Shared Waters : Soundings in Postcolonial Literatures [1 ed.] 9789042027671, 9789042027664

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Shared Waters

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

118 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

†Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Shared Waters Soundings in Postcolonial Literatures

Edited by

Stella Borg Barthet

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Published with the financial support of the following institutions:

All text-editing and layout for EACLALS by Gordon Collier Cover painting courtesy of Pawl Carbonaro Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2766-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2767-1 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

For Victor

Table of Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgements 1

xi

PROJECTING POSTCOLONIALISM

Exchanging – Sharing Our Places — translated from French by Carmen Depasquale

3

HODA BARAKAT

Exclusion and the Intellectuals: — Some Thoughts on Unequal Academic Exchange Between Africa and the West

7

BRIAN CROW

What Lies Ahead: — Consolidation and Diversity in Postcolonial Studies

JESÚS VARELA ZAPATA

19

Beyond Revolution: — Re-Writing Violence and the Future of Postcolonial Studies

35

DAPHNE GRACE 2

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE

Territorial Terrors: — Colonial Spaces and Postcolonial Revisions

GERHARD STILZ

51

In the Enemy’s Camp: — Women Representing Male Violence in Zimbabwe’s Wars

PAULINE DODGSON–KATIYO

61

Shared Place and Maimed Bodies: — Flesh of the Past, Soul of the Future (or Vice-Versa) in Once Were Warriors

CHANTAL KWAST–GREFF

75

Historical Trauma, lieu de mémoire, Source of Collective Renewal: — Parihaka in the Poetic Imagination of Aotearoa New Zealand

83

BÄRBEL CZENNIA

WRITING WOMEN

3

Becoming a Writer in Morocco LEILA ABOUZEID

107

Middle Eastern Women’s Roles Transformed: — The Gendered Spaces of Ghādah al-Sammān and Sahar Khalīfah

KIFAH HANNA

113

Going Through Twentieth-Century Malta in the Company of Francis Ebejer’s Heroines BERNADETTE FALZON

123

Aesthetic (Dis)Continuities in the African Gendered Space: — The Example of Younger Nigerian Women’s Writing

TAIWO OLORUNTOBA–OJU

133

Smells, Skins, and Spices — Indian Spice Shops as Gendered Diasporic Spaces in the Novels of Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora

CHRISTINE VOGT–WILLIAM

151

Generational Change: — Women and Writing in the Novels of Thea Astley

MAUREEN LYNCH PÈRCOPO 4

167

ISLANDS AND THE SEA

Poems from Malta DANIEL MASSA, ADRIAN GRIMA, MARIA GRECH GANADO, IMMANUEL MIFSUD, NORBERT BUGEJA

181

Currents and Swells in Maltese Identity: — Representations of Community in Maltese Poetry in English Since Independence

STELLA BORG BARTHET

197

Finding Nemo: — Puzzling Maltese Identity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

KEVIN STEPHEN MAGRI

207

The Sea and the Erosion of Cultural Identity in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef MELANIE A. MURRAY

217

The Otherless Other, or The Anonymity of Water: Unmapping Ondaatje’s ‘Sand Sea’ Self in Minghella’s The English Patient

SAVIOUR CATANIA

AND

IVAN CALLUS

229

The Sea and the Changing Nature of Cultural Identity ISABEL MOUTINHO

245

Diaspora in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) THOMAS BONNICI

261

“They are us”: Interview with Caryl Phillips ADRIAN GRIMA

271

5

SHARED SPACES

Sharing Media Spaces: The Kumars at No. 42

HILARY P. DANNENBERG

279

Writing Second-Generation Migrant Identity in Meera Syal’s Fiction DEVON CAMPBELL–HALL

289

Is ‘Sharing Places’ Viable in a Postmodern World Order? Salman Rushdie’s Novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet

AMRIT BISWAS

307

Sharing Nation Space: Representations of India T. VIJAY KUMAR

323

Exploring Boundaries: The North in Western Canadian Writing

JANNE KORKKA

335

Sharing Quebec: — Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens and George Elliott Clarke’s Quebecité

PILAR CUDER–DOMÍNGUEZ

353

Towards a Pedagogy of African-Canadian Literature GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

363

Notes on Contributors Index

393 403

Introduction

T

H E T W E N T Y - N I N E E S S A Y S collected in this volume are a record of a highly memorable occasion. They were read at the meeting of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies held in Malta in March 2005. Early on, long before the delegates arrived in Malta, the theme of ‘sharing places’ seemed to have become suffused with another element – Malta’s all-encompassing sea. Many of these essays are inspired by the dynamic Mediterranean, and throughout the conference, the blue water made itself felt, trembling in excitement or agitation on the northeastern side, calmer and more reflexive on the southwest towards Valletta. The sea is our history. In Malta, people are “naturally vitally interested in the sea,” as Arvid Pardo argued in 1967 when members of the General Assembly of the United Nations were surprised and even shocked by the proposal Malta made for a Law of the Sea to prevent conflict between nations, to stop sea pollution through negligence, and to protect the resources of the sea. On that occasion, Pardo spoke of the sea and the seabed as constituting the common heritage of mankind:

The dark oceans are the womb of life: from the protecting oceans life emerged. We still bear in our bodies – in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears – the marks of this remote past.1

The sea is the archetypal place of sharing. A site for the exchange of goods and for communication across cultures and languages, it is a fluid space, suggesting the openness our shared states need so badly. The sea’s watery stretches resist marking and signposting, urging us to reject walls and margins in nations and disciplines. The sea whispers to us the ultimate unmappability of identity and meaning. 1

Arvid Pardo, The Common Heritage: Selected Papers on Oceans and World Order,

1967–1974 (Malta: Malta U P , 1975): 1.

xii

SHARED WATERS

½¾

The sea also brings us face to face with loss. Not just the slow receding tides of our lives but also sudden drownings – who knows how many lie beneath the shimmering surface of the Mediterranean? Fishermen, merchants, sailors, soldiers, refugees. So many hopes forever lost, so many lives layering the dark depths of our sea. It is vital for us to remember these drownings . In the poem “Beach Glass,” Amy Clampitt speaks of the sea as a storehouse for memories: The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never balanced, goes on shuffling its millenniums of quartz, granite, and basalt.2

