherness is not constituted by her difference to the African population of Sophiatown but by her spatial and ideological distance from her ‘own’ population group. Yvonne Banning argues that this allows the woman to “claim difference from the white political oppressors and to assert her belief in the liberal concepts of individuality, personal freedom and private moral conscience.”23 Ruth has come to Sophiatown in search of her identity. Since she does not fit the ideal of a white Christian Nationalist, she cannot express and develop her identity in a society defined by apartheid. She flees to the township, where she hopes to be able to escape from this form of state-enforced identity-construction based on exclusion. Ruth clearly feels displaced in her own community. Yet as the solitary white liberal in Sophiatown’s culturally and ethnically diverse society, she is displaced again, albeit in a different way. From the perspective of the township’s inhabitants, she also constitutes an Other. Banning emphasizes the fact that although Ruth is welcomed by the African household members, “both they and she conspire to sustain her otherness as a necessary condition for comfortable exchange between them.”24 Mamariti earns good money from the pricey rent that Ruth is asked to pay and gains access to “Spirits from town”25 for her shebeen. Mingus, Mamariti’s son and a respected gangster, can secure his high status in his gang by claiming possession over the white woman, a 22

Waldenfels, “Response to the Other,” 38. Yvonne Banning, “Ghosts with Ears: The W E S S A in Contemporary Drama,” English Academy Review 6–7 (1989/90): 23; Yvonne Banning, “Junction Avenue Theatre Company: Sophiatown” [review], South African Theatre Journal 3.1 (1989): 97–98. 24 Banning, “Ghosts with Ears,” 23. 25 Junction Avenue Theatre Company, Sophiatown, ed. Malcolm Purkey & Pippa Stein, intro. Malcolm Purkey (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P , 1993): 14. Further references to Sophiatown are flagged as ST. 23

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most valuable commodity in the eyes of the men. Although Jakes values Ruth for being unlike the typical apartheid-supporting white, he sees her more in economic terms as a rare commodity or his “hot story” (ST 17) than as an individual. “You write about me, but you never look at me properly” (ST 58), she accuses the journalist. She is functionalized by all of the household members, who, like Jakes, hardly identify her as ideologically or politically oppositional, but use her to profit from her racial otherness. “For them the difference of racial identity is an all-encompassing one because is [sic] enables Ruth to do things that they cannot, to acquire goods to which they have no access.”26 Seen from this perspective, it seems doubtful that the African characters would ever want to free the white woman of her otherness and help her to integrate fully into the township. Despite various attempts, even successful ones, at introducing their respective cultures to each other in dialogue, Ruth cannot shake off her whiteness in the eyes of the Sophiatown characters. She even becomes their scapegoat when political attempts to oppose the forced removals fail. She remains the white woman, defined by race, because everyone knows that she can always escape from Sophiatown if there is trouble and return to the white suburb of Yeoville. It is only at the end of the play that Ruth realizes Sophiatown could have represented what Waldenfels calls the in-between-world that would have made a mediation between the home world and the alien world possible. She could have taken this opportunity to engage in a real dialogue with white society’s black Others. However, this would have required the Other to have willingly entered into this exchange. Ruth decides to leave the township when the government begins the forced removals. One of the key moments of the play is when she regrets the fact that she and Jakes did not begin a relationship. Banning believes that Ruth is too naive to “fully recognise the connection between her personal relations with the household and the legislated categories of identity that isolate and confine her within the all-encompassing difference of race.”27 Jakes’s reaction confirms this. Caught in fixed racial categories, he admits that he has always felt threatened by her and that for him she remains “some white girl,” or the other: You want to ride me over like a bulldozer and leave me here for dust. [...] Truth is, all the time you’ve been with us, we’ve both known you have a back door to Yeoville. (ST 70–71)

It is only then that Ruth really understands the power of the apartheid system to split a society in two. Ruth and Jakes have become strangers, or, in Wal-

26 27

Banning, “Ghosts with Ears,” 24. Banning, “Junction Avenue Theatre Company: Sophiatown,” 98.

