Postcolonial Literature [1 ed.] 1682175596, 9781682175590

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CRITICAL INSIGHTS

Garsha

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Among the essays in this volume: “Postcolonial Comics: Representing the Subaltern” by Dominic Davies “Obliteration or Assimilation? Culture Clash in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” by Stuart Bolus “Postcolonial Tempest: A Survey of Postcolonial Resection and Adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest” by Dhrubajyoti Sarkar “Raced Subjectivity and Anxiety in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric” by Alejandro Veiga Expósito

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Postcolonial Literature

Jeremiah J. Garsha is a postgraduate researcher in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is a social and cultural historian of violence. He received his BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara in History and Germanic Literature. He holds an MA degree in Modern European History from San Francisco State University as well as an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on visual and material cultures of imperialism, framed in a world history context. He specializes in comparative colonial atrocities, with broader interests in postcolonial memory, specifically the positioning and repositioning of physical memory structures within landscapes of atrocities. His publications have appeared in a global range of formats, including Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, Przegląd Zachodni (Journal of Polish Western Affairs), and the Canadian Eugenics Archive.

SALEM PRESS

CRITICAL I N SI G HT S Postcolonial Literature

Edited by Jeremiah J. Garsha

CRITICAL INSIGHTS Postcolonial Literature

CRITICAL INSIGHTS Postcolonial Literature Editor Jeremiah J. Garsha University of Cambridge, United Kingdom SALEM PRESS A Division of EBSCO Information Services, Inc. Ipswich, Massachusetts

GREY HOUSE PUBLISHING

Copyright © 2017 by Grey House Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. For information, contact Grey House Publishing/Salem Press, 4919 Route 22, PO Box 56, Amenia, NY 12501. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48 1992 (R2009). Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data (Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.) Names: Garsha, Jeremiah J., editor. Title: Postcolonial literature / editor, Jeremiah J. Garsha, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Other Titles: Critical insights. Description: [First edition]. | Ipswich, Massachusetts : Salem Press, a division of EBSCO Information Services, Inc. ; Amenia, NY : Grey House Publishing, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: ISBN 9781682175590 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism in literature. | Colonies in literature. | English literature--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.P555 P67 2017 | DDC 809.933581--dc23

First Printing PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents About This Volume, Jeremiah Garsha

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On Postcolonial Literature: Ideological and Generational Shifts South of the Sahara, Egodi Uchendu and Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu xv

Critical Contexts Postcolonial Comics: Representing the Subaltern, Dominic Davies Postcolonial Tempest: A Survey of Postcolonial Reception and Adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Dhrubajyoti Sarkar

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Emergent and Divergent Voices: African and African American Women Writers, Joanne Davis 39 Suffering and “Sacrificiality” in Postcolonial African Literature, Kieran Dodds 56

Critical Readings Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Postcolonial Perspective, Robert C. Evans 75 Disabled Bodies Matter: Rohinton Mistry and the Politics of Embodiment,” Shubhangi Garg Mehrotra

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Vyankatesh Madgulkar: A Thematic Signature of Postcolonial India Through the Changing Construction of the Rural Structure, Anuradha Malshe 108 Obliteration or Assimilation? Culture Clash in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Stuart Bolus 123 The Rhetorization of the Abject’s Grammatical Positionality, Michael A. Parra 137 Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies: Countering Foreign Domination Through the Care of the Self in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Liam Wilby 150 Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet: “A Photograph”, Robert C. Evans 164

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“An Eviction of Sorts”: Language, Race, and Colonial Liminality in Ireland, Peter Robert Gardner 180 The Hawaiian Television “Cop Show”, Aaron Iokepa Ki‘ilau

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Raced Subjectivity and Anxiety in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Alejandro Veiga Expósito

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Resources Further Reading Bibliography About the Editor Contributors Index

229 233 251 253 259

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Critical Insights

About this Volume Jeremiah Garsha

The purpose of this anthology is to explore postcolonial literature in its most broad sense. The chapters herein are purposefully written so that a reader entirely unfamiliar with postcolonial literary traditions will be guided into this rich body of text. No one volume could ever hope to cover the deep history and worldwide impact of postcolonial literature. Moreover, with each passing year hundreds of new works by postcolonial authors or works using postcolonial theory debut. To stay up to date with the ever-growing bibliography would be Sisyphean. Yet, the chapters within this anthology and, comparatively speaking, the limited authors and publications contained within, give the reader access to the fundamental ways one should read postcolonial literature. This volume is meant to instruct. The reader need not have previous knowledge of postcolonialism. Indeed, one does not even need a prior exposure to the specific texts. This book will teach the reader. It will teach the reader how to read a postcolonial work; reading, often literally, the spaces between and outside the page. To encounter postcolonial productions is to encounter colonialism in all of its raw brutality. It is to see the lingering trauma, inherited by authors born long after the crumbling of empire. But beyond the reaction to imperialism occupying many works is the great hope of new innovation. Postcolonial writers use the ruins of the past to create stories that captivate and inspire. They give us a fresh start, grounded in historical perspectives, that change the way we view ourselves and our place in a globalized world. Each of the contributors to this book have been shaped by postcolonialism. They share with the reader perspectives of occupiers and the occupied. This volume reaches beyond the limitations of its all too brief pages by imparting far more beyond each word and punctuation mark. The lived experiences of the authors discussed in this book, as well as the perspicacity of the contributors, augment this volume so that it can read the terms vii

“postcolonial” and “literature” latitudinally. In this regard this book covers source material beyond the standard scope of fictional books once controlled from European metropoles. Acted out performances take center stage, as do television shows, themselves a more modern twist on theater productions. Comic books are explored as visual sources liberated from the confines and restrictions of prose and grammar. Poetry is unpacked and reinterpreted from a postcolonial standpoint. Furthermore, the very term “postcolonialism” has been widened to explore medieval England, the Hawai’ian islands, and even a currently divided Ireland. In its expansive, global scope, and its reading of postcolonial literature in its most broad conception, this book is very much a product of postcolonial discourses and seeks to inform the discipline. Yet it is in the most limitless sense of postcolonialism, distanced from colonial occupation, and literature, expanded beyond the printed page, that this book becomes postcolonial. The greatest accomplishment of this book is in its linkage of international contributors of multiple generations. Professors and postgraduate students mix together in these pages. Each of them have a strong background and personal interest in the subject matter their chapters explore. They are here to guide the reader through each chapter, using a book, play, poem, picture, or TV episode in order to create something truly unique and novel. Whether the reader is encountering the work for the first time, or has viewed it a hundred times, by the conclusion of this volume, the reader will come away with a new understanding of postcolonialism in a way that can be applied to all their future readings. Structure The fifteen chapters in this book tease at the wide-reaching impact colonialism continues to have on the production of art across the globe. It begins, by way of introduction, with a chapter exploring postcolonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Far more than a survey chapter, this opening provides the requisite knowledge and foundation required to see the intergenerational and regional connections postcolonialism is producing in much of the African viii

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content. This first chapter, literally our volume’s introduction, explores a broad assortment of postcolonial texts resonating from sub-Saharan Africa. This chapter is thus mirrored by the book’s final resource section, where the critical, but by no means exhaustive, postcolonial novels have been listed as jumping off points for further pursuit. This volume is split into four sections. This preface and the fantastic introduction by Professors Uchendu and Ekwueme-Ugwu comprise the foundational first section. In the second section, Critical Contexts, a historical and cultural overview of postcolonial literature is provided in four chapters. These chapters continue the tradition set up by introduction chapter, and are intentionally dedicated to providing background and examples on how to critically read a postcolonial piece. The third section of this book, Critical Readings, is a collection of ten deeper readings into specific works of postcolonial literature. In the last section, Resources, as already discussed, the reader can find a reference guide to all of the works discussed in this entire volume, as well as suggestions for works that could not be included due to spatial constraints. The first five chapters of this book teach the reader how to properly encounter a postcolonial text. In their coauthored introduction “On Postcolonial Literature: Ideological and Generational Shifts South of the Sahara,” Egodi Uchendu and Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu present a regional focus on postcolonialism. Key terms used throughout this book are defined, and the major works, revisited in subsequent chapters, are identified and put into conversation with one another. History lessons of colonial occupation in Africa, along with liberation movements, are introduced here. The chapter moves chronologically. Chinua Achebe and Frantz Fanon, founding fathers of postcolonial literature, sit alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chika Unigwe. The reader is brought out of sub-Saharan Africa and into the Americana of a current thread of postcolonialism. Whereas Achebe documented the disruption of traditional livelihoods in the wake of colonialism, recent authors look toward neocolonial apparatuses that contributed to environmental derogation. About This Volume

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In the first Critical Contexts chapter, Dominic Davies illustrates the freedom artists have found in employing postcolonial critiques in the form of graphic novels. This chapter continues Egodi Uchendu and Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu’s wonderful introduction by identifying and analyzing the works of key subaltern theorists, before moving on to an exploration of the visual media postcolonial artists have used. Like a literary cartographer, Davies explores urban landscapes as postcolonial environments and metaphors. The gutters and walls that break up cityscapes line up with the boundaries of paneled illustrations within key comic books, showing the continued disruption of colonial policies, but also illuminating the spaces left between, blank and ready to be inked by new postcolonial actors. In the next chapter, Dhrubajyoti Sarkar explores the reinterpretations surrounding William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. In a brilliant example of the plasticity postcolonial studies can bring back to traditional texts, this chapter looks at the ways colonial educated subaltern actors have recast the island play by imbuing it with deeper meaning. The ability to quote Shakespeare was one of the hallmarks of island educated colonized subjects. By examining the critical receptions of The Tempest, Sarkar’s chapter underscores how texts can be read and reread from new perspectives to create new postcolonial prose. Joanne Davis bridges African and African American divides in her work showcasing the flow of postcolonial ideas. Where colonial projects stripped away the resources of occupied lands, Davis’ chapter shows the enrichment possible through networks of generational scholarship. Using a feminist approach, Davis highlights the notable, yet sadly often unacknowledged achievements of female authors. Capturing the nuanced perspective and role women had in colonial and then postcolonial situations, this chapter brings attention back to the voices of the silenced, serving as a reminder that postcolonial literature seeks to empower the marginalized. Kieran Dodds completes the Critical Contexts section in his unprecedented step of unpacking the twin themes of sacrifice and suffering within colonized African locales. By bringing together the classic writings of Achebe and Wole Soyinka with Ngũgĩ wa x

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Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Yvonne Vera, Dodds positions himself and these authors as “avant-couriers.” He shows that African authors used the trope of sacrifice in order to make sense of colonialism, but that we have been misreading the literary use of suicide. His outstanding chapter forms the spine of this entire book, covering a massive amount of works under a unifying argument that allows it to serve as a stable platform from which we can then jump off into nuanced readings. The next ten chapters focus on specific texts, with varying postcolonial approaches. Robert Evans begins the Critical Readings section with a microreading of the epic Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. By keeping strictly to the text, and offering a near line-by-line interpretation of the prose-poem, Evans connects early modern Christianity with classical Greek and Roman mythos. His chapter, like Sarkar’s survey of The Tempest in the section preceding it, offers new insight into canonical western texts that is only possible under a postcolonial lens. Shubhangi Garg Mehrotra’s chapter explores the doubly marginalized status of being a disabled in the postcolonial dynamics of India within subaltern relations. Dedicated to the works of Rohinton Mistry, this chapter focuses on the metaphorical and metaphysical “disability” as an existential identity category by challenging the postcolonial self/other dichotomy through the interdisciplinary lens of disability studies and postcolonial theories with physical disabilities, and as such their externally imposed status and identity within India’s caste system. Yet, as the chapter shows, an acceptance and performance of the (dis)abilities by these actors is a metaphorical underpinning of postcoloniality. The chapter reminds the reader to think beyond defined dichotomies and implicit binaries into the alternate viewpoints that postcolonialism creates. In her chapter on the largely unknown author Vyankatesh Madgulkar, Anuradha Malshe uses the exploration of rural and urban spaces to situate an industrializing India in the postcolonial era. Making the short fiction of Vyankatesh Madgulkar available to Anglophone audiences within this volume, this chapter tasks the reader with lingering on the spaces beyond the text. Everyday About This Volume

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conversations of normalcy are punctuated and paused upon, while rifts between city and village scenes show the widening gaps in newly independent nations. Stuart Bolus explores divides even further in his chapter comparing colonial encounters and postcolonial authorship in Nigerian and Indian literature. In his parallel approach to two very different locations, Bolus argues that the theme of loss creates a damning illustration of colonialism’s impact that may be insurmountable without adaptation and drastic realignment. Bolus makes the shrewd connection that it was the marginal groups of outcasts who became the first converts to European colonial culture, and in so doing acted as harbingers of destruction to the communities that had shunned them. Bolus’ chapter is a reminder of the forfeiture colonialism brought to these nations, whether through assimilation or obliteration. In his chapter analyzing Jean Rhys’s lauded novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Michael A. Parra gifts the reader with a true postcolonial reading. His chapter not only explores the novel as postcolonial literature, but also the way the narration of the novel has been crafted. Parra reminds the reader that colonial power structures and hierarchies prevail within the written word itself. The casting of a protagonist pushes the reader’s attention away from the page’s literal margins and thus away from the marginalized. By reading and questioning each noun, Parra’s chapter explores the broader issues of positioning behind the veil of plot and the privileging of viewpoints. The chapter reminds us to question the very words we are reading and to look for the actions of the minor characters, who have their own silenced narratives, reminding us of the onus, as readers, we carry to liberate even fictional characters from continuing colonial structures. Liam Wilby’s chapter brings an accessible look at foucauldian discourse analysis into postcolonial readings, using George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin to show a universal approach that could be brought to all postcolonial literature. By arguing that villagers within Lamming’s texts, in decolonizing space of independence, are coming into their own postcolonial state of xii

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consciousness, Wilby reads even the innocuous actions of the Caribbean islanders in the text as concerted efforts to undermine the authority of colonial agents and systems. His chapter echoes the idea that the act of questioning authority creates a space for counterdiscourses beneath dominant colonial narratives of power. Within these spaces rise new self-images and projections of independence. Robert Evans returns for a chapter reading deeply into prose of the cosmopolitan poet Constantine Cavafy. Evans argues that Cavafy’s very life was an embodiment of postcolonialism. Moving within collapsing spheres of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean empires, Cavafy created a liberated space for self-expression and fulfillment. Using same-sex erotic motifs seeped in Hellenistic aesthetics, Evans contends that Cavafy’s rejection of British colonial influences underscores the postcolonial literary technique of creating something entirely new from the collected rubble of historically collapsed imperially projects. Peter Gardner moves this book away from the more standard postcolonial literature in his discussion of Irish playwright Brian Friel. Exploring a play’s overlapping narrative structure of language, where British surveyors and indigenous Irish locals are unable to communicate, Gardner looks at the imposition of place names as a palimpsest of the past. The chapter forces the reader to think critically about Ireland’s history as a colonized nation and to recast Irish literature as postcolonial. English-named imposition reflects the British institutionalization and occupation. The chapter explores the eviction of named locations, of feelings and connections, in an era where there are no blank map spaces left for refuge. Aaron Iokepa Ki‘ilau’s penultimate chapter moves away from standard forms of literature entirely, focusing on Hollywood’s relationship to the Hawai’ian island in the serialized depictions of Hawai’ian people in what he calls “Cop Shows.” Television police dramas and crime fiction series, Ki‘ilau argues, are obsessed with Hawai’i. Yet the complicated relationship these TV shows have in portraying indigenous cultures creates an intersection between cultural appropriation and vilification. His meticulous documentation About This Volume

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of decades of “TV cop shows” reveals the erasure of Hawai’ian people from these shows, with the islands merely forming the idyllic tropical backdrop as a stage for colonial performances. The last chapter belongs to Alejandro Veiga Expósito and a reading of issues of race within Claudia Rankine’s work, Citizen. Here African American experiences of racialized violence, discrimination, and feelings of alienation are brought into alignment with the treatment of colonized people seen in all of the chapters above. In America, issues of identity, either self-fashioned or imposed, as Rankine sees it, cannot be separated from the skin color. Expósito exposes the reader to harsh lived experiences, depicted in a visceral account through Rankine’s poetic strategy of placing the viewer into the colonial gaze. Using Fanon’s writings and Lacanian readings along with Rankine’s ideas of subjectivity, this chapter links shared colonial histories between European colonization and the current state of race relations in America. The layout of these chapters is not to suggest that this book needs to be read sequentially. Indeed, each chapter is self-contained and creates its own ways into understanding postcolonial literature. The reader is encouraged to use this book as it best serves his/her purpose. No chapters require prior knowledge of the text/texts discussed. When viewed in totality, however, this book serves to highlight issues and themes that are applicable to forms of postcolonial literature. After all, it is the reader who will write the final chapter.

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On Postcolonial Literature: Ideological and Generational Shifts South of the Sahara Egodi Uchendu and Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu

Historically, postcolonial literature, south of the Sahara and elsewhere, progressively evolved from postcolonial philosophy. This philosophy is fundamentally tied to the inferiority complex that subjugation and colonization imposed on citizens of former colonies. Next, is the awareness of the need to fight and overcome this feeling of inferiority and actually struggle for freedom from all forms of external dominance—political, economical, and others. In recent times, moreover, there has been a growing consciousness of the cultural integration that has evolved and continues to evolve as a result of colonial contact. This integration has evoked “hybridity,” a biological concept, to account for the cultural overlap that has resulted from colonization. Modern colonialism is traced back to the fifteenth century when, for the purposes of economic and territorial expansion, the European nations of Portugal and Spain pioneered voyages into parts of the world hitherto unknown to them. The new worlds included the Americas, the African coasts, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. By the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, other European nations, including Britain, France, and Germany, had become major players in imperialist expeditions. Hinterland African nations, the Caribbean Islands, India, and parts of Asia were annexed and brought under the forceful rule of those imperialist powers. According to Benedikt Stuchtey, Europe’s capitalist drive for profit and their perception of the colonies as an outlet for Europe’s overpopulation, as well as the urge for exploration, were central to their expansionist moves. Later, religious and other ideological inclinations motivated the quests. Europe, for instance, perceived herself to be on a “civilizing mission.” The indigenous Africans and native Indians, for instance, were seen as culturally backward or uncivilized. As such, the colonizers, with their religion and their On Postcolonial Literature

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governments, were on a mission to civilize these peoples. Thus, with the military might of their home governments behind them, European missionaries entered hinterland nations, upturning and overthrowing native cultural practices, religion, politics, economic and social systems, and substituting them with their own, where possible. Postcolonialism, as an ideology, therefore, has its roots in those colonial experiences. It attempts in principle to restructure and reauthenticate the precolonial identities of persons from the former colonies. Authority, identity, voice, subjectivity, and location are explored by postcolonial thinkers and authors as issues associated with colonization that need to be addressed. Postcolonial literature also refers to writings that depict the colonial realities of conquests, occupations, subjugations, and exploitations; and the struggle for emancipation that follows. It mirrors the post-independence struggle for the transfer of real autonomy, power, and authority from the colonizers to the colonized. It reflects the experiences of both the colonizers and the colonized, characterized first by fatalism and then by passive acceptance of the situation. This is followed by a period of armed struggle, insecurity, and lawlessness after World War II; then by the more violent agitations for emancipation that culminated in independence. It reflects, moreover, the “independence” and post-independence experiences of the present day. Precolonial and Colonial Experiences Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl (1977), set in precolonial Igboland, depicts slavery as an accepted norm, the same way that marriage and divorce are today. Similarly, in Chinua Achebe’s precolonial Umuofia of Things Fall Apart (1958), the notion of twins as an evil omen that must be expunged through the killing of the twins, is an accepted norm, in much the same way that it was the norm in medieval Europe for persons labeled witches and sorcerers to be tied to the stake and burnt alive. Fatalistic acceptance of phenomena that cannot be explained simply as either good or evil are characteristic of primitive societies xvi

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the world over; and there are always power structures that sustain such beliefs. These power structures in those societies, which may not even constitute the majority of the populace, often possess the financial, political, and military might to suppress all oppositions. As such, dissenting voices within those societies, suppressed and rendered inaudible, become empowered only by some external forces. This is the case with Things Fall Apart where dissenting voices, the efulefus, worthless outcasts, and those sympathetic towards their cause, become the ready Christian converts, through whom British missionaries invade Umuofia and the surrounding clans. The powers-that-be in Umuofia, with their loyal subjects, at first ignore, as equally worthless, the strangers who are willing to associate with the outcasts. But when the outcasts and their sympathizers, empowered by the strangers, become threats to the culture and practices of the community, the Umuofia elders and warriors arise to defend their culture. But it is too late. The missionaries have the protection of their home government, who, with their superior military might, very easily defeats the poorly prepared and ill-informed natives. At this early stage, therefore, colonization, as depicted in the novel, is accepted as an evil that no one could do anything about. Obierika reasons it out this way: It is already too late…Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government. If we should try to drive out the white men in Umuofia we should find it easy. There are only two of them. But what of our own people who are following their way and have been given power? They would go to Umuru and bring the soldiers, and we would be like Abame (140-141).

These other Africans, the voiceless in precolonial Africa, who readily join the strangers’ party, are, under the colonial dispensation, empowered by the colonial government, economically, socially, and militarily, to deal ruthlessly with their own people. As they see it, it is the only way for them to retain their own recently won voice, authority, and power. One remarkable feature of this period is the creation of new structures founded on “binary oppositions,” terms On Postcolonial Literature

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that originate from Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist theory. This theory explains how (in language use) words that are opposite in meaning are consciously or otherwise set off against one another. If one opposite is considered superior, its other must be inferior. Such relationship dichotomies as master—slave, white man—black man, civilized—uncivilized, literate—illiterate, land owner— squatter, among others, are binary opposites, which characterize the associations between the conqueror nation and the conquered. They also characterize the inferiority complex that the subjugated acquires. Among the Kikuyu people of Kenya, the situation as depicted by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Weep Not Child, is no different. Ngotho, with his family of two wives and several children, squats on Jacobo’s land. “Only rich Africans like Jacobo can afford to buy and own land. For a living, Ngotho has to work for Mr. Howlands on a farm that is actually his ancestral land acquired by [Howlands] the European Settler” (x). Thus, the issue of race, power, and subjectivity create the opposition that is of concern to postcolonial writers such as Ngũgĩ. Deprived of the use of his ancestral land by the superior might of the white man, Ngotho, like Achebe’s elders of Umuofia, succumbs to a fatalistic acceptance of colonialism. He thus works “diligently” for a few shillings on his ancestral land, with the hope that one day, the white man would return to his home country and he would regain his inheritance. But unknown to him, Mr. Howlands, the white man, has no other home to return to and now considers Africa his homeland; thanks to the displacements of the two world wars. Ime Ikiddeh, in the 1996 introduction to the novel, comments: “Notice the irony in the situation and the fact that the writer is sympathetic towards both men” (x), Ngotho and Howlands. However, the subtle and mollifying approach by the older generation endures only until the end of World War II when Africans who had fought side by side with white soldiers return home disillusioned, disappointed, and angry. In Weep Not Child, Boro, Ngotho’s son, a World War II veteran himself, is disillusioned and embittered, not just over the loss of their lands, but more strongly by xviii

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the loss of his brother in a war he sees as between Hitler and other Europeans. As such, he disappears into the forest to fight with the Mau Mau. The periods between the end of World War II (1945) and the latter part of the mid-twentieth century (precisely the 1960s), when most African countries regained their independence, were thus characterized by violent struggles in which many lives, mostly of Africans, were lost. The struggles in Ngũgĩ’s Weep Not Child and A Grain of Wheat are, therefore, reflections of this period. Out of a plethora of literary texts that mirror this struggle and subsequent ones, this chapter surveys works by Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Chika Unigwe as representative of the earlier and the latter-day movements and to underscore the influence of the struggle for independence on literatures of colonized people. Specifically, Things Fall Apart, Weep Not Child, and Americanah, guide this exploration because of the generational and ideological drifts that each represents. Other authors and texts are mentioned as additional evidence in order to reflect both the ideological and generational shifts in their representations of postcolonial issues. Ideological Foundations of the Postcolonial Fictions In 1961, the North African born Frantz Fanon published an essay, The Wretched of the Earth. This essay is considered the first major postcolonial treatise that laid down the principle for decolonization. As such, Fanon’s ideological postulations and recommendations have tremendously influenced the trends in early and modern postcolonial fiction, south of the Sahara. Prior to Fanon’s publication, however, Achebe’s fictional representations of the crushing impacts of colonization, mentioned above, had gained popularity in various parts of Africa and beyond. Other writers, whose works, fictional and non-fictional, reflect the colonial and decolonization experiences, include Ngũgĩ and Buchi Emecheta (already mentioned), Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwakpa, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty, to mention but a few. In Africa south of the Sahara, Nigeria’s latterday postcolonial writers—Isidore Okpewho, Chimamanda Adichie, On Postcolonial Literature

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Chika Unigwe, Helon Habila, Kaine Agary, and Tanure Ojaide— have equally, from different perspectives, explored a variety of colonization and decolonization experiences. From the socialistMarxist perspective, through feminism and gender, to the ecocritical and ecofeminist ideologies, such issues as power, voice, identity, class, degradation, migration, and hybridity have characterized subSaharan African literature. These provide an interesting survey of the ideological contents and drifts in postcolonial African literature. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, set in Igboland, south-eastern Nigeria, during the British occupation tells the story of the displacement of Igbo social, cultural, and political systems by the imperialist power. It revolves around the tragic character, Okonkwo, who, unable to come to terms with the changes that have come over the land (while he lived in exile), hangs himself rather than succumb to humiliations from the colonial authority: “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; now he will be buried like a dog” (165), Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend and another of the great leaders of Umuofia, retorts helplessly to the British District Officer, as the men gaze at Okonkwo’s lifeless body dangling from a tree. Power and authority, thus taken from the elders of Umuofia is central to the postcolonial ideology. Okonkwo’s tragic end, considered shameful in Igbo society, and the helplessness of the warriors of Umuofia against the superior firepower of the colonialists, mark, at this stage, a total subjugation of African autonomy and authority by the imperialist power. This finality is even more pronounced by the fact that: “There were many men and women in Umuofia who did not feel as strongly as Okonkwo about the new dispensation. The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia” (142). The community welcomes European fiscal and commercial strategies, which it views positively as “much money” flowing in. But this introduction of cash into their market system marks the beginning of corruption as the “kotma” learns to extort money from fellow Africans. The people’s indigenous open market system is xx

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moreover replaced by the closed system of trading stores, thereby dislodging indigenous economic systems and identity. This placating and defeatist posture is radically opposed in the revolutionary content of Fanon’s treatise. In “Concerning Violence,” Fanon actually posits that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon…the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’” (33). Insisting that the struggle will not be without reprisals, a counter-friction from the colonialists (and more losses on the part of the colonised), Fanon advocates persistence even unto death. Those in the forefront of the conflict may not survive. In fact, the frontline resisters can statistically be surer of death than survival. But they fight in the confidence that subsequent generations will be the better for it. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to the 1963 edition of Fanon’s essay, sums this up: It will not be without fearful losses; the colonial army becomes ferocious; the country is marked out, there are mopping-up operations, transfers of population, reprisal expeditions, and they massacre women and children. He [Fanon] knows this; this new man begins his life as a man at the end of it; he considers himself as a potential corpse. He will be killed; not only does he accept this risk, he’s sure of it. This potential dead man has lost his wife and his children; he has seen so many dying men that he prefers victory to survival; others, not he, will have the fruits of victory; he is too weary of it all (12).

Following this Marxist-Socialist and revolutionary approach, Ngũgĩ depicts the issues of displacement, loss of power, and loss of identity suffered by Africans. Weep Not Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967), for instance, are vivid experimentations in the rise of the local African workers (the grass-root proletariat) against the displacement and exploitation of Africans by European settlers and their governments. At the initial stages of the struggle, depicted in Weep Not Child, the younger generation of African returnees from World War II adopts the Marxist-Socialist principle of organizing meetings for the purpose of educating the masses:

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The speakers had come from Nairobi…Kiarie spoke first…All the lands belonged to the people—the black people. They had been given it by God. For every race had their country. The Indians had India. Europeans had Europe. And Africans had Africa, the land of the black people…the land had been taken away, through the Bible and the sword…The Bible paved the way for the sword…Later, our forefathers were taken captives in the first Big War to help in a war whose cause they never knew. And when they came back? Their land had been taken away for a settlement of the white soldiers (57).

With the passive and diplomatic acceptance of colonization by the older generation of Africans over, the stage is set for revolution and counter-revolution. The unionist ideology, the coming together of the proletariat to fight for a just cause, is introduced. As Ime Ikiddeh warns, Ngũgĩ’s novel “is neither an autobiography nor history,” but rather a fictional representation of the historical experiences of a people (ix). One discovers in Weep Not Child the original uprising initiated by “the rural masses” as enunciated by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre expresses this in the following words: “Here Fanon stops. He has shown the way forward: he is the spokesman of those who are fighting and he has called for union, that is to say the unity of the African continent against all dissensions and all particularisms” (Sartre 12). Nevertheless, the initial organization fails, and a greater anarchy is unleashed on the working class by the armies of the colonial government. Conversely, rather than deter the workers, the “state of emergency” imposed on them produces a more formidable opposition in the form of the Mau Mau uprising, marked historically from 1952 to 1960, and often described as one of the bloodiest confrontations against British rule in Kenya. A Grain of Wheat is a depiction of the events that culminate in Kenya’s political independence from Britain. It portrays the struggles that produce the independence, with all the brutality unleashed by the colonial government and comes to a climax with the public hanging of Kihika. Kihika, a frontline activist for the return of the African identity, land, power, and voice, is betrayed by a fellow African and hanged by the colonial authority. But his spirit lives on, as the betrayals, loss of identity, power, and xxii

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voice, for which he dies, remain as the central issues of colonialism and postcolonialism to date. The political independence worn with so much bloodshed does not produce true freedom. The intrigues of the colonists are transferred to their African collaborators. As Sartre presages, “the native bourgeoisie takes over power [and] the new state, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists” (5). This new wave of imperialism over the nation is depicted by the experience of Gikonyo and five other men in the hands of a recently elected African Member of Parliament representing their district (A Grain of Wheat 146-147). The original authority, voice, identity, and influence, which the ordinary African enjoyed prior to colonialism, has been destroyed through imposition of alien social, political, cultural, and economic systems, whereby land and other means of production are no longer owned by individuals, but by the state, controlled by a few persons upon whom the majority have unconsciously surrendered their sovereignty. The “puppet bourgeoisie”, as Sartre calls them, the new authority wielders, do not represent the interest of the common African. Rather, they become the means by which the erstwhile imperialists retain social and economic control over the erstwhile colonies. The imperialists retain authority, moreover, by their refusal to transfer technological know-how and the skills necessary for good governance. In so doing, they are rendering the new “government” as mere puppets, tools for their continued exploitation and export of the agricultural and natural resources of the “independent” countries for the benefit of their home economies, but at the detriment of the African nations. This new form of colonialism, otherwise termed neocolonialism, makes it difficult for African countries to achieve rapid social, economic, political, and cultural regeneration and growth. This has equally become the subject of postcolonial thought, portrayed in African literary works, fictive and non-fictive. Ngũgĩ’s Weep Not Child, A Grain of Wheat, and Petals of Blood (1977), are thus, in this progressive order, fictional explorations of On Postcolonial Literature

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the postcolonial ideologies and movements in Africa, south of the Sahara. Petals of Blood, in fact, depicts the continuation of the struggle by peasant African farmers, this time against leaders elected from among them. The opening chapter starkly introduces this struggle with this confrontation between the state power machines—the armed officers—and the workers: “Long live the workers’ struggle!” “Please disband—appealed the officer, desperately. “Disband yourself…disband the tyranny of foreign companies and their local messengers!” “Out with foreign rule policed by colonised blackskins! Out with exploitation of our sweat!” (4).

No doubt, since Fanon, other contradistinctive postcolonial ideologies have emerged to explain the relationships that evolve from the colonial experiences. One of such is Homi K. Bhabha’s application of the biological concept of hybridity to explain what happens when cultural contacts, such as between the colonists and the colonized, occurs. Bhabha’s 1994 publication, The Location of Culture, is an attempt to bridge the prevalent binary dichotomies in previous postcolonial thoughts, with the idea of “cultural hybridity,” which emphasizes a new identity from colonization and de-emphasizes or negates the predominant ideological “otherness” inherent in earlier postcolonial thoughts. Corrupt and inefficient leadership—bequeathed to Africa through her erstwhile colonial and postcolonial experiences— breed other political, social, and economic vices that instigate migrations from African countries to Europe and other parts of the Western world. African youth, poorly equipped to cope in these foreign lands, end up ensnared in prostitution, drug abuse, and other vices. The twenty-first century has witnessed migrations from Africa and other former colonies to Europe, the former colonial metropoles, and to America. This migration, coupled with the colonial experience, produces a new breed of Africans as a third order, which contemporary authors such as Chimamanda Adichie, xxiv

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Chika Unigwe, and Kaine Agary have variously portrayed in their works. Although Americanah, with its complex plot structure, deals with a number of issues —identity loss, racism, displacement, and corruption—these are linked to the colonial and postcolonial experiences that the characters must contend with. The story centers on the main characters Ifemelu and Obinze, with a couple of other Nigerian youths. Like the other youths who, dissatisfied with their home government, migrate to Europe and America, Ifemelu moves to the United States, giving up in the process a thriving relationship with Obinze. Obinze is unable to secure a visa to the United States, but does make it to London from where all his attempts to reconnect with Ifemelu fail. Ifemelu, at first, attempts to give up her Africanness, affecting Americanness in her speech, dress, and hairstyle, as the other emigrants do. But in response to a compliment “Wow, cool. You sound totally American” (205) Ifemelu suddenly realizes the folly of “faking an American accent” (203) and queries her own conscious denial of her own identity as an African: “Why was it a compliment, an accomplishment, to sound American?,” she asks. However, on her return to Lagos several years later, her friend, Ranyinudo, teases her: “ Americanah!…You are looking at things with American eyes. But the problem is that you are not even a real Americanah. At least if you had an American accent we would tolerate your complaining”(437). With these titular remarks, Adichie marks identity loss a major issue of migration and hybridity that are central to contemporary postcolonial discourses. Ifemelu, like Obinze and several others, in the face of rejection in their host countries, return home and attempt to reconstruct their lives, but the task is almost impossible. So, the returnees form a club and hold meetings. “Their voices burred with foreign accents,” they complain about practically everything: “You can’t find a decent smoothie in this city! Oh my God, were you at that conference? What this country needs is an active civil society” (461). As such they unconsciously constitute the displaced elements in the society and sooner or later breed dissenting voices inherent in the concluding part of the above quotation. Similarly, Unigwe’s On the Black On Postcolonial Literature

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Sisters’ Street, resonates with those postcolonial issues (back home) of displacement, discontent, and migration, which breed in the migrants’ desperation for survival. The desperation, in turn, turns them to social misfits. Postcolonial Environmental Concerns Recently, in Africa as well as elsewhere, postcolonial ecocritical discourses and writings have emerged, as offshoots of the postcolonial and ecocritical discourses, to challenge the obvious polarization of the two concepts—postcolonialism and ecocriticism. Nabeta Sangili, for instance, depicts the negative impact on the environment in the oral African literature of the Maragoli people of East Africa, thereby shifting attention beyond the primacy of sociopolitical issues. Environmental issues, Sangili contends “would transcend from storytelling to dressing…when critically analyzed, it reveals deeper issues of gender, class, ideology, politics, religion, responsibility, pragmatics, and ecology among other critical elements.” In its ideological relationship with postcolonialism, these critical discourses address the issue of identity, which is central to postcolonialism. In their book, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin identify Western biocentrism and the African and non-Western anthropocentricism as constituting a major area of the division. The text is generally viewed by scholars as an attempt to reconcile the apparent antagonism between ecocriticism’s nature-centeredness and the postcolonial human-centeredness. Although the book does not cover, in its fictional analysis, texts from Africa south of the Sahara, the Indian, Canadian, South African, and other postcolonial diaspora texts reviewed aptly represent some of the issues addressed by writers in sub-Sahara Africa. This includes issues such as the relationship between human beings, the flora and fauna, and the fictional settings. The environment is equally depicted as a major issue in the fictive representations of the Nigerian Niger Delta people’s contact experiences with European and other first world explorers and exploiters of fossil fuels on the African soil. The impacts of the new xxvi

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science and technological cultures on the environment are clearly depicted in fictions and other literary forms set in that region. For instance, Isidore Okpewho, Tanure Ojaide, Kanine Agary, Bina Nengi-Ilagha, and Helon Habila have depicted, in their novels, the impact of Western technology on the pristine culture of the Niger Delta, the surrounding plants and animals, and the environment. Although Okpewho and Ojaide’s writings favor activism as a means of addressing degradations arising from exploitation of petroleum by Western conglomerates, Agary, Nengi-Ilagha, and Habila adopt a diplomatic reportage of the issue. Bickerbug, Okpewho’s eco-activist, and hero of the novel Tides, champions the use of violent means to get the oil explorers, “the Frank Segals and the Artauds and Cioffis of this world…to own up in an open forum” (144) responsibility for the degradation of the Niger Delta environment. Well versed in oil drilling technology, Bickerbug demonstrates to the journalist, Priye, the intricate details involved in drilling and how massive oil spillage occurs in the vast area destroying both terrestrial and aquatic lives and displacing local fishermen and farmers from their homes and occupations: There’s always an overspill…And when I talk about a blowout, it’s really a blowout, an explosion. The rig can take it, because it’s got the weight to absorb the shock. But what about the villages in the environs? For them it’s another tremor, and this goes on constantly even before the oil drifts to their fishing enclaves and their farms (144).

Issues relating to the socio-political and economic independence of previously colonized nations, issues of post-independence imperialism and the withholding of science and technological knowhow from former colonies are equally depicted in the novel in a major way. Besides Ojaide’s concern for the environment and human rights, in his Contemporary African Literature bridges whatever gap there is between ecocritical and postcolonial ideologies. Says Ojaide: “There has been a noticeable shift from using nature and the environment as simple tropes and romantic expression into On Postcolonial Literature

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political environmental and ecological awareness by pushing art into the political realm for public health and greenhouse” (73). He, therefore, debunks earlier views by some notable African ecocritics, such as Nixon, Slaymaker, and Hutchinson, of any real “antagonism between postcolonialism and ecocriticism,” especially because, according to Olaniyan, there is a “postcolonial preoccupation with displacement and an ecocritical preoccupation with an ethics of place” (qtd. in Ojaide 73). Another remarkable dimension to the postcolonial environmental literature south of the Sahara is the eco-feminist perspective of the representation of the issues of degradation of the African environment by Kaine Agary. Her 2006 novel, YellowYellow, set in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, tells the story of a young girl, Zilayefa. Born and raised in the creeks during the most turbulent period in the life of her people, Zilayefa, in her quest for identity, is confronted, like the rest of the villagers, with the alien influences of foreign oil exploiters and their Nigerian allies. Her life in the village is cut short as her mother’s sources of livelihood— fishing and farming—are destroyed. For as “the thick liquid spread out covering more and more land and drowning small animals in its path…The community took the matter up with the oil company that owned the pipes, but they said they suspected sabotage by the youths and were not going to pay compensation for all the destruction that the burst pipes had caused” (4). The protagonist is the product of a Greek sailor father, whom she never meets because his ship, having only “docked briefly in Nigeria” (7), give him just enough of an opportunity to enjoy a brief relationship with Zilayefa’s Ijaw mother. Before her mother realizes that she is with child, the man sails off and never returns. Thus, issues in the novel border not just on environmental injustice and its impacts on women, but also on displacement, quest for identity, and power central to contemporary postcolonial thoughts. In their quest for identity and power, the Ijaw youths migrate to the urban areas. But, ill-equipped for city life, they end up exploited and abused by the urban bourgeoisie, mostly oil expatriates and magnates, traders and politicians. This internal migration, similar to migration of xxviii

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Africans to Europe and America, in Unigwe and Adichie’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Americanah, respectively, are central issues in postcolonialism and postcolonial literature. Cultural and socio-economic issues, arising from the colonial contact of Africans with Europeans, continue to engage the attention of sub-Sahara African philosophers and authors, like those in other places where the effects of colonization linger. Economically powerful, often former colonizing nations and nationals still largely dominate the world’s wealth. Despite the United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, including freedom from subjugations, internal or external, the social, economic, and political systems of the world remain unfavorable to the attainment of true independence by the world’s rural and urban workers. These still depend for their sustainability on the few individuals who possess the voice, the power, and the authority—economically, socially, and politically. Impoverished and frustrated, they become ready tools for revolution. As long as true freedom is unattained, those issues that make colonization unacceptable will continue to engage the attention of philosophers and writers in Africa and the world over. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Print. Adichie, Chimamanda. Americanah. Lagos: Kachifo Limited, 2013. Print. Agary, Kaine. Yellow-Yellow. Lagos: A Dtalkshop Paperback, 2006. Print. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Web. www.google.com.ng/search?site=&source=hp&q=homi +bhabha+the+location+of+culture+pdf&oq=Homi+Bhabha. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963. Print. Graham, Huggan, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Print. Ikiddeh, Ime. Introduction. Weep Not Child. By Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. London: Heinemann, 1966. Print. Msiska, Mpalive. Introduction. Things Fall Apart. By Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann 2008. pp. i-viii. Print. On Postcolonial Literature

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Sangili,Nabeta. “Shifting Toward East African Ecological Criticism in Oral Literature: An Ecoanalysis of the Maragoli Songs” (2015). Web. www. academia.edu/839796/SHIFTING_TOWARD_EAST_AFRICAN_ ECOLOGICAL_CRITICISM_IN_ORAL_LITERATURE_AN_ ECOANALYSIS_OF_THE_MARAGOLI_SONGS. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. The Wretched of the Earth. By Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963. Print. Stuchtey, Benedikt. “Colonialism and Imperialism, 1450-1950.” In European History Online Mainz: Institute of European History 2011. Web. www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/colonialismand-imperialism/benedikt-stuchtey-colonialism-andimperialism-1450-1950. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa , Weep Not Child, London: Heinemann, 1964, pp. vii-xiii. Print. __________. A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann, 1967. Print. __________. Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977. Print.

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CRITICAL CONTEXTS

Postcolonial Comics: Representing the Subaltern Dominic Davies

Introduction: The Burdens of Representation The front cover of Sarah Glidden’s recent book-length comic, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (2016), depicts a scene overlooking a cramped Middle Eastern city. In the foreground, standing on a flat roof in the image’s very center is a man, his eyes concealed by his opaque spectacles. As the comic goes on to reveal, this man, Sam, was once an Iraqi refugee living in the United States until, after being suspected of terrorism (though without convincing evidence), his asylum was revoked, and he was forced to return to his home country. Separated from his family, who remained in America, Sam’s story is one of the many testimonies recorded in Glidden’s comic, as she seeks to educate American readers about the plight of dispossessed and disenfranchised people whose lives are subject to the whimsical policies of governments and the violent ramifications of war. Indeed, the comic seeks to correct the “rolling blackouts” of the mainstream media, representing the personal experiences of those who so often remain nameless, the details of their lives overlooked by the speed of continuous news cycles. This is a project that, as this chapter will show, is an overarching concern for postcolonial literature, culture and criticism more widely, and Glidden’s work is one example of what we might think of as “postcolonial comics. ”

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Fig.1: The front cover of Sarah Glidden’s book-length piece of comics journalism, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (2016). Used with permission.

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Let us return to the scene on Glidden’s front cover for a moment. The image does more than just tell us what the story is about—in this case, Sam. It demonstrates an awareness of decadesold debates in postcolonial studies that relate specifically to issues of representation and the difficulties raised by attempts to document the stories of the world’s most marginalized citizens. Also standing on the roof are Glidden’s journalist friends, interviewing Sam so that they can communicate his story to citizens in the West, thousands of miles away. That is, Glidden’s cover shows the process of journalism in action, asking readers to reflect not only on Sam’s story, but on the ways in which such stories are documented. Who is responsible for representing these stories to readerships in the West? How are they shaped and altered by the journalists, writers, and artists who do this representing? This front cover throws these questions into the foreground, asking readers to think through the complications they might raise. But looking one last time at this cover image, there remains yet one more layer. Standing to the right-hand side, unnoticed at first, is an image of Sarah Glidden herself, quietly drawing the scene in front of her. This self-depiction recurs throughout the comic as a whole: Glidden herself features as a character in almost every panel of Rolling Blackouts. In every scene, she shows readers where she was standing at the time, what she saw, and how she saw it. In this single cover image, then, readers are asked to consider: first, the original story; second, the processes of representation, and how journalists and writers document such stories; and then third and finally, to think about Glidden’s own act of drawing, and how those drawings represent (or fail to represent) the stories they are trying to tell. As for a number of comics set in (post)colonial contexts, the drawings included in Glidden’s book think about themselves. They are self-reflexive, perhaps even meta-narratives —which is to say, they are narratives about narratives, in that they show readers the way in which their own and other stories are made and constructed from fragments of facts, memories, and even sometimes, mistruths. Glidden is not alone in this practice. Groundbreaking comics artist Postcolonial Comics

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Joe Sacco, to whom we will return later in this chapter, similarly draws himself into almost every panel, asking readers to think about how his presence impacts on the scenes he documents and the stories he tells in his comics. Josh Neufeld, who has authored a number of comic books ranging from travelogues to documentary non-fiction, carefully reveals the layers of mediation involved in his storytelling in a short comic about Syrian refugees, entitled “The Road to Germany: $2400.” Every panel Neufeld draws is based on firsthand reporting gathered by Alia Malek, a journalist and civil rights lawyer, and the comic’s captions describe events that were related to Malek by the refugees who experienced them. He even uses color codes, with speech bubbles shaded in pink to denote direct quotations from those reports, whilst white speech bubbles are used to indicate paraphrased quotations. Meanwhile, in another example, the PostiveNegatives project uses comics to document, visualize, and relate the refugee experience, as well as other violations of social and human rights issues, to readers in host countries. As for Neufeld and Malek, anxieties around representing the stories related by victims and witnesses of such atrocities and abuses are found inscribed into the comic itself. The artists and writers working for PostiveNegatives always undertake extensive “ethnographic research” to tell “personal testimonies” in comics form, emphasizing that their “narratives are adapted directly from first-hand interviews” and that “illustrations are based on photographs taken during field research” (even if names are sometimes altered to protect the identity of their reallife protagonists). When possible, the comics are even returned to the refugees before they are published, so that they themselves can verify the final story before it is made available to readers. Such astonishing rigor around issues of representation, and a commitment to thinking through longer histories of colonialism to further our understanding of contemporary social justice issues, are shared by what has come to be known as “postcolonial” literature and criticism. As these examples suggest, there is now a notable movement in contemporary comics production that speaks to postcolonialism’s overarching project to communicate, study, and 6

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analyze the stories, fictional and otherwise, of peoples affected by the phenomenon of colonialism and other kinds of social and human rights abuses the world over. Despite the admirable ambitions of such projects, such efforts are not always without problems of their own; something that postcolonial criticism is carefully tuned into, and something to which postcolonial comics often draw attention. As for the comics discussed above, then, the movement of what we might think of as postcolonial literature has long taken place across national borders and cultural boundaries from writers often based in anglophone and francophone ex-colonies to readerships primarily —though not always—located in the global North (which is to say mostly the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as some other western European countries). This has been, on the one hand, the source of postcolonial literature’s great richness. Postcolonial studies offer students and critics a chance to read and discuss writing from many diverse cultures and countries and to learn about many different histories and geographies not so well-known in the West. On the other hand, however, this movement from global South to North—and related issues, such as the field’s emphasis on mostly anglophone and some francophone texts, or the economic and educational privilege of many now canonical postcolonial authors —have been points of contention very difficult to move beyond. Postcolonial scholars are acutely aware of the problems raised by these issues: that in this geographical movement from South to North can be seen the traces of old imperial power dynamics; that the poorest postcolonial populations continue to remain underrepresented, if not entirely excluded, from postcolonial cultural production; and that the languages of English and French tend to be spoken only by the most well-educated—and most wealthy— postcolonial citizens. All this led one scholar to ask, many years ago now, a question that continues to preoccupy both postcolonial literature and criticism: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Taking Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “subaltern,” which is used to describe peoples excluded from and forgotten by history, Gayatri Spivak’s answer to her own question was a resounding “no” (1988, 308). For Spivak, all stories, Postcolonial Comics

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“History” included, are mediated by some kind of representational tool or screen. That process of mediation will always contain within it dynamics of power and privilege that obscure, intervene in, and problematize the subaltern experience that is recounted by any story. A logical next question to ask, then, is if the subaltern cannot speak for him or herself, who, in fact, is able to represent them instead? Is it anyone’s particular responsibility? Speaking to these concerns about representation a decade or so later, Kobena Mercer shows how this question leads to a slightly different, though equally suffocating problem. He points out that “black art”—and we might cautiously extend this to include postcolonial literature and culture more broadly—gaining finally “after many years of struggle” the recognition it deserves, is now always met with “an expectation that it would be totally ‘representative’,” able to “say all that there was to be said” and “all at once” about the black or postcolonial condition, and about the subaltern experience (63-64). These two contentions do not by any means encompass the wide range of concerns addressed by postcolonial studies, but they are two of its central and recurring questions. They are especially relevant to considerations of “postcolonial comics” because the comics medium itself, as the opening examples discussed above suggest, is particularly adept at negotiating issues of how postcolonial peoples and their stories might be represented. That the two arguments about subaltern representation outlined above come from one literary and one art critic seems apt, given that comics combine the written word with the image—indeed, this co-mixing of the visual and the verbal is their defining feature. Comprised of multiple panels, in comics the readers’ attention is constantly drawn to the gutters, or the gaps in between, that separate the sequential images. Here, readers have to fill in the blanks, linking the preceding image to the following one to build narrative continuity, a process necessary for the comic to make sense. This also means that readers must consider what is not included on the comics page, just as much as what actually appears before them. They must pay attention to the way in which each image is itself framed. Comics require, fundamentally, that readers are attuned to the processes of 8

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representation, and how these relate to the reproduction of certain stories, peoples, cultures, and histories. Readers of comics, as for postcolonial critics, must, therefore, constantly interrogate the narrative’s contingency, fragmentariness, and lack of totalization. Postcolonial studies seeks to recover subaltern stories that have been forgotten by dominant narratives, be they in the mainstream media or in textbook histories; the comics form shows how those mainstream narratives are themselves mere constructions that always overlook subaltern stories. That postcolonial comics then often try to document the voices of the world’s dispossessed and disenfranchised postcolonial citizens seems, therefore, particularly appropriate. As Mercer writes: “no one ‘definition’ has more truthvalue than the others...what matters is whose definitions are more powerful, more hegemonic, more taken-for-granted, than the others” (78). Postcolonial comics not only recover undocumented subaltern experiences, but show on the one hand how we take certain stories and experiences for granted, and on the other, how we take-forgranted the fact that some stories never get told. Colonialism and Comics: From the Past to the Present Art Spiegelman’s astonishing comic, Maus, which was serialized in Raw magazine between 1980 and 1991, tells the story of Vladek (Spiegelman’s own father), and his experience of the Holocaust as a Polish Jew who, after many years of endurance, survived Auschwitz and settled in the United States. Maus’s success—it won the Pulitzer Prize in the United States in 1991—gained the comics form an unprecedented mainstream cultural recognition, and Maus is widely viewed today as a ‘graphic novel’ worthy of inclusion on literature and art courses in universities all over the world. Whilst the main narrative is about Vladek’s experience and survival of Auschwitz, throughout Maus we find Spiegelman drawing himself into many of the panels of which his comic is comprised, as the images reveal and reflect on the way in which he is representing his father’s memories. That is to say, “Spiegelman creates comic-book images of Auschwitz but constantly and critically reflects on his process of creation” so that, writes commentator Michael Rothberg, he is Postcolonial Comics

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able “[t]o remember genocide without abusing its memory” (189, 216). In many ways, Maus is as much about the act of remembering as it is a piece of remembrance in and of itself. As we’ve already begun to see, this capacity for self-reflexivity is at the center of the relationship between comics and some of the overarching concerns of postcolonial literature and criticism. Nevertheless, Spiegelman himself concedes that this is not a simple relationship. As he has commented, “the stereotype is the basic building block of all cartoon art” (1997, 3). There is here an obvious conflict generated by attempts to bring the terms “postcolonial” and “comics” together: where comics seemingly rely on a visual vocabulary of stereotype and simplification, the central project of postcolonial studies is to deconstruct stereotypes, resist reductive representations, and shed light on racial discrimination and other forms of essentialism. As Christophe Dony writes in his short article “What is a Postcolonial Comic?”: “the postcolonial label can [therefore] be confusing when applied to particular comics in particular contexts” (12). What, then, do we mean when we talk of postcolonial comics? How do comics, with their apparent visual simplification of the world and its peoples, in fact, lend themselves to the recovery of forgotten post/colonial histories? How do they deconstruct the kinds of racisms and misrepresentations of subaltern peoples that are complicit with the ongoing inequalities that shape our contemporary world? These are complicated questions that comics not only raise, but as we shall see, try and answer. In their introduction to the only collection to devote itself entirely to the topic of postcolonial comics, Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities (2015),1 which is an important milestone for current critical debates about the way graphic novels and comics and intersect with a variety of postcolonial issues, Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji write the following: comic-book production and circulation in contemporary regional histories usefully employ and introduce precisely...new postcolonial vocabularies. These scripts employ visual grammars, image-texts, and graphic performances that reconstitute conventional “imagefunctions” in established social texts and political systems and thus, 10

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perhaps, re-envision competing narratives of resistance or rights. In this sense, new comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a politically recomposed global landscape (3).