On land, imperial cities document domination, exploitation, marginalization, violence, genocide, contempt for indigenous cultures, rejection of local languages. The weight of the grandest libraries and museums of Europe still lies heavy upon many subjected people, causing injustice, prejudice, disease, and death. Our memory of wrecks and bones could be an effective counterweight to neocolonialism by retaining the memory of what this attempts to destroy or discard. The sea is a rich mineral sediment, an/other archive in the hands of the mariner–writer, scholar, teacher. The essays in this collection reach us from hands plumbing depths, sifting sands, tracing fossils. Coming from scholars working in very different environments, often looking at literature from the perspectives offered by other disciplines, challenging the parameters of postcolonialism itself, the essays show the writers’ commitment to the memory of history’s victims, to society and to literature’s enduring value in our lives. ½¾

My thanks go to the Commonwealth Foundation, the British Council, the Ministry of Education, and the University of Malta for their support of the conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. I thank Geoff Davis, Hena Maes–Jelinek, Bené Ledent, and Marc Delrez for their help and advice throughout the preparations for the event; Peter Vassallo, Head of the Department of English at the time of the conference, for his assistance; and Daniel Massa, Chair of the Pan-Common2

Amy Clampitt, “Beach Glass,” in Clampitt, The Kingfisher (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983): 10.

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

xiii

wealth adjudication panel, for bringing the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize to the conference. I thank Patricia Camilleri for her highly valuable advice on the organizational aspects of the conference; and Patricia Ellul–Micallef for creating the website of the conference and for preparing all the printing related to the conference. For their generous financial support towards the publication of these selected papers, I am indebted to the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, the Ministry of Education in Malta, the University of Malta, and the Sliema Lions Arts Foundation. I dedicate this book to my husband Victor – indispensable from the beginning.

STELLA BORG BARTHET

½¾

1 P ROJECTING P OSTCOLONIALISM

Exchanging – Sharing Our Places H ODA B ARAKAT TRANSLATED BY CARMEN DEPASQUALE

I

H E S I T A T E D F O R A L O N G T I M E before answering Dr Stella Borg Barthet’s invitation. I hesitated further when she sent me the programme listing papers by eminent personalities and the titles that were being proposed. ‘My God, I have nothing to say. Nothing to say’, I kept repeating to myself. The topics are important, the issues very serious. And I the novelist – it has been a long time since I tried my hand at research – not only do I have no clear answer and no reading grid to understand the present times, but, moreover, I am finding it all the more difficult to formulate any questions, to quell my fears, and lend words to my anguish. In fact, the older I grow and the more I write, the more my powers of control, of manifest selfdiscipline, and of conviction are confused. It is funny, and I feel rather ashamed, at my age, to find myself answering my children’s questions by a ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I have my doubts’, when I come from a part of the world where the older generation is a source of calm and of tranquility because it is a source of wisdom! Is it the bitter experience of my generation, which has undergone the therapy or, rather, the undoing of a civil war? Or is it that the present time, with its rapid changes which are both radical and violent, overtakes the benchmarks of our understanding, of our reading of the world? “What is wisdom today?” is a question to which the Nouvel Observateur dedicated a special issue and to which I only found more or less this answer: ‘the world today does not need wise men, it needs warriors. As in the ancestral rules of the laws of nature that govern agriculture, time belongs to a vacuum, to a fellow land and not to a seed-plot … the time of wisdom belongs to silence’.

4

HODA BARAKAT

½¾

All the same, I decided to come to Malta, to listen rather than to preach. One word in the conference proposal grabbed my attention or, rather, my ‘feeling’: the sea. The sea as a place of exchanging, of sharing our places; I would like, in my own way, as a novelist, as an artist, to humbly bear witness, if art is capable at all of sketching any answer whatsoever, to the questions regarding being. ½¾

Phoenicia, where I come from, the present Syro-Lebanese littoral – more specifically, the city of Beirut, thousands of years old, where I was born and lived for the first thirty-five years of my life – is well placed geographically and culturally to represent the Mediterranean: a mother sea of exchanges, of intermixture, and of communication of cultures. Let us today take a closer look at this sea, this water of great discord, this abyss which is becoming deeper and deeper each day. Shores that get farther away from each other and oppose each other: the examination is, in fact, over, the statement is there, but we continue to present our scripts, ignoring every failure, renouncing results and even the slightest doubt regarding the obsolete nature of our speech, its malfunctioning; out of touch with a reality that no longer offers an answer to our reading. But what is this reality? If it runs away from us, outstrips us, how can we enrol in it as actors? Under what title should the preceding chapter close? Under what title should the following chapter begin? When we thought that the page of colonialism was turned, responsibility assumed, guilt effective and restoring, postcolonialism which transcends the literary and artistic context today seems worn-out, broken-down, turning in a vacuum for its own consumption, cut off from the real world like the dervishes of the past. This postcolonialism which above all refuses to renounce the ideal of a cross-breeding which has ceased in a world that is still divided in two, and more so every day, carrying away in its schism–abyss the ‘modern’ intellectuals of the two camps, each in his furrow of ‘universalism’. And, to come back to the famous enchanting expression, what about the postcolonial Writer? Don’t you see that he is senile, out of touch, having worn out his contentious tongue acquired in colonial schools, getting old in the solitude of exiles, not finding anyone to take over, no disciples in the school of national liberations? These schools today find their bearings massively and inexorably in the teachings of God, whose Almighty Power alone will break down the drifts of an arrogant, unjust, and inefficacious Reason. In total failure. Let us look more closely at this sea, this black, frightening hole. Fright is not a term used by chance, not a figure of speech. We are afraid of each other.

