Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes 1443851655, 9781443851657

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND APPENDICES
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I
LIONEL FOGARTY AND A NOTEON THE INDIGENOUS
THE GAM:“A PARTICULAR PLACEIN THE TRANSNATIONAL”
SOLIDARITY IN DIFFERENCE:UNVEILING THE COLONIALITY OF POWERIN NTOZAKE SHANGE’S SOCIOPOETICS
THE HUNGER:THE POWER AND POLITICSOF A (POST)COLONIAL CANNIBAL
PART II
“WE MAY BE THROUGH WITH THE PAST,BUT THE PAST AIN’T THROUGH WITH US”
THE CHRONOMETRIC NOSEAND THE CHRONOTOPIC NOVELMIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
LITERARY TOPOI OF ORGANISEDHALLUCINATIONS IN IRVINE WELSH’STRAINSPOTTING
JOURNEY BEYOND BORDERS
PART III
RESPITE ON THE BRINK
SAM SELVON’S LONELY LONDONAND DIASPORIC CARIBBEAN IDENTITYIN LITERATURE
THE INDIAN GOTHIC
LAFCADIO HEARN AND GEORGE GOULD’SPHILOSOPHY OF SPECTACLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

Diasporic Identities and Empire

Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes

Edited by

Anastasia Nicéphore Guest Editor David Brooks

Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes, Edited by Anastasia Nicéphore Guest Editor David Brooks This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Anastasia Nicéphore, David Brooks and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5165-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5165-7

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations and Appendices .......................................................... vii Contributors .............................................................................................. viii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I—Diaspora and Colonial Discourses Lionel Fogarty and a Note on the Indigenous ............................................ 12 David Brooks The Gam: “A Particular Place in the Transnational” ................................ 29 Graciela Susana Boruszko Solidarity in Difference: Unveiling the Coloniality of Power in Ntozake Shange’s Sociopoetics ............................................................ 40 Maria José Canelo The Hunger: The Power and Politics of a (Post)Colonial Cannibal.......... 53 Creighton Nicholas Brown Part II—Schisms in National Spaces “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us”: Salman Rushdie and the Moral Prerogative of Memory ............ 74 Stephen Bell The Chronometric Nose and the Chronotopic Novel Midnight’s Children .................................................................................. 82 Ren Denton

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Contents

Literary Topoi of Organised Hallucinations in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting ............................................................................................. 99 Anastasia Nicéphore Journey Beyond Borders: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines ............... 122 P. Jeyalakshmi Part III—Ethnic Tensions and Writings from Elsewhere Respite on the Brink—Complicating the Crisis of Caribbean Identity in Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement .............................. 138 Spencer Tricker Sam Selvon’s Lonely London and Diasporic Caribbean Identity in Literature.............................................................................................. 157 Tzu-Yu Lin The Indian Gothic: Diaspora, Domesticity and Maternal Absence in Deepa Mehta’s Fire ............................................................................. 177 Lydia Saleh Rofail Lafcadio Hearn and George Gould’s Philosophy of Spectacles: The Story of a Buddhist-Christian Encounter .......................................... 199 Antony Goedhals Bibliography ............................................................................................. 213 Index ........................................................................................................ 230

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND APPENDICES

Illustrations 1. James Gillray, A March to the Bank (Cover Image). Courtesy of the British Museum. 2. Fig. 1. John Gabriel Stedman, March through a Swamp or Marsh in Terra Firma, from Narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1744–1797 (Bell 1796 St). Courtesy of University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library. 3. Fig. 2. John Gabriel Stedman, Group of Negroes Imported to be Sold for Slaves in 1793, from Narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1744–1797 (Bell 1796 St). Courtesy of University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library. 4. Fig. 3. Lafcardio Hearn. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Box 5. Folder 3, George M. Gould Collection of Hearniana, Manuscript Division.

Appendices 1. Appendix 1. Global Statistics on AIDS virus. Source: UNAIDS/WHO AIDS Epidemic Update. December 2005. 2. Appendix 2. Illicit drug use amongst young Britons. Source: Parker, H., Aldridge, J., and Measham, F. Illegal Leisure: The Normalization of Adolescent Recreational Drug Use. London: Routledge, 1998. 83–5.

CONTRIBUTORS

Stephen Bell is an Assistant Professor at the College of General Studies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia where he primarily teaches World Literature and introductory literature courses. He is currently working on his dissertation at Indiana University, Pennsylvania and researching the ways in which memory and the past construct identity in the novels and essays of Salman Rushdie. Graciela Susana Boruszko is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Comparative Linguistics, Hispanic Studies, International Studies and Languages at Seaver College, Pepperdine University. She is Director of the International Research Group, American and Spanish Scholars, “Identities Emerging from the Spanish Literature,” and Academic Member of the Literature Research Unit at the Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER). Graciela has published a number of articles on Comparative Literature and Linguistics. David Brooks has taught at various Australian universities and edited or has been on the editorial board of various Australian literary journals. A guest of numerous literary festivals, he has received or been shortlisted for many prestigious awards for his novels and poetry. He has lectured on Australian literature and/or read his poetry and prose at literary events in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, China, Serbia and Slovenia. He is currently Honorary Associate Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where until 2012 he was also Director of the graduate program in Creative Writing. He is co-editor of the journal Southerly. Creighton Nicholas Brown is a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Kansas. Creighton received his undergraduate education at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, where he double majored in English literature and Spanish and Hispanic Studies with a minor in Religion. Creighton’s current research interests include postcolonial literature and using Spanish influences to examine the Caribbean from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective.

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Maria José Canelo is Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Anglo-American Studies, and Senior Researcher Humanities at the Migrations and Peace Studies Group Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She is Vice-President of the Scientific Board at the Center for Social Studies, and Editorial Board member of A Journal of Anglo-American Studies. She is also the recipient of the ERASMUS grant (2008) and Fulbright PhD Scholarship (Commission Portugal). She has published numerous articles on issues of migration and Anglo-American comparative studies. Renee (Ren) Denton received her PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Memphis, United States. Renee is a recent recipient of the Ruth H. and Henry Loeb Scharff Scholarship award. She holds a Masters for her research on African American Literature and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She has also published work which historically examines the travesties surrounding the African American identity. Antony Goedhals grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. He has lectured at numerous universities in South Africa, including the University of Vista and the University of Pretoria. Antony is currently completing a critical study on Lafcadio Hearn. P. Jeyalakshmi completed her PhD on the aesthetics of “borderlessness.” Her areas of interests are postcolonialism, feminism, disability studies and holocaust literature. She graduated from The English and Foreign Languages University, India, and currently teaches at Salman bin Abdul Aziz University, Saudi Arabia. Anastasia Nicéphore is a PhD candidate within the Department of English at the University of Sydney, and the recipient of the UPA Scholarship. She is the author of Organised Hallucinations: Literary Topoi of (Post)colonial Disease, which examines the complex nature of diasporic identities in the twentieth century, with particular foci on lesser distinguished (post)colonial regions. Anastasia’s current research is part of a larger body of work on sociopolitical and intellectual eminences and the need to re-interpret certain cultural procurements. Lydia Saleh Rofail is currently completing a PhD in English at the University of Sydney, Australia. She holds a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Philosophy in English. The recipient of the APA

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Contributors

Scholarship, Lydia’s research examines urbanity in relation to subjectivity in contemporary Australian Literature. Further interests include the depictions and manifestations of urban wayfarers and subcultures in contemporary literature. Lydia has also researched and written extensively in the field of postcolonial Anglophone texts by Indian women and their role within Gothicism. Spencer Tricker is a PhD student of English at the University of Miami. His current research explores the interplay of imperialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in British and Anglophone literature of the twentieth century. Tzu-yu Lin is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. She has been teaching languages for many years and has taught at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan after receiving her Masters in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. In 2008 she was awarded a Government Scholarship for Study Abroad from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The people who contributed to this book move beyond merely those of contributors and editors. The hard work of the organisers at the South Atlantic Modern Languages Association (SAMLA), in Atlanta Georgia and Raleigh Durham North Carolina respectively, is to be commended, and it was here at the 2011 and 2012 conferences that the presentations of numerous contributors first took place and developed into this final publication. The discussions at the SAMLA conferences were immensely beneficial to understanding the new configurations that this popular term—the “diaspora”—is producing. This publication is truly a global effort, with contributors coming from various parts of the world—North America, South America, Europe, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Asia, Australia and Saudi Arabia. Each of the contributors not only writes on the complex nature of diasporas but, in some way, see themselves as diasporic. Whether explicitly affected by the constraints of globalisation on cultural contentions and personal identity, or bearing witness to this temporal phenomenon, there is much to be said on the impact of a new type of empire. More so, diasporas are critically engaged with the blurring of national boundaries rather than purely being refined by them, and for this reason studies on this strand of postcolonialism continue to be crucial within literary and interdisciplinary academic spheres. It is also important to thank Professor David Brooks, whose wealth of experience, intellectual support and marvellous insights into the process of publishing have been invaluable for this publication coming into fruition. Further, David Brooks’ own perceptions of the concept of diaspora, and the diegetic and non-diegetic implications it carries, have assisted in developing a vital stance in this publication. Equally importantly, we must thank the scores of people who took the time to offer constructive criticisms, advice and personal experiences in order to offer greater clarity on some of the issues confronting the diaspora in the twenty-first century. Finally, we would like to thank those at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their hard work, and to whom we entrusted our visions. We must say that without the efforts of the exceptional editor Carol Koulikourdi, and her initial interest in our project and subsequent personal guidance, this book may not have come to press.

being held back from a place or state we wish to reach … —David Brooks

INTRODUCTION

Unlike traditional theories on hybridity which were generated in consideration of multicultural infusions, and at times profusions, of colonial migrations, postmodern literature illuminates neo-hermeneutics of what Gayatri C. Spivak calls segregated “subalterns … the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat” (1995, 25). This collection, Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes, investigates these ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, American, Eurocentric, Australian and Asian literature and modes of thought. The post-Enlightenment text is an unpalatable interjection of cultural shifters defying imperial homogeneity as well as political and economic unions. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995), Robert J. C. Young looks at such representations as the unconscious imperial structure which sets its descriptions on a “fixed centre.”1 Each of the articles and academic papers in this book examines the manner in which authors not only attempt to write back to the “English” centre but further reflect, through their critiques, on the plight of the diasporic identity. Whilst cultural hybridity has become a signature of the postmodern psyche, there is also much literature foregrounding the realities of the diaspora. The aim of this collection is to bring to light the complex relationship between the diasporic identity and the empire in which it resides. In the past the yearning to find meaning and value within patriotism allowed countries to remain as independent nations, but centuries of tensions have seen them politically weakened. Such opinion is a far cry from Benedict Anderson’s assurance that “the end of the era of nationalism, so long prophesised, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nationness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”2 Collaboration amongst international scholars and researchers reveals the uncertainty and cultural anxiety dominating the postmodern horizon. Within Diasporic Identities and Empire, arguments on Anderson’s “nationness,” inclusive of problems in defining Englishness and the insinuations of hybridity for the marginalised, are considered on a global scale as national borders are experiencing new kinds of contentions. Although postcolonial studies have largely been Anglocentric in focus, developments elsewhere have opened up other theoretical applications and new insights, and these are explored in this collection.

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Introduction

Work of this kind was formerly called “Commonwealth Literature,” however the field has been transformed by the use of diverse theories concerning language, gender, subjectivity and race. In the context of cultural production, “postcolonialism” as a theory is ascribed to “writing after empire,”3 a reference to both colonial discourse and the writings of the ex-colonised. The proliferation of full-length studies, readers and conferences on the subject testifies to its importance over a range of cultural and interdisciplinary studies. Arguably, the two most important dates in postcolonial studies are 1947, which marks the beginning of a massive decolonisation of the British Empire, and 1978, when the founding text of postcolonial studies was first published—Edward Said’s Orientalism.4 In it, Said proposed that a text is “handcuffed” to its cultural, social, political and historical contexts. Said saw the importance of critics and theorists finding a way to “resist and recreate” meaning within texts in order to extract objective and less imperial convictions. The text is not only a reflection of the writer’s observations, but of the collective consciousness in its respective temporal realm. As a theory, “postcolonialism” permits the scholar and critic to recognise the environment (time and place) in which a particular text is made. Accordingly, Said insisted that a postcolonial critic should be willing to “develop a perspective, not just to postcolonial literatures, whereby states of marginality, plurality and perceived ‘Otherness’ are seen as sources of energy and potential change.”5 Postcolonial theory, the position of the diasporic identity, establishes a need to reconsider and reevaluate the text as a whole, and to therefore decipher any other cryptic truths it may possess. Foucault had referred to this process as “normalisation,” where “value” and “truth-content” could be extracted from a text.6 The term “postcolonial” has generated textual and aesthetic dynamics which provide a comparable element between territories which, in the past, were given little consideration in regards to their place within the postcolonial paradigm. For this reason, the consequences of empire and the role of the novel are now under closer examination than ever before. As Raymond Williams has asserted, even before the term “postcolonialism” came into literary studies7 there was a perceived need to unlearn “the inherent dominative mode.”8 In the past century, mass migration, exile, diasporic repositioning, refugee reshuffling and certain re-evaluations on the predicament of the Indigenous mean that, in one way or another, the global has undergone a major geopolitical and cultural transformation. In Part I, “Diaspora and Colonial Discourses,” David Brooks’ chapter “Lionel Fogarty and a Note

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on the Indigenous” offers a great deal in terms of methodically illustrating how colonial discourses reify a kind of “dispossession,” a paradoxical disposition. For the non-indigenous writer—the Australian poet, whom some may perceive as “invader”—there is a consciousness of one’s self as “handcuffed” to a dominative discourse. Aesthetically manoeuvring thought through writing, in a sense, pertains an understanding of “being held back from a place or state they (/we) wish to reach.” For the poet, academic, and/or writer, the necessity to bring forth some form, the dynamics of poetics—negotiating idiom and grammatical structures while “conscious of the manifold signs, actual and conceptual, tacit or vociferous”—is crucial to conjuring a temporal, and yet ephemeral oeuvre of a particular landscape. This interchange of discourse and its potent connection to place, however, is refuted in Graciela Boruszko’s chapter “The Gam: ‘A Particular Place in the Transnational’.” Instead, Boruszko explores the consequences of discourse which is unaffected by national borders. The diaspora is forced to find some type of “normative” process through a language that has transgressed due to its implications of universals. Rather than defining the properties of the individual, private space, and/or national political borders, there is an opposing universal space which defies definition but invariably constructs functional and somewhat comprehensible discourses that “dangerously pry on each other.” The “gam” signifies a “linguistic transnational” in which limitations form a preoccupation with transgressed states and moments of ambivalence to attain an appreciation for the universal. Boruszko scrutinises the transnational space and its notions of transgression, and this posits a vital understanding into contemporaneous identities and subjects. Maria José Canelo’s contribution delves into the consequences of “coloniality and power” as depicted in Ntozake Shange’s poem “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography” (1983). Canelo intriguingly refers to Shange’s work as a vehicle of agency that carries an oppositional voice to a “spatial articulation of power” (Quijano 2008, 249). With reference to the Latin American critic, Agentinian Walter Mignolo, Canelo proposes that colonial and imperial relations have contributed to a type of discourse which has implicated the disauthorisation and subalternisation of specific forms of knowledge, or at the very least has been influential on the aesthetic re-presentations of such knowledge. Canelo places emphasis on the decolonisation of thought, achievable only through deconstructions on movements between places, rather than through preoccupations within the limitations of specific geopolitical landscapes. Irrespective of colonial and imperial infiltrations, Canelo explores the “spatial dimension of

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Introduction

genealogy” and its capacity to provide Deleuzean rhizomatic assertions of defining identity.9 From this perspective, genealogy, the power of memory and the significance of ancestry are pivotal to the role of “spatial” discourses. Nonetheless, borrowing Paul Gilroy’s delineations of a “rhizomatic fractal structure” (1993, 4), Canelo notes the temporal implications of the post-ethnic turn and its disconcerting effects on intersubjectivity. In the case of critiquing Western neo-imperialism, Creighton Nicholas Brown writes on the metaphorical implications of cannibalism in his essay “The Hunger: The Power and Politics of a (Post)Colonial Cannibal.” Juxtaposing discourses and their accompanying connotations, Brown makes a point for the ramifications of consumption, particularly with regards to distant peoples and cultures. Interweaving an analogy to Marcus Clarke’s epic novel For the Term of his Natural Life (1874), Brown reassesses contradictory approaches to terms such as cannibalism, and thus exposes overt double standards that are embedded within a Western and predominantly Eurocentric discourse. Such doubleness in applications of “otherness” is established through the exploration of the “monster” motif, notably projected in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Here, Cohen puts forth “that the monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a resistant Other known only through process and movement, never through dissection-table analysis” (1996, x). Brown draws parallels between British imperialism and its approach to abject peoples, who were stigmatised as “savage.” Tensions between the “savage” behaviour of the cannibal and the natural savageness of abject convicts are evident through the “doubleness” in discourse, and expose the marked differences in the interpretation of civilized and uncivilized worlds. Part II of the collection is entitled “Schisms in National Spaces,” and the way in which, as Stephen Bell’s chapter indicates, identities within a given culture are palimpsestically construed. The diaspora emerges from within these pluralities, ideologically defying “purity.” Bell looks at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, where a multitude of identities, accompanied by a plethora of memories, come together to imaginatively reconstruct a “sterile, claustrophobic and oppressive land.” Building schisms in national spaces, to re-interpret an imperially constructed, fundamentally fabricated history, is a means of escaping from repressions of the past. In a conversation with David Brooks, Rushdie emphasises that: “India, if it means anything, means plurality. Although it also has different races, Pakistan feels much more like a singularity, because there is just one religion and there’s a much greater homogeneity both of language and

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faith.”25 Authors such as Rushdie, an Indian living in Britain, make use of writing styles that convey a counter-hegemonic vision, and determinately oppose the ones enforced by authority. Such counter-hegemonic visions are taken a step further in Ren Denton’s thesis on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where political violence produces private transformation for the diaspora. This is indicative of the schisms that colonisation instils within a nation. Denton, however, deconstructs these schisms by applying Aadam’s nose as a signifier—a nose where “dynasties” wait “inside … like snot” (Midnight’s Children, 8). Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorisations on the chronotope effectively establish the role of the novel, the predicament of the individual, and the ramifications imposed by sociopolitical and historical contexts. Denton reminds us of the distinct dialogical relationships between social and historical events, and the collocating philosophies of a “text’s imagined time and space” and the “space of the author’s real era.” Temporal-spatial relationships inevitably invite authorial interjections of abstract thought, materialised through the sign construct and producing meaning, since: “[c]onsequently, every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope.”10 As Saleem is “hurled into exile” there is an understanding of the need to assimulate: “‘[w]e must all become new people’ in the land of the pure” (Midnight’s Children, 355). In “Reflections on Exile”, Edward Said’s words ring true, as: “Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs, and, by so doing it fends off exile.”11 This is followed by work that elucidates the complexity of the term “(post)colonialism” as Anastasia Nicéphore’s thesis hones in on the relativity of the prefix “post.” Affiliating notions of “classic” colonialism, adjacency, and “late colonialism,” Nicéphore argues that cultural anxieties and the “urban subproletariat” (Spivak 1995, 25) are indisputable parallels between “the body politic and the body private.” Her discussion of Irvine Welsh’s post-Romantic Scottish novel Trainspotting disseminates a cultural pseudo doxia and, simultaneously, reveals the severity of colonial strategies, which continue to control fragile cultures. Welsh’s dystopic narrative looks at the consequential angst associated with policies of homogeneity and acquiescence when the body private remains “unconscious of empire’s civilizing pretensions.”12 For postmodern Scots, the diaspora within a British imperial framework—the vices, assumptions, and prejudices exploited through (post)colonial policies—continue to underscore current dilemmas. P. Jeyalakshmi observes that schisms in national spaces are, primarily,

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Introduction

affiliated to Western epistemology. In her chapter “Journeys Beyond Borders: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines,” Jeyalakshmi evaluates the provocations of visible borders. Schisms appear due to unnecessary material obsessions that can be dated back to Plato’s original iterations of an ocular-centrality of knowledge. Adapting Young’s assertion: “[c]olonialism may have brought some benefits of modernity, as its apologists continue to argue, but it also caused extraordinary suffering in human terms, and was singularly destructive with regard to the indigenous cultures with which it came into contact” (Post Colonialism: An Historical Introduction, 2001, 6), Jeyalakshmi situates schisms in Eurocentric disciplines whereby “boundary marking” perpetuates identity crises. Irrespective of this, Jeyalakshmi proposes that it is within these tensions that a unique neo identity advances, for: “[w]ithout space there is no art form.” It is in these so-called pockets, which might be defined as types of cultural enclaves, where divisions and subdivisions of space result in certain societies becoming “customized in their mindscape” and, in turn, “crav[ing] for a narrow, pin-pointed affiliation to space in the modern era.” The third and final section, “Ethnic Tensions and Writings from Elsewhere,” extrapolates a mental search for pluralistic modes of selfhood. Spencer Tricker’s chapter on Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement ventures into the fragility of the diasporic condition, which is challenged by fractured notions of national, racial and even sexual essentialisms. Whilst Tricker identifies the role of Queer Theory in postcolonial studies, there is a deeper underlining sensitivity to the predicament of the bisexual persona, in regard to which modern theories remain rudimentary. Furthered by the stance of the Afro-Caribbean writer, Tricker bears in mind the porous spaces that persevere in a globalised and postcolonial clime. Seeing the black diasporic lumpenproletariat (a term borrowed by Brent H Edwards to define “the marginal, the drifters, eking out an existence, sometimes parasitically, on the edges of modern industrialized society”13), Tricker deals with “a certain performative identity” that is determined to challenge simplistic associations to the wellknown South Asian postcolonial model. Revisiting Bhabha’s “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Tzu-Yu Lin unpacks ideological presumptions on the impact of hybridity on the diaspora. Even though, simply taken, hybridity concentrates on the belief that a colonial subject is developed through a “discriminatory identity,”14 Tzu-Yu Lin historically traces the empowerment gained by Caribbean writers who left for cosmopolitan cities such as London to forge their careers. Tzu-Yu Lin points out the ramifications of introducing hybridised discourses into

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Standard Englishness that opened up new variations to understanding the plight of such subcultures as Creole plantation slaves. In recent studies, the term “diaspora” is referred to in plural form “diasporas” with the view of reflecting upon the differing categories and subcategories within such a context. Tzu-Yu Lin’s chapter aims to unravel the immediacy of “negative transparency” (Bhabha 1994, 160) and how this impacts upon writings brought from elsewhere which have managed to articulate new perceptions on ambivalent spaces. Distinguishing the diasporas from previous postcolonial subjects, Tzu-Yu Lin argues that, now more than ever before, the globalised identity cannot decipher its own genealogical roots as the rhizome is “deterritorialised,”15 eradicated. Within an epoch that invites a post-ethnic stance, Tzu-Yu Lin questions the vulnerability of diasporas. In “The Indian Gothic: Diaspora, Domesticity and Maternal Absence in Deepa Mehta’s Fire,” Lydia Saleh Rofail posits the aporia of whether voluntary diasporas are capable of dismantling paradigmatic imperial structures. Saleh Rofail’s thesis recapitalises the role of the diasporic narrator/persona who determines to engage with the sociocultural and political vices that redirect them from their homelands in the first place. Recognising that terms such as “diaspora” and “transnational” should not so readily be used interchangeably, Saleh Rofail tentatively investigates the discrepancies that distance identity from an eroding culture. For, while the transnational identity migrates with an awareness to the benevolence of relocation, the diasporas require physical and mental distancing from their homeland to make way for a kind of “metaphysical emancipation.” Antony Goedhals offers the final chapter in this collection, and an ever important note on ethnic and religious tensions inexplicably attached to the composition of writings from elsewhere. In this instance, “elsewhere” is a non-Western mode of thinking. Through a biographical account, Goedhals traces the footsteps of Lafcadio Hearn whose findings on a “Buddhist set of axioms” provoked a new kind of discomfort for a predominantly JudeoChristian Victorian society which, thus far, was nestling in a “quasiscientific discourse of causation.” Goedhals propositions that it was to be this rigidness within the Victorian empire that pushed forth the individual’s search for identity through a “lonely search for an elusive, illusory self.” It is, therefore, acceptable to deduce that postcolonial theory and, specifically, the plight of the diaspora can be applied to nearly any part of the earth. That said, some critics consider the term “postcolonialism” to be reaching inflationary proportions and losing its initial preoccupation with defining its effects on those peripheries submissively interlinked with the West. Even though many notable postcolonial studies have ascertained

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Introduction

that the role of the academic, critic, and writer is to “write back” to empire (Ashcroft), it could very well be that the diasporas are evidence that the dominant social strata has such a profound influence, a brutal rigidness, and to which the diasporas find themselves “being held back from a place or state they/we wish to reach” (Brooks). Nevertheless, our thoughts on global cultural relations have, over the years, been transformed through the adaption of postcolonial theory which also extends itself into other fields of study such as anthropology, philology, history, politics, cybernetics (which has seen the development of the term “cyber-colonialism”) and cultural and political studies. In our contemporary setting of what could be termed “postpostmodernism,” “post-capitalism,” or perhaps “meta-Marxism,” ever more regions around the globe fit into this dynamic. The Arabian world, the Caribbean, Latin America, and more recently countries such as Ireland and Scotland, have emerged as regions confronted with comparable power struggles. This collection, Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes, brings together the works of scholars and researchers from a vast number of regions to critically converge on the contributions of this ever-evolving field of study.

Notes 1

Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 3. 3 Bill Ashcroft, G. Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge, 1989). 4 Stuart Sim (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 336. 5 Ibid., 198. 6 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–1979, trans., Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 18–19, 60–62. 7 Frantz Fanon’s observations were also crucial to the development of postcolonial studies. 8 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958). 9 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans., Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). 10 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 258.

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Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 176. 12 Peter Hitchcock, “Decolonizing (the) English,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3) (2001): 749. 13 See passage in Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, quoted in Brent Hays Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2003), 201. 14 See Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in The Locations of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 159. 15 Deleuze & Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minuit, 1977), 257.