They begin, here, with one of postcolonialism’s most important presuppositions: that today’s world, and the kinds of globalization that increasingly define and shape it, still bears the traces of inequality that were forged during periods of formal colonization. These global inequalities continue to exist between those parts of the world that were once imperial powers—most notably countries in Europe—and those that were the subject of imperial exploitation. Furthermore, Mehta and Mukherji also point to the way in which cultural representations of all kinds, from colonial literary writing through to photographs and maps, were complicit with those colonial projects. The representation of colonial populations and landscapes in fiction and non-fiction alike allowed imperial powers to better rule over and exploit other parts of the world. Indeed, one of the most famous comics of the twentieth century with which even noncomics readers will likely be familiar, the Belgian artist Hergé’s longrunning series The Adventures of Tintin (1929-present), propagated a pro-colonial narrative. Most notably, the issue Tintin in the Congo (1931) depicted black Africans with a racist accentuation of their physical features, the story portraying them as desperately in need of Tintin’s civilizing influence (whereas, in fact, Belgian rule in the Congo was one of the most violent instances of colonialism during that period of high imperialism). This complicity of forms of cultural representation with ongoing global inequalities and foreign policies continues in the twentyfirst century in what Derek Gregory calls “the colonial present”— Gregory takes as his examples of contemporary colonialism the US and UK–led occupation of Afghanistan, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Drawing on the work of the important postcolonial critic Edward Said, to whom we shall turn in a moment, Gregory argues that the “colonial present” is “not produced through geopolitics and geoeconomics alone,” but also “through mundane cultural forms and Postcolonial Comics

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cultural practices that mark other people as irredeemably ‘Other’ and that license the unleashing of exemplary violence against them” (16). Comics such as Tintin are clearly, if read uncritically, one example of these cultural forms that perpetuate ideas of sub-Saharan Africans, or people in the Middle East, as somehow “less human” than those in the West. By contrast, however, postcolonial comics seek to subvert these dangerous and violent stereotypes. As for postcolonial literature and criticism more generally, these comics try to reveal “the continuing impositions and exactions of colonialism in order to subvert them: to examine them, disavow them, and dispel them” (8). In the examples of these comics to which this chapter will now turn, we must remember that the comics form, with its unique combination of text and image, not only implement these reexaminations, but constantly reflect on how those reexaminations are undertaken. Said and Sacco: The Footnotes of History In his pioneering work, Orientalism (1978), which is now viewed as a foundational text for postcolonial studies, the American-Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said began an interrogation and analysis of Euro-American representations of the Middle East, or “Orient,” as he termed it then. For Said, issues relating to the representation (or lack of it) of oppressed and colonized peoples in literature, especially in the Western canon, was intimately related to the political immediacy of the slow colonization and eradication of his country of birth, Palestine, by Israel. This latter process, beginning formally in 1948, intensifying in 1967, and still ongoing, thus encompassed the entirety of Said’s adult life and forced him into exile in America. Orientalism raised a whole new set of questions about the problems and politics of representation, whilst his later work, Culture and Imperialism (1993), revealed the political complicity of some seminal texts in the English literary canon with Britain’s imperial project in Egypt and Palestine (where Said has spent his childhood) especially, but also elsewhere, from India across to the Caribbean. 12

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It is no coincidence, therefore, that Said wrote the introductory essay to the collected edition of Palestine (2001), a comic by the Maltese-American artist Joe Sacco, indicatively entitling this preface as nothing less than a “Homage to Joe Sacco.” Originally published serially in comic form in 1993 (the same year that Culture and Imperialism was published), the issues of which Palestine is comprised were first collected into two volumes before being consolidated into one book-length graphic novel by Fantagraphics Books in 2001. Sacco’s productivity throughout his life as a comic book artist has been prolific, and is still ongoing, but it is arguably Palestine that launched him to international fame and that remains emblematic and symptomatic of the political ethos that drives his work. Furthermore, it also raises some of the key issues around representation that have been addressed by postcolonial critics and comics ever since. In his preface to Palestine, Said shows how the motivations for his own postcolonial academic criticism and political activism can be found also in Sacco’s comic. He emphasizes the importance of Sacco’s writing and drawing as an effort to represent Palestine and the Palestinians in a way that punctures the bias that otherwise dominates mainstream discussion of the conflict, and that is generated, perpetuated, and consolidated by the West’s “mediasaturated world.” Sacco offers a different and much-needed counternarrative, Said argues, to the common depiction “of Palestinians as rock-throwing, rejectionist, and fundamentalist villains whose main purpose is to make life difficult for the peace-loving, persecuted Israelis” (in Sacco, 2001, iii). Written and drawn from the firstperson perspective of Sacco himself, it documents his attempts to meet those who inhabit the bottom rungs—the subalterns—of Palestinian society; to speak and listen to them, and to record their stories and experiences. Sacco draws these characters, who relate their stories to him in great detail, in his carefully etched style so that every Palestinian encountered has an individuality and personality that complicates the stereotypes of mass-media representation. Their stories, also visualized by the comic, seep into the work’s frames, taking readers Postcolonial Comics

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through the various layers of obstruction—geographical, political, representational—that separate them from the actual experience of that Palestinian. This both enables the communication of previously unheard stories, while simultaneously remaining aware of the layers of mediation that it has to navigate. The journalistic narrative is ultimately concerned with the politics of occupation, dispossession and oppression of Palestinians by Israeli forces. However, the comic always recourses to a self-reflexive interrogation of the politics not only of these central issues, but also of its own capacity to represent the Palestinians as a subaltern people. Sacco continually demonstrates an awareness of the power dynamics implicit in his documentation of these stories. For example, in one section of Palestine, Sacco visits an impoverished, freezing town in Southern Gaza where the Palestinian inhabitants he interviews have limited heating and running water. With relief, at the end of this section Sacco returns to the friend he is staying with in Israel, where he has a warm shower and gets into a comfy bed with a copy of Said’s Orientalism: “I make it through a couple dozen pages of Said’s dense prose,” Sacco tells us, before he falls asleep (177). For those who don’t know Orientalism, it is in the text’s opening twenty-four pages that Said outlines his effort to deconstruct the (mis)representation of the Arab world and to excavate the politics implicit within that process. Sacco, therefore, includes his own reading of the text that laid the foundational groundwork for postcolonialism’s later interrogation of representations of the Middle East as an episode within the narrative itself. The comic thus draws attention to the mechanics of its own representational project, displaying a postcolonial awareness of the politics implicit in any such attempt. Indeed, throughout all of Sacco’s comics, the author always depicts himself in glasses, the lenses of which remain opaque throughout. Sacco’s eyes always remain hidden from view, perhaps operating as a constant reminder to the reader to think about, and question, what it is we are seeing. The comic encourages readers to remember and to question, as all postcolonial scholars should, the layers of mediation separating reader from speaker, the most prominent of which is, of course, Sacco himself. 14

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Fig.2: Sacco draws himself settling down to read Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, after a hot shower, in his comic Palestine. Palestine © Joe Sacco, Published by Fantagraphics Books, is used with permission.

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In the preface to his slightly later work, Footnotes in Gaza (2009), which documents the remembered experiences of Palestinians in comics form, Sacco again highlights the postcolonial politics of representation. He writes: “any act of visualisation—drawing, in this case—comes with an unavoidable measure of refraction” (2009, xii); that is, the mediating screen or tool about which Spivak is so worried. But the motivations underlying this comic, which rather than being set in the journalistic present instead attempts to recover through interviews and archival research two atrocities committed against Palestinians back in the mid-1950s, are still the same. As the comic’s own narrative tells readers in its opening pages: History can do without its footnotes. Footnotes are inessential at best; at worst they trip up the greater narrative. From time to time, as bolder, more streamlined editions appear, history shakes off some footnotes altogether. (2009, 8-9)

Sacco is not only concerned to give a voice to those so often silenced by the mainstream media in the contemporary world. He also sets out, as does postcolonial studies, to recover those details, or “footnotes,” that have gone undocumented because they are inconvenient to the grand narratives produced by history’s winners. Sacco’s work, therefore, highlights both the politics of representation and selective memory that postcolonial literature and criticism seek to correct. These issues underlie Sacco’s comics and are taken up by numerous contemporary comics artists working in the industry in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, these comics show, again as does postcolonial studies, that the tensions between historical footnotes and mainstream narratives are often intricately related to issues of representation and subalternity in the present, as we shall see in the final example to which this chapter will now turn. Spivak and Satrapi: Can the Subaltern Speak? If the “postcolonial” comics discussed so far have mostly been authored by artists and writers residing in the global North, but who travel across cultural and national borders to document and represent subaltern populations elsewhere, what of comics actually 16

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written and drawn by non-Western comics creators themselves? This smaller question is linked to Spivak’s much larger question, which as already noted, is a crucial concern for postcolonial studies: can the subaltern speak? In his book about the 2011 Arab Spring, which he provocatively subtitles The End of Postcolonialism, the Iranian historian and cultural critic Hamid Dabashi’s answer to this question is refreshingly succinct: Of course s/he [the subaltern] does; of course s/he has. The subaltern needs no representation, or theorization, or terrorization from any English and Comparative Literature department. This is the enduring lesson of Edward Said...who to his dying day remained critical of his colleagues who were mystifying people’s struggles in a prose and politics that even their own colleagues could not understand. (2012, 77)

Speaking of the way in which Iranians and other Arab peoples are represented in the United States, especially since President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” in the aftermath of 9/11, Dabashi’s point is that the problem is not whether subalterns can speak. It is whether western scholars, critics and readers, either because they are blinkered by dominant historical narratives or, conversely, because they are too busy worrying about the burdens of representation, are capable of listening to them. It is interesting, then, that one comic to join Sacco’s Palestine and Spiegelman’s Maus in the contemporary canon of graphic novels is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Satrapi’s graphic memoir tells the story of her childhood experiences growing up in a liberal Iranian family during the country’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and Iran’s subsequent war with Saddam Husain’s Iraq during the 1980s. Serialized first in French in four volumes by the publisher L’Association, Persepolis was translated into English and collected into two volumes in 2003 and 2004 in the United States and United Kingdom, respectively. After the release of a film adaptation in 2007, which Satrapi directed and drew much of herself, the comic was eventually collected as a single, book-length graphic novel. It has since rocketed onto Postcolonial Comics

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the mainstream comics circuit, becoming not only a key read for comics readers and scholars, but appearing as a set text on numerous undergraduate literature courses in the United Kingdom and the United States. Though Satrapi cannot really be said to be a subaltern—she is from a middle class Iranian family, and at the end of volume one of Persepolis is sent to Austria to escape the violence of the Iran-Iraq War—the comic is widely viewed as able to communicate effectively an Iranian experience of this tumultuous period in Middle Eastern history to global readerships; though published first in French and then English, it has been since translated into numerous other languages.2 Persepolis’s success and astonishing sales figures, which are unprecedented for non-superhero comics and rivaled only by Maus, can be explained in a number of ways. Economically, its simple but effective black and white panels make it a cheap comic to reproduce and thus to purchase (many graphic novels are colored, glossy, and extremely expensive to print, a cost often displaced by publishers onto readers). Meanwhile, this simple aesthetic is used by Satrapi to offer with comedic brilliance an account not only of an eventful historic period in the Middle East, but also a child’s vibrant imagination and the ways in which war impinges on the daily lives of civilian populations. As comics critic Hillary Chute argues, Persepolis’s “minimalist, two-tone, simplified schema...speaks to the question of representation and also, in its accessible syntax, its visual ease, [suggesting] the horrifying normalcy of violence in Iran” (2010, 152). Though not as self-reflexive as Glidden or Sacco about the politics of representation, Satrapi’s comic repeatedly foregrounds the perspective of its child protagonist through drawings of imagined symbols and figures, and in so doing reveals the extent to which the story it tells remains a subjective—and, therefore, contingent— account of Iran at this time. But as postcolonialists, we have to think through the wider historical context that might have led to the success of Persepolis in the west in the early twenty-first century. Satrapi’s child protagonist is a rebellious young girl who enjoys rock music and cigarettes rather than Islamic culture and dress, symbolized especially throughout 18

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the comic in the wearing of a veil. It depicts the Islamic Revolution as an oppressive movement that transformed Tehran, Iran’s capital, into a conservative city dominated by an authoritarian state, and that is self-consciously positioned in opposition to the “decadence” of “capitalism” and “the West.” On one page, the veil literally and metaphorically comes between the young narrator, Marji, and her friends. In the concluding panel of this sequence, Marji herself adopts the position of the dictatorial headmaster, her raised arms invoking an imagery of oppressive dictators that evokes European historical figures such as Hitler. Western readers are clearly supposed to feel from these few panels a claustrophobic oppression resulting from the Islamic Revolution, rather than liberation from a decades-old unelected regime (though this it was, at least in part). Even Western readers who are not particularly enthusiastic supporters of capitalism are made to feel, by the closing down of the bilingual schools and the satirical claims of “bravo!” and “wisdom,” that this revolution is far from a liberating one. Of course, for Satrapi as for many Iranians, this was, in fact, her experience, and as postcolonial critics we must pay close attention to the restrictions on Marji’s human rights and cultural freedoms that were the result of Iran’s increased Islamization. But if we pay closer attention to the representational screens and mediating tools—such as the language in which it is written, the historical moment when it was released, and the geography of its readerships—then there are other power dynamics here to which attention must be paid. A thorough postcolonial critique will interrogate connections between the way in which an Iranian childhood is represented (notably first in French and then in English, the languages of Empire) and Persepolis’s uncritically celebrated success in the anglophone world in the heightened political tensions of the post-9/11 moment and the subsequent War on Terror. Dabashi himself, who declared that of course the Iranian subaltern can speak, notes the importance of this moment, and it is worth, by way of a conclusion to this chapter, briefly exploring this here in relation to Persepolis. When Western powers intervened in the Middle East first in 2001 in Afghanistan and then in Iraq in 2003, these wars were justified on Postcolonial Comics

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the grounds of the Taliban’s and then Saddam Hussein’s oppressive dictatorships and the latter’s development of weapons of mass destruction (which would later be proved false)—as noted above, this invasion has since been described by postcolonial critics such as Derek Gregory as symptoms of “the colonial present.” Circulating at the same time, Persepolis offered a narrative that communicated a story of a rebellious, young Middle Eastern girl, who hated wearing the veil but celebrated Western culture, and whose experience of Islam was oppressive rather than liberating. Whilst the comic itself is much more nuanced in its account of the experience of Islam in Iran (which is, after all, not even the same country as Afghanistan or Iraq!), the general trajectory of its narrative accords with the mainstream media narrative that sought to justify a US–led war in the Middle East. It painted a broad picture of young girls having their freedoms abused by bearded, Islamic men, who were antidemocratic and oppressive, a story that appears to support western intervention rather than challenge it. Again, we should note that Persepolis’s narrative is itself far more complicated than this, offering a sophisticated account of all kinds of issues, from war and history through to Islam and displacement. Furthermore, as for other comics that we might consider as “postcolonial,” from Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B.’s two-volume history of US–Middle East Relations, Best of Enemies (2012, 2014) to Michael de Seve and Daniel Burwen’s Operation Ajax: The Story of the CIA Coup that Remade the Middle East (2015), it also includes some details on the ways in which Western intervention in the Middle East earlier in the twentieth century was, in part, responsible for the Islamic Revolution in the first place. But the point here is that, as postcolonial critics, we need to remain constantly vigilant and aware, attuned to the burdens of representation and the occlusion of subalterns, asking how comics can better help us understand these two issues ongoing in the world today. This may mean that sometimes we have to ask whether “postcolonial comics” are, in fact, postcolonial, whether they do correct mainstream histories, and whether they are always able to recover what Sacco called “the footnotes of history.” 20

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Postcolonial studies demands that we think through the layers of representation and the dynamics of power, privilege, and political interest that are contained within them. This chapter suggested that comics, too, because they are so obviously concerned with issues of “representation” in their self-reflexive strategies and frames, and because they appear particularly adept at dealing with global themes, cross-cultural issues, and issues of war and disaster, are a particularly effective example of postcolonial cultural production. If Persepolis reveals anything at all, it is not simply whether the subaltern can speak—that question leaves too many complex issues out of the picture. Rather, Satrapi’s postcolonial comic shows how difficult it is to identify exactly who is and who is not a subaltern; how subalternity changes throughout history and how we should be attuned to the power dynamics that cause these shifts; how the burden of representation is placed upon authors who have long been vilified and silenced; and finally, how their newfound ability to speak continues to remain predicated on the discretion of the powerful, who tend still to be located in the global North. But just as postcolonial literature and criticism helps us, by understanding these processes, to resist and deconstruct them, so too can comics— especially those of a postcolonial orientation—be a site of resistance to colonialism, serving as a form of cultural production that might help us move gradually forward into a truly postcolonial world. Notes 1.

2.

Another notable reference point is Vol.52, Issue 4 of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, which was devoted in its entirety to the special topic of ‘Trans/forming Literature: Graphic Novels, Migration and Postcolonial Identity’, and was published in November 2016. In an interview given shortly after the release of the comic’s second volume in 2003, Satrapi commented that though she herself has never worked on or even seen a Persian translation of Persepolis, she has been told that it exists, citing Iran’s lax copyright laws in explanation.

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Works Cited Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print. __________. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016. Print. Dabashi, Hamid. The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. London: Zed Books, 2012. Print. Dony, Christophe. ‘What is a Postcolonial Comic?’. Chronique de Littérature Internationale, 7 November 2014, pp. 12-13. Print. Glidden, Sarah. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2016. Print. Knowles, Sam, Peacock, James & Earle, Harriet. Special Issue: ‘Trans/ Forming Literature: Graphic Novels, Migration and Postcolonial Identity’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 52, Issue 4, 2016. Print. Mehta, Binita, and Mukherji, Pia eds. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print. Mercer, Kobena. ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’. Third Text, Vol. 4, No.10, 1990, pp. 61-78. Print. Neufeld, Josh, and Malek, Alia. ‘The Road to Germany: $2400’. Foreign Policy Magazine, January/February 2016. Print. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2001. Print. __________. Footnotes in Gaza. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. London: Vintage Books, 2008. Print. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London and New York: Penguin Books. Print. __________. “Those Dirty Little Comics”. In Adelmen, Bob ed. Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s, pp.4-10. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak? ” In Nelson, Cary and Grossber, Lawrence eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271-313. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Print.

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Postcolonial Tempest: A Survey of Postcolonial Reception and Adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Dhrubajyoti Sarkar

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in’t (The Tempest 5.1.182-185)

The first recorded performance of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest on the “hallomas nyght” of 1 November 1611 at the Palace Whitehall and before the royal audience arguably marks the last solo play by the great Bard. However, it is not the last play that Shakespeare had a role in writing; three plays followed: Cardenio (c.1612), Henry VIII (c.1613), and Two Noble Kinsmen (c.1613-14). All are considered collaborations Shakespeare had with the younger dramatists John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Befitting the occasion of the first recorded performance, i.e. night of remembrance for the dead, faithful departed, martyrs, and the saints (“hallows”), the play featured lightning, thunder, and spirits (referred to as “goodly creatures” in the above quotation). Shortly afterwards, The Tempest was included in the royal festivities of 1612-13 celebrating the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine of Bohemia. The selection of the play may be considered as recognition of the attention and admiration it received from the royal audience. Shakespeare incorporated a masque scene into the play (4.1) to make it appropriately fit the celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s engagement (Chambers 492). Sustained contemporary popularity of the play may be attested by the fact that The Tempest is the first play that opens the First Folio of 1623. Over the centuries the play remained consistently popular, even if the reason behind such popularity changed over time. While some Postcolonial Tempest

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argue that interest in the play waned following Shakespeare’s exit from the dramatic scene, The Tempest barely managed its re-entry through a severely condemned neoclassical reworking called The Enchanted Island. From the jottings of Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of the period, we can find that Pepys watched the play seven times over two seasons! Pepys’ lauding of the play reinforces the fact that even if English audiences and theater companies neglected The Tempest in the period immediately following its debut, it was quickly revived with widespread acclaim. A brief glance at the history of performance of The Tempest reveals that if the Jacobean and the Restoration playgoers found elements of elaborate masques and the classical conformity of time and place rather appealing, the Victorians, on the contrary, found ample attractiveness in the opportunity of theatrical flourish, sensationalism, and Darwinian issues in the plot and structure of the play. In the post-World War II period, however, The Tempest experienced another resurgence in performance and adaptation. The main reason for this renewed popularity is quite distinct from the reasons of the play’s popularity centuries before. One of the main reasons for this resurgent interest is the rediscovery of the larger politics in the play. Postcolonial criticism and adaptations influenced by postcolonial thought feature prominently in that political perspective. As indicated in many other chapters of this volume, postcolonialism has been variously defined and interpreted in three distinct but interdisciplinary academic fields: postcolonial studies, postcolonial theory, and postcolonial literature (Cuddon 550). This interdisciplinary field seeks to understand the nature and impact of European colonialism in erstwhile colonized areas of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The term “postcolonialism” gained popularity among historians and academics following World War II, as former colonies became independent of their European empires. Since the 1990s “[postcolonialism] has been used by literary critics as an oppositional reading practice to study the effects of colonial representation in literary texts” (Cuddon 551). As the first historically delimited notion of postcolonialism related to colony 24

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and colonialism is not applicable to The Tempest, the latter notion becomes the main operative idea in any discussion of the play from a postcolonial perspective. Continuing the argument of a stable base of popularity of the play, albeit for ever-changing reasons, it may be observed that although earlier centuries found the story of loss/restoration, revenge/forgiveness, and the love interest of an innocent heroine quite appealing, the postcolonial readers and observers concentrated on a different set of issues. These are the master/slave relationship, occupation of the island, and the psychology of a faithful and obedient spirit. Accordingly, over time, with the change of perspective, the center of attraction in The Tempest has shifted from the powerful magician Prospero, who corrects his own initial mistake of confining knowledge within its textual boundaries to a successful application to reclaim his position and his daughter’s future, to his servants Caliban and Ariel. However, it would be a mistake to state that this attention to the master/slave narrative is possible only from a postcolonial perspective. Ben Jonson, a contemporary and competitor of William Shakespeare, made a taunting reference to The Tempest quite early: “If there be neuer a Seruant-monster in the Fayre [this refers to Jonson’s 1614 play Barthlomew Fair where this comment appears], who can helpe it? he sayes” (Jonson “The Induction on the Stage”). Further, it may also be noted that one of the most crucial psychological analysis of the colonial situation called “The Master-Slave Dialectic” (1807) by Friedrich Hegel and its reworking in Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) have no direct or indirect reference to The Tempest. Before we move into any survey of the postcolonial reception of the text, a discussion of Robert Evans’s essay may serve as a necessary note of caution to avoid the pitfall of over-interpretation of the play. In his chapter “‘Had I Plantation of this Isle, My Lord—’: Exploration and Colonisation in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” Evans begins with a presentation of the conflicting claims to the actual location of the island of the play and similarly conflicting views of the nature of Caliban. Postcolonial Tempest

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The particulars of the location and contents of the island in Shakespeare’s play are so minimalistic and general, depending upon various external references in the play, over time claims have been laid that it is set in America, the Caribbean, or the Mediterranean. Similarly, Caliban has been quite contradictorily claimed as a representative of colonized people and his experiences as that of a first generation colonizer (179-180). Most importantly, in a very significant departure from the major stereotypes of the colonial condition, none of the characters initially set out in search of a new world and none show the desire to permanently settle in the island (180). In brief, even if in the following sections of the survey takes us to various postcolonial references and adaptations, like any great piece of literature, The Tempest transcends the specific historical context. In this chapter we will attempt a survey of postcolonial reception and adaptations of the play. Although our main emphasis will be on these two aspects of reception and adaptation, the chapter is structured according to the major geographical areas where the most numerous and most influential criticisms and adaptations of The Tempest were produced. If one follows present critical attitudes to The Tempest, it sometimes becomes difficult not to be thoroughly convinced that the “new world” Miranda is so fascinated by can be anything but the New World of the Americas. Under the circumstances, it is quite extraordinary that in close to two hundred years of the play’s early existence hardly anyone spelt out the relationship between the two. Among the scholars who mentioned this connection, Edmond Malone must be included as the pioneering figure. In the first few pages of his 1808 pamphlet, Malone asserts the direct influence of a report documenting the incidents of the survival of the Bermuda shipwreck on Shakespeare’s plot and setting. Malone goes on to say that Shakespeare intentionally obfuscated the direct correspondence between the island of the play and the Bermuda, lest the mystique and the magic be lost to large sections of the audience who have already eagerly read the account of that seemingly miraculous incident (2). 26

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The account of the incident Malone refers to is an actual accident in 1609 when an English ship crashed against the desolate Bermuda islands. Rather miraculously, the people onboard swam to safety and subsequently survived further dangers on an isolated island. There were a number of pamphlets and accounts that were in circulation during the probable period of Shakespeare’s composition of the play. Malone’s mention of these sources and accounts has been later traced to two particular pamphlets, now collectively called A Voyage to Virginia in 1609. William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Silvester Jourdain’s “Discovery of the Bermudas” contain the fantastic story of the largest ever expedition fleet carrying six hundred people to the Virginian settlement of Jamestown. A week away from their destination, the Sea Venture, the flagship of the fleet, was waylaid and wrecked by a tropical storm (tempest) into one of the remote islands of Bermuda. Most of the inmates of the ship survived the shipwreck and a further eleven months in the desolate island. Eventually, in a show of even greater resourcefulness, they constructed their own small boats and successfully concluded their voyage to America. Because the pamphlets contained frank references to mutiny and the general wretchedness of the settlement at Jamestown, these accounts were not officially published. They were, however, privately circulated. The critical opinion regarding the matter gained solid footing with Louis B. Wright’s endorsement and edited publication of these two pamphlets as definitive sources for many references in The Tempest. However, not everyone was particularly impressed by the specific reference to the shipwreck and nods to the New World setting. One group, loosely called the “Oxford opinions” (in contradistinction from the previous group called, loosely, the Stratfordians), were not convinced that there was something specific in these two pamphlets that directly linked an American expedition to The Tempest. After all, they argued, details of shipwrecked sailors and settlers could be found in many other popular narratives that were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.1 Nevertheless, the Americanization of The Tempest began in earnest form in 1898 with the zealous scholarship of Sidney Lee. Postcolonial Tempest

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Lee’s claim that the play essentially reflected an early colonial experience gained steady support in the subsequent three decades. Prospero, the confident colonizer, encounters the pitiable aborigines, embodied by the character Caliban, stumbling through the initial stages of civilization. Subsequently early twentieth-century scholars like Morton Luce, Walter Alexander Raleigh, and Robert Ralston Cawley— to name just a few among many— all contributed to persuade “themselves and most (apparently) of their generation that The Tempest had an essentially American setting, predominantly American themes and, at least in Caliban, a truly American character” (Vaughan and Vaughan 102). While the contentious claims regarding the historical bond between the setting of The Tempest keeps the scholarly debate open, the recent cultural history of the United States adapts the play to create a unique postcolonial perspective. As Thomas Cartelli has indicated in his analysis of Percy MacKaye’s text accompanying Caliban by the Yellow Sands, the 1916 masque performance celebrating the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death contained two divergent directions of American postcolonial experience. On the one hand, the thirty-some professional actors who formed the cast of the play represented the multiethnic New York population, thereby moving beyond the Anglo-Saxon essence of the American populace. On the other hand, by incorporating such actors in a Shakespearean production, the British cultural values were enforced upon them (Cartelli 64). Post World War II America saw its share of postcolonial adaptations of The Tempest. Even though the new realignment of critical strategy reversed the attitude towards the colonist Prospero into that of unambiguous condemnation, the location and themes remained steadily American. It is as if Prospero’s sins—the “seizing the natives’ lands, enslaving their bodies and imposing an alien, unwanted culture”—in equal measure empowered the victim in his suffering (Vaughan and Vaughan 103). From the 1970s onward, the emerging theoretical domain called “New Historicism” has often focused on The Tempest. Stephen Greenblatt, the most celebrated representative of the critical trend, in his essays tries to establish 28

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connections between various ideas—such as attitudes toward cannibalism and the linguistic supremacy of the Europeans—related to the colonies of the New World and their manifestation in the play. These may not directly qualify as postcolonial criticism, but they still do enhance the knowledge of the possible influence of the colonial situation in the composition of The Tempest. Around the same time as Sydney Lee’s assertive proclamations were being made the play was recast in a different postcolonial perspective, namely that of Central and South America, with British colonization being recast as Spanish and Portuguese seaborne empire building. A good analytical description of this history of reception and adaptations in Central and South America can be found in Gordon Brotherston’s “Arielismo and Anthropophagy: The Tempest in Latin America.” Indeed, a number of ideas and opinions in this paragraph are taken from Brotherston’s work. The main contextual impetus behind such recasting was the nineteenth-century independence movements that began across Latin America. This was further intensified during the Spanish-American War of 1898. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States took over imperial control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Many writers of the modernista movement reacted by alluding or drawing on The Tempest. Rubén Darío (pseudonym of Félix Rubén García Sarmiento), a Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat—and arguably the most celebrated figure of the modernista movement—produced his “El triunfo de Caliban” [The Triumph of Caliban] right after Spain’s humiliating defeat in May 1898 at the hands of American forces. This builds upon his earlier comment likening “New York City’s crudity and materialism to Caliban’s,” made around the time Darío met José Martí in New York in 1893 (Vaughan and Vaughan 98). US military victory consolidated hostility among the Latin Americans and asserted itself through “a sense of Latinity” (Brotherston 213). In the tract, Darío takes up the comments made by a representative “Latin” intellectuals like Paul Groussac few days earlier in Buenos Aires. Darío described these intellectuals as emerging “from a book-lined cave (like Prospero’s) to reprehend the monstrous US–Caliban” (Brotherston 213). His further condemnation of this “dangerous and Postcolonial Tempest

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all-devouring beast of terrifying energy and greed” concludes with a comparison of his ‘Latin soul’ to Miranda, “who will always prefer Ariel” (Brotherston 213). From the above discussion, two ideas may be concluded. Firstly, that the stereotypes of Ariel and Caliban became representatives of the early Latin American points of selfidentification and that of the greedy and aggressive United States, respectively. Secondly, rather than center on the play’s geographical Caribbean or New World setting, this early reception was primarily focused on the four set of characters: Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. If Darío’s references to the Ariel spirit sometimes showed signs of ambivalence towards Caliban in his other writings, like Los Raros (1893), then, in the works of José Enrique Rodó, Uruguayan philosopher, educator, and essayist, and widely considered by many to have been Spanish America’s greatest philosopher, “Ariel came to inspire nothing less than a cultural and philosophical movement, known as arielismo, which gained notice in all parts of the continent” (Brotherston 214). Brotherston thinks that for Rodó “Renan’s play Caliban, Suite de ‘La Tempete’(1878) was more immediately important than Shakespeare’s play” (215). Rodó’s essay sets forth his specific credo for the postcolonial Spanish territories in general, and Uruguay in particular. Prospero, the venerable teacher, (Rodó unproblematically assumes the persona of Prospero as his self-projection) warns his impressionable listeners not to be lured by the material wealth and glitter (obviously a reference to the materialism of the United States) but to strive for a well-rounded idealistic life marked by intellectual, moral, spiritual resources. Rodó remained steadfastly committed to the paradigm of education that he saw as the principal operative in the relation between Prospero and Ariel. For example, the title of the 1913 gallery of portraits the South American intellectual - written at a later stage of life is called El mirador de Próspero [The Gallery of Prospero]. Although Rodó’s manifesto has often been hailed as “the ethical gospel of the Spanish-speaking new world,” we need to remember that its main structure and concerns are supposedly drawn from The Tempest [qtd. in “José Enrique Rodó”]. 30

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After graduating with a degree in medicine from the University of Caracas in 1905, Jesús Semprum realized that literature was his true calling. Subsequently, a group of like-minded youth (referred to as the Los Mechudos) gathered around him to translate the influence of José Enrique Rodó into literary practice. There is little scope for speculation regarding the influence of Rodó as they named their mouthpiece Ariel, the magazine that served as the main channel of their literary output. Further, when Semprum summarized the Hispanic view of the people of the United States, he took recourse to an earlier, literary, vocabulary by calling them “rough and obtuse Calibans, swollen by brutal appetites, the enemies of all idealisms” (qtd. in Vaughan and Vaughan 99). Identification with the spirit of Ariel and condemnation of the figure of Caliban, however, changed in a diametrically opposite direction after World War II. The person who can be singled out as the most important voice in this changing direction is Roberto Fernández Retamar. Retamar was a close confidant of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro; and his revolutionary profile is matched by his high profile official positions as the President of the Casa de las Américas. His politics may certainly be traced back to his 1969 revisionist essay called “Caliban” in which he emphasized that: Our symbol is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but Caliban. This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood… I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality. (Retamar 24)

Retamar’s original essay in Spanish was published in 1969. However, the source that has been used for the quoted text above is from a special issue of The Massachusetts Review, published in 1974, titled ‘Caliban,’ celebrating the changing direction of the Latin American appropriation of The Tempest. The editor proclaims, “Against the hegemonic, europocentric, vision of the universe, the identity of the Caliban is a direct function of his refusal to accept—on any level— that hegemony” (Márquez 6). Postcolonial Tempest

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Even the earliest audience and readers of the play perhaps could trace a sliding over of the terms “carib,” “canibal,” and “caliban.” Thus the identification and association of The Tempest characters to a particular geographic space could only be guessed. However, there is a big historical hiatus between the Carib people of these islands and the contemporary population of the Caribbean islands. Nevertheless, the African descent of the majority of the inhabitants, their past mired in the plantation settlement history and their culture and language lost due to colonial displacement, are all themes that could find a resonance in The Tempest. Moreover, the increasingly confident assertions specifying the locale of the play within the Caribbean islands certainly found resonance to the reception and adaptation of the play by Caribbean people. Although it could have been expected that the English-speaking Caribbean might have responded far more readily to the play, this was not the case. As we have already seen, one of the most emphatic assertions was offered by Roberto Fernández Retamar, a Spanish-speaking Cuban. Two other landmark postcolonial responses to The Tempest were offered in English and French, respectively. George Lamming, the Barbados born author, included a chapter entitled “A Monster, A Child, A Slave” in his semi-autobiographical text The Pleasures of Exile (1960). The references to both the title of the chapter as well as that of the book are obviously a direct indication of Lamming’s response to the Shakespearean play. Lest we miss the radical nature of Lamming’s involvement in talking back to the English canon, we may be reminded that it was expected that West Indians would have only utmost respect for, and often mimicry of, the English canon. Therefore, Lamming’s involvement in 1960, in offering a postcolonial response to such a canonical text, surely involved a sense of literary blasphemy (Hulme 220). Hulme further distinguishes the nature of engagement with the play as manifested in the works of Lamming and Retamar; calling “Lamming’s approach to The Tempest…more ‘internal’ in the sense that he developed his reading out of an engagement with the play as part of his colonial education, alongside a reading of early Caribbean history” (222). In this “internal” approach, Lamming successfully traces the double bind of 32

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the colonial situation. On the one hand, he recognizes a particularly Caribbean colonial history in the storyline of the play. But, on the other hand, Lamming recognizes that it is his own colonial education that empowers him to rebel against the same education. Another writer and intellectual from Barbados, Edward Kamau Brathwaite also extensively used the symbolism and character prototypes of The Tempest to theorize his study of the Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831-32. In this 1977 essay titled “Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization,” Brathwaite employs the literary motif to seamlessly elide into the historical and philosophical aspects of the subject under consideration. By expanding the conventional character metaphors, he identifies Alonso as a member of the British Parliament and Gonzalo as one of “the well-meaning but misguided Christian missionaries” (Vaughan and Vaughan 106). The most extensive postcolonial engagement with the play was displayed by the 1969 French adaptation called Une Tempête [A Tempest] written by Martinique writer Aimé Césaire. He is one of the central figures of the Negritude Movement in the Caribbean that triggered a transnational cultural refashioning across these islands. Césaire specified that Prospero is a white master, Ariel is a mulatto, and Caliban is a black slave, while retaining all the characters of the original play. His main thrust and the principle of adaptation becomes clear in the subtitle of the play: “Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre” [Adaptation for a Negro Theater]. Therefore, “the master/slave relationship, incidental and justified in Shakespeare, is made preeminent by the Martinican” (Arnold 237). The play’s extensive and overt engagement with the issues of colonial power relations, racial sentiments, and the process of decolonization make it a highly topical play. In particular, Césaire’s representation of religious fanaticism operating in connivance with the aggressive colonialism, create a unique idea that arguably does not appear in any other postcolonial reading and adaptation of The Tempest. However, the meditations on all these issues can also be conducted on a generalized abstracted fashion. For example, moving beyond the colonial situation of the Caribbean islands, extending an earlier comment made by Césaire himself, many critics have seen Martin Postcolonial Tempest

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Luther King in Cesaire’s Ariel and Malcolm X in his Caliban. Such extension to various other situations of oppression and manifestation of power relations is quite plausible because of the dual structure of the play. In the concluding section of this survey we take up a text that may be considered to be the urtext of all postcolonial critiques and adaptations that has been produced hence. In 1950, shortly after returning to France, Dominique-Octave Mannoni, a French psychoanalyst who spent more than twenty years as a colonial administrator in Madagascar, published Psychologie de la colonisation. Six years later, when the book was translated into English, Mannoni gave it a new title: Prospero and Caliban. His title leaves little to speculation. He is using the basic operative structure of the play to analyze his own everyday experience of the French colonial administration at Madagascar. Mannoni also had a short chapter in the book entitled “Crusoe and Prospero,” thus invoking another canonical English text of shipwreck that, too, manifests a typical master/slave relation. As a trained psychoanalyst and an experienced administrator, Mannoni brought a unique combination of skill sets to his analysis of both the French colonizers and the indigenous colonized Malagasy population. As Mannoni was an important influence on his onetime student Césaire, we may assume that the way Césaire’s work operates on a dual level by considering a direct influence of the way Mannoni structured his analysis. The detailed and complex analysis that Mannoni recorded in his book is a result of specific observation of the colonial encounter in Madagascar. However, aided by the rhetorical extensions afforded by the names of the fictional characters and the stereotypes they are expected to represent, Mannoni sought to narrate general structures of the results produced by any generalized colonial situation: on the one hand [they] were domineering, callous, neurotic colonizers; on the other [they] were submissive natives, racked by ambivalence over their acceptance of western values and their rejection of indigenous culture, and subconsciously resentful of their conquerors and even of themselves. (Vaughan and Vaughan 104) 34

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Despite initial controversy surrounding the portrayal of the Malagasies, both the political commentators and literary critics eagerly accepted the book and its general structures of analysis. This widespread and rapid acceptance of a non-literary work like Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban by the actors, directors, literary critics, and teachers has often been compared to such iconic texts as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, or Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. From this point onward, it becomes almost mandatory for postcolonial interpretations of The Tempest to either directly acknowledge Mannoni’s influence or to implicitly manifest that major findings of Mannoni’s work have been integrated into such studies. The figure of Caliban remained central to African responses to The Tempest throughout the 1970s. Some of the representative writers who contributed in this vein are Ugandan Taban Lo Liyong, Lemuel Johnson of Sierra Leone, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o of Kenya, David Wallace of Zambia, and the Nigerian playwright and poet John Pepper Clark. Clark’s essay “The Legacy of Caliban” (1970) and Lo Liyong’s poem “Uncle Tom’s Black Humour” (1970), importantly both published in the same year, are concerned with issues surrounding the loss of language for the colonized and subsequent “gain” of a Western language. If these two postcolonial takes on The Tempest have only exclusive choices between available languages, David Wallace’s Do You Love Me Master? published just one year later in 1971, represents a more realistic African linguistic choice where the African languages survive and thrive alongside English. Finally, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Homecoming (1972) invoked some of the themes The Tempest to reflect upon African and Caribbean literature, culture, and politics. Later, in his 1986 celebrated book Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ calls for a complete dismantling of the colonizer’s cultural domination by primarily revoking the indigenous languages. Rudimentary beginning of a few of these ideas can be traced to Ngũgĩ 1972 discussion of the Tempest theme. A few feminist writers have also brought their gendered reading to further bear upon their postcolonial locations. A group of Latin American feminist writers have offered such a Postcolonial Tempest

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sampling in their Daughters of Caliban (1998). Similar responses can be found in the literary workings on The Tempest in Constance Beresford-Howe’s Prospero’s Daughters (1988), Sarah Murphy’s The Measure of Miranda (1987), and Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992). In all three, these Canadian novelists work not only a new spatial turn is given to the location of the play, but some of them also challenge temporal and societal boundaries by either projecting them to a distant future or casting them in a society vastly liberated from the taboos of its time. Indian poet Suniti Namjoshi’s series of poems titled “Snapshots of Caliban” imagines an altered gendered relationship between Caliban and Miranda. In conclusion, we may on the one hand wonder at the potential of a play that is more than four hundred years old to provoke and inspire authors and thinkers so culturally and geographically different from its original audience. On the contrary, looking at the timeline, we may be curious to note that most of the discussions of the postcolonial reworkings conclude before the 1980s. Although critics have surmised that this declining interest in the energetic reworking of The Tempest may be traced to the geopolitical situation of the former colonies, it may as well be true that the general appeal of the themes and characters of the play are still waiting to burst forth into a new period of postcolonial attention.2 Speculations may also be made about the continuing vitality of the postcolonial perspectives on a play that may be considered to have shown some of the earliest symptoms of the change of the colonial world into a global age. Whether the postcolonial perspectives also transform itself into an increasingly global concern with the play’s motif is a question well worth remembering at the conclusion and way forward for postcolonialism. Notes 1.

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See Peter Moore’s brief discussion to dissociate any obvious connection between the play, the New World, and the colonial perspective:https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/bermudashipwreck-of-1609/.

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2.

See, for instance, director Julie Taymor’s 2010 film The Tempest, which gender swaps Prospero with Prospera, played by Dame Helen Mirran, and casts the very English Ben Whishaw as Ariel, and the Benin-French actor Djimon Hounsou as Caliban.

Works Cited Arnold, A. James. “Césaire and Shakespeare: Two Tempests.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 236-248. Print. Brotherston, Gordon. “Arielismo and Anthropophagy: The Tempest in Latin America.” In ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels. Edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Reaktion Books, 2000, pp. 212219. Print. Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare. Routledge, 1999. Print. Chambers, E.K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1930. Print. Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Fifth Edition. Revised by Habib, M.A.R, et al. Penguin Reference Library, 2014. Print. Evans, Robert C. “‘Had I Plantation of this Isle, My Lord—’: Exploration and Colonization in Shakespeare’s The Tempest”. Exploration and Colonization. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Infobase Publishing, 2010, pp. 179-190. Print. Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. Prepared from 1631 Folio (STC 14753.5) by Hugh Craig, D of English, U of Newcastle. Web. http://ota.ox.ac. uk/text/3249.txt. “José Enrique Rodó.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., Web. www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-EnriqueRodo. Accessed 18 May 2007. Hulme, Peter. “Reading from Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox of Exile.” In ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels. Edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Reaktion Books, 2000, pp. 220235. Print. Malone, Edmond. An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakespeare’s Tempest were Derived and its True Date Ascertained. London, 1808. Print. Márquez, Roberto. “Foreword”. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 15, No. 1/2, ‘Caliban’, p.6. Print. Postcolonial Tempest

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Retamar, Roberto Fernández. “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America”. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 15, No. 1/2, ‘Caliban’, pp. 7-72. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1623. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series. Thomas Nelson, 1999. Print. Vaughan, Virginia Mason and Alden T. Vaughan, eds. “Introduction”. The Tempest. Thomas Nelson, 1999. pp.1-138. Print.

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Critical Insights

Emergent and Divergent Voices: African and African American Women Writers Joanne Davis

In 2011, the editors of African Women Writing Resistance, Contemporary Voices noted that “African women writers have begun to appear on the world’s bestseller lists” (4). They cited Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose novel Nervous Conditions won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the African countries in 1989 and Chimamande Ngozi Adichie, whose novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. African American women writers preceded African women on the world’s bestseller lists by only seven years—Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her novel Beloved; her earlier novel Song of Solomon won two smaller prizes in 1977. In fact, there is a long tradition of African and African American women writers appearing in print. In Africa, Buchi Emecheta, Nawal el Saadawi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ, and Madhu Dubey; in America, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Michelle Cliff form the recent part of a tradition of women engaging in public discourse going back to as early as the 1820s, as Beverley GuySheftall reveals in her book Words of Fire: An Anthology of AfricanAmerican Feminist Thought. Despite the abundance of African and African American women’s literature, these stories have been significantly underrepresented in literary history. These women write against a tradition that is characterized by colonial incursions into Africa and America and the theft of people into slavery. Africans were depicted as less than human, who needed to be introduced to Christianity, spirituality, intelligence, and European notions of civilization and order, and every facet of African women’s identities—spirituality, Emergent and Divergent Voices

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intelligence, sexualities—was denied. Saartje Baartman, a woman from the Cape region, was even brought to Europe and displayed in a cage like a zoo animal, where Europeans visitors gathered to gawk at her buttocks. When she died there at the tender age of 25 years, her genitals were cut from of her body and stored as specimens, further aligning to the similar treatment of postmortem animal dissection (Gilman 212-219). For centuries, African and African American women have struggled to gain access to literacy. It was illegal to teach black people to read and write in antebellum America. The responsibilities of rural or domestic life also overshadowed any opportunity for girls to be educated. Postcolonial women’s literature highlights African and African American women’s shared experience of colonial oppression and resistance to that oppression because of their gender, class, and social status. These characteristics, aside from their racial identity, entrenched the “otherness” of African and African American women’s experiences. This is known as the “triple jeopardy” (Guy-Sheftall 2) that locks African and African American women out of powerful positions in society, including famous authorship. The triple jeopardy is even more dangerous when compounded by discrimination based on the lightness of skin as an indicator of racial purity. It is fitting that the main character Tambu in Nervous Conditions is educated only accidentally, taking her older brother’s place at the local mission school after he dies. Girls and women “were not allowed to go to school; they were supposed to learn from their mothers how to work in the fields, how to cook and how to be good wives,” as Elisabeth Bouanga explains (Browdy de Hernandez et al. 8). Even when education was offered to girls and women in colonial and mission schools, their class status often comprised education in needlework and housework rather than subjects described as masculine: reading, writing, and arithmetic. The assumption was simply that African and African American women were not fit to be literate. “Africana studies...is increasingly taking [African and the African diaspora] women’s experiences and voices into account” (Browdy de Hernandez et al. 4). African and African American women have been storytellers for millennia, and 40

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writing in colonial languages that are legible by European readers for many decades. Effects of Literary Exclusion of African and African American Women’s Writing Whatever the cause of these women’s exclusion from literacy, three chief effects were borne out by their experiences that are of vital interest to scholars of literary history. Firstly, their stories were excluded from the mainstay of the literary canon, which robbed the authors of readers who would have had the opportunity to read, know, and engage with their stories, and thus to build an oeuvre. The nascent tradition disappears as soon as it was born. This in turn foreshortened the opportunity for future generations of writers to develop the themes and motifs in these stories into an established tradition. This did not mean that no African or African American women wrote, but rather that each generation of African and African American women writers began to write as if no one had preceded them. Remarkably, as will be shown below, the themes that these authors highlight speak clearly to one another. Secondly, African and African American women and girl protagonists were either absent in European literature, or their representation was “othered,” occurring in stereotypical and derogatory ways because of their race, their gender, class, and their lighter or darker skin color status. This has led to a stunted vision of African and African American women’s personalities and identities. Literary theorists and writers seek the symbolic keys to reinvest these stereotypical depictions of women with their psychological makeup. It is not possible to ascribe an identity to a character specifically linked to her or his race because race is not a specific and essential determinant of personality and identity. It is possible, however, to imbue protagonists with motivation and preference through a keen understanding of the complex intellectual and psychological makeup of people from different contexts and eras. It is this complexity that African and African American women writers seek to portray in their literary characterizations of women. Emergent and Divergent Voices

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Finally, the literature that African and African American women had created was repressed. African and African American women appeared never to have been involved in creative cultural production, which perpetuated the sexist and racist myth that African and African American women were unsuited to creative intellectual cultural production. African and African American writers had to research work that had been done before alone and independently, as was the case with African American Zora Neale Hurston, a “controversial character of the Harlem Renaissance, [who was] forgotten and then rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s” (Condé 127). The task facing critics and scholars of African and African American women’s literature is to retrieve these stories, theorize them, and build the tradition. Scholars do find new stories regularly, from the political speeches and biographies of early nineteenthcentury America to the poets of today. As literary scholars, this is very exciting. We are able to explore how stories diverge, how different tellers construct stories in unique ways that reveal the issues most pertinent to these women as well as their chosen modes of representation, their literary techniques, favored motifs, and tropes. The study of the origins of these literatures, their canon and history on its own terms specifically, and how these cohere with or diverge from other literatures and canons more generally, allows us to understand the bigger picture of literature in the broadest sense. Recurring Themes: Nation, Race, Citizenship, and Belonging Literature from women in Africa and African America shares features of literature written by men from the same period because it, too, tackles the issues facing black people in a cultural moment of racist oppression. Yet postcolonial literature written by men often portrayed women within the stereotypical roles given by patriarchal parameters: women are mothers, nurses, or overly sexualized. Women authors and characters alike were represented as unable to achieve the demands of writing about political and public issues, and instead found themselves located strictly within the domestic sphere. 42

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Throughout the history of anti-colonial struggles, the life experiences of African women, whether of oppression and hatred or fulfillment and love, were subsumed within African and African American men’s experiences. Guy-Sheftall recounts how in 1869 the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted his fear that insisting on black and white women’s right to suffrage would cost black men suffrage. A hundred years later, Pauline Terrelonge wrote that the black social movement of the sixties “worked to the detriment of black women, because they were told in many different ways that the liberation of the black man was more important than was their own liberation” (qtd in Guy-Sheftall 497). These men insisted that combatting racism was more important than combatting sexism, since they argued that revolution for racial equality would automatically achieve gendered equality in black communities because the effects of social oppression would disappear once the root cause of that oppression was eradicated. They further insisted that female intellectuals could not tackle the bigger, public issues of nationalism as well as they could handle the domestic realm. But African and African American women authors do indeed grapple with the critical issues of nation, anti-colonial liberation, and revolution, with epic novels of nationhood. They had a longstanding history in the anti-slavery struggle. As Eleanor Flexner writes, “It was in the abolition movement that women first learned to organize, to hold public meetings, to conduct petition campaigns. For a quarter of a century the two movements, to free the slave and liberate the woman, nourished and strengthened one another” (41). Chimamande Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun depicts as complete a micro-historical rendition of the Biafran civil war as has ever been written. Her short story “A Private Experience” from the anthology The Thing Around Your Neck also focuses on this war. Similarly, the South African writer Bessie Head penned several novels, such as Where Rain Clouds Gather, A Question of Power, and Maru, with powerful women protagonists who negotiate questions of nation, race, and sexism. The title of the novel Maru is the name of the male protagonist who eventually falls in love with the main protagonist Margaret Cadmore, the central protagonist, Emergent and Divergent Voices

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who has taken her name from her adoptive mother, Margaret Cadmore. Margaret is a Mosarwa woman, a group so pale in skin color that they are not considered black enough to attain the full status of African, and are treated as unofficial slaves within the Botswanan economic and political system. The hue of black skin is sometimes an indicator of racial purity, with people rejected as not black or not white enough, as Head herself knew. Not only did she contend with the racism of South African apartheid on a public and national level, but as a mixed-race child herself, she had personal experiences of simultaneously being too black and too white to be accepted permanently by any one social group. Head was adopted at birth as her white mother was intermittently locked up for insanity (Stead Eilersen 8-15). The identity of her father was never made known, but it seems clear that he was a black African. After Head’s adoptive parents noticed her mixed racial identity, they placed her in foster care, and later she was sent to a mission boarding school (Stead Eilersen 8-15). Head became a reporter and columnist for South African magazines, and although Head was part of the South African intelligentsia, apartheid laws barred her from any roles that would grant her autonomy and authority. She left for a teaching position in Botswana, along with her son Howard, but after her arrival in Botswana, her teaching post was imperiled when the school head tried unsuccessfully to seduce her (Stead Eilersen 77). Unable to draw an income to sustain her or her child’s lives, Head became a writer (Stead Eilersen 77). Maru is, therefore, partly autobiographical (Adler et al. 28). Just as Head gained recognition through her writing, so, too, does her character Margaret through painting. Both Head and Margaret use their creative talents to uplift their social and financial status. It is Margaret’s paintings and her ability to express herself that catch the attention of the eponymous Maru, who proposes to her. She accepts his proposal, even though she loves a different man, Moleka, because Maru is more socially and politically powerful than Moleka and their marriage allows Head to create an opportunity for social transformation through Margaret: 44

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When people of the Masarwa tribe heard about Maru’s marriage to one of their own, a door silently opened on the small, dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom…turned and flowed into the room. (126)