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Exchanging – Sharing Our Places

5

A fear of hatred which turns before our very eyes into terror. And we, we hark back to the same old stories, fables of our egocentric nature which comforts us, and with the same means of yesteryear; we continue to condemn racism and xenophobia; telling those who are afraid or who bear hatred: you must not be afraid, you must not bear hatred, that problems come like that, stupidly, out of stupid amalgams (Islam and Islamism, etc.). For example, how would the situation be improved by repeating that, basically, the fault lies with the rich countries, with having ghettoes in the suburbs and belts of poverty, if, for example, fifteen pilots on 11 September are (rich) Saudis, the others engineers and ‘honourable’ science graduates? Our manner of dealing with information now resembles more the writings of amulets in the occult sciences; while we claim to be on the side of reason; is that not the reason of fanatics? Fanaticism is not only religious; withdrawal into one’s identity, under all its forms, is condemned without being understood or analyzed. Disarray is not a mortal sin, except if it is not admitted, meditated upon, and examined: and, confronted by a destructive fanaticism, how do we look upon, still in this same sea, these embarkations of fortune that pour out almost regularly, onto the northern coasts, the coasts of Europe, their share of the corpses of illegal immigrants? What are they seeking, in a world which repels them by all its means, through all types of violence? Are they attracted by wealth, they who are compelled solely by famine or poverty towards an opulence which they know is artificial, in countries which have difficulty in feeding their own poor, their numbers growing daily! Is it to that extent that they hate their ‘mother fatherland’ or ‘mother nation’, nevertheless the very lap in which was nurtured this withdrawal into one’s identity, the factory of fanaticism? Do they leave in order to still their hatred for the other, in order to destroy him while destroying themselves? What dreams, what dim objectives deserve such deaths, such losses? In the final scene of Emir Kusturica’s film Underground, a part of the land detaches itself to disappear in the sea, in the water. I think that, for the film director, it is his country, Yugoslavia, that is drifting away at a time when its people were together. And yet, this breaking away is a happy one, the departure jovial, the water clear and shining. Kusturica’s people, ‘carried away’ on this piece of land dance, eat and laugh; they make a feast! Only, those people do not exist any more. They are all dead. Superbly, definitely useless, inexistent, beyond collective time. And it is a sad scene. One of the saddest I have ever seen. Should we then resign ourselves and prepare to wave our white handkerchiefs? ½¾

Exclusion and the Intellectuals — Some Thoughts on Unequal Academic Exchange Between Africa and the West

B RIAN C ROW

T

some of the main implications of a phenomenon that seems to me to be central to the overall theme of this volume and that no doubt many contributors to it will be examining in more specific detail in relation to particular writers and texts. It touches on issues of which I am sure many of us are often mindful and that doubtless often crop up in informal conversation between colleagues but that, frustratingly, do not seem to get adequately aired in public fora. A gathering of Commonwealth and postcolonial scholars focused on the issue of exclusion in a place, Malta, that is geographically located between Europe and Africa certainly seemed a peculiarly appropriate occasion to air some of the main concerns that I wished to raise, and raise again here. Although I am well aware that these concerns are not exclusively associated with Africa, they currently affect it and its artists and intellectuals perhaps more acutely than those of any other part of the world. Temporally, as well as spatially, the gathering from which the present essay issued was particularly fitting, since, as we were all aware, it occurred less than two weeks since the publication of the Commission for Africa’s report in a year when the continent seemed to be on the international agenda as never before. At the heart of the matter is the not at all remarkable or surprising perception that in a global economy of unequal exchange, in which the debt burden, unfair trading arrangements, the massive corruption of comprador capitalism, the inadequacies of aid and development programmes and so forth are so much in evidence, the spheres of knowledge, education, and the arts in the developing world are just as profoundly affected as every other area of life, and for essentially the same reasons. I want to mention some of the forms in HIS ESSAY SEEKS TO DESCRIBE AND EXPLORE

8

BRIAN CROW

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which this unequal exchange manifests itself in specific areas that we, as scholars of Commonwealth and postcolonial cultures, should be most aware of and concerned about, and just as importantly, intent on counteracting. Although my particular concern here is with the theatre in Africa – its production, its scholarship and criticism, and its academic study – I imagine that much of what will be said applies more or less generally, if not perhaps quite so acutely, to the other arts and to scholarship and teaching more generally. My particular focus on the issue of exclusion has to do with the ways in which, it seems to me, African theatre artists and scholars have suffered exclusion internationally, in their relations with Western scholars and critics especially. Of course, exclusion goes far beyond this particular perspective. When, as in many African countries over the last few decades, it has been wellnigh impossible for many academics even to sustain themselves and their families on their normal salaries, there is certainly a kind of internal exclusion in operation – though one that affects many sections of society, and not just the intellectuals. In some places, of course, this economic disadvantage has been combined with various forms of political censorship and repression to produce often highly effective ways of silencing, or at least muting, voices of rational critical dissent. This is, however, too large and complex a topic to try to embrace here, so I will confine my remarks to the relationship between theatre artists, scholars, and critics in Africa and their counterparts in the West. One of a number of accumulating ironies we inevitably encounter when analyzing this topic is that, just in the period when the study of African drama and performance, alongside other postcolonial theatres, has burgeoned in many Western higher education systems, so the conditions both for the production of that theatre and its academic study and teaching in much of the continent have been especially difficult. As the effects of economic factors, ranging from the collapse of commodity prices, through pervasive corruption and mismanagement, to structural adjustment programmes, have made their impact on African national economies, budgets in university sectors, in most cases never very large, have inevitably been pared to the bone. Practitioners have sometimes – miraculously, it seems from the outside – continued to survive and even occasionally prosper in this harsh financial climate, in some cases by gaining access to external funding (as with some of the Theatre for Development work that has been going on now for thirty years or so) or by going private – that is, dropping out of the university system altogether and going it alone (for instance, the work of Chuck Mike or Bode Sowande in Nigeria). But where, as in many African countries, there has been a particularly close relationship between the universities and the writing and production of ‘serious’ drama – where the university has, in effect, been the

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Exclusion and the Intellectuals