PART I— DIASPORA AND COLONIAL DISCOURSES

LIONEL FOGARTY AND A NOTE ON THE INDIGENOUS DAVID BROOKS

I. A Note on the Indigenous A great many Australian poets are in an interesting and ironic state of dispossession, although perhaps only a very small proportion actually feels that way—that proportion, let us say, whose subjects and predispositions draw them towards the landscape, its flora and fauna, and their human experience thereof and thereupon. And perhaps we are speaking only of a proportion of this proportion, although even as we contemplate this we cannot exclude the possibility that some proportion of those great many who turn their backs upon such subject matter do so themselves out of some unacknowledged sense of impropriety or dispossession. I speak of white Australian poets, or at least of non-indigenous Australian poets, for not all of these non-indigenous poets are “white.” “Invader” poets, some may prefer to call them (or “us,” since I am one of them). And “dispossession” might not be quite the right term. Let us say, instead, a being held back from a place or state they (/we) wish to reach, as if they were looking, from a ridge or a fence-line, at the field they want to go to, just over there, but find they have to travel a very long way round, or perhaps not go there at all and instead find somewhere else to want to go—to translate or re-site their desire. Nor am I suggesting that this is in any way like the dispossession that indigenous Australians have themselves experienced. Some non-indigenous Australians, it is true, have experienced something like it, in the homelands from which they have come as refugees, but this is not the case for most of those to whom I refer, though there are some minor yet tantalising points of comparison. We might see it, this new dispossession, as a kind of poetic justice. Living all one’s life in a country, a landscape or set of landscapes, camping in them, walking through them, growing up with their sounds, their smells, having no other place so intimately available to one, no other place where one wants so much to be, knowing this as “home” and yet

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knowing also—accepting, intellectually, as one must—that it is also an invaded place, and that one is a descendent of those invaders, or that one has been invited, accepted, hosted and made complicit by their descendants, one is already dispossessed or, since one did not possess, by right, in the first place, is in a state of not possessing. But I mean something other or more specific than that. I am thinking about writing or in other ways representing this state of being—or rather, since this state itself is not so difficult to represent, of representing one’s feeling about, one’s relationship to, that place, that landscape, which one loves, which has shaped one, and which one wants to, has no choice but to call home, and yet which one cannot “claim.” Even here I have not quite got it right. “Claiming” is not what it’s about. Nor, really, is “possession.” Each of those concepts is something we should probably be trying to overcome, and we might eventually be grateful for this chastening spur. Let’s approach it yet another way. (This diffidence, this two-steps-forward-one-step-back, after all, is part of the poetics of this predicament.) Let’s say that the place, the landscape, does shape one, that it impacts upon one—that, if one has spent all of one’s life there (/here), or even only a part of that life, and found oneself deeply drawn, then it has somehow “in-formed” one, taught one how to feel and think about it, how to structure one’s feelings within it. One’s writing— one’s representing—may very well become, then, an attempt to express this place and these feelings, the things which one perceives in this place, which this place has taught one to perceive within it, as best one can. One might even say that some part of one’s writing, some part of one’s “poetics,” might seem to have grown from this place. And yet, of course, one has brought—has been brought—an alien language, alien forms, with which to perform the task, and one cannot expect that there will be a ready match between these things (the language of the place itself, and the language one has brought to it). Even when one has overcome all or most of the other cultural barriers and inappropriate behaviours and assumptions, the patterns and habits of other places that blinker and preoccupy an immigrant culture for so many generations, even when the living here has generated something of its own idiom, to make up for the insufficiencies of the imported languages and forms, there will not be a ready match, since it is not just a matter of terms and idiom, but of the deep grammars which deploy them. There is always a path. Let us call it the “Indigenous Path.” We stare at it. It seems to stare at us. Some writers go down it with no qualms. Others may itch to follow it but, conscious of the manifold signs—actual and conceptual, tacit or vociferous—warning them against doing so, or

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perhaps simply from their own senses of respect, difference and mis/appropriation, choose not to, no matter how much it might ease their way. The indigenous peoples have been in this country, on this land, within these landscapes, many thousands of years whether this period be of forty, sixty or one hundred thousand years seems scarcely to matter when one is comparing it with the barely more than two hundred years of nonindigenous occupation. And if, as indigenous culture asserts emphatically, the land moulds the lives, ideas, languages and dreams of those who live upon it, then indigenous culture will be much more deeply steeped in these ways, will have been taught things by the place that it might take nonindigenous culture many thousands of years yet to learn. It is almost a ludicrous understatement to say that indigenous culture has a great deal to teach the non-indigene who would express his or her feelings and experience of that place truly. And, as already foreshadowed, there have long been non-indigenous writers and artists who intuited or understood this, and attempted to learn, from indigenous culture, habits of thought and feeling more appropriate to the place they were finding themselves loving and wanting to express. At least one school of Australian writing, that of the Jindyworobaks, was dedicated to following this path. One of its tenets, naïve and presumptuous, was the substitution, wherever plausible, of terms and concepts from indigenous culture for English images and concepts. And, as it happened, this school suffered the ridicule of its own white culture for so doing (“Jindyworobaksheesh,” “Jindyworobakwardness,” “the boy scout school of Australian poetry” [terms from James McAuley, R.H. Morrison and A.D. Hope respectively1]). But as indigenous culture becomes more and more articulate—and articulated—in the contemporary Australian and international environment, and better and more successful at asserting its rights, it becomes more and more clear that this path cannot morally be taken, or that earning one’s right to take it can take a long, long time. And for non-indigenous poets this is a dilemma. If it is true, as indigenous culture asserts, that the land teaches, then those non-indigenous who are open and willing enough to be taught, by the land itself, without recourse to indigenous culture, will find themselves learning—find themselves inhabited by—things that, if they give them expression, will appear to have been appropriated from indigenous culture anyway. From a certain perspective, in other words, those who would learn and bear into their work the lessons of the place itself are damned if they do appropriate indigenous concepts, and just as likely to be damned if they scrupulously avoid doing so.

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But already, this discussion has begun to take on a freight of assumptions and misconceptions. There are numerous under-examined issues here and I should take a little time to note some of them. * There is, perhaps first and foremost, the issue of landscape itself—not exactly the field that the aforementioned dispossessed or, to put it more accurately, as-yet-unpossessing poets look at from over their fence, since that field, as we shall see, is a combination of actuality and concept, physicality and affect, thing inside and thing outside, but a large part of that field nonetheless. The very term “landscape” is a difficulty, as much a way of not seeing as it is of seeing, as much a way of preventing our understanding as it is a way of enabling it. A collective noun. A version of “Asia,” say, that one term which at once attempts to designate and obscure that huge panoply of nations, “landscapes” and peoples that comprise it, each with their own specificities. Or of “the Animal,” a term which, as Derrida so clearly and simply explains,2 not only performs in actuality an act of considerable intellectual violence in reducing to the abstract “One,” and so enabling us to hold at bay the countless differences of a vast array of distinct species, but also, since it bears so little relation to those to whom it is supposed to relate, says more about us and the way we wish to construct ourselves than about anything outside or beyond us. From such a perspective there is no landscape. There are only landscapes, in the plural, in a multiple that becomes only the more so the more closely we approach it. Identify a landscape and you will find, as you look at it more closely, landscapes within it. Look at any one of these more closely and you will find landscapes within that. And no, it cannot be claimed that this is a problem unique to the way we relate to our particular environment. It is of course a problem inherent in language itself. Nor (at the risk of introducing a measure of paradox) need it necessarily mean that, cautiously, under erasure, we cannot use the term. The “landscape,” after all, as “nature” outstretched, has been and remains the greatest symbol and metaphor we have for that which is beyond us, outside and obscured by the systems that comprise our knowing. We can talk, as I have been doing, about a mode of writing that brings us closer to the landscape and is somehow more appropriate or faithful to it, but surely all that any new mode of writing can ever be faithful to is our own sense of a replica or simulacrum of our own current understanding of the landscape—the body of ideas and beliefs and intellectual/conceptual

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fashions and frameworks that make up that understanding. To think that we are somehow getting closer to some actual “fact” of the landscape is a little troubling, if not actually paradoxical or absurd, and flies in the face of so much we have come to believe about the impossibility (given the nature of language and all other systems which compose our modes of apprehending anything) of our apprehending anything directly, of any actual, immediate and unmediated seeing or knowing. From this perspective, all is—can never be anything other than—gesture. And then, of course, there is the question of just what it is that we want from it, this landscape home, elusive and perhaps ultimately impossible as it might be—or, rather, of what it is that we feel that we are not getting, cannot have, or cannot have access to. If it is just a matter of terms for certain feelings that we experience—terms for feelings of connectedness, say, or of our love of place, our sense of its somehow sacredness—and leaving aside the fact that our real unpossession might inhere not so much in terms themselves, or the lack of them, as in a sense that we do not have a “right” to the feeling in the first place, then surely it amounts principally and to no more than a kind of linguistic/artistic challenge. At first glance this should not be a great problem. The Australian land and its landscapes have generated many languages already—there were, it has been estimated, several hundred indigenous languages at the time of white invasion—and surely it can generate one language more. But, while particular words may be its surface—its most overt sign—it is not really a question of words. And here, again, we face a kind of chimera. There may be many different indigenous languages, but beneath them there is, arguably, one deeper, wordless language, and it is this language, if language is the right term for it, that is the problem. Words themselves are surface. The “home” we long for is something—a language?—beneath or beyond them. It is, we could say, this language we are kept from, this language that holds us at bay. And this “home,” this deeper language, represents a problem in several ways. There is the problem of access to this language. There is the problem of appropriation of this language. There is the problem of the relation of this language to the language of those who are seeking it. And there is the problem of the relation of this language—just as there is of the language of those who seek this language—to language itself; of this language as language. Non-indigenous Australian artists and writers—that proportion concerned to feel, explore and articulate their place—have the challenge not only of finding, opening themselves to, this new language in which to articulate the place of their real but nevertheless illegitimised belonging,

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but also of relating that language to the language they already have. Or— and one can understand this thought even more readily—of releasing themselves in some manner from the grip (what I have already called the deep grammar) of that language. Arguably, of course, some of these matters—of the definition and conception of landscape, or of the landscape’s generation of or relation to language and culture—are not so much of indigeneity and the complications thereof as they are to do with our own evolving arguments concerning human capacities of perception and representation per se; emanations of an exploration of and struggle with our deeper structurations that have been preoccupying Western theory for decades, and that have already produced some significant propositions. Many, for example, in a readily understandable recourse, have seen this as a matter of reconceptualising that which does the conceiving, i.e. of finding a new way of handling and conceiving of ourselves within the places we find ourselves. We are offered (by Deleuze & Guattari, amongst others) release from that Freudian ontology which sees the individual constructed about a lack; we are offered a rhizomatic rather than an arborescent conception of knowing and arranging the known; we are offered, as a concomitant conception of procedure, the idea of a nomadic rather than a settled being. That the latter is an idea which has been seen to be so deeply sympathetic to and even to have originated within indigenous Australian culture strongly substantiates the assertion already made that the matter of the indigenous, for the nonindigenous, cannot readily be separated from matters of authenticity, language, perception and representation at the heart of our own cultural moment. But these are perhaps ideas for a further stage of this discussion, not this one. If the land teaches and informs, then it will not be changing its lessons and languages to suit intellectual fashion. Somehow this idea of being in-formed and the idea of finding new ways of being don’t seem to go too readily together. Even for those who pursue the latter in one or another of its various forms, the problem of language, the grip of language, and the releasing of that grip, will maintain. Central amongst and to the manifold epistemological adjustments to be made, there will still be the problem of the language in which they are made and discussed, and of how that may be opened and adjusted to accommodate and allow them, since the language itself, it must be presumed, carries within it the tentacular roots of many of those very things they will be seeking to change, and without substantial alteration to the one it is hard to see how there could be any substantial change in the other. Poets who, for these or some other reasons, choose not to follow the

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path of or into such ontological reconceptions will have an awkward and uncomfortable choice. To accept a kind of internal exile from their own home, as it were—or to haunt it, mute—or to give themselves over, open themselves to it, and take the consequences of being ridiculed, made to seem thieves when they know or feel that they are not. The poetry might be marked, as a consequence (as many would argue Australian poetry has been) by a diffidence, a guilt, an uncanniness (unheimlichkeit), or some later developments of the same. They may, on the other hand, chose not to use the words or the concepts that are there, in front of them, just over the fence or down from the ridge, but these words and concepts will still be there, absent, at the hearts of their poems. It’s not, after all, as if it is not a price they—those of the tribe of they—have not already asked others to pay. There is, of course, another way of looking at this. The poem (/poetry) is—is brought about by, exists because it is—a site of tension, a disagreement, a quarrel, a facing-off. Therefore, the poetry of this landscape is, and will be, a settling between the emanations of the landscape itself and those who are trying to express it. Were they able to mirror the landscape exactly—were it the idea that they do so—then it is likely that the poetry which attempts to do so would not exist at all, would not need to. It may not all come down to grammar, but grammar, surely, is a large part of it. A grammar moulds us. To accept and learn and conform to it is, potentially, to let a very insidious thing into your mind. The unheimlich may be a matter of a grammar that has not released us—and perhaps cannot, will not—in the face of encountering a grammar new to us, emanating from this place, these landscapes of our invasion. It is fraught territory. That much at least is evident. And, perhaps exasperatingly for those readers who have followed me this far, I am not going to push these notes (for they are nothing more) towards some sort of rhetorical conclusion. To get some of the questions right—or, rather, since the concept of rightness in this way is also part of the problem—to arrive at questions that make more sense of our predicament, may be far more important at this stage than to answer them. To appear to do so, to attempt to do so, would bring a specious and dismissive frame to what are in fact entrenched and serious challenges. Instead I would move to an example. It would be nice to be able to say of what this example is, but anyone who has been truly following so far will realise that this, too, would be preemptive and premature. It is the poem “Weather Comes” by an indigenous poet, Lionel Fogarty, and—since it seems to me that any other kind of reading would be ludicrous and very counterproductive—I would like to attempt a close reading.

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II. ‘Weather Comes’ The weather is wearily The winds are webbing blowing voices of help Sun is lowering its light moon is darking its face stars is fallen its flight rain has rained non stop sea waters raised higher rivers swallower and banks fall apart. Trees grow old no more Fruits grow wilder no more Raw uncleaned smelling air goes in the plants soils. Ochres shows colours unseen. Sand dirt mud soot all look different, touch different, smell funny. We can’t hardly believe this was once our dreamtime home The sky turns strangler and clouds hide behind smoked pollutions. Pollutions walking the bush slips feet unfound, and seeks sound unheard. Sleeping never rests in our human minds, for fear terror follows about day and night. The weather is a changed by man’s interfering Our respects for seasons for hunting and gathering is untogether mixed up. Feelings of heat rushes sweat all over bodies hurting Feelings of cold shivers blood veins frozen. The weather is changed.

The danger for a non-indigenous writer approaching a close reading of a work by an indigenous writer is that he/she – I – will get bogged down in diffidence and apologetics. While hardly absolved from such things, I am

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going to assume from the outset that, since it is published and thus in the public record, “Weather Comes” is no less an attempt at communication than any non-indigenous poem I might have been reading, and no less subject to thought and discussion. Once, to a group of students, I described Lionel Fogarty’s use of language as occasionally – not always – Shakespearean. I exaggerated, wildly, and even then only partly believed the gist of what I was saying, a thing I admit now not out of any reduction in respect for Fogarty3 but out of a sense of the irrelevance of Shakespeare to almost all that I have been writing about, for years now, and a consequent reluctance to cite him. Still, the point had shock value, and did get some of those students to think about his language more carefully. In invoking Shakespeare in this manner I had in mind a freshness and almost-gothic intensity and unpredictability of language, and a prodigious inventiveness. I could have invoked any number of other writers but, thanks to the New South Wales secondary education system, Shakespeare I could be pretty sure they knew. One of the most significant factors contributing to Fogarty’s distinctive verbal texture is what we might call his “agrammaticality,” a departure from normative usage that can sometimes seem a lexical version of what in painting might be called naïf and which can be misapprehended as grammatical ignorance or failure, but which is as deceptive as John Shaw Neilson’s apparent simplicity.4 Indeed the comparison with Neilson is interesting in a further direction, in that one of the effects of Fogarty’s agrammaticality could be seen as a variety of negative suggestion, the words on the page—their agrammatical structure—often bringing to mind a “correct” or “normative” usage even as they defy it, so that we find ourselves working with both. This happens several times in the opening lines of “Weather Comes”: The weather is wearily The winds are webbing blowing voices of help Sun is lowering its light moon is darking its face stars is fallen its flight rain has rained non stop sea waters raised higher rivers swallower and banks fall apart.

I don’t think I would be alone, that is to say, in having expected, upon reading that first line as I read it, a further verb or adjective to follow the

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adverb “wearily,” and to find myself momentarily asking what it is that the weather is doing wearily, and at once pleased (the “surprise” that some would argue has to make a frequent appearance as we move line-by-line through a poem: that is part of the “currency” of the poem), and yet not fully satisfied (although this too, this finding something—and so oneself— unfulfilled, can itself be a mode of surprise) by the realisation that, if it had to qualify something, it would have to be the “is,” that the weather was being wearily. But that dissatisfaction is there too, or rather that openendedness, for another way of seeing this opening line is as gesture, a vector, an arrow pointing, an opening within an opening, an opening not just of the poem but out, into something else. Whether or not it is so in intention, in effect it is also a kind of declaration, a notice that the rules are destabilised. It is language being opened, grammar being opened. In this way, when we come to the next lines, although the mind might wish to supply a comma at the end of the second, or take the caesura naturally created by the end of the line as having the effect of a comma, there might also be a more ready preparedness to enjamb the lines and the separate sense units, so that it is not only “The winds are webbing, blowing voices of help” that we read—that is, not that the winds are “webbing” and “blowing”—but also that the “blowing voices” are being “webbed” by the wind. The withdrawal of or refraining from punctuation, in other words, has enabled an opening or multiplication of meaning. Things are moving (webbing? blowing?) beneath grammar, stirring from it, as if the rules of normative usage not only enable things, but also prevent things, hide them from us, strip them down to particular functions, deny them a wanderingness, a play, a tendency to lose focus and to become distracted from a central, effective purpose (as if, as Bruce Beaver might put it, “menageries” were being contained5). Even now, for example, we have not exhausted the options, given that “webbing” might also be a substantive, a noun, a gerund, and that we have said nothing about the absence of punctuation here—indeed it will be sparse throughout the poem—and the way, in its absence, semantic units are freer to form their own connections, make their own choices, or, better, not make them, leave us to deal with their doubleness. As is not unusual, when one begins to move—to read—so slowly, one starts to stumble. There is not the momentum to carry us over the cracks (cracks that, arguably, are always there). What might have seemed a relatively smooth surface now seems to be full of fissures. “Help,” ironically, comes just in time, to give us—let us glimpse—a possible grid, or at least an angle of vision. There is trouble of some kind here, for which

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help might be required, although still there is doubleness—we don’t know whether the winds are bringing assistance, or carrying the voices that are calling for it. If only slightly, “Sun,” in line four, continues our dislocations (or are they relocations?). There is the lack of the definite article. That it is not “The Sun” but “Sun” only, capitalised, presumably, in order to mark the beginning of a new semantic unit, though in the process rendering this something like a proper noun, not only bringing something new—another thing—into the poem, but establishing a certain kind of relationship with it. It is not unusual to drop the definite article in a poem, from this very word (“Sun set, moon not yet risen …”) but when it is done it is usually part of an extended local telegraphic mode in a poem or part of a poem that would see, as in the line just quoted, the auxiliary verb also omitted, whereas here it is precisely the fact that the auxiliary verb (“is”) has not been omitted that governs the tone and sense. Normative as the grammar here could be said to be, the agency is not. A certain perspective (a “Western” one?) sees sun and its light as inseparable, virtually synonymous. What does it do to present the sun as something—someone?—that (/who) can do something with its light? As if there were volition here. As if there were consciousness. Animism? Very possibly. But let’s not jump to conclusions. In its effect, the absence of the definite article before “Sun” is subtle, and/but certainly not un- or a-grammatical. Not so the next line, “moon is darking its face,” where one would expect, and so ghost-read (negative suggestion) “darkening.” But the meaning, at least initially, is surely the same—so what, other than a further registration of resistance, is to be gained by withholding the syllable? Firstly, one of the defining characteristics of poetry, according to Viktor Shklovsky,6 is defamiliarisation (ostranenie), that sense, called “surprise” a couple of paragraphs ago, which prevents us taking something for granted and so passing over it quickly, insensitively, not seeing it for what it is. And secondly, of course, since the “-en-” in “darkening” would serve as a kind of comparative (to darken is to make dark, yes, but also to make darker)—there is a matter of degree; the moon is not making its face darker, it is making it dark. “stars is fallen its flight”. What a strange and interesting line. “Stars” “disagrees,” in number, with “is”. “Is” “disagrees,” in tense, with “fallen.” “Fallen,” as past participle, cannot “agree” with “its.” And while “its,” as possessive, can be reconciled with “flight,” the unit this makes has no clear referent. It is as if the line were in fact made up of five virtually— grammatically—discrete units:

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is

fallen

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its

flight

One thinks, setting them out like that, of Pound's discussion of the Chinese written character, and specifically of his discussion of the line:

᭶ Moon

⪀ Rays

ዴ Like

ᬕ Pure

㞷 Snow7

and, more specifically, of the point that Pound was trying to make about opening poetic form, in order to liberate it, to the extent that this might be possible (indeed to explore the extent to which this might be possible), from the confining grips of Western discourse, Western grammar. There were many things wrong or naïve about Pound's approach, but no-one has ever, to my thinking, quite adequately answered his haunting observation that the classic Western sentence (of subject, verb, object)—the core unit, arguably, of all Western thought, and floor (/flaw) of its logic—is, in its insistence that, in order to be spoken, one thing must be doing something to another, fundamentally aggressive. His excitement about the Chinese written character is that it is comprised of radicals, and that (here his naïveté?—no matter; it is, truly, the thought that counts) there are no inherent instructions within the character as to how the radicals are to be related, just as in the Chinese poetic line there are no inherent instructions, no grammar, to determine how the characters are to be put together to comprise a “message.” Their valencies, this is simply to say, are less constricted; ambiguities—and possibilities—open up in their relations. A long way from Pound, Fenollosa and the Chinese character to some of the lines of Lionel Fogarty, perhaps. And yet, perhaps not. But back to the line. For meaning—if one must mean it8 —we have, what? that stars have fallen? ceased flying? Thus completing an array of celestial sources that have ceased providing light. A discontinuity. A kind of supra-natural event, akin to Shakespeare's lioness whelping in the streets (Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene II). Mixed, perhaps, with a sense of shame—the moon has darked its face for a reason. Not wanting to look on at what is happening here? The rain raining non-stop; the sea waters—out of the moon’s control? or are they in it?—rising; the river’s swallower, a word ghosted, perhaps, by shallower, its opposite, in one direction recalling the dream-time story of the frog Tiddalik, who drank all the water of the world9; in another suggesting that the sea, rising, is drinking, greedily (like that frog), the rivers; and in another suggesting, very graphically, the way a rising river swallows the land around it. Not that I

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want to leave that “stars” line so readily. There is more there than mere meaning. There is, as it were, under-meaning, there is over-meaning. Logopoeia. The “dance of the intellect among words,”10 yes, but also the music of that dance. Here, for example, it is a “reversed dodrans.” What is that? A whole story to be told. The earliest meters identified in the West. Sappho. Her “Aeolic” meters. Quantitative, originally—a matter of long sounds and short sounds—but, when turned into accentual-syllabic (the long sounds becoming stressed syllables, the short becoming unstressed), preserving/manifesting nonetheless a particular power, so that one is tempted to think that these meters might, just, register something deep in the psyche. Over and over again, when “free” verse poems are scanned in this way—when their stress-patterns are charted—one finds these meters, as if they were the “musical phrases” that Pound wanted us to shift to, “rather than the rhythms of the metronome,” as if they were scored into our bones. Arbitrary/unclear/in-consistent use of capitals, absence of punctuation, disagreements of number, ambiguous possessive/plural doublings caused by absence of apostrophes, lacunae/unfinished sense units (“unseen” [before?]), the next lines, like a camera approaching the punctum11 of a scene, tighten upon the disaster: Trees grow old no more Fruits grow wilder no more Raw uncleaned smelling air goes in the plants soils. Ochres shows colours unseen.

Trees grow old no more. They are exploited, cut down, replaced, their fruits not left, on the aged tree, to grow wilder. Or is it simply that— poisoned (salinated?)—these trees sicken and die. “Raw,” “uncleaned,” “smelling” air contaminates the plants, the soils. “Ochres shows colours unseen”—a simple line, and yet visual, intense, the singular verb (“shows”) suggesting we are looking at a spread-sheet/chart of ochre colours, and seeing things we are not accustomed to, that should not be there: oil intrusions, pollutions, and the disagreement of number here, before we leave it, reinforcing the sense and kind of agency of which I spoke a few paragraphs ago—Ochres as a capitalised collective noun denoting some thing or one capable of an act of showing. The next lines continue the catalogue of distress: Sand dirt mud soot all look different, touch different,

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smell funny.

It’s that “touch different” that leans out, as if, as we touch it, feel it—for it means, of course, at one level, only “feel differently”—it also reaches out, touches us, but differently now, as if something had altered the relationship: We can’t hardly believe this was once our dreamtime home

And we relax a little, perhaps—this is an aboriginal poem, after all, here is the “dream time” again, archetypal and on cue. But is it? The next line jerks us from our rest. The sky turns strangler

—“strangler,” containing as it does the word “stranger,” the sky now alien to us, different (again that “changed relationship”). and clouds hide behind smoked pollutions.

—clear enough again, until the next strange lines: Pollutions walking the bush slips feet unfound, and seeks sound unheard.

Pollutions are found—pollution is found—as “we” walk in the bush. But this is also pollution walking, as in (perhaps) alien people, un-used-to people, people who pollute by (/almost by) merely being there, people who have not found their feet. We have, as in so many other places in the poem, two ways in, two angles of vision, because, to specify, “slips” is either, grammatically, without a “subject” (he slips? she slips? it slips? which?), or is in a disagreement of number with its inverted subject (“feet unfound”). Sleeping never rests in our human minds, for fear terror follows about day and night.

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The word “human” appears. We might have assumed it all along, but now it is suddenly there. In drawing attention to itself—negative suggestion again—it draws into silent play the non-human, and in suggesting that the non-human mind (whether or not it might be part of the human, for might not the human have also, along with its human mind, its non-human [animal?] mind?) might not have the same problem with sleep, gestures again to the breakdown in relation, the separation of the human from something it was not separated from at some time before. Sleep is not able to rest—a paradox?—in the human mind, but can (by implication) in the non-human. The human is beset by a fear that terror stalks it. There is more to be considered here—the lines are like a little well of further complications (“Sleeping” vs “Sleep”; its personification; the taut tautology of “fear terror”)—but we should move on. The weather is a changed by man’s interfering

Strange, this. You look at lines and see only—think only awkwardness. But come back again and see into that awkwardness, look at what it is. Not “changed,” but “a changed.” We might think at first of Bob Dylan (“The times they are a changing”), but if we did so it would be with some bitter irony—he was staking a claim for improvement—and would arguably be impoverishing what was happening here, which is more likely that the “a” specifies an indefinite object that is not here, as in “The weather is a changed [thing].” But what is that thing? We are picking our way carefully over language, that is the point, slipping, not having (re-)found our feet, and are, ironically—but perhaps very intentionally—in the position of, say, a people subjected by language. The way it has been—say—for indigenous Australians, or at least for a great many of them, for the duration of white settlement. And it continues. Something turns inward now. “Our”—but this is not, for most of us, our—feelings, that are part of, essential to, “our” relation to this place, to place, have been distorted, dislocated, dis/membered somehow. “Our respects” (for seasons, for hunting and gathering) are “untogether” (hard to read that word without “altogether” coming to mind, a negative suggestion again), “mixed up”, although held together (see? “altogether” was there!), paradoxically (but only an outsider would think paradox?), by a stubborn singular form of the verb to be: Our respects for seasons for hunting and gathering is untogether mixed up.

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Although, of course, there is another reading possible here. Perhaps even, when one thinks about it, an ostensible reading to these ulteriors. That because we are untogether—because our families, our tribal groups, our clans, have been literally decimated by invader policies of deliberate dislocation—Our respects for seasons for / hunting and gathering is mixed up, confused. With the disruption of community there has been disruption of lore, of focus. A disruption which—as if to show how deep it is, how radical—becomes grammatical in the lines that follow: Feelings of heat rushes sweat all over bodies hurting Feelings of cold shivers blood veins frozen.

Just so—the weather is internalised: fever, illness, but more than that; nouns that may also be have become verbs (“rushes,” “shivers”); verbs in numerical disagreement with their objects (the plural is singular, the poem seems to tell us, over and over): The weather is changed.

Something like a worldview emerges? Or rather can be glimpsed, intuited, twisting beneath or within the world. Who am I to say whether or how much the language—distorted, broken open as it has been—has been adequate to it, or even to the indication of it? Who is anyone to say? How can we expect that “weather”—or what we think of as weather—is only weather, now?