Here, Head specifically negotiates national issues of belonging and racism, and does so from a female perspective, opening up that small airless room for other black female authors to follow. Immigration and Stateless Citizens The vulnerability of immigrants without proper legal status to be self-sufficient residents of a country is a recurring theme in African and African American women’s writing. Chinedu, a character from the title story of Chimamanda Adichie’s anthology The Thing Around Your Neck (115-127) is a devoutly Christian, God-fearing homosexual Nigerian who has overstayed his papers in America by three years. He is unable to work to support himself and is terrified of being deported to Nigeria. Adichie highlights homophobic representations of gay people’s minority status, as she consistently portrays both his intense religious conviction and his sexual preference to show that these do not depend on each other at all. She creates multidimensional characters that can occupy the seemingly contradictory spaces of real life. African women in America and Europe, with or without work visas and qualifications, are vulnerable to unscrupulous employment practices, and often work far beneath their qualification level. Kamara, the central protagonist in “On Monday of Last Week” in the anthology The Thing Around Your Neck works as a nanny while she waits for “her green card application to be processed” even though she has a Masters degree (Adichie 76). Her husband Tobechi had been employed as a taxi driver “in Philadelphia for a Nigerian man who cheated all his drivers because none of them had papers” (83). Her employer’s wife is an artist who asks Kamara to consider modeling nude for her; while Kamara is undoubtedly attracted to Tracy and decides to accept the request, her choice is underscored by her social vulnerability. Emergent and Divergent Voices

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Although Buchi Emecheta’s character Kehinde has “a degree in sociology” (127) in her novel Kehinde, she works as a cleaner in a hotel in London. She earns extra money teaching English to the wife of a hotel guest until the husband demands that she undress for him, causing her to leave her job. She takes another job as a cleaner at Marks and Spencer, a UK–based clothing store, because she is “too old for their managerial training scheme” (133) although obviously intelligent enough to excel in it. The prevalence of this syndrome is highlighted when a woman at the local job center, who tries to help Kehinde find a better job, tells Kehinde that when she visited Berlin the year before, “the cleaners in my hotel were Turkish women who had come to Berlin to make money. Some of them were professionals too…” (134). This overall degradation of African women in Europe stands in stark contrast to the idea that living in Europe would bring instant opportunities of betterment and is, therefore, preferable than living in Africa. Sissie, a Ghanaian student in Germany looking for scholarship opportunities in Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint, is disgusted at the way in which African people live in Europe. She remarks, “They were all poorly clothed. The women especially were pitiful. She saw women who at home would have been dignified matrons as well as young, attractive girls looking ridiculous in a motley of fabrics and colours” (88-89). Ifemele, the central protagonist in Adichie’s novel Americanah, is a Nigerian student in America. After she finishes her studies, her white upper-class partner helps Ifemele obtain American citizenship by asking a company to employ her as a communications officer and sponsor her application for American citizenship. She is unaware that her teenage love, Obinze, also called The Zed, eventually makes his way to England but without a visa to work there. He is left vulnerable to all kinds of scams, from extortion by the person whose National Insurance number and whose name he uses to work, who charges him 35% of his earnings, to the consortium who charge him thousands of pounds for an arranged marriage knowing that his visitor’s visa had expired. This oppression culminates when Obinze 46

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is arrested as he arrives at the court for his wedding (278-9). In Americanah, Adichie’s feminist voice does not discriminate against men, but rather exposes the vulnerabilities and sensitivities of men and women to exploitation within a system, rather than always being the victimizers; the exploiters. Obinze compares his life to those who have the correct visas to work and live in London; but as in Emecheta and Aidoo’s work, African women are underemployed or unemployed. Even promising academics must abandon their careers and dedicate all their creative talent to raising children who, in turn, must excel where they could not. Ifemele begins to blog, using a literally alien narrative technique to relate her perceptions of life as an outsider and deliver social commentary on the world that she has entered, America. Ifemele blogs her perspective on the impact of race on social interactions in America, sometimes as a guide for “NABs”—Non-American Blacks like herself, who are unaccustomed to the racism to which they are exposed in America. This is not such a problem in African contexts where class is a better indicator of privilege than race. Yet it is in America that Ifemele encounters her “Blackness.” Ifemele achieves a small celebrity status and receives PayPal donations for her work and then payments for click-link advertising on her blog. Soon she is able to leave her job and concentrate on blogging full time. This form of journalism resembles Head’s and other African and African American authors in that it is a form of selfemployment through intellectual labor. What is also interesting is that Americanah contains different written genres: prose, blog articles, and their comments, which function almost like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, permitting a variety of voices and opinions to come through. Adichie provides more than just a single story, she provides a multitude of stories, a multitude of perspectives, all engaging and interacting with one another. This polyphony and dialogism is interesting because several texts of earlier African women writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo in Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint employ a similar variety of genres within their novels, using a combination of prose, poetry, lyrics, and folktales within their novels. This narrative Emergent and Divergent Voices

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technique is encountered far more frequently in the writings by African and African American women. Here a tradition moves and grows, developing characteristics unique to African and African American women’s literature. Womanism and Representation Womanism is a term defined by Alice Walker to express a black feminist consciousness, as distinct from second wave white liberal feminism. Walker first used it in her work In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose where she wrote that a womanist “loves struggle, loves the folk, and loves herself” (xi-xii). The specificities of black women’s oppression were ignored within white liberal women’s liberation discourse—including the ways in which white liberal women used black women to achieve independence and autonomy, either as economic help that relieved white liberal women of the responsibility for housework and child-rearing, or as raw data for discussion in a sociological or anthropological vein. Womanism spoke more to the particular experiences of African American social activists, and can arguably be seen echoed in Adichie’s 2012 TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” and her book-length essay of the same name. A key site of contestation in writing by both African and African American women has been around the representation of their bodies, spirituality, and intelligence. As Gayatri Spivak writes, “The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored” (243). Patricia Hill Collins notes that African American women have been portrayed as “stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas” (67), a trend that African and African American women writers have sought to overturn. An early literary device that African and African American women writers employed was intertextuality, where they reinterpreted the psychology of African and African American women characters from books written by colonial authors to render them more fully rounded and complex. Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea as a reinterpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s character Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s West Indian wife who seemingly stands in the way of 48

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Jane Eyre’s marriage to Mr. Rochester in the eponymous novel, Jane Eyre. Brontë portrays Bertha as a speechless Other, a dangerous and incarcerated almost animal who is unflinchingly prepared to burn down the house and murder her husband. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha is no ordinary jilted wife. Through amplification, a literary device in which characters borrowed intertextually are imbued with new characteristics, Rhys embroiders Bertha to portray her as a woman with a history and a cultural identity. Bertha is a celebrated Creole beauty with a pale skin color, and someone with a web of relationships to other members of her community, which she uses for validation. She is moreover the heiress to a sizable fortune, which becomes Mr. Rochester’s property after their marriage. Her burning of their home comes in the light of the terrible reality she must negotiate after she marries Rochester and moves to England. There she finds her husband dependent on her fortune yet in love with someone else, leaving her confined to one floor of a remote house, away from the high society and culture she knew on her home island, absolutely adrift from her normal life. Her burning of Rochester’s home, therefore, is reinterpreted as a political act of resistance, burning her own home, rather than an act of unwarranted madness as formerly depicted by Brontë. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved explores the true story of the apparent murderous craziness of a real-life African American woman, Margaret Garner, named Sethe in the novel. Sethe is a slave who has endured terrible violence, beatings and rapes, at the hands of the slave overseer and his two sons. Her back is covered in scars from these beatings. But instead of using these scars as symbols of Sethe’s degradation, Morrison depicts them as a tree grown on Sethe’s back. The organic metaphors of trees and forests underpin much of the novel. When Sethe, pregnant and vulnerable, runs away from slavery, she picks out her path to freedom by following the blossoming flowers on the trees, and the scars on her back become emblematic of her strength and self-defining route to freedom, even in the face of terrible violence. Whereas colonial literature often depicted “wilderness” as hostile and frightening, African women writers use the forest and the jungle as sites of refuge and safety: Emergent and Divergent Voices

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For a while, we were hiding in the forest and the jungle, and we endured a terrible period of starvation...The rest of my family also left their houses and sought refuge in the jungle. (Dongala in Browdy de Hernandez et al. 215)

The jungle is a place where people can thrive, it is not a site of incomprehensible chaos that must be tamed or cut back. This ironic inversion of expectation is also a reinterpretation of colonial stereotypes. Sethe escapes slavery but when slave-catchers arrive at her hideout, she reacts by instantly murdering her youngest daughter. It is not clear whether she would have gone on to murder her other children had she had more time. “Beloved” is the name given to the ghost of that child that comes to haunt the family, as a metaphor for the memories of the child and of slavery that have haunted America, and indeed the world, in their aftermath. Likewise, Nathalie Etoké of Cameroon depicts a mother who kills her son in “A Poem Written in the Ink of the Blood Shed in Rwanda”: A Hutu woman buries the fruit of a forbidden love The child is still alive Fighting for his life He doesn’t understand He keeps saying: Mummy stop playing! I don’t want to play anymore Stop playing! He must die ... His father was Tutsi... (Browdy de Hernandez et al. 223)

These crimes are all the more grotesque because a mother is supposed to work to safeguard a child against all danger, not to constitute the danger itself. This depiction is antithetical to the normal depiction of “mother-love” as nurturing and life-giving. But these authors portray the choices available to mothers with more sympathy. Morrison interprets the dangers for female slaves who routinely faced sexual violence as too great for Sethe, as a mother, to bear bringing on her daughter, and the early burial of a son by the 50

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mother in Etoké’s poem is a fate far more humane than any he faced had he been discovered during a campaign of genocide, with its: Cacophony of machetes chopping up Legs Arms Skulls In the house of God. (Etoké 224)

These representations of mother-love interrogate the meaning of motherhood in a world of terrible violence, and underscore the need of these mothers to protect their children through their own violence from the violence meted out against their children by others— even if that protection is murder. The ability to write these stories enriches global literature and understanding, no matter how hard the stories are to digest. The authors who depict these terrible true experiences also describe writing as a cathartic experience and note that the “creative impetus seeks to go beyond the tragic” (Etoké in Browdy de Hernandez, et al. 227). These representations offer us a way of including the devastating lives these women have led and the choices they have made within the literary canon. The stories stress the impact of history on African and African American women’s lives and their agency within their lives. This act of reclamation highlights how vulnerable ideas of gendered actions are to different historical contexts, underscoring that categories like motherhood are not stable and that nurturing is more complex than the stereotypical representation of women nursing. Likewise, writing by African and African American women portrays self-nurturing through black women characters’ attention to their bodies. The framing device for the novel Americanah is the context of the hairdressing salon where Ifemele will have braids put in. The salon is a gendered space, a space where women are involved in the languid preening of women’s hair. This context harbors and encourages the telling of women’s stories to pass the time. Ifemele will be there all day, and it will take the whole day for her to tell her story of the circumstances of her arrival in America, her experiences in America, and her intentions to return to Nigeria. Americanah thus Emergent and Divergent Voices

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begins in its middle, and is reminiscent of that quintessential colonial novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which opens with the characters waiting on a boat on the Thames for the night to end and their journey to begin, passing the time by telling of a story. Whereas seaborne adventures in Conrad’s novel were a masculine affair, here braiding hair and weaving stories are intricately intertwined as singularly within a female space of leisurely women’s activities. The hierarchy of the salon’s proprietors and the laborers become part of that tapestry, too; their love affairs and exilic narratives are revealed during the course of the day alongside those of Ifemele. This social context of braiding is juxtaposed with the lone venture Ifemele recounts of straightening her hair for the interview for the job that enabled her to stay in America. She decides to straighten her hair to indicate that she can be the kind of person who is acceptable to white notions of black beauty. She does, indeed, get the job, but it is not clear whether this is due to her qualifications, her straightened hair, or the power of her partner’s intervention. After a few days, however, Ifemele’s hair starts to fall out in clumps, and then more falls out. Rather than remaining beautiful, Ifemele ends up almost bald. As early as 1918, African American Nannie Burroughs had argued against using hair straighteners; she insisted that those who used them and skin bleachers had “color phobia” (Guy-Sheftall 9). Trying to make oneself acceptable by changing or forcing change to the structure of one’s self and one’s body was and is doubly dangerous; as early chemicals products were highly toxic. Continued Disempowerment Alarmingly, African and African American women authors reiterate their position of disempowerment, often narrating tales of the most terrible inhumanity, containing the most senseless violence perpetrated against people. These stories describe the reality of abuse and social distress that the characters endure, and which can be deadly. Their vulnerability to sexual oppression, whether through rape, domestic abuse, and/or unfair labor practices, reveal that an “analysis of the feminist activism of black women…suggests the necessity of reconceptualizing women’s issues to include poverty, 52

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racism, imperialism, lynching, welfare, economic exploitation, sterilization abuse, decent housing, and a host of other concerns that generations of black women foregrounded” (Guy-Sheftall:2). The options available to African and African American women as agents of action are depicted in literature in the same way they are found within the bounds of normal life: few choices, in a narrow sphere, predetermined by the spaces carved out for their race, gender, and class status. For Ifemele, it is only after her many applications for work are routinely refused and she faces a desperate situation in which she almost physically attacks one of her roommates during a discussion over unpaid rent, and finally confronts her other unpaid bills, that she realizes that she must accept the one position for which she has been deemed acceptable: sex work. This job exists whitewashed in the euphemism of providing “comforting” work. It is telling that her vulnerability is attached to her ambitions to study. This one action changes the entire course of Ifemele’s life. She may be able to continue to study in America, to pay her bills and feed herself, but she shuts out her sexuality and with it Obinze, The Zed, “her Ceiling”; the partner who she has loved and with whom she has discovered her sexuality, her past, and all their plans together. She is distraught over her actions, knowing that her sexuality is now monopolized as her labor by economic necessity and that this vicious cycle must be repeated the next month, but she feels powerless to do anything other than go on as if her previous plans had not existed. These new paths mean she chooses different paths later in her life, too. Yet as Etoké reminds us, this should not imply that this literature has a debilitating effect. She notes that, “I write about chaos in order to escape chaos. I write about a nightmarish past because I dream of a better future. I write about death in order to celebrate life. I describe hopeless situations because I do not want to lose hope. I write because I want to bear witness to what happened, to recreate what happened, what should have happened, what will happen” (Browdy de Hernandez 227). African and African American women writers have been at pains to create characters who are reminiscent of people who these women know or are, to create women characters Emergent and Divergent Voices

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who are like the women who these women encounter and live within the normal course of their lives. May these contributions be ever more keenly known. Works Cited Adichie, Chimamande Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print. __________. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate, 2013. Print. __________. The Thing Around Your Neck. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. Print. Aidoo, Ama Ata. Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. Lagos and New York: Nok Publishers, 1979. Print. Brontë Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006 (1847). Print. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1995 (1847). Print. Browdy de Hernandez, Jennifer; Dongala, Pauline; Jolaosho, Omotayo and Serafin, Anne (Eds). African Women Writing Resistance, Contemporary Voices. Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi and Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011. Print. Condé, Maryse. The Journey of a Caribbean Writer. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014. Print. __________. Windward Heights. Trans. Richard Philcox. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin Books, 1983 (1902). Print. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. London: Women’s Press, 1988. Print. Emecheta, Buchi. Kehinde. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994. Print. Etoké, Nathalie. ‘A Poem Written in the Ink of the Blood Shed in Rwanda’ in African Women Writing Resistance, Contemporary Voices. Browdy de Hernandez, Dongola, Jolaosho and Serafin (Eds). Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi and Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011. 223-226. Print. Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959. Print. 54

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Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” in Critical Inquiry 12, No 1 “Race, Writing, and Difference”. Autumn 1985. pp 204-242. Print. Guy-Sheftall (Ed). Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press, 1995. Print. Head, Bessie. Where Rain Clouds Gather London: Gollancz, 1969. Print. __________. A Question of Power. London: Davis-Poynter, 1973. Print. __________. Maru London: Gollancz, 1971. Print. __________. Interview with Michelle Adler, Susan Gardner, Tobeka Mda and Patricia Sandler in Between the Lines: Interviews with Bessie Head, Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali. Craig Mackenzie and Cherry Clayton (Eds). Grahamstown: The National English Literary Museum, 1989: pp. 5-30. Print. Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Print. __________. Song of Solomon New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. André Deutch (UK) and W.W. Norton (US), 1966. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, ” in Critical Inquiry 12, Autumn 1985. pp. 243-261. Print. Stead Eilersen, Gillian. Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears. Portsmouth: Heinemann; London: James Currey; Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip. 1995. Print. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, US. 1982. Print. __________. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Print.

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Suffering and “Sacrificiality” in Postcolonial African Literature Kieran Dodds

“Did Okonkwo fail?” (Achebe 2009:129). Chinua Achebe’s protagonist in Things Fall Apart—which for the longest time was African literature to a great number of western readers —commits suicide at the novel’s climax. After his murder of a white court messenger, he prefers to hang by his own hands rather than by those of the imperialists. Criticism of the text —again, mostly western— has since framed Okonkwo’s final act as surrender. Things Fall Apart is seen as a “tragedy” whose once-mighty hero is finally reduced to hopelessness and helplessness by the piecemeal subjugation of his Ibo village, Umuofia (Killam 1969:31). A different reading is, however, possible, spurred, in part, by Achebe’s teasing question. Okonkwo’s failure, or otherwise, cannot be taken for granted, for such simple readings of complex texts have obscured one of the ways in which African authors have made sense of the colonial encounter, namely, sacrifice. By placing Okonkwo’s death and others like it in their correct cultural context, it is possible to take Africans’ colonial and postcolonial narratives in daring new directions. Suicide and ‘self-inflicted wounds’ (Coundouriotis 2005) underpin works by several of the most popular African authors, but rarely are these phenomena discussed comparatively as agential anticolonial actions. That is what this chapter proceeds to do, working from case studies categorized in two ways: the works of the “avantcourier” (Ayoola 2012), classic African literature as imagined by Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Wole Soyinka (Death and the King’s Horseman), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Weep Not, Child); and more recent postcolonial and contemporary fiction by Ngũgĩ (Devil on the Cross), Tsitsi Dangarembga (She No Longer Weeps), and Yvonne Vera (Butterfly Burning). No chapter of this length can hope to capture the essence of all African art engaging colonial themes. My focus on but one way some African authors have approached and 56

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understood colonialism is a simple acknowledgement that African literature is immensely varied, to be treated not as “one unit” but as a “group of associated units” (Achebe 2007:343) rendered legible only by careful qualification. The theoretical parameters of this chapter include African arts of the “everyday” (Newell 2002; Newell and Okome 2013), the precise political role played by language (Achebe 1975; Ayoola 2012; Ngũgĩ 1986), and definitional contestations surrounding “colonialism” (Cooper 1994, 2005; Mamdani 1996; Spear 2003) and indeed the “African” (Adéèkó 2007; Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike 1980). The chapter’s argument, therefore, contributes to a debate that occupies anthropologists, historians, and literary theorists; that is, the extent to which literature has been a vehicle for resisting power in the African context (Barber 1987). African fiction has been marked by individual sacrifice in deference to the collective anti-colonial, or neocolonial, good. More striking, this sacrifice has often been final and self-inflicted, with Achebe, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, and Vera all writing suicide into their works. Of these authors, only Ngũgĩ appears to view suicide as something entirely individualized and inhibiting to anti-colonial resistance, with the attempted suicides of the protagonists in Weep Not, Child and Devil on the Cross being presented as acts of surrender and even cowardice. In Things Fall Apart, Death and the King’s Horseman, and Butterfly Burning, suicide is treated with greater nuance, and at its most radical actually constitutes anti-colonial resistance. The ending of one’s own life could be a pathetic deed and a sad capitulation to external control, or it could be a conclusive means of reasserting control, an exertion of corporeal agency in a colonial state that could do no other but try to police the African body (Bernault 2006; Mbembe 1992). As Foucault once wrote, suicide “was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone . . . had the right to exercise” (1990:138). Further, self-infliction of this kind was tied up in, and often directly related to, an African conception of the common good. Achebe writes in an essay on the teaching of Things Fall Apart in schools that whereas suicide is viewed in western culture through the lens of “moral cowardice, or [treated] simply as a ‘copping Postcolonial African Literature

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out,’ thus trivializing it into a matter between an individual and his problems,” for Okonkwo and the Umuofia villagers it is, conversely, “a monumental issue between an individual . . . and society and all its divinities . . . indeed, the entire cosmos” (2009:129). To make this point is not to essentialize African culture, but merely to recognize a recurring trend. Soyinka has argued elsewhere that “tragedies” of the kind described in Death and the King’s Horseman are “cleansing processes for the health of a community,” “ritual” restoring balance (2003:164). If this is the case, suicide can be interpreted as the performance of individual agency on behalf of an indigenous collectivity. This is what is meant in the chapter by sacrifice. Just as personal suffering by imposition—say, death at the hands of the colonizer—is presented in Ngũgĩ’s novels as a nearnecessary means of alleviating “social suffering” (Norridge 2013), suicide serves a similar purpose for Achebe, Soyinka, and Vera. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a sensible starting point for this enquiry. The 1958 novel is still the most widely-read of any African author and dwells extensively on themes of surrender and sacrifice, suffering and suicide. Okonkwo’s decision to hang himself at the novel’s climax, MacDonald rightly points out, is “the action to end all action,” and correspondingly “frames the text” (2012:176). In other words, to decipher Okonkwo’s motive —never expressly stated—is to decipher Achebe’s. This begs a question that standard readings of suicide in Things Fall Apart will struggle to answer. Why is it that Achebe, an “avant-courier” of African anti-colonial art, would choose to deliver a message that communicated straightforward surrender? I resolve that Okonkwo does not surrender himself to the white settlers but sacrifices himself for the Ibo of Umuofia. On the surface, this seems to fly in the face of the text’s representation of Ibo culture. The reaction to Okonkwo’s death among the villagers is one of horror: Obierika tells the District Commissioner that Okonkwo has committed an “abomination” and “an offence against the Earth,” asking the white men to bury his “evil” body because the villagers are not permitted to touch it (Achebe 1958:186). Such clarity of criticism has led Ogbaa to dismiss the idea that Okonkwo performed 58

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a “sacrifice to his great society” (1981:134), and it would indeed be foolish to argue that he died an uncomplicated martyr. Rather, his death would have been keenly contested among the Ibo. For Obierika also remarks after the suicide that Okonkwo’s life was lived as “one of the greatest men in Umuofia,” and wonders aloud how it was that the District Commissioner and his allies could “[drive] him to kill himself . . . [to] be buried like a dog” (Achebe 1958:187). Okonkwo in death generates dialogue; village-wide soul-searching is virtually guaranteed by his suicide, Obierika and other community leaders forced to reckon with their earlier recourse to “tumult instead of action” (Achebe 1958:184). Earlier passages also endorse a message of sacrifice. Okonkwo’s suicide is certainly seen as an unconventional and even abhorrent way of dying, but Okonkwo was never presented as one that would unthinkingly abide by Ibo custom. By beating his youngest wife in the Week of Peace, Okonkwo had committed another sin against the Earth—“[but] Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess” (Achebe 1958:27). And in one of the novel’s most pivotal moments, he goes against the advice of a village elder and slays his adoptive son Ikemefuna, for whom the Oracle had decreed death, because “[he] was afraid of being thought weak” (Achebe 1958:55). Okonkwo’s independence can be interpreted as an independence from modern Ibo custom; he believed himself to represent a glorious Ibo past more masculine and warrior-like than was reflected in his present-day Umuofia. Suicide, with its potential for generating dialogue and innermost reflection among others, was a way for Okonkwo to bring this past back into popular consciousness. It was an individual sacrifice that left behind a collective message, his denying the white man the opportunity for vengeance a reminder of what he sees as an endangered Ibo heroism. If provided with such an explanation of his apparently abominable action, says Nwabueze, Okonkwo’s ancestors “would probably nod in thoughtful understanding” (2000:172). That an appeal to the ancestors would be necessary is suggestive of a “cultural identity” (Ojaide 1992), central to which is communalism and the conception of a cyclical relationship between Postcolonial African Literature

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past and future that differs from the western interpreter’s. Nowhere is this laid out more clearly than in the theatre of Wole Soyinka, especially Death and the King’s Horseman, an historical work dramatizing the colonial authorities’ intervention in the eponymous horseman’s ritual suicide. With the horseman Elesin Oba ostracized by his community for failing in his duty, it is left to son Olunde to offer up his body and restore “the honour of [the] household and [the] race” (Soyinka 1984:218), which he does at the play’s conclusion. Elesin then follows suit, hanging himself in his makeshift prison cell. The eventual suicide of Elesin consciously corresponds to the model of suicide as surrender, a model that appears more aligned to the western tradition than the African. From Herodotus through Camus, the dominant philosophical narrative has presupposed “refuge” (Herodotus 1922:361) in suicide, which is seen to communicate “acceptance at its extreme” (Camus 1955:40-41). As Achebe noted, the reason for death by one’s own hand is usually thought to be the intractability of one’s own problems. This is certainly the case for the horseman, who cannot go through with his ordained death but impulsively and pathetically hangs himself on learning of the death of Olunde, for which he is partly responsible. Cast off by his people, shorn of his son, and (albeit temporarily) imprisoned by the colonial officer Pilkings, Elesin sees no way out but death. Olunde’s fate, on the other hand, is unambiguously sacrificial, provoked by a respect for Yoruba tradition and a rejection of colonial “modernity” and all its associated baggage. As Soyinka has himself written, “Man resorts to the strangest of devices for nullifying that unanswerable nullity of History . . . in the phenomenon of death” (2003:174). Here death holds collective emancipatory potential: it helps agents make sense of what is being done to them in the name of progress, and can even arrogate power from what presents itself as inevitable. In Death and the King’s Horseman, Olunde’s suicide is the strange device, and the false teleology of a colonial civilizing mission is History. This notion of collectivity, Ojaide has argued, extends beyond a handful of case studies. “Modern African literature is very socialized,” Ojaide contends, in that it focuses “not 60

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on the individual [but on the] communal spirit”; in a break from most European novels and plays, there is rarely even a “single protagonist that overwhelms other characters” (1992:45). The importance of Umuofia to Things Fall Apart and Yoruba practices to Death and the King’s Horseman bear this out, as Gates, Jr. notes in how the latter’s protagonists are “protagonists for the whole community” who would choose even death if it was what the “communal will” so called for (2003:163). In Olunde’s case, it was, and choose he did; his character is constructed by Soyinka to be constitutive of agency. Having studied medicine in England for four years, Olunde lays claim to knowledge of two distinct cultures. His decisions, therefore, necessarily arise out of an internal, cross-cultural dialogue within which the indigenous is consciously privileged. His ritualized death should not be read as blind acquiescence to custom, but as an implicitly anti-colonial affirmation of duty. Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is thematically similar to Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman, but the author’s Marxist-Fanonist radicalism and the immediacy of Kenya’s anti-imperial struggle result in a treatment of suffering different from that of Achebe and Soyinka. As Ngũgĩ’s first novel, published in 1964, it shortly precedes his country’s independence. The book follows the Mau Mau Uprising, and is indelibly marked by violence and freedom. The plot centers on young Njoroge, a boy whose dreams of education gradually unravel as the struggle between colonial authority on the one hand, and the Gĩkũyũ forest fighters—led by his older brothers—on the other, intensifies. His father having been tortured to death by the authorities and his only friend Mwihaki having shunned him for his family’s involvement in the murder of her own father, Njoroge tries to hang himself on “a familiar tree . . . waiting for darkness to come over him” (Ngũgĩ 1964:153). But he is found by his two mothers and stops himself. “I am a coward” (Ngũgĩ 1964:154), he says, and the story ends. Anticolonial sacrifice is again one of the text’s central motifs, embodied in the suffering of Njoroge’s father, Ngotho. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the prototypical postcolonial author Ngũgĩ frames suicide more in line with a European philosophical tradition. Postcolonial African Literature

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Njoroge’s attempted suicide, an act of “cowardice” born of resignation and a loss of kin, mirrors the successful hanging of Elesin Oba. Yet of all three “avant-couriers,” Ngũgĩ is the only one who renders suicide an abdication of responsibility. That Njoroge is found by his two mothers at the tree, and that this is what prevents his going through with the act, is significant. It is a reminder that Njoroge’s life is not a life lived in isolation, but one that is shaped by his surviving family and the colonial subjugation under which they still suffer. Indeed all three are breaking a colonial curfew by being out in the darkness. If he had committed suicide, Ngũgĩ suggests, Njoroge would have committed his family to even greater suffering, and would also have denied the Gĩkũyũ the benefit of an educated local who wished to “learn like Jomo [Kenyatta]” (1964:43). The particularities of the authors’ colonial experiences best explain their divergent treatments of suicide. All agree about the importance of doing one’s duty to the community, but in Weep Not, Child that need is especially urgent. Achebe wrote about nineteenth-century colonialism in an independent Nigeria, and so could afford to pen for Okonkwo a death that opened up mere dialogue among his people. His was a sacrificial suicide whose consequences might only bloom later, post-mythmaking. Ngũgĩ did not have that luxury, writing with Kenya still under the imperialist yoke and fresh from the horrors of Mau Mau. To volunteer death at such a critical moment in the country’s history was, for the Marxist-Fanonist nationalist Ngũgĩ, a kind of betrayal, ironically close to the western typology—“a species of moral cowardice”—as described by Achebe. Agency in sacrifice is nevertheless an important component of Ngũgĩ’s characters, a device used in common with his contemporaries. Ngotho’s obstinacy in torture is the text’s most apparent example. “[Offering] his old tooth that had failed to bite deep into anything” (Ngũgĩ 1964:134), he confesses to the murder of Jacobo, the father of Njoroge’s friend Mwihaki and colonial collaborator, to save son Boro, the Mau Mau leader and genuine killer. At the behest of Mr. Howlands, the owner of Ngotho’s ancestral land and his former employer (Ngotho was fired for going on strike and attacking Jacobo), he is then “tortured in all manner of ways” and “beaten 62

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from day to day” (Ngũgĩ 1964:134). Ngotho, though, will not budge: “[He] would tell nothing beyond the fact that he had killed Jacobo . . . Ngotho had stuck to his story” (Ngũgĩ 1964:134-135). His subsequent death, it is implied, is honorable. The older man lays down his life for the younger anti-colonial rebel. His is an example of a knowing sacrifice, in that it guaranteed death, and thus, for Boro, life. Indeed, Boro’s status as head of the Uprising confers an added significance. Ngotho’s sacrifice is not only for the good of his family, but also for the freedom of Kenya and the return to his people of the land stolen by Howlands and his contemporaries. African literature made sense of colonialism through its reconfiguring of tragedy. In translating one person’s suffering, the climactic moment in most western tragedies, to political sacrifice on behalf of others, Achebe, Soyinka, and Ngũgĩ were expressing the idea that African societies must act as collectivities to break imperialism and end imperial violence. Soyinka makes this point explicitly in a passage worth quoting in full: “Great tragedy is a cleansing process for the health of a community. Tragic theatre is a literal development of ritual. It is necessary for balancing the aesthetic sensibilities of the community. Tragedy is a community event” (2003:164). Many an article has been written about what it is, if anything, that marks African literature out as a distinguishable category. Two of the most common tools of analysis are “hybridity” and “creolization,” as discussed in works by Hannerz (1987) and Barber (1987), respectively. African cultural forms are here seen as “viable new syntheses” (Hannerz 1987:552) growing out of the “interplay between imported and indigenous cultures” (Hannerz 1987:546). This is true of African literature as it is of African popular music. Musicians in Sophiatown in South Africa appropriated American jazz and transformed it into a music of resistance (Hannerz 1994), just as African authors have taken an individualized interpretation of tragedy prevalent in the Global North and turned it on its head. In the hands of the African “avant-courier,” the paradigmatic “violent obliteration of the noble individual” (Gates, Jr. 2003:162) becomes public performance. Postcolonial African Literature

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This is also true of more recent African postcolonial fiction concerning colonial and immediate neocolonial periods. Devil on the Cross, another of Ngũgĩ’s novels, is a satirical story set in independent Kenya, and takes aim at those domestic and foreign elites who propagate a system of “neocolonialism . . . the last vicious kick of a dying imperialism” (Ngũgĩ 1982:210). Its metaphorical title urges Kenyans to “crucify” colonial politics once and for all, for the masses had not been sufficiently vigilant post-independence, allowing “black people in suits and ties” to “[restore the oppressive system] to life” (Ngũgĩ 1982:139). Following protagonist Warĩĩnga’s consciousness-raising journey from despondent and suicidal colonial victim to independent anti-colonial agent, the novel ends as she murders the “Rich Old Man from Ngorika,” the father to both her daughter and her lover, and the personification of Kenya’s capitalistimperialist carryover. Before broaching the story’s sacrificiality and similarities to Weep Not, Child, one must again note its peculiar context. Written in 1980 on prison-issued toilet paper (Ngũgĩ was detained without trial by the Kenyan government in 1977 for his outspoken political play I Will Marry When I Want) and entirely in Gĩkũyũ, Devil on the Cross sees the author at his most radical. Whereas in his earlier works, Ngũgĩ paints a more balanced, more typically Kenyan (Lonsdale and Odhiambo 2003:5) picture of Mau Mau resistance, here he is unflinching in his support. Tellingly, more ire is reserved for matatũ driver and former homeguard Mwaũra than the laughably pompous Rich Old Man or the caricatured robbers (one of whom is named Rottenborough Groundflesh Shitland Narrow Isthmus Joint Stock Brown); he is a reminder that colonial legacies survive in postcolonial African states, that the need to combat colonialism has not yet gone away. As another of his characters wishes to do with music, that is, “compose [the] truly national” and encourage “harmony in polyphony” (Ngũgĩ 1982:60), so Ngũgĩ does with literature. His employing the motif of suffering as sacrifice plays no small part in this achievement, with Warĩĩnga’s tale in Devil on the Cross almost mirroring that of Ngotho in Weep Not, Child. Like Njoroge’s 64

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father, who is initially afraid to strike against the colonizer and contemplates instead “[harming his own] body to drive away the curse that removed [his people] from the ancestral lands” (Ngũgĩ 1964:28), Warĩĩnga attempts to commit suicide more than once (“Who has instructed you that your work on Earth is finished? Who has told you that your time is up?” (Ngũgĩ 1982:12)) prior to finally shooting the Rich Old Man. Suicide is again framed as a kind of selfishness by Ngũgĩ, as opposed to the powerful instrument of resistance that is sacrifice. The novel’s final act sees Warĩĩnga storm out of the Rich Old Man’s house, leaving behind her lover Gatuĩria and determining that “the hardest struggles of her life’s journey lay ahead” (Ngũgĩ 1982:254). Her action effectively prioritizes the needs of Kenyans—because her victim is a “parasite that lives on the trees of other people’s lives” (Ngũgĩ 1982:254)—over and above her need for companionship. She accepts individual suffering because it will ultimately alleviate, in Norridge’s formulation, the “social suffering” exacted by agents of the neocolonial state like the Rich Old Man. Tsitsi Dangarembga sounds a similar tone in her play She No Longer Weeps, a feminist critique of the Zimbabwean postcolonial state where the protagonist, Martha, looks to have been written in the image of Warĩĩnga. Freddy, the father of Martha’s unplanned child, is angered by his partner’s independence and ambition: “Women like you,” he tells her, “have no place in Zimbabwe” (Dangarembga 1987:9). They part ways, much to the disillusionment of Martha’s parents, and, in a further transgression of patriarchal norms, she becomes a successful lawyer. The center cannot hold, however, and Freddy returns to take back his child, citing the laxness with which Zimbabwe’s contemporary Legal Age of Majority Act was enforced. Martha then stabs Freddy, presumably to death, in the presence of her parents before turning herself in to the police. Again, the particular postcolonial context is important in comprehending the text’s message. The play is set in a Zimbabwe where “legal rights for women were [still] not honored” (Shaw 2007:8). It is abundantly clear that this owed much to the imperialist past: Khan and Vambe are correct that “the coloniality of power,” here resulting in women’s Postcolonial African Literature

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subjugation, “is not merely a colonial invention” (2013:315), but it must also be stressed how working women were routinely criminalized in European-ruled Zimbabwe (Schmidt 1992). The message of Freddy’s murder can again be interpreted as Martha’s sacrificing herself for others. The act is carried out in front of her parents, who had previously expressed grave concerns regarding Martha’s revolutionary zeal: “If only she would understand,” muses her mother at one point in the play, “that things cannot be changed, only accepted” (Dangarembga 1987:40). It may, therefore, be read as a message to the Zimbabwean older generation, a decisive act communicating the extent to which radicalism is required. Second, she explicitly states that the murder is carried out not for selfish reasons. The initial stab wounds, it is true, atone for “the suffering you caused me,” but the fatal wound is delivered on behalf of “all the women” (Dangarembga 1987:59) betrayed by Freddy and men like him. While not wishing to erase the hurtful loss of her daughter, Dangarembga nevertheless invests in Freddy’s death a greater, collective meaning. Martha will, in prison, shoulder the suffering of all “women like her”—women who in an independent Zimbabwe still find themselves inhibited by a pervasive set of colonial mentalities—and she will do so of her own volition. Finally, protagonist Phephelaphi’s self-abortion and immolation in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning closely mirrors Okonkwo’s agential anti-colonial suicide in Things Fall Apart. Published forty years afterward, Butterfly Burning is also set in the colonial period, albeit in a Bulawayo where the persecution of black Africans is altogether more visible, residents being forced to “walk in the city without encroaching on the pavements from which they are banned” (Vera 1998:4) and negotiate the “taverns which have NO BLACKS signs” (Vera 1998:6). Its rather sparse plot centers on the young Phephelaphi’s relationship with the older Fumbatha, which fatally disintegrates owing to said colonial restriction. Phephelaphi lives out her dream in becoming her country’s first black nurse, but on becoming pregnant she must either abort her baby or lose her job. Opting for the former, Vera gives the reader an immensely vivid account of a painful and yet somehow cleansing process. When she 66

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becomes pregnant again, Phephelaphi’s response is more severe still: she sets fire to her body and chooses death. Following in the footsteps of her literary antecedents, Vera’s Phephelaphi perceives self-harm as a cathartic, individualized response to an imposed collective oppression. Both her abortion and immolation, apparently tragic, are, in fact, “willed [actions] to assert one’s agency” (Coundouriotis 2005:64), written by Vera to represent “a repossession of self and feeling in a colonial situation that has reified identity and sublimated violence” (Coundouriotis 2005:65). Such agency may well be “perverse” (Zeleza 2007:19), and is certainly exacted within tight structural limits, but is agency all the same. This is made clear in the text, a paradoxical parallel between pain and power drawn explicitly by Vera. At first, on carrying out her abortion, Phephelaphi is individually insignificant: “From a distance, she is only a mark on the ground” (Vera 1998:99). But when her pain is described, and once the reader understands its implications, she becomes a symbol of African resistance to imperialism. Phephelaphi “[believes]” in her pain, “[lives] in it,” “[knows] its true and false nuances” (Vera 1998:99), and is empowered as a consequence. The same is also true of her suicide. Because “to be harmed [is] to be freed,” it follows that “[this] quality of pain can only heal” (Vera 1998:129), both individually and collectively. In deciding to immolate herself, Phephelaphi burns not alone but, to paraphrase Ranger (2010), with the whole of Bulawayo. Again, agency is forcefully displayed. She, the African woman, is in control of her body; the settler, who desires it, is not. Phephelaphi, like Okonkwo and Olunde before her, “[dies] in her own storm” (Vera 1998:130). My argument here has been that sacrifice, which I frame as individual suffering endured on behalf of the community, is one way in which African writers have processed the colonial moment. This sacrifice was sometimes fatal and self-inflicted, but was always, at least in these case studies, performed at a level above and beyond that of the self. That the collectivity is prioritized is due to deeply-rooted ideas about what constitutes duty and identity; Camus is clearly thinking only in terms of the European literary and philosophical tradition (despite his own Algerian background) when he writes, “It Postcolonial African Literature

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may be thought that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly” (1955:40). The African authors featured in this chapter have succeeded in giving expression (Norridge 2013) to the “inexpressible” (Scarry 1987), that is, immense mental and physical pain. From Achebe’s account of Okonkwo’s struggles with white settlers and Umuofia villagers alike through Vera’s harrowing account of Phephelaphi’s abortion in the barren Bulawayo fields, the horrors of imperialism are plainly set out and ways in which it was contested clearly signposted. In contending that African literature has largely been written as resistance, I do not, however, wish to homogenize what is an amorphous field. For as well as resisting existent attitudes and structures, literature also has the potential to reproduce them. The Nigerian novelist Flora Nwapa has, for instance, observed that Achebe and Ngũgĩ have often “played down the powerful role of women” in their novels (2007:528), reinforcing gendered domination. Future research into sacrificiality in African literature might further explore this dual-consequence. Indeed, it could also help to shift the analytical onus from elite to everyday, taking heed of Newell’s call to take seriously Africa’s “lesser-known but locally significant writers” (2002:1). The prevalence of suicide and sacrificiality in African literature justifies the length at which it is here discussed, even if suicide was not always sacrificial, nor the only form of sacrifice recorded by authors. In fact, politically motivated or “revolutionary” (Ryan 2000) suicide was not limited to fiction. Adeboye finds the idea that “death is preferable to ignominy” to have “always been reflected in Yoruba social thought and political culture,” and notes that such avowals of agency were especially common during the early-colonial period (2007:190). Imperialism in Africa was, after all, teleological only to the imperialist. To the African, colonialism was a rupturous moment whose endpoint was uncertain. The anchoring of the continent’s classic and contemporary literature in sacrificial tropes was a means of making sense of what for many was nonsensical. The collective good for which the authors’ agent-protagonists suffered was a greater comprehension of, and resistance to, colonial subordination. 68

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Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Print. __________. ‘English and the African writer.’ In Olaniyan, Tejumola, and Quayson, Ato (eds.), African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Print. __________. ‘Teaching Things Fall Apart.’ In Achebe, Chinua The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print. ­­­­__________. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1975. Print. Adeboye, Olufunke. “‘Iku ya j’esin’: Politically Motivated Suicide, Social Honour, and Chieftaincy Politics in Early Colonial Ibadan.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 41:2 (2007), pp. 189-225. Print. Adéèkó, Adélékè. “My Signifier Is More Native Than Yours: Issues in Making a Literature African.” In Olaniyan, Tejumola, and Quayson, Ato (eds.), African literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Print. Ayoola, Kehinde. “Things Fall Apart as the Avant-courier of the Nigerian Variety of English.” In Anyadike, Chima and Ayoola, Kehinde (eds.), Blazing the Path: Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart. Ibadan: HEBN, 2012. Print. Barber, Karin. “Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review, 30:3 (1987), pp. 1-78. Print. Bernault, Florence. “Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa.” Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 207-239. Print. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955. Print. Chinweizu; Jemie, Onwuchekwa; and Madubuike, Ihechukwu. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. London: KPI, 1980. Print. Cooper, Frederick. “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History.” American Historical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 1516-1545. Print. ­­­__________. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Print.

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Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Self-Inflicted Wounds in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning.” World Literature Today, 79 (2005), pp. 64-67. Print. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. She No Longer Weeps. Harare: College Press, 1987. Print. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Hurley, Robert (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Print. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “Being, the Will, and the Semantics of Death.” In Soyinka, Wole, Death and the King’s Horseman: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, Gikandi, Simon (ed.). New York: Norton, 2003. Print. Hannerz, Ulf. “Sophiatown: The View from Afar.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 20:2 (1994), pp. 181-193. Print. ­­­__________. “The World in Creolisation.” Africa, 57:4 (1987), pp. 546559. Print. Herodotus, Bks. 5-7: the Persian Wars. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1922. Print. Khan, Khatija, and Vambe, Maurice. “Decolonising the ‘Epistemic Decolonial Turn’ in Women’s Fiction.” African Identities, 11:3 (2013), pp. 304-317. Print. Killam, Douglas. The Novels of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1969. Print. Lonsdale, John, and Odhiambo, Stephen. Mau Mau and Nationhood. Oxford: Currey, 2003. Print. MacDonald, Megan. “Suicide Falls Through the Cracks.” In Anyadike, Chima and Ayoola, Kehinde (eds.). Blazing the Path: Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart. Ibadan: HEBN, 2012. Print. Mamdani, Mahmoud. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. London: Currey, 1996. Print. Mbembe, Achille. “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony.” Africa, 62:1 (1992), pp. 3-37. Print. Newell, Stephanie (ed.). Readings in African Popular Fiction. London: International African Institute, 2002. Print. Newell, Stephanie, and Okome, Onookome. Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday. London: Routledge, 2013. Print. Norridge, Zoe. Perceiving Pain in African Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. 70

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Nwabueze, Emeka. “Theoretical Construction and Constructive Theorizing on the Execution of Ikemefuna in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Study in Critical Dualism.” Research in African Literatures, 31:2 (2000), pp. 163-173. Print. Nwapa, Flora. “Women and Creative Writing in Africa.” In Olaniyan, Tejumola, and Quayson, Ato (eds.). African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Print. Ogbaa, Kalu. “A Cultural Note on Okonkwo’s Suicide.” Kunapipi, 3:2 (1981), pp. 126-134. Print. Ojaide, Tanure. “Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity.” African Studies Review, 35:3 (1992), pp. 43-57. Print. Ranger, Terence. Bulawayo Burning: the Social History of a Southern African City, 1893-1960. Oxford: Currey, 2010. Print. Ryan, Katy. “Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” African American Review, 34:3 (2000), pp. 389-412. Print. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Schmidt, Elizabeth. Peasants, Traders, and Wives. London: Currey, 1992. Print. Shaw, Carolyn. “‘You Had a Daughter, But I am Becoming a Woman’: Sexuality, Feminism and Postcoloniality” in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and She No Longer Weeps. Research in African Literatures, 38:4 (2007), pp. 7-27. Print. Soyinka, Wole. “Death and the King’s Horseman.” In Soyinka, Wole, Six Plays. London: Methuen, 1984. Print. __________. “Elesin Oba and the Critics.” In Soyinka, Wole, Death and the King’s Horseman: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Gikandi, Simon (ed.). New York: Norton, 2003. Print. Spear, Thomas. “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa.” Journal of African History, 44 (2003), pp. 3-28. Print. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann, 1982. Print. __________. Weep Not, Child. London: Heinemann, 1964. Print. __________. Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Currey, 1986. Print. Vera, Yvonne. Butterfly Burning. Harare: Baobab Books, 1998. Print. Postcolonial African Literature

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Zeleza, Paul. “Colonial Fictions: Memory and History in Yvonne Vera’s Imagination.” Research in African Literatures, 38:2 (2007), pp. 9-21. Print.

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CRITICAL READINGS

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Postcolonial Perspective Robert C. Evans

It might seem odd to examine Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—a poem usually dated to the end of the fourteenth century—from a postcolonial point of view. After all, postcolonialism is one of the most recent and still-developing approaches to literary criticism. It dates mostly from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. What could such a theory have to say about a poem from the late 1300s? Would not a postcolonial approach be literally anachronistic? It was perspective unimaginable to the anonymous author and his first audiences. Would not postcolonialism, therefore, be irrelevant to a poem from the “high” middle ages? The simple answer to these questions is “no.” Any plausible theory of literature is, arguably, relevant to any individual work of literature, no matter when that work was written. Thus it should not surprise us that Sir Gawain has recently received attention from various postcolonial perspectives, especially from perspectives involving the poem’s possible relevance to fourteenth-century politics, conflicts, and “international” relations. In particular, recent critics have explored the poem’s possible relevance to attempts, during this era, by the English to colonize the Welsh, who occupied the western-most sections of the main British isle.1 Although debates about this issue are fascinating, this chapter instead focuses on a far more obvious way in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is definitely postcolonial. The poet’s clear and undeniable interest in colonialism is made blatantly clear in his poem’s opening lines: Once the siege and assault had ceased at Troy, The burg battered and burned to brands and ashes, The trooper that the tricks of treason there wrought Was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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It was Aeneas the noble and his high-born kin Who then despoiled provinces and patrons became Well nigh of all the wealth of the West Isles. Then rich Romulus to Rome rushes him swiftly, With great splendor that burg he builds at first, And names it his own name, as it now has. Ticius to Tuscany and towns he builds. Longabeard in Lombardy lifts up homes, And far over the French Flood Felix Brutus On many banks full broad Britain he sets To begin. Where war and wrack and wonder Have often flourished therein, And oft both bliss and blunder Have ruled in turn since then.2

[5]

[10]

[15]

It is hard to imagine phrasing more relevant to issues of colonialism—and especially to issues of postcolonialism. The “siege and assault . . . at Troy” is, of course, the famous Trojan War depicted in Homer’s Iliad. The war began when Helen, a notoriously beautiful Greek queen, committed adultery with Paris, a handsome Trojan prince. Together they fled to Troy, leading Helen’s husband, Menelaus, to call on other Greek kings to aid him by sending massive armies to attack Troy and seize Helen. The other kings sent many troops, and for ten years the Greeks and proto-Romans battled bloodily outside Troy’s walls. Many fine men were lost in a war that would never have happened if, at least according to medieval Christian interpretations, Helen and Paris had controlled their lust. Their adulterous passions unloosed wanton death and destruction on many self-sacrificing heroes. For many medieval Christians, the story of Troy showed just how much evil might occur from a failure to discipline unworthy emotions. Such failure, even involving just two people, could cause untold suffering to many others. Ultimately, in the view of many medieval Christians, the adulterous passions of Helen and Paris led to the destruction of the entire magnificent Trojan civilization. When Greek forces hid within 76

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a massive wooden horse, the infamous “Trojan Horse,” they were finally able to get inside the walls of Troy. The destruction of the city was swift and thorough. Only the Trojan prince Aeneas and some followers were able to escape the ravaged city. They sailed east, stopping briefly in northern Africa but then, supposedly, colonizing Italy, thereby founding Roman civilization. But they not only allegedly colonized Italy; they also, at least according to medieval legend, colonized practically all of Western Europe. Among the lands they supposedly colonized were Tuscany (Line 11), Lombardy (Line 12), and—most relevant to our present purposes—Britain (Line 13-15). Many medieval Britons, then, like some other peoples of western Europe, believed they were literally descendants of Trojans.3 Partly for this reason, many medieval Britons were intensely interested in the legend of the Trojan war. Many were especially interested in the lack of self-control that led to the adultery, which then led to the war. And, because Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is very much about a hero who maintains self-control (at least for the most part) and who refuses to commit adultery when thrice offered the chance, the medieval poem is closely related in themes and interests central to the three great ancient epics: Homer’s Iliad (which tells how war began because two people could not control their passions); Homer’s Odyssey (which tells of one hero’s tenyear effort to return to a virtuously loyal, non-adulterous wife); and Virgil’s Aeneid (which tells how the great Trojan prince, Aeneas, by resisting temptation, fulfilled a grand colonial mission). As we will see, all these stories are relevant to Sir Gawain, which is one reason the medieval poem both begins and ends by emphasizing the Trojan war. Troy and King Arthur’s Britain The so-called “matter of Troy” seemed immensely relevant to many fourteenth-century Britons. When reading or hearing about the fate of Troy, many believed that they were reading or hearing about the fate of their own colonial ancestors—a destructive fate most hoped to avoid. Of course, the legends of King Arthur tell of his exceptionally Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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beautiful wife Guenevere and the handsome knight Lancelot, with whom she eventually commits adultery. That adultery leads to the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom, just as adultery between Helen and Paris led to Troy’s destruction. The legend of Arthur, then, closely recapitulates the tragedy that overtook Troy. This is another reason Troy is relevant to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Helen and Paris failed to control their passions. Destruction resulted. Guenevere and Lancelot failed to control their passions. Destruction resulted. But the story told in Sir Gawain takes place before the adulterous affair between Guenevere and Lancelot. And the story told in Sir Gawain shows the title character successfully resisting—three times —the temptation to commit adultery. He does fail when faced with another temptation, but he then berates himself for failing and is eventually forgiven and, indeed, embraced by Arthur and the rest of Arthur’s court. Gawain, then, despite his inevitable human flaws, manages to avoid the particular failures of Helen and Paris on the one hand, and Guenevere and Lancelot on the other. The Gawain poet immediately emphasizes that Britain has long been a place “Where war and wrack and wonder” have flourished (Line 16-17). British history, he knew, involved the rise and fall of various rulers and dynasties. In other words, it was a history of various conquests and even colonizations. The most famous recent example to the poet would have been the conquest and colonization that took place in 1066, when Normans from France conquered and colonized Britain, imposing their own culture right on top of the native culture that had itself originally come from Europe. French, oddly enough, was suddenly the official language of the English court; Sir Gawain and the poems of Chaucer are unusual partly because they were written in English. The Gawain poet, then, was still living in a postcolonial culture. It was a culture in which Norman/French domination was still everywhere apparent. This is another way Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is postcolonial: it was written when Britain was still, to a great extent, a postcolonial nation. But medieval Britain was also “postcolonial” religiously. Its official religion, Christianity, had supplanted the original pagan 78

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religions that had dominated the island both before and after the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons. Almost all Britons living in the 1300s were Christian, if only because they had little choice. But most were probably also sincere Christians who assumed that Christian beliefs were true, that Christian values were valuable, and that Christian ethics were crucial to personal conduct. Many pitied their pagan ancestors, including the Trojans, for having been pagan. And many judged their own conduct, and the conduct of their contemporaries, in terms of Christian moral and spiritual aspirations. I emphasize this point because I want to argue that Christian values are absolutely crucial to properly understanding Sir Gawain.4 Christianity, the result of a kind of cultural colonization of Britain from continental Europe, had by the 1300s long since been the central intellectual force in English life. No wonder, then, that the Gawain poet sets the poem at Christmas and emphasizes the importance of that literally holy day by describing two separate Christmas holiday celebrations. The first takes place at Camelot, at Arthur’s court. Note how it is described: This king lay at Camelot upon Christmas With many loyal lords, lads of the best, Renowned of the Round Table all those rich brethren, With rich revel aright and reckless mirth. [40] There tourneyed troopers by times full many, Jousted full jollily these gentle knights, Then came to the court carols to make, For there the feasting was the same for a full fifteen days With all the meals and the mirth that man could devise; [45] Such gladness and glee glorious to hear, Dear din upon day, dancing on nights; All was happiness on high in halls and chambers, With lords and ladies, as most lovely it seemed. With all the wealth of the world they dwelt there together, [50] The best known knights under Christ Himself, And the loveliest ladies that ever life had, And he the comeliest king that the court holds;

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For all was this fair folk in their first age, And still [55] The most fortunate known to fame, The king highest man of will. It would now be hard to name So hardy a host on hill.