9

seedbed of much theatrical activity – the decline of the higher-education sector has inevitably had an impact on the conditions for creating ‘art’ theatre. Even though plays continue to be staged and some new work produced, many university theatres and arts centres seem currently to be relying largely on the production of plays written during what now seems to be something of a golden age in African playwriting, the 1960s, 1970s and perhaps early 1980s. Either that, or, in the case of arts centres, the repertoire has shifted away from ‘serious’ drama to attract much-needed audiences for more popular live forms where these still command an audience (for example, the use of the Ghanaian National Theatre to perform concert party, which is also televised). This is at least partly a problem of audiences. In conditions of economic crisis, crime rates usually soar and the streets can be unsafe at night in at least some areas of African cities and towns. Consequently, it is harder to get people to leave their homes in the evening – especially when the ‘middle class’ has much greater access than before to television, video, and D V D – and there is inevitable resort to ‘entertainment’ and to ‘old favourites’ to attract audiences into the theatre. But it is also a problem of production. In the economic and social conditions prevailing in much of Africa, it is very hard for even the most dedicated young playwright to find the time or opportunity to develop his or her talents, and when there is perceived to be no money or no future in it, there is a real disincentive to even try. The problems here were compounded by the collapse of the multinational African book business in the early 1980s. It can be difficult to find play texts by, say, Nigerian dramatists even in Nigeria. Much publication of playtexts, at least in anglophone West Africa, is done by small independent publishers, often in rather poorly produced editions, often with weak distribution networks. A healthier publishing business, in which interesting new plays could be published and made reasonably widely available at reasonable cost, would provide a considerable impetus to African playwriting and production. But this is only one side of the coin. Alongside this decline into relative stagnation in the university-based ‘serious’ theatre there has occurred the most striking recent development on the African – and especially (though not only) the West African – drama scene, the rise of the video-drama industry. The immense popularity of this genre, which can now even sustain a South African-based satellite television channel, has had profound implications for theatre and entertainment generally, not least for the production of ‘art’ theatre.1 The video film boom has created much-needed work for writers and 1 A Nigerian filmmaker and commentator has estimated that even as far back as 1996 the annual production cost of Nigerian video drama was in the region of 125 million naira, with even a poor selling title grossing sales of around 2.5 million naira. See Afolabi Adesanya,

10

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practitioners and has produced its own star system, with those at the top of the heap earning extravagant sums and enjoying enormous kudos. Many of the graduates of university drama and theatre departments in Nigeria, where the industry is biggest, who would once have hoped for careers in the ‘art’ theatre, now strive to make it in video drama. For many of the actors and other practitioners involved in the business, however, the pickings are poor indeed, with many falling victim to cheating and exploitation in an industry that has no regulation whatsoever. For those who care about the continued survival of live performance on the continent, the prospects are bleak. The once-flourishing Yoruba travelling theatre has ceased to exist because its practitioners – or at least the leading figures in it – found there were greater profits in videodrama production. More importantly, at least in relation to the long-term health of dramatic theatre as an art form, the literary theatre based in the university and arts-centre sector seems to be waging a losing battle against the popular but trite meanings generated by the indigenous video drama. For those who believe that there is an important function in African societies for a serious drama that attempts to explore complex African realities with an appropriate complexity of vision and form, there is something deeply depressing about the proliferation of sensationalist melodrama that characterizes the video genre.2 One of the inevitable consequences of the African economic crisis and the decline of the university sector has been forced exclusion in the form of emigration, by African writers and other creative practitioners and critics, either abroad or, in some cases, to the opportunities offered by the relative development of post-apartheid South Africa. Some of the most senior names in African literary and theatre scholarship – Abiola Irele, John Conteh–Morgan, Biodun Jeyifo among them – are gracing American universities (though there are many less well known scholars and teachers from Africa now working in Western universities), while in recent years playwrights and critics like Kole Omotoso and Harry Garuba have joined the Nigerian exodus to South Africa. There is, of course, a great benefit to scholarship generally, and Western scholarship in particular, in this, especially when these senior African aca“From Film to Video,” in Nigerian Video Films, ed. Jonathan Haynes (Athens G A : University Center for International Studies, 2000): 44–47. 2 I am well aware that this is a contentious area about which much has been written, from varying positions. I certainly do not want to deny the significance or interest of at least some African video drama as expressions or indicators of popular consciousness, nor am I challenging the validity of some recent and thought-provoking theorization of the African popular arts and culture generally. For a useful introductory discussion, see the section on “African Popular Arts” in Jonathan Haynes’s introduction to Nigerian Video Films, ed. Haynes, 13–18.

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Exclusion and the Intellectuals

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demics lend their knowledge and talents to the editorship of journals and other publications. But the emigration, temporary or permanent, both of leading scholars of stature and of many of the most promising members of the younger generation of academic talents from the continent, cannot be other than a further depletion of the intellectual resources of African universities, and it must surely be dispiriting to some of those who remain. What such emigration does, of course, is not just to remove particular, and often particularly gifted, African critics and scholars from their countries and / or continent but to further shift the centre of intellectual gravity – or perhaps I should say the balance of intellectual power – from Africa to the West. Although they no doubt modify critical and scholarly work abroad through their contact with it, the presence of African critics and scholars in Western countries – in the U S A above all, of course – seems to me increasingly likely to lead gradually to the absorption of those critics and scholars into the discourse or discourses prevailing within academia in the West. I need to be very careful about my own thinking, and about how I express myself here. I am most definitely not suggesting that African theatre academics are either ignorant of or indifferent to Western criticism and scholarship before their arrival in the West – though we should not underestimate the difficulties some of them face in keeping abreast of recent work published (as, of course, most of it is) abroad (or even, for that matter, elsewhere in Africa) – or that they are entirely malleable intellectually and are disposed to adopt ‘foreign’ intellectual discourses at the drop of a Western pay cheque. What I am suggesting is that there may well be considerable differences between the concerns and perspectives of dramatic activity, criticism, and scholarship in Africa – as well as, of course, within African drama and its academic study – and those being pursued within Western universities. And it would be hard, at least if one wishes to establish a permanent career within Western academia, not to adjust one’s perspectives and discourse so as to accommodate oneself to the prevailing criteria of research excellence there. Not all, but a good deal, of what we are talking about here is what a British critic of African and other postcolonial literatures calls the development of “theocolonial” poetics, meaning “theory as an instrument of power.”3 In this development of criticism, according to Robert Fraser, “the intelligentsia devised a body of thought describing the condition and cultures of the former colonial world, and exported it as a transferable, and marketable discourse.”4 Within this discourse, ‘postcoloniality’ became a condition – a condition of 3

Robert Fraser, Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2000): 221. 4 Fraser, Lifting the Sentence, 220.