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Notes 1

“Jindyworobaksheesh” is the title of a poem in James McAuley’s first collection, Under Aldebaran (Melbourne University Press, 1946); R. H. Morrison’s term appears in a review, “The Verse Anthologies: For and Against” (Southerly 1/1948); A. D. Hope’s description is from a review, “Brought to Book: Culture Corroboree” (Southerly 3/1942). 2 The point is made most extensively in The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2008), 23–35, but perhaps most concisely in a filmed interview, an appropriate excerpt from which is available on YouTube, in which Derrida says “I avoid speaking generally about animals. For me, these are not ‘animals.’ When one says ‘animals’ one has already started to not understand anything, and has started to enclose the animal into a cage. There are considerable differences between different types of animals. There is no reason one should group into one and the same category monkeys, bees, snakes, dogs, horses, anthropods and microbes. These are radically different organisms of life, and to say ‘animal’, and put them all into one category—both the monkey and the ant—is a very violent gesture” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry49Jr0TFjk —accessed August 24, 2012). 3 Aboriginal poet and activist, born 1958 on Wakka Wakka land at Barambah (now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve) in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland. 4 John Shaw Neilson (1872–1942), Australian lyric poet. 5 See “Letter XII” from Letters to Live Poets (Beaver 1969): “So it’s one day at a time spent checking/the menagerie of self; seeing/the two-headed man has half as much/of twice of everything; curbing the tiger;/sunning the snake; taking stock of/Monkey, Piggsy, Sandy’s belt of skulls.” 6 “The language of poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language” (etc). See “Art as Technique” (1917), a translation of which is available in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (1965). 7 Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, first published in Pound’s Instigations (Boni & Liveright, 1920). 8 I am employing here the concept of the word “meaning” as gerund. 9 A story originating with the Aboriginal people of south Gippsland, Victoria. 10 See Ezra Pound, How to Read (Harmsworth, 1927), where he speaks of the concepts of phanopoeia, melopoeia and logopoeia as a means of approaching the analysis of free verse. 11 A term I take from Roland Barthes’s memorable discussion thereof in Camera Lucida (Fr: La Chamber Claire, 1980), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981).

THE GAM: “A PARTICULAR PLACE IN THE TRANSNATIONAL” GRACIELA SUSANA BORUSZKO Herman Melville’s view is that of a twenty-first century literary visionary approaching the world from the nineteenth century. In Melville’s classic work, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, the organizing theme of the narrative is the hunting of an abhorred white whale, Moby Dick, by a monomaniac named Captain Ahab. In this study, I will analyze The Gam, the encounter of the whalers at the open sea as a farsighted perception of the twenty-first century transnational world. In this story, the author introduces the image of a space in the open sea, beyond the national borders, where people intersect each other’s pathways, exhibiting a new identity that relates to the transnational space rather than to the national identities that are related to the land. I will use a comparative approach to analyze the images that emerge primarily from the chapter of the gam in this literary narrative. In the narrative, the transnational world in its transgressive nature is presented from multiple approaches. The image of the transnational reflected in the open sea, beyond frontiers, is so close to the author that he sees himself as a ship navigating the vast ocean. In the following fragment from another work, Melville describes himself as a vessel navigating in the perilous open sea: And like a frigate, I am full with a thousand souls, and as on, on, on, I scud before the wind, many mariners rush up from the orlop below, like miners from caves; running shouting across my decks; opposite braces are pulled; and this way and that, the great yards swing round on their axes; and boisterous speaking-trumpets are heard; and contending orders, to save the good ship from the shoals. Shoals, like nebulous vapors, shoreing the white reef of the Milky Way, against which the wrecked worlds are dashed; strowing all the strand, with their Himmaleh keels and ribs.1

His sense of being part of a dangerous world conveys the meaning of transgression as he presents the world in tension between the particular and the universal, the individual and the world at large, between the

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private space and the open space that stay undefined, yet nonetheless dangerously pry on each other. The isotopy of war is clearly deployed in the author’s text and insidiously embedded in the description “and as on, on, on” as a monotonous enlargement through repetition of the image of an impending confrontation or storm. The image is reflected in the expression “I am full,” as a heavy ship indicates being loaded to the maximum, thus at the border or limit where transgression seems inevitable to be freed from the excess weight. The chaos unfolds as images of the confusion of words and as sounds pervade the ambiance: “running shouting across my decks,” “boisterous speaking,” “trumpets are heard,” “contending orders.” This tense atmosphere resonates to what Ian Angus in his recent work, Identity and Justice,2 describes as “locative thinking,” which also emerges from the narrative of Moby-Dick. Melville communicates his particular vision of the world as it interacts with other particular visions, thus conveying the image of a transnational space that is not well defined. That is why the notion of transgression is enlarged and becomes more and more dangerous as the “territory” and the “individual” become “exceptional” simultaneously, outside of the boundaries that correspond to the image of the open sea, where the gam takes place. Notions of the exceptional and the transgressive coincide with a deep sentiment of danger. The political quandary of America in the nineteenth century is revealed as one in which conflicting forces concurrently created a strong urge to redefine “othered” identities. Place is a notion for which space and time are occupying presences. There are borders and limits in time and space that define the presence of the “other.” In a transnational world, these presences are defined to a certain extent by an “exceptional” event, such as the rare meeting of whalers within a large open sea “territory,” or gam. Melville describes the gam as: “the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.”3 These exceptional meetings take place in open seas and on common cruisinggrounds, leaving the reader with the impression that the transnational is outside of national political boundaries, but well within human experience. In these encounters, the “other” is sharing something in common, thus transgressing individuality in a positive way. The exceptional is conceived by the encounter with the “other” as closer than the particular place guarded in a “national territory.” As a novelist, Melville defines the encounters in the gam as having linguistic commonalities that allow for proximity in the vast open sea, “Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that

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is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English.”4 The exceptional transnational space that is beyond borders is not open completely, as boundaries are transposed from the “outward space to the inward space” of linguistic practice. A linguistic translation is not contemplated in the convocation of a gam, as this transgression is located outside of a particular shared space. M. M. Bakhtin has described the ways time and space are represented by language and in literature with the concept of the chronotope. The Russian term ɏɪɨɧɨɬɨɩ, from the Greek ȤȡȩȞȠȢ meaning “time” and IJȩʌȠȢ meaning “space,” can be translated literally as “time-space.” In the narrative of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville anticipates and expands the notion of a Bakhtinian chronotope that is both a cognitive concept and a narrative attribute of language, while also placing the meeting of the whalers in a space that is broad and beyond “territorial borders.” The author describes the meetings of whalers in an intimate ambiance, just as he had described the entire sea environment. He talks about “mutual salutations,” “sitting down for a while” “and resting in concert” “to interchange the news,”5 relating these meetings to one’s own land. He continues to describe the gam in extraordinary terms and as exceeding the experiences on land as well as the horizons perceived: … how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone Fanning’s island, or the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and sociable contact.6

Melville describes the gam as being authentic—“how much more natural”7 —to obtain this extraordinary effect, and he uses the assessment of superiority to denote a linguistic transnational where limits are transgressed to reach the sublime. The author then transitions the description into the intimate space of the individual, in which the salutations represent “still closer, more friendly and sociable contact.”8 Melville pushes the limits of the depths of such encounters, as he depicts them as closer in distance, affection and space. One of Melville’s narrative strategies is to engage with the chronotope by adding the emotional aspect of communion with the other. The author takes the vast intimate space and makes it parallel to the vast outside space, finding a cruising-ground where “the self” meets “the other.” The system of communication seems unique, as in it letters are carried by multiple vessels until a ship carrying a letter meets a ship transporting

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the receiver. The communication process is a social excuse, as everybody is involved in the transport of news. It is a community task to keep the others informed. The exchange of personal news is analogous to the exchange of trade news, all in an atmosphere of an “agreeable chat.”9 The solitude of each navigating whaler participates in an open ocean transnational space that carries in itself particularities that distinguish each group. The transnational seems to indicate the space beyond controlling forces. According to Stanley Geist, and in Melville’s words: … any attempt to reduce life to a set of abstractions, or to impose an ordered system upon an irrational universe, was both presumptuous and heartless. … All his thought constituted a mode of perception, all the thought of the philosopher constituted a reasoned scheme. We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.10

“Merchant ships”11 are associated with distance, criticism and a competition of “mutually cutting each other on the high seas.”12 The merchant world is an occupation that belongs to the land, to the national realm, while the transnational is the territory of passage that brings merchants to the destinations where important actions take place. The places of definition and of belonging reside in the destination. There is no reason to socialize or to share a particular space in the transnational open sea; the identity of the “other” is ignored, as interests are concentrated in their places of destination. In the following image of other travellers of the open sea, “As for Men-of-War,”13 they have to follow a ritualistic salutation that eliminates the affection or personal touch that is dear to the writer in his descriptions of whalers. The business of war uses the transnational as a place of transit because the actions and goals of those involved are related to territorial land. The salutation is just an affirmation of their identity as members of a group based on a link to land that has no specific business in the transnational. This “transnational space” is not related to their occupation, so a ritual takes place in lieu of an authentic exchange or an acknowledgement of the other as a human partner in the journey. War represents the extreme of any relationship and is where words, encounters and a shared space have failed to be successfully negotiated. The transnational proves to be a place where wars lose their impetus, allowing for just a salutation as a stimulus or a suggestion to come closer in the future:

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As for Men-of-War when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all.14

Again, this type of ship is not designed to promote the gathering and sharing of news. There is a hierarchical system of communication, which has been developed on land and seems to be prevalent in the open sea, too. There is no possibility of transgression, as these vessels are intended to preserve order and the “law of the land,” not the “law of the sea” that seems to relate more to whalers. The following group is made up of the slave-ships which, by all means, are both the transgressors of land and the transgressors of the sea. They constitute the opposite of the ships of war. They hurry to travel away from each other, as the transgressive nature of their business creates an atmosphere of fear and guilt. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible.15

The transgressive action that began on land extends to the open sea, making the meeting with other vessels impossible as the transnational permeates itself with the transgressive nature of the enterprise. The transnational is not a place for hurrying back-and-forth, but rather it is a place that entertains life, where meaningful exchanges happen at a human level on the surface, as in imitation of the marine life sheltered deep in the ocean. Melville approaches the ocean as a metaphorical place where meaning lays hidden and where man has to go to depths to “capture it,” similar to how the whaler tries to capture the whale. Melville depicts the world as an epic battle for survival in a natural environment. Slavery is a battle for survival, but it happens at the surface level of land and involves the same species. It is presented in this segment as an aberration of nature. There is no place for slavery in the transnational open sea. The next category is “pirate ships” which, according to Melville, comprise the worst category: And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is— “How many skulls?”—the same way that whalers hail— “How many barrels?” And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s villainous likenesses.16

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The guilt of the Slave-ships is deepened in the behaviour of the Pirates, who see in the “other” the dark side of the self. There is only a momentary exchange to compare numbers because the details of each other’s actions are very well known to both. This exchange is an affirmation of the identity of the pirates. The transgressive becomes the norm against which each ship member builds a personal status or place in the pirates’ own hierarchy. The pirate constitutes the worst category, as they corrupt the gathering nature of the transnational space into a battleground for personal gain. The “other” becomes another object that needs to be placed aside to get to other items that are more valuable according to the pirates’ scales. That is why numbers and profits are the only types of statistics exchanged. There is no reference to the other as a human being. The profit of the pillaging is equal in value, at least from a statistical point of view, to the deaths that their enterprises required. The metaphors of death and pillaging are very illustrative of a materialism that is brought to a transnational space that is supposed to be free from it. The atmosphere of freedom that the notion of the transnational conveys is defiled by the act of pillaging. The fact that Melville shifts the reader’s attention to the whaler is representative of a complete rejection and a condemnation of this behaviour. As a comparison, Melville introduces the uplifting and particular place of the whaler in the same territory. A use of the conjunction “but” indicates a point of contrast that is enhanced by a profuse use of adjectives: “godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-andeasy whaler!” The exclamation mark indicates the climax of the description of the whaler, which is presented as an extraordinary event. The previous descriptions of meetings of other types of vessels contrast dramatically with the depiction of the gam: … a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers” and such like pretty exclamations.17

For Melville, meaning is hidden beneath the surface of appearance as the ocean conceals a life of its own while allowing for a superficial existence. The whaler is the character that transgresses all levels as he seeks to extract the whale from the heart of the transnational ocean. The open sea leaves the surface as an open space that conceals a rich life in its depths. In the same way, the gam is depicted as a fortuitous, sporadic and amicable encounter that, nonetheless, follows a protocol that is described by the author in detail, which indicates that the space of the encounter is a

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particular place and time, a narrative chronotope. Melville navigates spaces in this literary work in such a way that places and particularities are conceived in concert with the vast transnational as a hosting place. The transnational as a place is beyond control; its vastness and confrontations of forces make it an open environment. Being so fortuitous, the gam infuses a particularity to that vast transnational place. The author suggests an evasive delineation of spaces that first hosts a gam and then disappears into the vast open sea. That whalers follow a certain protocol indicates that, once again, human behaviour delimits the frontiers of a place and makes it particular. When the limits of a particular physical space are temporary, then spaces tend to lose their particularities and enter into the generic category of places. In this case, the physical space is determined by the human presence of a group of people tightly connected by the same occupation. The space acquires a particularity that emanates from the human contact of a group of people that seek to gather together. This space resembles a place where a spiritual ritual occurs when the assembly is motivated by an inner drive rather than by a social constraint. The word “Whale-ships”18 resembles the spelling of the word “worship.” This image correlates to The Bible’s image that mentions the same idea of place and worship in the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman. The political and cultural dispute of the place where Jews should congregate for worship was then a point of dissension. Jesus responded to the dilemma by proposing a spiritual chronotope: 19 Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” John 4: 19-24

The physical place of worship is replaced with a more intimate place of worship, creating a parallel with the gam that consecrates a space of the ocean for having communion with other whalers for a time before they resume their respective journeys. The meaning of worship conveys the action of honouring. Similarly, in the gam there is a personal recognition

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of “the other” that is a way to pay honour. Notably, the ocean space where whalers carry on their occupations is the same space where they meet and recognize each other, thus making particular the larger general space. Life, as well as the transatlantic space, is a vast open “territory” where encounters with other fellow sojourners occur in the middle of established routines. The particularity of the place is marked within the confines of a vessel that remains in the ocean, while communion happens in its interior. The particularities are hosted in the intimacy of the community, rather than in an external space. There is a subtle transgression in the notion of borders of a particular space. These types of borders can be viewed as symbolic images and are incorporated to build upon each other. This is the case with the ship versus the ocean, the gathering of the whalers versus the solitary nature of the occupation, the hunting of whales and the pursuit of Moby Dick, and the private news in letters against the news of the trade. Transgression and the transgressive are topics dear to Melville from the beginning of the story, when he introduces his narrative by giving an etymological glossary of the word “whale” and chooses arbitrary languages and sources. He is more interested in presenting the “lexical beast” in its own wild context—the ocean of the narration. When the author describes the gam, he presents the ocean as a transnational place beyond the established powers, with the gam being a particular place of congregation. This approach establishes a parallel between the singular intimate life of the whaler and the multiple lives that cross the open sea. Melville also contrasts the times of encounter with solitary navigation, pointing out the tensions of controlling forces that are tested as Melville brings them to the “territory” of the open sea. The whale waits in the deepest and remotest spaces that are marked by time, by the time of the inevitable encounter when the whale and Ahab will each have to measure their determination to become extraordinary by conquering the other. The transnational space without frontiers, which is inhabited and ruled by conflicting forces, does not allow access except by the conquering of the opposing forces that wait outside the gate of the transnational world. The American culture was painted in the description of the gam as a culture that ventures into the transnational while recognizing a distinct identity, which makes it as exceptional and as belonging to the transgressive territory at the same time. The author treats the concept of transgression with the utmost respect and values its own “limits.” Here, the transgression is presented as a positive action, with the geographical confinement of the gam transgressing the notion of the transnational that lays in the concept of a space without and outside boundaries. Melville proposes a space that is subject to human needs and interests.

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This literary reflection crosses centuries, not only keeping current with the political and social trends, but also transcending the space and time to project a new “land” inhabited by a “new kind of citizen,” and all the while belonging to a particular space which is well inserted into the evasive transnational world.

Notes 1 Herman Melville and G. T. Tanselle. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo: a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, 1022. 2 See Angus, Identity and Justice, 26. 3 See Melville, Hayford & Parker. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, 204. 4 Ibid., 205. 5 Ibid., 204. 6 Ibid., 204–205. 7 Ibid., 204. 8 Ibid., 205. 9 Ibid., 205. 10 Geist, Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal, 43–51. 11 Melville, Hayford & Parker. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, 205. 12 Ibid., 205–6. Whereas some merchant ships crossing each other\s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other’s rig. 13 Ibid., 206 see next citation in the text. 14 Ibid., 206. 15 Ibid., 206. 16 Ibid., 206. 17 Ibid., 206. 18 Ibid., 206.

Works Cited Angus, Ian H. Identity and Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Print. Bezanson, Walter E. “Moby-Dick: Work of Art.” In Moby-Dick: Centennial essays. Eds. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield, 31– 58. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953. Print. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Deep Time: American Literature and World History.” American Literary History 13 (4) (2001): 755–775. Print.

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Doyle, Laura. “Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1 (1) (2009). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vr1k8hk. Web. Geist, Stanley. Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1939. Print. Kaplan, Amy. “Transnational Melville.” Leviathan 12 (1) (2010): 42–52. Print. Klein, Bernhard & Mackenthun, Gesa, eds. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2004. See especially Chappell, David, “Ahab’s Boat: Non European Seamen in Western Ships of Exploration and Commerce.” Print. Lazo, Rodrigo. “‘So Spanishly Poetic’: Moby-Dick’s Doubloon and Latin America.” In “Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby Dick. Eds. Bryant, Edwards, Marr, 224–237. Kent State, 2006. Print. Melville, Herman, Harrison Hayford & Hershel Parker. Moby-dick: An Authoritative Text. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967. Print. Melville, Herman & G. T. Tanselle. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo: a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; Mardi, and a Voyage Thither. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982. Print. New York City Opera Project: Don Giovanni, “Catalogue” Aria [Act I, Scene 2]. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/dongiovanni/catalogue.htm l. Web. Otter, Samuel. “Getting Inside Heads in Moby-Dick.” Melville’s Anatomies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Print. Rangno, Erik. “Melville’s Japan and the ‘Marketplace Religion’ of Terror.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 (4) (2008): 465–492. Print. Rogin, Michael Paul. “Moby-Dick and the American 1848.” Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983. Print. Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Whence Come You, Queequeg?” American Literature 77 (2005): 227–257. Print. Sedgwick, William Ellery. The Tragedy of Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1944. Print. Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers”. PMLA 119 (1) (2004): 92–102. The Holy Bible: New International Version, Containing the Old Testament and the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978. Print

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Thorp, Willard. Introduction to Herman Melville: Representative Selection. New York: American Book Company, 1938. Print. Weaver, Raymond. “The Centennial of Herman Melville.” The Nation (New York) 109 (August 2, 1919), 146. Print.

SOLIDARITY IN DIFFERENCE: UNVEILING THE COLONIALITY OF POWER IN NTOZAKE SHANGE’S SOCIOPOETICS MARIA JOSÉ CANELO

Introduction This chapter is a close reading of Ntozake Shange’s poem “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography” (1983), and is centred on the uses of place under a framework of “coloniality of power” as established by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Shange’s statements on geopolitics and ancestry, which aim at constructing a new subject moved by an alternative geopolitics of affect and memory, and attempt to write anew the map(s) of the world. Shange, herself, is a US African-American poet, essayist, novelist and playwright, best known for her 1975 award-winning choreopoem/play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975). Even her name signals a critical location which is important to the study of her poetry because it recovers and underlines the role of ancestry in its self-definition—it comes from a Zulu language and holds a meaning of “She Who Comes With Her Own Things” (Ntozake) and “Walks Like a Lion” (Shange). A “speaking” name, indeed, for a poet who has for a long time used writing as a vehicle of agency, to denounce and reconstruct the narratives of power, elaborating on what the Chicano critic José David Saldívar calls “a radical ethnopoetics” (1991, 17). Shange’s work has been extremely important especially in the field of ethnicity studies, but I would like to propose a reading of her critical stance within a framework of new critiques of postcolonialism and empire in the Americas, in particular under the light of Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality of power. In effect, I see Shange’s work as departing from an acute awareness of the enduring legacy of the old empires in the Americas. Quijano’s definition of coloniality of power as “a spatial articulation of power” (2008, 238) [my emphasis] and “a

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principle and strategy of control and domination” (2008, 249) refers to power which started to be accrued, roughly, in the fifteenth century with the foundations of modern capitalism. This led to the “emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit” which continues to affect the present through diverse guises (2008, 238). This same concept has been reworked by another Latin American critic—Agentinian Walter Mignolo—who demonstrated how the establishment of such colonial and imperial power relations implied the disauthorization and the subalternization of particular forms of knowledge, hence his extension of Quijano’s theory into the idea of the coloniality of knowledge. Mignolo, however, strives to incorporate into the theory of coloniality the possibility for an alternative location from within the colonial difference—one that allows for a de-colonization of knowledge and the invention of new epistemic, rhetorical and political forms of agency. So, in line also with José David Saldívar, I take Ntozake Shange as part of a group of American artists who put forth “critical and creative processes that aim to articulate a new, transgeographical conception of American culture—one more responsive to the hemisphere’s geographical ties and political crosscurrents than to narrow national ideologies” (1991, i). By “American” I mean a continental length that certainly goes beyond the United States. The emphasis of this chapter will be on the roles of place in this critical articulation and the mechanisms Shange deploys. I am particularly interested in the way she intertwines the awareness of geopolitics and the motif of ancestry against a diasporic background. My final argument is that as a critique of the coloniality of power and knowledge, the poem eventually stages alternative positions of enunciation along the lines suggested by Mignolo. It is my belief that Shange eventually attains a new collective subject, sustained by geography but not limited to it.

(Geopolitical) Senses of place We tend to think that movement defies place; that dislocations such as that of diasporas, exiles and migrations necessarily disconnect people from a location. For a while, cultural theory itself reflected this belief, and hopeful notions envisaged a post-national future inhabited by loose cosmopolitans, freed from sentimental nationalisms bred by old-fashioned notions of space (Appiah 1997; Robbins & Cheah 1998). In the footsteps of benchmark studies exposing the modern invention of the nation (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Anderson

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1983), the national framework was contested, and as a consequence its repressed heterogeneity and implied inequities were brought to the fore. A growing interest in themes such as internationalism, globalization, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism followed suit, suggesting broadly that space as an analytical category lost breath in the face of more enriching possibilities, such as those emerging in association with movement and the freedom of non-spaces.1 Yet the interest in questions of space and place endured. It is undeniable that territory, for instance, even if in different forms than the nation and according to very diverse strategies, still fuels identity struggles and legitimates diverse kinds of claims around the globe in our every day. The growing perception of the importance of movement, be it physical, imaginary, metaphorical or virtual, has not brought about the dissolution of the notion of place. The latter, therefore, remains a fundamental cultural category and, as such, a productive lens of analysis in literary and cultural studies. The ongoing importance of place can be assigned firstly to the fact that it remains a key repository of history and memory. In post-colonial studies, as in the critique of coloniality of power, for instance, place is still a significant category. Quijano and other Latin American critics favour the term “coloniality” to that of “postcolonialism” because the prefix in the latter is misleading— it signals an ending that actually never happened. Instead, the coloniality of power theory emphasizes the remnants of the power structure of colonialism. In another reference study, Quijano & Wallerstein have argued that the project of modernity was based on the “capitalist experiment” in the Americas, a process that was covered by a gigantic ideological mantle they identify as “Americanity” which comprised discourses, institutions and worldviews that naturalized the enterprise (1992, 30). The basis for the exploitation system first rehearsed in the Americas was a strong hierarchical interstate system which remained in place long after colonialism ceased; this structure is what these critics define as coloniality. Following the legacy of that history, the critique of coloniality stresses the contemporaneity of the power relations established with colonialism/modernity: “we are still living under the same regime. Today coloniality could be seen as the hidden side of postmodernity and, in this respect, postcoloniality would designate the transformation of coloniality into the global coloniality” that takes up several strategies now within the framework of globalization (Mignolo 2008, 249). Against the coloniality of power there must be a decolonisation of thought in the first place, a project leading to an alternative epistemology that comes from what

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Mignolo also calls a different place of enunciation: “the colonial difference” (2008, 239). If enunciation entails a location, a place from which to speak, and bearing in mind the importance of history and memory to think through coloniality, place will bear its importance as long as “oppositional versions of history” (1991, xv) are written from the colonial difference, to link it back to José Saldívar again. These are the versions of history which hold the memory of dispossessed communities or subaltern groups, which feel that they still have a say in the (re)construction of the world and the imagination of new forms of society. Ntozake Shange’s poem is precisely one such instance. Besides these contributions to a geopolitical understanding of space, the dimension as “place” in particular is taken up by both cultural studies and postcolonial studies, which have insisted on the analysis of place as a cultural condition, a notion I would like to articulate here with that of coloniality of power to analyse Shange’s poetry. Conceiving of place as a cultural condition entails the idea of a sense of place, that is a dynamic relationship between subject and space. Place is a subjective appropriation of space, the latter remaining a more abstract and philosophical category. Place as the lived experience of space in turn produces two different movements: on the one hand, the experience of space produces knowledge and thereby establishes specific power relations (Crang & Thrift 2000, 3), the imposition of the name “New World” on America is an obvious instance of this process, in which “newness” stiffened the idea of a crude mass of land on display, a purely empty space—a design that (conveniently) left it prey to all sorts of exploitation. On the other hand, a lived experience of space can also lead to creative responses which reinvent meaning and uncover counter-memories. Place as a cultural construct can thus be summed up as follows—space becomes place by being named and by the meanings entailed in the names given (Carter 1993, xii). It is, therefore, meaning that explains how places provide identitarian fodder par excellence—the body, the home, the region, the nation, stay as powerful organizers of human experience that rely on a spatial framework.