To save time and space, I have italicized and highlighted with bold type key words and phrases. What emerges from this emphasis is just how little attention Arthur and his courtiers are actually paying to the true spirit and meaning of Christmas. They seem to have forgotten that the holy day’s genuine purpose, in medieval times and even to many people today, is supposed to stress celebrating the birth of Christ the redeemer. Instead, Arthur and his courtiers—who are explicitly described as youthful (Line 54) and who are, perhaps, still immature—seem to be focusing mostly on the material, sensual pleasures of the Christmas holiday rather than on the spiritual, religious meanings of this Christian holy day. Just as Christmas now is often a time of self-display and self-indulgence, of massive over-spending and over-eating, so the same seems true at Arthur’s court. Christianity had once been a colonial religion brought into the country by foreign missionaries, sometimes imposed on pagans by royal decree or actual force. But by the fourteenth century it was the religion all Britons were expected to sincerely embrace and embody. Yet Arthur and his courtiers seem to have lapsed back into pre-Christian, pagan ways of thinking and acting. Thus, they don’t simply feast; they feast “for a full fifteen days,” and presumably the dancing, singing, tourneying, jousting, and “reckless mirth” last that long as well (Line 44; 40). Admittedly, Arthur and his courtiers do sing “carols” (Line 43), and they are described as “Knights under Christ himself” (Line 51). They are not, by any means, completely pagan, and certainly not intentionally so. They have neither entirely nor deliberately reverted to pre-Christian, pre-colonial values and behavior. But they are disturbingly fixated, I would argue, on the fleshly, worldly pleasures, as the next stanza again suggests: 80

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While New Year was so young, since it was newly come, [60] That day with double portions were the diners served, For the king was come with knights into the hall, The chanting in the chapel achieved an end. Loud cries were there cast by clerks and others, “Noel” named anew, announced full oft; [65] And then the rich run forth to render presents Yelled “Year’s gifts!” on high, yielding them by hand, Debated busily about those gifts; Ladies laughed full loud, though they had lost, And he that won was not wroth, that may you well believe. [70] All this mirth they made until the meal time. When they had washed worthily, they went to sit, The best brave always above, as it best seemed; Queen Guenevere, full gay, graced the middle, Bedecked on the dear dais, adorned all about, [75] Fine silk at her sides, a ceiling above Of rich cloth of Toulouse, and of Tartary many tapestries That were embroidered and bedecked with the best gems That might be proven in price with pennies to buy In our day. [80] The comeliest to see There gleamed with eyes of gray; A fairer that ever could be In sooth might no man say.

From this passage and the one already quoted, it seems clear that the poet goes out of his way to emphasize the materialistic aspects of the Christmas holiday celebrations and de-emphasize the spiritual aspects of Christmas as one of Christianity’s most important holy days. The stress on “double portions” (Line 61), on material “gifts” (Line 6667), on debate about those “gifts” (Line 68) and on “the mirth they made until meal time” (Line 71) can all seem implicitly critical, although the poet does—to be sure—passingly mention “chanting in the chapel” and cries of “Noel” (Line 63-65). Most unsettling, however, is his intense focus on Queen Guenevere’s physical beauty and the luxury that surrounds her. Nearly all members of the poet’s audience would have known the eventual tragic result of Guenevere’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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beauty: her adultery with Lancelot. Of all the characters mentioned so far, she is the only one singled out by name, and she is certainly the character most associated with costly material splendor. She is physically gorgeous and her tastes are worldly, but nothing at all is said about her spiritual commitments or her devotion to Christ, whose birth the court is nominally celebrating. In a poem that begins by alluding to the Trojan war, Guenevere closely resembles Helen. She is one of three beautiful women in the poem who seem linked with the theme of adultery (Bercilak’s wife, who appears later, is the third). When composing this work, the unknown poet arguably had very much in mind its parallels with the story of the Trojans, England’s supposed colonial ancestors. Having described the queen, the poet now moves to describing her husband, to whom she will eventually (although outside this poem) prove unfaithful: But Arthur would not eat until all were served, He was so jolly of his joyfulness and somewhat juvenile: He liked his life light; he loved the less Either too long to lie or too long to sit So busied him his young blood and his brain wild.

[85]

Arthur here is still young Arthur, and he seems significantly immature. But so do his queen and courtiers. From a strictly Christian perspective, he sets a bad example for his equally youthful, equally “juvenile” wife and followers. Arthur differs from the mature, virtuous, self-sacrificing Trojan prince Aeneas, who eventually renounced personal pleasure (in the form of the Carthaginian queen, Dido) to accomplish grander goals, particularly colonizing Italy. Ultimately, Aeneas’ decision to control his own passions and do his duty led to the Trojan colonization of Britain and other lands, at least according to medieval legend. To a fourteenth-century audience, it was imagined that thanks to the sincere, self-sacrificing, and in some cases fearless Christianity of continental missionaries that Britain adopted its postcolonial religion. Arthur and his fun-loving courtiers are at risk of forgetting, or at least under-emphasizing, life’s most 82

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important values: the mature ideals of virtuous self-control, rational self-discipline, and whole-hearted commitment to Christ. The Green Knight Arrives Everything changes, of course, when the Green Knight shows up. A mysterious figure who resembles some strange creature from pagan literature, he is memorably described in the following passage and then in many later lines: There hastens in at the hall door an awesome figure, One of the most on earth in measure of height, From the neck to the waist so square and well-set, And his loins and his limbs so long and so big Half a giant in earth I hold that he was; Yet man must I nonetheless admit him to be And that the merriest in his muchness that might ride, For though of back and of breast his body was stout, Both his belly and his waist were worthily slim, And all his features conforming, in form that he had, Full clean.

[140]

[145]

So far, so good: he sounds like a young, medieval Arnold Schwarzenegger. But what happens next catches both the court and the poem’s readers by surprise: this muscle man of the Middle Ages is entirely green. His skin is green; his hair is green; his beard is green; his clothing is green; his shoes are green; even his horse is green. The poet emphasizes all this greenness repeatedly over many lines (147-202). But then he adds these nice details: Yet he had no helmet nor hauberk neither, Nor no armor nor plate that pertained to arms, Nor no spear nor no shield to shove nor to smite, But in his one hand he had a holly branch, That is greatest in green when groves are bare, And an axe in his other, a huge and monstrous, A spiteful axe to describe in speech, if anyone could.

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The poet here first leads us to assume that the strange, mysterious visitor intends no harm: he wears no armor and bears no weapons one might expect. In one hand (oddly) he holds a green holly branch. But in the other he holds a gigantic green axe. So much for having apparently come in peace. Yet, as the poem will eventually demonstrate, this is precisely why the Green Knight has come. Holly was conventionally understood in the poet’s day as a symbol of life amid death (as holly bushes stay green even in winter). Holly leaves’ sharp points gave the plant additional usefulness as a symbol of the crown of thorns worn by the crucified Christ, whose death restored life. As Brian Stone explains in a typically helpful annotation: The holly cluster or wassail bob (its living green leaves promising that spring would succeed dead midwinter) was a symbol of Christmas good luck, though its origin as such is pagan. The early Christians in Rome probably took it over from the Saturnalia, in which it figured prominently, Saturn’s club being made of holly wood (167).

In this particular symbol as in much of its general symbolism, then, the poem can be seen as significantly multicultural—which is to say “significantly postcolonial.” Christians, gradually taking over Roman civilization and other pagan cultures, often appropriated useful pagan symbols. They made these symbols their own to such a degree that medieval, much like modern, Christianity was shot through with previously pagan symbolism. Analysts of Sir Gawain still debate the ways in which, and the degrees to which, the poem is either pagan or Christian. But the correct answer seems to be that it is thoroughly Christian with significant borrowings from the pagan cultures the Christians intellectually colonized and, eventually, politically dominated. Ultimately the significance of the Green Knight’s greenness—and of his holly bob—will be obvious: he symbolizes renewed life, not death. Eventually we realize that he has comes as a friend, not an enemy. Eventually we understand that he has helped Arthur’s court in general, and Sir Gawain in particular, to return to their proper focus in the true spirit of Christmas, which includes love, forgiveness, and devotion to Christ. Before we turn to the end of the poem, however, let us now turn to the middle. 84

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The Poem’s Second Depiction of Christmas The outcome of the Green Knight’s visit to King Arthur’s court is widely known. He issues a challenge: he will allow someone at Arthur’s court to chop off his head (with the conveniently available axe he has brought) if that person will agree to allow his own head to be lopped off in a year’s time. This offer that seems impossible to refuse; there seems absolutely no real risk. But when Gawain, after volunteering, chops off the Green Knight’s head, the Green Knight calmly walks over, picks it up, reattaches it, and rides off—but not before reminding Gawain of his ominous appointment, which is set for the following Christmas season. Suddenly the party’s mood has been deflated. Arthur and his courtiers now have more serious things on their minds than fifteen-day feasts, nightly dances, or friendly arguments about trivial gifts. Although they don’t yet know it, the Green Knight’s visit will in the end prove a gift of immense value. A year quickly passes. Gawain now prepares for his journey to keep his appointment. In an especially famous passage, the narrator describes Gawain’s shield, which bears a five-pointed star (or pentangle) on its front. This symbol, the narrator carefully notes, was first devised by Solomon, the ancient Hebrew king so important to later Christians (another example, by the way, of multicultural influence). The pentangle symbolizes many of the moral and spiritual virtues Gawain should ideally exemplify: First he was found faultless in his five wits, And also failed never the fighter in his five fingers, And all his faith in the field was in the five wounds That Christ caught on the cross as the Creed tells; And where-so-ever this man in melee took a stand, His steadfast thought was in that over all other things, That all his courage he took from the Five Joys That the courteous heaven-queen had of her child; For this cause the comely knight had On the inside of his shield her image depicted, That when he looked thereto he never lacked boldness. The fifth five that I find that the fighter used Was generosity and fellowship before all things, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

[640]

[645]

[650]

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His purity and his courtesy crooked were never, And pity, that passes all points these pure five Were more heartily heaped on that horseman than any other. [655]

Gone is the earlier holiday partying and self-indulgence. Now Gawain is being sent out onward as a truly Christian soldier, with Christian symbolism on the front of his shield and an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary staring him squarely in the face on the shield’s other side. Whatever figuratively “pagan” behavior he had indulged in a year ago is now vanished. He is now fully associated with the postcolonial religion of a still-Catholic Britain. After a dangerous and uncomfortable journey through a grim winter landscape, Gawain realizes that it is almost Christmas day itself. All he wants to do now is spend the day in sincere worship with other Christians: Through the country comes this knight, til Christmas eve, Alone; [735] The knight well that tide To Mary made his moan, That she reveal where to ride That some dwelling him be shown.

Gawain may at present be, as the narrator puts it, “a man all alone” (Line 749), but he now has his spiritual priorities straight—he is now also a man: Caring for his duties lest he should not come [750] To see the service of that Sire that on that same night Of a maiden was born our troubles to abate; And therefore sighing he said, I beseech thee, Lord, And Mary, that is mildest mother so dear, For some harborage where holily I might hear mass, [755] And thy matins in the morning meekly I ask, And thereto promptly I pray my “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” And “Creed.”

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He rode in his prayer, And cried for his misdeed; [760] He signed himself repeatedly there, And said “Cross of Christ me lead!”

It would be hard to find a more explicitly Christian passage in the entire poem than this one. Whatever the influence of pagan imagery and symbolism on the poem’s phrasing, Gawain’s values are now firmly rooted where they should have been during the preceding Christmas: in the Christian religion that supplanted paganism in Britain as in the whole of Europe. Britain may have been founded, according to legend, by a pagan Trojan colonizer, but poetic passages such as this one show just how strongly the “new religion” brought by colonizing missionaries had now become the “old religion” of Roman Catholicism. The rest of the story is well known: no sooner does Gawain pray for shelter than shelter—in the form of a magnificent castle— suddenly appears. He rides to the castle, is enthusiastically welcomed, is offered lavish meals and fine clothes, and attracts the attention of a stunningly beautiful young woman, who happens to be the wife of the castle’s owner. During the course of three successive mornings, this woman sneaks into his bedroom, thrice offers him her body, which Gawain virtuously refuses. She then offers him a green sash with supposedly magical powers. If he hides the sash, and thus deceiving his host, Gawain will—the woman promises— be immortal, immune to any strokes from the Green Knight’s axe. Gawain takes the sash, deceives the woman’s husband by hiding the suspicious gift, and rides off to confront the Green Knight. On this new journey, he vociferously and repeated professes faith in Christ, even though he has now put his faith on the green sash to save him. In short, Gawain becomes both a liar and a hypocrite. He meets the Greek Knight, who thrice swings his axe at Gawain’s neck, deliberately missing each time, and who then reveals he is also the lord of the castle whom Gawain deceived. It was the Green Knight’s wife who tested Gawain repeatedly, and although Gawain withstood all three sexual temptations, he did deceive the Green Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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Knight by lying about the green sash. But the Green Knight doesn’t blame him: any person, he says, would have done the same to cheat death. He freely forgives Gawain, but Gawain will not forgive himself. Angry, humiliated, his pride deflated, he returns to Arthur’s court. He is now -full of shame and self-condemnation, and he fully expects Arthur and the court to ostracize or even expel him: “Lo! lord,” quoth the liegeman and the lace handled, “This is the emblem of the blame I bear in my neck, This is the injury and the loss that I laid hold on For cowardice and covetousness that I have caught there; This is the token of untruth in which I was taken, And I must by necessity wear it while I may live, For one may hide his harm but sin cannot be hidden, For where it once is attached depart will it never.”

[2505]

[2510]

But although Gawain is full of self-loathing, he is also incorrect: in the Christian scheme of things, sin can be taken away and forgiven through God’s gracious mercy—mercy symbolized by the birth of Jesus and by his death on the cross. That is the whole point of the holy Christian holidays of Christmas, Good Friday, and the Easter. Significantly, the king and the courtiers regard Gawain far more charitably and forgivingly than he regards himself. In fact, something beautifully and unexpectedly loving occurs: The king comforts the knight and all the court also Laugh loudly thereat and lovingly agree That lords and ladies that belonged to the Table, Each member of the brotherhood a baldric should have, A band obliquely him about of a bright green, And for the sake of that stalwart to wear that sign, For it represents the renown of the Round Table, And he was honored that it had evermore after, As it is written in the best book of romance. Thus in Arthur’s day this adventure befell, The Brutus books thereon bear witness; Since Brutus, the bold brave first bounded hither Once the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, 88

[2515]

[2520]

[2525]

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As it is. Many adventures here-before Have fallen such as this. May He Who bore the crown of thorns Bring us to his bliss!

[2530]

In short, the green sash, which Gawain thinks symbolizes humiliation and punishment, becomes a symbol of love, fellowship, and forgiveness. The same transformation had already happened, of course, with the cross on which Christ was crucified. Intended by the Romans as an instrument of torture and degradation, it became, thanks to Christ’s resurrection, a symbol of life, love, and mercy. Arthur and his courtiers, by not only forgiving Gawain but by embracing him and wearing green sashes themselves, act as good Christians should. Thanks to the Green Knight’s odd intervention, the king and courtiers have been reminded of Christmas’s true meaning, and now they not only know that meaning but actually live it. Whatever paganism they may have displayed in their Christmas celebrations a year ago has now been replaced by genuine Christianity and the real meaning of the Christmas holy day. The stanza quoted above is the poem’s last. Notice not only how it stresses real Christian values and true Christian behavior but also how it reminds us, once again, of Britain’s status as a colony of Troy. Brutus is mentioned twice, and the poem’s closing lines explicitly echo its opening. The text achieves impressive formal symmetry. It ends by reminding us that although Britain was, supposedly, colonized by virtuous pagan Trojans, it now has the good fortune to embrace Christianity. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offered contemporary fourteenth-century audiences, along with, perhaps, modern readers a later and much better result of Britain’s complicated colonial history. Notes 1.

On Sir Gawain and colonialism and/or postcolonialism see, for example, Arner, Ganim, Holsinger, Ingraham, and Vaughan. For a solid overview of key ideas associated with postcolonialism, see Ashcroft et al. On the relevance of postcolonialism to medieval

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2.

3.

4.

literature see, for instance, the books and/or articles by Cohen, Ganim, Kabir and Williams, and Lampert-Weissig, to mention just a few. I have chosen to quote an extremely literal (but anonymous) translation posted on the Harvard University web site (see Works Cited). An easily accessible version of the poem in Middle English is available from the web site hosted by the University of Michigan (see Works Cited). From among the many discussions of medieval legends of Troy, see, for instance, the articles and/or books by Andrew, Benson, Desmond, Federico, Risden, and Sadowski (esp. 53-56), among many other possible sources. This strongly Christian interpretation of the poem is, of course, not the only way to read the work; it is simply the reading I and many others find most persuasive. Examples of this view can be found in the articles and/or books by Gardner, Haines, Hatt, Howard (esp. 215-54), Hughes, and Schnyder. For other interpretations that also emphasize the importance of Christianity see, for instance, the following items described in the Hambridge bibliography: 1, 29, 40, 51, 63, 83, 99, 126, 135, 138, 145, 146, 152, 167, 172, 189, 199, 202, 215, 218, 223, and 231. Similarly, see the following items in the Do bibliography: 252, 253, 255, 270, 274, 280, 286, 300, 309, 324, 326, 327, 334, 335, 336, 337, 345, 347, 372, 373, 377, 379, 383, as well as H79, H117, H123, H196, H201, and H239. Finally, in the Stainsby bibliography, the following items are relevant to my claims about the Christian nature of Sir Gawain: 202, 203, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 220, 228, 235, 263, 269, 272, 274, 275, 289, 290, 318, 328, 333, 337, 341, 368, and 371.

Works Cited Andrew, Malcolm. “The Fall of Troy” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Troilus and Criseyde. The European Tragedy of Troilus, edited by Piero Boitani, Clarendon, 1989, pp. 75-93. Print. Arner, Lynn. “The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2006, pp. 79-101. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, et al. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. 90

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Benson, C. David. The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae in Medieval England, D. S. Brewer, 1980. Print. __________. “The ‘Matter of Troy’ and Its Transmission through Translation in Medieval Europe.” Übersetzung: Ein Internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung / Translation: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Harald Kittel, et al., 3 vols., De Gruyter, 2004-2011, pp. 1337-40. Print. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, editor. The Postcolonial Middle Ages, Palgrave, 2001. Print. Desmond, Marilyn. “Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy.” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Rita Copeland, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 251-68. Print. Do, Merdeka Thien-Ly Huong. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Annotated Bibliography,1973-1978.” Comitatus, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1980, pp. 66-107. Web. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rp6z8zt. Federico, Sylvia. New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages. U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print. Ganim, John M. “Postcolonialism.” A Handbook of Middle English Studies, edited by Marion Turner, Wiley, 2013, pp. 397-412. Print. Gardner, John, translator and commentator. The Complete Works of the Gawain Poet. U of Chicago P, 1965. Print. Haines, Victor Y. The Fortunate Fall of Sir Gawain: The Typology of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, UP of America, 1982. Print. Hambridge, Roger A. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Annotated Bibliography, 1950-1972.” Comitatus, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1973, pp. 49-81. Web. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84d8m59g. Hatt, Cecilia. God and the Gawain-Poet: Theology and Genre in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Brewer, 2015. Print. Holsinger, Bruce W. “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique.” Speculum, Vol. 77, No 4, 2002, pp. 11951227. Print. Howard, Donald R. The Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World, Princeton UP, 1966. Print.

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Hughes, Derek R. “The Problem of Reality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 40, 1971, pp. 217-35. Print. Ingham, Patricia Clare. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain, U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Print. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara and Deanne Williams, editors. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Lampert-Weissig, Lisa. Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print. Risden, E. L. editor. Sir Gawain and the Classical Tradition: Essays on the Ancient Antecedents, McFarland, 2006. Print. Sadowski, Piotr. The Knight on His Quest: Symbolic Patterns of Transition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, U of Delaware P, 1996. Print. Schnyder, Hans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Essay in Interpretation, Bern, 1961. Print. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. [In Middle English]. Web. http://quod. lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;view=fulltext. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Close Verse Translation. http://sites. fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/ready.htm. Web. For another version, see also http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/litsubs/romances/ sg-prt1.htm. Stainsby, Meg. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Annotated Bibliography, 1978-1989. Garland, 1992. Print. Stone, Brian, translator and editor. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Penguin, 1974. Print. Vaughan, Hannah. “Gawain the Exile: Reading ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ in a Postcolonial Context.” Web. Master’s Thesis, Clemson University, 2015. http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/2168/.

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Disabled Bodies Matter: Rohinton Mistry and the Politics of Embodiment Shubhangi Garg Mehrotra

According to the United Nations, “[t]here is a large and growing number of persons with disabilities in the world today…In most countries, at least one person out of 10 is disabled by physical, mental or sensory impairment, and at least 25 per cent of any population is adversely affected by the presence of disability” (“General Description on the United Nations Enable” 4). However, the situation is much worse in developing countries where “the percentage of the disabled population is estimated to be as high as 20 and, thus, if families and relatives are included, 50 per cent of the population could be adversely affected by disability” (“General Description on the United Nations Enable” 4). Therefore, it is no coincidence that the postcolonial fictional writing is inundated with the images and portrayals of disabled characters and protagonists. However, even with such high proliferation of disabled characters in postcolonial novels, a serious critical inquiry into disability as an existential marginalized and political identity is missing from the scholarship. It is often subdued by the overbearing postcolonial body-politics that categorize the body in terms of gender, race, color, caste, class, ethnicity, or religion. Nevertheless, in the last couple of years some interdisciplinary disability studies analysis has started making its way into postcolonial criticism. Comparative postcolonial theorists like Clare Barker, in her groundbreaking analysis on postcolonial literature and disability studies, emphasizes on the urgency to incorporate “disability perspectives into mainstream postcolonial theory [as it] is in this sense not simply a niche interest or a rarefied addition to the field’s already wide-ranging concerns, but a point of immediate relevance to many postcolonial subjects and experiences. Equally, this study contributes to the cultural diversification of disability criticism…that do not always travel well to postcolonial locations” Disabled Bodies Matter

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(6). While elaborating further on how the fields of disability studies and postcolonial theory need to collaborate for more inclusive and relevant criticism for its members and scholars, Barker lays down a more optimistic approach than some of her counterparts in disability studies, such as Mitchell and Snyder, who coined the term Narrative Prosthesis that sees the representations of disability in literature, “first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device”(47). Counter-arguing some of the popular claims in disability studies on the “overemphasis on metaphors” (Barker 20) that see the representations of disability in literature “as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,” (Narrative Prosthesis 49), Barker contends to look at metaphors as an intricate technique of postcolonial writing that, if employed sensitively, “can enhance awareness that disability is a complex, resonant human condition, and is frequently used to establish empathetic connections between characters, communities and readers” (20). Dismissing the “‘prosthetic’ readings of texts [that] may signal a scarcity of critical methodologies with which to analyze disability representations more holistically,” (21) Barker argues “that our strategies for ‘reading’ disability must be updated to account for the multiple corporeal and cultural vectors of difference offered by postcolonial writing” (6). With an aim to supplement Barker’s perspectives on the constructive integration of postcolonial theory and disability studies, this chapter does an interdisciplinary reading of the novels of acclaimed postcolonial author, Rohinton Mistry. While the postcolonial issues of identity remain central to his writings, this chapter focuses on the politicized “disability identity” that remains relatively less discussed and probably submerged with other subaltern identities in the criticism of his work. Building his narratives in and around the Indian Parsi community1 and their struggle for survival in postcolonial India, Mistry weaves an intricate web of stories that highlight the disabling effects of the postcolonial environment on its subjects. By doing a survey analysis of Mistry’s trilogy on postcolonial disability narratives, this chapter examines 94

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postcolonial disability as a political identity category through a more inclusive and interdisciplinary lens of postcolonial theories and disability studies that questions the western “hegemony of normalcy”2 (Davis 6). Using the postcolonial notions of fluidity and liquidity of identities, this chapter deconstructs the modern binaries of Self and Other in postcolonial disability narratives where Self and Other not just frequently interchange their positions, but also join forces against the western audience/reader, who fail to recognize the role of postcolonial history and socio-cultural environment in shaping these identities, as the ultimate Other. Among the many real and imagined insecurities that bother the Parsi community in Mistry’s literary writing —for example their decreasing numbers, the clashes between traditional and modern Parsis, declining interest in Zoroastrianism and Parsi culture among the younger generation, increasing interreligious marriages, the perpetual nostalgia of the British Empire, and the complex identitycrisis of the Parsis as a doubly marginalized community— one cannot help notice the expansive and ubiquitous presence of disabled and diseased bodies in Mistry’s community-based narratives, which he also suggests to be studied as fictional socio-anthropological reserve3. Reflecting on the Parsi community’s apprehensions of “feeling” disabled onto the phenomenology of “being” disabled, Mistry delineates convoluted circles of metaphysical and metaphoric experience of disability in his novels. Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey, spins a complex web of insecurities and challenges faced by the Parsi community that finds itself on the peripheries in the hegemonic construction of national identity in postcolonial India. The novel is set in the crucial phase of Indian history, that is to say the milieu of the early 1970s where India’s plurality was challenged by growing Hindu fundamentalism in the face of increasing internal and external political crisis. Mistry takes us into the cramped spaces of the apartment of Gustad Noble, a middle class Parsi resident of the Parsi housing colony—Khodadad Building. Gustad walks with a limp as he broke his left hip in a road accident nine years prior. However, the more he sees his fellow neighbor, Tehmul, who, as Mistry writes, is a “supremely pathetic Disabled Bodies Matter

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example of hip-fracture victims who had had the misfortune to be treated by conventional methods, condemned to years on crutches and walking-sticks, with nothing to look forward to but a life of pain,” the more comfort Gustad takes in being left with just a “slight limp” that may sometimes turn into an “ugly hobble” (Such a Long Journey 29-30). Despite acquiring a practiced controlled grip on his limp, Gustad still finds it “slipping its usual containment” from time to time making him either “sway wildly” or “more than usual” in stressful situations (Such a Long Journey 165). Tehmul, however, unlike Gustad, was not that lucky after his hip-fracture as he was “condemned to years on crutches and walkingsticks, with nothing to look forward to but a life of pain” (Such a Long Journey 30). In addition to acquiring a “rolling gait and twisted hip … something [also] went wrong inside [his head] due to the jolt of the accident” leaving Tehmul with mental and physical disability (Such a Long Journey 30). Although Gustad empathizes and bonds with Tehmul over the physical limp that they both acquired, he also situates himself at, what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls, the normate4 position of the Self/Other dichotomy grappling with the ambiguous “discomforting dissonance” for Tehmul’s disability that becomes a site to “displace anxieties and uncertainties about [his] own identit[y]” (Extraordinary Bodies 61). Tehmul is further marginalized due to his limited ability to communicate like “others” with an extensive vocabulary and at a “normal” speed. Unlike Gustad, Tehmul is a victim of his disability that is more pronounced and visible, making him an easy prey to the “hierarchies within… communities where some disabilities are viewed as less assimilable than others” (Narrative Prosthesis 3). Like a parasite, Tehmul is often shooed away by his neighbors or used for entertainment purposes by the children in the building compound. He is exploited at the hands of Dilnavaz (Gustad’s wife) and Miss Kutpitia (fellow neighbor) in their experiment to cast away the evil-spell from the Noble family. He is subjected to intense physical and psychological violence at the hands of the prostitutes at the brothel. And finally, when Gustad catches Tehmul violating his daughter’s doll, he is shamed as some abnormal hypersexual 96

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monster with deviant sexual fantasies and aberrant sexual organs (Such a Long Journey 303). Gustad’s persistence in coercing Tehmul to feel ashamed of his sexuality reflects the paradoxical anxieties of identity politics that see “shame” not just as a yardstick to define normate bodies, but also something whose absence can generate a dehumanized and objectified Other. Anita Ghai, who asks us to consider the work of Albert Memmi as a useful benchmark to understand the process of Othering in postcolonial scholarship, claims “the creation of a ‘devalued’ Other is a necessary precondition for the creation of the ablebodied rational subject who is the all-pervasive agency that sets the terms of the dialogue” (273). Therefore, Tehmul, in Anupama Iyer’s analysis of Susan Sontag, is like any other mentally disabled fictional character who is “not allowed the dignity of ordinary abilities, difficulties and assets. Instead, [his] disability bears what Susan Sontag (1983) calls ‘the metaphorical and symbolic weight’ of the images assigned to [him]” (132). Projecting his anxieties on Tehmul and empathizing with him from a commonly shared space of the physical limp; Gustad, however, struggles to hold on to his end of the Self/Other binary. He fails, slips, permeates, and vacillates between the two categories echoing Homi Bhabha’s notion of identity that is fluid—“never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality” (51). Thus, even if Mistry initially assigns Tehmul and Gustad a “programmatic (even deterministic) identity” (Narrative Prosthesis 50), “the textual stumbling” occurs and “the restless dialectical of representation…unmoor [them] from the programmatic location and place [them] elsewhere” (Quayson 25-27). Although Tehmul’s character is delineated inside the myopic framework of stereotypes and appears to be merely a narrative prosthesis, such character construction, according to Bhabha, is “a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection…to construct the positionalities and oppositionalities” of social hegemony (81-82). These positionalities literally shift and permeate boundaries for both Gustad and Tehmul (the Self/Other) in the climax scene of the novel with Tehmul’s accidental death during the violence and Disabled Bodies Matter

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Gustad cradling him single handedly without faltering despite his limp (Such a Long Journey 335). Gustad’s “superhuman” feat in taking Tehmul’s body back to his apartment with a “single mighty effort” while all the neighbors watch him in awe and admiration turns Gustad both into a freak and a hero (Such a Long Journey 335). This precipitous departure of Gustad’s limp and disability in general from the novel and its transformation into extraordinariness is symbolic at many levels. Although initially it appears as a reinforcement of the superiority of the “able-bodied” culture by perpetuating the socio-cultural stigmatization and inadequacy of a disabled body, on close examination, this homogenization of disabled bodies into becoming an extraordinary body can be seen as “camouflage” and “ironic compromise” (Bhabha 85-86). Bhabha argues, “the discourse of mimicry [to be] constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce it slippage, its excess, its difference…Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however,…which coheres the dominant strategic function of [hegemonic] power” (86). It is in this liminal space of the spectacle of otherness—Gustad, without a limp or hobble, carrying the burden of disability on his shoulders, disrupts yet integrates into the ambivalent world of postcolonial identities. Thus, even if Mistry seems to be deploying disability as a narrative prosthesis or a “deterministic vehicle of characterization,” disability does not “operate…as the textual obstacle that causes the literary operation of open-endedness to close down or stumble” (Narrative Prosthesis 50, emphasis in original). Rather, the complex end of the novel leaves the holes open for permeation and amalgamation of these broken identities into the national postcolonial identity erasing the distance between the Self and the Other. In his second novel, A Fine Balance, Mistry weaves a paradoxical narrative of metaphorical and metaphysical disability by interweaving the lives of its characters during the political turmoil of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency period (1975). Written as a realist 98

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fiction, Mistry delineates a grotesque performance of disability on the urban landscape and takes his readers far and wide from the Parsi housing colonies to the dilapidated slums and streets. The central plot of the novel is woven around the relationship that develops amongst the four protagonists who are thrown together for reasons of survival. However, during the course of the novel, the marginal disabled characters become as important as the main, and disability seems to be the leitmotif of the novel. As the novel opens, we find Dina Dalal metaphorically “paralyzed” not just as a middle-aged widow but also as a woman belonging to the marginalized ethnic community of Parsis, who is toiling hard towards breaking the patriarchal shackles and maintaining her independence. In her struggle for survival, she meets two tailors, Om and Isvar, who belong to a lower caste and are socially and economically “handicapped.” Finally, to make ends meet, Dina sublets her apartment to Maneck Kohlah, a young Parsi college student who is battling with his abstract “inability” to help his family and friends in the wake of the turbulently increasing Hindu fundamentalism of saffron India. As the four characters begin to form a utopian accidental family of the Emergency Period, the narrative complicates itself into multilayers of their intertwined corporeal journeys and self-reflexive meditation on the statesponsored biopolitics. During the course of the narrative, the two tailors make a new friend in the armless and legless beggar, Shankar, who becomes a medium to expose the stark postcolonial reality of nameless disabled bodies that work in the beggar industry and use their disability for survival. While Shankar’s bragging about his ability to earn the “highest profits” for his master due to his (dis)ability reflects on the disturbing commercialization of disability, it also highlights the paradox of disabled embodiments that find themselves positioned at the bottom of the socio-economic hegemonic paradigms. Rather than feeling victimized by the discomforting stare of the onlookers, Shankar “take[s] charge of [the] staring situation” (Staring: How we Look 84), dismissing the hegemonic authority of the viewers by deliberately indulging in the act of “self-enfreakment” (Barker 109). Disabled Bodies Matter

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He admits exaggerating his crawling and wriggling to arouse “pity and curiosity” among the onlookers (A Fine Balance 322). In doing so, Shankar actually objectifies his audience and plays with their vulnerabilities by blurring the lines between the “cultural other” and the “cultural self.” Thus Shankar, as Frantz Fanon quotes MerleauPonty in Black Skin, White Masks, becomes “a being who has acquired consciousness of himself and of his [disabled] body, who has attained the dialectic of subject and object, [his disabled] body is no longer a cause of the structure of consciousness, it has become an object of consciousness” (200). Comparing the disabled body’s advantages over an able-bodied person in the business of beggary, the beggar not only questions the aesthetic notions of “normalcy,” but also seizes the opportunity for subjectivity or agency in the postcolonial political consciousness. In this blatant performance of his disability, the disabled beggar revises his “status and identity” not as the discriminated urban “Other,” but as a valuable commodity. However, in a nation of billions of people below the poverty line, disability and its performance do not just appear to be a lucrative and easy-to-acquire venture, but, like any other business, can become mundane and monotonous. Therefore, the beggarmaster has to be competitive as well as ingenious. In Shankar’s words: Beggarmaster has to be very imaginative. If all beggars have the same injury, public gets used to it and feels no pity. Public likes to see variety. Some wounds are so common, they don’t work anymore. For example, putting out a baby’s eyes will not automatically earn money. Blind beggars are everywhere. But blind, with eyeballs missing, face showing empty sockets, plus nose chopped off—now anyone will give money for that. Diseases are also useful. A big growth on the neck or face, oozing pus. That works well. Sometimes, normal people become beggars if they cannot find work, or if they fall sick. But they are hopeless, they stand no chance against professionals. Just think—if you have coin to give, and you have to choose between me and another beggar with a complete body. (322-323)

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For beggarmaster, the spectacle of disability is an art form that requires genuine inventiveness and imagination. In addition to finding the appropriate “unique” bodies to play the suitable roles in this spectacle, these bodies also undergo “professional modifications” and training to deliver a convincing performance that can instigate distressing emotions among the audience so that they can donate generously to the most compelling case of misery and mutilation (A Fine Balance 447). Other than the professional training and makeover, the “backstage” work also includes bribing the police, finding the best place to beg, making sure no one takes away that place, feeding the beggars despite their collection and also pampering the best or favorite performers by treating them with sweetmeats or taking them to brothels or getting them groomed with a full luxury treatment (A Fine Balance 322). Consequently, in this case, the urban landscape of the city transforms into a dynamic stage where beggarmaster places his disabled (actors) strategically to generate maximum profits. Therefore, even if these bodies emerge out of hierarchal socio-political and economic exploitation, the beggar celebrates the radical possibilities for disabled bodies like him in the postcolonial “economy of visual difference” (Extraordinary Bodies 8). As the novel progresses, the two tailors, Om and Ishvar, find themselves embroiled in the state-sponsored biopolitics. In a forced vasectomy operation, Ishvar is castrated and Om succumbs to the infection that leads to an amputation of his legs. Material disability replaces their metaphorical disability, and for reasons of survival, the tailors turn to beggary with their new bodies. Cathartically, Dina Dalal’s metaphorical disability is further displaced by her anorexia, while Maneck Kohlah also capitulates to his depression followed by a suicide. The novel ends with a tragic epic image of disability when the two tailors go back to the city and engage in the spectacle of their disabled bodies at the strategic locations to provoke the psychosocial reaction from the passersby. Unlike Mistry’s first novel, disability does not disappear or “needs to be cured” in the final scenes of A Fine Balance (Singh 85). The acceptance and presentation of disability as a persistent Disabled Bodies Matter

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postcolonial reality and an integral politicized identity challenge the trite literary norms about the representations of disability in literature. Mistry, in his unique approach to disability, presents the complexity of divorcing metaphorical value of disability from its materialistic understanding in postcolonial criticism of disabled bodies. While the hostile backdrop of the Emergency period highlights the diseased biopolitics of the country, “disability,” ironically becomes an ability or “a strategy of survival within compulsory systems” (Butler 139). As a disability narrative and a documentary to the horrors of the infamous Emergency, A Fine Balance thus both testifies and critiques the paradox of the diseased nation and the survival of its ailing and disabled citizens. In Mistry’s third novel, Family Matters, disability hits home both literally and figuratively, blurring the lines between the private and public space by challenging the Self/Other dichotomy. The novel weaves a sensory commentary on postcolonial anxiety of ageing, loss, nostalgia, disabling illness, and caretaking in the backdrop of the aftermath of 1992 communal riots. Nariman Vakeel is a seventynine-year-old retired distinguished professor of English who is suffering from debilitating Parkinson’s disease and osteoporosis. During one of his evening strolls, he breaks his ankle. This accident not only leads to his leg becoming encased in plaster of Paris from his thigh down to his toes, but also confines him to bed for the rest of his life. As a result, his stepchildren—Jal and Coomy, who share Nariman’s seven-room plush apartment with him— have to unwillingly bear the burden of his caretaking. However, they soon run out of patience and become overwhelmed by the demanding job of caretaking. Through devious machinations they foist off their stepfather into the tiny two-room apartment of their younger halfsister Roxana, Nariman’s biological daughter, who lives with her husband, Yezad Chenoy, and her two almost teenage sons Murad and Jehangir. The presence of Nariman’s disabled body—with its odors, excretions, and secretions in the close quarters of Roxana and Yezad’s tiny apartment—combined with the additional responsibility of his round-the-clock care with Yezad’s meager salary and looming 102

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job insecurity exacts a toll not just on the Chenoy family but also escalates tensions among Nariman’s children. Unlike Mistry’s previous novels, disability is more palpable and relatable in Family Matters as it literally hits home. Although Nariman’s disability is what drives the narrative forward, the focus of the narrative soon shifts on the arduous task of caregiving that is often overshadowed in the narratives of disability. Since Nariman is living with his unmarried stepchildren, the strenuous responsibility of looking after him falls on them. Finding themselves unprepared and inexperienced to take on the huge responsibility of giving intimate care to their stepfather, the novel not just highlights the predicament of the caregivers but also provides a critical commentary on the lack of social security and support for the health and well being of the elderly disabled population as well as their caregivers in postcolonial countries. Reflecting on the culture of caregiving in postcolonial nations where the duties of caregiving are mostly shared by women, Mistry focuses on the impact of such patriarchal ideologies on postcolonial identities. As Nariman’s body becomes more and more immobile, it produces odors and secretions that engulf the liminal spaces of the apartment, transforming his once healthy “clean and proper” (Kristeva 8) body into a site of “disgust and repugnance” (Hughes 21-22). Coomy is disgusted to touch the bedpan and embarrassed to see her stepfather naked. She is frustrated in the obligated caregiving and “can’t help hating” her stepfather (Family Matters 75). On the other hand, Roxana never complains and feels grateful for the opportunity to look after her bedridden father. Nevertheless, both the women endure long-term physical and mental effects of their “unpaid and invisible labor” (Hooyman and Gonyea 6). Whereas Coomy leads a lonely life with no friends and no children of her own, Roxana’s marriage is burdened by her caretaking duties. Caregiving for a dependent disabled in the liminal spaces of postcolonial houses not only blurs the lines between the public and private space, but also propels the caregivers to the social peripheries diminishing the distance between the self and the Other. According to Murthy, “In India, caregiving is largely by the family members as there are extremely limited alternative institutional Disabled Bodies Matter

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facilities and welfare supports for those with long-standing illnesses … In addition, in India, most families prefer to care for the ill person at all stages of illness. However, the larger societal changes in the country are placing significant demands on the caregivers. Two of the changes making caregiving difficult are living in urban areas and living in nuclear families. The lack of a supportive community in urban areas and the limited resources in a nuclear family make caring a demand on the caregivers and places their mental health at risk” (10). As concluded in several investigations, the long-term impact on caregivers of disabled family members range from physical to mental. As isolating as this “disability experience” is for the disabled people, it is also, if not to the same extent, marginalizes and oppresses their caregivers too. Overburdened by the humongous caregiving duties and overbearing medical expenses, many caregivers are not just dealing with their own invisible disability like depression or psychological distress, that is often left undiagnosed or even unacknowledged, but also engage in fighting an isolated battle against the embedded discrimination within the disabled as well as able-bodied community that do not consider their “disability experience” as the ‘real’ one. And it is precisely at this juncture that Mistry’s novel Family Matters becomes a compelling critical commentary on the state of caregivers and postcolonial healthcare system and provides an alternate insight into the paradox of identifying the self/other in postcolonial disability narratives. In exploring the phenomenology of “being” disabled to “feeling” disabled in and around the Parsi households, Mistry, in his three novels, not just challenges the western “cultural model of disability” (Cultural Locations of Disability 5) but also presents the “complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation,” of postcolonial disability identities that demand that we, the readers, “not only … extend our critical and political objectives but that we change the object of analysis itself” (Bhabha 70). The Other in this sense is thus not unfamiliar or uncanny, but rather a reflection of Self. Instead of placing metaphor and material representations of disability as the two ends of a dichotomy, this chapter echoes Barker’s argument to read the postcolonial novels through interdisciplinary lenses 104

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that are more accepting and sensitive to postcolonial culture. By not suggesting to look at Mistry’s novels as dystopian or grotesque carnival of disfigured and diseased bodies, this chapter, in fact, argues to read his work through a unique alternate viewpoint that challenges the western “hegemony of normalcy” and suggests to see disability as the new (postcolonial) normal (Davis 6). Notes 1.

The Parsi community is a miniscule ethnic-religious minority of Zoroastrians who were forced to flee Persia (now Iran) in the seventh century to escape persecution at the hands of Islamic invasion. They currently constitute about 0.006% of the total population of India and according to the census survey of 2011, they continue to shrink in numbers at a plummeting rate of around 18% from their numbers in the census survey of 2001 in India (Sunavalal). Since their arrival in India, the Parsi community is not only the most economically successful ethnic minority, but also the community that has most successfully escaped the intercommunal tensions. Parsis fondly remember the British colonialism due to the many privileges they enjoyed as colonial elites and feel uncomfortable with their new status in postcolonial India. In modern times, they prefer to live together as a community in secluded housing colonies that only inhabit people of Zoroastrian faith. 2. Lennard J. Davis coined the phrase “hegemony of normalcy” to explain the phenomena of proliferation of disabled characters in the literary work that he believes is a result of the hegemony of normalcy. He argues, “This normalcy must constantly be enforced in public venues (like the novel), must always be creating and bolstering its image by processing, comparing, constructing, deconstructing images of normalcy and the abnormal” (10). 3. During one of his interviews, Mistry told Ali Lakhani that he hopes his writing will “preserve the record” of Parsi culture and rituals when they are wiped off of the face of the earth in a few years. 4. Normate is a term coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson that usually “designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings. Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations Disabled Bodies Matter

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and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8).

Works Cited Barker, Clare. Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Print. Butler, Judith P. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Print. Davis, Lennard J. “Introduction: Disability, Normality and Power.” The Disability Studies Reader. Taylor and Francis, 2013. Print. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Print. __________. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. Print. “General Description on the United Nations Enable.” U.N Enable. Page 4. Web. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/diswpa04.htm. Ghai, Anita. “Engaging with Disability with Postcolonialism.” Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, Edited by D. Goodley, B. Hughes, and L. Davis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp 270-286. Print. Hooyman, Nancy R., and Judith Gonyea. Feminist Perspectives on Family Care: Policies for Gender Justice. SAGE Publications, 1995. Print. Hughes, Bill. “Civilising Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People.” Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions. Edited by D. Goodley, B. Hughes, and L. Davis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp 17-32. Print. Iyer, Anupama. “Depiction of Intellectual Disability in Fiction.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment: Journal of Continuing Professional Development. 2007, Vol. 13, pp. 127-133. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Lakhani, Ali. ‘The Long Journey of Rohinton Mistry’, Interview at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival. Canadian Fiction Magazine, 1989. Print.

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Murthy, R. Srinivasa. “Caregiving and Caregivers: Challenges and Opportunities in India.” Indian Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2016, Vol. 32, Issue 1, pp 10-18. Mistry, Rohinton. Family Matters. McClelland & Stewart, 2003. Print. __________. A Fine Balance. First Vintage International Edition, 1997. Print. __________. Such A Long Journey. Faber and Faber Limited, 1992. Print. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Print. __________. Cultural Locations of Disability. U of Chicago P, 2006. Print. Murray, Stuart, and Clare Barker. “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism.” The Disability Studies Reader. Edited by Lennard J. Davis, Taylor and Francis, 2013. Print. Singh, Prabhat K. The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Print. Sunavalal, Nergish. “Alarming 18% Decline in Parsi Population since 2001 Census has Community Worried.” The Times of India, City, Web. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Alarming-18-declinein-Parsi-population-since-2001-census-has-community-worried/ articleshow/53387279.cms. Accessed 26 July 2016. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. Columbia UP, 2007. Print.