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denfels’s words, Ruth experiences that the familiar has suddenly become alien. She has failed to realize that she and Jakes could only have become lovers in an in-between-state or Zwischenwelt, in which the mediation of the home world and the alien world could have occurred. In the end, this last experience has prepared her for an unbiased encounter with the Other after all. Her last comment suggests this: “Right now I don’t know where I’m going, but the door to Yeoville is shut. [...] I’m the one who’s closing it” (ST 71). Her experience makes it impossible for her to reintegrate into a white society whose beliefs and values she does not share. However, she also cannot turn to the new all-black community in Meadowlands from which she is excluded, not only because of the state-imposed racial separation, but also because she continues to remain the Other that the black community is not willing to approach. Nonetheless, Sophiatown ends on a much more hopeful note than The Blood Knot, and suggests that in 1986 an unbiased and unmediated exchange between the races is not only possible but also desirable because it allows both parties to develop in freedom and dignity.

WORKS CITED Banning, Yvonne. “Junction Avenue Theatre Company: Sophiatown,” South African Theatre Journal 3.1 (1989): 95–102. ——. “Ghosts with Ears: The W E S S A in Contemporary Drama,” English Academy Review 6–7 (1989–90): 19–27. Coplan, David. “Retying the ‘Blood Knot’: Fugard on Broadway,” South African Theatre Journal 1.1 (1987): 114–17. Cujai, Nicole. ‘And I too am not myself’: Konstruktionen weiblicher Identität in Werken der englischsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur Südafrikas (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001). Fugard, Athol. Notebooks 1960–1977, ed. Mary Benson (London: Faber & Faber, 1983). ——. Blood Knot, in Fugard, Blood Knot and other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991): 1–73. ——. The Blood Knot (Johannesburg: Simondium, 1963). Goetsch, Paul. “Erziehung zu Toleranz: Das didaktische Drama Athol Fugards,” in Erziehungsideale in englischsprachigen Literaturen: Heidelberger Symposium zum 70. Geburtstag von Kurt Otten, ed. Dieter Schulz & Thomas Kullmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997): 297–310. Junction Avenue Theatre Company. Sophiatown, ed. Malcolm Purkey & Pippa Stein, intro. Malcolm Purkey (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand U P , 1993). Kruger, Loren.“The Uses of Nostalgia: Drama, History, and Liminal Moments in South Africa,” Modern Drama 38 (1995): 60–70.

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Nkosi, Lewis. Home and Exile and Other Selections (London & New York: Longman, 1983). Vandenbroucke, Russell. Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985). Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Response to the Other,” in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, ed. Gisela Brinker–Gabler (Albany: State U of New York P , 1995): 35–44. ——. Topographie des Fremden: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). Wertheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2000).

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V E R A A L E X A N D E R is an assistant professor at the Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures at Saarland University, Germany. She studied English, German, and Italian philology and education at the Universities of Cologne, Freiburg, and Norwich, and she holds an MA from the Centre for Colonial and PostColonial Studies at Canterbury. Her doctoral dissertation, “Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels,” was published in 2006. H A I K E F R A N K studied at the Albert Ludwigs University, Freiburg, the Université Stendhal Grenoble III, and Indiana University. Her dissertation covers the topic of “Role-Play in South African Theatre.” She is currently working in the Corporate Communication department of a large German energy-utility company. M A R T I N G E N E T S C H studied German, English, and Media Studies at the University of Trier, Germany, and at the University of Essex. His doctoral dissertation dealt with Canadian multicultural and postcolonial literatures. He currently teaches English literature at the University of Trier and English and German to highly gifted children at a grammar school in Trier. He has published on postcolonial literatures, cultural theory, popular culture, and didactic issues in foreignlanguage teaching. J Ö R G H E I N K E studied Economics, English, and History in Braunschweig, Melbourne, and Kiel. He worked for a D F G research programme on the Indian state of Orissa and completed his doctoral dissertation, “Die Konstruktion des Fremden in den Romanen von David Malouf,” in 2003. Apart from publications on Peter Carey, Malouf, and Michael Ondaatje, he has taught and presented papers on postcolonial literatures and cultures, English history, contemporary British literature, and the E S L teaching of postcolonial literature. S I S S Y H E L F F teaches literature and cultural studies in the Department for the New Literatures in English of the University of Frankfurt. Her main fields of interest are postcolonial and transcultural literature and theory, narratology, media and gender studies. She is currently working on a project focusing on the representation of refugees in British literature. Her publications include Die Erfahrung der Migration in der Black British Frauenliteratur (1999) and her forthcoming Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Literature, the