Maps of kinship, language and memory In Shange’s poem, “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography,” we easily recognise the Black Atlantic as the primary setting and are reminded of how the slave trade produced the Caribbean region. Slavery is certainly an important motif, triggering memory and providing the historical connections between the places mentioned in the poem. But Bocas, which

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translates into English as “mouths,” is more likely to read, to my mind, as a specific geographical place—Bocas del Toro, in Isla Colon, lies in the isthmus of Panama, bordering Costa Rica. It was originally part of the archipelago used by Christopher Columbus to repair his ships and obtain provisions when he arrived there in 1502 on his fourth and last voyage to the Americas. Colonization ensued and the region soon became a hotbed of pirates due to the precious supplies coming from Peru en route to the metropolis. Later, the slave trade maintained its vitality and, nowadays, if you happen to Google Bocas del Toro, or if you simply stumble onto it in a travel agency’s flyers, you will learn that it goes by elegant and appealing names such as “the Eden of the Caribbean.” This is the imprint of the coloniality of power, to which I will come back shortly, but for now I would like to set Shange’s poem, or Shange’s Bocas del Toro, in the second cultural process I mentioned above as deriving from lived space—a creative response that produces other versions of place and thereby proposes alternative knowledges as well, claiming a place of enunciation of its own. As I hinted at earlier, geography, albeit central to the poem, cannot be read in isolation or just in reference to territory. I would venture to suggest that if there is a place in the poem it is family, because the imbrications between ancestry and geography are so tight that ancestry and geography cannot be separated clearly. For one, spelling and syntax refuse geography as such. Place names are not written in capitals and no commas signal their separation. Free enumeration follows the attempt to connect, instead of separating, America and Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Place names come alongside and one is tempted to resort to the central metaphor of the poem—these places are all siblings in one family. A concurring effect to the non-capitalization of place names is the defamiliarization of identities as national. This reinforces the effect just noted. Instead of divisiveness or separation, places come as sons and daughters, within the same family. Paul Gilroy’s elaboration of the Black Atlantic as a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” (1993, 4) is fitting in helping us conceive of the horizontal landscape of reciprocity and solidarity the poem invents. The Deleuzian idea of a net of multiple and fluid relations is implicit through the suggestion of an alternative form of power. The different geographical places are articulated not by power but by kinship relations. This idea of the rhizome as a new model for the diasporic community is held up, in Shange’s poem, by the stretching of the Black Atlantic to other seas, namely the Pacific, in reference to the Philippines and the Vietnamese postcolonial leader Ho Chi Min, as well as the Mediterranean

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Sea via Palestine. The poem, therefore, rehearses a radical revision of the mappa mundi by means of a re-signification of these places, so as to bring about the potential of solidarity between the oppressed groups scattered, but not separated, throughout them. One thinks of families as blood ties and affinities (and affects), but the family story the poem tells is different. Here, family ties are the result of violence and hazard, certainly not of choice or desire. The tortuous map the poem outlines confuses not just places but also family ties and so rehearses anew the mock-family of slavery times, in which mothers and fathers lost control over and contact with their children, the families scattered throughout the region and the colonies of the world. This followed the command of the market, never of affections. These were also the times when oppression, as a fatal disease, was passed on with the blood—oppression before love. The confusion of personal and possessive pronouns tells of such perversions: but I have a daughter/ la habana I have a son/ Guyana our twins santiago & Brixton/ … (my emphasis)

The final image is that of a grotesque family tree, an image that is intensified by the zigzagging of the family ties, and further by the unexpected gender of some place names.2 Despite the apparent randomness, there is order in the poem as it follows ancestry, not place, and memory traces the lines of history. In this new map that is the legacy of slavery, mother, father, daughter, son, oppressor and liberator turn into the new cardinal points, suggesting the replacement of the old power relations with those of family ties. This calls to mind the poetics of relation evoked by another great Caribbean poet, Édouard Glissant. For the poet of Martinique, the poetics of relation consists precisely of the replacement of power as the organizer of relations amongst subjects, through personal relations alone. Hence his vision of a world-in-relation, the outcome of intertwined histories whose ties do not entail subjection. Shange underlines this idea when she projects her utopia in the future to come, having us imagine the journey by following those human cardinal points, at the mercy of affects and affinities, as new routes yet unnavigated, but which become an ever stronger sight: “we’re trying to feed our children the sun / … / we are feeding our children the sun.” This new map seems to indicate that the reinvented references make up for the diaspora and the need for belonging since origins expose the

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absence of a fixed place. The emergent concepts of emotional and affective geography, in their acknowledgement of geography as also the result of relationships between the subjects and space, would certainly be helpful in an analysis of the spatial dimension of genealogy Shange’s poem builds upon.3 Although I will not go further into this aspect, I would like to bear that relationship in mind because in “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography” it is the emotions and affects that modify stable geographical notions which might otherwise help the reader navigate the routes depicted in the poem. While suggesting that history established affinities and deep links between the familiar geographical entities presented, the poem rejects, notwithstanding a Eurocentric geography, these beliefs that ultimately cut off Africa from Europe and America from Asia, as well as from the Middle-East and so on, and builds for each of these geographical entities an independent identity made of incommunicable differences. North and South are the ultimate evidence of such dichotomies, each producing an exclusive constellation of meanings (rich/poor, developed/undeveloped, modern/primitive, etc.). Such invention of geography was followed, Aníbal Quijano would add, by the production of the concept of race (1992, 28). To shelter its place as the centre of the world-system, Europe developed an ethnocentric discourse which naturalized its superiority visa-vis the races of all other continents gravitating around Europe, thus legitimating the coloniality of power: The idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the colonization of America … Terms such as Spanish and Portuguese and, much later, European, which had until then indicated only geographic origin or country of origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to the new identities. Insofar as the social relations that were being configured were relations of domination, such identities were considered constitutive of the hierarchies, places and corresponding social roles, and consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being imposed (2008, 182).

In this sense, race is an important element in the poem. The voice speaking is in the subaltern position of the African-American and the geographical references strengthen the connection (Angola, Mozambique …). The subject-voice identifies with “all the dark urchins” who, from Chicago to Luanda, trace the circumference of the world, “rounding out the globe.” Yet, race is not there to differentiate. The poem, ultimately, aims at deconstructing the dichotomies of race that naturalize the difference between white and black and the associated values, as all other binaries. The process is clear, for instance, in the way

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the poet deals with linguistic difference. Different languages are often put forth as the final representation of incommunicability. However, in “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography,” the trivial symbol of difference is something common and nonthreatening. In effect, as in the case of geographical distance, linguistic difference does not need to separate the “sons” from the “daughters”: our twins Salvador & Johannesburg / cannot speak The same language But we fight the same old men / in the new world

Understanding protrudes through linguistic difference because it finds other common references that run deeper than language. The presence of the interlocutor—in this case a collective entity, the “same old men” (my emphasis)—provides that link, emphasized by repetition in the poem. Despite the abstraction of this entity—in clear contrast to the naming of places and family relations—the “same old men” easily hint at both old and new forms of power in the Americas, as in other places around the world. They are the imprint of the coloniality of power. The United States easily resonates as this type of collective entity and with its hegemonic position in the Americas, born out of an eagerness to replace the European empire shortly after the newly won independence of many Latin American nations, managed to extend its “old” bondage. The lines: the ones who think helicopters rhyme with hunger who think patrol boats can confiscate a people and ones whose dreams are full of none of our children

easily bring to mind images of the routine exercise of power by a domineering America, patrolling its borders to prevent access from the periphery—the poor Americas. As in the past, these “same old men” remain deliberately oblivious to the “children” inside or at its margins, “unaware of the rest of us in Chicago.” In Chicago and elsewhere, as in all the margins of the world, are “all the dark urchins / rounding out the globe.” The expression that almost sounds like a refrain, “the same old men,” is a link to a common memory to which spaces or ethnicities defined by a Eurocentric knowledge pose no obstacle. Memory is the vehicle leading to translation and celebration and is shared by diasporic subjects. Memory flows through the lines and binds them. The map the poem redraws conveys a transnational network of connections, in which a common

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memory of oppression becomes the blood that binds, or reunites, the subjects unnaturally scattered around the world. Bringing the image of the family close to that of the Deleuzean rhizome seems to be the basis of Shange’s images in this poem. The ramifications eventually make the centre obsolete or unlocateable, the same centre from where they originated—an image in which the route itself is more important than the origin. Against “the same old men,” historical figures of colonial liberators are evoked, showing common references to slavery, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism: “‘don’t worry bout lumumba/ don’t even think bout // ho chi minh / the dead can’t procreate’.”4 Despite dislocation and diaspora that dispersed the family in the world, memory passed on other histories by denouncing the “same old men.” These counter-histories prove to be places of enunciation and capable of decolonizing knowledge; as Walter Mignolo argues, memory legitimates the new place of enunciation and the revisions of history emerging therefrom. Memory is a witness and it stands against the “same old men” who thought that she—or, as they said, “the dead”—could not breed other histories, another history; in other words, that she too “[could] not procreate.” Memory also sustains other forms of kinship and the affects, which to my mind provide for stronger alternative forms of connection than the twisted family ties that history entwined. Oppression is the family surname, the ultimate affinity that brings parents, sons and daughters together in a different form of union—solidarity. This in turn goes beyond the question of race, notably suggested by the extension of the new map to Palestine. Here, Shange seems indeed to be inspired by the theory of solidarity in the difference that emerges in Paul Gilroy’s metaphor of the Black Atlantic, the idea that diasporic communities share, in their different places, identities, positions and common forms of oppression from colonialism to nationalism or racism, which they become better at naming and deciphering (1993, 230). To a certain extent, Shange’s poem anticipates what has of late been discussed as the post-ethnic turn, exposing an emerging awareness that a common experience and memory can structure affinities in a much stronger way than merely through considering ethnic difference. Such is the case in forms of oppression, which may differ in historical terms but are similar in structure. Therefore, intersubjectivity is crucial to attempts at describing affinities resulting from similar experiences.5 The new form of interconnection or intersubjectivity, the poem suggests, is reinforced by other forms of emotions, specifically through the search for the morning and the sun as symbols of emancipation. Light as

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spiritual nourishment and liberation links with hope, and together they tone down the imperfections of history, while projecting a better map for a better future, for the children are still young and blossoming: “We are so hungry for the morning// We’re trying to feed our children the sun.” Hence, my assertion that the map the poem draws is less a map of the past than one which is revelatory of the type of future that awaits. Encapsulating the reminder to the old men, “the earth is not flat old men” brings to the fore the understanding that there is no one truth, nor one mapping of the world, for this would mean one location-asimprisonment. Space is lived through and if infused with memory it becomes a place, bears witness and “procreates.” In this manner, awareness is born and prevails, dispersed, ever moving, and unstoppable. Shange’s poem, therefore, traces old-new symbolic political geographies that are not individual but collective—the “family”—and whose ultimate goal is the pursuance of freedom. As Saldívar writes: [Shange] envisions a new sort of geographical space altogether in which new kinds of social and sexual relations, denied by the older classical American literatures, might flourish. Her geography is thus always sociopoetic, and in her discourse places act as “ciphers” for alternative visions of social existence in the Americas (1991, 19).

The circulation of this consciousness of the lived space as a place of memory allows for the creation of new meanings. The “new world” that witnessed the arrival of the slave ships, long ago—“but a long time ago/ we boarded ships/ locked in // depths of seas our spirits”—becomes the edgeless new world of today. Newness, instead, redefines the world as a borderless place that allows reunion with the family, even though it had once fought doom through conservative observations: “there is no edge // no end to the new world.”

Conclusion We need representations such as Shange’s in this poem to counterbalance other recurring depictions which overlap and tend to dominate our views of geography and the meanings attached to place. My overarching preoccupation is with the coloniality of power in the Caribbean region and its implications upon discourse. Not only does the colonial history of Bocas del Toro remain unknown to the modern traffic of people who circulate the islands—the tourists—as the entertainment services and facilities the archipelago in general provides are designed to bury that history deep, a condition for its very existence in the current design. The

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paradise poster (magnificent palm trees, the bluest sea, the softest sand), a delightful image, is the one that prevails, concealing the other history and memory of the Caribbean. As in the poem, it makes of us all “Mae Wests” and “Jean Harlows”: in whittled white cafes near Managua listening to primitive rhythms in jungles near pétionville with bejewelled benign natives,6

or yet, “ice skating in Abidjan // unaware of the rest of us in Chicago.” In opposition to the movement that transforms space into place, an appropriation by the people that subjectify, historicize and politicize it, supposedly making it meaningful, is a common image of the Caribbean as a touristic paradise which becomes evidence to the regulating push of the coloniality of power. The drive behind them is to produce a static space again, a modern version of the “new world,” of the time of the “discoveries,” the “flat world,” there for the taking. When we consume the viewcard version, we engage the Caribbean-America as a commodity, merely there for consumption. It bears a plain message, typical of commercial language, inviting identification, not estrangement or indignation, but consequently deprives it of any complexity. Only accidentally are we reminded of the other meanings of history concealed by images such as these, when the inverted version of the viewcard invades the news in brutal sights of chaos and horror, like Haiti’s earthquake, uncannily reminding the world of the coloniality of power. Another poem in the same collection, “A Black Night in Haiti, Palais National, Port-Au-Prince,” written in 1983 long before the earthquake, sings of a Haiti almost as chaotic and pain ridden as the one that pierced our television screens in 2010.7 “There is no edge,” Shange’s poem repeats, “no end to the new world,” suggesting that there is no limit, no lines of separation from the emergent wider family the poem invents, as there are no borders actually separating the histories of the world from our very present states of perception. The closing lines call the present to think of the future: “we are feeding our children the sun” [my emphasis].

Notes 1

Against this euphoria, some cautious remarks were, and still are, worth listening to; see, for instance, Manuel Castell’s The Rise of the Network Society: the

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Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Vol. I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). The motif of the genealogical tree is actually typical in Caribbean diasporic literature. See, for instance, Tree of Life, by Maryse Condé, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, by Pauline Melville, or Autobiography of my Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid. 3 These interdisciplinary fields developed within cultural geography from the intersection of socially constructed categories of identity (race, gender, sexuality, age, spirituality) with spatial categories. 4 The references here are quoted by Lumumba, an anti-colonial leader and the first elected President of Congo, in 1960, and Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Communist revolution for Vietnamese independence. 5 V. Jayson T. Gonzales Sae-Saue, “The Inter-ethnic Return: Racial and Cultural Multiplicity in Foundational Asian American and Chicana/o Literatures,” Comparative American Studies 8 (4) (1910): 267–282. 6 The line “whittled white cafes” in Managua probably refers to the so-called “white cities”/ “pueblos blancos,” adobe houses painted white probably after colonial influence, near the capital of Nicaragua and a very touristic site (in the picturesque style). Pétionville is a wealthy region in Haiti. 7 A Daughter’s Geography, 33–36. 2

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23 (3) (1997): 617–639. Ashcroft, Bill., Griffiths, Gareth & Tiffin, Helen. “Key Concepts in PostColonial Studies.” The Empire Writes Back, Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Carter, Erica., Donald, James & Squires, Judith (eds.). Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Print. Crang, Mike & Thrift, Nigel J. Thinking Space. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Print. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print. Hobsbawm, Eric & Ranger, Terence (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Print. Mignolo, Walter. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial

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Debate. Eds. Mabel Moraña et al., 225–258. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Pheng, Cheah & Bruce Robbins. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification.” Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Eds. Mabel Moraña et al., 181–224. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Quijano, Aníbal & Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World System.” International Social Science Journal 2 (1992): 549–557. Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America, Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Print. Shange, Ntozake. A Daughter’s Geography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Print.

THE HUNGER: THE POWER AND POLITICS OF A (POST)COLONIAL CANNIBAL CREIGHTON NICHOLAS BROWN

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2003) delivers an unlikely survival story of a little Indian boy, Pi, at sea on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and large Bengal tiger. As the days pass, Pi notices “the zebra’s broken leg was missing. The hyena had bitten it off and dragged it to the stern, behind the zebra” (120). The surprising end of the story suggests that the story of the animals was really the story of four human survivors, the cook, Pi’s mother, a wounded sailor, and Pi. The story of the zebra is revealed to have been the story of the wounded sailor, who’s leg, as he became sicker, the group decided to amputate: “We fell on him. Mother and I held his arms while the cook sat on his good leg … The cook worked his knife quickly. The leg fell off” (305). The cook then consumes the flesh of the dead sailor, with Pi and his mother refusing, instead eating raw fish or sea turtles. Next, the cook kills Pi’s mother. In righteous rage, Pi kills the cook with the single knife and consumes his “heart, his liver, and his flesh” (311). Within this story of survival at sea, Martel develops two forms of cannibalism. First, Martel depicts survival cannibalism through the cook’s consumption of the wounded sailor. Second, Martel changes the direction of his cannibalism when he moves Pi to consume the vital organs of the cook in anger, rather than a need for survival. His incarnation of survival cannibalism is tinged with horror and becomes suspect through the mediation of Pi’s narration, which gives the episode a sinister hue. Pi’s turn towards cannibalism appears justified—and not nearly as menacing— as the cook murdered Pi’s mother. The tension between a sinister form of survival cannibalism and an oddly non-threatening and vengeful cannibalism creates a unique place within which to explore modern empire. Typically, the cook’s survival cannibalism is seen as an acceptable last resort for the European in a difficult position, while Pi’s vengeful cannibalism is seen as a native form of cannibalism, which is

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unacceptable. Martel makes the boundaries between the civilized and the uncivilized ambiguous. Through the ambiguous nature of cannibalism in Life of Pi we can reflect on the animal allegory that composes the majority of the narrative and explore its deeper implications as they apply to the age-old literary trope of cannibalism. The cannibalism present in Martel’s engaging survival narrative is metaphorical. For instance, one reading of the novel especially suggests that Western culture consumes Eastern cultures. The sale of Pi’s family’s Indian zoo animals to various zoos in the Unites States and Canada narrowly demonstrates the consumptive practices of the West. Indeed, Western zoos consumed the separate parts of the Indian zoo and the cook consumed the various members of the stranded group—as Pi consumed the cook—not just out of a need to survive but, also, out of malice. Martel uses the trope of literary cannibalism to explore the neoimperialist consumerism of Western culture under the guise of an animal fable, but then fractures our understanding of both his story and our understanding of the cannibalistic narrative. As a purported survival tale, Life of Pi sets up the reader to expect cannibalism as a means of survival, yet this story becomes warped when we are presented with cannibalism resulting from rage. That is, the cook resorts to consuming the sailor as Pi and his mother sleep in order to survive aboard the life raft. Pi’s killing of and eating the cook can then be seen as resulting from justified rage after the murder of his mother, out of malice, instead of survival. Pi’s actions shift Martel’s depiction of cannibalism from that of survival, which is often rationalized and accepted, to that of savage cannibalism, which is condemned throughout the world. Just as Martel’s complicated presentation of cannibalism opens his tale to a critique of Western neo-imperialism, so too does Marcus Clarke’s epic novel For the Term of his Natural Life (1874). Martel explores neoimperialism as it consumes distant peoples and cultures. As I noted above, the catalyst for this story results from the sale of an Indian zoo to several Western zoos, which can be read as the West’s desire to absorb the exotic of Eastern culture. In a similar fashion, Clarke’s novel functions as a complex critique of British imperialism during the late nineteenth-century. His Natural Life contains depictions of cannibalism in the Australian bush, which provide an interesting space to explore Clarke’s critique of British imperialism. Clarke appears to be criticizing the British Empire’s practice of absorbing distant lands and peoples during the height of the empire under Queen Victoria.

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Clarke composed a brief and yet compelling scene of cannibalism at the heart of his novel about Australian identity in the British penal colony of Port Arthur, where similarly to Life of Pi readers are neither certain of the type of cannibalism present nor of its significance in relation to the trope of literary cannibalism. The majority of the novel tells the story of Rufus Dawes (a.k.a. Richard Devine), who is falsely accused of murder and sentenced to live in the penal colony. Throughout most of the novel, Dawes epitomizes what it means to be Australian by keeping his head down and serving his unjustified punishment with dignity and grace. Dawes’s dignity and grace keep him from participating in an escape that engenders the scene of cannibalism on which this essay focuses, and which includes eight other convicts. The convicts attempt to escape by ship, but the group loses one member to the icy waters. As the convicts take stock of their situation, and the audience becomes aware that the leader Gabbett possesses the “axe in his belt” and that Sanders and Greenhill carry knives (354). The group notes they have “but one bag of provisions,” which “contained a piece of salt pork, two loaves, and some uncooked potatoes” (354). The audience is presented with the stark situation faced by the convicts through the documenting of the minimal provisions. Gabbett exits the scene as a “gaunt and blood-stained man,” a mere human, but before and during our scene of cannibalism Gabbett is characterized as being monstrously inhuman (360). This brief scene, I will argue, proves crucial to understanding the larger work of the novel; and key to understanding the scene is the examination of the adjectives used to describe Gabbett—monstrous, wolfish, giant, and savage—and how these adjectives create a boundary between the human and the inhuman. Through the tensions between the human and the inhuman, Gabbett provides the space within which this essay will explore cannibalism and its relationship to the imperial project. While Clarke’s His Natural Life is seen by the majority of critics as a novel situating itself in the context of Australian identity,1 I argue that a focus on the Lilliputian section depicting cannibalism departs from a strict Australian narrative to move toward a metaphorical conversation about the nature of literary cannibalism2 as it applies to British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, I will argue that Clarke’s adaptation of apparent survival cannibalism demonstrates ambivalence toward British imperialism during the latter half of the nineteenth century and that his characterization of Gabbett embodies this ambivalence through his characterization as monstrous and savage. This ambiguity of identity that vacillates between his human and inhuman qualities works to complicate

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our perception that the scene is one of survival cannibalism. Gabbett’s identity as human or inhuman changes depending on the type of cannibalism he practices at particular moments. In other words, to the extent that Gabbett performs survival cannibalism, he can be seen as human, but as soon as he slips into a savage form of cannibalism, his identity alters and he becomes inhuman. This complication moves the act of cannibalism, as Clarke wrote it, to an indistinct form of cannibalism that is more frightening as well as threatening. The ambiguity of Gabbett’s identity, stemming from the type of cannibalism in which he engages, creates a unique space within which to explore the complications of imperialism. I will argue that Gabbett’s unidentifiable form of cannibalism embodies the imperial project. That is, Gabbett consumes bodies to maintain his own power, just as the British Empire consumed distant lands—lands filled with native peoples—to increase its global dominance. In order to fully explore the complexities of Gabbett’s cannibalism as a microcosm for empire, first I will look at three distinct types of cannibalism which will shed light on Gabbett’s compounded identity as a cannibal. Second, I will scrutinize the identity of Gabbett—the inhuman and the human—by looking at the various ways in which Gabbett is described during Clarke’s short scene. Third, I will explore the relationship between Gabbett’s illusive form of cannibalism and British imperialism in Australia, which will complicate our understanding of both cannibalism and British imperialism in Australia and beyond.

“Did he eat it? Did he like it?”— Of Survival and Ceremonial Cannibalism3 Understanding Clarke’s construction of Gabbett as an ambiguous cannibal is key to analyzing the larger implications of Clarke’s critique of British imperialism. Geoffrey Sanborn in The Sign of the Cannibal provides an interesting lens through which to consider Gabbett’s cannibal identity. Though Sanborn’s argument centres on the issue of the cannibal in the works of Herman Melville, a few of his insights will translate onto Clarke’s treatment of our cannibal. Sanborn ascribes a particular postcolonial function to Melville: “the articulation of the dynamics of anxiety and menace in the colonial encounter” (xiii). In other words, Melville’s cannibal embodies the tension created by the fear and hazard present when Western society encountered the cultures of the southern hemisphere. This idea is present in Clarke’s version of the cannibal, as

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well. We can see Gabbett’s cannibalism as expressing a similar process to that of Victorian imperialism. Before analyzing Gabbett’s inhumanity and humanity, it is important to examine the different forms in which cannibalism occurs. The cannibalism in His Natural Life exists in a complicated matrix of shifting definitions and realities.5 To clarify the various forms of cannibalism, I will turn to Laurence R. Goldman’s The Anthropology of Cannibalism, where he provides a useful delineation of three forms: survival cannibalism, exocannibalism, and endocannibalism. For Goldman, survival cannibalism consists of “people eat[ing] human flesh in emergency starvation situations” and “is certainly accepted as fact” (14). In other words, survival cannibalism is a verifiable fact, as with the historical Donner Party, and results from harsh conditions and the threat of starvation. For Goldman, survival cannibalism is chiefly a European endeavour reserved for perilous situations, often at sea. The remaining two categories of cannibalism— exo- and endocannibalism—can function ceremonially or as a manifestation of desire; that is, Goldman positions both forms as ceremonial. First, Goldman establishes exocannibalism as the “consumption of ‘outsiders’, such as enemies of war, and frequently includes some form of perimortem mutilation and use of skull trophies (headhunting)” (14). This form of cannibalism is ceremonial, in that it involves the incorporation of one’s enemy as a conclusion to the war. According to Goldman, endocannibalism is the “consumption of flesh from a member of one’s ‘insider’ group (possibly kinship or descent) and seems most usually associated with ideologies about the recycling and regeneration of life-force substances” (14). For Goldman, both exo- and endocannibalism occur within the native scene and as such are described as “ceremonial.” From this point forward, I will refer to native cannibalism—the exo- and the endo-—as ceremonial cannibalism. As we will see, all three versions of cannibalism are presented through the actions of Gabbett, which makes defining Gabbett’s identity all the more challenging. While Gabbett’s cannibalism is presented as a fact in Clarke’s novel, his cannibalism can also be read as a metaphor for imperial consumption. The metaphorical use of cannibalism can be best explained through the combination of consumption and abjection. Anne McClintock explores the idea of abjection in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. The abject, according to McClintock, is “everything that the subject seeks to expurge in order to become social” (71). In other words, the abject is everything that should not be incorporated into the body, such as vomit, mucus and blood. The abject can even be the blood, the flesh, or the entire body of another human.

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“Abject peoples,” McClintock writes, “are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without: slaves, prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers, the insane, the unemployed, and so on” (71). These are the non-white or non-productive members of imperial society, whom society needs in order to function efficiently. To McClintock’s list I would add the category of the convict or criminal. Through this, the convicts of Clarke’s novel become abject people for the empire. But as McClintock points out, abject peoples are necessary—and yet undesirable—for the formation of empire. In the cannibal scene, the convicts become abject as Gabbett consumes them. Therefore, Gabbett metaphorically embodies the British Empire as it too incorporates those abject natives in distant colonies such as Australia, India or South Africa. The play between Goldman’s three categories of cannibalism and McClintock’s thoughts on abjection creates a fascinating dilemma for the character of Gabbett and Clarke’s critique of British imperialism. First, Gabbett’s ambiguous form of cannibalism shifts between that of survival and that of the ceremonial. Second, the ambiguity of Gabbett’s type of cannibal creates a tension between Gabbett being seen as human (in the case of survival cannibalism) and inhuman (in the case of ceremonial cannibalism) as he consumes his fellow convicts. Third, and following McClintock’s work, Gabbett’s fellow convicts can be seen as abject peoples, and who become abject objects as they are incorporated into Gabbett’s body. Finally, Gabbett’s incorporation of the abject mirrors the process of colonization as it integrates native peoples around the world. I argue that this demonstrates an inherent complexity in British imperialism —imperialism is savage as it consumes other peoples and lands, and yet imperialism is also viewed as a noble cause as it works to civilize the darker places of the world. This same complexity is witnessed through the various descriptions of Gabbett’s inhumanity—“monstrous,” “savage,” “giant” and “wolfish”—and the sole description of Gabbett’s humanity.