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Vyankatesh Madgulkar: A Thematic Signature of Postcolonial India Through the Changing Construction of the Rural Structure Anuradha Malshe

Raison d’etre Vyankatesh Madgulkar was a frontrunner of Marathi literature. He gave a wholly different garb to the Marathi short stories.1 Gangadhar Gadgil, Arvind Gokhale, Purushottam Bhaskar Bhave and Vyankatesh Madgulkar are considered the four pillars of the post-modern Marathi short story. Each one handled a particular genre. Gadgil wrote more about the urban middle-classes whereas Bhave underlined with extreme finesse the psychological torment, Gokhale, too, dealt with mental angst. Yet Madgulkar’s genre was completely different from these three. Although Gadgil, Bhave, and Gokhale all looked inward toward the self, Madgulkar looked out toward one’s surroundings. He was born in a rural setting and later migrated to the city and lived there for the rest of his life. Vyankatesh Madgulkar was born in 1927 in a pre-independence India, and his writings and themes straddled the divide between the colonial and postcolonial time periods. Vyankatesh Madgulkar initially wrote about the villages and rural people. He discussed caste, economy, and families. Never once did he waver from the subliminal level of underlying angst that was the recurring theme of rural life. His early life experiences were beautifully mirrored in all his short stories. In this way, Madgulkar was a prototype for early postcolonial social structure. He was born to a family that had once enjoyed considerable wealth and social influence, but that had slowly degenerated into a meagre existential living. He was a younger son amongst eight siblings. Like all families of the time, his father was the only breadwinner, and thus poverty was a way of life. His mother was considerably harassed and tired. She had to bear successive pregnancies and raised eight children singlehandedly. Common to the time period, and particularly in case of 108

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the Madgulkar family, there were times when his father had to live in urban locations for employment opportunities, while his family stayed behind in their ancestral village. Madgulkar joined in the struggle against British colonial rule as a freedom fighter when he was around 17 years old. As a result, he dropped out of schooling and was on the run from the police. Unable to complete formal education, Madgulkar moved to Mumbai in search of employment. Eventually he migrated and settled in the urban center of Pune. Madgulkar’s short stories, his novelettes, and even his hunting stories (in his youth he was a game hunter before becoming a conservationist later in life) are biographical in nature. He never travelled into imaginary worlds. He had a rich repertoire of experiences that he beautifully delineated into his literature. His short stories were his forte, where he wrote about the rural people, poverty, droughts, and scarcities. He constructed his stories in a matter-of-fact writing style. Short pithy sentences and simple, fluid language were the essence of all his works. His characters were always real people who experienced real emotions. They would cry and become depressed by the real-world events, some even committed suicide. They were no protagonists, no fictionally created situations. When things happened they were always a natural course of events. His characters were not fatalistic, but they are never larger than life either. Like Ruskin Bond, Madgulkar too dealt with typical Indian imagery. The rural structures he depicted were tiny and drab, highlighting the real lived experience of meager resources. The villages were not quaint, picturesque postcard images. Rather, they were drought-stricken lands filled with hardships. His stories showed how the entire social fabric of life’s structure suffers. This act in itself aligns Madgulkar’s work under postcolonial phenomena. While portraying subconscious struggles, postcolonial Indian literature, particularly Marathi literature, often focuses on the theme of urbanization and how it railroaded into and over the rural structures, whereas other emotions experienced by characters become a compulsive back-drop. Economic reasons are supposedly the main cause, however, this is often a façade as the real force is change in Vyankatesh Madgulkar

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social texture due to the manifold influences of postcolonial India. As one progresses through various story lines this thematic structure becomes evident. Social and Economic Context Madgulkar was born in colonial India. The social and economic situation was vastly different than it is today. The differences between urban and rural societies were stark. Even with the advances of modern technology, post-Independent India had not reached the tiny hamlets centered on the locations where all of Madgulkar’s stories took place. Manufacturing and industrial jobs were nonexistent. The main income source, or rather the only income source for 95% of the population, was farming. Importantly, the areas where Madgulkar set his stories is a particularly arid part of Western Maharashtra. Frequent and successive droughts depleted the farming income and reduced the farmers to penury. Family sizes were large and farms were tiny; utterly unable to subsist even a small family. Low incomes consequently meant a very low standard of living. Despite the droughts and poverty, people clung to their farms and homes as it was the only way of life they knew, refusing to move to cities. Migration for social and economic betterment, therefore, became a postcolonial phenomenon. Literacy was not widespread and frequently broke along gendered lines. Women had a subordinate role in the household, due to an entrenched patriarchal social system, as well as general social conditioning. Women seldom had any say, lacked separate incomes, were completely uneducated, usually illiterate, were often married at a very young age, and frequently suffered from oppressive and aggressive treatment in their marital relationships. While Madgulkar was growing up and even when he started writing as a young adult, (he was around 22 years old when his first short story was published in 1949-1950) the social and economic situations described above held true across all spectrums of society. Yet, urbanisation added to this disparity. Compared to the rural hinterlands, urban centers offered more abundant employment opportunities, higher incomes, more freedom, better infrastructure, 110

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and most important, anonymity. In an ironic shift, it was the densely populated urban settings, compared to the more spaced out rural areas, where one could feel “alone,” due to the severing of intimate personal links. The theme of rural spacing, played out in postcolonial settings, occupied a central space in Madgulkar’s writings, particularly his short stories. Rural and Urban Divides Market Road has a simple plot and setting. Vancha is returning home from the weekly market. This is not the first time that she has been to the market but today she was delayed as it took her longer to sell all the produce she had brought with her. She had come to the market with some other women from her village who apparently waited for her, but as the day passed and it was getting dark, the women left. So Vancha now has to walk home by herself, causing a sense of unease. As she starts walking home, Sukhdev, a man from her village, passes by. They merely have a nodding acquaintance and as he is riding a bicycle, Vancha sees no possibility of companionship on her walk from the market to her rural home. However, it seems providence played a hand as Sukhdev’s cycle suddenly punctures its tire and he, too, is forced to walk home. Initially both are unsure as to whether they should walk together, as this breaks down social boundaries. They wonder how, if they speak to each other, it might be perceived by the other person and to any onlookers. Slowly the ice breaks and they fall into conversation. Soon they are exchanging confidences. Vancha, an exceptionally attractive married woman, is extremely unhappy in her marriage. Not being able to have children has affected her marriage in a very negative way. Her husband blames her for not being able to conceive a child, and beats her often. Vancha’s in-laws are unsympathetic, and her husband is considering marrying again, which would ostracize Vancha and strip her of any status. Sukhdev, though married with children of his own, is attracted to Vancha, though Madgulkar subtly alludes to this attraction at a subliminal level. The story ends in a purposefully unfinished climax, with Vancha telling Sukhdev that she is very tired and asks to sit down for a moment. Vyankatesh Madgulkar

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What could have been a depressing tale of marital discord turns into a poignant romance pregnant with deeper layers. Where the story ends is actually the beginning of the real story for these two characters. Madgulkar skillfully sketched an imagined version of a real-life moment, with two people walking home, and with it the awkwardness of first encounters, a universal human experience. The story ends just as the two are growing intimate, like an interrupted conversation or a half finished sentence. In this way the story ends just when Madgulkar has gained the reader’s full attention and developed his characters and setting. He abandons Vancha and Sukhdev to their own story, exiting along with the reader as the real story just begins. In this way, Market Road serves as a prologue to an entire thematic journey. Amongst all four of the short stories examined in this chapter, only Market Road has a complete rural setting. In a very Madgulkar way, here too many possibilities are explored without ever being vulgarly explicit. The attraction felt by Vancha and Sukhdev may or may not culminate into intimacy and a relationship, though there is the ever-present potential about which Madgulkar never explicitly writes. Rather, he only offers charming hints. Vancha feels depressed and repressed on multiple levels. In keeping with the social dictate of the time, where having a baby was seen as being the prime importance of being a woman and a wife, Madgulkar’s design of making Vancha being unable to have one was a deeply intimate and personal issue that Madgulkar, through Vancha, made explicit. He has that issue gnawing at Vancha as the root cause of all her misery. Having sympathetic in-laws and a husband who acts as a companion and friend were secondary to her wish for a baby. The absence of such a caring husband and in-laws only adds to her feeling of isolation. Vancha is not a city dweller. The bicycle that Sukhdev rides, perhaps a symbol of modernity and urban factory work, breaks down, slowing the pace of their journey and focusing purely within a rural backdrop. Postcolonial literature constantly harped on the dichotomy of two Indias; rural and urban. They are portrayed as stark contrasts. Urban centers were viewed as faceless existences, in spite of how much 112

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everyone aspired to take part in city life. Despite the popular literary beliefs, cities represented freedom and new ideas for the aspirants. Madgulkar had his own individual style and beliefs. His characters were always real people with realistic lives. Therefore, Vancha never digresses from realism. She never talks of empowerment or liberation, ideas that were foreign to her setting. She is unhappy at home and finds comfort in the company of a gentleman who lends a sympathetic ear. While within the rural setting, Madgulkar explores the inner isolation one can feel in being so connected, where life’s most intimate details are common knowledge to her family and friends. This contrasts to the outward sense of alienation one would feel when migrating to an urban center. Perhaps this particular piece of writing is more idealistic in nature. Madgulkar had a very rural upbringing, migrating to Kolhapur (an urban center as well as capital place of a princely state, in the erstwhile British India) in his late teens. So the angst experienced by Vancha, in a way, is the focal point of a progressive journey of continuous dynamism. Never in the short story is there a hint of an extramarital affair. Both Vancha and Sukhdev are not even looking for passion of any kind. Theirs is a chance meeting that has the potential to blossom into something else as they travel down the “Market Road.” The intimate overtones are extremely subtle. The metaphors used are commonplace, like stars slowly coming out, the sky getting darker and then once the moon comes up everything is dappled in silver light. Once again, in his typical realistic style, Madgulkar never becomes lyrical but manages to send across the underlying poetry in the situation. Madgulkar was a famous illustrationist who often designed the book cover artwork for his own books. The imagery in his writing is brought out with same fine skill as his drawings. He is not describing a torrid love affair, neither is it a “happily ever after” fairy tale story. His stories are seldom designed with a built-in, feel-good factor for the reader. Being matter-of-fact was his forte. So Vancha and Sukhdev come across as very mature adults walking their own private roads along a main thoroughfare connecting the village’s market. Per chance their Vyankatesh Madgulkar

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roads cross that becomes or may become a starting point of once again a mature relationship that need not be entirely physical. Postcolonial literature explored many varied themes. As time progressed, portrayals became bolder and sometimes louder. Madgulkar never subscribed to this genre. He always preferred the subliminal to overtly vocal. In fact, the journey that begins with Vancha and in a way is completed with the Bai (Woman), which is the final point in the voyage and the fourth and final short story this chapter focuses on. It is a very slowly meandering passage of subtle progression. It is an expedition from the known (the village) into the unknown (the urban center) with all that it stands for. The subtle progression is of ideas, ideologies, morals, and everything else socially and culturally constructed that, although never being fully cast off, is at least temporarily set aside. For the female characters in Madgulkar’s short fiction, each one of them is at, and offers a window into, a stop in this longwinding passage of self-realization. In a way these women represent the torment experienced by the postcolonial woman who was trying to find her voice and consequently her niche in society. Madgulkar writes about these themes across three other stories. In Loni ani Vistu (Butter and Fire) Kamli, and Bai (The Woman), we are shown three more female characters navigating through the decolonizing period into India’s postcolonial era. These three stories are ostensibly romantic tales, yet each one has a subconscious theme that has more to do with psychological angst than physical depravation. Butter and Fire centers on the unrequited romance of a post-office writer and a young illiterate woman, named Chingi, who sends postcards home. The post-office writer, Raghu falls in love with her but is unable to find the courage to act. Just as Raghu decides to declare his feelings and intentions, he gets news that Chingi is in a relationship with her boss at the textile mill where she is employed. Kamli is a story of the titular young woman, probably around 22 or 23 years old, who had to leave school to stay at home, but is now continuing her education in a city far from her village. She is a student living in a boarding school and seems disinclined to visit home. Writing in a first person perspective, Madgulkar gives 114

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the reader an account, where Kamli meets the author when both are travelling home to their village. Here, too, like Market Road, Kamli and the author have at best a nodding acquaintance. Since the story is written in the first person, the author’s internal thoughts are revealed. While he is a few years younger than her, he gets a distinct feeling that she is attracted to him and yearns for something deeper. Kamli spends the vacation at home in the village, then travels back to her school in the city. In response to a letter from the author, Kamli requests that he ceases writing to her, as all letters are ‘read’ by the school’s hostel warden, and she does not wish to be scandalized because of their correspondence. Years later the author learns that Kamli has remarried and settled down. Kamli and Chingi share some common points. Both women are from a tiny rural village, both have had no prior exposure to the outside world, have had very limited or no freedom, and are exploring the world in their own way. In adding an overarching connection, Madgulkar writes both Kamli and Chingi as widows, thus providing the socio-economic explanation for why each has moved from rural villages to an urban city. This shared experience also underscores that both women are possibly looking for the same things in life, or are at least starting out from the same situation. Yet, migration to the city has affected them in different ways. Kamli attends school, continuing her incomplete education, while Chingi finds employment. Back home both are still attached to a part of an extended family structure with their respective brothers and their families. Through this, both women are considered, and are treated as, a second-class citizens. Their lives are entangled with their village roots and the confines of the social rural settings. Kamli travels to Pune while Chingi to Mumbai. Be it for employment or education, this literal movement signals independence for these characters as well as the reader, which in itself was a novel experience. Here, once again, Madgulkar is not very explicit about their desires. In fact, they never openly speak about what aspects in their lives are causing them such anxiety. Kamli is extremely talkative and speaks of everything. The author gets to know more about her life on the bus journey that they take, which is almost equal to what Vyankatesh Madgulkar

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she knows herself. Once they are established in the village, she again keeps visiting the author on some very paltry pretexts or sometimes on no pretext all together. However, never once does she speak her mind apart from long sighs accompanied by long faces, which the author notes. Yet, her trivial chatter betrays her true intentions. She repeatedly describes her friend at school who remarried and had a baby. The implications are clear. Once again, in very Madgulkar way, the physical yearnings though a presence just under the surface remains well shrouded. Kamli needs her own home, husband, and children. She is looking for a companion and stability, and most important, independence, which allows her at least a moderate degree of freedom. The case of Chingi is very similar. She, too, hankers for the same things but her background, upbringing, and social context are vastly different from Kamli. Her migration to the city is not to continue education but to gain employment. Money represents independence, as the corollary to that meant not merely poverty but probably complete subjugation in a distasteful domestic scenario, which in all likelihood was presumably what she was experiencing when she was part of an extended family back in her village. There, as a dependent widowed sister, Chingi had no rights, many restrictions, and a long list of domestic chores. Both of these women have come to the city. Initially the new situation bewilders them but slowly they seem to adapt very well. The adaptation, too, happens on multiple levels that is beautifully sketched by Madgulkar in seemingly trivial details that only an artist could paint. The way they dress, the way they style their hair, their gestures, even the way they walk changes when they adapt to an urban life. Slowly each step is more confident. Gone is the shy, timid look in their eyes, and first glances become bolder. That each of these women chat up complete male strangers is a testament to their newly gained confidence. Madgulkar meets Kamli on her way home from school. Here she is fully urbanized in looks and manner. But once she is re-established in her family home in the village, she is compelled to revert back to her old ways. The reader sees the internal conflict, as she keeps repeatedly telling the author 116

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that she should never have come home for vacation. In the case of Chingi, once she is established in the city she never goes back. Her transformation, though equally gradual and subtle, is nevertheless evident. For someone who knew no other life than drudgery and dependence, having her own income is a luxury beyond words. Chingi works in a textile mill as an unskilled worker. Her income was certainly low, but for her, it afforded a sense of infinite freedom. The same freedom Kamli is trying to achieve via her education, though in Kamli, Madgulkar leaves her story arc to conclude outside the pages of his text, mirroring the conclusion of Market Road. The final short story discussed in this chapter is titled Bai (The Woman). Here, the most poignant aspect of the story is that the female protagonist has no name. She is a schoolteacher in her forties. She eventually marries a colleague but that relationship soon crumbles. All throughout the story she is merely referred to as “Bai.” In a way this story is a natural progression of Madgulkar’s short fiction. Unlike Vancha, the unnamed Bai has always been a city dweller, completely anonymous in her setting. Unlike Kamli or Chingi, Bai has not migrated to an urban life but has been born and raised inside of one. However, like Kamli and Chingi, Bai too is a widow. Interestingly, Madgulkar has created Bai as a much older woman than Kamli and Chingi, yet assails her with a similar torment. Whereas Kamli and Chingi are clear in their minds about their needs, Bai, though older and established, is unsure and confused. Bai confuses her yearnings with a twisted sense of what is right and wrong. Even when she marries a fellow teacher she is incapable of accepting the relationship in its entirety. Though his wife, she refuses to live with her husband or to have a life together. Rather she tries to slice the relationship into “convenient” pieces. Initially her new husband gives in but eventually his own domestic commitments take over. His regular visitations at the outset become occasional. While saddened by his more frequent absences, Bai does not fully understand what went wrong or what caused it. She is unable to comprehend a future she may have lost. Yet, Bai is actually a free agent. She is not encumbered with disapproving relatives or a distasteful husband, unlike Vancha in Market Road, Vyankatesh Madgulkar

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so Bai has a better chance of achieving freedom and happiness. The same independence that the anonymity of city life afforded to Kamli and Chingi, was Bai’s from the outset. Yet, by being born into it, she has not earned it and is, therefore, unable to grasp it. It is a fundamental passage of migration that always takes place on a subtle subconscious level. In case of Vancha, the road to the Market brought about a change in her life or at the very least the potential for change. Vancha’s tale takes place on a more romantic plane, where her inner tribulations are mirrored in an understated manner. She never openly asks for what she desires, but Sukhdev is very aware of her expectations as well as their fallouts. Vancha and Sukhdev’s story has more lyrical and stylized elements. Yet it is a realistic portrayal of real life, where both characters are mature enough to understand the consequences of what might take place. Madgulkar plays with traces of a romantic interlude, while leaving his characters to their own devices. Here the rurality that embodied charm and idealism in the early postcolonial period plays a pivotal role. What could become a torrid affair actually develops in to a slightly wistful stanza. The same dreamy rhetoric is maintained throughout the entire piece, playing out exclusively in a rural setting. However, the natural progression of the same charming story transforms itself into something different when placed in an urban context. Kamli and Chingi are prototypical embodiments of this change. Where Vancha’s anguish is pensive and endearing, Kamli’s torment comes across as more pathetic. Her efforts to woo the author and at the same time maintain a decorous distance take away all the wistful charm of Vancha. In a way it depicts the realism of postindependent India. The entire social fabric of the rural structure suffering in the process of urbanization stands as a completely postcolonial phenomenon. Kamli and Chingi reflect it back to the reader in very effective ways. Village and rurality represented allure of an idyllic existence. Literature set the city and everything urban as the proverbial big bad wolf. The crumbling of the rural structure was believed to be almost akin to a cultural loss. Although true on some level, the anonymity of the urban structures accorded an immense freedom that was essential to both Kamli and Chingi. 118

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Vancha, having never experienced the move to urbanization, was totally unaware of freedom. It is fitting that her story ends before she can perform any acts of agency other than asking to sit and rest. She did not physically migrate to the city but her inner angst was propelling her to embrace the same subconscious struggle that Bai, Chingi or Kamli were willfully taking on. The same sort of liberation was possible even for Bai. She tried to clutch at it, even if fleetingly. Bai is very different and vastly more mature, generationally, than the other three. But with age she is trapped in an urban bourgeois psychology that actually prevents her from obtaining what could be a better and fulfilling relationship. Vancha is completely alien to the same bourgeois ideas and so does not hesitate to look at happiness in the eye, illustrated by her gazes at Sukhdev as he pushes his bicycle alongside her. Kamli too makes an attempt at accessing the new bourgeois ideas through education, while Chingi tries to buy into it through employment. Each of these women travel their own private road of struggles and independence. The migration, or more accurately displacement, of ideas takes place on a variety of planes, but the underlying theme of urbanization is evident and is a silent character within these three stories. From the initial starting point delineated in Market Road, appropriately titled after a route of movement towards urban economies, the progression Madgulkar takes the readers along is a meandering passage that returns full circle in Bai. Here the transformation is already complete. Bai’s whole portrayal is completely urban. She is educated, has a job (fittingly she is a schoolteacher, bringing the urban twins of education and employment, or Kamli and Chingi, together), yet she stays by herself, unencumbered by familial responsibilities or restrictions. Even when Bai decides to remarry, it is completely her decision, thus showcasing her urban agency. She does not have to either ask for permission or wait for a sanctioned period of time, nor does she need to worry about displeasing her relatives. She has the freedom, the liberty, and the independence all the other three characters are seeking. Kamli and Chingi snatch at it when they leave their rural settings, with a secret devout promise to themselves never to return Vyankatesh Madgulkar

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to their rural upbringing. Vancha is restricted by her situation. She cannot access urban liberty but she, too, tries to steal some reprieve from an otherwise oppressive and unhappy domestic situation, epitomized by Sukhdev and his bicycle. In her circumstances, that is the best that she can achieve. As Madgulkar ends the story with them mid-conversation, the reader can only guess at her future and where, geographically and symbolically, Vancha may end up. Another vital signpost the reader encounters is Bai’s crumbled relationship. Unlike Chingi, Bai does not enter into a live-in domestic partnership. Her bourgeois mind, set by a prototypical by-product of postcolonial urban values, prompts her to marry her colleague. The same psychological twist prevents her from leading a life of togetherness that the other three characters are not afraid to enter into. Vancha is totally rural and conforms to the village-based patriarchy, whereas Kamli and Chingi, in spite of their new urban settings, still retain traces of their previous rural mindsets. Comparatively, these three are younger and more open to absorb fresh ideas. Bai, however, falls short on all counts. Her journey is completely on an urban track from its outset. Bai’s own inner dichotomy engenders a disintegration of a relationship that could, perhaps, have afforded her a modicum of happiness. Interestingly, the point where Bai gives up is the point where the other three begin. In this way, Madgulkar’s circle completes with Bai; and another circle opens up. When all of these stories are combined together, Madgulkar sets up the notion that migration from rural to urban has a twin in migration from urban to urban. What began as the displacement of notions becomes a replacement of notions. Vancha, Kamli, Chingi, and Bai are the four focal points of this same passage. Madgulkar has adroitly used different metaphors to portray the morphing of a huge social canvass that maps onto society at large. In the historical transition of India’s move from precolonial to postcolonial periods, Madgulkar illuminates the changes within the social journey. His stories talk of coming-to-age values. It is not a degeneration of the social fabric but essentially a new weave. The social fabric remains the same but takes on diverse hues. Vancha, Kamli, Chingi, and Bai each play a dual role. Their 120

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courage to flee their settings and take ownership of their fates is born out of their own inner trauma. This allows these four women to have their own stories. Vancha’s story, with its many pregnant possibilities rather than overshadowing explict details, creates the foundation of shift from rural to urban. While with urbanized Bai, the completed movement becomes an opening of a new circle. Once again the journey pauses with Bai. And then it renews its progression with Chingi and Kamli, from urban to more urban. Madgulkar in his signature restrained style portrayed four points on a long journey. The urban structure, with its enormous possibilities, becomes an allegory. The various nuances in the relationships cease to be mere individual torments; they take on a macro mantle which, too, is a metaphor for a larger canvass. The dynamism incorporated by postcolonial lifestyles, fast becoming urbanized, is reflected in the lives of these four women. Their lives are no longer monolithic, but rather interconnected. The psychological churnings make their lives a series of varied data points that can be correlated. The inherent emotional turmoil adds a certain dynamism to the progression. The journey continues more as a natural evolution. Urbanization ceases to be an aspired conclusion. Rather, it continues to be a work in progress that encompasses the many morphing of the personal angsts Madgulkar readers themselves would be struggling with in a postcolonial society. Note 1.

Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra state. Marathi language is spoken in the state of Maharashtra (with a population of around 110 million out of which 90 million speak Marathi). Marathi literature is a rich layering of traditions and styles. Earlier Marathi literature consisted of lyrical and devotional poetry. From the nineteenth century onwards, Marathi literature became more experimental in its styling. Poetry took on a more liberated grammatical form, with contemporary Marathi “literature” consisting of novels, novelettes, essays, short stories, poetry and thriving theater productions.

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Works Cited Madgulkar, Vyankatesh. “Bai.” Jambhala che Diwas, (Jamun Days). 3rd ed., Continental Prakashan, 2002, pp. 85-102. Print. __________. “Butter and Fire.” Jambhala che Diwas, (Jamun Days). 3rd ed., Continental Prakashan, 2002, pp. 53-67. Print. __________. “Kamli.” Goshti Gharakadil (Stories from Home). 3rd ed., Utkarsh Prakashan, 2002, pp. 112-119. Print. __________. “Market Road.” Jambhala che Diwas, (Jamun Days). 3rd ed., Continental Prakashan, 2002, pp. 103-113. Print.

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Obliteration or Assimilation? Culture Clash in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy’s THE God of Small Things Stuart T A Bolus

Colonialism. The word itself evokes strong emotions depending on the reader, and some will struggle to put the feeling into words. It is more than simply an accident of history or an irreversible transfer of wealth from one nation to another. In some instances, it is loss of the culture of a people itself. To lose something important to you can be harrowing but to lose a culture? Can one ever actually recover from such a separation of self and identity? Or does the old culture persist despite the introduction of a new culture? The theme of loss recurs often in postcolonial literature and one that features prominently in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things. A comparative study of these two texts reveals differences in approach to the clash of cultures for individual people and a nation as a whole, as they are forced to either come to terms with the new changes of life or become stuck in the realization that what once was is gone forever. Through the shared experiences of colonialism on the African continent and the South Asian subcontinent, we see the differences in terms of adapting to cultural exchange and how colonizers not only took control of territorial spaces through force, but also attempted to maintain control by converting “hearts and minds” to their cause. However, although we see the devastating effects cultural shift can have on people, sometimes, despite the adoption of new cultural practices and interests, the old culture never truly dies away. Marginalized people make use of new culture as a source of protection and in so doing, create a new avenue for opportunity. Things Fall Apart and The God of Small Things, when analyzed intertextually, act more like companion pieces, with a similar story played out in different historical eras and different geographical settings. Furthermore, both texts are considered masterpieces of Obliteration or Assimilation?

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postcolonial literature and should be considered required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the genre. Yet, they also unmask the true sorrow and depth of melancholy faced by these postcolonial authors. After all, both Things Fall Apart and The God of Small Things were the literary debuts of Achebe and Roy, respectively. Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was one of Nigeria’s first authors to make it to the international stage. The novels he produced between the years of 1958-1987 showcased Nigeria, its history and its contemporary struggles to the rest of the world. It is remarkable that his most famous book, Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, only two years before Nigeria attained independence, and was one of the first novels to truly challenge the convention of an African past. Achebe dispelled the common myth of precolonial African savagery and of the subtle erosion of any history before contact with European powers, or in his own words, “that African peoples did not hear of civilisation for the first time from Europeans” (The Guardian). Things Fall Apart is the story of a man named Okonkwo from the small Igbo village of Umuofia. The novel documents how Okonkwo came to a position of importance within his community, and, through events that he cannot control (mainly creeping colonization), becomes an outsider to his people. Achebe writes about an Africa before Christianity, of the Africans’ encounter with European peoples from an African perspective. To do so in 1958 was groundbreaking. Achebe shows how African people’s lives are forever changed by the imposition of colonial rule, conversion to new religion, and how the old religion of one’s ancestors is swept aside and vilified by the new order, and thus struggle to find a place in the new world. Arundhati Roy (1961-) is a world famous Indian writer/political activist who first came to international attention when she was awarded the Man Booker prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things. Written in 1997, Roy details the life of a family living in India over two different time periods; 1969 and 1993. She examines how events in the past shape the lives of the characters. The main characters are twins Esta and Rahel, their mother Ammu, their Uncle Chacko, and their handyman, the untouchable Velutha. The family 124

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is torn apart by forbidden love and a desire to maintain status quo. They seek to reject change, and enforce society’s expectations on all, even those who choose to go against it. She writes in such a way to critique postcolonial India. Roy’s story explores, in-depth, the oppression of the “untouchable class” and the limits placed upon them, how women have been denied their rights to things such as education or the choice to love freely, a postcolonial fixation on the west, and the hypocritical nature of the so-called elites, who still obey the old ways despite pretending that, being western educated, they are above such things. Outcasts The role of outcasts in society showcases the culture of each in the two novels. Outcasts in both novels are oppressed and discriminated against by the rest of their community. The coming of a different religion and culture allows some of these people a degree of security and safety. In Things Fall Apart we see that there is a sense of community among the outcasts and a separate society develops within the Christian church’s sphere, providing the shunned members safety and opportunity. Meanwhile, in The God of Small Things we see the old Hindu practices subvert the new religion and create an amalgamation of old and new. The old ways are never truly abandoned and follow the new converts into their new life, yet prevents them from changing their status. In Things Fall Apart the people who convert to Christianity at first are described as the dregs of society. Many in the village are happy for these people to abandon their ways, as the community, therefore, will no longer need to deal with these outcasts. When the Christians first come to Okonkwo’s village they build a small church but “none of his converts was a man whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people. None of them was a man of title. They were mostly the kind of people that were called efulfe, worthless, empty men” (Achebe 135). The people seen as the bottom of Igbo society are the ones who join, who have nothing to lose by converting as they have little to no stake in the society and culture they are presently part of. The character Nneka becomes the first woman to join the Obliteration or Assimilation?

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Christians. She lost all her previous children because she could only conceive twins, which in the Igbo society were considered unnatural and thus they were left to die in the forest shortly after birth (Achebe 142-143). Before she gives birth a final time, she joins the Christians who prohibit this practice and protect her and her new children. And yet, her husband is not even upset when Nneka joins the mission station: “Her husband and his family were already becoming highly critical of such a woman and were not unduly perturbed when they found she had fled to join the Christians. It was good riddance” (Achebe 143). It’s obvious why these outcasts would join something that offers them another chance at life. As the first converts, they had nothing left to lose. Yet, it is not only complete outcasts who convert to the new religion. Nwoye, the son of the main character Okonkwo, converts to Christianity because his own culture perplexes him, and he sees it as an opportunity to part ways with his father, whose hypermasculinity and aggression are at odds with Nwoye’s own nature (Achebe 50). We learn that there are certain aspects of Igbo culture with which Nwoye disagrees. There are two particular events that seem to evoke strong emotions in Nwoye, which he recalls when he hears the Christians singing hymns: “The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed” (Achebe 139). Nwoye sees Christianity as a way to rid himself of his father and the culture he has never felt comfortable being a part of. He wholeheartedly adopts his new religion and way of life. Nwoye even abandons his name and language, taking on the Christian name, Isaac, and goes to the Christian school to learn how to read and write English (Achebe 172). It is Nwoye, as Isaac, who later converts his mother and siblings (Achebe 144). When Okonkwo is living in exile, a friend tells him that the white men have established themselves as a new power in Umuofia. He is told “It is already too late…Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government. If we should try to drive out the white men in Umuofia we should find it easy. There are only two of them. But what of our own people 126

Critical Insights

who are following their way and have been given power?” (Achebe 165). To further the status of the new religion, men of title who have disobeyed the white men’s laws, such as molesting Christians, have been punished by the white men and their converts (Achebe 164). In belittling the community elders and those in traditional power, the once worthy men have now become the outcasts in the eyes of their own community. Achebe, therefore, skillfully documents the slow creeping of colonialism, through the motif of church converts, in order to exemplify the shift of power dynamics. The outcasts have gained power within the colonial system while the traditional elites and anti-colonial resisters have become the new outcasts. This is in stark contrast with the life of outcasts in The God of Small Things. In Indian society, the Dalits or Paravans occupied the bottom rung of the Hindu caste system. Known as the untouchables, they were (and in some ways still are) the perpetual outcasts in society, doomed to a lifetime of oppression. Furthermore, the untouchables pass their outcast status hereditarily, meaning even their descendants are unable to break out of this imposed status. The discrimination they suffer is severe: “Pappachi would not allow paravans in the house. Nobody would. They were not allowed to touch anything that touchables touch” (Roy 73). They are considered unclean and are generally unwanted, forced to take spiritually contaminating employment, such as bodily funeral perpetration or pest extermination (Mayell). It is unsurprising, therefore, that many untouchables would seek to join a new culture or religion like Christianity to escape from their situation. Under British colonialism that is precisely what some of them do: “When the British came…a number of paravans…(among them Velutha’s grandfather, Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican church to escape the scourge of untouchability” (Roy 74). It is clear how those with little status in society are the ones clamoring for a new culture or a new religion, as a shifting power structure can only improve their lives. However, while in Things Fall Apart the new converts are treated with a sort of gawking amusement by the rest of society, particularly within their small communities, where members are pleased to be rid of them, in The God of Small Things, Roy showcases Obliteration or Assimilation?

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that the old culture’s sway is indeed much stronger and their new religion is unable to protect the untouchables from old prejudices: “It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services and separate priests” (Roy 74). In contrast to how one culture gives way to another in Nigeria, in India it just adds another layer of complexity to the culture rather than removing what came before. The touchable Christians are Brahmins, the highest of the castes “believed that they were descendants of the one hundred brahmins whom saint Thomas the apostle converted to Christianity” ( Roy 66). Although they take on a new religion, they do not cast aside their high status as Brahmins. These new converts do not see the Christianized untouchables as fellow Christians. Instead they continue to view them as socially untouchable, reinforcing the caste system even within the massive changes brought by colonial control. Although the untouchables are now able to attend school, they are not expected to be anything more than laborers. Mammachi, the grandmother of the family notices Velutha’s talents and persuades his father to send him to a school that her father-in-law built, however, years later, she remarks: “if only he hadn’t been a paravan, he might of become an engineer” ( Roy 75). They are trapped in the prison of their caste and nothing, not even conversion or education, allows them to escape. While charity is given to the untouchables in the form of schooling, the higher caste converts expect an unquestioned loyalty and obedience from them afterwards (Roy 77). In this way, the outcasts are not given a new status, merely a marginally better life than they had before, but one where they remain unable to challenge their societal superiors. It is clear that the outcasts in Things Fall Apart wholeheartedly adopt the new culture that is presented to them and thrive in it. These people have not joined the colonial apparatus out of fear. Rather, they have willingly joined out of a desire to access new opportunities. Whereas before they were only “empty men,” as Christian converts with an English education, they have become court messengers and court clerks (Achebe 171). They gain a new status that has been created by the new culture and use this to assert power over the ones 128

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who used to have power of them. However, in India, the untouchables have gained very little from their conversion to Christianity. The new culture retains its previous prejudices and continues to have a much stronger hold over the population. In Achebe’s work, we see cultural obliteration that is irrevocably changing a society. In contrast, Roy depicts the assimilation of culture and the prevention of outcasts to escape their fate. In comparing Things Fall Apart to The God of Small Things, it seems that in Africa the presence of Christianity has offered outcasts an escape, whereas in India it has given them only false hope in a society that continues to treat them with disdain. Obliteration/Assimilation For the first half of Things Fall Apart, the reader is introduced to Nigerian Igbo culture, the oral traditions of stories, the proverbs said to one another, the oracles, and the superstitions. This precolonial lens creates the world that Okonkwo and his family live in. As the book was first composed in English, it can be assumed that Achebe expects the reader to have little knowledge of Igbo culture. Indeed the first half of the novel is a cultural feast for the reader in this regard. However, over the course of the novel we see how things slowly change and how things fall apart. In fact, the last line of the book is from the perspective of the English District Commissioner of Umuofia “He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” (Achebe 197). At this final point, we see that this rich and detailed African world is, to the Europeans, a mere academic article of repressing a different people. Any goodwill one may have thought the Europeans had brought is eradicated as it is shown they have absolutely no respect for this culture and view any resistance as something to be pacified. Igbo culture is gone and now we are witnessing familiar European scholarly traditions taking over. However, In Things Fall Apart, as the colonization depicted in the novel is a recent event, the acquisition of language is not dealt with in depth. Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his book Decolonising the Mind talks about the importance of how language can be used to subjugate people. Obliteration or Assimilation?

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He states that “language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (Thiong’o 9). Whereas language as a tool of subjection is not fully explored in Things Fall Apart, it is quite prevalent in The God of Small Things. In India, the English language has been assimilated in the culture as a sign of importance; the local communist party leader, Comrade Pillai, when meeting Chacko, insists they speak in English, to show that he, too, is educated (Roy 273). Despite being a communist, he shows his envy for bourgeoisie culture and the exchange seems like a piece of upper-class warfare, with him showing off his children’s knowledge in their recitation of English poems and Shakespeare, despite his children having no idea what they are actually saying (Roy 275). Their knowledge of their own culture seems to come a far second compared to the knowledge of their former colonizers. For communists tasked with overthrowing the upper classes, they overtly fixated on elite viewpoints. Chacko prides himself on his Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and his credentials, but his Oxford degree has hardly helped him in life. There is a loss of self-confidence and identity; Chacko goes to two universities, in Delhi and then to Oxford, but we never hear him talk about his university experience in Delhi. Clearly it means less to him than the old intellectual seat of imperial power in Oxford. He even admits how Indians admire the British at the expense of being proud of themselves: “Our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves” (Roy 53). This is even more poignant when Ammu reminds her brother that he married one of their conquerors (his English ex-wife) (Roy 53). It is also interesting that when the reverse has happened, when an Englishman “goes native” by learning the local languages and adopting Indian dress, he is portrayed as a madman who lives a life of debauchery and sin (Roy 52). He is not commended for learning their language; he is reviled for stooping so low, for betraying his privilege (Roy 52). When Indians learn English and dress and act like 130

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Englishmen, they are portrayed as men of class. To do the opposite is to be considered insane. The very fact that this is the case portrays that their minds have been colonized to the point that they have degenerated their own culture and have fully accepted an admiration of British culture. Yet, it is an assimilation of the new culture rather than an obliteration of the old. These Indian converts have kept their own language and, unlike Okonkwo’s son, have not changed their names to reflect a more European Christian background. They retain some parts of the old culture yet it is clear that speaking English is seen as a status symbol. To know the literature and culture of the former colonizer is respected in ways their own culture is not. In many ways, it echoes the teachings of the famous philosopher Frantz Fanon who declared “There is no help for it: I am a white man. For unconsciously I distrust what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being” (Fanon 162). This observation underscores what plagues men like Comrade Pillai in The God of Small Things; they despise what they are and seek to be the other. Pillai is a proletariat who aspires to be bourgeois; Chacko is an Indian who aspires to be English. Communism is used as an example of how another new culture again fails to break the cycle of inequality in society, just like Christianity. In The God of Small Things, as Christianity has not given the untouchables the freedom they seek, many have turned to another foreign belief system with near religious zeal. They have become converts to communism. Although it is an ideology and not a religion, Roy states how similar they are: “Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the church with the party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar” (Roy 66). At its core, communism is concerned with redistributing power, wealth, and status. Those with nothing take on those with everything. One would think this would include changing the status of the untouchables. But Comrade Pillai is shown to be selfish and greedy, using communism only to benefit himself. Years later, when he thinks about his part in Velutha’s death, he recollects that he “didn’t hold himself responsible for what happened. He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Obliteration or Assimilation?

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Politics. The old omelette and eggs thing” ( Roy 14). Meanwhile, Velutha is a card-carrying member of the communist party, but his party chairman, Pillai, does little to help him and seems to do even less to improve the status of the untouchables (Roy 121). The chairman even complains that he cannot allow untouchables in his household because his wife would not allow it (Roy 278). In his sidestepping of responsibility, he passes the blame across gendered and economic lines, where the responsibly is anyone’s but his own. He tells Chacko that having an untouchable on the workforce is bothering the other workers so he should let him go: “Whatever job he does, carpenter, or electrician…for them he is just a Paravan. It is a conditioning they have from birth. This I myself have told them is wrong. But Frankly speaking, Comrade, Change is one thing. Acceptance is another” (Roy 279). He is not interested in sorting out the problems with caste and is, therefore, part of the problem. Marxism, like Christianity, provides little comfort for the untouchables, and they are exploited as they have always been. It is equally telling that before the police go searching for Velutha on the false charge that he attempted to rape higher status women, they go to Comrade Pillai first to see if Velutha is protected by the communist party (Roy 262-263). Pillai knows the allegation to be false but he does not inform the police (Roy 262). He sees no personal gain in helping an untouchable like Velutha, despite him being a fellow communist, and in so doing Pillai condemns Velutha to death. The old ways of caste have supremacy over the comradeship of the party. The ways in which language has brought in a new way to denote class, how a society views itself as inferior, and how new cultures can still bring change but not full acceptance all combine to within these two novels to underscore just how damaging colonization can be to a society. For Okonkwo, his culture and traditional way of life is pushed aside with the full adoption of another, leaving him behind. In The God of Small Things, Velutha is merely a pawn to be used by the already entrenched higher statuses in their schemes and ideas for increased power and wealth. Both men react against these powers over their lives, and both men meet tragic ends. 132

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The Sacrifice of Velutha and Okonkwo Okonkwo built his legacy from the ground up. Achebe tells us that Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, was a wastrel of a man, preferring to drink and sing rather than do an honest day’s work. Due to his lifestyle “his wife and children had barely enough to eat”(Achebe 5). Growing up in this way, Okonkwo despises his father. Men in Umuofia gain prestige by their titles, their prowess in battle, and the number of wives they can accumulate. When Okonkwo leaves his village and comes back after the European infiltration, his lifelong achievements are now worth nothing. His people no longer fight wars, so his martial abilities are worthless. His son who is entranced by Christianity suddenly has a place in society and is learning how to read, rather than learn to become a warrior like his father. For the proud, courageous Okonkwo, adapting and accepting what Umuofia has become is too great a feat. When a meeting is called to discuss the situation with the Europeans, the colonial police storm in. Okonkwo, the warrior, fights back (Achebe 194). However, only he alone fights. The other village leaders and elders, having stayed in Umuofia as it slowly transitioned under colonial rule, do not physically resist. Okonkwo knows it is the end. He knows there is no hope for him or his people to regain the old ways. And thus he hangs himself. His suicide logically fits the progression in Things Fall Apart, as there is no longer a space left for Okonkwo. It is a double tragedy, as it prevents him from being buried by his own people. Although Igbo society has been significantly altered by colonial incursion, Achebe informs the reader that one significant precolonial taboo remains. As Okonkwo’s friend Obierika states in the novel’s climax: “It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offence against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, only strangers may touch it” (Achebe 196). It seems out of place for Okonkwo to commit such a shameful act, considering he spent his entire life trying to eradicate the societal stigma of his lazy father Unoka. However, Okonkwo has, in his final act, shown that he no longer cares for cultural connections, as his society is one he no longer recognizes. As Okonkwo puts Obliteration or Assimilation?

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it, “worthy men are no more” (Achebe 189). His violent resistance to the colonial administrators goes nowhere. His spirit has been broken, and he can no longer go on. Okonkwo finds he is no longer a valued member of society despite spending his entire life trying to gain his position. Okonkwo has lost everything. His culture is diminished before his eyes and his place in it fades to nothing. For Okonkwo, everything has fallen apart. In The God of Small Things, Velutha’s crime is that he engages in an illicit romance with Ammu. Both characters are marginalized by their society due to their breaking of its social norms. Ammu’s divorce from her abusive husband, Baba, has ostracized her. Yet, her brother Chacko is freely able to sleep with his workers. These relationships are such an open secret in the family that a private entrance is built so he can have his liaisons without disturbing the rest of the family (Roy 169). Chacko and Ammu’s mother even pays the women Chacko sleeps with so they will remain silent (Roy 169). In fact, Roy depicts these affairs ambiguously, so that it is never entirely clear if they are consensual. Yet Chacko can get away with it, because he is a man and he is of a higher status. On the other hand, Ammu sleeps with their untouchable handyman and is confined in a room for it. For a touchable man to have extramarital relations is overtly accepted, possibly even expected, but for a female to do the same is considered to be one of the greatest societal taboos. For her unforgivable actions of having sexual relations with an untouchable, Ammu becomes a persona non-grata in her family. Ammu has been ill treated for much of her life. She was never given an education because her parents merely expected her to get married (Roy 38), whereas Chacko was sent to Oxford University. Being a divorcee with children in a conservative society makes her feel trapped and ostracized. She is regarded with suspicion as “A woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could, therefore, be dangerous” (Roy 44). This, in part, explains why she is drawn to Velutha, her “God of small things.” They are both damned and trapped in their societal positions. Velutha is killed by the police, not for what he has done (having sexual relations outside your caste only breaks cultural taboos, not legal ones), but for what he 134

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represents—an anomaly in the system. Velutha is an untouchable who does not act like an inferior. His father, who is described as an “Old World Paravan” (Roy 76), dislikes the way that his son behaves: “Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked” (Roy 76). An untouchable who refuses to bow down to the system, despite Christianity and communism not giving him the freedom it originally promised, Velutha still seeks a life of his own. When the police come to arrest him, they have no need to beat him, as he is asleep when they find him. Yet he is savagely beaten to death. Roy informs us: “They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear…They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak” (Roy 309). He is made an example of, the culture defending itself against those who would subvert its norms. The police act as a personification of its reactive element. Conclusion Each novel evokes sadness and neither end on an uplifting note; daring to challenge the system destroys Okonkwo, Velutha, and Ammu. Both novels, in their own way, highlight how the strict rules of culture and dogmatic beliefs uproot and yet entrench social hierarchies. Both novels tell a story of change, of pain and suffering. Each novel has deeply depressing outcomes, Okonkwo commits suicide, Ammu dies alone in a motel, and the police beat Velutha to death. Postcolonial literature, due to its subject matter and the systems under which it is produced, in many ways is rarely positive. So much culture and knowledge has been lost or subverted and the outcome is often a culture living in contradiction to itself. A new culture can create a space for the downtrodden in society to overcome their obstacles and experience a new way of life. Conversely, the established elites of the old culture can become outcasts and struggle to adapt to their new position, stuck in a fixation to the past while society rapidly shifts around them. However, the imposition of a new culture creates fractures where the elite in society can coopt to entrench their power and position Obliteration or Assimilation?

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and deny that right to others. Colonization creates a choice, one of either assimilation, of taking parts of the old culture and merging it with the new, or of obliteration, with the old culture being swept away forever. The process of colonization can be rather sudden and its effects on culture severe. Okonkwo, in the space of only a few years, saw Christianity ravage his community. Eventually his entire family converts to the new religion. White men, who at the start of the novel are a myth, are the ones fully in control of his village by the novel’s conclusion. In India, while the British are gone, the legacy of colonialism is everywhere in society. Speaking English and knowing English culture is used to increase status and prestige. The traditional customs that are adhered to are those separating individuals in terms of class and caste. Those who resist the eradication of their culture or seek to oppose the limits placed upon them are not tolerated. Okonkwo, Velutha, and Ammu all share this fate. They fight against the tide of societal expectations, and are made examples of, martyrs to the cause, but tragic to the end. Obliterated and Assimilated. The choice was not theirs to make, the clash of their culture made it for them. Note 1.

The author would like to thank Philip Le Fanu for editing an earlier draft of this chapter.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London, Penguin books, 2010. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 2017. Print. Mayell, Hillary. “India’s ‘Untouchables’ Face Violence, Discrimination.” National Geographic News. 2 June 2003. Web. http://news. nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables. html Accessed on 10 Sept. 2017. Roy, Suzanna Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo, 1998. Print. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa . Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: Currey, 2011. Print. 136

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The Rhetorization of the Abject’s Grammatical Positionality Michael A. Parra

The Lockean notion of a self-reflective consciousness firmly situated in the body inspired scientists and philosophers to map the unseen internal life of the human onto the material surface of the body. This attempt is manifested most clearly, for instance, in the popular science of physiognomy, which posited that individual character was embodied in the features of the face. (Corinna Wagner, “The Dream of a Transparent Body: Identity, Science and the Gothic Novel,” 74)

What is the protagonist? Taking center stage on the narrative’s soapbox in the art of storytelling. However, this chapter asks: is their privileged dominance a façade to distract a reader from the periphery? How might the primacy of such a narrow lens enable/ disable the reader’s interpretation of a text? And, what ultimately determines the protagonist within the narrative structure? If one has the courage to address these questions without getting stuck in the seaweeds of systematic thinking, then the interrogative nature of each question mark challenges conventional reading strategies. In the context of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, these interrogative pronouns allow readers to view the periphery, which is illuminated by lightning, as though the abject breathing at the margin is catalyst to lightning itself. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the protagonist (n) as the leading character, or one of the main characters, in a narrative work such as a poem, novel, film, etc. (OED Online). The narrator (n), on the other hand, is the voice or persona (whether explicitly identified or merely implicit) by which are related the events in a plot, especially that of a novel or narrative poem (OED Online). In Wide Sargasso Sea, both the protagonist and the narrator are synthesized and multiplied in the grammatical construction of Antoinette and Rochester. Recounting the past from a white Creole Rhetorization

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woman’s and Englishman’s lens, the structure seems to privilege Antoinette and Rochester as though the once omniscient narrator should be seen as protagonist especially as their once unidentifiable skin color is now “white.” Unfortunately, that produces a misreading that ultimately creates two separate centers and reinforces colonial language that look upon land, bodies, and identity as objects for the subject’s consumption. As a result of these separate spheres, with distinct social and political positionalities, the narrative structure then forces other characters to violently transmute into talismans as the omniscient voice measures and compares these elements unfavorably against the “white” lens. Yet, does the simple act of narrating automatically deem the persona/voice as a protagonist? To go about such a reading, with a naive conception of the protagonist, will only deter the reader from realizing that although Antoinette and Rochester may be major characters to Wide Sargasso Sea, it is actually Christophine, as the first acting subject, who is the leading character of this postcolonial text. Pushing them back into their omniscient positionalities, Antoinette and Rochester are then the designated names not for the protagonist, but that of the narrating voice that threads related events in Wide Sargasso Sea. One can take it even further to suggest that, as characters, Antoinette and Rochester are automatons that only function within the perimeters of English Law. This point regarding English Law will be discussed further in the chapter; yet, if the omniscient narrators have automaton personas, then privileging Antoinette and Rochester as the only major characters seen fit to be “protagonists” is a misreading, especially taking into account the narrative structure and its mechanic. This misreading, as a result, reinforces colonial ideologies that automatically place one in the subject, or superior, grammatical positionality due to the material surface of “white” skin. The lifelessness in Antoinette becomes even more apparent after Rochester violently changes her name to “Marionette,” which means doll (Rhys 92, 93). Equating Antoinette to a doll, a mere object used for experiment with human subjectivity, is telling of her positionality within the narrative especially because 138

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she seems to depend on Christophine as a source of counsel and guidance through womanhood. Readers witness Antoinette’s ravenous need once an ongoing conflict with Rochester causes Christophine to entertain the idea of leaving not only the geographical location, but also the narrative. In a state of panic, Antoinette confronts her source of counsel: ‘You’re not leaving?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ said Christophine. ‘And what will become of me?’ said Antoinette. ‘Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Woman must have spunk to live this wicked world.’ (Rhys 60)

It is important to note that at this point of the narrative, Rochester is the narrator who interprets and conveys the signifying actions between Antoinette and Christophine. As an automaton, not only does Rochester confirm that Antoinette’s soul is as lifeless as a doll, but, in this instance, it seems as though Antoinette’s fear of the unknown solidifies her dependency on Christophine. Antoinette’s second question, which predicates on the absence of Christophine, linguistically annihilates her consciousness of self-conscious and any experience she may have accumulated up to this point. That is to say, the moment she utters, “what will become of me,” Antoinette devolves in experience and reinforces the shackles her mind to an external subject whose directive she ingests [“I must dress like Christophine said”] (Rhys 61). This devolving also symbolizes Antoinette’s automaton nature in a sense that Christophine, as the acting subject, becomes that external subject who uses language as a system’s reboot. The use of the term “girl” not only illustrates Christophine’s observation of Antoinette, but it also marks the starting point for the source of counsel to inject the communicability of a woman’s experience into a “crashing” automaton who is unsure of “what will become” of her. It is precisely Christophine’s language that exposes Rochester’s automaton nature after “walking out” of the narrative [the use of quotations poses the following question: does Christophine really leave the narrative after the confrontation with Rochester?].

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Soon after introducing him to “Bull Blood” (Martinique coffee as opposed to English “piss” water), Rochester violently transmutes Christophine into his antagonist and makes his sentiments regarding her known: “ [Christophine] is a very worthy person no doubt. I can’t say I like her language” (Rhys 50). As mentioned in the previous excerpt, and as disclosed in Rochester’s sentiments, it is important to note that Christophine’s use of language not only brings her out from the margins as a minor character but also, as a rising major character, this makes her a threat to the “white” centers. After his confrontation with Christophine, a “free woman,” Rochester seems to experience a moment of abjection as he walks up and down the room, feeling blood tingling at his fingertips, racing to his heart, which then beat faster (Rhys 97). During this moment where reality, or what a character views as their reality, collapses, it can be suggested that Rochester is experiencing a system glitch and then, like an automaton, verbalizes his error: I spoke the letter I meant to write. ‘I know now that you planned this because you wanted to be rid of me. You had no love at all for me. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I was young, conceited, foolish, trusting. Above all because I was young. You were able to do this to me…’ But I am not young now, I thought, stopped pacing and drank. Indeed this rum is mild as mother’s milk or father’s blessings. (Rhys 97)

This soliloquy induced by Christophine’s language is another example of an automaton character that is devolving and in need of an external subject for guidance. Whereas Antoinette devolves in experience, Rochester, on the other hand, crashes and then has a cathartic expungement of language. Regurgitating a speech out loud illustrates how suffocated Rochester’s consciousness was with repressed language and how such repression up to that point has only resulted in a mouth full of blood. While both Antoinette and Rochester devolve into the primal state of being (“girl” and “because I was young…”), Christophine’s language is not what Rochester utilizes for reboot. Rather, it is a halting of movement (“stopped pacing”) and a drink of rum. From Bull Blood to unspoken words resulting in 140

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a mouth full of blood (“the letter I meant to write”), the dependency on alcohol, which shares the same fluidity as language, becomes the external subject to reboot Rochester. Alcohol, for Rochester, serves as a substitution for maternal and paternal figures (“mother’s milk” and “father’s blessings”)—the conventional familial power structure and whose ideological language a child ingests. The wonders that are revealed by pushing a persona/voice into its omniscient positionality and allowing characters’ actions, as signifying acts, speak volumes. Reducing these once privileged “white” lens to automatons, the literary “I” Antoinette and Rochester utilize is then no more than a dead metaphor that human bodies ingest as they operate, like zombies, the rhetorization of language’s grammar. As readers come to terms with the mechanics of these automatons, it becomes evident that privileging the omniscient narrative as protagonists for being a white Creole woman and Englishman will only be a reinforcement colonial ideology because neither seem to act until they are touched by Christophine’s language. To follow this naive outlook on the protagonist, Christophine is then only read as being a minor character that becomes the “third world difference” in the ethnocentric cosmos imposed upon her (Mohanty 352). Yet, as the first speaking subject in Wide Sargasso Sea, it is Christophine’s ability to command a speaking language throughout the narrative that rejects the power relations that shackle Antoinette and Rochester to the Law. In fact, it is her ability to transgress the structures of power and narrative that solidifies Christophine’s positionality as the protagonist, and not a minor character despite the conventional readings that inscribe her as the abject. The OED defines abjection (n) as the state or condition of being casted down, humbled, degraded, whereas the abject (adj) is that which is expelled, rejected, and casted out (OED Online). Julia Kristeva, in the Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1941), describes abjection as a preservation of what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationships: the “immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (Kristeva 10). While such definition seems abstract and denotes a psychoanalytic signification of the “ego” and its “id,” or Rhetorization

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the unconsciousness, Wide Sargasso Sea demonstrates how human individuals can operate either as an “ego” or the “id” depending on how their subjectivity is inscribed in the banality of English Law. For instance, Kristeva, in her use of “body,” demystifies and places the abject within the context of a grammatical positionality that is (1) opposite of “I” and (2) a pseudo-object. Forcing readers to acknowledge life in the periphery, it becomes apparent that the subject (“ego”) sublates, or represses, the abject—thus making “it” the object of “primal repression (Kristeva 12). Whereas the abject is that which breathes at the margins as conscious individuals masquerade behind an “I,” Christophine as the opposite of the narrating persona/voice transcends the abject from the pseudoobject to the subject positionality. As language becomes the medium in which hierarchical structure, or structures if looking at the state and its institutions, of power are perpetrated (Introduction to The Empire Writes Back 7), is it not Christophine’s rejection of the “truth,” “order,” and “reality” that are established by the narrating persona/voice that marks her as an effective postcolonial figure? Setting in motion an imperative that acknowledges Christophine’s as the first interpreter and named speaking subject of the text, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states that Christophine cannot be contained by the novel: “which writes a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native” (Spivak 253). Further transgressing the conventionalities of the narrative structure, the etymology of protagonist, in ancient Greek, is the actor who plays the first part—the leader—in a piece of work (OED Online). Combined with the ways in which the narrative organizes its character’s actions, this deeper meaning of how the protagonist comes to life in art, and particularly in the novel, thus solidifies Christophine as the postcolonial figure of Wide Sargasso Sea. Giving her space as the protagonist, Christophine emerges as a postcolonial figure for penetrating the imperialistic English language with her Martinique patois: “because she pretty like pretty self” (Rhys 9). Grammatically built as the linguistic caricature of the “Third World Woman,” Christophine reveals how hyperconscious she is 142

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of the antagonist positionality that the white Creole woman and Englishman centers impose upon her. An antagonist is the main character opposing the protagonist in a drama or other narrative (OED Online). The use of “main” is misleading because it guides one to assume that the antagonist is always a leading character; however, it is useful to look at how this same usage can also indicate a specific threat to the narrative’s progress. For the antagonist can also be a person who holds an opposing view to another, or an opponent in a controversy, politics, etc. (OED Online). In a provocative interpretation, one can view Wide Sargasso Sea as a novel where the once omniscient narrator personifies and has direct contact with its characters. In doing so, the “all knowing” and infinitive narrator now has the opportunity to alter the reader’s interpretation of Christophine through the relation of actions and events. In fact, as the “white” centers force Christophine into the antagonist positionality, this alteration in narrative structure reinforces colonial ideologies by creating a linguistic other. Aside from being the first acting character, Christophine is also the first speaking character to vocalize her consciousness of sociopolitical positionality: ‘No more slavery!’ She had to laugh! ‘These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got magistrate. They got fine. They got jailhouse and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones—more cunning that’s all.’ (Rhys 15)

Equivalent to sharecropping and vagrancy laws to the Postbellum South of the United States of America, Christophine exposes the legislative hypocrisy in the botched enterprise in England’s emancipation of enslaved Africans. After receiving orders to magically produce a garment for Antoinette, Christophine’s rant not only exposes how language (“Letter of the Law”) is the master’s tool in keeping African’s enslaved post-emancipation, it is also a testament to her resistance against colonial structures of power. The use of magistrate, fine, jailhouse, chain gang, and a tread machine to mash up people’s feet provides insight to the apprenticeship period post-emancipation and its aim to chain black bodies to an Rhetorization

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inferior positionality in English society. Rhys’s use of Christophine as a talisman in the white Creole woman and Englishman centers is a representation of this botched enterprise. As a result, Christophine, the postcolonial figure, can only be linguistically interpreted and conveyed as the other. However, it is precisely her consciousness of this use of language to perpetrate hierarchical structures of power that allows Christophine, as a free woman, to emerge as a postcolonial figure while leaving Antoinette and Rochester shackled to language of the English Law. It is not only Christophine’s consciousness of and vigilance to question, and defy, colonial structures of power that distinguishes her from the narrating voices. In fact, there is significance in her freedom to be able to “leave” the island, and the narrative for that matter, in contrast to Antoinette and Rochester’s enslavement to the English Law. Readers observe this distinction when Antoinette discloses how she can no longer claim ownership over her wealth: ‘He will not come after me. And you must understand I am not rich now, I have no money of my own at all, everything I had belongs to him.’ ‘What you tell me there?’ [Christophine] said sharply. ‘That is English law.’ [Christophine] retorts, ‘Law! That Mason boy fix it, that boy worse than Satan and he burn in Hell one of these fine nights. Listen to me now and I advise you what to do… (Rhys 66)

In this excerpt, it becomes apparent that Antoinette’s wealth transforms her into “pretty self,” or the commodified subject whose exchange value became the golden ticket for the highest bidder that would marry her—Marionette. When she utters, “everything I had,” this includes her monetary wealth; however, this insinuates that Antoinette also lost her innermost property: her-self. If Antoinette exposes her enslavement to the English Law, how can she be the postcolonial figure? Indeed the narrative will continue with her as a main character, yet her presence will be a reminder of two things: (1) the narrative inscribes as property to Rochester and (2) the narrative places Rochester in a higher positionality. In such an eminent position, Rochester thus replaces Christophine as Antoinette’s external subject—the source 144

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of counsel. After pointing out “that Mason boy” as the culprit, Christophine’s vigilance propels her to inject Antoinette with a language of communicable experience in hopes that she, too, can escape the English phallocentric structure. One could even suggest that Christophine is the ventriloquist to Marionette and uses language as a medium to counsel Antoinette—manifesting into a ventriloquist-doll relationship. Such an escape would never occur because Christophine’s replacement deems her advisement frivolous and Antoinette’s fate is already sealed within the narrative. While Christophine is nurturing to Antoinette, it is her persistence to defy Rochester that exposes the transgenerational effect that English Law has had on “white” subjectivity. By questioning his intentions of marrying Antoinette, Christophine is the leading character, the detective if one chooses, that unravels the mechanics of Rochester’s colonial nature: ‘‘It’s she won’t be satisfy. She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don’t come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don’t come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it’s you come all the long way to her house—it’s you beg her to marry…what did you do with her money, eh?’ Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said ‘money.’ I thought, of course, that is what all the rigmarole is about. I no longer felt dazed, tired, half-hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend myself. (Rhys 95)

Throughout this excerpt, Rochester remains lifeless as an automaton and a placeholder for the Englishman’s character type. It is as though Christophine’s language penetrates Rochester and hypnotizes him while uttering the words Antoinette, as a doll, is unable to enunciate. Inducing his cathartic episode, this confrontation with Rochester allows Christophine to address two specificities of English Laws: (1) the principle that all of a woman’s property became her husband’s after marriage and (2) the common law of patrilineal inheritance. This is seen in the imagery of a “house,” its geographical distinction between England and Rhetorization

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Jamaica, as well as Rochester’s need to travel to the Caribbean for the purposes of marrying a female individual with monetary wealth like Antoinette. The significance of money not only symbolizes how radically human subjectivity partook in the grammar of trade, but also how bodies ingested this monetary value as the source of their identity. In fact, the reason Rochester feels threatened and must defend himself is not to vanquish his antagonist, but in response to Christophine’s hissing: “her money.” To question the whereabouts of Antoinette’s money is to also highlight that her monetary wealth was never Rochester’s to begin with. Therefore, Rochester must defend his-self because it is Antoinette’s wealth that engenders life into his subjectivity. However, as their access to monetary gains is inscribed in English Law, Rochester and Antoinette’s subjectivity is thus linguistically chained to the common laws that police land, bodies, and identities. After realizing the threat of Christophine as a free woman, Rochester’s need to get rid of her, from the island and the narrative, can be seen as a desperate attempt to use language to contain the “third world difference.” Reading Fraser’s letter out loud, like an automaton regurgitating someone else’s language, Rochester threatens Christophine’s freedom, or so it is believed: ‘I have written very discreetly to Hill, the white inspector of the police in your town. If she lives near you and get up to any of her nonsense let him know at once. He’ll send a couple of policemen up to your place and she wont get off lightly this time...You gave your mistress the poison that she put into my wine?’ ‘I tell you already—you talk foolishness’ ‘We’ll see about that—I kept some of that wine.’ (Rhys 96)

It is important to note that Rochester never shows proof that any wine is preserved or whatever wine he has contains the medicine Christophine gave to Antoinette. This misinterpretation of medicine as “poison” is telling and representative of the colonial outlook on religious practices that are non-Christian. As an omniscient persona/ voice that can manipulate the progress of the narrative, Rochester is able to narrativize Christophine’s actions so that she can once again 146

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become a ward of the police state but only after confronting the “white inspector.” Unlike Antoinette, Christophine is conscious of the Law and such awareness engenders the ability to see her-self as a free woman. This is precisely why Christophine is able to “leave” the narrative after stating, “read and write I don’t know. Other things I know” (Rhys 97). However, from the first interpreting and speaking subject to having the last word upon exit, does Christophine ever really leave the narrative? Although Christophine is not in geographical proximity of Rochester and Antoinette, it is her impact and presence as a postcolonial figure that keeps her alive in their unconsciousness. While Rochester needs her as the antagonist to privilege his positionality, the words that Christophine enunciates on behalf of Antoinette become a broken record set on repeat (Rhys 99). Despite initially disliking Christophine’s language, the narrative ends with Rochester having an obsession over her words and uses them to ignite his hatred towards Antoinette. Also, while no “good-bye” is shared between ventriloquist and dummy, Antoinette and Christophine still share a speaker-doll relationship even at the very end of the narrative. In the ending pages of the narrative, where Antoinette narrates her dream, Christophine emerges from the unconscious margin to help her automaton through a fire (Rhys 111-112). One could suggest that if Christophine’s memory lives on in the lived experience of Rochester and Antoinette, the ability to speak back to the “Empire” became the mechanism for her to reserve colonialism back onto the “white” centers. As the potential to misread the rhetorization of language’s construction of unreal people from unreal places arises, it becomes imperative to challenge reading strategies with texts like Wide Sargasso Sea where the distinction between narrator and protagonist blurs. Pushing back Rochester and Antoinette’s privileged lens to their omniscient positionality, it becomes apparent that what was once believed to be dominant “protagonists” are actually automatons caught in the grammatology of the English Law. It is coming to terms with the error of privileging the sublated narrator-protagonist character where readers can then engage with the characterization of Rhetorization

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Rhys’s novel. In doing so, readers will witness how the first speaking subject is neither Antoinette nor Rochester but Christophine—the abject herself. Despite being forced into the antagonist position, Christophine maintains a leading role as an external subject to Antoinette’s lifelessness and threat to Rochester’s subjectivity, or lack thereof (“her money”). Yet, in looking at how she not only breathes at the margin of the text, Christophine transforms the abject from a pseudo-object to subject positionality by commanding a language that penetrates and rejects English colonialism. It then becomes an imperative for readers to question and defy reading strategies that unconsciously import external colonial ideologies into texts and privilege “whiteness” while subjugating the “third world difference” to the periphery. For that which is illuminated by the lighting is just important as the spot lightning is believed to have stroked. Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. “Introduction,” The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practices in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection,” The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abject, Columbia UP, 1941. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” The Discourse of Humanism 12.3/13.1, Duke UP (Spring-Autumn 1984): pp. 333-358. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Theory 12.1, U of Chicago P (Autumn 1985): pp. 243-261. Print. Wagner, Corrina. “The Dream of a Transparent Body: Identity, Science and the Gothic Novel,” Gothic Studies 14.1, Manchester UP (2012): pp. 74-92. Print. “abject, adj. and n. ” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2017, www.oed.com/ view/Entry/335. Web. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017.