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co-edited volumes Transcultural English Studies (2007), Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2007), and South Asian Modernities: Facing Social, Political and Cultural Transformation at the Beginning of the New Millennium (2007). S U S A N N . K I G U L I is a Ugandan poet. She obtained a BA in education and an MA in Literature at the University of Makerere, Uganda, where she is a lecturer. She completed an M.Litt. in Literary Linguistics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and a PhD in English at the University of Leeds under the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme. Currently she chairs the Uganda Women Writers’ Association (F E M R I T E ). She has published widely in national and international anthologies and journals. Her first volume of poetry, The African Saga (1998), won the National Book Trust of Uganda Poetry Award (1999). Kiguli has won a number of local and international awards for her poetry. She was also a special participant in the Northern England Professional Development for Writers of African and Asian Descent Project (2005–2006). As a critic, she has written on Ugandan poetry, oral performance, and the position of women writers in African literature. D A V I D L A B R E C H E is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, and has taught language, literature, and cultural studies in the U S A , Europe, and Africa for over twenty years. He lives in Trier, Germany, and is currently teaching English with the German Army’s officer training programme. M A R Y E . M O D U P E K O L A W O L E is a professor of English and women’s studies at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile–Ife, Nigeria; her teaching and research interests cover African literature, black women’s literature, literary theory, gender in cultural context, and American literature. She has been an international Guest Researcher in many institutions and gender centres, including the Nordic Africa Institute at Uppsala, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and Cornell University, where she was a Rockefeller Scholar. She was a D A A D Scholar at Humboldt University, Berlin, and an Associate of the African Gender Institute, Cape Town, South Africa. She was the National Chair for the Women Writing Africa project of the Feminist Press, New York. Her publications include Womanism and African Consciousness (1997). D A N I L O V I C T O R I N O M A N A R P A A C took English and American studies and did his MA at Frankfurt University. In 2001, he joined the Graduate School on Postcolonial Studies at Munich University. His main area of research is Philippine-American literature. He currently lives and teaches in the Philippines. N A T I V I D A D M A R T Í N E Z M A R Í N is a member of the Research Group “Reception, Modes and Genres in English Literature” in the English Department of the University of Granada in Spain. Her initial research area was Chicano literature, on which she has published several articles; later areas have been South African literature, more specifically the short fiction of Nadine Gordimer, which is the topic of her doctoral dissertation. She has also published articles on teaching Eng-

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lish at secondary level, which is the field in which she has been working for the last four years as a teacher and researcher. D U N J A M . M O H R is an assistant professor at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She has studied English, American, Canadian, and German literature in London, Montreal, and Marburg, and was a lecturer in English literature and cultural studies at the Universities of Trier and Erlangen. She received a doctoral scholarship from the Hans Böckler Foundation, Düsseldorf, and was a D F G postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School on “Cultural Hermeneutics: Reflections of Difference and Transdifference” at the University of Erlangen. Her doctoral dissertation, “Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias,” received the Margaret Atwood Award for Best PhD Thesis in 2004 and was published in 2005. She has published articles on utopian literature, cyborgs and posthumans, Canadian and British women writers, and on transdifference. Her current research focuses on literary representations of hybrid bodies. R A I H A N A H M.M. is a lecturer at the National University of Malaysia. She submitted her doctoral dissertation on “Constructs of Identity in Multiculturalism: Personhood, Ethnicity and Nationhood in Malaysian Literature” at the University of Malaya in May 2007. She is the co-author of Voices of Many Worlds: Malaysian Literature in English (2004) and co-editor of Linking Literary Identities: Malaysian Society, Culture and the Other (2003). M A L A P A N D U R A N G is Head of the Department of English, Dr BMN College, Mumbai. She is also visiting faculty at the University of Mumbai. She has been a postdoctoral Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and taught as Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005–2006. She has published in the areas of diaspora studies, gender and postcolonial writing. J U D I T H D E L L P A N N Y , Honorary Research Associate, Massey University, gained her BA at Victoria University, her MA and doctorate at Massey University. She has taught New Zealand Literature at the University of Trier and was a Guest Professor at the Christian Albrechts University, Kiel. Her chief publications are ‘I Have What I Gave’: The Fiction of Janet Frame (rev. ed. 2002), Turning the Eye: Patricia Grace and the Short Story, and John Bevan Ford: Paintings. Retired from teaching, she is currently writing a literary biography of the New Zealand author C.K. Stead. S A N D H Y A P A T E L was born in England in 1966 and received her PhD in French Polynesia (Tahiti) in 1999. She was a research attaché in Martinique in 2000, and since 2001 she has been working as a senior lecturer in Commonwealth languages and literatures in the English Department of the Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont–Ferrand. Her teaching ranges from the Pacific literatures in English (Indigenous Australian, Maori, etc) to the history of Australia and New Zealand. Her research interests are postcolonialism, travel literature in English, and concepts of first contact and representation.