“Lamb chops, extra rare”—Of Monsters, Savages and Other Gruesome Beings To understand Gabbett’s cannibalism as a metaphorical microcosm for Victorian-era imperialism, we need to return to the language Clarke uses to describe Gabbett, noting its inhumanity and how this is used to almost excuse his appetite. As the central cannibal in our group of absconding convicts, Gabbett is often described as monstrous, savage and wolfish, which almost removes the consequences of his actions by dehumanizing him. The most frequently recurring of the three designations is

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“monstrous,” which as readers we do not at first understand, but later come to an intense comprehension of as the scene of the Australian dinner party unfolds. Typically, “monster” connotes a frightful combination of the human and the inhuman as well as a person who is heinously cruel. This connection between frightfulness and inhumanity adds nuance to Gabbett’s characterization as a monster—not only is he of a “ferocious appearance” but his inhumanity is apparent as he consumes the flesh of humans. This example shifts the idea of monstrousness from one of animal ferocity to one of human barbarity, with the combination of these nuances of monster combining perfectly to describe Gabbett. But what does it mean to be a literary monster? In The Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film, Joseph D. Andriano discusses the use of monstrosity as a metaphor for human characteristics or anxieties. Adriano writes: “When a monster is a metaphor, it is a representation of some human characteristic” (xiv). In other words, the monster does not simply stand for itself, a creature other than human, but instead the monster possesses some human characteristic to make it recognizable to the reader. As we will see, Gabbett simultaneously embodies the human and the inhuman during the scene of cannibalism; he is at once a monster, who consumes others to survive, and he exits the scene a blood-stained human. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen clarifies the idea of the monster in his introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture: “I argue that the monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a resistant Other known only through process and movement, never through dissection-table analysis” (x). Cohen furthers what the monster embodies by establishing seven theses about what it means to be a monster. Of interest to me for this essay are his third, fourth and fifth theses. Thesis Three describes the monster as a “harbinger of the category crisis” (6). Cohen explains this when he writes, “Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes” (6). In Clarke’s construction of cannibalism, Gabbett’s voracious appetite rears its monstrous head during the convict’s food shortage crisis. Next, Cohen’s fourth thesis explains that the monster exists on the threshold of difference. This difference often takes shape as it relates to national distinctions: “Through all of these monsters the boundaries between personal and national blur” (10). In other words, monsters appear at the confluence of the personal and national identity. We see this in Gabbett, as his national identity changes from British citizen to convict to Australian native. Cohen’s fifth thesis places the monster as the policer of potential

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boundaries. He writes: “The monster is a powerful ally of what Foucault called ‘the society of the panopticon,’ in which ‘polymorphous conducts [are] actually extracted from people’s bodies and from their pleasures … [to be] drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by multifarious power devices” (15). Gabbett does in fact incorporate the bodies of others in a concrete rather than an abstract way. Significantly, Clarke uses this term during the brief passage depicting Gabbett’s slow consumption of his comrades. Curiously, however, Rex first refers to Gabbett as a “surviving monster” while discussing his escape plan with Dawes (324). This first linkage of Gabbett with the idea of monstrousness occurs before readers are even aware that cannibalism has transpired in the novel’s off-stage past or will materialize in the novel’s near and actual future, though Rex’s use of the term hints at Gabbett’s behaviour as being outside the bounds of normality. Even before Gabbett becomes the nightmarish monster, devouring his fellow men, Clarke plants a small dormant seed of monstrousness in our mind through the conversation between Rex and Dawes. As Rex enumerates those convicts making the escape, Dawes raises his head and refuses to join the jailbreak. Dawes explains: “Gabbett bolted twice before,” which causes him to shudder “at the remembrance of the ghastly object he had seen in the sunlit glen at Hell’s Gate” (324). As yet, we have no idea from where Dawes’ physical reaction to the mention of Gabbett’s name comes or what the object is, but Dawes helps to clarify—at least a little—when he says to Rex: “Others went with him, but each time he returned alone” (324). The vagueness of Dawes’ statement may imply that Gabbett was the sole survivor as the others died of starvation (or more natural causes), but coupled with Dawes’ peculiar employment of “ghastly objects” we may read this as something more sinister than simply survival of the fittest. When Rex wonders aloud: “How came the surviving monster to live six weeks” without food, we are further asked to imagine cannibalism (324). The implied answer to Rex’s question is that Gabbett ate his fellow convicts as a means of survival. But at this point Gabbett has bolted twice and both times returned alone, suggesting that he possesses a deep, covetous hunger—he desires human flesh as a preferred cuisine. Indeed, Rex drives home Gabbett’s potential as a cannibal as he pales when reflecting on “the sanguinary legend that pertained to Gabbett’s rescue” (324). By using “sanguinary” (i.e. bloody) to describe the legend of Gabbett’s past breakouts, Rex adds nuance to this initial connection of Gabbett and the term “monster.” By characterizing Gabbett’s rescue as “sanguinary” and as possessing a “ghastly object,” readers begin to

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suspect Gabbett of desirously cannibalistic tendencies, but we have not yet witnessed the atrocious dietary acts of Gabbett for ourselves. At this point in the narration, “monster” appears to connote an inhumanity on the part of Gabbett, but this inhumanity is couched in the misperception that Gabbett resorts to cannibalism—something we are not yet sure of—out of a need for survival. In other words, the inhumanity exhibited by Gabbett may be explained away as simply a tactic for continued existence. However, there is the unexpected mention that a similar situation occurred at least one other time, and the recurrence of Gabbett’s association with ingesting humans may instead further the inhumanity of this monstrous convict. The next three iterations of the monstrousness of Gabbett clearly erase any doubt about his inhumanity, as each mention of the adjective coincides with our experience of his bloodthirsty and systematic gorging on the dwindling number of consumable comrades. The first example of this more clearly defined usage of “monster” occurs as Gabbett readies to kill and ingest his penultimate victim, Sanders. To this point, Gabbett has digested two of the original eight escapees—Bodenham and Greenhill— and moves to polish-off a third. As Gabbett approaches and strikes Sanders with an axe to the forehead, Sanders resurrects his remaining strength to tear “the axe from the monster who bore it” and flings it to the other survivor, Vetch (359). Clarke’s narrative voice applies this disparaging (and quite correct) epithet to Gabbett, while placing another cannibalistic actor—Sanders—in a place of sympathy for the reader by making him victim. Sanders appears to become absolved of his culinary crimes as he begs for time to pray before being assimilated into the body of Gabbett. Extraordinarily, this role reversal for Sanders reveals this particular example of “monster” being applied to Gabbett in Sanders’s ability to demonstrate remorse before his own end on the blade of Gabbett’s axe, shedding a glaring light on Gabbett’s inhumanity. Gabbett never demonstrates remorse; he simply continues to chew through his criminal compatriots with little regard for the moral or humane implications. At this point, in our minds as readers there is no question of the inhumanity in Gabbett’s actions, and the branding of Gabbett as monster seems particularly appropriate. The penultimate mention of Gabbett’s gruesome monstrousness occurs as Vetch and Gabbett eye each other before their final showdown. This marks the point where Vetch is still lucid enough to reflect on the horrors of his current predicament. The narrative voice tells us: “Vetch comprehended the devilish scheme of the monster who had entrapped five of his fellow-beings to aid him by their deaths to his own safety” (359).

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Curiously, this reference evokes a premeditated nature or an evil intent to Gabbett’s acceptance of the escape plan. That demonstrates that Gabbett’s monstrousness is not simply a biological abnormality, but instead demonstrates agency. Coincidently, by invoking the devil, Clarke appears to be alluding to the tempting of Eve. In this grotesquely updated version of the Judeo-Christian story, Gabbett plays the part of the Devil to the other convicts’ Eves, in that Gabbett tempts the starving convicts into participating in the consumption of a forbidden and rather meaty fruit. Also, his devilish experience (his repeated attempts at escape resulting in cannibalism) goes unknown to many of the other convicts—save Greenhill and Sanders—which allows him to prey on their innocence, much as the Devil preyed on Eve’s innocence. The final mention of Gabbett as an inhumane monster arrives with the conclusion of our scene of cannibalism. The climax of this “survivor’s narrative” comes to pass as Gabbett hunts his final victim, Vetch. Vetch has become delirious with hunger and lack of sleep. Even though Vetch controls the bloody axe, he attempts to string up a noose made from his own belt. While suffering from a slow shut down of his body, Vetch ponders the “madness” of Gabbett and wonders: “Would the monster find opportunity to rush at him, and, braving the bloody axe, kill him by main force?” (360). This final mention of Gabbett as “monstrous” shifts our definition of monster from one of inhumanity to one of inhuman madness. The continuous mentioning of Gabbett’s “monstrousness” reinforces his inhumanity which results in a potential lack of culpability for his sinister actions, especially as he exits the cannibal scene as a man. “Monster” is not the only descriptive pinned on Gabbett; the term “savage” is employed by Clarke’s narrative voice to describe Gabbett and his counterpart, Greenhill. “Savage” often connotes a state of exhibiting low cultural development as well as an inhuman ferocity.6 These definitions connect cultural development to individual temperament. For the purposes of this chapter, the individual temperament is of more interest as it pertains to Gabbett’s individual behaviour, except that Clarke’s cannibal scene works to critique imperialism. As I mentioned earlier, British imperialism incorporates abject peoples and lands, which were viewed as “savage.” The tension between Gabbett’s savage behaviour as a cannibal and the savageness of those abject convicts he consumes clearly demonstrates the savageness of British imperialism. That is, Gabbett’s metaphorical imperialism requires the same savageness projected on those being incorporated into the empire. In other words, savageness is used to mark the difference between the imperial powers and those they colonize,

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just as cannibal is used to mark the difference between the civilized and uncivilized world. A slightly more nuanced—and less mentioned—characterization of the beastly acts penetrated by Gabbett occurs as the first victim— Bodenham—is prepared during the night. After Greenhill suggests consuming the weakest member of the surviving convicts, he is the original recipient of this adjective: “Greenhill, eyeing the prostrate man, said, slowly, ‘I have seen the same done before, boys, and it tasted like pork’,” to which the narrative voice, hovering over Vetch’s shoulder, comments: “Vetch, hearing his savage comrade give utterance to a thought all had secretly cherished, speaks out, crying, ‘It would be murder to do it, and then, perhaps we couldn’t eat it’” (357). While this first instance of “savage” is in relation to Greenhill rather than Gabbett, the next mention—clearly linked to the first—distinctly refers to Gabbett. While the majority of the absconders sleep, Greenhill and Gabbett fillet and barbeque the lame Bodenham: “No one but Greenhill and Gabbett would eat that night. That savage pair, however, makes a fire, fling ghastly fragments on the embers, and eat the broil before it is right warm” (357). Levi-Strauss argues that cooking food is one way of making it psychologically consumable—of separating what can come into our bodies (what we label “food”) from all of the objects we do not take in because they are psychologically threatening. Both Gabbett and Greenhill skip the step of human cooking to feed their hungry desire, thus eating uncooked flesh. The two occurrences of “savage” present us with two paths to explore. First, “savage” denotes something that is subhuman, not necessarily inhuman, and Greenhill and Gabbett are both very much human, as they were citizens of the British Empire before becoming convicts sent to live in the penal colonies of Australia, where they appear to have become less than human. Indeed, the transport from England to Australia appears to have created a stain on the convict, changing him from British citizen to a denizen of the Australian wilds. In other words, the expulsion or rejection of the convict from the British Isles results in the incorporation of the convict into the apparent terra nullius of the Australian continent, which makes them subhuman. Clarke chooses to never mention a native in His Natural Life, though historically they would have been both present and visible to convicts. This seems to place Gabbett in a unique position—if he were British before becoming a convict and if the convict transport stains him so that he can no longer be considered British, then Gabbett becomes Australian when he arrives in Port Arthur.

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Second, because the word “savage” connotes a sense of uncontrollable, brutal power, we can excuse the ferociousness of Gabbett’s cannibalism by prescribing it to a savage state. This is the more probable use of “savage,” as Greenhill and especially Gabbett act in a ferocious manner when they initiate the scene of cannibalism, a scene Gabbett continues on his own. This conjecture is supported by a description not of another death by consumption, but by a brief occasion of Gabbett’s anger. When Greenhill allows the kindling to become wet, Gabbett “swings his axe in savage anger at enforced cold” (358). While in this case no human is the recipient of Gabbett’s savagery, this brief episode underlines the callous barbarity of which Gabbett is capable. Just as “savage” connotes the untamed, ferocious behaviour of Gabbett as he masticates his way through his mates, so too does the repeated classification of Gabbett as “giant” or “a giant.” Traditionally, giants are perceived as being stupid and violent monsters who were believed to eat humans. Also, “giant” connotes a sense of immense size or stature.7 This complex combination of definitions draws on our earlier work with the idea of monstrousness and savageness. In other words, combined with the size and power of the giant, we also have the brutality and ferociousness of the savage and the monster, which add nuance to the consumption of people. By using the term “giant” to describe Gabbett, Clarke is furthering his metaphor of his embodying British imperialism. British imperialism was a trans-global project connecting nearly all continents and a myriad of abject peoples. Remember, the sun never set on the British Empire—it was a giant force in the world, just as Gabbett is a giant force among his fellow convicts. The first example of Gabbett’s association with being a giant occurs in that same instant in which he swings the axe in frustration and not in murderous rage: “The giant swings his axe in savage anger” (358). This passage demonstrates Gabbett’s violent temper, but not his lethal intentions, but this use of “giant” builds on our exploration of Gabbett as both monster and savage by combining both former adjectives with the hulking mass signified by giant, which furthers Clarke’s critique of empire. The next occasion where Gabbett’s monstrousness and savagery coalesce with the idea of Gabbett as a giant emerges when Vetch and Gabbett eye each other during Vetch’s final days of life before he becomes Gabbett’s last cannibalistic supper. However, the sheer size, strength and gruesomeness are undercut, slightly, as Gabbett is described as a “gaunt giant,” whose “eyes gleam with hate and hunger” (359). While Gabbett is described as “gaunt” he is still a hulking menace, feared by the feeble Vetch.

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Next, as Vetch prepares to hang himself, he ponders the madness of Gabbett and his size, when he laments: “Surely the giant, muttering, gesticulating, and slavering at the mouth, was on the road to madness” (360). Interestingly, this is the first mention of Gabbett’s madness. As Vetch flees the ambling giant, the narrative voice tells us: “The insatiable giant, ravenous with famine, and sustained by madness, is not to be shaken off” (360). While this passage clarifies the nature of Gabbett’s insatiability by linking it to “ravenous with famine,” the juxtaposition of “insatiable” and “giant” creates a comprehension not controlled by the said adjectival phrase. Instead, the proximity of “insatiable” and “giant” links the heinous act of Gabbett’s premeditated cannibalism with his desire—his hunger— for the flesh of his fellow-beings. All doubt about the meaning of either word, however, is relieved as Gabbett approaches Vetch with the intent to butcher and feast on Vetch’s dead body: “and the giant, grinning with ferocious joy, approaches on clumsy tiptoe and seizes the coveted axe” (360). From gaunt starvation to ferocious joy, the giant Gabbett relishes his final kill—a kill that sadly occurs out of scene. Each label placed on or assumed by Gabbett brings to his character an inhumanity or a beastly element which works to complicate Clarke’s depiction of apparent survival cannibalism. Also, each label adds particular nuance to Clarke’s critique of British imperialism. The final locution employed to describe Gabbett is “wolfish.” This characterization carries with it a few particular nuances that add new facets to the inhumane brutality exhibited by Gabbett. “Savage” connotes brutality and ferociousness and “wolfish” functions in the same way. First, “wolfish” denotes an untamed ferocity and power, especially during the hunt. For example, as Greenhill pronounces he is so hungry he “could eat a piece of a man,” the narrative voice, which hovers over the shoulder of Vetch, notes: “Gabbett’s eyes have a wolfish glare in them” (357). The “wolfish glare” present in Gabbett’s eyes implies a desire to hunt at the mere mention of consuming a bit of man. Second, “wolfish” suggests participation in a pack mentality, which is important to the book’s ultimate argument that Gabbett’s pseudo survival cannibalism is excusable as he becomes an animal in the Australian bush. The pack mentality denoted by “wolfish” adds another layer to Gabbett’s metaphorical embodiment as the British imperial machine by demonstrating the need for group complicity when colonizing other lands and abject peoples. For example, Gabbett insists that all members of the absconding party “must … have a hand in it” (357). By requiring everyone’s hands in the taboo acts of murder and cannibalism, Gabbett spreads the culpability over the whole group rather than on one individual

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convict; this seems to implicate the whole group in the act of the hunt much like wolves hunt in packs. Again, the pack mentality is highlighted when Greenhill complains about having to feed the weak Bodenham. Upon hearing Greenhill begin his grumbles, “the giant silences him with a hideous glance” (356). This brief verbal and non-verbal interchange between Greenhill and Gabbett triggers a memory for Vetch, who: “remembers Greenhill accompanied Gabbett once before, and feels uncomfortable. He gives hint of his suspicion to Sanders, but Sanders only laughs. It is horribly evident that there is an understanding among the three” (356). From the outset of the escape, and before the initial act of cannibalism, there is already present a pack pact between the three convicts as to how they will survive in the Australian bush. This early agreement pushes for a reading into the premeditated nature of the act. Third, wolfish can indicate the presence of an alpha-male, a pack leader. As noted above, Gabbett leads the group of absconders into complicity as they consider cannibalizing each other in an attempt to survive. Queerly, as Gabbett is found by the sailors, he loses both his monstrousness, his savagery and his gigantism, and instead is described as “a gaunt and blood-stained man” (360). As Gabbett emerges from his experiences in the wild, he regains his humanness. Clarke uses inhuman language to describe a human Gabbett in order to distance his humanness from his inhuman behaviour. By using such adjectives as “monster,” “savage,” “giant” and “wolfish,” Clarke positioned Gabbett to metaphorically embody the British empire through guised terms reminiscent of the behaviour of imperialism. The inhumanness expressed through such adjectives allows for Gabbett to exit the cannibal scene as a mere single human, which reinforces the need for a pack mentality when colonizing abject peoples. By this I mean imperialism is an inanimate, inhuman process that requires the complicity of a myriad of individual humans, with the culpability of each singular human being diffused across the broader group and not focused on the individual. Thus, Gabbett can monstrously consume his fellow convicts and still exit the scene a mere man.

“Secret’s in the sauce”—On the Confusion of Survival and Ceremonial Cannibalism Clarke constructs these acts of cannibalism to be something more, something between survival and ceremonial, something sinister. Clarke achieves this by showing Gabbett’s cannibalism as the consumption of the abject and as being serial in nature with the possession of trophies.

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Gabbett clearly demonstrates the incorporation of the abject through his acts of ambiguous cannibalism. While Goldman has clearly inscribed three distinct forms of cannibalism, not one of them unmistakably applies to our monstrous and savage cannibal Gabbett. For example, Gabbett consumes his fellow convicts under the guise of survival cannibalism, but as I noted above, the descriptions of Gabbett as “wolfish” or “monstrous” add a menacing hue to the misleading depiction of survival cannibalism. Gabbett’s act of consuming the abject imitates the colonial act of incorporating abject peoples of other lands. Historically this can be seen as the British incorporation of the Maori of New Zealand or the Xhosa and Zulu of South Africa. And yet, Gabbett’s previous attempts at escape—at least twice before our current scene—complicate his reliance on this tactic of self-preservation. Furthermore, Gabbett’s propensity for consuming his fellow convicts indicates a serial nature to his ambiguous form of cannibalism. The frequency of his acts as anthropophagus indicates a distinct shift from survival cannibalism into something else. On the one hand, we see Gabbett resort to cannibalism when the food runs low, but on the other he has performed the role of human restaurateur before. Remember, even before the cannibal scene occurs, Rufus Dawes mentions that “Gabbett bolted twice before,” each time returning alone the sole survivor (324). This particular cannibal scene marks Gabbett’s third attempted escape, and the third time he has returned alone as the sole survivor. Just as Gabbett continually gorges himself on his fellow convicts, the British Empire also continuously sought to increase its global dominance by incorporating new lands and peoples. For example, at its height the empire possessed such diverse colonies as Hong Kong, Cape Town and Bermuda, filled with abject peoples and native artifacts that may be called trophies. Finally, the serial nature of Gabbett’s culinary pursuits brings us back to Goldman’s exocannibalism category where he introduces the idea of consuming the flesh of those defeated in battle. Curiously, Goldman makes a connection I have not yet seen in cannibal literature—the idea of cannibalization as a means to procure a trophy. Typically, trophies are associated with serial killers, not necessarily with cannibalism. The connection between cannibalism and trophies is echoed in The Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal aids Agent Starling with the Buffalo Bill case.8 Hannibal asks Starling why Buffalo Bill removes the skins of his victims. Starling says: “It excites him. Most serial killers keep some sort of trophies from their victims,” to which Hannibal responds, “I didn’t.” Drily, Starling replies: “No. No, you ate yours.” Hannibal, a psychiatrist and serial anthropophage, consumed his victims; he incorporated his trophies

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with a sense of ceremony or ritual as with Goldman’s exocannibalism. When Gabbett exits the cannibal scene he opens his bundle for the sailors, “with much ceremony offer[ing] them some of its contents” (360). The contents of his bundle are presumably the remains of Vetch—those remains Gabbett had not yet consumed. Just as in The Silence of the Lambs, Gabbett consumes most of his trophies instead of simply keeping them. We can see the possession of trophies in practice both historically and today in the British Museum in London, where mummies from Egypt and marbles from Greece are housed, among a myriad of other cultural trophies within an empire. Just as Gabbett houses his trophies in his body, so too does the British Empire in its heart—its central city. The cannibalism at the heart of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life illuminates the anxieties surrounding the practice of imperial expansion. Through its gruesome portrayal of serial abject incorporation, this novel makes metaphorical the processes of the British imperial machine. While His Natural Life provides a singular example of how reevaluating the literary trope of cannibalism can expose new approaches to British imperialism, it is not a well-known example to American scholars. But what might happen if we begin to re-examine other more prolific works such as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket? Just as His Natural Life, Poe’s work features a scene of survival cannibalism. Could this also work to include a latent critique of American imperialism? This chapter serves as a launching point for new investigations into old cannibal tales.

Notes 1

For other approaches to Clarke’s novel, see Damien Barlow’s “‘Oh, You’re Cutting My Bowels Out!’: Sexual Unspeakability in Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life,” an essay on the connection between male sexuality and cannibalism; Nicholas Birns’s “Cosmopolitan Convict: Marcus Clarke’s Reshuffling of the Past” and Beth A. Boehm’s “Nostalgia to Amnesia: Charles Dickens, Marcus Clarke and Narratives of Australia’s Convict Origins,” both of which discuss convict identity and Australian history; and Andrew McCann’s “Textual Phantasmagoria: Marcus Clarke, Light Literature and the Colonial Uncanny” and Devarakonda Ramakrishna’s “The Australian Gothic and Edgar Allan Poe,” both of which discuss caricatures of the grotesque and the gothic in Australian literature. 2 Rebecca Weaver-Hightower explains one way in which cannibalism has traditionally been read in Empire of Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest. Citing Hulme, Weaver-Hightower writes that Columbus, as the first colonizer, “felt compelled in The Four Voyages to denote a split between good savages … and bad ‘cannibals’” who resisted colonization. The “bad cannibal”

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becomes inextricably linked with what Weaver-Hightower calls the “undesirable Other.” 3 Frida. Dir. Julie Taymor. Perfs. Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush and Ashley Judd. Miramax Films. 2001. DVD. 4 Fried Green Tomatoes. Dir. Jon Avnet. Perfs. Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker and Jessica Tandy. Act III Communications, 1991. DVD. 5 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, at the time Clarke was writing His Natural Life the term “monster” connoted either a “mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance,” or a “person of repulsively unnatural character, or exhibiting such extreme cruelty or wickedness as to appear inhuman.” 6 The Oxford English Dictionary offers two suitable and interrelated definitions of “savage” that will guide us during our investigation of Gabbett’s monstrously savage side. First, the OED prescribes savage to “peoples or (now somewhat rarely) … of individual persons,” who are “uncivilized [or] existing in the lowest stage of culture.” Secondly, and quite connectedly, to be a savage human is to be “fierce, ferocious, [and/or] cruel.” 7 The Oxford English Dictionary defines a giant as being “one of the supposed beings in human form but of superhuman stature, who occur frequently in mythic or pseudo-historical traditions and in romantic fiction,” and “a human being of monstrously or abnormally high stature” as well as of “extraordinary size, extent, or force; gigantic, huge, [and/or] monstrous.” 8 Silence of the Lambs, The. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Perfs. Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Scott Glenn. Orion Pictures. 1991. DVD.

Works Cited Andriano, Joseph D. Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film. Contribution to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 78. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Print. Barlow, Damien. “‘Oh, You’re Cutting My Bowels Out!’: Sexual Unspeakability in Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life.” Journal of the Association of the Study of Australian Literature 6 (2007): 33–48. Association for the Study of Australian Literature. MLA International Bibliography. March 14, 2011. Print. Birns, Nicholas. “Cosmopolitan Convict: Marcus Clarke’s Reshuffling of the Past.” Lemuria Winter (2006): 112–21. MLA International Bibliography. 14 March 2011. Print. Boehm, Beth A. “Nostalgia to Amnesia: Charles Dickens, Marcus Clarke and Narratives of Australia’s Convict Origins.” Victorian Newsletter Spring (2006): 9–14. MLA International Bibliography. March 14,

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2011. Print. Clarke, Marcus. For the Term of His Natural Life. Melbourne: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1886. Print. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. —. “Preface: In a Time of Monsters.” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, vii–xiii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Frida. Dir. Julie Taymor. Perfs. Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, and Ashley Judd. Miramax Films. 2001. DVD. Fried Green Tomatoes. Dir. Jon Avnet. Perfs. Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary- Louise Parker, and Jessica Tandy. Act III Communications, 1991. DVD. Goldman, Laurence R. The Anthropology of Cannibalism. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999. Print. Hulme, Peter. “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene.” In Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Eds. Francis Baker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson, 1–38. Cultural Margins. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Kilgour, Maggie. “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time”. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Ed. Francis Baker., Peter Hulme & Margaret Iverson, 238–259. Cultural Margins. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. McCann, Andrew. “Textual Phantasmagoria: Marcus Clarke, Light Literature and the Colonial Uncanny.” Australian Literary Studies 21 (2) (2003): 137–50. MLA International Bibliography. March 14, 2011. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Print. Obeyesekere, Gananatha. “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Fiji: Seamen’s Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination.” In Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Eds. Francis Baker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iverson, 63–86. Cultural Margins. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Ramakrishna, Devarakonda. “The Australian Gothic and Edgar Allan Poe.” In Edgar Allan Poe Review 9 (1) (2008): 49–54. MLA International Bibliography. March 14, 2011. Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. Print.

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Silence of the Lambs, The. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Perfs. Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Scott Glenn. Orion Pictures. 1991. DVD. Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Empire. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2007. Print.