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“abjection, n. ” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/340. Web. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017. “antagonist, n. and adj. ” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2017, www.oed. com/view/Entry/8172. Web. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017. “protagonist, n. ” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2017, www.oed.com/ view/Entry/153105. Web. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017. “narrator, n. ” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/125148. Web. Accessed 22 Sept.2017.

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Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies: Countering Foreign Domination Through the Care of the Self in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin Liam Wilby

George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin is a 1953 novel concerning the coming into consciousness of a small village population in Barbados as the island moves towards independence. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes the process of the village-dwellers’ experience moving through “a static phase, then a phase of rebellion, [and] ending in a phase of achievement and disillusionment with society poised on the edge of a new struggle” (Ngũgĩ 110). By observing this progression through the lens of Michel Foucault’s later works on ethics and the care of the self, this chapter shows how Lamming’s novel, as a work of Caribbean literature, opens a space for the formation of a self-image in the Caribbean, one that is in rigid defiance of the region’s years of subjugation under colonial rule. Much has been written on the validity of Foucault’s work in postcolonial studies, most of which echoes Edward Said’s eventual dismissal of Foucault’s “profoundly pessimistic view” of the “unremitting and unstoppable expansion of power” (cited in Nichols 135). In a familiar resonance to all postcolonial subject matter, this conception does not allow the governed to produce their own subjectivity. Robert Nichols, however, argues that such criticism, echoed and extended by both Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, focuses too heavily on Foucault’s earlier works. The claim that Foucault does not allow for the “mechanics of self-constitution within which the governed modify themselves” and “exploit the space of possibilities left open by the mechanics of disciplinarization” is, for Nichols, to ignore the later engagements of Foucault’s writing (Nichols 131). Indeed, Foucault himself acknowledged that he progressed from an analysis of “coercive practices” to the “practices of self-formation 150

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of the subject” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 113). In this chapter, I will take Nichols’ claim as a starting point to analyze In the Castle of My Skin through the lens of Foucault’s works on autonomous subject formation. I argue that Lamming’s representation of the colonial subjugation of the villagers, as well as their subsequent coming into consciousness, becomes an act of caring for the self. This combats foreign domination and constitutes the strengthening of a self-image in the Caribbean. At the beginning of Lamming’s novel, the school’s Empire Day celebrations reveal the mechanisms of disciplinarization present in Barbados. On this day, a visiting inspector delivers a pedagogical speech on the island’s relations with its so-called Mother Country, dictating that the “British Empire…has always worked for the peace of the world” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 30). Positing the relationship of the two countries as the “will of God” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 30), the inspector oversees “intelligence tests” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 27) that manifest as collective acts of memorized chanting—an incantation that students recite to bind their will to the power of the colonizers. As Paquet writes, in the novel “formal education divides the society against itself, by educating individuals to an unthinking reverence for values and symbols that are in direct conflict with community interests” (Paquet 20). This assimilation to the dominant colonial discourse is evidence of what Foucault calls the “discursive practices” that “constitute the matrices of possible bodies of knowledge” (Foucault, The Government of Self and Others 4). In the inspector’s claim that “Barbados is truly Little England!” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 31), Lamming’s novel reveals the “forms of veridiction in these discursive practices” (Foucault, The Government of Self and Others 4), where the will of the ruling powers becomes entrenched in the minds of the colonized as objective truths. The violence of these forms of veridiction is graphically symbolized by the head teacher’s beating of a child. The pupil’s supposed transgression is to laugh “in the presence of respectable people, people of power and authority” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 35). The student is seen as “trying to speak” before being Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies

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silenced by the “leather” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 35). This act symbolizes violent opposition to any counter-discourse to the authority of the school. In this setting, the students are under what Foucault describes as a state “of domination, in which the relations of power…find themselves firmly set and congealed” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 114). Relations of power are present in all interactions, but are only inherently negative when they are not “changeable relations” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 123). In a state of domination, the students become objects on which those in power “exercise an infinite and unlimited violence” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 123). They are not active subjects within relations of power, but are instead beholden to the totalizing power of the colonizers. By drawing on Foucault’s technologies of the self, the ways in which Lamming’s novel becomes a treatise against foreign domination in the Caribbean can be observed. The novel pejoratively describes the inspector as “[s]mooth like the surface of puss” and the head teacher as carrying himself with the “slouching carriage of the leech” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 32), subsequently undermining the authority of these agents of colonial discourse, while also elucidating the colonial system as parasitically draining and wounding. So, too, the text ironically reveals the propaganda present on the island, describing how in “every corner of the school the tricolour Union Jack flew its message” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 28, my emphasis). By revealing this subjugating colonial discourse, the novel becomes an act of caring for the self through truth-telling, which Foucault denotes as “parrhesia.” Parrhesia is defined as “the courageous act of telling the truth…for the purpose of criticising oneself or another” (Robinson). The three axes of parrhesia—“saying everything,” “telling the truth,” and “freespokenness” (Foucault, The Government of Self and Others 75)— constitute a “practice of the self,” as they rely on both “the relation of the subject to truth” (Robinson), and the constitution of subjectivity through speaking this truth. The novel, then, is an act of truthtelling—of parrhesia—that, to use Foucault’s words, is a “practice of liberty” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 114) that strengthens the 152

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self-image of the Caribbean subject by speaking against the state of domination. The potential for the subaltern’s auto-reification of subjectivity is also seen in the children of the novel. The boys’ question the authority of the head teacher, asking why “should a man beat a boy like that? He’s an advantage-taker, that’s what I say” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 39). Disagreeing with the logic of the head teacher, the boys search for a different truth to the one dictated to them. This exemplifies the exact grounds for speaking with parrhesia, where one “must flush out this truth and practice truth-telling” (Foucault, The Government of Self and Others 89). Questioning the logic of the state of domination in which they are implicated, this counterdiscourse is prophetic of a potential for revolt. Although the possibility of the student’s speaking out against authority is limited, by questioning the dominant narrative amongst themselves, they uncover the potential for forming their own selfimage. In response to the Empire Day beating the boys plan to make some of their own “hist’ry” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 40) by stoning the head teacher. The only history the boys currently know is Western history, that of “William the Conqueror an’ Richard an’ all these” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 40). Writing their own history would constitute a symbolic de-centering of the dominant colonial history they are being taught. Performing a Foucauldian reading of Frantz Fanon, Renault shows how this act “reintroduces the colonized not only as a subject of history, but also as a subject who tells his (counter-)history” (Renault 221). Both countering a dominant discourse and forming a self-image, this telling is a “self-representation” (Renault 221). As the boys question the head teacher’s authority, they create the necessary conditions for a “truth discourse” (Renault 221), involving themselves in the Foucauldian “games of truth” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 121) so that they themselves may speak for the Caribbean with parrhesia. The children’s attempt to write their own history takes on a further impetus when we consider the novel’s form. Having initially moved from first to third person narration, Lamming uses the schoolroom scene to write in a dramatic form. This, coupled with the Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies

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introduction of the colloquial register of the village children, disrupts the text in what Brown describes as a “hallowed modernist effort” (Brown 74). Using Woolf’s words, this provides a “transformative challenge to a reader’s habitual frames of understanding” (cited in Brown 75). By challenging common conceptions, Lamming’s use of modernist techniques is a vital accompaniment to the boys’ inquisitive, anti-colonial conversations. Modernism, as Friedman suggests, is generally viewed as a “loose affiliation of aesthetic movements that unfolded in the first half of the twentieth century” (Brown 426). Delineating modernism in this way, however, “privileges Anglo-American modernism,” upholding an imperially dictated “center/periphery” framework (Friedman 426-428). This framework is deconstructed by “polycentric modernities and modernisms at different points in time and in different locations” (Friedman 426). In utilizing modernism’s style after the so-called end of modernism, whilst also being centered in the colonial space of Barbados, Lamming enacts a space/time displacement of the modernist period.1 One of the village boys’ assertions that it “is not a question of know. ‘Tis a question of do” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 39), subsequently becomes particularly poignant. Whatever may be known by Western-centric conceptions of modernity is undone by the doing of Lamming’s novel, which performs an “interruptive, anticolonial reordering of perception” (Brown 78). This is vital when considering the complicated relationship between Caribbean subjects and the English language that was forced on the islands’ inhabitants following colonization. Lamming’s use of a modernist style is a means of using this colonial language to undermine the logic of colonialism. This, I argue, is a further example of how he speaks with parrhesia against foreign domination. In The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Lamming discusses “the migration of the West Indian writer, as colonial and exile, from his native kingdom, once inhabited by Caliban, to the tempestuous island of Prospero’s and his language” (Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile 13). Here, Lamming describes the Caribbean writer as a Caliban figure, who in The Tempest, acknowledges the transgressive power of Prospero’s language: 154

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You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! (The Tempest, 2.1 362-364)

Like Caliban, Lamming manipulates the tools of the colonizer to speak against their prevailing narrative. By using a modernist style, Lamming produces a parrhesiac “discourse of imprecation” (Foucault, The Government of Self and Others 135), a spoken curse that deconstructs the hierarchical binary of colonizer/colonized. During a day at the beach, the village boys show their own potential for creating a transgressive discourse. Amongst the wide range of topics discussed, the boys tell a melancholic tale regarding a triadic relationship between Bambi, Bots, and Bambina. Bambi splits his time happily between Bots and Bambina, has children with both, and they all “live real splendid together” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 126) until a visiting German Christian convinces Bambi to marry one of the women. Bambi marries Bots and soon after turns to drinking heavily and beating both women, before suddenly dying from a heart attack. Ngũgĩ notes that in this story, “Christianity…is seen as disrupting peoples’ lives” (Ngũgĩ 120). The boys acknowledge this and subsequently challenge the presence of Christian practices in Barbados: but it seem it don’t belong to certain people, meanin’ a lot of people put together, like the village for instance. Except for those who live sort of different, who live in the village but don’t sort of belong, except for those, there’s always that said same breakin’ up when marriage makes his appearance. I don’t know. I only know I ain’t ever goin’ get married. (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 13)

Here, Trumper argues that the Christian practice of marriage is incompatible with the lives of the villagers. The only village inhabitants that it is suitable for are those that, as Trumper says, already “don’t sort of belong.” As discussed above, the school aims to teach the children to revere the practices of the Mother Country. In questioning the compatibility of marriage to the lives of the villager’s, Trumper, therefore, offers a different narrative to Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies

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that of the school—one that counters the myth of Barbados as a “Little England.” This is a re-education that is vital in caring for the self, as “[e]ducating oneself and taking care of oneself are interconnected activities” (Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3 55). Foucault calls this act of caring for the self “alethurgy”; that is, “the manifestation of truth as the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable or forgotten” (Foucault, On the Government of the Living 7). Importantly, “there is no exercise of power without something like alethurgy” (Foucault, On the Government of the Living 7). In Barbados, the power of foreign bodies such as the church is derived from a colonial alethurgy that the boys challenge in their assessment of marriage. If, as Nichols suggests, the aim of postcolonial theory is to “‘detranscendentalize’ Western forms of knowledge…to deconstruct, essentially, the Western logos of superiority” (Nichols 115), then, in their rejection of the institution of marriage, the boys perform a postcolonial alethurgy that undermines the matrices of truth dictated by the colonial powers. Spivak’s claim that Foucault’s work ignores “the necessity of the difficult task of counterhegemonic ideological production” (cited in Nichols 129) can, therefore, be tempered. The boys perform an alethurgical act, which when understood as a technology of caring for the self, becomes a postcolonial theoretical practice that produces the “reversibility of movement” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 114) in existing power relations. Involving themselves in alethurgy, the boys open a space for autonomous subject formation. The changes in Bambi’s character are explained as resulting from “something going off pop” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 134) in his head. Discussing this “internal implosion” (Edwards 71), the boys attempt to restructure an internalized thought process currently imbricated with colonial veridiction. For Foucault, caring for the self is an “ascetical practice” that is “an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 113). This asceticism (askēsis) is a “cultivation of the self” (Foucault, Ethics 99) that is set in contrast 156

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to Christian asceticism, which is a means of “self-renunciation” (Foucault, Ethics 228). Owing to the Christian practice of marriage, Bambi enacts a “refusal of the self” that causes a popping in his head (Foucault, Ethics 245). It is this that the boys suggest results in him becoming “a different man” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 135), most evident in his uncharacteristic abuse of his two partners. Rejecting marriage as a “self-renunciation,” the boys perform an act of caring for the self that does not lead to the psychic self-denial of something going pop in the head (Foucault, Ethics 228). Instead, they educate themselves against the dominant Christian narrative, working towards the self-cultivation of subjectivity. The novel also highlights the difficulty of self-formation within the colonial setting. The boys note how they need further education to continue the alethurgical processes that come from askēsis: “Perhaps we would do better if we had good big words like the educated people. But we didn’t” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 145). Education is key, then, but the institutional education available to the boys takes the form of colonial propaganda, causing what Edward’s calls a “psychic repression” (72). This is described with violent imagery in the novel: “you could slaughter your feelings as you slaughtered a pig. Language was all you needed” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 146). Although education may prevent the popping in the head that makes you a “different man” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 135), the only education available to the boys involves assimilation to Western forms of knowledge. This is evident in the nautical imagery used, where educating oneself is likened to being a “captain on a ship” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 146), symbolically placing the colonial subjects in the position of slave traders during the middle passages. It appears that it is only through assimilation to colonial forms of knowledge, then, that an education that prevents the popping in the head can be received. Contrary to this, through an interaction with a fisherman the novel reveals possible alternate modes of education. Initially, the boys’ fear of the fisherman means that they mythically inscribe him with belittling powers akin to colonial agents: “There was something powerful and corrective about his big figure…He wasn’t the sort Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies

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of person you looked at without feeling terribly little” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 140). Soon after, this appearance is deemed false: “he was only big and strong but he was one of us. His anger was human…Some hours ago we had discovered a giant. Now we had discovered a man” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 144). As Ngũgĩ suggests, the revelation of the fisherman’s humanity reveals his vulnerability (Ngũgĩ 119). This de-mythologizing of the fisherman is an alethurgical discovery that symbolizes the potentially transgressive power of certain educational experiences. Earlier, for example, the students discuss how only a body double of the King of England appears in public. This regal simulacrum invokes a mystery that is linked to the actions of the Mother Country: “The English… were fond of shadows. They never do anything in the open” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 47). If experiencing the humanity of the fisherman lifts the veil from his giant-like appearance, then the shadowy actions of the colonizers may also be revealed through such an alethurgical process. Something similar occurs later in the novel, where during a riot the seemingly omnipotent white landowner’s vulnerability is revealed to a villager: “He had never seen or imagined Mr. Creighton could look like that” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 198). In this way, alethurgy undermines the so-called truths of colonial discourse, but causes neither a renunciation of the self— the harbinger of popping in the head—nor an assimilation to the pedagogical aims of the colonizers. It is important not to conflate caring for the self with an individualist ideology. The neocolonial aspects of the latter position are revealed through the character of Mr. Slime. The villager Pa initially heralds Slime as a potential liberator: “he say in the speech he speak the other night how he goin’ to make us owners o’ this land” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 71). Slime’s association with “Moses” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 70), however, arouses suspicion by linking him with a religious institution incongruent with the villager’s lives. Slime, as representative of an individually minded “neocolonial black bourgeoisie” (Edwards 72), sells the land to wealthy natives, causing many villagers to be displaced. As 158

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such, he does not create fluid relations of power, but instead only manages to shift the parameters of the villager’s subjugation. Against this individualism, caring for the self can be a means towards greater unity amongst colonized subjects. Foucault diametrically opposes individualist thinking and caring for the self through a story of Socrates, who chastised subjects that prioritize their wealth over their self-care (Foucault, Ethics 93; The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3 44). This feeds into a caution against the simple fact of liberation alone as a means of freeing subjects: When a colonial people tries to free itself of its colonizer, that is truly an act of liberation […] But as we also know […] this act of liberation is not sufficient to establish the practices of liberty that later on will be necessary for this people, this society and these individuals to decide upon receivable and acceptable forms of their existence or political society. (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 113-114)

The “slimy” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 278) actions of the individualist Slime are not practices of liberty that will define a society beneficial for others. Taking care of the self, however, is seemingly a paradoxical “care for others,” as the practice of askēsis produces a self-mastery that prevents one from being a “slave to their desires” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 199). Self-care, then, effaces a neoliberal drive for individual wealth, thus opening a space for better “interindividual relationships” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 118). Slime has not mastered his desire, symbolized by the affair he has with the head teacher’s wife (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 54-55). He has not cared for his self and thus is unable to care for others as a means of building greater unity amongst the colonized subjects. As well as the criticism of Slime, the end of the novel is also critical of Trumper’s narrow ideology. Upon returning from the United States, Trumper at first appears to be an important agent of alethurgical processes, being the first to show G the “tremendous injustice in the transaction” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 279) of the land. Lamming, however, also treats Trumper’s pan-African belief in his “people” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 287) with suspicion. Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies

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When showing G the music of Paul Robeson, for example, Trumper recites the words: “Let my people go” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 286). As with Slime, the association of Trumper with Moses is complicated by the negative impact of Christianity on the island. The reasons for this are shown through G’s thoughts during his conversation with Trumper: Whatever he suffered his assurance was astonishing. He had found what he needed and there were no more problems to be worked out. Henceforth his life would be straight, even, uncomplicated. He knew the race and he knew his people and he knew what that knowledge meant. (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 290)

As Brown notes, Lamming shows the “need for communal action against the forces of socioeconomic oppression and exploitation— but refuses the ideological closure that he [Trumper] advocates” (Brown 99). Trumper’s concrete “knowledge” is untenable with the perpetually ongoing process of caring for the self, where one’s education must continue into adulthood—a mature education that Foucault denotes as “Erwachsenerziehung” (Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3 50). Significantly, during his conversation with G, Trumper only remembers the day the boys spent at the beach, with a “strange quality of irrelevance in his voice” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 292). This was an important alethurgical day that, when dismissed by Trumper, highlights the limitations of an absolute ideology that does not enact Erwachsenerziehung. Differently to Trumper, the novel suggests that the Lamming figure of G will continue the Erwachsenerziehung necessary to provide a dynamic criticism to colonial forms of knowledge and open a space for greater unity amongst colonized subjects.2 This is evident in the novel’s final conversation between G and Pa. Pa’s consistent willingness to consider “how things make a change” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 77), as he says, means he maintains a malleable outlook, allowing for “more diverse horizons than the narrow homogeneity of Trumper’s ‘My People’” (Brown 99). By ending the novel with a conversation between this pair, it is with an explorative mind that G is sent “into the wide wide world” (Lamming, Castle 160

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of My Skin 294). So too, the partially autobiographical G leaving the Caribbean at the novel’s end, echoes Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Just as G ends the novel ready to say “farewell, farewell to the land” (Lamming, Castle of My Skin 295), the Joycean figure of Stephen Dedalus leaves “home and friends” to “encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my [his] race” (Joyce 288). As with the form of the novel, Lamming uses the tools of modernism for his own ends. Gikandi discusses the presence of the “Joycean concept of self-development in the literature of colonial disenchantment” (Gikandi 423) and here, G’s similarities to Stephen allow the novel to be read as a Joycean kunstlerroman. By writing of his own development, Lamming has made himself his own aesthetic object. This is an act of caring for the self, as the self is “something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity” (Foucault, Ethics 232). This care of the self through writing is a practice of liberty that, unlike Slime, allows Lamming to care for others. As he himself wrote, the West Indian subject “became, through the novelist’s eye, a living existence…It is the West Indian novel that has restored the West Indian peasant to his true and original status of personality” (Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile 39). Giving the villagers personhood, Lamming’s novel speaks with a parrhesiac “agonistic discourse” (Foucault, The Government of Self and Others 133) that effaces Western notions of colonial subjects as “primitive,” thus challenging an “unexamined acceptance of a racial hierarchy” (Brown 77-78). This opposition to foreign domination opens a space for the strengthening of a Caribbean identity outside of an imposed quasi-hierarchy. In the Castle of my Skin does not posit the Caribbean writer as the only agent necessary to liberate colonized subjects from their state of domination. Indeed, the unresolved differences between G and Trumper means a critical enquiry into how to counter the matrices of colonial rule remains open. The Caribbean novel is instead presented as one way of caring for the self so that one can speak with parrhesia against colonial domination. The modernist form of the novel, whilst performing a deconstruction of the hierarchical center/periphery Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Studies

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binary of Eurocentric modernism, allows the act of reading the text to become an act of caring for the self. As a challenging parrhesiac document, it catalyzes alethurgical processes that undermine dominant colonial narratives, thus creating a counter-discourse that strengthens the possibility of colonial subjects forming a self-image. Notes 1. 2.

Friedman cites The Modernist Studies Association framing of modernism as “roughly the 1890s-1940s.” Paquet gives evidence that the novel describes a world Lamming “knew intimately as a child in Barbados.” So too, the character of G follows Lamming’s own move from Barbados to Trinidad. G, then, can be read as a semi-autobiographical rendering of the author. See, Paquet 13.

Works Cited Brown, J. Dillon. Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. U of Virginia P, 2013. Print. Edwards, Nadi. “George Lamming’s Literary Nationalism: Language between The Tempest and the Tonelle.” Small Axe, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2002, pp. 59-76. Print. Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Translated by Robert Hurley. Penguin BooksLtd, 2000. Print. __________. On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France 1979-1980. Ed. Michael Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. __________. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Translated by J. D. Gauthier. Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 12, 1987, pp. 112-131. Print. __________. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. __________. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. Penguin, 1990. Print. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2006, pp. 425-443. Print. 162

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Gikandi, Simon. “Preface: Modernism in the World.” Modernism/ Modernity, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2006, pp. 419-424. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin Books, 1996. Print. Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. Addison Wesley Longman Ltd, 1998. Print. __________. The Pleasures of Exile. Michael Joseph Ltd., 1960. Print. Nichols, Robert. “Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault: Survey of a Field of Problematization.” Foucault Studies, Vol. 9, 2010, pp. 111-144. Print. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet Paquet. The Novels of George Lamming. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1982. Print. Renault, Matthieu. “A Decolonizing Alethurgy: Foucault after Fanon.” Foucault and the History of Our Present, Edited by Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 210-223. Print. Robinson, Bob. “Michel Foucault (1926-1984).” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucault/ Web. Accessed 28 April 2017. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Homecoming: Essays of African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics. Lawrence Hill & Company, 1972. Print.

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Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet: “A Photograph” Robert C. Evans

Although the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is now widely considered one of the most important poets of the modern period, his international fame came only after his death. The first comprehensive English translation of his works appeared in 1961. Astonishingly, however, more than twenty separate volumes of translations have appeared in the years since then. Cavafy’s great current reputation has resulted from various overlapping factors. First, he is an exceptionally talented stylist and craftsman. The power of his works comes through forcefully even in translation, and even in many different translations. Yet readers who know Greek (including many of his translators themselves) often assert that no translations can really do justice to the power of the original texts. Secondly, the breadth and depth of Cavafy’s current standing as a poet is undoubtedly due, in large part, to the frankness with which he treats homosexual themes. Whereas much “gay” poetry from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can seem cloyingly overwrought and embarrassingly precious, Cavafy (like Whitman) was one of the first gay poets to write in ways that seem refreshingly realistic and straightforward. He was one of the first and one of the few writers of his time to treat gay themes in ways and in language that seem both surprisingly modern and somehow also timeless.1 But interest in Cavafy is probably also due, in part, to what might be called the “postcolonial” dimensions of his work. Although he is probably best known for his “gay” poems, his favorite subjects may actually have been historical. He was especially interested in the complex relations among the various cities, countries, cultures, and empires that, over many centuries, have grown up around the Mediterranean Sea. These included ancient Greece, Hellenistic Greece, classical Rome, the Byzantine empire, ancient and modern Egypt, and the dominance of Christianity and Islam, to mention 164

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just a few of the many cultures depicted in Cavafy’s poems. The lands surrounding the Mediterranean have been some of the most contested—and some of the most frequently and variously colonized—in the history of the planet. The ancient Greeks dominated the area at one point, but eventually they were supplanted by the ancient Romans: the colonizers became the colonized. The Greeks and Romans, however, also had to deal with civilizations that had been in place long before their own (especially ancient Egypt), and the pagan Greek and Roman cultures eventually both lost power to the growing and ultimately dominant influences of Christianity and Islam, which in turn came into often violent conflict with one another. In short, Cavafy inhabited a part of the planet that, perhaps more than any other, has seen empires come and empires go, leaving behind them a long legacy of colonial and postcolonial histories and influences. Most importantly, however, Cavafy took a deep and strong interest in all these matters. The rise, falls, and intermixtures of various cultures are evident everywhere in his poetry. Cavafy Himself The postcolonial aspects of Cavafy’s poetry are hardly surprising. Cavafy was, after all, a strikingly cosmopolitan figure, both in his cultural background and in his personal experiences and interests. He was born in 1863 into the small but important Greek community living in Alexandria, Egypt. As its very name suggests, Alexandria had been founded by the famous Greek colonizer Alexander the Great, whose empire once spread over much of the known world. Eventually Alexandria was dominated by the Romans, then by Islam, then (briefly) by Christians, then by Napoleon, and then finally (at the time of Cavafy’s birth) by the British. In short, Cavafy was born into one of the most important, and one of the most frequently colonized, cities in the world. What’s more, as he grew up he became fascinated by all these periods in the city’s and the region’s history. But Cavafy was hardly interested only in Egypt or the Mediterranean. In his youth, he lived for years in England (his father, a merchant, actually acquired British citizenship) during a period when Britain was the most powerful colonial power on earth. Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet

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The Cavafy family (minus the father, who had since died) returned to Alexandria in 1877, but they had to flee to Constantinople when an anti-colonial rebellion broke out in Egypt in 1882—a rebellion forcefully suppressed by the British (whose bombardment of the city destroyed the family’s apartment). By 1885, Cavafy was back in Alexandria, where he lived for the rest of his life. He obtained employment in a British-run colonial office, where he worked for the next thirty years. Yet despite his long residence in Egypt, Cavafy wrote in Greek, was a member of the local Greek community, and had a strong and enduring interest in Greece and all things Greek during a time when Greece itself was in the throes of various anti-colonial and postcolonial experiences. Cavafy, today, is considered one of the greatest of all Greek (not Egyptian) poets, even though he rarely visited Greece. It is hard to think of a modern life that better illustrates the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism than Cavafy’s. Postcolonialism in “New” Poems by Cavafy Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Cavafy’s work, at least for anyone primarily interested in literature (that is, in arrangements of words intriguing first and foremost as memorable arrangements of words) is its striking originality. This is especially true (as I have already suggested) of the “gay” poems from the latter half of Cavafy’s career. In fact, a whole new collection of poems has recently become available in English thanks to the efforts of Cavafy’s latest translator, Daniel Mendelsohn. His impressive new edition of Cavafy’s Complete Poems contains an entire section devoted to a group of so-called “Unfinished Poems” (355-94). These works have also been published separately in a volume edited by Mendelsohn and titled The Unfinished Poems, subtitled The First English Translation (hereafter abbreviated as “UF”). The so-called “Unfinished Poems” are actually highly polished works and would almost certainly have been published by Cavafy if he had lived longer. They exemplify the full range of his interests, including not only new poems about same-sex desire but also new poems about his historical and philosophical interests. 166

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In his introduction to the stand-alone volume devoted entirely to these works, Mendelsohn notes that the term “Unfinished Poems” may be misleading if it suggests works that are not up to Cavafy’s highest standards. These are not, he points out, immature juvenilia or ill-crafted rough drafts that Cavafy might have discarded or substantially revised. Instead (Mendelsohn observes), these texts “represent the last and greatest phase of the poet’s career”; they are “serious works of art in themselves, the deeply wrought products of a great poetic consciousness at its peak” (UF ix). There is, Mendelsohn continues, “persuasive evidence that Cavafy considered the thirty drafts presented here as work he eventually meant to be recognized and published” (UF x). As Mendelsohn accurately puts it: Readers encountering these Unfinished Poems will immediately see how fully they partake of Cavafy’s special vision, in which desire and history, time and poetry are alchemized into a unified and deeply meaningful whole. Part of the excitement of reading these Unfinished Poems for the first time comes, indeed, from the way they seem to fit into the existing corpus, taking their place beside poems that are, by now, well known; there is a deep pleasure in having, unexpectedly, more of what one already loves. But a great deal of the excitement generated by the Unfinished Poems derives, even more, from the new “light,” as the poet put it, that they now shed on existing work— on our knowledge of the poet, his techniques, methods, and large ambitions. (UF xi-xii)

It is largely to those “techniques” and “methods” that I now wish to turn, for it is mainly thanks to those technical, formal, and stylistic aspects of Cavafy’s writing that I think it is fair to call him a “postcolonial” poet. In his best works—especially in the works dealing with “homosexual” themes—he strikes off in directions that seem remarkably and memorably his own. He writes in ways that seem strikingly at odds with what had come before him, especially in preceding British literature—a literary tradition that he knew quite well. As Peter Jeffreys (a major Cavafy scholar) has recently shown, Cavafy was intimately familiar with the work of the various British “aesthetes” (not only poets but also painters and writers of Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet

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prose) of the late nineteenth century. Cavafy had lived in Britain during the time when interest in such art was at its peak, and there is concrete evidence that Cavafy knew this work well.2 In particular, Jeffreys sees a strong influence by Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), the prominent English poet, on Cavafy’s own verse. Swinburne’s poetry is not read very widely or enthusiastically today, but in his own time it was well known and ultimately much appreciated. Swinburne was at first considered scandalous but was eventually widely admired. Jeffreys notes that both Constantine and his brother John (who also wrote poetry) were “well versed” in Swinburne’s writings (“Aesthetic” 62). And Jeffreys quotes another scholar (Murray G. H. Pittock) who observes that Swinburne was “the most sedulously imitated of poets for twenty years after the appearance of [his] Atalanta in Calydon [1865]” (“Aesthetic” 62). Jeffreys also notes that despite “the censure aroused by his risqué verse, [Swinburne] was even favored by many to succeed Tennyson as Poet Laureate” (“Aesthetic” 62). When Jeffreys discusses Cavafy as an imitator of British poets, it is mainly Swinburne whom he mentions. Jeffreys argues that “Cavafy’s debt to [Swinburne] has been largely ignored” (“Aesthetic” 62). He notes that Swinburne wrote about many of the same topics and themes later emphasized by Cavafy, including the sea, pain, lust, pleasure, Hellenistic sculpture, Julian the Apostate, elegiac emotions, Greek subjects and characters, and same-sex erotic motifs (“Aesthetic” 63-65). As Jeffreys states: Swinburne’s radically erotic reveries with their open articulation of homosexual desire offered Cavafy a poetic point of departure conceptually aligned with a most seductive Hellenism. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to explore fully Cavafy’s debt to Swinburne, one may justifiably conclude that Swinburne mapped out a creative course for Cavafy that pointed him in the direction of French decadence and encouraged an open celebration of Greek homoerotic love. (“Aesthetic” 66)

According to Jeffreys’ approach, Cavafy was indebted in numerous ways to one of the major British poets of his time. Swinburne 168

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(Jeffreys claims) laid out a path that Cavafy followed. According to Jeffreys, Swinburne (like Tennyson, as another scholar [Jusdanis] has argued) wrote in ways that Cavafy imitated and to which Cavafy was indebted. Of course, all writers are arguably influenced, in one way or another and to one degree or another, by the writers they read. It seems undeniable that Cavafy read Swinburne, in some ways admired his work, and was in some ways influenced by that work. But many readers may be struck, instead, by the ways and extent to which Cavafy differs from Swinburne (and other British poets like Swinburne). In terms of style, tone, techniques, and achievement, Cavafy seems a poet very much removed from Swinburne and other such poets. If Swinburne symbolizes (to put it crudely) the best poetry produced by the British empire of his time, then Cavafy represents something significantly different. It is in terms of style, especially, that Cavafy can be called a postcolonial poet—a poet who in many ways rejected what the empire (at least as represented by poets like Swinburne) had to offer.3 Cavafy and Swinburne Compared Peter Jeffreys mentions several poems by Swinburne while discussing Swinburne’s influence on Cavafy. Whatever similarities they may share with Cavafy’s poems in terms of themes, they seem radically different in style. Consider, for example, these lines from “The Triumph of Time” (lines quoted by Jeffreys): O fair green-girdled mother of mine, Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain, Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine, Thy large embraces are keen like pain. Save me and hide me with all thy waves, Find me one grave of thy thousand graves, Those pure cold populous graves of thine Wrought without hand in a world without stain. (“Aesthetic” 63)

Jeffreys compares these lines to lines from a poem by Cavafy titled “Voice of the Sea”: Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet

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And if you are young, the longing for the sea will run through your veins; out of its love the wave will say a word to you; it will water your love with a secret fragrance. The sea gives out a secret voice— a voice that enters our heart, and moves it, and delights it. (“Aesthetic” 63)

Admittedly, both poems do deal with the ocean. Also, admittedly, these particular lines by Cavafy do seem more mannered and conventional than the poetry for which he is widely and deservedly admired. But even these lines differ significantly in tone, manner, and technique from Swinburne’s; any similarities in theme seem minor in light of important differences in style. Cavafy’s poem (like most of his best poems) reads much more like prose than like an obviously artificial, contrived poem—the kind of poems Swinburne wrote voluminously. Swinburne apostrophizes the sea as if it were an actual living being; Cavafy addresses another human being, like himself. Swinburne uses language that must have sounded mannered, quaint, and antique even in his own day (“O,” “art clothed”; “thy”; “thine”). Did anyone (except, perhaps, Quakers) actually speak this way in the late nineteenth century? In contrast, it is not hard to imagine an actual human being of Cavafy’s time (or even our own) using the diction Cavafy’s speaker uses. Cavafy’s speaker is one human frankly addressing another; Swinburne’s speaker rhetorically addresses a fictitious mythological entity. If Cavafy had really written poems in the style of Swinburne, he would probably be as unread today as Swinburne is. Instead, he largely rejected the kind of phrasing Swinburne used (phrasing quite common in British poetry of the nineteenth century), choosing instead to develop a style that still, in some ways, seems uniquely his (or at least vastly ahead of its time). It would be easy to cite many other examples of poems by Swinburne that sound almost nothing like the best poems of Cavafy. But my point is basically this: in his best poems, Cavafy did not allow the dominant style of British verse of the nineteenth 170

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century to “colonize” his mind. Swinburne may indeed have been as “aesthete,” but Cavafy seems something more and greater. It is to examples of some of his best, previously untranslated “Unfinished Poems” that I now wish to turn. Cavafy’s “Unfinished” Homoerotic Verse In a poem titled “Anactoria,” one of Swinburne’s most obviously homoerotic works, the poet imitates the famous Lesbian poet Sappho. Here are the opening lines: My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound, And my blood strengthens, and my veins abound. (Swinburne, Major 93)

Contrast those lines with one of Cavafy’s shortest “Unfinished Poems,” titled “The Photograph”: Looking at the photograph of a chum of his, at his beautiful youthful face (lost forever more;— the photograph was dated ’Ninety-two), the sadness of what passes came upon him. But he draws comfort from the fact that at least he hadn’t let—they hadn’t let any foolish shame get in the way of their love, or make it ugly. To the “degenerates,” “obscene” of the imbeciles their sensual sensibility paid no heed. (UF 18)

[5]

[10]

This brief lyric exemplifies the best of Cavafy’s poetry (especially his homoerotic poetry) in numerous ways. For starters, this poem would have struck most of his initial readers as surprisingly modern rather than quaintly archaic, like so many of Swinburne’s poems. The mere fact that it deals with photography—which still seemed innovative and constantly innovating at the turn of the twentieth century—would have made this poem seem genuinely “up-to-date” Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet

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when it was first written and read. Although Cavafy himself was obsessed with the ancient past, his poems set in that past rarely, if ever, sound old-fashioned or archaically “mannered.” In his best works, he brought to his writing about ancient times a quite modern sensibility. Rarely do any of his works sound “old-fashioned,” either in style or in thought. Instead, the ancients who populate his verse sound surprisingly and convincingly modern, both in the ways they think and in the ways they speak. Cavafy rarely romanticizes the past; his perspective is almost always refreshingly realistic (and, in fact, often cynical). That realistic, modern sensibility is especially obvious, quite appropriately, in “The Photograph,” which is set in the very recent past and that deals (as so many of Cavafy’s poems deal) with mutability and ephemeral time. There is, in this poem, the elegiac tone so common in Cavafy’s works, but that tone here (as elsewhere in his writings) never seems saccharine or sentimental. The very use of a word such as “chum” (at least in this translation) seems refreshingly unpretentious. It is hard to imagine Swinburne ever using such a term (and, in fact, he never did).4 The second line in the above quoted poem typifies Cavafy’s work both in style and in theme. As many critics have noted, Cavafy rarely uses elaborate metaphors or similes; his phrasing rarely sounds preciously or artificially “poetic.” When his speakers describe handsome young men, they describe them in ways that leave much to the reader’s imagination, as Cavafy does here.5 If this style risks seeming too general and imprecise, too much lacking in specific details, it rarely if ever sounds artificial or contrived. The mere fact that Cavafy was willing to write poems that were so explicitly homoerotic, especially at a time when such writing was almost nonexistent among other major poets, makes even Cavafy’s most restrained poems sound surprisingly “modern.” By writing as he did, he managed to be frank without being salacious. He was honest but not pornographic (as some obscure homoerotic poets of his era were). By exercising restraint in the ways he describes the “beautiful youthful” men who populate his erotic poems, he treats his poetic subject (and his human subjects) with a dignity that would 172

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have surprised many readers of his time. In this way as in so many others, his homoerotic poetry strikes out in its own fresh directions. The shift from line 2 to line 3 of this poem exemplifies Cavafy’s masterly (and characteristic) use of enjambment—the movement from one line of poetry to another without intervening punctuation. Half the lines in this ten-line lyric employ enjambment—a figure that actually seems fairly low by typical Cavafian standards. Enjambment is one of the devices Cavafy uses to make his poems sound more like prose than like conventionally structured poetry. This enjambment can be seen in the parenthetical interruption in lines 3-4. Here we have yet another example of the “prosiness” of Cavafy’s verse: it is as if we are listening to an actual person thinking and speaking in real time rather than a poet imposing some pre-planned conventional structure on the speaker’s thoughts. Also effective here is the splendid juxtaposition, or sudden shift from one thing to its opposite, as we move from the second line to the third: the “beautiful youthful face,” we abruptly learn, “has been lost forever more,” whether through death or through the inevitable process of aging. One of Cavafy’s obsessive themes, in fact, is this pervasive sense of a “remembrance of things past” or a “search for lost time” (to quote two different ways of translating the title of Marcel Proust’s famous novel). This theme appears in his poems about the distant past, but it definitely also appears in his poems about the recent past, especially when the recent past involved homoerotic desire. Cavafy knew that such desire, in his era, could only ever be impermanent even at the moment it was being felt and expressed. It could only seem ephemeral even in the original moment of thought and feeling, and it definitely could not last into an enduring future. Men who loved men in Cavafy’s day had to do so (for the most part) secretly, furtively, temporarily: this, at least, is the typical mode of such love in Cavafy’s verse. Homoerotic love could only ever be “lost forever more,” at least during Cavafy’s time and place, and especially in 1892. It was in 1895, after all, that Oscar Wilde descended into a legal hell from which he never emerged, and it was in 1924 that Cavafy himself was “outed” by being accused of being “another Oscar Wilde”.6 In any case, by referring to the year Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet

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as “’Ninety-two” rather than “1892,” Cavafy again contributes to the poem’s colloquial, informal, unpretentious tone—a tone distant from the tone of much of Swinburne’s poetry and of much British nineteenth-century poetry in general.7 By the time we get to line 5, we arrive at an explicit statement of the poem’s theme: “the sadness of what passes.” This, as I have already indicated, is one of the key motifs of Cavafy’s poetry in general, and it is very much a central topic of the homoerotic poems. In the Mendelsohn translation, the speaker, having begun as an active observer of the photograph, is now the passive object of a sadness that comes upon him and overtakes him. This line was potentially an opportunity for Cavafy to become saccharine, sentimental, and merely melancholy—to indulge in self-pity. Many British and American poets of his period could not have resisted the impulse; they would have wallowed in the sadness Cavafy merely mentions briefly. It is, once more, the emotional restraint that Cavafy so often demonstrates that can help make him seem so modern. Like Philip Larkin, Cavafy writes in ways that seem instantly accessible, understated, unpretentious, but often tinged with deep emotion. In line 6, just at the half-way point of the poem, this ten-line lyric takes a definite turn. The speaker is suddenly back in the present. He no longer focuses on the beautiful youth of a beautifully youthful past. He now thinks (at least momentarily) about the present and about the “comfort” he now takes from an important detail—a detail that (we will soon see) makes this poem all the more strikingly modern and indeed even defiantly rebellious (and, in that sense, “postcolonial”). It is hard to imagine Swinburne or many of his contemporaries saying what Cavafy is about to say, and it is also difficult to blame them for not being able to be as frank, audacious, and daring as Cavafy is about to be. Even his own poems, after all, could not be widely published or circulated beyond a few of his friends. But the fact that he had the courage to write them at all, and to trust that someday they might be read and appreciated, makes him seem a person of genuinely independent mind. Line 7 is typical of the skill one comes to expect from Cavafy’s best poems. Just when the speaker might seem self-congratulatory 174

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in commending his own defiance (after all, “he hadn’t let” himself be foolishly shamed by his particular kind of love), the poem dramatically stops itself (as the dash indicates) and includes the beautiful youth as well: “they hadn’t let” such shame affect them (italics mine). But of course (in a complex moment typical of Cavafy) it did affect them; otherwise there would be no reason even to mention it. It affected them mentally even if it did not finally prevent them from acting on their desire for one another. Cavafy’s willingness to call such homophobic shame “foolish” makes this poem one of his most outspoken in asserting the genuine dignity and worthiness (whatever the society of his time might have said) of same-sex attraction and “gay” love. Rarely is Cavafy as openly defiant toward, and even contemptuous of, homophobic prejudice as he is in this poem. And it is important that he credits the beautiful youth with a similar defiance: their bond was not only erotic bond but also a bond rooted in a shared rejection of conventional attitudes designed to shame and humiliate them and others like them. In the transition from line 7 to line 8, Cavafy again uses enjambment effectively. The words “get in the way” also seem colloquially “prosy” rather than artificially “poetic.” The plainspoken diction seems entirely appropriate to the plain, honest sentiments. The speaker, becoming blatantly angry in a way that is fairly rare in Cavafy’s verse, has no time for clever, sophisticated, elevated phrasing. He speaks his mind bluntly, and he also implies that if anyone needed to feel ashamed, it was, in fact, the “foolish” people who would have thoughtlessly condemned the two lovers. Their love, he suggests, was never actually “ugly”; if it seemed “ugly” to others, those others had to “make” it seem ugly. The choice to view it that way was theirs, but the speaker and the beautiful youth refused to buckle under such outside pressure. They felt and acted as they chose to feel and act. Line 9 is especially interesting in its initial ambiguity— an ambiguity caused by the structure of the sentence this line begins. The first three words (“To the ‘degenerates’”) seem, at first, to describe the two lovers, even if the description of them is obviously disparaging and highlighted by “scare quotes” that Constantine Cavafy as a Postcolonial Poet

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imply the speaker’s skepticism. But it soon becomes clear that the words “degenerates” and “obscene” do not describe actual obscene degenerates. Instead, these words are treated as words—words that the speaker finally attributes to “imbeciles,” thereby dismissing both the words themselves and the “imbeciles” who speak them with contempt. One often thinks of Cavafy as a mild-mannered poet—a poet of civilized nostalgia, given more to understatement and implication than to overt expressions of anger. Partly for this reason, line 9 seems especially unexpected and, therefore, memorable. Rarely does Cavafy strike out (and strike back) so forcefully at the fools and “imbeciles” who prevented him and others from living freely. Line 10 typifies the effectiveness with which Cavafy often ends his poems. In this case, he is sure to emphasize the lovers in the last line rather than the foolish, imbecilic critics. The last two lines could easily have been structured to say that the sensual sensibility of the lovers paid no heed to words such as “degenerates” or “obscene” spoken by imbeciles. But that hypothetical sentence structure would have given the fools almost literally the last words. Instead, Cavafy reverses the order of the sentence, so that the final line stresses the “sensual sensibility” of the defiant lovers. And what a splendid phrase “sensual sensibility” is! “Sensual” implies physical pleasure; “sensibility” implies an attitude of the mind. The mental and physical are thus combined in two words that resemble each other in sound even as they differ in meaning. But then the final three words bring the whole poem to the kind of forceful but understated conclusion Cavafy is so good at creating. To the censure of imbecilic critics, the lovers “paid no heed.” Cavafy does not end by saying that the lovers “damned the words as idiotic” or “rejected them as deranged” or “spurned them with contempt.” Phrases like those would have granted the critics more power, at the very end of the poem, than the speaker wants to stress. Instead, the lovers simply “paid [them] no heed.” To the lovers, now focused on each other, the critics (almost) do not matter. As this splendid brief poem suggests, Cavafy’s whole body of erotic verse is an implied declaration of independence from the 176

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constraining conventions and constricting culture of his own day. Those conventions and that culture largely resulted from the power of Christianity and Islam in particular, the two dominant religions of the Mediterranean area. In implicitly rejecting both Christian and Islamic strictures, Cavafy was, in this sense as in many others, a postcolonial poet. Outwardly he had to conform to the mores of his time; but inwardly—and occasionally in his actual behavior— he was mentally and spiritually free. That was all the freedom his culture allowed him and others like him. He would have been a happier man, in some ways, during some earlier time, some earlier century, when some different empire, whose values were closer to his own, ruled his region. But during his own lifetime he could only be postcolonial in his mind, not in the ways he openly lived. But the power and present popularity of his “postcolonial” verse has itself helped bring about a new freedom—a freedom he hoped for and foresaw in one of his own most memorable and most moving poems: From all I did and from all I said they shouldn’t try to find out who I was. An obstacle was there and it distorted my actions and the way I lived my life. An obstacle was there and it stopped me on many occasions when I was going to speak. The most unnoticed of my actions and the most covert of all my writings: from these alone will they come to know me. But perhaps it’s not worth squandering so much care and trouble on puzzling me out. Afterwards—in some more perfect society— someone else who’s fashioned like me will surely appear and be free to do as he pleases.

(CP 319)

Notes 1. 2.

For further discussion of this point, see Evans. Jeffreys first laid out his arguments in an article (“Aesthetic”) later reprinted in a book (Reframing Decadence). Since the article is likely

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

to be more easily and quickly accessible to most readers (through JSTOR), as well as more easily searchable as a PDF, I will cite from the article rather than the book. Incidentally, much of what I say here in response to Jeffreys writing about Swinburne could just as easily be said in response to Jusdanis writing about Tennyson. I would argue that Cavafy’s response to Swinburne parallels his response to Tennyson. In both cases, the stylistic difference between him and the English writers strikes me as more interesting than the similarities. Jusdanis, following Harold Bloom is, in fact, attuned to the “anxiety of influence” evident in Cavafy’s response to Tennyson. This is less true of Jeffreys writing about Cavafy’s response to Swinburne. See the easily searchable electronic edition of his Complete Poetical Works issued by Delphi Press. For fuller discussion of many of the typical features of Cavafy’s general phrasing (including both style and themes), see, for instance, the introduction to Mendelsohn’s translation of the Complete Poems. See Dan Chiasson’s “Man with a Past: Cavafy Revisited.” Robert Browning, with his often quite colloquial speakers, sometimes comes closest to Cavafy in this respect.