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dependency and weakness, the main metaphors for which were cartographic or typographic (marginality), military (subalternity) and biological (hybridity). The condition of postcoloniality was minutely examined, and a whole area of theoretical writing elaborated, on the basis of disadvantage as the subject of the discourse. The discourse, and the academic power-structure associated with it, was itself an interesting hybrid, made up of the theoretical interrogation of cultural oppression and weakness conducted by increasingly starry gurus in increasingly prestigious positions in prestigious universities – largely in the U S A – who had themselves originated in the cultures they now magisterially theorized upon. And, as Fraser shrewdly recognizes, though leftist or Marxist in tone, “the new discourse did nothing to disturb the commercial systems of the capitalist world”;5 indeed, while appearing to oppose them – and lamenting the growing disadvantage of the postcolonial world – the wellplaced exponents of ‘theocolonial’ poetics actually utilized the methods of the ruthless commercialism of the new capitalist world order for their own individual advantage. As Fraser summarizes it, “most theory made possible little but itself, and empowered nobody except its gurus.”6 It may be felt that, perhaps in the interests of polemic, Fraser has in some respects overstated his case. After all, even if we taken only the anglophone West, there are plenty of university departments of African Studies, of Literature or English, of Drama and / or Theatre where African culture is studied in perspectives that are not fundamentally those of postcolonial criticism. There are important publications devoted to African literature and drama that, while they may sometimes include work belonging to it, are not characterized by a commitment to ‘postcolonialism’. It is also true that there are stimulating and valid issues and debates being explored in postcolonial criticism. But there is nevertheless much that is persuasive in Fraser’s mordant analysis, and if one accepts the gist of his critique it isn’t hard to see that there is inevitably immense pressure on an African academic in theatre or literature, on arrival at least in the English-speaking Western world, to adapt him- or herself to what has increasingly become the prevailing ‘theocolonial’ reality in the academy. In Britain, certainly – and I imagine it is no different in North America or Australasia – applications for research funding in the humanities and social sciences routinely require a theoretical underpinning, and this is likely to mean, in the context we are discussing, that failure to participate enthusiastically in the vocabulary of postcolonial theory will be looked upon with disfavour by assessment panels. To be seen as unsympathetic to or, even worse,

5 6

Fraser, Lifting the Sentence, 221. Lifting the Sentence, 223.

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non-conversant with postcolonial theory is to risk being seen as academically dysfunctional, both in teaching and in research. It would be inappropriate here to enter into a full-scale critique of postcolonial theory or the criticism that bases itself upon it.7 Rather, my concern is with how ‘theocolonial’ poetics, enshrined within much of Western academe, may inhibit alternative approaches to the study of postcolonial drama, theatre, and literature and at the same time proliferate itself through the routine workings of such mechanisms as departmental research strategies, funding bodies, peer review, postgraduate study and examination, and the like. What we increasingly have in the academic world is a situation that essentially replicates the larger relations of unequal exchange in the financial, commercial, and political worlds, even if the rhetoric and indeed the genuine feelings of many Western academics are quite different from those in these worlds who unashamedly embrace the brutal logic of ‘free’-market values. To have intelligent and perhaps important things to say about some aspect of African literature or drama, grounded in a local context and specific history, whether it is by an African or a Western scholar, is often regarded as less interesting than some further refinement or flourish of theory, often floating quite free of any specific actual postcolonial cultural context. Quite simply, if an African scholar has something important and interesting to say – which might well be the case – it is, if not impossible, at least far from easy for him or her to gain access to publication in a form that will reach a global academic audience. Far harder, I believe, than it is for Western academics. And it seems to me to be getting more difficult all the time. Fraser and others have suggested that the concerns of much postcolonial criticism more closely reflect the marginalized positions of émigré intellectuals in the Western university system than, necessarily, the issues raised by specific postcolonial contexts and the writing emerging from them. Certainly, the perspective within which, say, a Nigerian critic may read the drama of Wole Soyinka could be very different from that adopted by a promising Western doctoral candidate whose formulation of her or his thesis has been heavily influenced by immersion in postcolonial theory and the criticism based on it. Even the choice of plays for particular critical attention might be very different. A play like Death and the King’s Horseman has been privileged in a good deal of Western critical literature in which the word ‘postcolonial’ is prominent – including, I confess, my own. There are fairly obvious and perhaps even justifiable reasons for this. But a Nigerian or West African critic 7

Apart from Fraser’s discussion, a deeply informed and authoritative critique of certain tendencies in postcolonial criticism in relation to African literatures is Karin Barber’s in “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 26.4 (Winter 1995): 3–30.

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might well choose to pay more attention to other plays – Kongi’s Harvest, say – which, I think it is true to say, has been more often performed and more warmly received by audiences in Nigeria than Death and the King’s Horseman, and which may be felt to be of equal, if not greater, significance as a dramatic text within, say, a post-independence political perspective. So the dominance of Western criticism and discourse affects not only particular readings of plays and oeuvres, but even what plays are read or at least privileged for critical discussion and used to substantiate particular intellectual perspectives. Much – though by no means all – of Western scholarship and criticism of African literary and dramatic culture seems to be in danger of losing touch with the artists and scholars who actually inhabit it and are its bearers, and at the same time African artists and intellectuals have been finding it increasingly difficult to gain access to what is happening in the arts and academic criticism in the West, simply, for example, at the level of being able to read plays, critical or scholarly monographs, and journals on a regular basis. And for those African academics that have emigrated, for some at least it must be hard to avoid succumbing to the pressure to conform to the dictates of postcolonialist theoretical discourse and the criticism informed by it. If, in some respects, the picture is not as bleak as Fraser represents it in his polemic, in some ways it seems to me worse than even he takes it to be. Towards the end of his discussion, he writes: Thus, just as in the counter-Reformation, novices of the Catholic orders in the final stages of induction were sent for acclimatization in Rome; so, in the theocolonial period, nascent academics were sent forth on scholarships to mother academies in Europe or America, which alone could accord them their final certification. In the neo-colonial stage, African students had been sent to study African literature in Leeds; in the new dispensation young Asian or Brazilian academics were sent to study the ‘postcolonial condition’ in Nevada. As usual, the credit – and the money –went to the West.8

If, as Fraser notes, the characteristic metaphors of colonial discourse are best understood as “describing the critics themselves, their place within the university community and the position of the university within the wider world,”9 that position in the formative years of the discourse was one of steady marginalization in Britain and America during the Thatcherite and Reaganite years of the 1980s. But the situation has moved on somewhat since then. Intellectually, the academy is no less marginalized now than it was then; what has 8 9

Fraser, Lifting the Sentence, 229–30. Lifting the Sentence, 222.