PART II— SCHISMS IN NATIONAL SPACES

“WE MAY BE THROUGH WITH THE PAST, BUT THE PAST AIN’T THROUGH WITH US”: SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE MORAL PREROGATIVE OF MEMORY STEPHEN BELL

In his celebrated essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie wistfully acknowledges the partial, fragmented perspective that migration to London forced upon him as he tries to recover his beloved Bombay through writing. Yet “human beings,” he writes, expanding his meditation on the dislocatory, disruptive experience of exile to encompass the human condition itself, “do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions.”1 The difference for diasporic individuals is that they’re forced to come to terms with this basic human limitation far sooner than others. Despite a desperate desire to counteract feelings of “disorientation: loss of the East”2 through recourse to a stable, grounding vision of the past, Rushdie writes that “our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”3 Although such visions of the past are bound to be incomplete and even potentially fictionalized, Rushdie recognizes the vital task of resurrecting the past in memory as an inherently moral act which both grounds individual and national identity in all its hybrid complexity, while revealing mistruths and false constructions perpetrated by those in power. Rushdie’s own reading of history in the 1960s at Cambridge encouraged him to recognize the ways that the discipline of history itself stands as a human construct providing only a partial record of events, and that it must be situated in the field of what postmodern theorists would call historiography. According to Linda Hutcheon: “in arguing that history does not exist except as text, it does not stupidly and ‘gleefully’ deny that the past existed, but only that its accessibility to us now is entirely

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conditioned by textuality. We cannot know the past except through its texts.”4 Such writing about the past obviously never qualifies as an objective, disinterested act, but is always motivated by particular interests. For instance, during the “Raj Revival” of the 1980s in Britain and the concomitant enactment of the neo-imperialist, conservative ideologies of Margaret Thatcher’s administration following the Falkland Islands War, there was a political attempt to unify the nation under “the fantasy that the British Empire represented something ‘noble’ or ‘great’ about Britain; that it was, in spite of all its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous.”5 Likewise, after the manifold abuses of state power during India’s “Emergency” period from 1975–77 (including the arrest of dissidents, suspension of civil law, and enforced sterilization of the poor), there existed, according to Rushdie, a concerted effort on the part of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi to conceal the enormity of the truth, which would allow for a later rehabilitation of their public image and permit Indira to be re-elected, as Saleem puts it in Midnight’s Children: “[e]vidence went up in smoke … and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with particolored hair and her beloved son.”6 The first goal of a politically minded novelist like Rushdie, then, is (notwithstanding the understandable limitations of individual vision), to contest such descriptions with his own memories which read history “against the grain” and inscribe an alternative vision of events, creating a kind of politically charged “counter-memory.” As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”7 Rushdie incorporates Kundera’s idea into his essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” when he reminds us that “particularly at times when the State takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized.”8 In other words, “[a] poet’s work”, as Gibreel Farishta’s dream-character Baal intones in The Satanic Verses, is defiantly “[t]o name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”9 Postcolonial authors like Rushdie often make use of magic realism as a writing style to create a counter-hegemonic vision which opposes the one enforced by authority. Andrew Teverson writes that magic realism “is conceived of as an inherently radical form of writing, because it develops fictional strategies in which accepted (“realist”) representations of the world are destabilised by their encounter with forms of representation which are less easily contained or controlled within ‘normative,’ ‘rationalist’ discourses.”10 Nowhere is this destabilizing, contestatory approach toward

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“official facts” clearer than in the central episode of the Banana Company massacre in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Despite “the official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand [that] there were no dead, [that] the satisfied workers had gone back to their families,” José Arcadio Segundo stubbornly insists on his version of events, which include a “nightmare trip [on a] train loaded with corpses traveling toward the sea”11; readers are thereby forced to remember the phantasmagorical reality of an inconvenient truth belied by the historical record. As Rushdie writes in his recently published memoir, Joseph Anton, “[a]gainst ruthlessness, remembering was the only defense.”12 Midnight’s Children perhaps intentionally echoes the nightmarish intensity of the Banana Company Massacre when Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, stumbles into Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar in 1919 with his bag of medical supplies, and Rushdie captures the surreality of events in characteristically magical realist fashion. General Dyer’s massacre of innocent civilians is recounted in dream-like terms as he congratulates his men for firing “a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark.”13 Later, confusing the blood on his shirt for mercurochrome, Aadam’s wife Naseem asks him where he’s been. His reply is telling: “Nowhere on earth.”14 Although such an absurd narration of an event strikes the reader as a form of science fictional alternate reality that couldn’t possibly be true here “on earth,” Rushdie insists on its absolute historicity. Just as Saleem is indissolubly “handcuffed to history”15 by his birth at the moment of Indian independence, the magical unfading bruise on Aadam’s chest created on April 13, 1919 by the clasp on his medical bag when he was pushed to the ground during the Amritsar massacre permanently marks his identity as a lifelong Indian as well. In The Satanic Verses, after Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta mysteriously survive the mid-air explosion of Bostan Flight 420, Saladin is immediately confronted with a “through the looking glass” nightmare version of his beloved England that dramatically opposes the anglophilic fantasy he’d patiently constructed all his life. After being arrested and repeatedly abused by racist police officers who humiliate him and deride his Dionysian/demonic appearance of hooves and horns, he thinks to himself: “This isn’t England … How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire?”16 Things grow stranger when he’s deposited in a kind of sanatorium for illegal immigrants who assume monstrous, fantastical shapes, including

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manticores and other hybrid beast-people, one of whom offers him an explanation of sorts for his recent metamorphosis: “They have the power to describe us … That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.”17 Throughout the novel, therefore, it becomes clear that the primary responsibility for such grotesquerie lies in the Orientalist, racialized constructions of non-white inhabitants of England as irredeemably ex-centric and “Other,” which are perpetuated by those in power. And one of Rushdie’s primary goals is to “write back” to those descriptions by reminding his readers that: “of the black communities, over forty percent are not [even] immigrants, but black Britons, born and bred, speaking in the many voices and accents of Britain, and with no homeland but this one.”18 Very often, such racist depictions can be turned on their head and recuperated by an author eager to explode unjust stereotypes by problematizing their usage. In the controversial Muhammad chapters of The Satanic Verses, the Muslim prophet is given the ugly name “Mahound,” which had been used by European authors since Dante to defame and demonize Muslims. As the narrator explains his controversial choice, “to turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn.”19 The racially downtrodden members of the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities of “Brickhall” in East London choose to perform the same ideological manoeuver with Saladin’s devilish appearance in The Satanic Verses when they begin to defiantly wear devil horns in public. As one character explains to Saladin, “people can really identify with you. It’s an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own.”20 In his essay “In Good Faith,” Rushdie explicitly ties this rhetorical gambit of redefinition to the prerogative of oppressed minorities to re-write their own version of the world: “The very title, The Satanic Verses, is an aspect of this attempt at reclamation. You call us devils? it seems to ask. Very well, then, here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world, the version written from the experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness.”21 In many of Rushdie’s works, memory is furthermore explicitly tied to individual moral responsibility, so that when Saleem is conked on the head by the falling spittoon after his family is wiped out during the IndoPakistani war of 1965, it constitutes a purifying, amnesiac withdrawal from history and an irresponsible abdication of his need to remember injustices rightly. Tellingly, this historical “emptying” occurs when he’s residing in Pakistan, literally “the Land of the Pure,” which as Rushdie

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indicates in his novel, Shame, is full of inhabitants who “have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time. I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country.”22 Founded by M. A. Jinnah and partitioned from India a full day before India itself received its independence from Britain in 1947, Rushdie’s narrator believes that Pakistan has historically sought to exclude any trace of ungodly, un-Islamic “impurity” from within its national borders; yet such reductive measures are continually derided by Shame’s narrator throughout the novel. These ideological attempts at “purity” on the part of Pakistan’s leaders are doomed to failure because, according to Rushdie, they repress the fact that Pakistan is an imaginary construct (hatched by Muslim intellectuals living in England) that was built palimpsestically “on the past. A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten.”23 By ignoring the teeming abundance of multiple identities and histories just beneath the surface of “Pakistan” in the name of “purity,” “Peccavistan” (as the narrator punningly calls the country24) becomes a sterile, claustrophobic and oppressive land that stands in stark contrast to the joyful overabundance of Saleem’s Bombay. As Rushdie indicates in a conversation with David Brooks: India, if it means anything, means plurality. Although it also has different races, Pakistan feels much more like a singularity, because there is just one religion and there’s a much greater homogeneity both of language and faith.25

Yet in later works, such as The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie laments that the Nehruvian dream of a heteroglossic, pluralistic India has also been sabotaged of late by the forces of singularity and religious and cultural monologism in the guise of rising Hindu nationalism. The national Bharatiya Janata Party and the local Shiv Sena faction in Mumbai each increasingly try to articulate the myth of a homogenous India free of any “inauthentic” traces of Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Jews or Christians, to say nothing of the colonialist influence of the British. As petty despot Raman Fielding hyperbolically boasts at one point, “One day the city—my beautiful goddess-named Mumbai, not this dirty Anglo- style Bombay—will be on fire with our notions”: … Hindu-stan: the country of Hindus! … Now our freedom, our beloved nation, is buried beneath the things the invaders have built. This true

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nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires.26

Just as Rushdie’s version of Pakistan opts for a stripped-down, monolithic unity and purity of identity in Shame that conveniently forgets those buried “Indian centuries,” so too does Fielding’s exclusivist vision of a Hindu India immorally rejecting the modern nation as a palimpsest that must be stripped of its “illegitimate” patina of non-Hindu sources, in order to return to an imaginary pre-colonial, pre-Mughal past. Rushdie continually decries such dishonest flights from historical truth and advocates remembering the nations of Pakistan and India as fully-layered multiplicities rather than false and forced singularities. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem provides his rationale for transcribing his memories because: “[t]oday, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down.”27 As Ernest Renan writes in “What is a nation?”, historical amnesia is often required to consolidate the myth of national narratives: Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations … Unity is always affected by means of brutality.28

In other words, for Pakistan to see itself as a unified nation-state it must repress the memory of atrocities committed by Pakistani soldiers during the War for Bangladeshi independence of 1971, when professors and intellectuals were shot in the street and women were gang-raped in back alleys. And for India to see itself as a thriving, modern democracy, it must often fail to remember the excesses of the Emergency or the livid violence of the Partition riots. Such unproblematic views of the past are at best blithely irresponsible, and at worst, unethical. For Rushdie, the conflict between morality and irresponsibility finally comes down to a choice between memory and forgetting. For Saleem, this means exposing the invisible “black part” of history (using Indira Gandhi’s particoloured hair as an analogy for his historical method) and challenging the official narratives of the nationstate. Nowhere is the moral prerogative to resurrect and recover painful memory more evident than in one of Rushdie’s more recent novels, Shalimar the Clown, set for much of its length in the disputed territory of Kashmir. As Rushdie explains, Kashmir before Partition existed as an idyllic paradise embodied by Kashmiriyat (Kashmiri-ness), which was

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marked by the heterogeneous, polyglot, syncretic co-existence of Muslims and Hindus: The words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story … In the valley these words were merely descriptions, not divisions. The frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred.29

However, the combined efforts of Muslim insurgents from Pakistan and the brutal crackdown of the Indian army serve to forever destroy the villagers’ sacred peace. When Hindu villages are razed by Muslim militants, the narrator pleads that: “[t]hese names had to be remembered. Forgetting would be a crime against those who had suffered ‘whole-hog’ burning of their neighborhoods, or seizure of their property, or death, preceded by such violences as could not be imagined or described.”30 And after the inhabitants of the predominantly Muslim village of Pachigam are violated, raped and massacred by the occupying Indian army, the narrator hauntingly laments, [t]here are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun … The village of Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory.31

Or as Saleem succinctly puts it, echoing the charge of Rushdie himself: “Morality, judgment, character … it all starts with memory.”32

Notes 1

Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 12. 2 Salman Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet (New York: Picador, 2000), 5. 3 “Imaginary Homelands,” 10. 4 Linda Hutcheon, “Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism,” in A Postmodern Reader, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 256. 5 Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 101. 6 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1991), 506. 7 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin, 1986), 3. 8 “Imaginary Homelands”, 14. 9 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1997), 100. 10 Andrew Teverson, Salman Rushdie: Contemporary World Writers (New York:

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Palgrave, 2007), 16. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 309. 12 Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), 188. 13 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1991), 34. 14 Ibid., 35. 15 Ibid., 3. 16 The Satanic Verses, 163. 17 Ibid., 174. 18 Salman Rushdie, “The New Empire within Britain”, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 132. 19 Ibid., 95. 20 Ibid., 296. 21 Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 403. 22 Salman Rushdie, Shame (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1983), 91. 23 Ibid., 91. 24 Peccavistan, of course, represents a witty allusion to Sir Charles James Napier’s reputed one-word dispatch after capturing the Sind, now part of modern day Pakistan, in 1843: Peccavi (“I have sinned”). 25 Michael Reder, Conversations with Salman Rushdie (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 67. 26 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Vintage, 1997), 293–5. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” qtd. in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11. 29 Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (New York: Random House, 2006), 57. 30 Ibid., 296. 31 Ibid., 309. 32 Midnight’s Children, 241. 11

THE CHRONOMETRIC NOSE AND THE CHRONOTOPIC NOVEL MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN REN DENTON

Saleem Sinai has a huge nose that drips incessantly, allows him to smell emotions, and resembles the Deccan peninsula. Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, has a nose that is described as a “colossal apparatus … comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh” (8). Aadam’s nose foreshadows Saleem’s, in that the nose is “to start a family on,” a nose where “dynasties” wait “inside … like snot” (8). Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children uses the nose as the symbolic centre for the allegory of India’s national history. Such a symbol creates the body as political, as the private body becomes politic with the experience of the public nation. Tai tells Aadam that the nose is “the place where the outside world meets the world inside you,” and this statement establishes the novel’s metaphoric image that unites the public and private worlds. As the nose inhales the air of the outside world, it enables a sensory knowing of the world. Therefore, the nose, as a trope for knowing, becomes the instrument that Rushdie needs in order to guide readers through a comprehensive critical analysis of India’s history. Novels are born out of their political and social contexts, according to Mikhail Bakhtin. In turn, aesthetic forms consciously mirror the perceived realities within the creator’s environment. Upon its conception and birth, the text forms a unique dialogical relationship with social and historical events, just as Saleem shares his identity with India when he is born at the moment of India’s independence. Hence, the text’s imagined time and space shares common boundaries with the cultural time and space of the author’s real era. The chronotope measures “real historical time and space” and “actual historical persons” in relation to the fictional time and space in which the characters exist. Within this, temporal-spatial relationships permit an expression of abstract thought, as the thought takes on a form of a sign, signifying meaning or experience, and: “[c]onsequently, every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished

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only through the gates of the chronotope” (FTCN, 258). Thus, one can access the door of knowledge through understanding chronotopic relationships: The chronotope operates on three levels: first as the means by which a text represents history; second, as the relation between images of time and space in the novel, out of which any representation of history must be constructed; and third, as a way of discussing the formal properties of the text itself, its plot, narrator, and relation to other texts. (Vice, 201–202)

Midnight’s Children follows the chronotope pattern: first, the text itself is a representation of history; second, time and space images are represented as historical events, as genealogical histories merge, overlap and echo one another in such a way that history is constructed through links of casual relationships; third, the narrator interrupts the story so he can comment on the textual events, the plot, and its relationship to memory and history as well as compare it to the cinema or “Bombay’s talkies,” as life acquires “the coloring of a Bombay talkie” and “life imitate[s] bad art” (168, 249). The narrative techniques borrow from travel tales, biographical writing, adventure tales, Indian folk tales, as well as cinematic principles. The result of such a blend expands Rushdie’s aesthetic canvas both artistically and historically while suspending the reader in the thrill of the tale. Like Aadam’s and Saleem’s lives, the various narrative techniques intertwine and intersect over and over like the great looping of an intricate knot. Thus, the incessant dripping of Saleem’s nose is analogous to the narrator’s “writing-shitting,” in that both are free flowing organic substances representing historical consequences (20). Rushdie states he owes the development of his talent to the oral narrative tradition of India, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Rushdie is interested in creating “literary idiolect that allows the rhythms and thought patterns of Indian languages to blend with the idiosyncrasies of ‘Hinglish’ and ‘Bambaiyya,’ the polyglot street slang of Bombay” (xi). If Rushdie set out to write a novel that blends the East with the West in order to create a polyphonic discourse akin to Hinglish (Hindu and English), then his challenge lies within forming an aesthetic judgment that does not privilege one culture over the other, but blends them in such a way that the spaces between the cultures are indiscernible to the point the cultures form a natural union. India itself is the blending of cultural diversities, so it was easy for Rushdie to form the analogy of country and body, as both the nation and the individual are impacted by colonization. History and the theme of the body intersect in bizarre ways within the novel. Therefore, it is useful to unpack some of its meaning through applying Mikhail

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Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope. Chronotopic plot devices intersect at multiple crossroads of past and present, which renders Rushdie the larger canvas he needs for his creation. In other words, Midnight’s Children combines elements of various chronotopic novel types in order to create a rich and full satiric tale about nationalism and colonization. As a way to imitate India’s fragmented identity, Rushie’s novel is also fragmented with intersecting plot techniques that blend East with West. Rushdie merges India’s oral narrative with various Western novel formats, which gives the work its mystic element as well as its unique fragmented structure that is often associated with modern and postmodern novels. There are many mythical allusions and ghost stories that signify India’s cultural influence over the text. However, the most noticeable allusion to oral narrative is the fact there are a thousand and one midnight’s children, and that many possibilities exist for India’s future. This number speaks back to the oral tale “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights,” where the stories are framed within the suspenseful knowledge that, at the end of the story, the narrator is sure to be killed by the king who is determined to have and kill a virginal maid every night. The narrator entertains the king in order to save her own life and possibly spare the lives of others. Likewise, the narrator of Midnight’s Children also intersects several stories and plots as he too heads for his own destruction. The intersecting plots are poignant because they each borrow from common Greek narrative formats, which in turn not only builds suspense within a larger chronotopic canvas but delights the reader’s aesthetic senses as the stories involve the most common genres of storytelling. Aziz’s colossal nose is the chronometric device that organizes and measures the novel’s time and space in conjunction with India’s history. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque states that a big nose represents pregnancy (literal or metamorphic): therefore, Aadam’s and Saleem’s noses represent the possible birth of a dynasty within India. Aadam’s nose foreshadows Saleem’s in that the nose is “to start a family on,” a nose where “dynasties” wait “inside … like snot” (8). The hereditary colossal nose is a “birthright,” and allows people to believe Saleem “was truly [his] mother’s son, [his] grandfather’s grandson” (8). The nose, as a “birthright,” is the chronotopic surface that bridges past and present generations just as it joins the public and private spheres of the nation. The birthright nose that joins Aadam’s life to Saleem’s life also connects to India. Accordingly, just as Saleem must start his own biography with the story of his grandfather, India’s story must also begin with the grandfather, as the events leading to India’s independence occur right under Aadam Aziz’s colossal nose.

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Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, “introduces the corporate, somatic basis on Indian identity. His suggestive anatomy anticipates the novel’s central conceit, the fusion of an individual body with the subcontinent and a personal biography with its political history” (Kane 1996, 94). When in the posture of prayer and worship, Aadam Aziz “hits his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray.” He bloodies his nose and resolves “never again to kiss the earth for any god or man.” However, this decision leaves him fragmented, as a hole appears in a “vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history” (4). Aadam’s unfortunate encounter with the violent valley marks a private transformation that indicates the schism colonization creates within a nation as well as within the individual. Aadam has just returned home to the valley from Germany where he “learned that India—like radium—had been ‘discovered’ by the Europeans” (6). Aadam struggles with being back in India, “parroting” his Mecca religion, as his European education seems to mock “his prayer with anti-ideologies” (6). He is “trapped between belief and disbelief” (6). As if to remind him of his culture and ancestors, the valley, “gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on the nose … it smote him upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and diamonds” (5, 6). If the punch served as a reproach for his Westernization, then he certainly received such a reprimand with much contempt: Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed back diamonds contemptuously from his lashes. (4)

The fantastical transformation of bodily fluids into tangible gems is one of the narrative descriptions that gives the novel its magical quality. However, it should not be read as a blatant begging for the reader to suspend belief. Aadam’s blood and tears transforming into gems signifies a political moment of crisis not only within the individual, but within the nation as well. Aadam bleeding rubies and crying diamonds heralds pregnant meaning to the novel’s theme of colonization. Metamorphosis serves as the basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of crises in that it shows: “how an individual becomes other than what he was … what we get is a crises and rebirth” (FTCN 1981, 115). The gems represent what Aadam had been before he

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went to Europe—the son of a jewel manufacturer. The mother worked in the jewel factory to send Aadam to school so that he could become a doctor. His Western education caused him to parrot religious worship. His ritualized prayer was an attempt “to reunite himself with an earlier self” (6). With his hands and body being “guided by old memories,” he overextends himself and causes injury to his nose. The blood dropping out of him and transforming into rubies, the tears welling out of him and twinkling into diamonds, are representative images of what Aadam had once been and illustrate that his past identity has been expelled from his essence, which leaves a hole in his soul. The inability to reconcile Eastern and Western cultures within the body is analogous to the nation’s inability to create a unified national identity. This identity crisis is also echoed when Aadam struggles with the decision of identifying himself as Muslin or Indian. He decides that he is Indian before he is Muslim, and therefore must share in India’s battle for independence. Aadam’s identity crisis also leads to The Amritsar Massacre of 1919. Aadam’s Muslim identity is fully disavowed when he forces his wife into Western dress. The domestic war parodies the culture clash between England and India. On their second night of marriage, Aadam tells his wife to “move a little … like a woman” (31). The request makes her recoil: “she shrieked in horror. ‘My God, what have I married? I know you Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make us girls be like them!”’ (31). Aadam’s request to be “like them” (the Western girls) mirrors what Britain is doing with the Indian culture. The gist is carried further when Aadam tells her to come out of her purdah. He burns the purdahs so she has to dress as the Indian Hindu. He wants her to be a “modern Indian woman” (32). He tries to reassure her: “Your shirt covers you from neck to wrist to knee. Your loose-pajamas hide you down to and including your ankles” (32). Even though he is trying to align himself with an Indian identity as he has decided he is Indian before he is Muslim, and his impinging on his wife in that way is similar to colonization, where the colonizers try to dress the colonized who serve them in their own ideal dress of propriety. However, the issue of the purdah does more than parody the colonizers; it causes Aadam’s nose to incite a massacre. As Aadam burns the purdahs, the flames get violently out of control and leap up curtains. People have to scramble to extinguish the fire. The smoke smell chases him into the streets where the air, filled with dust, is still and continues to reek of that horrid “smell of ordure,” excrement (34). The dust and the smell irritate Aadam’s colossal nose. He sneezes. The sneeze causes fifty British troops to open fire on an unarmed crowd in the Indian streets.

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The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 also serves as an image that blends time and space in order to make meaning of historical ripples in time. Rushdie carefully places the massacre against the cracking of the narrator and Tai’s death in order to illustrate the national strife Britain created. Directly after the massacre, the narrator shifts the attention to himself as he states he has “noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in [his] wrist, beneath the skin” (35). If Saleem is India, and if Saleem’s narrative is seeking to make sense out of a national history, then his cracking at this point in the narrative illustrates the opinion that India’s partitioning, its fragmentation, begins at the Amritsar Massacre when so many Indians were murdered, which provoked more anger, insurrections and demands for independence. The mystic relationship between the body and the nation demonstrates that the individual is affected by national history and events. Just as India’s political identity crisis between Indian and Muslim is made corporeal in Aadam’s identity crisis, Saleem’s body also represents a corporal India. The generation gap between Aadam and Saleem is India— what she was and what she is becoming. In this way, Aadam’s and Saleem’s lives intertwine in the past and intersect in moments of crisis which symbolizes India’s transformation or metamorphosis. This intertwining intersection is where the narrator Saleem drops his readers inside a narrative that circles around itself as if it were knotting time and memory into a fantastical temporal spatial relationship, the meaning of which can only be fully comprehended through studying the narrative technique itself. There is an element of folk magic in Saleem, as he is the boy who could travel India telepathically. Saleem’s incessant nose-dripping is what gives him his telepathic powers. He can tune into people’s thoughts, a phenomena he describes as a “polyglot frenzy in [his] head” (192). Saleem’s telepathic power symbolizes India’s quest for national purpose. When Saleem hears the disjointed echoes of “I” coming from the four regions of India, he soon comes to realize that the voices are all the surviving children of the thousand and one born on the midnight of India’s independence. Each of the children’s powers represents some reality for India—twin girls bewitching sons to commit violence to themselves could possibly be Pakistan and India bewitching the sons into war. The child who can change gender is a strange echo of India’s loyalty changing from Gandhi to Indira Gandhi. Other children represent India’s need for action: the boy who could travel through reflective surfaces signifies that India needed to be more self-reflective as it came into power; the boy who could time travel to correct the past and see into the future seems to speak to

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India’s need to rewrite history from a national viewpoint as well as to point the nation to a positive future. The children were so diverse in their abilities and personal agendas that when they gathered for a conference they bickered about their purpose, each wanting to be the leader. Nothing was accomplished. Further, Saleem could tune into the voices and see images through people’s experience while hidden inside a stopped clock tower. The clock tower should be viewed at the panoptical watchtower that allows sentries to watch over their prisoners. Saleem becomes the all-knowing eyes and ears of India. Sitting in this tower, he says: “I can find out any damn thing! There isn’t a thing I cannot know!” (199). When he discovers this ability he tours India, and these sections read comparably to a travel novel. Rushdie uses the travel novel technique in association with Saleem’s nose to illustrate how colonization makes tourists out of natives living within their own land. The travel novel is a factor of Greek romance. Travel to foreign countries where isolated curiosities are filtered through the author’s own real homeland perspective “serves as [an] organizing center for the point of view, the scales of comparison, the approaches and evaluations determining how alien countries and cultures are seen and understood” (103). However, as Saleem telepathically or literally travels through India, instead of measuring India against Rushdie’s Britain, he takes account of the impact Britain has had on the land and on the people, as colonization with its “palaces in pink stone” made a strange new world for Indians (74). Saleem criticizes Britain’s colonial power: “You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other’s view of the roseate edifices of power” (74). “The narrow lanes” “leaned over” in the “old city” gives an abject image of a dejected India bowing to the edifices of power. The amalgamation of the old and new, the East and the West, within the same city splits cultural experience along racial boundaries and create oppressive relationships between the colonizer and the colonized. The result is a blending of cultures, as India “leans,” bends or bows to England. England then moulds the colonized into an identity that pleases the colonizer by creating a hybrid culture since India embraces British culture and its commodities. This hybrid cultural experience is emphasized through Saleem. He signifies a hybridism by the virtue of his birth. Methwold, a British aristocrat, somehow gets intimately involved with a poor, married Indian woman who gives birth to Saleem. The union is a corporeal representation

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of the colonizer and the colonized, where Britain has seduced or raped India and then produced a hybrid product of that union, which is a free India struggling with identity. Likewise, Saleem’s travels reflect fragmented identity. Reared in Bombay, a Western-like city, Saleem experiences the indigenous Indian culture as the “exotic simplicities of travel,” as if he were experiencing them as a Western tourist (198), at the same time experiencing British tourist sites in India as an exploited native. As he travels he says: “I was a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private ‘Dilli-dekho’ machine” (198). The sites he sees balance south against north: I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman … I hopped down to Dadurai’s Meenakshi temple nestled amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver, complaining bitterly to my fares about the rising prices of gasoline; in Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisherwoman … then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal mosscovered hut of a Goojar tribal … At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirror worked dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tantric carvings on the Chandela temples (198).

Saleem’s travels give the reader an understanding of the diverse experiences in India ranging from socioeconomic classes to religious beliefs. As Saleem travels in time and space, scents that offend the nose enter the text as a way to express discontent regarding colonial conditions. “On April 6, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled … of excrement” (29). The ungodly smell in the holy city is a metaphor that signifies the colonial degradation of India. This metaphor becomes increasingly clear as the description continues: “mules and men and dogs attend nature’s calls, mingling in a brotherhood of shit. But there were cows, too: sacred kine roaming the dusty streets, each patrolling its own territory, staking its claims in excrement. And flies!” (30). The “brotherhood of shit” refers to the Indians who work like mules and are treated like dogs under British control. The sacred cows patrolling for their territory is a trope for the Muslim Indians who are cozying up to the British so they can gain their own territory—a partition of India—Pakistan. However, the humour within the excrement metaphor is found in the streets where “a white woman was buying silks from a shop across the street and men in turbans were ogling her” (30). She is buying silk among the raunchiness of a city

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filled with excrement? Can she not smell it? She certainly seems out of place, just as the silk is out of place among a sewage-filled street. She illustrates the British ignoring how they are out of place in India; and just as the lady is unconcerned with her environment, the British are unconcerned with the impact their exploiting and colonizing are having on the Indian denizens. The conditions in Amritsar apparently represent all of India, as conditions everywhere seem to be so intolerable that Gandhi “decreed that the whole of India shall … mourn in peace, the continuing presences of the British” (31). As Saleem’s powers allow travel along with the ability to discover “what really goes on around here,” he serves as the organizing unit of time, as he places history within the time frame of himself or his family (198). In the time of his childhood, he can give the reader a glimpse of what is happening all over India. He is able to spy on the gossip of India. He first learns the “truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala” (198), but he soon discovers politics and sees the class differences in India. He experiences life as the engorged and the starving, Gandhi, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Therefore, he fulfils the travel novel requirement for its hero in that he becomes the public and political man, even “from the moment of [his] conception, it seems, [he has] been public property” (84). Furthermore, the hero, or the central character, of a travel novel arranges the novel’s temporal sequences in biographical time. The biographical model constructs a human image self-consciously at the helm of public and political events. The biographical time creates gaps in time and space so that only the most relevant actions relating to the historical event within the subject’s life shape its meaning. Such gaps and meaning are exaggerated when the biography is autobiographical, as the materials displayed to the public are an appraisal of one’s own self, which more times than not leads to self-glorification. Bakhtin states “Selfglorification, after all, is but the most sharply focused, most vivid distinctive feature of a biographical and autobiographical approach to life” (FTCN 1981, 133). The exterior and interior of the human subject become public and under evaluation in such a way that the private and public spaces merge within the individual standing in the public square. Saleem Sinai is that autobiographical figure, over-bounding with such self-importance that he compares himself to a variety of pagan gods and the religious icon Buddha. Because his nose is enormous, he imagines he is Ganesh, the elephant God of Hindu. He imagines that he is “Sin, the ancient moon-god … capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting times of the world” (199). He feels that: “there isn’t a thing [he] cannot know!”