Works Cited Chiasson, Dan. “Man with a Past: Cavafy Revisited.” The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2009. Web. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/ man-with-a-past. Evans, Robert C. “‘New’ Gay Poems by Cavafy.” Critical Insights: LGBTQ Literature, edited by Evans. Salem, 2015, pp. 146-60. Print. Jeffreys, Peter. “‘Aesthetic to the point of affliction’: Cavafy and English Aestheticism.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2006, pp. 57-89. Print. __________. Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits. Cornell UP, 2015. Print. Jusdanis, Gregory. “Cavafy, Tennyson and the Overcoming of Influence.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 8, 1982, pp. 123-36. Print. Mendelsohn, Daniel, translator. Complete Poems, by C. P. Cavafy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Print. 178

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__________. translator. The Unfinished Poems, by C.P. Cavafy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Delphi Classics, 2013. Print. __________. Major Poems and Selected Prose. Edited by Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh. Yale UP, 2004. Print.

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“An Eviction of Sorts”: Language, Race, and Colonial Liminality in Ireland Peter Robert Gardner

Introduction In 1920, a port town in County Cork changed its name from “Queenstown” to “Cobh” (in the Irish language, pronounced “Cove”). In 1849, the town had been renamed “Queenstown” in honor of Queen Victoria, the ruling monarch of Great Britain and Ireland at the time who, on her maiden visit to Ireland, had landed first at this port. However, by 1920 the mood was somewhat different. The island had witnessed the rise of Irish nationalism, the Gaelic revival,1 and three failed attempts at democratically attaining Home Rule, and was in the midst of the War of Intendance (19191921). Revolutionary fever and anti-colonial nationalism were very much in the air. Overthrowing British imperial rule in Ireland came to mean not merely instituting rule from Dublin rather than London, but also painting the red British post boxes green, institutionalizing Irish as the national language, and attempting to change the names of counties, towns, places, and roads “back” to their “original” Irish names: Kingstown to Dún Laoghaire, Queen’s County to County Laois, Queenstown to Cobh. Decolonizing name changes is fraught with difficulty. Locating the “original” is not always a plausible aim. Places often had multiple names, different names depending on context, and wide varieties of spelling and pronunciation. Place-names tend to change and evolve over time, and older places often were never written down. Numerous linguistic influences, both specially and temporally, also influence this process. As such, decolonizing the map is a challenging exercise. And what if the town or city was founded by the colonial power, ought new names to be produced? What’s more, nationalist rhetoric often entails homogenizing difference within the nation-state. As such, post-independence nationalism can also be a form of domination of a central government over the population. Such ideologies also 180

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heavily influence both the decision to change the place-name and the name that is chosen. Linguistically, the standardization of the national language may produce national homogenizations of placenames, overriding lost local dialects. By way of example, the town of Cobh was known as “Cove” before it became Queenstown: the name “Cobh” is a Gaelicization of the English word, and has no meaning in Irish. But does this older name of “Cove” speak of a long history of colonial domination or nautical interaction and codevelopment in the centuries prior to the invention of the nation, state, and border? And does British domination in Ireland represent colonial imperialism or simply the state domination of the periphery (Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) from a powerful center (the southeast of England)? In this chapter, I discuss language, the (re)naming of places, and postcolonial liminality in Ireland through Brian Friel’s (1981) play Translations. The play is set in 1833, in the fictional small town of Baile Beag, County Donegal, Ireland. It describes the interactions among British army officials and locals of the town at a moment of colonial map-making. Although the play is entirely in English, the English characters speak only English and the Irish characters only Irish, and hence are unable to understand each other. Only the audience and three English-Irish bilingual Irish characters can understand all speakers. Through the play, one of the bilingual characters, Owen, works with Lieutenant Yolland to produce the new, “standardized”2 map of Ireland. British colonial rule frequently utilized such scientific language to legitimize and institutionalize their control over the populations they sought to rule. By discussing the role of colonial map-making, the play explores the effects of British colonial domination on language and place, and the capacity for the act of imperial cartography to produce various forms of domination: political, economic, military, ideological, sexual, cultural, and linguistic. Discussing Ireland’s specific space in postcolonialism, I discuss some of the dimensions of Irish colonialism within Translations.

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Ireland as a Liminal Case of Colonialism

Ireland’s location within debates on postcoloniality has always been—and will no doubt remain—contested, yet its inclusion is vital because of that very contestation. Eóin Flannery (2007)

In terms of colonialism, Ireland is a liminal case (Graham 1994). To exclude it from the history of colonialism would be a loss both to understanding both modern Ireland and the development of the colonial enterprise. However, unreserved inclusion of Ireland on the list of colonized states is equally problematic, due to its comparative wealth, industrial development, inclusion into the United Kingdom’s governance structure, eventual incorporation into racial whiteness (see below), and direct involvement in British imperialism and its colonial project in colonies elsewhere. Ireland frequently functioned as a testing ground for a variety of techniques of colonization that the British government subsequently employed in its other colonies. Settler colonialism is a technique of colonial governance whereby the ruling state relocates members of its own population onto the land - to bring the population under colonial control, appropriate the natural resources and production output of the colonized state, “civilize” its “natives,” as well as other nefarious goals. In the early seventeenth century, the British monarchy embarked upon its first such mission. Known as the Ulster Plantation, the monarch at the time3 planned to attain full control of Ireland by relocating British settlers, largely from the Scottish borderlands. With the “success” of the Ulster Plantation, it became the testing ground for the techniques of colonization that would subsequently be employed in British colonialism elsewhere (Home 2013; McVeigh and Rolston 2009). Similarly, Ireland became an experimentation ground of sorts for many other techniques of colonialization, such as the map, the census, and racial hierarchy, as I discuss below. With other colonized states, Ireland shares experiences and effects of British domination, as well as an overlap of personnel. Both this reality and the interpretation of Irish independence as decolonization led to solidarity between Ireland and other states 182

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pushing for independence, most prominently with India (see O’Connor and Foley 2006; Nagai 2007). Friel hints at this colonial cross-pollination and connection in Translations through the biography of Lieutenant Yolland: I might have been in Bombay instead of Ballybeg. You see, my father was at his wits end with me and finally he got me a job with the East India Company—some kind of a clerkship. This was ten, eleven months ago. So I set off for London. Unfortunately I —I—I missed the boat. Literally. And since I couldn’t face Father and hadn’t enough money to hang about until the next sailing, I joined the army. And they stuck me into the Engineers and posted me top Dublin. And Dublin sent me here. (Friel 1981, 46-47)

Friel draws the reader’s attention to the shared experience of colonialism of India and Ireland through the similarity between the words. “Baile Beag” and “Bombay” are both disyllabic and together form double alliteration4. Coupling the two places linguistically, Friel presents them as two sides of the same colonized coin. An interesting dynamic exists in the relationship between Yolland and Owen in the play. Yolland, a lieutenant with the British army, is much more reflexive and critical about the project of creating the new “standardized” map than Owen, an Irish subject of the British Empire. Although Yolland is unsure of precisely what is problematic about the project, he states that he is “concerned about [his] part in it.” Owen, on the other hand, defends the project from Yolland’s critiques, as well as those from other inhabitants of Baile Beag. Between the two, the English “colonizer” is the voice of dissent, whereas the “colonized” Irish character endorses the colonial scheme. This relationship raises a crucial question relating to Ireland’s coloniality: to what extent does the depth and extent of Irish collusion with, and inclusion in, the colonial project alter its position in relation to the colonial order? The Acts of Union between Great Britain and Ireland were signed in 1800, making Ireland fully part a single “United Kingdom.” This provided Ireland with political representation in the House of Commons in London, incorporating the Irish legislature “An Eviction of Sorts”

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into the government of Great Britain (Jackson 2012). The period of Irish representation in Westminster (1800-1920) was the period that witnessed the greatest rise in British colonization (Darwin 2009). As such, Irish political elites were complicit in a government that oversaw the rise of the British Empire, the wars of conquest, the “Scramble for Africa,” and the ruling of the territories under British control. The Irish were also complicit in the British colonial project in various other roles: as settler-colonialists, army officers, administrators, missionaries, and other imperial roles across the Empire (O’Connor and Foley 2006). Hence, as embodied in the character of Owen in Translations, the Irish were simultaneously both colonizer and colonized. It is also worth noting, however, that the Acts of Union were also a mechanism of domination and control, rather hastily enacted - to pacify an increasingly revolutionary Ireland (Jackson 2012). Influenced and emboldened by the American and French Revolutions in the second half of the eighteenth century, Irish Republicans had launched a rebellion in 1798. The Acts of Union were intended to quell this rebellion and bring the island under complete British control. Furthermore, as McGarry notes, “Ireland was governed through much of the nineteenth century by emergency legislation, the only part of the United Kingdom to have this dubious distinction. Its regime was arguably closer to Britain’s non-white colonies than to Scotland’s” (2012, 131). Michael Hechter (1975) uses the term “internal colonialism” to describe the structure of political, economic, and cultural inequality that has been produced through the uneven historical development of the United Kingdom between the south-eastern English “core” and the northern English and Celtic periphery. However, almost all nations and states, whether colonial or not, have involved the domination of a powerful core over a periphery. Within the “British Isles,”5 both Scotland and Wales were also brought under rule from London through various trajectories, including violent incursions and subjugations, the appropriation of land and settlement, the joining of crowns, the extension of legal jurisdiction, and Acts of Union (Wales in the sixteenth century, Scotland in 1707). As uneven and unequal 184

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as these various arrangements were, little separates a situation of “internal colonialism” from normal structures of domination in statebuilding. As such, Ireland’s (thoroughly unequal) incorporation into the United Kingdom renders it somewhat different to almost all colonized parts of the world. In terms of economic structure, Ireland also diverges considerably from the experience of the rest of the colonized world. At the time of independence, the economic structure of Ireland was much less agricultural (43% in 1911) compared with other colonial states: for example, 72% of India’s workforce was agricultural in 1950, 68% for Malaysia in 1947, and 68% for Ghana in 1960 (Kennedy 1992). Ireland has had a comparatively higher industrial sector; however, this was geographically concentrated in the north-east (in what would later become Northern Ireland). In terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita at the time of independence, Ireland also stands out as disproportionately wealthy compared with other colonized states (Kennedy 1992). However, it is crucial when considering such figures to take into consideration the fact that this wealth was unevenly distributed between colonialists and colonizers, as well as between the industrialized north-east and the rest of the island. At independence, Ireland was certainly an outlier in terms of economic structure, wealth, and stage of capitalist development in comparison with other colonized states (Kennedy 1992). However, in line with the colonial model of capitalism, the means of production were mostly held by the settler-colonial or comprador bourgeoisie (Howe 2000). In Translations, Owen is a liminal character. However, being “amphibian” in terms of language, culture, and relationship to British imperialism renders him not just a “useful tool of empire” (Cronin 2006, 76-77), but also a participant in, and beneficiary of, that colonial system. Similarly, within the world of colonized states, Ireland found itself occupying a space of liminality, being colonized and colonizer, a mouthpiece for and voice against the empire, a tool of imperialism and a banner for decolonization. I contend, however, that Ireland ought to be included within postcolonial studies not despite its liminality but because of its liminality. This problematic, “An Eviction of Sorts”

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multiple character raises interesting and important questions in understanding colonialism and postcolonialism. Imperial Cartography In Translations, Lieutenant Yolland and Owen debate the meaning of the imperial cartographical project upon which they were embarking: YOLLAND: It’s an eviction of sorts. OWEN: We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that? YOLLAND: Not in — OWEN:—And we’re standardizing those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can. YOLLAND: Something is being eroded. (Friel 1981, 52-53)

The colonial mapping and renaming of places by “translating” into English, and “standardizing” to render the area more amenable to British rule is described as simultaneously an eviction and an erosion. An eviction implies a coercive displacement of people from their home. It also infers a claim of possession of the land: eviction requires the evictor to claim legitimate ownership over that which they evict others from. An eviction is also a sudden and violent act. An erosion, on the other hand, is a long-term, gradual yet unremitting form of destruction. Erosion involves a reshaping of the landscape in line with the forces continually working upon it. Although Yolland is working as a colonial cartographer, he has apprehensions over his role. He is cognizant of his position as a deliverer of the eviction notice and a transmitter for forces of erosion. Benedict Anderson (1991) outlined three institutions of power utilized by the colonial states that led to the spread of ideas of nation and nationalism to the colonized world. These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum6. As with many colonial ideas, the map has become universally accepted as a scientific, neutral, even natural way to visualize the world, detached from its historical invention as a tool of colonial domination. Before the map, space was conceptualized in a wide variety of ways throughout the globe. 186

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Many places had multiple or shifting names. Boundaries of power overlapped, moved, or were roughly and divergently marked in particular spaces. Maps produced a range of new phenomena: a two-dimensional, birds-eye-view conception of the land; singular and unchanging names for places and spaces; and definite borders separating counties, states, and nations. This new “cartographic discourse” created a global revolution in governance, control of populations, taxation, military action, and—crucially—the ways in which individuals and groups conceived of themselves and the area they inhabited (Anderson 1991, 175). As mentioned above, lessons in domination learned from Ireland were subsequently adopted and utilized to further the British Imperial project elsewhere. Experimentation with colonial cartography in Ireland illustrated the usefulness of the map in rendering a territory and a population amenable to governance, appropriation of resources, control over the means of production, and military control. In the seventeenth century, the English economist, William Petty (1711), produced his notorious volume, Political Arithmetic. The aim of this new science of “political arithmetic” was to utilize mathematics, statistics, and geography to manipulate populations such that they would be rendered both loyal to, and productive under, English rule (McCormick 2009). The successfulness of this technique of domination resulted in its use in successive colonies. Mapping a territory itself entails multi-layered claims of superiority. The colonizer claims this superiority through the tools of “modern” science. “Rational scientific method” lends itself well to structures of domination. Laws of the universe are understood to be deducible through the application of logic, rationality, and methodology. Scientific logic was commonly used by colonial powers to describe various measures and repressions—even the colonial control of the territory itself—as defensible and legitimate. Furthermore, possession of scientific method itself was held up as proof of the colonizing state’s superiority. Through the map, the colonizer could claim to be able to know the land and people of the colonized territory in a way the colonized population did not (Said 2003). Having gained the power of description over the colonized “An Eviction of Sorts”

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space, the power to describe, locate and articulate the territory was (quite literally) in the hands of the colonizer. This power to describe the territory has linguistic implications. The racist hierarchies of colonialism produced hierarchies of language, wherein the language(s) of the oppressed came to be stigmatized as uncivilized, unscientific, backward tongues, naturally inferior to those of Europe (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). As Hugh, in Translations, puts it: “it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of … fact” (Friel 1981, 52). With “reality” and “truth” dictated by the science of the powerful, the actual place-names and spoken language of the people are made incongruous with the colonizer’s “factual” landscape. Precolonial discourses of the terrain are designated as antiquated, premodern, folklorish; prison bars trapping a culture from “correct” development. Colonizing states legitimized much exploitation, domination, and by couching it in terms of setting the “native” free from their “primitive” cultures, customs, and languages. As a result, colonizing powers, in fact, expressed expectations that their colonized populations should feel indebted to them for offering them “development” (and indignation when it wasn’t forthcoming). As the governing charter for the cartographic project in Translations states, “Ireland is privileged. No such survey is being undertaken in England. So this survey cannot but be received as proof of the disposition of this government to advance the interests of Ireland.” Not only does imperial cartography include an eviction/erosion based on a hierarchy of people, language, knowledge, and landscape; its subjects are to receive it with gratitude. Race, Whiteness, and Sexuality One reason for Ireland’s frequent exclusion from the literature on postcolonialism is racial and geographical. As Clayton put it, some theorists have excluded Ireland from such discussions due to an “unease at categorizing white European Irish Catholics in the same way as Africans and Asians” (1996, 25). It is important, however, to differentiate between different kinds of “unease” in this regard; specifically between those harboring racist anxieties 188

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that somehow including Ireland would be a “lowering” to the level of non-white states. A more defensible unease expresses concern over the potential for color-blinding of postcolonial studies or a diminishing of the importance of racial domination. The latter form of unease is a genuine concern, and one that must be taken seriously in considering colonialism. The construction and implantation of race, racial hierarchy, and racial domination were/are intrinsic to the colonial project (Davis 1997). In this regard, however, Ireland again occupies a liminal space. The categorization of Irish as white, and hence racially homogenous with the British, has not always been the case in the “British Isles.” Racial categories have differed in number, meaning, application, and boundaries in different places across the world, and in each place over time. The notion that Europe was racially homogeneous developed slowly, and was applied with much more hesitancy internally than in its colonies (Bonnett 2000; YuvalDavis 1997; Eze 1997; Miles 2003). Within the “British Isles”, the Irish have not always been considered “white.” In the nineteenth century, popular understandings of race included two separate categories, “Xanthochroi” (fair white peoples of northern Europe) and “Melanochroi” (dark whites of southern Europe). As with other forms of scientific racism, not only were those placed within the different categories considered somehow naturally different, but were also ranked into racial hierarchies with the Xanthochroi conceptualized as the superior race. Within the “British Isles,” this racial line was alleged to run along the Irish Sea. The British were included within the Xanthochroi category (unsurprisingly, given that the designations were made by English anthropologists), whereas the Irish were to be understood as the inferior Melanochroi grouping (Bonnett 1998, 2000; Ignatiev 2009; Jacobson 1999; Ní Shuinéar 2002). In this sense, nineteenth-century British rule in Ireland incorporated a racialized conceptualization of the Irish “native.” The Irish were, however, brought very much into the fold of whiteness during the twentieth century. So much so, that the notion of racial difference across the Irish Sea was buried and forgotten. As such, although colonial raciology did exclude the Irish from access “An Eviction of Sorts”

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to power and resources, their eventual (re?)inclusion into whiteness has permitted Ireland and the Irish with access to various dimensions of white privilege and domination. Furthermore, it is important to note that, even at the height of the Xanthochroi-Melanochroi racial ideology, there was a substantial difference in terms of domination, dispossession, and privilege between being categorized not-quitewhite and non-white. In Translations, a relationship develops between the British soldier and imperial cartographer, Lieutenant Yolland, and an Irishspeaking Baile Beag local named Máire. As they do not speak each other’s language, their interaction is restricted to vocal tone and timbre, physicality, and non-verbal communication. Yolland and Máire’s relationship is characteristic of sexual attraction between colonizer and colonized, and, hence, asymmetrical. YOLLAND: I want to tell you how beautiful you are, curly-haired Máire. I would so like to tell you how beautiful you are. MÁIRE: Your arms are long and thin and the skin on your shoulders is very white.

In terms of physicality, Yolland fetishizes Máire’s physical and performative Irishness, focused on her “curly-haired” exoticism. This echoes an earlier discussion within the play. Amidst translations of Irish place names, Yolland learns that Máire’s surname, “Chatach,” means “curly-haired” (Friel 1981, 44). In this way, sexual conquest and territorial conquest are conflated, wrapped up in language, exoticism, and cartography. In discussing the production of colonial maps, Anne McClintock describes how the patriarchal “male, reproductive order,” the “white economic order,” and the “political order of empire” come to “take intimate shape in relation to each other” (1994, 4). Something of this colonial framework is reflected in the relationship of Yolland and Máire. Yolland fetishizes Máire Irishness. His attraction is wrapped up in his desire to conquer Irishness—the Irish language, Irish places, and place-names. He embodies the imperial male desire for the exotic, longing to conquer new land, even to “go native.” 190

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As McClintock points out, “the transmission of white, male power through the control of colonized women” is a core governing theme of Western imperialism (1994, 1-3). Intersections between patriarchal, racial, and colonial domination took on a broad variety of forms. Relationships between colonizing men and colonized women, such as that of Yolland and Máire in Translations, involve multiple and intersecting, yet often masked, power asymmetries. MÁIRE: Say anything at all. I love the sound of your speech. […] YOLLAND: Go on—go on—say anything at all—I love the sound of your speech.

As neither character can understand the language that the “other” is speaking, communication between the two is restricted to the sound, inclinations, and tonality of speech. As such, “the established order of language is undermined by the new meanings attached to the words they utter. The sound of the words is more important than the meaning” (Szabo 2009, 135). However, the limitations of language are further heightened by the fact that, although the characters state exactly the same sentence, their love for each other’s speech have fundamentally different qualities. Máire’s attraction to Yolland mirrors her longing for development and modernity. She desires his Britishness, his commanding voice, his southern English poise, his whiteness. Máire expresses physical and social difference through hands: in comparison to her own: “My hands are that rough; they’re still blistered from the hay. I’m ashamed of them.” She remarks that Yolland’s hands are “Soft hands; a gentleman’s hands” (Friel 1981, 78, 66). Máire’s love is a love for modernity, for progress. Her love for his speech—his English—is associated with a desire for development, for progress. She loves his whiteness. Colonial domination has a tendency to produce subjects who internalize the colonized desire for “civilizing:” a desire for being “saved” by the colonial master (Fanon 1972, 2004). Fanon perceived a desire among colonized women for “civilizing” the colonized population by reproducing “up” the colonial racist

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hierarchy, under the notion that “the race must be whitened” (1972, 33). Again, as noted above, the experience of colonization in terms of racial exclusion and domination diverges substantially between those categorized non-white and those as not-quite-white. This divergence is compounded by later incorporations of Irishness into racial whiteness. Something of the dynamics that Fanon describes are represented in Máire’s desire for Yolland. Throughout the play, Máire repeatedly expresses disdain for, or frustration with, traditional Irishness. She longs for full inclusion into the “civilized world.” Her desire is to move “up” the colonial raciological hierarchy from “dark white” to “fair white.” The asymmetry between Yolland and Máire is made most evident in their divergent aspirations. Yolland articulates a desire to remain and assimilate (“I want to be here— to live here—always—with you—always, always”) whereas Máire’s ambition is to leave and be modernized (“Take me away with you, George”) (Friel 1981, 67). However, the experiences of the dynamics of patriarchal and racist colonialism experienced in Ireland also diverge from those described by Fanon. Different categorizations and experiences of colonialism created a plethora of different struggles for colonized women. The interrelated liminalities of Ireland in relation to colonialism and its racial hierarchy created different opportunities and oppressions. Máire aims not merely to “whiten the race,” but, under the British colonial racial nexus, aims to pass into whiteness herself. Conclusion Friel’s work illuminates the reality that “to make a map of a landscape is always not only to simplify it, but to impose one’s own meaning on it and even, at the extreme, to do violence to it and its inhabitants” (Howe 2000). The naming of a place inscribes language, peoplehood, and ideologies onto the landscape. Colonial renaming includes complex intersections between imperialism, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy. Almost invariably, the power to (re)name was in the hands of western, wealthy, white men. The reach of colonialism across the world has produced a globe of 192

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colonized maps. As such, the themes, questions, and obstacles that Translations broaches are significant to postcolonial theory. The historical development of place-names in Ireland, however, is also tangled up with its colonial liminality. The islands that are now Great Britain and Ireland were not always the allegedly neat and bordered nations, languages, and cultures of the modern map. There has always been mixture, connection, and interaction across, between, and throughout these islands. The “practices of cultural resistance, retrieval and recovery” involved in decolonizing placenames can include problematic discourses of “cultural purity evident in racism and ethnic fundamentalism” based on ideas of “returning to supposedly pure precolonial cultures” (Nash 1999, 459; Graham 1994). Between Ireland and the “British Isles,” the local is both colonized and colonizer, historical interactions are both colonial and precolonial, and the colonizer is both differentiated and local. In this way, the liminality of Ireland’s colonial past creates formidable entanglements of power and nomenclature, rendering the injustice of colonial eviction difficult to justly reoccupy. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

The “Gaelic revival” was a rise of interest the latter half of the nineteenth century in documenting, reviving, and, at times, inventing Irish tradition, culture, and language. MANUS: What’s ‘incorrect’ about the place-names we have here? / OWEN: Nothing at all. They’re just going to be standardized. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 made King James VI of Scotland also James I of England and Ireland. As such, he is known as King James VI and I. Reinforced by the inclusion of ‘Bombay’ in Yolland’s list at the end of scene one: ‘Anna na mBreag! Baile Beag! Innis Meadhon! Bombay! Tobair Vree! Eden! And poteen—correct, Owen?’ (Friel 1981, 61). “British Isles” is commonly used as a collective term for Great Britain, Ireland, and surrounding smaller islands. Although this term is uncontroversial for most in the United Kingdom, it is often considered provocative in the island of Ireland insofar as it evokes a sense of British ownership. Numerous alternatives—such as “Islands of the North Atlantic,” “these islands,” or the “Atlantic archipelago”

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6.

(2005:77)—have been proposed, but none have made it into common parlance. For detail on the census and the map, see Chapter Ten of Anderson’s (1983) book, Imagined Communities.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Bonnett, Alastair. “How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialized Capitalism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 11 (3), 1998: pp. 316-40. Print. __________. White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives. Edinburgh: Pearson, 2000. Print. Clayton, Pamela. Enemies and Passing Friends: Settler Ideologies in Twentieth Century Ulster. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Print. Cronin, Michael. Translation and Identity. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Print. Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British WorldSystem, 1830-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Davis, David Brion. “Constructing Race: A Reflection.” The William and Mary Quarterly 4 (1), 1997: pp. 7-18. Print. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. London: Paladin, 1972. Print. __________. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Print. Flannery, Eoin. “Irish Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory.” Postcolonial Text 3 (3), 2007: pp. 1-13. Print. Friel, Brian. Translations. London: Faber & Faber, 1981. Print. Graham, Colin. “‘Liminal Spaces’: Post-Colonial Theories and Irish Culture.” The Irish Review 16 (1), 1994.: pp. 29-43. Print. Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Print. Home, Robert K. Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities. Second Edition. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. Print. 194

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Howe, Stephen. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Print. Jackson, Alvin. The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707-2007. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print. Kennedy, Liam. “Modern Ireland: Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions?” The Irish Review 13 (Winter), 1992: pp. 107-21. Print. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. McCormick, Ted. William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. McGarry, John. “The United Kingdom’s Experiment in Asymmetric Autonomy and the Lessons Learned.” In Multinational Federalism: Problems and Prospects, edited by Michel Seymour and Alain G. Gagnon, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. pp. 129-48. Print. McVeigh, Robbie, and Bill Rolston. “Civilising the Irish.” Race & Class 51 (1), 2009: pp. 2-28. Print. Miles, Robert. Racism. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Nagai, Kaori. Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland. Cork: Cork UP, 2007. Print. Nash, Catherine. “Irish Placenames: Post-Colonial Locations.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (4), 1999: pp. 457-80. Print. Ní Shuinéar, Sinéad. “Othering the Irish (Traveller).” In Racism and Antiracism in Ireland, edited by Robbie McVeigh, and Ronit Lentin. Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002. Print. O’Connor, Maureen, and Tadhg Foley. Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006. Print. Petty, William. Essays in Political Arithmetick, Or, A Discourse Concerning the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings: As the Same Relates to Every Country in General but More Particularly to

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the Territories of Her Majesty of Great Britain and Her Neighbours of H. London: Printed for Henry and George Mortlock, 1711. Print. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 2003. Print. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. Linguistic Genocide in Education, or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Print. Szabo, Carmen. “Clearing the Ground”: The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Print. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Print.

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The Hawaiian Television Cop Show Aaron Iokepa Ki‘ilau

No other television genre has filmed on location in Hawai‘i1 with more consistency than the crime fiction series—what this chapter will colloquially refer to as “cop shows.”2 Magnum P.I. (198088) and especially Hawaii Five-O (1968-80) have enjoyed critical acclaim during their times on air and gained enthusiastic local fandom, attaching themselves to Hawaiian culture in general. FiveO’s popularity continues today in the form of a much-anticipated reboot of the iconic crime series that premiered in 2010. Setting and filming cop shows in the Hawaiian Islands has also been incredibly lucrative for the film and tourism industries, helping to pump billions of dollars into the Hawaiian economy for almost half a century. Hawaiian television crime fictions have also been the subject of academic inquiry with Peter Britos’ Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai‘i (1983), a thorough dissertation that covers the first three Hawaiian crime fiction (paramilitary) programs; Karen Rhodes’ study and episode catalogue Booking Five-O (1997); and Stanley Orr’s “Strangers in Our Own Land,” an examination of SamoanAmerican playwright John Kneubuhl’s Five-O episode of the same name. Yet, although all Hawaiian television crime shows lend the fiftieth American State at least a weekly national spotlight and a chance to display a Hawaiian “authenticity” that their Hollywood creators have prioritized, none of them are credibly authentic from a local Hawaiian perspective. What persists instead are reiterations of paternalistic colonialism, “Orientalist” stereotypes, and a strategic misrepresentation of Hawaii’s historical demographics, all of which accommodate economic (tourist) and sociopolitical (imperialist) ends. To approach such a charge, an examination of both titular points is appropriate: TV crime fiction and Hawai‘i.

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The Crime Fiction Genre Crime fiction is a historically popular literary genre, representing an impressive number of written, cinematic, and televisual works. Their plots are traditionally set in motion by some mysterious crime or graphic encounter of violence. A protagonist detective leads the ensuing investigation by collecting and comparing evidence, bringing culprits to justice, and restoring some kind of social order to their respective patrols. Crime fiction is told from the perspectives of many professions both within and beyond the criminal justice system. The semi-historical Judge Dee, for example, is a Chinese county magistrate, Sherlock Holmes is a private detective from London, and Jessica Fletcher is a New England mystery novelist— yet all serve the part of detectives in their stories. These lead investigators are often, but not always, accompanied by an assistant or second in command: Sherlock Holmes has his proverbial (“dear”) Watson, Captain Jean-Luc Picard has Commander William Riker, and Hawaii Five-O’s Steve McGarrett has Sergeant Danny (book ‘em) “Danno” Williams. The dialogue that occurs between these two leads lend a Socratic air to crime fiction investigations as detectives and their assistants ask questions, form hypotheses, recognize motives, recreate crime scenes, eliminate suspects, and bring about sound conclusions to initially faceless heists and homicide—what Rhodes refers to as the “Process” (17). And, if their viewers and readers are not too distracted by the prevalent crime and violence, crime fiction stories inherently contemplate on the social problem of crime itself, approaching it from a safe spectator’s distance (Sargent 1767-68). This points to one of several ways in which crime fiction is also controversial by nature. For instance, crime fiction risks popularizing crime and violence even if it means to denounce it. Moreover, while actually performing illegal activity is forbidden, reading and writing about it is still legal and popular. As a result, people have sometimes committed copycat crimes, claiming inspiration from criminals in newspapers, film, and television—from Jack the Ripper to Dexter (2006-2013). Incidences like these feed an ongoing debate on what is appropriate for television, if violence should only be shown at later 198

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hours, if more “family programming” should be added to equalize content, and so forth (Alley 43). The backgrounds and social ideologies of crime drama heroes may also vary as widely as those of their many writers. As a result, TV crime fiction has over the years had to adapt to shifting social and political movements, constricting and decompressing its moral tone between ideological trends. As cop shows are a generic cousin of the TV western, they have often been criticized for being dominated onand off-screen by white male lead characters and filmmakers. This perhaps allowed for television producers to complexify their series’ narratives and diversify their casts. TV crime drama has matured over the years from the deadpan documentarian style of Dragnet (1951-59) to more intriguing, cerebral, and even comedic variations. Many crime shows have attempted to break the traditional white-male mode as Columbo (1971-77), Kojak (1973-78), and Baretta (1975-78) have done by emphasizing their heroes’ ethnic backgrounds. Cagney and Lacey (1982-88) and Charlie’s Angels (1976-81) focused on female crimefighters whereas Hill Street Blues (1981-87) attempted to revive the realist approach to professional police work. The critically acclaimed NYPD Blue (1993-2005) offered more intimate looks into the personal lives of police officers whereas Monk (2000-09) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-) are more comedic variants of the crime fiction genre. TV cop shows have also made visual updates over the years. In the early 1960s, TV producers capitalized on the dynamic capabilities of color television. Whereas black-and-white film was more fitting for the nocturnal cityscapes of early film and TV noir, color television offered filmmakers more lively visual effects especially in exotic filming locations. Surfside Six (1960-62) and Miami Vice (1984-89), for example, brought the traditionally monochromatic big-city cop show to vibrant, seaside Miami. Hawai‘i Five-O and all subsequent Hawaiian TV cop shows heavily ride this tradition as opening, end credit, and scene transitions are often cut with beaches, ocean vistas, tropical forests, and general touristic scenery. The Hawaiian Television Cop Show

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TV in Hawai‘i Because of its easily recognized theme song, colloquial catchphrases (“Book ‘em, Danno!” and “Five-O” as a colloquialism for policemen), and recent series remake, CBS’s Hawaii Five-O is more often identified as the definitive Hawaiian TV cop show. To a lesser extent, a similar thing may be said about its original successor, Magnum P.I. However, while Five-O may have been the first Hawaiian duo-detective series filmed in Hawai‘i, it is not the first TV cop show to be set there. That distinction belongs to ABC’s Hawaiian Eye (1959-63), an earlier crime series whose lead detectives worked out of the Hawaiian Village Hotel—the show was actually filmed at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California. CBS would continue to set and film more crime series in Hawai‘i after Magnum, but with less success as its predecessors. Jake and the Fatman (1987-92) relocated its later seasons to Hawai‘i, and the short-lived Raven (1992-93) and One West Waikiki (1994-96) also failed to sustain the popularity held by Magnum and Five-O. Almost a decade would pass before the genre would be picked up again, though not in earnest, by A&E’s Dog the Bounty Hunter (2004-12), with an ultra-realist, controversial approach to the material. To be fair, filming nationally broadcast television programs in Hawai‘i was not limited entirely to crime fiction. Almost every other imaginable TV genre has filmed at least one episode in Hawai‘i. Game shows, domestic sitcoms, celebrity news programs, soap operas, beauty pageants, cooking shows, and reality TV have all done at least one “Hawaiian” episode in the Islands. These occasional oneoffs capitalize on the “authentic Hawaiian experience” stereotype, as characters and contestants are treated to the proverbial Hawaiian vacation. Still, only TV crime fiction series have kept longer, more substantial productions in Hawai‘i for almost the entirety of television history, placing crime and mystery in the fore with the ever-marketable Hawaiian scenery as backdrop. There are several explanations as to why the Hawaiian cop show sustained such a presence in Hawai‘i and on network television. The first, more subtle explanation points to an oft-evoked theme of Hawai‘i as an idyllic paradise. The heinousness of theft 200

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and murder are emphasized heavily when it is set against an Edenlike background. Series creator Leonard Freeman made it explicit in Hawaii Five-O’s concept to display “man’s evil amid the beauty of paradise” (Rhodes 12). When Thomas Magnum, stranded in such a place, asks if he can use a telephone in one Magnum episode, he’s told by a sarcastic Native Hawaiian, “There are no telephones on this island. There’s no telephones, no radios, no television, or burglaries or drugs,” summarizing a common indigenous comment on the haphazard effects of hasty modernization. Most of the episode takes place on a fictional island that depicts an idyllic Hawaiian community, whose strict traditionalism and resistance to modern conveniences is made to resemble of an Amish community in oldfashioned Hawaiian dress. The implied history of this 1986 episode flies in the face of an otherwise rich intellectualism and modernity exemplified by nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers and literature (Silva and Ngũgĩ, 2017). Such characterizations of pre-statehood Hawai‘i touch upon similar notions of western explorers being credited with bringing ingenuity, intelligence, and modernity to so-called “primitive” or “discovered” cultures. Jared Diamond argues otherwise that the eponymous guns, germs, and steel were a more likely and clumsy factor in the decline or extermination of indigenous peoples (1997). This is well-demonstrated by the near obliteration of Hawaiian, American, and Canadian indigenous populations who had poor resistance to diseases introduced by Euro-Americans. Before western colonization, Native Hawaiians were for many centuries impressively self-sufficient and mobile despite their near isolation in the middle of the largest body of water on Earth. They were expert navigators, creative agriculturalists, fierce warriors, and maintained an impressive cultural library both in oral and, after western contact, written form. Many of these components were later subordinated and even outlawed by incoming colonizers who, through both political manipulation and military force, replaced the Hawaiian government and social structure. Western accounts about Hawai‘i (and elsewhere) do display a self-awareness of the unintended effects of exploration, but this is usually achieved by depicting indigenous peoples, and The Hawaiian Television Cop Show

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similarly “discovered” civilizations, as fragile, unspoiled, or naïve to sin. A more cynical explanation for the Hawaiian cop show’s success points toward economics. Both the Hawaiian cop show and tourism industry flourished side-by-side in the mid-twentieth century. It is no coincidence that Hawaiian Eye’s detectives worked primarily for what would inevitably become one of the largest real-life hotels in the world. A year before the series was cancelled, Conrad Hilton bought the Hawaiian Village Hotel in 1962. American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the famed creator of the Kaiser Permanente healthcare system and Kaiser Broadcasting, who also developed the upscale Honolulu community of Hawaii Kai, home today to a high school that also bears his name, built the Hawaiian Village Hotel in 1955. The impetus to advertise Hawai‘i as a tourist destination was thus supported by substantial financial backing. In this sense, the State of Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian TV crime show, and the Hawaiian vacation commercial shared a simultaneous debut in the form of Hawaiian Eye. Since then, American TV audiences were regularly offered free tours of Hawaii’s hotels and resorts, encounters with musicians and entertainers, natural features, souvenirs, historical monuments, and cultural sites. Wheel of Fortune (1975-) and Win, Lose, or Draw (1987-90) have given away vacation packages as prizes on their episodes filmed in Hawai‘i. Many domestic television series such as I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70), The Brady Bunch (1969-74), Full House (1987-95), Saved by the Bell (1989-93), Step By Step (199198), My Wife and Kids (2001-05), Modern Family (2009-), among many others, have familiarized potential visitors over the years with nearly the same “authentic” Hawaiian experience. They are normally greeted with leis as they disembark their planes, checked into hotels, and are then given tours of the island(s). The entire excursion is often rounded off with a “traditional” luau. Other elements of Polynesian culture—such as Tahitian music and Samoan fire-knife dancing— are commonly bundled together in such depictions and appropriated to be passed off as part of the “Hawaiian experience.” 202

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Filming tourist industry-supportive programs was so significant to the Hawaiian economy that the Hawaii Film Office was established in 1978 under the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism. By the time Hawaiian Eye left the air in the early 1960s, the film and television industry had pumped $3.5 million into the local economy, growing to $45 million near the end of Hawaii Five-O’s first run in 1977 (Rhodes 25). So integral was the industry’s economic contributions that Hawai‘i governor George Ariyoshi made a public plea to Jack Lord when he threatened to leave Five-O. Twenty years later governor Ben Cayetano’s administration would lobby to have Baywatch’s (19892001) tenth and eleventh seasons produced in Hawai‘i rather than Australia—provided, of course, it were renamed Baywatch Hawaii. The Sociopolitical Hawaiian Cop Show Peter Britos’ explanation for the Hawaiian cop show’s success places the genre within a sociopolitical context, focusing on the first three series—Hawaiian Eye, Hawaii Five-O, and Magnum P.I.—which he identifies as the “first cycle” of Hawaiian paramilitary programs. Hawaiian Eye and The Alaskans (1959-60) both premiered within months of Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood. Warner Bros. distributed them both, and both aired on ABC in 1959. Britos notes not only the ubiquitous military dominance—or at least favoritism—in the first cycle series narrative structures, but also their timely appearance in Hawaiian, television, and American military history in the Pacific. The heads of the American film industry, including the Warner Brothers, had previously been inducted into the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor to form the First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU) of the United States Army Air Forces. The FMPU was responsible for pushing out wartime propaganda and training films to promote US military efforts during World War II. There is little doubt that the Warner Brothers’ double distribution of Hawaiian Eye and The Alaskans aided in “[rehearsing] the successful control of empire by patrolling the space of the new frontier on a weekly basis” (Britos 26). As Britos writes, “If the TV Western sketched out the frontier heartland of domestic space and American ideology, the The Hawaiian Television Cop Show

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detective and police melodramas would protect and secure not only urban space and capitalist hierarchy, but international borders and democratic compliance as well” (Britos 18). Hawaiian TV cop show protagonists’ military affiliations are written into their programs’ “series bibles” that provide episode writers with character analyses and thematic guidelines. Hawaiian Eye’s Tracy Steele is a World War II and Korean War veteran. Steve McGarrett and Thomas Magnum of Hawaii Five-O and Magnum P.I. also have backgrounds in military intelligence. Jonathan Raven, of the short-lived Raven, likewise is a former Special Forces agent. Their roles as retired military personnel often grants them the ability to traverse smoothly between military and civilian life, unlimited financial resources, political connections, and the firearms needed to eradicate crime in Hawai‘i at any cost. Euro-American characters in particular were cast and characterized strategically for their competence and ability, whether on camera as actors or in text as proficient law enforcers. Britos argues, through an exhaustive examination of the first cycle series, that ethnic characters who stood in for local Hawaiians were otherwise cast “less for their demonstrated [acting] ability, than they were because they embodied a credible ethnic type” (48). Ethnic entertainers from Poncie Ponce to Hilo Hattie to Don Ho have had big and small parts in Hawaiian cop shows more for their recognizance, but with never as much crime-solving competency as the detective leads that their characters either inform or serve under. Locals were often cast in support roles, most notably Gilbert Kalani Kauhi (the Hawaiian entertainer also known as “Zulu”) who played detective Kono Kalakaua for the first four seasons of Five-O. Kono regularly addresses commander McGarrett as “boss,” and is usually given compliant lines that Darrell Hamamoto would describe as “Greek chorus” or “sounding board” for authority, and characterized in such a way that Native Hawaiian activist HaunaniKay Trask decries as “the worst caricature of Hawaii, of Hawaiians, as this kind of mysterious and dangerous place with beautiful women and strange pidgin-speaking locals . . . There was an underworld 204

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atmosphere [in Hawaii Five-O] that the [foreigners] were trying to save us from” (Orr 919-920). Nonetheless, such innate imperialist overtones of the Hawaiian cop show sub-genre—if it can so be grouped—is, for the most part, missed or disregarded by local Hawaiians. Real-life protests are more often vocalized against urban development, cultural site disturbance, or resource allocation than they are organized around a protest of media representation. As such, the Hawaiian TV cop show has and continues to enjoy local approval and popularity, especially with the 2010 series remake of Hawaii Five-O. On Hawaiian History and Local Culture Another feature of the Hawaiian TV cop show is its historical underrepresentation—and thus, misrepresentation—of the local population and culture, despite their producers’ professed commitment to Hawaiian “authenticity.” Yet, owing to, among other things, the shows’ casting processes, Euro-American actors generally “fill the foreground and background” of Hawaiian TV cop shows (Britos 38, emphasis added). In an attempt to lend criminal activity global normalization, the crimes they fictionalize often involve strange international elements that overplay Hawaii’s multiethnicity, and a very small percentage of them deal specifically with native or local Hawaiian culture. Hawaii Five-O’s 2010 remake pilot, for example, begins in South Korea and introduces Irish terrorists as well as Rwandan and Chinese criminals. True to the original series, the Five-O reboot again casts two white men (Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan) as its leads with Asian-American actors (Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, neither of which hail from Hawai‘i) as supporting lead roles. A glance at the US census taken concurrently with Five-O’s remake debut illustrates the series’ demographic inaccuracy. In 2010, Hawaii’s population (about 1.3 million) accounted for a little less than half a percent (0.44%) of the total US population (308.7 million). Hawaii’s largest ethnic groups (whether they identify as each alone or in combination with others) were, in order, Asian (57.4%), White (41.4%), and Native Hawaiian (21.3%). Nationally, Americans who identify as all or part white represent a three-quarter The Hawaiian Television Cop Show

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majority, whereas Asians account for 5.6% and Native Hawaiians make up 0.17% of the US population (2010 Census Briefs). Yet the primarily white narratives of Hawaiian TV cop shows do more than misrepresent census numbers, they are also inconsistent with Hawaiian history. Hawaii’s modern, off-camera demographic is the result of several successive waves of colonization. Polynesian navigators first arrived in Hawai‘i several centuries ago, and sustained a large population for some time. Later, British and American explorers, missionaries, and businessmen began colonizing Hawai‘i toward the end of the eighteenth century. King Kamehameha I consolidated political authority shortly after to establish the Hawaiian Kingdom. This was followed by a century of increased global trade, as Hawai‘i entered into sugar exportation, whose affiliates assisted in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. The sugar industry then dominated Hawaii’s physical landscape and economy, and was owned by only five white-led (haole, meaning “foreign”) 3 corporations known unofficially as the “Big Five,” and managed by an organization of sugarcane plantation owners known as the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA). As a historically agrarian people, the Native Hawaiian peoples were not entirely dependent on sugar work for employment, nor were their numbers large enough to supply its increasing demand for inexpensive labor. As a result, the Big Five imported thousands of laborers from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. At one point, planters paid its laborers a paltry one dollar per day. These workers, in turn, were rarely able to afford to return to their home countries. As organized labor demands to plantation owners intensified, the sugar industry imported increasing numbers of successive ethnic groups to offset the demands of the former (Reinecke). This meant that within a relatively short time, half a dozen different ethnic communities were living on Hawaii’s few main (yet isolated) islands, which added up roughly to the size of New Jersey. Hawaii’s ethnic makeup today—is the sum result of these events, bound by a unique local culture known for its linguistic 206

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and social differences from haole culture. All of this had already occurred decades before Hawaiian Eye’s premiere. Yet Hawaiian TV cop show producers are obligated to play mainly to mainland audiences who are understandably less familiar with these historical factors—hence the mostly white cast both in the foreground and background roles of these programs. Moreover, the vast majority of all series’ plots have little to do with Hawaiian (Native or otherwise) people or culture. The Five-O remake’s episodes are all named with Hawaiian words, but the cultural resemblance to Hawai‘i often ends there. It is also interesting to note that while Japanese, Filipino, and Native Hawaiian citizens have held the office of Governor of Hawai‘i since statehood, virtually all of the governors in Hawaiian TV cop shows were white, reflecting the western patriarchal governors of post-overthrow, pre-statehood Hawai‘i. The heavily Euro-American role of Hawaiian TV cop show detective is also problematic, especially, as Sargent suggests, that the choice of “who gets to carry a badge and gun on TV [implies] who gets to be considered an ‘American’” (1768). Contemporary Variations Even though it is often overlooked as such, A&E’s reality TV hit Dog the Bounty Hunter picked up the genre as a professional documentarian variation of the Hawaiian cop show. Very similar to Cops (1989-), the highly successful and controversial series followed the real-life bounty hunting family of Duane “Dog” Chapman as they collected on Hawaiian fugitives. The New York Times explains that the show “is a mix of tweaking meth-heads and post-arrest moralism, a business built on repossessing human flesh” (Carr). At one point it was A&E’s highest-rated and most watched program. Chapman gained notoriety in 2003 for the capture of Max Factor cosmetics heir Andrew Luster. Yet Chapman also epitomizes the blurring between cop and criminal vigilantism as an unofficial “cop.” Earlier in his life, Chapman was convicted of first-degree murder allegedly in connection with a botched drug deal. Despite his apparent turn to philanthropy, it is important to note that although Chapman portrays himself as a law enforcement The Hawaiian Television Cop Show

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official, he is neither a police officer nor does he have any kind of military affiliation. Moreover, although he is from Colorado and of English and German descent, he accessorizes with Native American jewelry and adopts a Hawaiian Pidgin accent while he patronizingly lectures his Hawaiian detainees into reform—before turning them over to the real authorities. Yet he “works the gutters for data, deploys phony accents and white lies on the phone, and physically tracks a runner in a way that seems a bit supernatural. It helps that most crooks are dumb as a box of rocks, but still” (Carr). His intentions seem well-founded in trying to break circular criminal behavior, but Chapman’s motivations are primarily economic, as his cases are set in motion only after his clients skip bail, with the dramatic pursuits aired on television for high ratings. Although it lacks in many of the cop show conventions mentioned above, Dog the Bounty Hunter is consistent with Freeman’s Five-O employment of Hawai‘i as an idyllic bastion for criminals. Yet while Britos’ first cycle series portrayed Asians and Hawaiians as subservient, Dog the Bounty Hunter brings the patriarchal-colonial logic full-circle to valorize an unqualified law enforcement official who hunts the unfortunate for the viewer’s entertainment. In 2010, CBS revived the Hawaii Five-O franchise, but casting problems of the original series still persist even a half century later. In June 2017, Grace Park and Daniel Dae Kim left the cast of CBS’s reboot of Hawai‘i Five-O after failing to negotiate the terms of their contracts. The two Asian-American actors (who played updated roles of Chin Ho Kelley and Kono Kalakua) were reportedly making 10-15% less than their two white costars, Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan, with whom they worked alongside for seven successful seasons. Sidestepping the issue, CBS responded, “We are so appreciative of Daniel and Grace’s enormous talents, professional excellence and the aloha spirit they brought [to the production]” (Holloway and Ryan). Kim responded publicly by saying that he will miss playing Chin Ho on Five-O, a character he describes as “representative of a place my family and I so dearly love [Hawai‘i]. It has been nothing short of an honor to be able to showcase the 208

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beauty and people of Hawaii every week, and I couldn’t be prouder to call these islands home” (Otterson). Although Kim and Park’s parts were supporting roles, the failed pay negotiations incited an intense debate in the media over a racial wage gap, and CBS suffered a significant backlash. Yet while this drew apt attention to broad social issues, many critics avoided mention of the social problems inherent to the Five-O franchise, the Hawaiian cop show sub-genre, and Hawaiian sociopolitics. The exchange between Five-O’s Asian cast members and CBS executives raises appropriate postcolonial questions concerning Hawaiian history and commercial Hollywood culture. Kim, for example, is a Korean-American actor from the mainland United States playing the role of a Chinese officer in a crime series set in Hawai‘i. On the other hand, while most Asian-Americans in Hawai‘i are descended from several generations of international labor immigrants, Kim considers Hawai‘i “home” despite only moving to the islands fairly recently during the production of Lost (2004-2010). Whereas Asian sugar laborers came to Hawai‘i for jobs that paid only a dollar per day, Dae Kim became an island resident to be paid hundreds, perhaps thousands of times more. This single exchange raises ever-important questions with regard to the ways Hawai‘i and Hawaiians are portrayed to national audiences. Who is from Hawai‘i? And who should portray local or Native Hawaiians on television? What myths are perpetuated through such characterizations of the Hawaiian population? Or, for that matter, of any multiethnic community around the country? Do Hollywood TV writers have a responsibility to the multiethnic communities they portray? And, as a part of the United States, do postcolonial questions like these even apply to Hawai‘i? Throughout its history, the Hawaiian TV cop show perpetuated themes that strategically revised and contradicted a complex and multicultural Hawai‘i that residents have long since understood. But Brenda Kwon warns against such common misreadings of Hawaiian literature—which should include television programs— that strips Hawai‘i of various histories crucial to understanding the motivations for and effects of its competing ideologies. Native The Hawaiian Television Cop Show

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Hawaiian, colonial, Asian settler-colonial, and tourist (capitalist) thoughts are obscured in the Hawaiian cop show, displaying instead the oft-evoked myth of a Hawai‘i that “exists for the pleasure of others as a playground devoid of histories” (Kwon 3). Even if local residents can appreciate the Hawaiian cop show as an opportunity for national media representation, their willingness to do so requires them first to relinquish a concern for a cultural hegemony that local culture actively resists outside the realm of prime-time television. Notes 1.

2.

3.

The original Hawaiian word “Hawai‘i,” with the diacritical ‘okina or “glottal-stop,” will be used and spelled differently throughout this chapter for several reasons. As the use of a suffix -an to denote an associated country or culture is an English convention, the ‘okina will be omitted. The same goes for the plural and possessive (i.e. “Hawaiians,” “Hawaii’s”). Moreover, the word “Hawaiian” will be used to denote people who are from Hawai‘i regardless of ethnic origin. Specific mentions of indigenous or Native Hawaiians are done so explicitly. Finally, quoted material or published titles preserve the original authors’ usage of the word. The use of the term “cop show” throughout is mostly colloquial, but also figurative in that crime fiction programs, especially modern TV crime fiction, “police” the physical and psychic spaces that their protagonists inhabit. Police procedural programs—that is, TV shows that deal specifically with police officers—are literally more “cop show” than others. But not all crime fictions revolve around police officers, yet all crime fiction texts discuss laws that “cops” are meant to enforce. The term “haole” is a Hawaiian word that predates western contact and means “foreign,” whether in reference to people or objects. Although it has unfortunately taken on pejorative connotations, its usage in this piece keeps entirely with its former usage.

Works Cited Alley, Robert S. Television: Ethics for Hire? Nashville: Abingdon, 1977. Print.