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J O C H E N P E T Z O L D studied English and German language and literature in Freiburg and Eugene, Oregon. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, teaching courses on English literature and cultural studies. His PhD project on the use of history in contemporary South African fiction, “ReImagining White Identity by Exploring the Past,” was published in 2002. He has published articles on various aspects of South African writing, on Shakespeare, on Joseph Conrad, and on Victorian adventure novels. His current research focuses on English poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. G I N N Y R A T S O Y has taught at Thompson Rivers University since 1980. In addition, she has taught for the Native Indian Teacher Education Program in Kamloops and was a visiting professor at the University of Erfurt in 2002. As well as publishing articles about British Columbia plays and novels, and co-editing, with James Hoffman, Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000, she published an anthology on the province’s theatre history, Theatre in British Columbia, in 2006. D I P L I S A I K I A took a PhD on Sri Lankan Literature at the University of Bristol, where she was a J.N. Tata Fellow and where she later lectured. She has worked for the Times Higher Education Supplement and has translated from two Indian languages for the B B C , and now works for the South Asian archive S A L I D A A . H E N N I N G S C H Ä F E R graduated from the University of Hannover, Germany, in 1990. From 2001 to 2004 he researched on a D F G doctoral scholarship at the

Graduate School “Cultural Hermeneutics: Reflection of Difference and Transdifference,” University of Erlangen, Germany. He has taught at the universities of Braunschweig and Hannover and continues to work on his PhD project, entitled “Re-Establishing the Trickster: The Articulation of Cultural Identity in Native Canadian Theatre.” He has published several articles on Native theatre, and his research has led him to Canada several times. His main areas of interest are postcolonial studies and drama. E D W I N T H U M B O O is an award-winning Singaporean poet and professor emeritus of English at the National University of Singapore as well as the Director for the Centre for the Arts. He won the National Book Development Council of Singapore Award for poetry in 1978 and 1994, the inaugural S.E.A. Write Award in 1979, the Cultural Medallion for Literature in Singapore in 1980, the A S E A N Cultural and Communication Award (Literature) in 1987, and, most recently, the Meritorious Services Medal as Distinguished Poet and Literary Scholar in 2006. V I R G I N I A R I C H T E R is a professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She studied English, comparative and German literature at the University of Munich, where she also held various teaching and administrative posts in English and Comparative Literature. She wrote her postdoctoral dissertation on the representation of post-Darwinian anxiety in English literature. She was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Leeds, and taught English literature at the University of Göttingen. Her publications include Gewaltsame Lektüren: Gender-Konstitution und Geschlechter-

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konflikt in “Clarissa”, “Les Liaisons dangereuses” und “Les Infortunés de la vertu” (2000) and Die Gleissende Welt: Translation of Margaret Cavendish’s “The Blazing World” (2001). She is the co-editor of Zwischen Revolution und Emanzipation: Geschlechterordnungen in Europa um 1800 (2004) and Theater im Aufbruch: Anfänge des europäischen Dramas in der Frühen Neuzeit (forthcoming). L A U R E N Z V O L K M A N N studied at Erlangen University, Germany, where he also received his PhD in English Literature. He also studied at Miami University of Ohio as an exchange student and worked as a lecturer at Manchester University for two years. Later he went through teacher’s training and taught at several schools. Between 1992 and 2004 he worked as a lecturer and professor at the Universities of Würzburg, Bielefeld, Hannover, and Paderborn. He is currently professor of E F L Teaching at Friedrich Schiller University. Jena. His major recent publication is a lengthy study of homo oeconomicus in English literature from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Additionally, he has written, edited, and co-edited numerous volumes on teaching English literature and culture. He has also published many articles on a wide range of topics, from Shakespeare in the E F L classroom and Madonna as an icon of postmodernism to German techno music. R U S S E L L W E S T – P A V L O V is a professor of postcolonial literature at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. His most recent publications are Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies (2005) and Bodies and their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Drama (2006).