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occurred, however, is its steady absorption of so much of the ideology and practices that were introduced, or at least came to prevail, during that decade. I will limit my specific observations to Britain alone, though my experience for several years in Australia in the late 1980s, and what I know of North American universities, suggests the widespread nature of the phenomenon. The broad tendencies are easily identifiable: the marketization of universities (in England we have the introduction of top-up fees in 2006); the obsessive concern with income from students and from research (in which the R A E , or Research Assessment Exercise, plays a crucial role, to the point where its operation has led to threats of redundancy, or at least of a disadvantageous change of contract, to those regarded as non-research active, or not research active enough); the selling of universities as ‘brands’ (‘rebranding’ is a current pursuit among some British universities); the student as customer and the degree (indeed, the whole university experience) as product. Within this schema, it is commonly regarded as crucial to attract overseas students to both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes but most especially the latter, since they represent such a large income. In some departments of literature, drama and theatre studies, and cultural studies, the presence of programmes of postcolonial studies in one form or another is regarded as an important means of attracting highly profitable overseas students. Given this climate, and the financial imperatives that are part of it, whatever sense there might once have been – and I don’t think there ever was very much – that there could and should be a different relationship between the developing world and the Western academy than the prevailing one seems to have vanished entirely. To suggest, in, for example, a meeting of a School of Humanities’ postgraduate committee, that we should think seriously about a system other than that which operates currently, would be to invite doubts about the state of one’s mental health. So profoundly have British universities in the last few years absorbed the ruthless calculations of market values that any notion of forming partnerships with higher-education institutions in the developing postcolonial world that may have some ethical basis – that may, indeed, conform to the spirit that is at least partly evident in Blair’s Commission for Africa Report – is simply not on the agenda. (Commercial partnerships are a different matter.) What this means, in practice, is that Fraser’s critique of a situation where young scholars come from the Third World to study the ‘postcolonial condition’ at Western universities is itself, at this point, rather optimistic. Because prospective African postgraduate or postdoctoral students are usually poor, and because dedicated funding for them is quite limited, they do not seem much in evidence, from what I have seen, at British universities, at least in disciplines such as ours. The larger economic picture means that there is a current relative lack of interest in sub-Saharan African

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countries as a source of revenue with regard to postgraduate students. At a university such as Birmingham, where I work, the Far East is currently far more important, followed probably by the Middle East. Clearly, my comments relate to a very large topic with several distinct aspects requiring far more analysis than I have attempted to offer here. Even in broaching some of the issues in broad terms, I am aware that I might well be on treacherous ground. I have, for example, resorted, for convenience’ sake, to the adjective ‘Western’ on a good many occasions in this essay, but I am aware that my ignorance of the university systems in continental Europe, as well as of the particular national forms that the history of unequal exchange between Africa and Europe have taken, may mean that my observations for Britain have to be qualified, or even abandoned, in respect of, say, France or Germany. While I hope the issue will be felt to be of such significance that it deserves further analysis by others, I want to conclude by suggesting that such analysis can and should be harnessed to a determination to influence and pressure governmental and funding bodies to take speedy action. The issue of Africa’s exclusion from global development in so many spheres has never been so high on the political agenda, even if Yao Graham is right in arguing that the Commission’s report is flawed by the fact that, intellectually, it remains “wedded to the aid donors’ most important imposition on Africa – the supremacy of the market.”10 It is important for scholars in the West to initiate and pursue public debate on the fact that this exclusion includes the sphere of intellectual capital, knowledge generation and transfer, and the broad fields of education and the arts. Better funding for young African scholars is one obvious area for improvement, even if it invites, at least on my part, some ambivalence. A far better option, especially in the longer term, seems to me to be the recognition that it is possible and necessary to establish new kinds of partnership between universities in Western countries and those in Africa, and that in disciplines such as ours scholarship in the West could be as much the beneficiary as in Africa, if not more so. If such things are to happen, now is the time to act. WORKS CITED Adesanya, Afolabi. “From Film to Video,” in Nigerian Video Films, ed. & intro. Jonathan Haynes (Athens G A : Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000): 37–50. Barber, Karin. “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 26.4 (Winter 1995): 3–30. 10

The Guardian (London; 12 March 2005).

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Fraser, Robert. Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2000). Haynes, Jonathan, ed. “Introduction” to Nigerian Video Films (Athens G A : Ohio Center for International Studies): 1–36. Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Methuen, 1975). ——. Kongi’s Harvest (London & New York: Oxford U P , 1967).

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that there is a literary canon in English insofar as it is always possible to refer, without hesitation, to certain figures as canonical: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Joyce. However, the fact that perceptions vary with the passing of time has given rise to a myriad of studies that consider the reason why a particular work or author has been neglected after a period of glory or, conversely, has seen an unprecedented revival. Thus, Jay B. Hubbell ponders on the mutability of canons, admitting that only exceptional figures, such as Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Molière or Shakespeare, have maintained their place on the literary Parnassus. Indeed, he considers that outstanding writers such as Spenser or Milton have seen their names declining in popularity at some time or other.1 Furthermore, on some occasions it seems that the canonization of a given writer relies heavily on the whims of fortune; Frank Kermode has mentioned the case of texts from classical Greece that have reached present times thanks to their haphazard preservation in medieval Italy; similarly, the survival of Sophocles’s plays is probably indebted to an unknown Greek compiler who had the intention to use them in schools.2 Throughout the ages, the relevance of academia in canon-formation has been great, since decisions taken by teachers and professors are bound to influence a large group of people and, what is even more important, because they are bestowing on books and works a kind of official seal of approval that will be instrumental in their renown. Critics such as Kermode, Lauter, Alberti, 1

E CAN SAY

Jay B. Hubbell, Who Are the Major American Writers? A Study of the Changing Literary Canon (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1972). 2 Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1985): 73.