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Asian Population: 2010 Census Briefs. Place of publication not identified: Bibliogov, 2012. Print. Britos, Peter J. O. Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai‘i: Hawaiian Eye, Five-O and Magnum P.I.: the First Cycle. Diss. University of Southern California. 2001. Web. Accessed 8 Sept. 2017. Carr, David. “A Cornered Pit Bull: Bounty Hunter Becomes Prey.” New York Times, 18 Sept. 2006. Print. Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017. Print. Holloway, Daniel and Maureen Ryan. “Daniel Dae Kim, Grace Park Exit ‘Hawaii Five-0.’” Variety, 30 June 2017. Web. Kwon, Brenda L. Beyond Keʹeaumoku: Koreans, Nationalism, and Local Culture in Hawai‘i. New York: Garland, 2016. Print. Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Island Population: 2010 Census Briefs. Place of publication not identified: Bibliogov, 2012. Print. Orr, Stanley. “‘Strangers in Our Own Land’: John Kneubuhl, Modern Drama, and Hawai‘i Five-O.” American Quarterly. 67.3 (2015) John Hopkins UP. pp. 913-936. Print. Otterson, Joe. “Daniel Dae Kim Addresses ‘Hawaii Five-0’ Exit.” Variety, 6 Aug. 2017. Web. Reinecke, John E. The Filipino Piecemeal Sugar Strike of 1924-1925. Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawaii, 1996. Print. Rhodes, Karen. Booking Hawaii Five-O: an episode guide and critical history of the 1968-1980 television detective series. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997. Print. Sargent, Andrew. “Police in Television.” The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Wilbur R. Miler. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2012. pp. 1767-1774. Print. Silva, Noenoe K, and wa Thion’o, Ngũgĩ wa. The Power of the SteelTipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. Print. White Population: 2010 Census Briefs. Place of publication not identified: Bibliogov, 2012. Print.

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Raced Subjectivity and Anxiety in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric Alejandro Veiga Expósito

Claudia Rankine brings a postcolonial focus to contemporary America. Born in 1963, Rankine is Jamaican poet, essayist, playwright, and professor at Yale University, her writings have reached a global audience. Her most recent poetry volume, called Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry among a further six prizes in the United States alone. Critically acclaimed, Citizen, with its sevenpart structure from the perspective of the assaulted person, pinpoints everyday scenes of racist aggression against African Americans. Critics have stated that in Citizen a series of intimate stories with racist attacks as their leitmotiv converge, calling the reader to seriously reflect about the damage caused by contemporary racism in modern American society. While true, in this chapter I argue that from a psychoanalytic and postcolonial perspective, Rankine’s poetic strategy results in something far more complex than a mere collection of anecdotes. To ground that claim, this chapter starts with a psychodynamic conception of subjectivity to provide a more flexible interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s Fact of Blackness by viewing it in light of Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’ Lacanian reading of race. This enables us to understand race as a structure operating in the symbolic order, interjecting concepts of “race” with feeling of alienation as its most immediate outcome, thus causing racial anxiety. Within this theoretical framework, I claim that Citizen offers a confrontation, using a complex poetic strategy, where the reader glimpses the experience of racial anxiety. Here, a rereading of Fanon’s theory of colonized black subjectivity is critical. Much has been written in psychoanalysis since Sigmund Freud’s proposition about the role of sexuality in the development of the subject during childhood. However, many scholars have sought 212

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to analyze how race and other factors (such as ethnicity, nationality or class) can have a severe effect on subjectivity. Therefore, a more flexible concept of subjectivity than Freud’s is needed when taking these elements into consideration. After all, a child that has not developed linguistic abilities cannot introject any of the parameters that operate within ideology and the symbolic order. A child apprehends sexuality—considering Freud’s enlarged concept of sexuality—through ways that go beyond language (e.g. through pleasure).1 To assimilate other concepts such as race, the subject must be able to be inscribed in the symbolic order. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the symbolic order is that part of the psyche structured by language and society. Once one enters language, the subject’s desire is bound to language. Subjectivity, thus, is not simply exercised but apprehended. This is especially the case for African Americans in colonial and postcolonial contexts, as we will see further on. I will thus start with an analysis of Amina Mana’s psychodynamic approach to subjectivity, in order to allow us to understand the relevance and influence of different structures. After all, the understanding of “race” occurs during the development of subjectivity in various moments of life. The situations Rankine exhibits in Citizen take place mainly during adulthood, making a purely Freudian or Lacanian approach, which focuses on childhood development, insufficient when analyzing how she depicts the development and alienation of the black self. Scholars of psychoanalysis have studied subjectivity as stemming mainly from infantile sexuality. Rather than this static position, psychoanalytic studies of race have had to use a more malleable approach to subjectivity. In Amina Mana’s analysis of the influence of racial dynamics in the constitution of subjectivity, she argues, from a psychodynamic perspective, that subjectivity is constantly developing and changing: Subjectivity is not only dynamically formed but also continually changing and being constituted and reconstituted, from one instant to another, as well as over longer periods of time. Once one has taken this view of subjectivity as being continuously constituted throughout Citizen: An American Lyric

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life then it follows that it can be studied at any point in the life cycle (129).

Without ignoring the importance of sexuality during childhood and the latency period, Mana understands the subject as a multilayered individual in constant change and formation, susceptible to different elements within society and ideology. This approach must be considered when theorizing the role of race in subjectivity because a race based subjectivity will be formed during several periods in life. This psychodynamic conception of subjectivity is critical to shed light on Rankine’s work. We can see from a dynamic point of view how the subject is constituted and constantly changing throughout his or her life. This allows us to understand the outcome of race and racism in subjectivity and the constant influence postcolonial and social dynamics have on the raced subject during his or her life. A helpful example to see this dynamic formation of the raced subject during adulthood is Frantz Fanon’s famous passage in chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks. Here Fanon narrates his encounter with a woman and her child who address him as “negro,” forcing him to live the experience of being black. Fanon calls this experience “The Fact of Blackness”—a slight mistranslation from the French L’expérience vécue du Noir, which strengthens the idea of being black as an experience rather than a mere factuality. This is a concept Rankine directly follows, as we shall see further on. Fanon shows how the colonized Algerian subject is marked with race in his or her encounter with white reality in France: “Dirty nigger!” Or Simply, “Look, a Negro!” I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of the other objects. Sealed into that crushing of objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing…But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye (109). 214

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Here Fanon shows us, in the colonial context, how the black subject is brought into being by experiencing his or her putative inferiority with respect to white subjects. It is through assimilating a new paradigm within the body: race and more specifically, blackness. One cannot ignore the pivotal idea that runs through Black Skin, White Masks: the objectification of the subject through race, or the alienation of the colonized “negro” as Fanon puts it. The strength of the passage above resides in the emphasis given in its first lines to how he felt prior to being objectified, and thus prior to being made aware of race. It is an animating force to discover the nature of being. Yet, suddenly it is destroyed by the colonized subject’s fixation on the objecthood of nonbeing. Fanon is, therefore, describing how anxiety is born out of the “assignment,” in Laplanchean terms, of race. Race is not simply discovered. It is not a fact but rather a label, designated to a subject by the different layers of society. Fanon, therefore, later on states: “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics” in this moment (112). Fanon felt alive, human, and curious about the world—a state annihilated by the imposition of a new order within his body. While Fanon’s experience took place in a colonial context far from contemporary North American society, today we see the same violent and emotional imposition of a raced subjectivity in the United States and in Europe. The message of being black and inferior, a lifeless object, is sent from one subject to the other. This can be sensed in Fanon’s example, yet it can also be mapped onto any racist attack, which we will discuss further on with regards to its treatment in Citizen. However, through Seshadri-Crook’s Lacanian reading of race and Fanon, this racial imposition is more than a linguistic imposition. It could be said that Fanon is simply discovering his blackness, but in psychoanalytical and postcolonial terms one could argue that this situation is more complex. It is fully divorced from “race” in any biological sense. In encounters where a racialized subjectivity is imposed, there is a lack of recognition of the other’s own subjectivity. Race is not only the installing a feeling of inferiority but also a process of establishing a structure where human difference is instituted. Here Citizen: An American Lyric

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I follow Seshadri-Crooks’ Lacanian idea of whiteness as a master signifier. That is, a signifier without signified in Saussurean terms—a symbol emptied of meaning—which is used to order certain power relations in the body through a regime of visibility. Seshadri-Crooks develops the notion that it is necessary to clarify the difference between simply perceiving different skin colors and the imposition of a superior and inferior color via that master signifier or emptied symbol: As Fanon implies, racial visibility must be distinguished from the moment when the subject introjects an ego ideal as a coherent body image. But by marking the temporal difference in the constitution of the bodily ego and the raced body, we will see that the anxiety that Fanon refers to is not caused by the ideology of blackness, but by the structure of Whiteness. Less cryptically: we will see that racial anxiety, the unconscious anxiety that is entailed by the sight of racial difference, has its cause not in ideology, but in the structure of race itself and in the functioning of its master signifier, “Whiteness” (32).

Race here is conceptualized as a perceptible signifier that forms a code that has nothing to do with black/white binary logic or with the historicity of blackness. Instead, the imposition of this structure entails a raced subjectivity organized around whiteness. Racial anxiety is born here, in the collision of one’s own subjectivity with whiteness and the supposed superiority towards which the raced subject must aim. In Seshadri-Crooks’ psychoanalytical terms, this is referred to as an “ego ideal.” This is not to ignore the moment when the subject gains awareness of the black/white binary logic. Rather there is a clarification here: it is not then when alienation starts but when the assimilation of the structure of race ordered around whiteness takes place. In that introjection, the raced subject will be created and installed in this new racialized structure suffering from alienation. For this reason, Fanon argues, “In the man of color there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence” (60). Racial anxiety arises at the point when the subject witnesses that he or she has been brought into a new symbolic order in which his or her body is seen as inferior. 216

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In terms of race, it is precisely here where Seshadri-Crooks makes Lacanian alienation more complex. That is to say, Seshadri-Crooks shows that one is not merely alienated into language, as a white subject does as well. Instead the black subject suffers the alienation process as well with an added new signifier that “whiteness” is the ideal aspirational category. This places the racialized subject in the impossible condition of never being able achieve “the ideal” and is thus put in an inferior place within the structure of race. Seshadri-Crooks suggests that Fanon’s alienation comes from the intrusion of an archetypical structure that gives birth to the “fact” of being black. The ego ideal imposed in raced subjects, then, through racial attacks is not only an image of whiteness. “Whiteness” is a signifying chain that organizes subjects into races. In other words, race shapes the human body through perception only in relation to and around whiteness. Race thus becomes a regime of visibility, the perception of a signifier that has nothing to do with biology.2 And while it is true that white subjects also suffer part of an alienating process, the black subject’s unconscious differs in that it is being imposed in a structure where he or she must aim towards an ideal of whiteness. Race, then, is a process based on perception that inscribes the subject in a dynamic where anxiety operates not only within the symbolic, but has an effect in the constitution of the subject’s psyche. In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, we can see this same process taking place in the United States. It is clear that Fanon’s case differs from Rankine’s in that he is writing from the standpoint of colonialism; the extreme context in which blackness is introjected as subjection during adulthood. Assimilation is more complex in the United States due to the exposure of subjectivity since childhood. In America one is brought up within gradual race-based impositions, rather than Fanon’s sudden encounter with race subjectivity. Nonetheless, the premises are the same when it comes to how the annihilation of the subject operates through a structure’s imposition of which the outcome is racial anxiety. That is what Citizen shows in its series of racist aggressions. Rankine does not give the reader Fanon’s “Look! A Negro!” moment, but a web of terrible situations with Citizen: An American Lyric

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the imposition of a more complex “Fact of Blackness.” She creates vignettes where the instilling structure of race is mapped on to black bodies and gives the reader examples of how it operates. Claudia Rankine is well aware of the difference between the European colonial world and her contemporary United States scenarios. While her book does not focus on European colonial project in the same way as Fanon, there is a poem in the final section of Citizen in which the central idea is the treatment of the Algerianborn French football player Zinedine Zidane’s famous physical aggression to Italian player Marco Materazzi during the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. Here Rankine exemplifies European colonial and postcolonial racist situations by connecting both Europe and the United States’ historical, social, and geographical backgrounds through racism. She writes, “Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, nigger / Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. / The Algerian men, for their part, are a target of criticism for their European comrades” (122). It is worth noting that these verses are written in-between printed footage strips of the fight between Zidane and Materazzi. Putting aside the consideration of language in these verses, which will be treated further on, as well as Rankine’s interest in sports, these verses bring to light Europe’s racial situation and its postcolonial issues. The reader is shown the confrontation of an Algerian and a European football player, in prose and image. Rankine further draws attention to the colonial overtones by naming personalities related to this context from various disciplines, particularly Frantz Fanon (125-129). By placing this poem in a book that treats the United States racial problem almost entirely within its composition, Rankine is connecting both Europe and the United States through a shared colonial history. She focuses not only on the political scaffolding against African American communities in her country but in that shared history as well. Furthermore, she is demystifying the American view of Europe as a paradise where racism has been overcome. Rankine knows that her readers are traditionally an audience of liberal, well-educated, middle class Americans. Rankine wants the reader to see the introjection of the racial structure African Americans 218

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suffer every day. Technically, she does this by using ordinary middle class scenes punctuated by poetic voice. Specifically, she uses a second person singular voice, which addresses the reader as if he or she would be experiencing the situation firsthand. This is a direct attack on the reader. She is well aware that her audience is one that believes they are far beyond being racist themselves. In Rankine’s own words: I wanted the book to exist in the space of the white liberal. Because people like to say “oh, it’s the South,” “it’s ignorance,” “it’s white supremacist Fox News.” And I am like, no, no, no…[T]hese [racist] moments are happening in our offices, with our so-called friends, in the Congress, among highly educated people who apparently know better…The use of the second person—that “you”—was meant to say, “Step in here with me, because there is no me without you inside this dynamic” (Adewunmi and Billing).

That “you” is addressing the reader, requiring him or her to live within the situation of a racist attack and to consider his or her responsibility with regards to racism. But this also shows Rankine’s poetic thinking in action. She understands that her reader is well informed. She knows they are conscious of the problem that racism represents in modern society. That is why her poetry breaks the barrier of denouncing. She is not interested in only making the reader aware of how many African Americans die in the streets, as her reader would already know the statistics. She is interested in memory. Rankine wants the reader to observe the psychological consequences of constantly being a victim of racism, to experience how it feels to be imposed in the structure of race, to be a raced subject, crossed by racist language, by a symbolic order that makes one inferior, unrecognized. To do this efficiently, Rankine uses ordinary scenes such as ordering coffee, paying a bill, or having a chat with a longtime friend. These are based on shared personal experiences loaded with racism. For example, in one poem a little girl refuses to sit next to the narrator (to Rankine but also to the reader) on an airline flight. The resemblance of this passage is remarkable to Fanon’s famous scene Citizen: An American Lyric

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of the little girl shouting: ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ (112). It could even be read as a perfect rewording of the same situation in a modern United States setting: Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle (12).

Rankine’s awareness of the type of reader she is speaking to becomes obvious at the very beginning, where the putative reader has the opportunity of boarding the plane first due to his or her “elite status.” She is building a complex situation in which race, profession, and socio-economic conditions converge. It could be argued that Rankine has fallen into the trap of documenting bourgeois situation while there are entire African American communities suffering from police violence. Let me be clear, I am using this passage purely to analyze her poetic strategy. It is worth noting, however, that the book includes the names of African American victims recently killed by police. Rankine is keen to emphasize the importance of memory and inequality. However, the book is not concerned exclusively with institutional racism but with analyzing racism from a social and psychological perspective. And from this position Rankine wants her liberal audience, who think they have superseded racism, to witness how it feels to be implanted in the structure of race, to see how racist attacks alienate you, make you feel uncomfortable with yourself, create an urge to escape from your body, as Fanon’s previous quote—and Rankine as well, we will see—shows. This feeling would be impossible to recreate in this specific kind of reader only by showing him or her how, for example, life in the “urban projects” plays out or how police bias affects one’s day to day life.3 Rather, she is looking to engage the reader in lived experiences familiar to them in order to render that same feeling of alienation. Being under attack, the subject is placed in a particular point of inferiority with respect to whiteness within the structure of race. 220

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This is a poetic strategy, but on a psychoanalytic level Rankine’s girl is able to overcome all the values provided by a socio-economic elite status in a capitalist society through the projection of an ego ideal that the other cannot reach: whiteness. What Rankine is stressing by bringing the elite status into the poem is that the racist message is not only sent to the other but to the other’s symbolic context. Once again we are stepping beyond the white/black logic boundary. This is why Rankine uses the symbolic contexts shared by white liberals. When the racist message overthrows all the values of a higher socioeconomic position that are articulated with the structure of race in the unconscious, one can see how Rankine’s alienation is more complex. Here lies the complexity of this situation in comparison to Fanon’s experience. Although they resemble one another in their operation, Rankine’s other’s symbolic expression differs in that the “raced other” not only receives his or her blackness but also receives his or her sense of inferiority regardless of the apparent superiority he or she may have within the socio-economic context. Rankine is aware of this operation. She has intentionally placed language into the verse quoted in the Zinedine Zidane World Cup poem: ‘Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word’ (126). She is aware of the difficulty that performs here. Language is prior to learning. What we have here is not Zidane’s reception of an insult but his inscription within a language that segregates him. That is why Lacan’s theory of the subject is useful. It allows us to grasp a precise vision of what happens in these events and specifically in postcolonial contexts. The subject is inscribed in language and brought into being. For Lacan, this is a universal experience. We all go through this alienating process and, as Seshadri-Crooks has shown, white subjects are also alienated within the structure of race. The difference resides in the racialized subject’s unconscious, in which an imposition of the race structure organized around whiteness has been introjected. That is why Rankine says: “Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways you are present” (49). This language renders the other as visible within the structure of race. Racist language not only inscribes and alienates the other in language, both also in Citizen: An American Lyric

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the symbolic sense. It imposes a raced ego ideal in the unconscious towards which the subject must aim. In the coalition within the signifying structure of race, one can see how whiteness is emptied of meaning, as Seshadri-Crooks puts it, in order to dominate and constantly be in a position of power in which black anxiety arises. The strength of Citizen is that it makes the liberal reader understand that this stems not only from the power of the depicted moments, but from the accumulation of the kinds of racist circumstances documented in the book. This confronts the reader complex situations, which when brought together, form a traumatic mesh of events. To exemplify this, one may go back to Freud’s earlier “general theory of seduction.” Freud’s “The Aetiology of Hysteria” defines “trauma” as a “genealogic tree” in which one or many symptoms have their origin in a conglomerate of traumatic scenes (196-197). In this sense, Citizen represents the genealogic tree that gives place to racial anxiety in African Americans. Through the different branches of this tree, one sees the traumata of hurtful moments. The reader attends to the same traumatic introjection of the structure of race through language. We have seen so far how language causes racial anxiety in Citizen’s moments of racist tension and analyzed its consequences with regards to subjectivity as well as part of the book’s formal conception and functions. But how do we know that Rankine is talking about alienation and anxiety, which problematize race within postcolonial contexts instead of simply depicting anecdotes and reflecting on language? One answer could be found in the long poem that opens the book’s seventh section. Quoted below are the first two stanzas. Here the reader sees a body injured by terrible experiences, a voice that is looking, as Fanon does, to run away from his or her body: Some years there exists a wanting to escape— you, floating above your certain ache— still the ache coexists. Call that immanent you—

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You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you. Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence (139).

It is worth noting the experience of reading this poem comes after all the traumata rendered through the first six parts of the book. The imposition of the raced subject is palpable in the second stanza’s idea of existing before being able to understand one’s self and build one’s own image. Although we know that this happens to everyone, based on the Lacanian notion of alienation as a universal experience, here we confront Rankine’s passage in the context of a precise type of alienation, a special inscription in the symbolic order that structures the subject’s psyche around the signifier of whiteness as we have seen. It all comes to this, to the first stanza’s alienation, the wanting to escape from a body that does not seem to belong to the subject, just as Fanon’s description of the “negro” running away from him or herself. For the subject is alienated within a signifying structure that completely annihilates his or her own development around family and society. And of course, there are many master signifiers as terrible as whiteness, as harmful as colonization. And there are many alienating structures as dangerous as race. Yet that is beside the point Rankine is making. One of the loci of Citizen, as we have seen, is to show how race operates in the symbolic and how language renders the imposition of a foreign order in the subject’s psyche in order to produce an anxious raced subject. Rankine is showing a colonization of African American subjectivity. For this reason, that need to escape of the first verse “coexists” with the pain of racial anxiety, because the alienated subject cannot understand the origins of that pain imposed via language. Rankine takes us, as readers and citizens ourselves, to the horrifying experience of not belonging, of wandering through a sort of no-place that forces one to reach for the impossible, where the only possibility of surviving is Citizen: An American Lyric

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to wear a mask, to live within anxiety, in a white mask, in another’s body. In this context, Citizen emerges as an experience to surpass that anxiety and understand the complexity of being a colonized and raced subject. Most importantly, Rankine forces us to remember that race and racism are ongoing issues. They must be constantly revised and are far from overcome. Notes

The author would like to thank Dr. Nicholas Ray for his valuable suggestions since the very early stages of this chapter. 1. One could consider here Freud’s explanation of how sexual activities take over self-preservation instincts through the child’s experience of pleasure during the practice of nursing in Three Essays on Sexuality. Those instincts, therefore, become sexual pleasure through the satisfaction of nourishment (Freud 181-182). 2. Here I follow Jean Laplanche’s understanding of gender as a sign that structures a code (167-209) which comes to terms with SeshadriCrook’s reading of race as a signifier that takes the subject into a code structured around whiteness. 3. It should be said, though, that this does not mean or only slightly considers that cultural productions aiming to show the life of any kind of African American community are not necessary. It is quite the contrary, as demonstrated by David Simon’s acclaimed show The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008).

Works Cited Adewunmi, Bim and Lynzy Billing. “A Conversation with Claudia Rankine,” BuzzFeed, 27 August 2015. Web. Accessed 27 Dec. 2016. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. by Charles Lam Makmann. London: Pluto Press, 1993. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Volume III. Trans. by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1962. pp. 187-221. Print.

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__________. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works. Trans. by James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001. Print. Laplanche, Jean. “Gender, Sex and the Sexual.” Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006. Trans. by John Fletcher, Jonathan House and Nicholas Ray. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2012. pp. 167-209. Print. Mama, Amina. Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. Rankine, Claudia, Citizen. London: Penguin Books, 2015. Print. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Reading of Race. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

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Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. Print. Edric, Robert. Elysium. London: Duckworth, 1995. Print. Emecheta, Buchi. Kehinde. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994. Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Makmann. London: Pluto Press, 1993. Print. Farrell, J.G. Troubles. London: Phœnix, 1993. Print. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. London: Viking, 2014. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery. New York: Avon Books, 1998. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. London: John Murray, 2012. Print. Gordinmer, Nadine. July’s People. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Admiring Silence. London: Penguin, 1997. Print. Head, Bessie. Maru London: Gollancz, 1971. Print. Head, Bessie. Where Rain Clouds Gather London: Gollancz, 1969. Print. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. Heat and Dust. London: Abacus, 2011. Print. Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. London: Vintage, 1997. Print. Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. London: Vintage, 1997. Print. Kourouma, Ahmadou. Allah is Not Obliged. London: Vintage, 2007. Print. Lahiri Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Print. Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. Addison Wesley Longman Ltd, 1998. Print. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Michael Joseph Ltd., 1960. Print. Le Clezio, Jean-Marie G. Onitsha. Translated by Alison Anderson. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. Print. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Day the Leader Was Killed. Cairo: The American UP, 1997. Print. Malouf, David. Remembering Babylon. London: Vintage, 1994. Print. Mda, Zakes. The Whale Caller. New York: Picador, 2006. Print. 230

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About the Editor Jeremiah J. Garsha is a postgraduate researcher in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is a social and cultural historian of violence. His research focuses on visual and material cultures of imperialism, framed in a world history context. He specializes in comparative colonial atrocities, with broader interests in postcolonial memory, specifically the positioning and repositioning of physical memory structures within landscapes of atrocities. He received his BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara in History and Germanic Literature. He holds an MA degree in Modern European History from San Francisco State University as well as an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Cambridge. His studies in postcolonialism is rooted to his MA thesis, which uses an interdisciplinary focus to explore the intertextuality and internationalism of early twentieth-century intellectual protests against colonization. His MPhil dissertation documents the shifting narrative rhetoric used in colonial monuments and genocide memorials in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa and the ways these memory structures have been rewritten and reinterpreted by postcolonial societies. His PhD dissertation moves firmly into the realm of transnational history in its exploration of German and British colonial occupation in East and Southwest Africa (modern day Tanzania, Kenya, and Namibia) by unpacking the global history of imperial conquest and indigenous resistance. His publications have appeared in a global range of formats, including Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, Przegląd Zachodni (Journal of Polish Western Affairs), and the Canadian Eugenics Archive.

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Contributors Stuart T A Bolus was born in Hampshire, England, to an English father and a Ghanaian mother. He was raised and brought up in Hampshire. After completing the International Baccalaureate Diploma at a local school, he studied International Relations at the University of Essex and completed an Erasmus Exchange year at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Upon graduation from Essex, he then completed a Master’s degree in African Studies at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. His MPhil dissertation is titled “Election Powerbrokers and Local Government Strongmen: Chieftaincy in Ghana, 1992-2015.” His research included five weeks of fieldwork in Ghana. After graduating from Cambridge, he taught English for an academic year in a primary school in Madrid, Spain. His main interests include international travel, postcolonial history, politics, and the Spanish language. He is also a massive fan of the series Bojack Horseman. Dominic Davies is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930 (Peter Lang, 2017) and Urban Comix: Collaboration, Reconstruction and Resistance in the Divided City (Routledge, 2018). He is also the coeditor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World (Peter Lang, 2017) and Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature (Palgrave, 2018). He will be taking up a Lectureship in English at City, University of London from April 2018. Joanne Davis is a feminist theorist of African literature living in London with her young family. She has written extensively on the English works of the Xhosa Reverend Tiyo Soga, and occasionally published poetry. Here she discusses the entry of postcolonial voices within the more traditional English literary canon, which has led to the exciting entry of newness to English literary studies as stories written and told by people with very different interests, content and narratives to those traditionally considered worthy subject matter have come to the fore. This chapter focuses on the writings of African and African American women writers in 253

the postcolonial era, some of whom are in the diaspora, whether in Europe, America, or in other African countries to their home countries. Kieran Dodds is a graduate of the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge. His MPhil research explored the role of soccer in late colonial Lesotho and apartheid South Africa, and especially the social identities actors came to fashion and fasten around sport. His chapter “‘Solidarity in Dreams’: Community, Difference, and Race from Narcissus through Heart of Darkness” was featured in the recent volume Critical Insights: Joseph Conrad in 2016. He received his BA in History at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Dr. Chinonye C. Ekwueme-Ugwu is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria. Her research interests are in Literature and criticism, particularly the African literary environmental criticism. She had her studies at the University of Lagos (Nigeria), from where she obtained a Bachelor (1997), a Master of Arts in English (2007), a Post Graduate Diploma in Education (2008) and a PhD (2014) from the University of Nigeria. She has taught at the various levels of the Nigerian educational system—primary, secondary, and tertiary. She commenced her career at the University of Nigeria in 2016. Ms. Ekwueme-Ugwu’s published works, which reflect both her experiences as a teacher of the English language and a literary environmental scholar include Foundational Courses in English Grammar and Usage (2013), ‘Between the Signifier and the Signified: A Theological Approach’ (2013), ‘Global Ecological Degradation and English Nouns’ (2014) and ‘Energy Environmental Crisis in Nigerian Novels and the Renewable Energy Alternatives’ (2016). Robert C. Evans is I. B. Young Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery. He earned his PhD from Princeton University in 1984. In 1982 he began teaching at AUM, where he has been named Distinguished Research Professor, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and University Alumni Professor. External awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Folger, Huntington, and 254

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Newberry Libraries. He is the author or editor of roughly forty books and of more than four hundred essays, including recent work on various American writers. In 2017, he was appointed a Research Scholar at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, home of the Ben Jonson Journal, which he co-edits with Richard Harp. Alejandro Veiga Expósito is currently a Spanish Teacher at Instituto Cervantes Leeds and University of Leeds. He received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish Language and Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a master’s degree in Critical and Cultural Theory from the University of Leeds. His research interests are Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, Race and Gender Studies, and Contemporary British, American, Latin-American, and Spanish literature. Peter Robert Gardner received his PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on ethnicity, race, peoplehood, postcolonialism, conflict, and peacebuilding. His most recent project investigated the politics of the Ulster-Scots ethno-linguistic movement in Northern Ireland. At present, he is a Teaching Fellow in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen and an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Aaron Iokepa Ki‘ilau is a graduate assistant in the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa’s English department. He is also a student athlete tutor for UH Student Athlete Academic Services. Aaron received his B.A. in Humanities with a concentration in English at the University of Hawai‘i—West O‘ahu, and a Liberal Arts A.A. at Leeward Community College. He also helped to found the LCC Writer’s Guild where he served as “Master of the Quill,” was awarded “Most Valuable Bard,” and helped to establish their annual publication of student and faculty creative works, Kuamo‘o ‘Olelo. He also won LCC’s annual poetry contest with a single unpunctuated run-on sentence. Aaron has contributed to LCC’s campus magazine Ka Mana‘o, and worked as a staff writer UHWO’s campus newspaper The Hoot. Several of Aaron’s works have been published in Tompkins-Cortland Community College’s literary journal Revisions, and his TV studies paper on The Hawaiian TV Cop Show will be presented at the Pacific Ancient Contributors

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and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) conference. He is currently working on finishing his book, The Cynic’s Guide to Customer Service: An Unromantic Explanation of Your Service Industry Job, which was wellreceived by the Center for Labor Education and Research (CLEAR) at the UHWO Humanities Conference. Dr. Anuradha Malshe completed her post-graduation and doctorate from Mumbai University’s Economics Dept. Her doctoral work has been in the area of development banking. She has successfully completed projects for EXIM Bank, SICOM, and ICICI. She has worked on Education and has been part of team on UN and Planning Commission Assisted Projects. Dr. Malshe was post-doctoral research Fellow at University of Fort Hare, South Africa, where she worked for Nelson Mandela Foundation assisted project. She has been a Guest Lecturer to University of Passau, Germany. Dr. Malshe has written several articles and research papers that have been published in India and abroad. She has published books on education and communication. Her current research interests are gender issues, inclusion studies and development economics. Dr. Malshe has been Dr. LM Singhvi Visiting Fellow to the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. Shubhangi Garg Mehrotra is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo. Her research interests revolve around Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, and Cultural Studies with a focus on South Asia. After finishing her graduation and post-graduation in English Literature, Shubhi also acquired another Bachelors degree in Education and worked as an English teacher at both public and private educational institutions in India. Just prior to moving to the U.S for her doctorate, Shubhi worked intensively with the underprivileged children of Delhi’s slum area and help design pedagogical strategies for teaching English to first generation speakers who have limited available resources at their disposal. Michael A. Parra, born and raised in San Fernando, CA, relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend the University of California, Berkeley. There Michael completed his B.A. in English, with a minor in African American Studies, in 2012 while maintaining leadership involvement 256

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with Lambda Theta Phi Latin Fraternity, Inc. As a rising literary scholar, Michael is currently completing the M.A. English Literature program at San Francisco State University. Michael’s master’s thesis is titled “Breaking Through Ideology: Deconstructing ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ Who is Not ‘Myself,’” and focuses on the tensions between empirical reality, fiction, and the self. His research interests include critical theory, continental philosophy, and literary theory; specifically through reading narratives of identity formation in American, U.S. Latino, Afro-Latino, and Latin American literary and cultural studies. Dhrubajyoti Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Kalyani, India. He teaches British literature with an emphasis on nonfictional prose as a clue to the English history of ideas. For more than five years, he has been teaching an elective graduate course of Shakespeare criticism and his reviews of Shakespearana have been published in Multicultural Shakespeare. Egodi Uchendu is a Professor of History and International Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Her research revolves around gender— women’s history and masculinities studies, people and conflict situations, childhood memories and conversions to Islam. She has received research grants from major funding bodies including the United States Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the A. G. Leventis Foundation, CODERSIA, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and National (Nigeria) Universities Commission. She has served on Boards, grant-selection committees, and as transnational assessor for a variety of academic awards and non-academic matters; recipient of “The Wangari Maathai Award for Innovative Scholarship and Leadership” of The University of Texas at Austin (2017), a member of the Presidential Committee for the Review of Nigeria National Defence Policy (2015), two-term Vice President of the Fulbright Alumni Association of Nigeria (2010-2014), Vice President of the Historical Society of Nigeria (since 2013), African Collaborative Member of the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge, UK (2014-2019), member, Gesellschaft zur Foerderung des ZMO e.V., Director of CODESRIA’s 2005 Gender Institute and current Editor of Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (JHSN). She currently leads

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African Humanities Research and Development Circle (AHRDC), a University of Nigeria Institution-Based Research Group. Liam Wilby is a first-year PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He holds the University of Leeds Inga Stina Ewbank Scholarship. His research concerns figuring posthuman selfhoods in contemporary literature and film. With a focus on the formation of posthuman subjects, this includes research into global speculative and science fiction, such as that of Octavia E. Butler and Nnedi Okorafor. Liam completed both his undergraduate and Masters studies at the University of Leeds. Whilst his current focus concerns the posthuman, his Masters was weighted towards postcolonial study where he produced work on Wulf Sachs Black Anger (1947), the poetry of Kamau Brathwaite, as well as Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin.

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Index Achebe, Chinua ix, xvi, xxix, 56, 70, 123, 124 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi ix, xix adultery 76, 77, 78, 82 Adventures of Tintin, The 11 Aeneid 77 Aetiology of Hysteria, The 222, 224 African American x, xiv, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 71, 218, 220, 223, 224 Agary, Kaine xx, xxv, xxviii Aidoo, Ama Ata 39, 46, 47 alethurgy 156, 158 allegory 121 Americanah xix, xxv, xxix, 46, 47, 51, 54 Ammu 124, 130, 134, 135, 136 amplification 49 Anactoria 171 ancient Greece 164 Anderson, Benedict 186 Angelou, Maya 39 antagonist 140, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149 anti-colonial 43, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66, 127, 154, 166, 180 Antoinette 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 Ariel 25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37 Ariyoshi, George 203 Asian 123, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211

automaton 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147 Avant-courier 69 Baartman, Saartje 40 Bâ, Mariama 39 Barker, Clare 93, 107 Barthlomew Fair 25 Baywatch Hawaii 25 Beaumont, Francis 23 Being and Nothingness 25 Beloved 39, 49, 50, 55 Bercilak 82 Beresford-Howe, Constance 36 Bertha 48, 49 Bhabha, Homi K. xxiv, 150 Bhave, Purushottam Bhaskar 108 black bodies 143, 218 blackness 47, 212, 214, 218 Black Skin, White Masks 100, 136, 214, 215, 224 Bloom, Harold 37, 178 Bond, Ruskin 109 Booking Five-O 197 Boro xviii, 62, 63 Bouanga, Elisabeth 40 Brahmins 128 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 33 British xiii, xvii, xx, xxii, 28, 29, 33, 69, 71, 75, 78, 95, 105, 109, 113, 127, 130, 131, 136, 151, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 206 Britos, Peter 197, 203 259

Brontë, Charlotte 48 Brotherston, Gordon 29 Browning, Robert 178 Burroughs, Nannie 52 Burwen, Daniel 20 Bush, George W. 17 Butter and Fire 114, 122 Butterfly Burning 56, 57, 66, 70, 71 Caan, Scott 205, 208 Cadmore, Margaret 43, 44 Caliban 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 154, 155 Caliban by the Yellow Sands 28 Camus 60, 67, 69 Cardenio 23 Care of the Self 150, 162 Caribbean xiii, xv, 12, 26, 30, 32, 33, 35, 54, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 161, 163 Cartelli, Thomas 28 cartography 181, 187, 188, 190 caste xi, 93, 99, 108, 127, 128, 132, 134, 136 Castro, Fidel 31 Cavafy, Constantine xiii, 164, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179 Cawley, Robert Ralston 28 Cayetano, Ben 203 Césaire, Aimé 33 Chakravorty, Gayatri xix, 142, 148, 150 Chapman, Duane “Dog” 207 Chenoy, Yezad 102 Chiasson, Dan 178 Chinedu 45

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Chingi 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 Christianity xi, 39, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 155, 160, 164, 165, 177 Christmas 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 Christophine 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 Chute, Hillary 18 citizen xiv, 70, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225 Citizen: An American Lyric 212, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221, 223, 225 Clark, John Pepper 35 Cliff, Michelle 39 Collins, Patricia Hill 39, 48 colonialism vii, viii, ix, xi, xii, xv, xviii, xxiii, xxx, 6, 7, 11, 12, 21, 24, 25, 33, 57, 62, 63, 64, 68, 75, 76, 89, 105, 123, 127, 136, 147, 148, 154, 166, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 197, 217 colonization xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiv, xxix, 11, 12, 29, 78, 79, 82, 124, 129, 132, 136, 154, 182, 184, 192, 201, 206, 223 colony 24, 89, 95 Color Purple, The 39, 55 comics journalism 4 Communism 131 Critical Insights

Communist Manifesto, The 35 Comrade Pillai 130, 131, 132 Conrad, Joseph 52 Coomy 102, 103 Creole woman 137, 141, 143, 144 crime fiction xiii, 197, 198, 199, 200, 210 cultural context 56 culture xii, xvii, xxvii, xxix, 3, 8, 18, 20, 28, 32, 34, 35, 49, 57, 58, 68, 78, 95, 98, 103, 105, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 177, 185, 188, 193, 197, 202, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210 Culture and Imperialism 12, 13

desire 26, 125, 128, 159, 166, 167, 168, 173, 175, 190, 191, 192, 213, 214 Devil on the Cross 56, 57, 64, 71 Diamond, Jared 201 dichotomy xi, 96, 102, 104, 112, 120 Dido 82 Dilnavaz 96 disability studies xi, 93, 94, 95 Disabled 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107 Dog the Bounty Hunter 200, 207, 208 Dony, Christophe 10 Douglass, Frederick 43 Dubey, Madhu 39

Dabashi, Hamid 17 Dae Kim, Daniel 205, 208, 211 Dalal, Dina 99, 101 Dalits 127 Dangarembga, Tsitsi xi, 39, 56, 65, 71 Darío, Rubén 29 Darwin, Charles 35, 184, 194 Davis, Lennard J. 105, 107 Death and the King’s Horseman 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 70, 71 Decolonising the Mind 35, 129, 136 Decolonizing 71, 163, 180 Dedalus, Stephen 161 de Hernandez, Browdy 40, 50, 51, 53, 54 de Saussure, Ferdinand xviii de Seve, Michael 20

Ecocriticism xxvi, xxix ego xxx, 141, 142, 216, 217, 221, 222 Egypt 12, 164, 165, 166 elites 64, 105, 125, 127, 135, 184 Emecheta, Buchi xvi, xix, 39, 46 Emergency Period 99 empire vii, 29, 164, 165, 169, 177, 185, 190, 203 End of Postcolonialism, The 17, 22 England viii, 46, 49, 61, 82, 91, 143, 145, 151, 156, 158, 165, 181, 188, 193, 198 English Law 138, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147 environment xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 94, 95 Esta 124 ethnocentrism 141 Etoké, Nathalie 50

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Europe xv, xvi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxix, 11, 40, 45, 46, 77, 78, 79, 87, 91, 188, 189, 215, 218 exploration x, xi, xv, xix, 201 Fact of Blackness 212, 214, 218 Family Matters 102, 103, 104, 107 Fanon, Frantz ix, xix, xxx, 100, 131, 153, 212, 214, 218 Feminism 71, 106 Filiu, Jean-Pierre 20 Fine Balance, A 98, 100, 101, 102, 107 Flannery, Eóin 182 Fletcher, Jessica 198 Fletcher, John 23, 225 Flexner, Eleanor 43 Footnotes in Gaza 16, 22 Freddy 65, 66 Freeman, Leonard 201 Freud, Sigmund 212, 224, 225 Friel, Brian xiii, 181 Gadgil, Gangadhar 108 Gandhi, Indira 98 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 96, 105 Garner, Margaret 49 Gatuĩria 65 gender 106, 195, 196, 225 generational x, xix Ghai, Anita 97 Glidden, Sarah 3, 4, 5 God Of Small Things, The 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 136 Gokhale, Arvind 108 Gordimer, Nadine xix 262

Grain of Wheat, A xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxx Gramsci, Antonio 7 graphic novels x, 10, 17, 18 Greeks 76, 165 Greenblatt, Stephen 28 Green Knight xi, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 Gregory, Derek 11, 20 Groussac, Paul 29 Guenevere 78, 81, 82 Guevara, Che 31 Guns, Germs, and Steel 211, 237 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly 39, 40, 43, 52, 53, 55 Habila, Helon xx, xxvii Half of a Yellow Sun 39, 43, 54 Hamamoto, Darrell 204 Harlem Renaissance 42 Hattie, Hilo 204 Hawai‘i 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211 Hawaiian Eye 200, 202, 203, 204, 207, 211 Hawaiian History 205 Hawaiian literature 209 Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association 206 Hawaii Five-O 197, 198, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208, 211 Head, Bessie 43, 55 Heart of Darkness 52, 54 Hechter, Michael 184 Hegel, Friedrich 25 Helen xxvi, xxix, 37, 76, 78, 82, 148 Critical Insights

Henry VIII 23 Hergé 11 Herodotus 60, 70 her-self 144, 147 Hilton, Conrad 202 his-self 146 history ix, xxx, 8, 12, 16, 60, 69, 70, 71, 72, 91, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 195, 205, 211 Hitler, Adolf xix, 19 Ho, Don 204 Holmes, Sherlock 198 Homer 76, 77 homosexual 45, 164, 167, 168 hooks, bell 39 Hounsou, Djimon 37 Huggan, Graham xxvi Hurston, Zora Neale 39, 42 Husain, Saddam 17 hybridity xv, xx, xxiv, xxv, 63 identity politics 97 ideological xv, xix, xx, xxiv, xxvi, 141, 156, 160, 181, 199 Ifemele 46, 47, 51, 52, 53 Igbo culture 126, 129 Igboland xvi, xx Ikiddeh, Ime xviii, xxii Iliad 76, 77 Imperialism xxx, 12, 13, 55, 68, 148 independence xii, xiii, xvi, xix, xxii, xxiii, xxvii, xxix, 29, 48, 59, 61, 64, 65, 99, 108, 115, 116, 118, 119, 124, 150, 176, 180, 182, 183, 185 India xi, xv, xxii, 12, 94, 95, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114, 118, 120, 124, Index

125, 128, 129, 130, 136, 183, 185, 195 Indigo 36 integration xv, 94 Interpretation of Dreams 35 intertextuality 48 In the Castle of My Skin xii, 150, 151, 163 Ireland viii, xiii, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195 Irish xiii, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196, 205 Isaac 126 Ishvar 101 Islamic Revolution 17, 19, 20 Island 24, 211 Iyer, Anupama 97 Jacobo xviii, 62, 63 Jal 102 Jamaican Slave Revolt 33 James I of England 193 James VI of Scotland 193 Jane Eyre 49, 54 Jeffreys, Peter 167, 169 Jehangir 102 Jesus Christ 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89 Johnson, Lemuel 35 Jonson, Ben 25 Jourdain, Silvester 27 Joyce, James 163 Judge Dee 198 Kaiser, Henry J. 202 Kalakaua, Kono 204 Kamara 45 263

Kamli 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122 Kauhi, Gilbert Kalani 204 Kehinde 46, 54, 69, 70 Kelley, Chin Ho 208 Kihika xxii King Arthur 77, 85 King Kamehameha I 206 King, Martin Luther 33 Kneubuhl, John 197, 211 Kohlah, Maneck 99, 101 Korean War 204 Kristeva, Julia 141 Kutpitia, Miss 96 Kwon, Brenda 209 Lacanian subjectivity xiv, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 223, 225 Lakhani, Ali 105 Lamming, George xii, 32, 37, 150, 162, 163 Lancelot 78, 82 language xiii, xviii, 19, 31, 32, 35, 57, 78, 109, 121, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 155, 164, 170, 180, 181, 185, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 201, 213, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223 Laplanche, Jean 224 Larkin, Philip 174 Latin America 29, 37 Lee, Sidney 27 Le Fanu, Philip 136 Lieutenant Yolland 181, 183, 186, 190 literary criticism 75 264

literature vii, viii, ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xx, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18, 21, 24, 26, 31, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 63, 64, 68, 69, 75, 83, 90, 93, 94, 102, 108, 109, 112, 114, 121, 123, 124, 131, 135, 150, 161, 166, 167, 188, 201, 209 Location of Culture, The xxiv, xxix, 106 Lo Liyong, Taban 35 Lorde, Audre 39 Lord, Jack 203 Los Raros 30 loss xii, xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 25, 35, 62, 66, 88, 102, 118, 123, 130, 182 Luce, Morton 28 Luster, Andrew 207 MacKaye, Percy 28 Madgulkar, Vyankatesh xi, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121 Magnum P.I. 197, 200, 203, 204, 211 Magnum, Thomas 201, 204 Máire 190, 191, 192 Malek, Alia 6 Malone, Edmond 26 Mammachi 128 Mana, Amina 213 Mannoni, Dominique-Octave 34 Marathi literature 108, 109, 121 Marionette 138, 144, 145 Marji 19

Critical Insights

Market Road 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119, 122 Martha 65, 66 Martí, José 29 Martinique 33, 140, 142 Maru 43, 44, 45, 55 Marxism 22, 131, 132 Marx, Karl 35, 131 Mason, Bertha 48 Master-Slave Dialectic, The 25 Materazzi, Marco 218 Mau Mau Uprising 61 Maus 9, 10, 17, 18, 22 McClintock, Anne 190 McGarrett, Steve 198, 204 Measure of Miranda, The 36 medieval viii, xvi, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90 Mediterranean xiii, 26, 164, 165, 177 Mehta, Binita 10 Memmi, Albert 97 Mendelsohn, Daniel 166 Menelaus 76 mental colonization xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiv, xxix, 11, 12, 29, 78, 79, 82, 124, 129, 132, 136, 154, 182, 184, 192, 201, 206, 223 Mercer, Kobena 8 Middle East xv, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20 Migration 21, 22, 110 Miranda 26, 30, 36 Mirran, Dame Helen 37 Mistry, Rohinton xi, 93, 94, 106 Modernism 154, 162, 163 Moore, Peter 36 Morrison, Toni 39, 49, 71 Mukherji, Pia 10 Index

Murad 102 Murphy, Sarah 36 Murray, Stuart 107, 168 Mwihaki 61, 62 mythmaking 62 Namjoshi, Suniti 36 native xv, xvi, xxiii, 78, 130, 142, 154, 188, 189, 190, 205 Native Hawaiians 201, 206, 209, 210 Negritude Movement 33 Nengi-Ilagha, Bina xxvii neocolonialism xxiii, 64 Nervous Conditions 39, 40, 54, 71 Neufeld, Josh 6 New World 26, 27, 29, 30, 36 Ngotho xviii, 61, 62, 63, 64 Nichols, Robert 150 Nneka 125, 126 Noble, Gustad 95 nostalgia 95, 102, 176 Nwapa, Flora 68 Nwoye 126 Oba, Elesin 60, 62, 71 Obierika xvii, xx, 58, 59, 133 Obinze xxv, 46, 47, 53 Odyssey 77 Ojaide, Tanure xx, xxvii Okonkwo xx, 56, 58, 59, 62, 66, 67, 68, 71, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Okpewho, Isidore xix, xxvii O’Loughlin, Alex 205, 208 Olunde 60, 61, 67 Om 99, 101 omniscient narrator 138, 143 265

One West Waikiki 200 On the Black Sisters’ Street xxv Orientalism 12, 14, 15, 196 Origin of Species 35 Orr, Stanley 197 Other xix, 12, 49, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 147, 202, 211, 225 outcasts xii, xvii, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 135 Owen 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 193 paganism 87, 89 pagan symbols 84 Palestine 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22 Paris 76, 78, 102 Park, Grace 205, 208, 211 Parkinson’s disease 102 Parrhesia 152 Parsi community 95, 105 Pepys, Samuel 24 Persepolis 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 Petals of Blood xxiii, xxiv, xxx Petty, William 187, 195 photograph 171, 174 Pittock, Murray G. H. 168 place names xiii, 190 Pleasures of Exile, The 32, 154, 161, 163 poetry 47, 113, 121, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 212, 219 Political Arithmetic 187, 195 polyphony 47, 64 Ponce, Poncie 204 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 161, 163

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positionality 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148 postcolonial comics 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 20 postcolonialism vii, viii, ix, xi, xiii, xxiii, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, 6, 11, 14, 24, 36, 75, 76, 89, 166, 181, 186, 188 postcolonial studies x, 5, 8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 24, 150, 185, 189 post-modern 108 Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 141 Prospero 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 154 protagonist xii, xxviii, 18, 43, 45, 46, 56, 61, 64, 65, 66, 117, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 147, 149, 198 racial anxiety 212, 216, 217, 222, 223 raciology 189 racism xxv, 43, 44, 45, 47, 53, 189, 193, 212, 214, 218, 219, 220, 224 Raghu 114 Rahel 124 Raleigh, Walter Alexander 28 Rankine, Claudia xiv, 212, 217, 218, 224 Ranyinudo xxv Raven 200, 204 Raven, Jonathan 204 Ray, Nicholas 224, 225 renaming 186, 192 representation xxii, xxviii, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 33, 41, 42, 48, Critical Insights

51, 58, 97, 104, 144, 151, 153, 183, 184, 205, 210 resistance 11, 21, 40, 49, 57, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 129, 134, 143, 193, 201 Retamar, Roberto Fernández 31, 32, 38 Rhodes, Karen 197 Rhys, Jean xii, 48, 137 Riker, William 198 Robeson, Paul 160 Rochester, Mr. 48, 49 Rodó, José Enrique 30, 31, 37 Roman Catholicism 87 Rothberg, Michael 9 Roxana 102, 103 Roy, Arundhati 123, 124 Saadawi, Nawal el 39 Sacco, Joe 6, 13, 15 sacrifice x, xi, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68 Said, Edward xix, 11, 12, 15, 17, 150 Sangili, Nabeta xxvi Sappho 171 Sarmiento, Félix Rubén García 29 Sartre, Jean Paul 25 Satan 131, 144 Satrapi, Marjane 17 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 83 self-inflicted wounds 56 Self/Other 96, 97, 102 Semprum, Jesús 31 Sergeant Danny 198 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana 212 Sethe 49, 50 Settler colonialism 182

Index

Shakespeare, William x, 23, 25, 37 Shankar 99, 100 She No Longer Weeps 56, 65, 70, 71 shipwreck 26, 27, 34, 36 Simon, David 224 Sir Gawain xi, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight xi, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92 Sissie 46 Slave Girl, The xvi slavery xvi, 39, 43, 49, 50, 143 society xx, xxv, 13, 36, 40, 49, 58, 59, 110, 114, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 144, 150, 151, 159, 175, 177, 212, 213, 214, 215, 219, 221, 223 sociopolitics 209 soliloquy 140 Song of Solomon 39, 55 Sontag, Susan 97 Soyinka, Wole x, xix, 56, 60 Spiegelman, Art 9, 10, 17, 22 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 142, 148, 150 status xi, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 53, 63, 89, 100, 105, 111, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 161, 220, 221 Stead Eilersen, Gillian 44, 55 Steele, Tracy 204 Stone, Brian 84 Strachey, William 27 Stuchtey, Benedikt xv 267

student 34, 46, 99, 114, 151, 153 Subaltern 3, 7, 16, 22 subjugation xv, xx, 56, 62, 66, 116, 130, 150, 151, 159 Such A Long Journey 95, 96, 97, 98 suffering x, 28, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 76, 102, 118, 135, 216, 220 suicide xi, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 101, 109, 133, 135 Sukhdev 111, 112, 113, 118, 119, 120 Swinburne, Algernon 168 Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai‘i 197, 211 Tambu 40 Taymor, Julie 37 teacher 30, 117, 151, 152, 153, 159 Tehmul 95, 96, 97, 98 Tempest, The 27 Terrelonge, Pauline 43 terrorism 3 Things Fall Apart xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxix, 56, 57, 58, 61, 66, 69, 70, 71, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 136 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa xxx, 71, 136, 163 Third World Woman 142 Tiffin, Helen xxvi, xxix, 148 Tintin in the Congo 11 Tobechi 45 Translations 164, 190 Trask, Haunani-Kay 204 Trojan Horse 77 268

Trojans 77, 79, 82, 89 Trojan war 77, 82 Troy 75, 76, 77, 78, 88, 89, 90, 91 truth-telling 152, 153 Two Noble Kinsmen 23 Ulster Plantation 182 Umuofia xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, 56, 58, 59, 61, 68, 124, 126, 129, 133 Uncle Chacko 124 Unigwe, Chika ix, xix, xx, xxv Unoka 133 untouchables 136 urban x, xi, xxviii, xxix, 99, 100, 101, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 204, 205, 220 urbanization 109, 118, 119 Vakeel, Nariman 102 Vancha 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 Velutha 124, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Vera, Yvonne xi, 56, 66, 70, 72 Violence xxi, 136 Virgil 77 Voice of the Sea 169 Wagner, Corinna 137 Walker, Alice 39, 42, 48 Wallace, David 35 Warĩĩnga 64, 65 Warner Brothers 203 Warner, Marina 36 War on Terror 17, 19 Watson 198 Critical Insights

Weep Not Child xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxix, xxx Whishaw, Ben 37 whiteness 148, 182, 189, 190, 191, 192, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 Wide Sargasso Sea xii, 48, 49, 55, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148 Williams, “Danno” 198 womanhood 139 Womanism 48 Women’s Rights 54

Index

World War II xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, 24, 28, 31, 203, 204 Wretched of the Earth, The xix, xxii, xxix, xxx, 194 Wright, Louis B. 27 X, Malcolm 34 Yellow-Yellow xxviii, xxix Yoruba 60, 61, 68 Zidane, Zinedine 218, 221 Zilayefa xxviii

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