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(199). He admits, when he discusses his narrative technique, that such “self-aggrandizement … was born of an instinct for self-preservation” (199). The autobiographical form allows Saleem to narrate a story about himself that places his body at the centre of history, as he is the corporal embodiment of India. The autobiographical nature of the novel allows for the narrator to comment upon the art and act of narration and its relationship with the reader. It is also through this narrative technique that the narrator repetitively circles around the birth of India, each time revealing and qualifying a bit more information about the significant relationship between the time and space of actual realities, and the time and space of the imagined individual. In other words, this autobiographical format allows the real-life chronotope of India’s history to intersect a fictitious space so truths may be philosophized and exposed regarding the sociopolitics hidden behind the façade of nationalism. Further, as the hero travels to new lands, the novel takes on adventure novel qualities. The adventure novel mechanics are appropriate for Rushdie’s project in that the action in this form often “unfolds against a very broad and varied geographical background, usually in three to five countries, separated by seas” (FTCN 1981, 88). Midnight’s Children incorporates colonies of England and the colonized India, Bombay, Kashmir and Pakistan with the separating Arabian Sea. The geological space between Kashmir and Bombay juxtaposes India’s past and present; or at least serves to mark India’s transformation from India’s indigenous culture to the Western culture of film, business and capitalism. In the adventure novel there are “short series of segments that correspond to separate adventures; within each such adventure time is organized from without, technically” (FTCN 1981, 91). These series of segments are organized within Saleem’s fragmented memory. His memory, his mind, is the technical space of time that adheres the short segments of adventure in order to present the whole, biographical life that emerges with historical meaning. Just as Saleem’s mind allows unlimited space for the thousand and one Midnight’s Children Conference to meet in order to discover their purpose, it also permits the reader a wide historical space for analysis within Saleem’s memory, his consciousness. His consciousness is the technique that allows Rushdie the mechanical space for exploring history. Bakhtin states: For Greek-adventure-time to work, one must have an abstract expanse of space. The world of the Greek romance is of course chronotopic, but the link between space and time, has, as it were, not an organic but a purely technical (and mechanical) nature. In order for the adventure to develop it needs space, and plenty of it. (1981, 99)

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Via Saleem’s consciousness, the reader can access various planes of time and space. Saleem’s first adventure is love. Saleem is totally enamoured by an American girl, Evie, and calls her the “Adam’s apple of [his] eye” (208). Evie symbolizes India’s transformation under American influence. Saleem and his friends accept “her sovereignty over [them] all” (208). After World War II, when America emerged as a superpower, more countries came under the influence of American culture and Americanization began its global march. “Americans have mastered the universe,” Saleem says (208). Evie represents this mastering as she is the “ring-mistress supreme” (213). Showing off on a silver bullet bicycle like some circus-ring mistress, standing on the seat, riding fast and furious, “facing the rear, and [working] the pedals the wrong way round … a witch on wheels …,” packing a Daisy air-pistol and able to hit her target “stone-dead,” Saleem conceded “we knew that a power had come among us” (209). The transfer of cultural power is indicated when Saleem states: In India, we’ve always been vulnerable to Europeans … Evie had only been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mimicry of European literature … Perhaps it would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself in India, as farce … Evie was American. Same thing. (212)

America’s globalization in India is occurring because: “It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier” (208). In 1957, even as Evie Burns dismounts her bike and announces “there’s a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians?”, America is flexing its powers around the globe through the marketing of American products and politics; Coca-Cola makes an appearance in the novel. However, the most obvious impact America has on Saleem (India) is cinema. Saleem is obsessed with the Lone Ranger. He views Evie as a female version of the Lone Ranger with her silver bike, air-gun, toughness and chief status. However, Evie not only serves in the novel as Saleem’s first experience with love; she actually pushes Saleem into history. Thus, Saleem’s adventurous ride into history begins on a modern-day Silver horse—Evie’s silver bicycle, the colour of Lone Ranger’s horse. Saleem states that if it were not for Evie, his story may not have ever “progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class” (207). Desperate to know how Evie honestly feels about him, Saleem gets into Evie’s head. However, she is so involved with the present scene of the language protest that he has to probe deeper, beyond the consciousness. Evie feels him there, and screams “Get out!” and pushes him “hard-as-hard” on the bike

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so that he loses control, “hurtling down the slope” (218). He hurtles pellmell toward the mouth of the language protest march, “yelling blue murder, crashing into history on a runaway, young-girl’s bike” (218). They command him to speak some Gujarati and all he can think of is: “Soo ché? Saru Ché! Danda le ké maru ché!”, which translates into “How are you?—I am well!—I’ll take a stick and thrash you to hell!” (219). The group takes up the chant. The language riots explode, ending with the partition of the state of Bombay. Saleem states: “In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the violence” that resulted in the partition of Bombay (219). Such fragmentations of India are demonstrated through the fight for national language, where language riots challenge nationalistic ideologies of unity. Saleem first hints at the many languages spoken within India when he is able to tune into “the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike” who “jostled for space with [his] head” (192). Saleem, as India, represents the young country becoming aware of India’s various regions vying for power. Saleem describes the experience as “a language problem,” as “voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Nega dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil” (192). He describes it as a “polyglot frenzy” (192). His desire for India’s unity comes forth when he is able to allow the language to fade away and replay it with “universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended word” (192). However, Saleem’s thought-forms break away with more regional signals of “I” calling from North, South, East, West: “I. I. And I” (192). It is the language riots, according to the narrator, which caused a great enough melee that the state of Bombay emerged from the violence, furthering the partitioning of India. The inability to act nationally instead of regionally demonstrates the lasting impact colonizers have over the colonized, in that the colonizers disrupt national unity, which in turn fosters local allegiance. Without a common enemy to fight, the newly freed colonized nation is left in fragmented cultures and political ideologies vying for domination. Thus, the “national front which has forced colonialism to withdraw cracks up, and wastes the victory it has gained” (Fanon 2004, 1,583). As a way to fully explore issues associated with a new country freed from colonial power, the novel shifts into foreign space. If postcolonial India is not faring well in the creation of her power, Pakistan is not doing much better. Pakistan comes to be the alien space that is common to adventure novels. Whereas the travel novel filters the travel experience through the comparative lens of the author’s homeland, the adventure novel filters the travel experience as if in an alien world where chance

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plays a major part in development. Saleem’s descriptions of odours allow the reader to breathe in the unique experiences of Pakistan, as his nose becomes the chronometer for guiding the reader through the country. “Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose” (354). He could discern the “infinitely subtle gradations of good and evil smells” (364). And through his descriptions of smells, the reader senses the dominating Islamic laws that he identifies as sacred smells: “purdah-veils, halal meat, muezzins’ towers, prayer-mats.” The profane smells are: “Western records, pig meat, alcohol” (364). He also states that he has “learned the olfactory incompatibility of Islam and socialism, and the inalienable opposition existing between the after-shave of Sind Club members and the povertyreek of the street-sleeping beggars at the clubgates” (364). Saleem rejects the sacred as it infringes upon individual will. His rejection is a cue to how the reader should also feel about what has been presented, consequently illustrating the chronotopic principle that “the human body becomes a concrete measuring rod for the world” (FTCN 1981, 170). Here the nose becomes the medium through which Pakistan is measured and judged. Through the use of smells, Saleem can be subtle in his criticisms of Pakistan, and through his preferring the “pungency of the gutter” he signals that he is unconforming. With Saleem’s displacement from India, Rushdie speculates on nationalism, exile and the family fragmentation that nationalism and exile create. As Saleem is “hurled into exile,” the family seeks to assimilate. “‘We must all become new people’ in the land of the pure,” they say (355). Edward Said, in “Reflections on Exile,” states: “Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs, and, by so doing it fends off exile” (2001, 176). The Sinai family tries to adopt the new country through becoming a part of it by becoming pure. Saleem says “in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal” (355). This adoption of a new country in order to fend off that exiled feeling of abandonment mimics the same way the family comes to terms with finding out Saleem was switched at birth. The “re-imagining of brother and son” is akin to reimagining national loyalties as the family seeks to adopt Pakistan as their new home (329). The family seems to be assimilating well—the father starts a towel factory, the mother becomes pregnant again, and Jamil becomes the national symbol of purity because of her angelic voice. Then, suddenly, without explanation, new life in Pakistan drains them of their vitality. Saleem comments that he is “forever tainted with Bombayness” (355). The

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father soon suffers a stroke and does not know where or who he is. The inability to thrive is like the replanting of a full- grown plant—it may thrive in the beginning, but as its roots sink into foreign or new soil, the roots cannot fully be nourished for the new soil lacks what the old soil had, and so it withers and dies. Furthermore, the longer Saleem’s family is in Pakistan, the more fear of Indian invasion spreads throughout the country. Newspaper headlines again report the news of Indian invasions killing innocent soldiers. As a way to purge the invasion, Saleem believes his family was the target of an imagined war where the only victims were his parents and extended family members, with the exception of his sister, who continues to be Pakistan’s emblem for purity. His parents are killed during a night bombing. During the explosion of his house, just as Saleem approaches it, he is hit in the head with his mother’s silver spittoon. The chance, traumatic event causes silence and amnesia. The loss of Saleem’s parents illustrates his nationalistic orphanhood, where: “Exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference … as a kind of orphanhood” (Said 2001, 182). Being cut off from his genealogical roots in Pakistan, Saleem demonstrates how “Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past” (Said 2001, 177). Even his sister, frightened at his declaration of an unnatural love, severs her relationship with him when she turns him over to Pakistan’s army. Even though Saleem becomes part of a group, part of Pakistan’s military, he still remains isolated. “Nationalisms are about groups, but in a very acute sense exile is solitude experienced outside the group” (Said 2001, 177). Saleem remains outside the group as he is traumatized from losing his family. His amnesia still allows his Indian identity to be forgotten, but his silence keeps him from participating in the group. The other boys speculate about who Saleem is and what he is, as he is as silent and inaccessible as a mystery—he becomes Buddha. Interestingly enough, Saleem’s lack of speech indicates his lack of national identity within Pakistan, which is contrasted with his sister who has discovered her voice and becomes the nation’s angel singer within her kingdom. When operating within the adventure chronotope, it is no accident that Saleem meets Parvati the witch before his name can be restored to him. The motif of a meeting is one of the most important devices in an adventure novel, because the meetings are often used in conflicts such as search and discovery. The meeting always “enters as a constituent element of the plot into the concrete unity of the entire work, and consequently, is part of the concrete chronotope that subsumes it” (FTCN 1981, 97). In other words, the meeting unifies what is gained with the theme of the text.

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When Parvati gives back Saleem his name and identity during a bloody conflict, she is the key to helping Saleem realize his identity as Indian as well as his love for India. This meeting echoes an earlier encounter with the prostitute when she reveals Saleem’s love for his sister. What Parvati and the prostitute reveal is typical of their roles within chronotopic novels: “The prostitute … is convenient for spying and eavesdropping on private life with its secrets and intimacies” (FTCN 1981, 125). The witch should be viewed in the same function as the prostitute, as both archetypes can function as a source for revealing or prophesying the secrets of private life. Parvati unifies the text—she is the key to helping Saleem flush out the star-crossed lovers motif when he recognizes that it has been India he has loved, not Jamil. Rushdie borrows from the star-crossed lovers motif to dramatize the relationship between Pakistan and India. Jamil takes on the identity of Pakistan slowly. First, as the parents try to assimilate, they begin to favour Jamil over Saleem (whose body is India). Second, her pure voice becomes the national representation of purity. It is while Saleem is in Pakistan that a five-hundred-and-twelve-year-old witch-whore, Tai Bibi, discovers, through transforming into his smell preferences, that he desires his sister. During this time, Pakistani newspapers are reporting the possibility of good relations between India and Pakistan, and Saleem simultaneously dreams of his sister with his heart “full of forbidden love” (382). He also dreams of “mythical lovers, both happy and star-crossed-Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, but of also Montague and Capulet” (382). However, the symbolism of the star-crossed lovers motif transforms so that it encompasses the bodily love in the role of nationalism once Saleem is reunited with his country. Upon returning to India and reclaiming his identity, the meaning of his guilt unfolds before him as he realizes his incestuous desire has been directed toward the wrong sister: “I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake skin” (444). Jamil also reinforces the image of the perforated sheet, which plays a part in the adventure motif of star crossed lovers. She has taken to covering herself with a burka, that Saleem describes as a “perforated sheet” (367). Furthermore, Pakistan’s prince falls “head-over-heels with a glimpse of her demure eyes he saw through her perforated sheet” (367). The description links directly back to Dr. Aziz seeing his wife-to-be, Naseem, through a perforated sheet, body part by body part, until he falls in love with her. Their daughter, Saleem’s mother, has to fall in love with her husband a piece at a time as she has to make herself like the man a

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body part at a time. The fragmented representation of love speaks back to India’s partitioning and Saleem’s love for her. If the novel seems fragmented with its pieces of memory, various novel techniques, plots, motifs and distorted history, it should not be assumed that it lacks structure, for the narrator, the centralized character, glues these fragments together in a unified manner. The result may be a little cubist, but all the parts adhere well. The narrator tracks shifts in time and space, justifies actions, and testifies to the truthfulness of event. With a chronometric nose as the guiding instrument, the narrative uses myth and magical realism to break free from the Western hegemony of literature and creates a book spiced with Indian savours. The magical representation of cultural desire may go undetected by those unfamiliar with the subjective culture. Admittedly, the magical elements within the book can be baffling if one is not accustomed to deciphering mystic codes. Such bewilderment can tempt the reader to disregard the novel as a fantastical attempt to write history or a stereotypical exhibit of Eastern exotic behaviour rooted in magic. However, to label Rushdie’s novel as magical realism without acknowledging the blending of other novel discourses minimizes the intellectual knowledge of his craft as well as his talent as a writer.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward Historical Poetics”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 84–258. Print. —. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 212–235. Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. NY: Grove Press, 2004. Print. —. “From the Wretched of the Earth”. Norton Anthology Theory and Criticism. Vincent Leitch Ed. NY: Norton, 2001. 1673–1684. Print. Giles, Todd. “Writing and Chutnification in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”. The Explicator. Spring 2007. 182–184. Print. Kane, Jean M. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”. Contemporary Literature (1996): 94– 119. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. NY: Random House, 2006. Print. Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile”. Reflections on Exile and other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 173–186. Print.

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Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. NY: Manchester University Press, 1997. Print. Wexler, Joyce. “What Is a Nation? Realism and National Identity in Midnight’s Children and Clear Light of Day”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2002): 137–155. Print.

LITERARY TOPOI OF ORGANISED HALLUCINATIONS IN IRVINE WELSH’S TRAINSPOTTING ANASTASIA NICÉPHORE

In a society which works and enriches itself by means of organized hallucination, be less devoted to creating new forms of hallucination. And more devoted to piercing through the hallucinations that nowadays pass for reality. —Susan Sontag, “On Art and Consciousness”

In postmodern literature, drug use has become a prominent signifier of (post)colonial1 disease, which is both a psychological and a physical condition. Susan Sontag’s proposal of organised hallucinations (a theory that is strikingly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s own organised chaos theorem2) is particularly appropriate to our temporal condition of postmodernity, (post)colonialism and globalisation. Sontag’s exploration of disease and its metaphors relates to more than an individual’s state of being; it also conveys underlying social tension, conflict and decay. My argument has three interconnected areas of concern. Firstly, to establish the source and criteria of “organised hallucinations” as a form of social tension within the plight of the diasporic community within Britain. Secondly, to explore reasons of why “organised hallucinations” can be associated to (post)colonial theories. Lastly, to present as evidence that cultural anxieties and the “urban subproletariat” (Spivak 1995, 25) run parallel to the body politic and in turn affect the body private. In this chapter I explore Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, which has induced immense controversy due to its carnivalesque depiction of disease and the social and political problems in contemporary Scotland. While some argue that the novel has glamorised the use of heroin, the metaphorical implications of drug abuse and consequent contagion and disease have far wider implications than the conventional poetic justice of unworthy people. Rather, disease formulates a type of grand narrative in the global socioeconomic environment of the twenty-first century in which

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AIDS features as a symptom and a political instrument, as well as a physical contagion and a metaphoric projection. In this context, the political manipulation of the fear and reality of disease through Sontag’s “organised hallucinations” is a form of social control. In Sontag’s (1991) Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, disease is given the significance of the “other,” signalling exposure of the physical body to contamination from a foreign entity that attaches itself to the visceral realm and triggers infection. The unwelcome contagion invades the individual’s body and identity. Sontag describes “a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness”3 as crucial to a wider political agenda. Diseases such as AIDS target key groups within society that are vulnerable because of cultural, moral, social, national or provincial prejudices, and who feel oppressed by an authority that supposedly advocates hegemonic ideals. Thus, prejudice becomes a convenient political tool used to manipulate fears and conjure mistrust of dangerous infections and other metaphorical, imagined, diseases from elsewhere. It is commonplace knowledge in English social and cultural history that disease comes “from the East.”4 As Bewell explains: The framing of “tropical disease” is not easily separated from the framing of the diseases of the English poor, especially since the latter were seen as the purveyors of sickness. (252)

Whether from Asia or the East End of London, contagion was thought to originate in foreign climes or to be generated within an underclass. In this situation, the body politic had to be protected and the sickness had to be purged and excised by strong and ruthless measures. This suggests that the actuality or fear of disease offers an important and effective tool for governments. At times, it is argued, it is enough to manufacture rumours and create fictions to justify political actions, and equally to blame the government for deliberately spreading actual infections for political motives. For instance, Bewell examines Cobbett’s 1832 Weekly Political Register, in which he reports that, in the face of the pandemic Cholera, some “saw the epidemic as a fiction disseminated by health authorities, a ‘hobgoblin’ that gave them powers wholly unknown to English law!” (253). In this way, the hobgoblin generates convenience through hallucinations developed by governing authorities.

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Fig.1 J. G. Steedman, March through a Swam mp or Marsh inn Terra Firma. Courtesy of James Fordd Bell Library.

Workingg on an alternaative scenario, disease has bbeen manufactured and spread delibberately, as a matter m of poliicy. Benedict Anderson theeorises on the applicattion of contaagion as a political p instrrument develloped for distinguishinng and dividinng social classses: A set of half-starved dooctors … have endeavoured tto frighten the nation ded in into a lavvish expenditurre; with the Government theyy have succeed carrying a bill which will afford fin ne pickings. A ruinous systeem of taxation, starvation, andd intemperancee, has long beeen carried on; it has

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Literary Topoi of Organised Hallucinations in Trainspotting now arrived at its acme, and disease is the natural result. (Bewell 1983, 253)

Such a political instrument has the ability to perpetuate, effectively and promptly, tensions within a country as well as within a broader political framework, where the epicentre is a dominating political power and where smaller nations, provinces or social classes on the periphery are seen as imposing a threat. Significantly, Anderson identifies the idea of the subset or class within, rather than a foreign or exotic entity, as the threat to the health and balance of the whole: The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to “blue” or “white” blood and “breeding” among aristocracies … racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.5

Tensions among classes are useful in allowing governing systems to enforce extensive and even totalitarian control in the face of threat to cohesion and the social order. In this context, the metaphor and actuality of disease are exploited by interested factions. In the 1980s and 1990s, the political policies of the Thatcher, Major and Blair governments adapted expansionist strategies that neglected to protect the smaller nations within the European Union, even though such policies were seen as a form of management rather than authoritative oppression. Under the Union Jack, a unified culture and topography was affirmed. All parts of the Union were in “imperial alignment with England,”6 whose role was to protect its fostered “children” from the perceived threats of Americanisation and the European Union. Independence within or from the (British) Union, especially that of Scotland, was and continues to be viewed with some cynicism, considered an outdated dream in a world of globalisation and the ideology of the United Kingdom (UK). Not surprisingly, the Scottish are perceived as a troubled nation, disconnected from the English and themselves, caught in a political and societal struggle implemented by the imperial ambitions of the English under the name of Great Britain. John Robertson considers the situation in terms of Scotland’s “enforced union” (Nairn 1997, 18) with England as an uneasy relationship between the two which has long been critiqued by historians, culturists and literary theorists. A cultural and political tug of war which began with the Acts of Union in 1707 continues into the present, and is especially urgent given the economic conditions caused by the global economic crisis of the early twenty-first century,

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brings into question the viability of Scottish independence.7 Now with its own parliament, Scotland, politically, has some freedom as an independent and autonomous country located north of England and on the periphery of Europe. Strategically, it has the potential to integrate with an English or Eurocentric culture, and years of “foreign” exposure make it vulnerable to both. Yet, conservative Protestant Scots continue the struggle to maintain a connection to their heritage. Gardiner believes the: reason for Scotland’s centrality is that, as the breakdown of a form of globalisation originally arising in Glasgow and Edinburgh as a Scottish adaption to Britishness, devolution and other post-British movements could only really have arisen in Scotland. (2004, xi)

Indeed, there is something distinct about being Scottish, particularly in the literary realm, where writers such as Muriel Spark, Alexander Trocchi and Irvine Welsh have written in antithesis to Anglo-Saxon conventions by portraying characters that move against the Imperial grain. For the reader, these are a didactic juxtaposition to the “bravado of William Wallace, Rob Roy, and Robert the Bruce,”8 where most Scottish writers previously tended to produce anti-colonial narratives. In “Wankerdom: Trainspotting as a Rejection of the Postcolonial?”, Farred speculates: Welsh’s novel, however, disrupts the Scot’s dominant anti-English paradigm because he deals a death blow to that most fundamental of postcolonial imaginaries: Renton sees no value in the nation–state, the symbol and articulation of selfhood, of independence, of (initially) triumph over and (subsequently) equality with the colonizer. (223)

Despite the ongoing push for socioeconomic assimilation with their English parent, a political strategy rather than a cultural and social one, some Scots have devolved into a psychologically disintegrated state.9 Their urge to be free from Englishness, which does not articulate their identity or distinguish their unique Scottishness, has resulted in, particularly for the subclasses, a feeling of alienation and detachment from their own heritage.10 Consequently, an underclass has developed that feels neither comfortable with the perceived domineering stance of the English, nor secure within Scottish culture. These Scots have developed their own subculture which is explored in Trainspotting, as Haywood (1997) writes: [The] emphasis on poverty rather than capitalist exploitation has had the ideological effect of submerging working-class identity (or significant fractions of it) into a heterogeneous, proletarianized underclass of alienated social groups, defined by their economic unproductiveness and

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Literary Topoi of Organised Hallucinations in Trainspotting an inability to participate fully in society: families living on social security, single parents, the disabled, the homeless, delinquents, drug addicts.11

These marginalised groups, categorised as the “foreign from elsewhere,” have manifested a profound disgust at their own helplessness and an antinationalistic stance towards their own country. Consequently, the unique Highland persona (epitomised by the characters of Sir Walter Scott’s novels), which was always more of a construct than a reality, is recognised as a mere marketing ploy far removed from the modern-day Scot.12 In the past, the yearning to find meaning and value within patriotism held Scotland together as a nation; however, centuries of tensions have produced a politically weakened nation. This opinion is a far cry from Anderson’s assurance that the “end of the era of nationalism, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”13 Uncertainty and cultural anxiety dominate the postmodern Scottish horizon, especially among inhabitants of the deprived areas of Scottish towns, cities and housing estates such as Leith, whose inhabitants are now described as the “Trainspotting Generation.”14 While cultural hybridity has become a signature of the postmodern psyche, Welsh’s novel foregrounds the realities of the proletarian Scots, who recognise no allegiances, a type of post-Enlightenment “hollow men.” Haywood (1997) explains that Welsh’s Trainspotting is an important illumination of these tensions.15 Unable to preserve culture, identity and authenticity since “Cults and subcultures segment and cross-matrix,”16 the anti-heroic protagonist of the novel, Renton, constantly expresses his distaste for the grand idea of Great Britain and its effects on a place such as Leith, which is economically starved by its imperial parent: The pub sign is a new one, but its message is old. The Britannia. Rule Britannia. Ah’ve never felt British, because ah’m not. It’s ugly and artificial. Ah’ve never really felt Scottish either, though. Scotland the brave, ma arse; Scotland the shitein cunt. We’d throttle the life oot ay each other fir the privilege ay rimmin some English aristocrat’s piles. Ah’ve never felt a fuckin thing aboot countries, other than total disgust. They should abolish the fuckin lot ay them. Kill every fuckin parasite politician that ever stood up and mouthed lies and fascist platitudes in a suit and a smarmy smile (228).

The anxiety of identity runs as a significant thread through many of Welsh’s novels, including The Acid House, Ecstasy and Filth. The inability of the literary characters to counteract their own powerlessness

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and vulnerability signifies for the author an emblem of the complexities of life for a disempowered majority who live in postmodern Scotland. Welsh encodes the relationship between the English and the Scots as similar to that between a parent and child. This is also lucidly portrayed in Renton’s relationship with his parents. After his scheduled visit with his psychiatrist, he concludes that his drug habit is directly linked to his dysfunctional relationship with his mother and father: Ma junk behaviour is anal in concept, attention-seeking, yes, but instead of withholding the faeces tae rebel against parental authority, ah’m pittin smack intae ma body tae claim power over it vis-à-vis society in general. (185)

Decisively, Renton describes his problems in terms of an Oedipal Complex. He confesses “oedipal feelings towards ma mother and an attendant unresolved jealousy towards ma faither” (185), and develops a parallel between his own parents and the British government to take in wider connotations of power and politics. Renton determines “Let Ma decide whether or not I should have a coffee. Devolve or delegate that level of power, or decision making, to her. Power devolved is power retained” (202). In identifying the Oedipal Complex as the source of his anxieties and confusion, Renton seems to discover a new (or perhaps delusional) level of empowerment. Renton/Welsh feels that recognition of limitations is the first step to finding solutions for a better future. The intertextual reference to Carl Rogers’ On Becoming A Person is, undeniably, Welsh’s authorial voice providing resolution in “The acceptance ay self-defeating limitations seemed than tae constitute mental health, or non-deviant behaviour” (185). Whether or not this is delusional is very difficult to determine, especially considering the chain of events that unfold throughout the course of the novel. Welsh describes the consequences of Scottish resentment for what they believe they have become; that is, puppets in the (post)colonial political game.17 “Englishness is the norm,” says Welsh, Scottishness is increasingly seen as a second-class thing. There’s always been an idea of two types of Scots: those who went to London and made it big, and the second-raters who stayed home. It's a very negative thing.18

Historically, in 1978 the Scots had failed to achieve a majority vote in a referendum that called for Devolution,19 and instead endured another eighteen years of Thatcherite policy, one which was carried over into the successive government’s political agenda that continued to control the

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Scottish Parliament. This could be what Welsh speculates on through Renton’s reflections on the condition of his nation, blaming himself and his fellow Scots for allowing the state of decay that had seeped into his culture: Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots (78).