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and Ohmann maintain that scholars, with the intervention of filters such as academic journals, constitute the ultimate echelon of canon formation. However, Dean Kolbas refutes “a widespread belief that literary canons are maintained by the authority of educational institutions and can therefore be changed, or preserved, by engineering syllabus accordingly;” Kolbas points out that the basic role of academics and traditional education in canon-formation has been exaggerated; thus, he adheres to the thesis of the Frankfurt School, whose members “perceive the judgement and fate of works of art to be a complex sociological and historical process that is confined neither to a single institution nor to any one field of cultural production.”3 As an example of an early attempt to set the boundaries of the canon we can mention Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste, published in 1909, where he provides lists of recommended books and their most convenient editions; this work would be later revised, expanded, and edited by Frank Swinnerton in 1939. Here we can find lists of authors and works, intended as a guide for the average person to start buying and reading the classics so as to be able to form their own literary taste. Some of Bennett’s criteria may now seem awkward and lacking scientific rigour (he admits that his choice of books has been “calculated according to the space which they will occupy on the shelves and to the demands which they will make on the purse”).4 However his lists give us a comprehensive view of the idea of the consecrated authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when universities where still opening up the canon to vernacular literature, after centuries of paying exclusive attention to works written in classical Greek and Latin.5 Throughout the book, Bennett does not refrain from attributing or denying literary merit or interest to the writers mentioned, such as when he refers to “several lesser writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Fletcher, Sackville, Raleigh, and Sidney, among others) “whose finest work, often small in quantity, scarcely justifies the acquisition of a separate volume,”6 or when he advises the reader “to attack the nineteenth century before the eighteenth, for the reason that, unless his taste happens to be peculiarly ‘Augustan’, he will obtain a more immediate satisfaction and profit from his acquisitions in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth.”7 Swinnerton’s comments on and comparisons with 3

Dean Kolbas, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon (Boulder C O : Westview,

2001): 5–7. 4

Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste (1909; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938): 125. Robert Crawford has pointed out that the introduction of English literature in the educational system was already under way in Scotland, anticipating the process in England and America; Devolving English Literature (1992; Edinburgh: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 2000): 18–21. 6 Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste, 132. 7 Bennett, Literary Taste, 135. 5

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Bennett’s original lists are even more interesting, for they reveal how appreciation of literature changes with the passing of time.8 A work such as Bennett’s and Swinnerton’s is intended to record tradition, what the centuries have come to establish as excellent and superior literature; thus, when dealing with the most recent period, the latter admits that only the future will be able to determine the accuracy of one’s guess: “The lists which follow are more tentative than those given in previous chapters. They contain the names of living writers […] it is likely that a number of the books here indicated will drop out of any edition of Literary Taste prepared in, say, the year 1950.”9 Half a century later we can check the names mentioned, only to realize that most of them have no doubt become classics; this is the case with Hardy, Henry James, Bernard Shaw, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf; others have also fared well in our contemporary age: Meredith, Kipling, Barrie, Wells, Huxley. There are, however, names that would inevitably have dropped out of a revised edition of Bennett’s work: Allan Monkhouse, Oliver Onions or Norah Hoult can be seldom found nowadays in literary companions or anthologies. Paradoxically enough, what Swinnerton did not anticipate was that the arguably most seminal figure in twentieth-century English literature, James Joyce, was not mentioned at all. Jay B. Hubbell has published a volume-length study where he refers to the efforts to outline the Amercian canon; he admits that “Somehow to many proud and sensitive Americans the ranking of our authors has seemed important.”10 Apart from the significance attached to the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize in the process of canon-formation, this author mentions several polls undertaken by newspapers and journals (Vanity Fair, Bookman, Literary Digest, all three carried out in 1923; Book Week, in 1965), to conclude that, with the expected additions, the American canon has remained substantially stable for the past half-century. These kinds of surveys have continued and, by the end of the twentieth century, they have almost become fashionable, as can be seen in the projects undertaken by publishers such a Waterstones or Random House (the Modern Library), the media (B B C Big Read) or institutions and organizations such as the Norwegian Book Club or the Orange Prize. All of them have produced lists of authors and works chosen by panels of readers, critics or scholars, in accordance with various criteria. 8

Swinnerton himself admits that “I have left the original lists as nearly as possible what Arnold Bennett made them. They are good lists, and very characteristic and instructive. Two or three of his names unavoidably disappear -for Sir William Temple is vieux jeu, and so is Augusta Webster- and two or three which were unaccountably overlooked by the author have been inserted”; Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste, 10. 9 Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste, 151–52. 10 Jay B. Hubbell, Who Are the Major American Writers?, xvi.

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Similarly, many figures, from different posts and perspectives, have undertaken a crusade to consolidate the foundations of the canon by stressing the importance of recognizing the essential figures not to be missed out for the sake of fancy or political agendas. F.R. Leavis authoritatively stated: “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.”11 Harold Bloom has gone so far as to compile a list of mainly Anglo-Saxon literary references, placing Shakespeare at the very top.12 William Bennet, for a time U.S. Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton, has similarly stressed the importance of enforcing the canon of Western culture. He does not hesitate to name some of the figures not to be disregarded, from classical Antiquity up to the modern classics, among them Dickens, George Eliot, Marx, Nietzsche, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner.13 Somehow or other, those in favour of reinstating the value of a traditional canon (such as Bloom and Bennet) have been labelled conservatives who wish to maintain the status quo represented by these works. In fact, Bloom criticizes the so-called “school of resentment” made up of “Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucalt-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors.”14 He then engages in a kind of counter-attack, stating: “Those who oppose the canon insist that there is always an ideology of canon formation, suggesting that to make a canon (or to perpetuate one) is an ideological act in itself.”15 Jan Gorak observes: “Most of the ferocity of the current canon debate stems from its protagonists’ tendency to narrow the cultural and historical diversity of canons into one reactionary canon.”16 This means that anti-canonists create a “graphocentric, nationalist, phallophilic and gynophobic picture.”17 Among those militating in anti-canonical quarters, William Cain accuses the conservative voices defending the traditional canon of sheltering behind the same positions of those who disregarded in the 1920s emerging figures such as Eliot, Joyce, and Faulkner.18 Along similar lines, Terry Eagleton claims that “Departments of literature in higher education, then, are part

11 F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1972): 1. 12 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994; London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). 13 Robert Scholes, “Aiming a Canon at the Curriculum,” Salmagundi 72 (1986): 117. 14 Bloom, The Western Canon, 20. 15 The Western Canon, 22. 16 Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London & Atlantic Highlands N J : Athlone, 1991): 248. 17 Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 235. 18 William E. Cain, “Opening the American Mind,” in Canon vs. Culture, ed. Jan Gorak (New York & London: Garland, 2001): 5.