The descendants of Highland warriors20 can now only perceive themselves as “failures,” since they are oppressed by a culture that has been their antagonist for so many years. The fact that they are in a servile predicament and “ruled by effete arseholes” contributes to the diseased psyche that continues to plague the poor and deprived in Scotland. It seems inevitable that such resentment and powerlessness conjures severe physical and psychological diseases. Farred points out that Renton does not even conceive the possibility of living in a world where they are no longer colonised; he just wishes his country was controlled by a “healthy culture.” This condition is particularly intensified in Edinburgh where “Embra’s goat eight per cent o the UK population but ower sixty per cent o the Scottish HIV infection, by far the highest rate in Britain” (193). HIV infection is thus seen as the consequential result of marginalisation and submission, where despair leads to the failure to care for the self and/or take necessary precautions, which could be interpreted as the effects of colonialism. However, many theorists query whether the term “postcolonialism” is an accurate portrayal of postmodern Scotland and other similar countries that lie in close proximity to their imperial parent. When assessing the position of Scotland, the terms “colonialism” and “postcolonialism” are much more complex. In relation to Trainspotting, Farred uses Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism and Anderson’s Imagined Communities to argue that Welsh’s novel rejects the idea of Scottish nationalism. Renton feels betrayed by Scottish policies and ideologies, particularly regarding the way they have created the deplorable state of Leith housing estates, which resemble a cesspool of helplessness, drug addiction and AIDS. The housing estates function as a metonymy for the civil society of Scotland, and perhaps a hyperbolic and carnivalesque reflection of the plight and tribulations of what Sick Boy refers to as “white trash” and “Leith plebs

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and junkies” (28). Some of the incidents presented as ordinary and typical in Welsh’s version of the Leith estates include heroin addicts sticking their hands down public toilets, surreal images of dead babies crawling across ceilings, out-of-control dogs turning on their owners and football fanatics attacking helpless mothers who are taking their babies for a stroll. Hence, Welsh gives a voice to a helpless and depleted community attempting to hold on to an “imagined vision” of patriotism, where the only way to escape their miserable existence and to break free from the monotony in this place of limited possibilities is through drug use, violent football matches and the mindless habit of trainspotting. This reference to trainspotting is, in fact, an urban metaphor for drug using. Heroin use requires junkies/addicts to inject themselves and this leaves marks, or “tracks” on their arms. To “train spot” means to notice these “tracks”— needle marks—which are quite distinct on someone who has been injecting themselves for a long time or excessively. In Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Bewell focuses on the struggles between the coloniser and colonised, claiming that these tensions not only fail to establish effective communication and positive interaction, but further disrupt relations due to obvious “social, political and cultural differences.”21 Bewell believes it is not coincidental that the colonial period accelerated the spread of foreign diseases to new territories, and the rise in diseases being brought back to the colonial centre by sailors and soldiers returning home. Within literature there is the notion that diseases attendant on colonisation are not merely physical; they show themselves in psychological disorders that manifest in national crises. As Bewell (1999) writes: historians and critics often view them [diseases] as metaphorical projections of racial and cultural anxieties. Even as one recognises that disease plays a primary role in representations of otherness, the social and political construction of disease during this period is complicated in that diseases usually did come from elsewhere.22

Therefore, disease is seen as an index of the “cultural anxiety” of living with the “other,” and a means whereby the body politic coerces the body private. Pratt suggests that this arises from a violent contact zone, that is, a hybrid space where “conditions of coercion” intensify because of the “radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Bewell 1999, 3) that comes from both the coloniser and the colonised. This is evident in Trainspotting when, during the Edinburgh Festival, Sick Boy is repulsed when he attempts to hit on two “oriental types” only to be responded to in “a posh, English-colonial voice” (29). The tourists

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find Sick Boy’s accent difficult to understand, whilst he feels insulted and dislocated within his own country. The so-called cultural hybridity that these “oriental types” represent is too discomforting and unfamiliar for Sick Boy to accept. Similarly, Renton responds: “Ah hate cunts like that … Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that’s different; pakis, poofs, n what huv ye” (28). Sick Boy continues to voice the dilemma of the marginalised: the socialists go on about your comrades, your class, your union, and society. Fuck all that shite. The Tories go on about your employer, your country, your family. Fuck that even mair. It’s me, me, fucking ME, Simon David Williamson, NUMERO FUCKING UNO, versus the world, and it’s a one-sided swedge … I admire your rampant individualism. (30)

Ultimately, these post-Romantic Scots remove themselves from both sides of the equation. Renton is exemplary of the anti-nationalistic approach that identifies individualism as the only solution for survival. Unfortunately, this also has debilitating outcomes, as the individual turns inward and, detached from their context, declines into self-loathing. More distressingly, there is a detachment between themselves as social units and community relationships, for “we all fall down” (30). Sick Boy’s need for drugs stems from this void at the centre, and he yearns to “fill this big, BLACK HOLE like a clenched fist in the centre ay my fucking chest” (31). In fact, the “sink” estates that harbour the problems are to be found in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as in most societies, yet Edinburgh has a higher rate of HIV communities than most. This presents social critics and historians with a number of questions, such as whether the Scots’ situation is the result of political factors or of irresponsible actions by marginalised groups.23 Renton and his friends constantly fear illnesses such as AIDS, which has plagued society since the late twentieth century, and is a disease that is most threatening to intravenous users who share needles. The synthesis of fear, worthlessness and self-inflicted punishment that is the product of drug taking is expressed in Renton’s frenzied confessional monologue when he tries “kicking” heroin. A fragmented psychological state is vividly communicated to the reader: Every cell in ma body wants tae leave it, every cell is sick hurting marinated in pure fuckin poison cancer death sick sick sick death death death

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AIDS AIDS fuck yis aw FUCKIN CUNTS FUCK YIS AW SELF-INFLICTED PEOPLE WI CANCER – NAE CHOICE FIR THAIM DESERVING AIN FAULT AUTOMATIC DEATH SENTENCE THROWN AWAY YIR LIFE DOESNAE NEED TAE BE AN AUTOMATIC DEATH SENTENCE DESTROY REHABILITATE FASCISM NICE WIFE NICE BAIRNS NICE HOOSE NICE JOAB NICE NICE TA SEE YA, TA SEE YA. . . . NICE NICE NICE BRAIN DISORDER DEMENTIA HERPES THRUSH PNEUMONIA WHOLE LIFE AHEAD AY YE MEET A NICE LASIE N SETTLE DOON . . . She’s still ma first lurve BROAT IT OAN YIRSEL. Sleep. (194–195)

The single word lines, namely, “cancer” and “death,” are accompanied by the consecutive repetitions of “sick sick sick” and “death death death,” which articulate the horrors of the heroin addict. The monologue rapidly moves into a stream of capitalisations that are at the core of Renton’s inhibitions. His innate misconception of not being worthy of a fulfilling life is presented through the outburst of negation. This may be a hallucinatory effect of the withdrawal symptoms, however the reader senses that a truth is exposed through his bewildered mutterings. “BROAT IT OAN YIRSEL” baldly states the self-critical, self-annihilating culture that has developed in Scotland, and its manifestation in a diseased “Trainspotting Generation.”24 Renton’s lapse into a psychosis culminates in “NICE NICE NICE” juxtaposed with an elongated stasis before: BRAIN DISORDER DEMENTIA.

It is interesting to note that the inclusion of the term “Fascism,” strategically placed at the centre of the confessional monologue, perhaps

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exposes the political tensions at the centre of Renton’s subconscious. Within this discourse lie the two extreme conditions—the “AUTOMATIC DEATH SENTENCE” and the deluding niceties with promises of hope. Renton’s own belief—that society has rejected him as a drug user— develops the psychological ground for the reception of AIDS, cancer or, at the very least, insanity. There is a perverse and voyeuristic inclination within these selfsacrificing addicts of Leith as they move within the circles of the “sick,” spreading disease amongst themselves, many carrying the HIV virus but ignorant or indifferent to their situations. Their deaths appear to be a wish fulfilment. Sontag refers to Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical responses to disease and social deviancy, where death is the “promise of a temporary triumph” (Sontag, 57) over real situations that are beyond the control of the diseased. Certainly, here, the deadly virus of AIDS runs as a diegetic undercurrent to the plot. For the reader, it is discomforting to watch the characters retreat into a state of misery until death is the only instrument of power—an acceptance of the inevitable that is a parody of free will. Death offers salvation from the intolerable present and is a type of fulfilment or triumph, albeit a nihilistic one. The epitome of such selfannihilating behaviour is Sick Boy, the heroin junkie, whose indifference leads him to sleep with Molly, a prostitute with HIV. After a night of kissing her, Sick Boy is momentarily struck by fear and “brushe[s] his teeth half-a-dozen times before turning in for a sleepless, anxiety-filled night” (326). AIDS is associated with the “other”—a group outside the norms— carrying with it a social stigma for the individual. Unlike diseases that are hereditary or beyond the direct responsibility of the people who become sick, AIDS carries a presumption that the carrier has been promiscuous or undertaken socially unacceptable behaviour that has resulted in contracting the disease. Sontag identifies a marked distinction between AIDS and other diseases such as cancer: In contrast to cancer, understood in a modern way as a disease incurred by (and revealing of) individuals, AIDS is understood in a premodern way, as a disease incurred by people both as individuals and as members of a “risk group”—that neutral-surrounding, bureaucratic category. (132)

The behaviour of addicts is linked to “social deviation” (Sontag 1991, 58), and therefore it is expected by society and themselves that they will suffer and be punished for their actions. As shown earlier, AIDS is a disease that is attributed pariah status. Sontag believes diseases such as the 1832 cholera epidemic in England, tuberculosis and now AIDS have been

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“associated with sinners and the poor” (Sontag 1991, 140). Typically, the characters in Trainspotting are drug addicts, however, more worrisome are the heroin users, as heroin was the most lethal drug of the 1990s. The “Trainspotting Generation” finds itself to be the vulnerable casualty within this political, cultural and social tug of war. This is emblemised in the scene where Sick Boy, Renton and Raymie are dared to share a needle with Johnny. The “dare” is a test of loyalty, but there is also the threat of injecting themselves with a needle that is potentially infected with AIDS. Johnny’s exclamation “Wir playin trust games the day, he smiled, but he wisnae jokin” (9) presents the actualities of the drug addict living in an “organised hallucination.” Each person and/or nation fights to survive and to maintain some form of identity or nationality within a hostile global landscape. As a result, the helpless—colonised, without community, living in debased and alienated isolation—ironically led into a ritual bonding. The prospect of injecting themselves with a “mutual coincidence of wants” (321) turns the “adversaries ay a few minutes ago” into “soul-mates” who, once they exchanged what they needed, were “like lovers in a post-coital embrace” (310). The forces and pressures that shape such commonality are iterated by Begbie in his account of Julie Matheison who, after giving birth, is escorted home by two men dressed in attire similar to radioactive suits, with “helmets, the lot” because she was diagnosed with AIDS. The incident described dates back to 1985, when AIDS was relatively new and not just a social taboo, but also a rumour exaggerated into grotesque fears. Julie’s neighbours, having seen the quarantine performance, “freaked” and had her evicted from her home, despite the fact that she had a baby. Begbie recalls: “Harassment followed harassment. Eventually, she hud a nervous breakdoon and, wi her damaged immune system, wis easy prey fir the onset ay AIDS” (78). Her plight is familiar in the rising drug subculture. The character of Begbie is an example of psychological detachment amongst heroin users when he confesses to his inability to love Mathieson. He believes that if they became intimate “it wid change things too much, like it does in male/female friendships. Sex generally makes them intae real relationships, or ends them” (78). Begbie is seemingly frightened of the “real”—something that disturbs his version of “reality”—and so he retreats into the nightmarish hallucinatory place. In Trainspotting, none of the characters are capable of forming intimate relationships, as their associations are those of need and convenience. Their loyalty is a semblance of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, that is, manipulating and exploiting one

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another. Renton summarises this as “Albo needs Johnny’s jellies as much as Johnny needs his psychos. A mutual coincidence of wants. Yes, god bless the Royal Jocks, and god bless the NHS” (321). Any Romantic ideals of clan loyalty, comradeship and valour that once identified the Scottish character are without meaning in the post-industrial globalised world. Welsh claims that his novel is a social satire, but it is deeper than that. He understands the “organised hallucinations” of post-Thatcher political control and their effect on vulnerable subcultures. Here, we may deduce that the exploitative relations between Britain and Scotland are mimicked by the characters that collaborate in “A mutual coincidence of wants” (321); that is, they form bonds and engage in a relationship because of its convenience to both parties. The underlying realities of such organised hallucinations are parodied by Welsh in the chapter entitled “A Leg-Over Situation,” where Renton and his gang meet up with other addicts to swap their prescriptions and self-medicate on a cocktail of pills. Waiting anxiously in line at the clinic (a government-funded project that, one could speculate, both monitors and controls their addictions), Renton, Sick Boy and their so-called friends are an image of the vulnerable minority undergoing “maintenance therapy” (310). They represent the nation state—weakened and in cultural chaos— being controlled by the political forces of an outside power. The postmodern Scot feels no connection to their history or their present and, in this predicament, they cannot look towards a productive future. Instead, the “Trainspotting Generation” remains in a maintenance state of existence—alive but not moving—since it’s “a challenge tae move” (177). The characters supplement their addictions with the government’s assistance to prescriptions. This perpetuates the underpinning British imperial policies of control, which intentionally regulate and monitor the chemicals—illicit or legal—in order for individuals to survive in a world of “organised hallucinations.” While waiting in line at the clinic, Renton has a chemically induced quasi-epiphany that endorses this: Ah believe in the free market whin it comes tae drugs. Ah’ve goat tae gie the NHS its due though. Since ah hud this pin oaf n went oan the maintenance therapy ah’ve started tae believe thit the state kin compete wi private enterprise in oor industry, n produce a satisfyin product at low cost tae the consumer. The methadone n cyclozine combined; ah’m tellin ya man, fuck me. Ah jist go doon, git ma jellies fi the clinic, then look up some ay the boys thit git the cyclozine oan script. They gie it tae the perr cunts wi cancer, fi AIDS, likes. A wee swap, n every cunt’s chuffed tae fuckin bits. (310–11)

On the surface, all parties are content with the mutual exchange of wants;

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however, realistically, the authoritative parent continues to control its fostered children in an organised way, fulfilling its own political objectives. Even so, AIDS as a metaphor encapsulates other anxieties within the postmodern culture. AIDS signifies the consequential effect on the body politic of unruly and unethical sexual relations. Thus, it is received with disgust and prejudice. This is further endorsed by that fact that AIDS was (and for many, still is) associated with homosexuality at a time when same-sex relationships were deemed as perverse and morally degraded. Homosexuals were unfairly persecuted and dismissed as social outcasts when AIDS was first recognised as an epidemic, and many heterosexuals wrongfully believed they were safe since they did not engage in same-sex relationships. Intravenous applications contributed to the spread of AIDS, especially in prisons, where sharing needles was more common. Therefore, to people who are not from such marginalised groups or the “sink” estates, the characters in Trainspotting project a “collective insanity.” This prejudice is summed up by Renton, who states that “It’s easy tae be philosophical when some other cunt’s goat shite fir blood” (10). Sontag’s hermeneutics of AIDS as a metaphoric projection include the effects of political forces on the body politic; whilst “the standard plague story is of inexorability, inescapability” (Sontag 1991, 138), the postmodern plague story creates a new awareness of the prejudices against and within humanity. For the first time in history, the plague story does not put the focus on “God” or some other foreign entity; rather, it turns inward and is self-reflective, acknowledging the corruption within human society. For Sontag, the myths surrounding disease are incongruent with the actualities. To illustrate her concerns, Sontag dedicates part of her argument to the potential of rumours to maintain social order. Sontag explains that, according to a number of sources, it is rumoured that AIDS was originally “an act of bacteriological warfare” (Sontag 1991, 138) aimed at decreasing the population in third world countries such as Africa. To this day, it is widely recognised that Africa has the highest rate of AIDS in the world (see Appendix 1). According to the rumour, the virus was originally targeted at the third world and was supported by the then United States (US) Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, who observed in 1969 that the African continent was a threatening “mushrooming cloud of overpopulation.”25 In the 1970s, army documentation revealed that the US engaged in the development of “ethnic weapons.”26 This may explain why, in 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and environmental activist, Wangari Maathai, allegedly claimed that “AIDS is a biological

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weapon manufactured by the developed world to wipe out the black race.”27 The similarities to Bewell’s (1999) descriptions of the spread of the plague and the extensive governing powers that were granted because of the fear it instigated produced further concerns regarding the use of disease as a political tool. Generating fear within deviant, unhealthy and irresponsible people makes it invaluable to governing forces that are eager to maintain power and control. Bewell points out that AIDS “was largely restricted to a specific class” (78), further reflecting that: Given our contemporary experience of the politics of AIDS, we are perhaps in a better position to understand how an epidemic that had massive impact on a marginalized group within English society could be largely ignored. (78)

In Trainspotting, Renton and his group are oblivious to this interpretation of the circumstances in which they find themselves. They perceive their plight as self-inflicted. Each of the characters—Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Tommy—fails to understand why that “big, BLACK HOLE” is not solely brought on by their own lack of will. On a subconscious level, perhaps there is a doubt that tells them that Scotland as a nation and a selfsufficient state will never resurface again. They are maintained in their hallucinatory state by the British imperial ideal. External homogenous political forces have produced a “contact zone” that has shifted into a “twilight zone” (188). Sontag concludes her manifesto on AIDS and its Metaphors by discussing how the “medical model of the public weal” is “probably more dangerous and far-reaching in its consequence” than the overt military metaphor: since it not only provides a persuasive justification for authoritarian rule but implicitly suggests the necessity of state-sponsored repression and violence (the equivalent of surgical removal or chemical control of the offending or “unhealthy” parts of the body politic) (1991, 180). The fear of AIDS, as treated in Trainspotting, is such a potent political tool that military action and violence become unnecessary. Instead, repression is executed through the chemical control of the subclasses, which maintains them, in a manner of speaking, in hallucinatory submission. Renton’s decision to leave Leith and Scotland may be a rejection of Scotland’s subservient policies to accommodate a false search for a

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contemporary Scottish identity. The final three chapters of Welsh’s novel are respectively entitled “Exile,” “Home” and “Exit,” and they explore these issues and dilemmas. Welsh’s tonal shift from the first person narrative voice to the third person when describing Renton’s experiences implicates a necessary detachment from this anti-nationalistic character. This implies Welsh’s detachment from the myth of Scotland and, more importantly, it may be viewed as Welsh’s own reservations on Renton’s choices. Renton believes his only chance of survival is to reject nationness and escape its false promises by fleeing to Amsterdam (the world capital of illicit drugs) in pursuance of a new life. Renton’s decision to leave, which is only possible by ripping off his friends, is difficult even for this anti-hero, who feels “paranoid and self-conscious” (341) as a result: Their mutual antagonism, once a joke, a performance for the benefit of others, had slowly become, through being ritualised in that way, a mundane reality. It was better this way, Renton thought. (342)

This mutual antagonism culminates in the psychological factors leading to disease, where sociopolitical discomfort makes the contact zone open to social control. Scotland, “as a nation-within-the-colonial nation” (Nairn 1997, 187), is helpless against grander political agendas unless its inhabitants reject their heritage and their country, in which case the military metaphor has succeeded in its purpose. Welsh’s chapters are structured in terms of a series of vignettes from the point of view of different characters providing distorted and fragmented accounts of living in Leith. This method of storytelling illuminates the psyche of the Scottish character. It is only natural that their condition(ing) leads to the feared disease of AIDS. This dystopic environment spawns addictive relationships; for example, the minor character of Tommy, whose story is presented in the chapter entitled “Scotland Takes Drugs in Psychic Defence.” Tommy’s story is not unique in Edinburgh’s subculture. He falls into Renton’s group, becomes addicted to heroin and finally tests positive for HIV. He never has a chance to escape his environment (see Appendix 2). It is during one of his small periods of sobriety that Renton determines that in any case an alternative “choice” (the choice of materialism and compliance with the capitalist code) would be equally futile: Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mindnumbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve

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Literary Topoi of Organised Hallucinations in Trainspotting produced. Choose life. (187)

Choosing “life” and “us” means choosing to accept the rumour of contagion—to be subservient out of fear of whatever it is that leads drug addicts to their addictions in the first place. However, engrossed in their own drug hallucinations, it is questionable whether Renton and the “proletarianized underclass” (Haywood 1997, 141) entirely recognise that they are living in an organised hallucination. In the greater scheme of things, Renton chooses the very path that a (post)colonial stratagem desires, despite “the extreme moral cowardice [that] it was” (343). Renton’s rejection of his nation will leave Scotland vulnerable (if many other Scots follow suit) to the very policies it has been fighting against for over three hundred years; namely, assimilation and homogeneity. Welsh’s underlining motif, “choose life,” perpetuates a cultural paradox and, at the same time, a realisation of the “organised hallucinations” which, as signifiers of colonial strategies, continue to control fragile cultures, and in the case of postmodern Scots, the diaspora within the British imperial framework. Central to these strategies is the threat of contagion and disease, which is spread by rumour and selfaffirmed susceptibility to that disease. Conveniently, however, this benefits a policy of homogeneity and acquiescence. Welsh positions his reader to see through the illusion. His masterful novel produces a twisted carnivalesque and dystopic narrative probing the illusions and nightmares that his characters presume to be reality, where the body private is organised by a hallucinatory body politic. Welsh’s characters are imprisoned within the hallucination, “unconscious of empire’s civilizing pretensions.”28 This post-Romantic Scottish novel exposes the vices of postmodernity and the assumptions and prejudices exploited by (post)colonial policies. This is the outcome of Welsh’s heteroglossia—the distinctive voices of the “Trainspotting Generation.”

Notes 1

Throughout the thesis the term “(post)colonialism” is presented thus to illustrate the complex nature of current debate which is also affiliated to notions of “classic” colonialism, adjacency, and “Late Colonialism.” 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 168; “The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1887], trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), 129; “I say unto you: you still

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have chaos in yourselves.” Both are suggestive of the transcending narrative trope where interacting positive and negative forces frame civilisation. Nietzsche saw that a deeper understanding of chaos was necessary for a cathartic manifestation to be achieved within human will. Influenced by classical Greek philosophies and Hesiod, Nietzsche agreed with the need to “organise the chaos,” and from there one could extract the didactic qualities it offers (The Birth of Tragedy [1872], trans. Shaun Whiteside; [Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1993], 123). 3 Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1991), 134. 4 Morden, 51–52. 5 See Anderson, who quotes Landes, 230–31; 442–43; and White, 135–43. 6 Nairn, 18, 204; who explores the economic management of Scotland under the colonisation strategies of the British. 7 Gardiner, xi. 8 Farred. 9 See Gardiner, xi. 10 See Farred, 219. 11 Haywood, 141. 12 Gardiner, 159–160. 13 Anderson, 3. 14 Edemariam & Scott: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/15/scotlandtrainspotting-generation-dying-fact. “According to the Scottish parliament, some 1.2 million people in Scotland live in poor households—25% of the population”. 15 See Haywood, 141. 16 See Welsh, 228. 17 See Riddell’s interview with Welsh, 553. 18 Edemariam & Scott: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/15/scotlandtrainspotting-generation-dying-fact. 19 Gardiner describes the theories of Nairn and Anderson. 20 Farred, 218. 21 Bewell, 3. 22 Bewell, 7. 23 See Edemariam & Scott. A profound discussion on the excessive use of illegal drugs in Scotland, in which “[a] 2008 study in the British Medical Journal of the so-called ‘Scottish effect’ (mortality is 15% higher in Scotland than in England and Wales) found that the excess was mainly accounted for by males aged under 45— and that at least a third of that was due to problem drug use, usually heroin.” 24 Riddell, 553. 25 Shapley, 48. 26 Military Review: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/aids.pdf. Also, Farmer evaluates some of the controversies of biological warfare in other countries as well as Africa. Further, see Horowitz, who claims that the virus was engineered by US Government defence contractors, specifically naming Litton Bionetics. 27 See Faris & Maathai. Maathai later retracted the statement: “I neither say nor believe that the virus was developed by white people or white powers in order to destroy the African people. Such views are wicked and destructive.” 28 Hitchcock, 749.

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print. Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Medicine and Culture). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Print. Byrne, Peter. “Trainspotting and the Depiction of Drug Addiction.” Psychiatric Bulletin 21 (1997): 173–75. Print. Edemariam, Aida. & Scott, Kirsty. “What Happened to the Trainspotting Generation?” The Guardian, August 15, 2009. Web. 20 October 2009. Faris, Stephan. “10 Questions: Wangari Maathai.” TIME Magazine, October 10, 2004. Web. October 21, 2009. Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Print. Farred, Grant. “Wankerdom: Trainspotting as a Rejection of the Postcolonial?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (1) (Winter 2004): 215–26. Print. Gardiner, Michael. The Cultural Roots of British Devolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Print. —. From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Critical Theory since 1960. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Print. Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting. Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1997. Print. Hemingway, Judy. “Contested Cultural Spaces: Exploring Illicit DrugUsing Through Trainspotting.” International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 15 (4) (2006): 324–35. Print. Hitchcock, Peter. “Decolonizing (the) English.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3) (Summer 2001): 749–71. Print. Horowitz, Leonard G. Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola. Nature, Accident or Intentional? Las Vegas, NV: Tetrahedron, 1996. Print. —. Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare. Las Vegas, NV: Tetrahedron, 2001. Print. Jeffers, Jennifer M. “Rhizome National Identity: ‘Scatlin’s Psychic Defense’ in Trainspotting.” Journal of Narrative Theory 35 (1) (Winter 2005): 88–111. Print. Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Print. Maathai, Wangari. “The Challenge of AIDS in Africa.” The Green Belt Movement, December 12, 2004. Web.

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Military Review. November 1970. Web. Morace, Robert A. Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting: A Reader's Guide. London: Continuum, 2001. Print. Morden, Barbara. “When the Fourth Horseman Rides.” Cholera and Conflict: 19th Century Cholera in Britain and Its Social Consequences. Eds. Michael Holland, Geoff Gill & Sean Burrell. Leeds: Medical Museum Publishing, 2009. Print. Nairn, Tom. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. London: Verso, 1997. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy [1872]. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1993. Print. —. Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1887]. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin, 1961. Print. —. The Gay Science [1882]. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Print. Parker, Howard, John Aldridge and Fiona Measham. Illegal Leisure: The Normalization of Adolescent Recreational Drug Use. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Riddell, Mary. “The New Statesman Interview—Irvine Welsh.” New Statesman 128 (4434) (May 3, 1999): 22–3. Print. Shapley, Deborah. Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1993. Print. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Print. Sontag, Susan., Bonnie Marranca & Gautam Dasgupta. “Interview: On Art and Consciousness.” Performing Arts Journal 2 (2) (Autumn 1977): 25–32. Print. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg. Eds. London: Macmillan, 1988. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft., G. Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. UNAIDS/WHO AIDS Epidemic Update. December 2005 http://www.unaids.org/epi/2005/doc/report_pdf.asp. Web. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. London: Vintage, 2007. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1973. Print. Wiessing, L., M.J. van de Laar, M.C. Donoghoe, B. Guarita, D. Klempová & P. Griffiths. “HIV Among Injecting Drug Users in Europe: Increasing Trends in the East.” Eurosurveillance 13 (50) (2008): pii: 19067. Print.

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Appendix 1 Region

Adults and children living with HIV/AIDS

Adults and children newly infected with HIV

Adult prevalence (%)*

Adult & child deaths due to AIDS

Sub-Saharan Africa

23.8–28.9 million

2.8–3.9 million

6.6–8.3%

2.1–2.7 million

North Africa & Middle East

230,000–1.4 million

35,000–200 000

0.1–0.7

25,000–145 000

South & SE Asia

4.5–11 million

480,000–2.4 million

0.4–1.0

290,000–740 000

East Asia

440,000–1.4 million

42,000–390,000

0.05–0.2

20,000– 68,000

Oceania

45,000–120,000

2,400–25,000

0.2–0.7

1,700–8,200

Latin America

1.4–2.4 million

130,000–360,000

0.5–0.8

52,000– 86,000

Caribbean

200,000–510,000

17,000–71,000

1.1–2.7

16,000– 40,000

East Europe & Central Asia

990,000 – 2.3 million

140,000–610,000

0.6–1.3

39,000– 91,000

Western & Central Europe

570,000–890,000

15,000–39,000

0.2–0.4