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of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state.”19 The role assigned to dons and instructors is seen as conservative, beyond the ideological implications of this term: Literary theorists, critics and teachers, then, are no so much purveyors of doctrine as custodians of a discourse. Their task is to preserve this discourse, extend and elaborate it as necessary, defend it from other forms of discourse, initiate newcomers into it and determine whether or not they have successfully mastered it.20

No wonder the only way to resist or reverse the inertia of the entrenched academy is to find the available means of escape: if you allow a lot of young people to do nothing for a few years but read books and talk to each other then it is possible that, given certain wider historical circumstances, they will not only begin to question some of the values transmitted to them but begin to interrogate the authority by which they are transmitted.21

Finally, we can quote John Guillory, who equates the nature of canon-formation with the “exclusion of socially defined minorities from power,” so that “the strategy of opening the canon aims to reconstruct it as a true image (a true representation) of social diversity.”22 From what we have considered above, it seems clear that the process of canon-formation has been shaken in contemporary times by the explicit attempt by some politically excluded groups to gain representation. Among the successful ones, we can name women and racial minorities, while the working class, according to Guillory, has not even asked for admittance for lack of a defined cultural identity, although “the emergence of a professional-managerial class has enormously altered the constitution and distribution of cultural capital in the school system.”23 After the lull represented by the New Criticism and other formalist schools, because of their aversion to forays into social or political matters, the current expansion of cultural studies, with deep roots in Marxism, has given way to a major challenge of the existing canonical status quo. A similar assertion can be made about postcolonial studies. Gorak states: “From one direction, the 19

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1995; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996):

174–75. 20

Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction, 175. Literary Theory. An Introduction, 175. 22 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1993): 8. 23 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 38, 342. 21

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postcolonial critique [.. .] points to the inadequacy of homogeneous canons as a means of studying the diversity of literary and cultural history.”24 We should bear in mind that the new postcolonial canon cannot be instantly considered in terms of a radical departure of classical conventions. Rob Pope, in his survey on versification, points out that accentual verse –with or without structural alliteration – has been recognised as a powerful resource by many later writers across a whole range of ‘Englishes’. Poets as various as Burns, Barnes and Hopkins in the eighteenth century, and Dylan Thomas, Walcott, Brathwaite, Dabydeen, Hughes and Heaney in the twentieth century, have all expressly acknowledged the influence of early accentual ‘markers’ on their own poetic craft.25

John Thieme argues that although terms such as ‘counter-discourse’ or ‘writing-back’ are usually associated with postcolonial literatures in their relationship to the literary tradition of the colonizers, the fact is that this may become a kind of ‘con-text’, giving rise to or inspiring some of the postcolonial production. The ‘new’ texts, although engaged in dialogue with the traditional canon, should not be automatically interpreted as being in confrontation with it or, to put it in Thieme’s words, as adopting a “straightforwardly adversarial” attitude to pre-texts from the colonial culture.26 The problem with the definition of the extent to which postcolonial writers and critics have been able to enter or transform the traditional canon is that only the passing of time provides us with enough data to consider such changes and, unless the choice is nearly unanimous, no one seems to be sure enough to venture on matters of canonicity. Even in the case of Bloom, disparaged for his arrogance, we find him calling his last chapter “A canonic prophecy”; however, it is significant that Bloom finds room for nearly fifty writers from the Commonwealth in an appendix.27 Furthermore, in spite of 24

Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 232. Rob Pope, The English Studies Book (London: Routledge, 1998): 238. 26 John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London & New York: Continuum, 2001). 27 A separate entry is devoted to Caribbean literature; he lists C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and Michael Thelwell. The section on Africa includes Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, Aya Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Gabriel Okara, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and Athol Fugard. India is represented by R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The white Commonwealth provides such names as the Canadians Malcolm Lowry, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Northrop Frye, John Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, and Daryl Hine. Australia and New Zealand share a single section and include Miles Franklin, Katherine Mansfield, A.D. Hope, Patrick White, Christina Stead, Judith Wright, Les A. Murray, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Kevin Hart, and Peter Carey. 25

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some pessimistic views, such as Georg Gugelberger’s, who states that “it is unlikely that universities will quickly embrace the study of ‘Third World Literature’,”28 several surveys and general studies on contemporary literature by Bernard Bergonzi, Frederick Karl, David Lodge, and Alan Sinfield reveal that postcolonial writers are increasingly perceived as canonical. John Hawley has expressed the view that “the most vibrant field in litererary studies today is one variously known as ‘world literature’, ‘emergent literature’, or ‘literature from the Third World’.”29 Similarly, Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel provides “a list of major works,” including postcolonial or Commonwealth writers such as Amit Chaudhuri, Wilson Harris, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Hanif Kureishi, Katherine Mansfield, Alan Massie, V.S. Naipaul, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, and Vikram Seth.30 No wonder critics whose career is more clearly identified with postcolonialism refer to the same evolution in literary appreciation. Angus Calder wrote in a valedictory editorial: “The canon is dead: long live the canon!” He then proceeded to mention Achebe, Soyinka, Naipaul, Desai, Narayan, Walcott, and Brathwaite (concentrating on what he called the non-white Commonwealth) as essential names in the field of the new literatures in English.31 Edward Said stated that “today writers and scholars from the formerly colonized world have imposed their diverse histories on, have mapped their local geographies in, the great canonical texts of the European center.”32 Susheila Nasta considers that “One of the major events of ‘English Studies’ in the last thirty years has been the transformation of Departments of English to a broader nomenclature which acknowledges the fact that we can no longer easily study in an area much more broadly defined by Literature in English.”33 A.L. McLeod did not refrain from engaging in the allegedly venturesome attempt at canon-formation to provide us with a list of introductory and Mention is also made of some francophone writers: the Martinican Aimé Césaire, the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Anne Hébert from Canada. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 540–67. 28 Georg Gugelberger, “Decolonizing the Canon: Considerations of Third World Literature,” New Literary History 22.3 (1991): 521. 29 John C. Hawley, “Introduction: Voice or Voices in Post-Colonial Discourse?” Critical Studies 7 (1996): xi. 30 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). 31 Angus Calder, “Farewell Editorial,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (1987): 3. 32 Edward W. Said, “Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1995): 31. 33 Susheila Nasta, “Introduction: Stepping Out: Reading the ‘New’ Literatures in a Postcolonial Era,” in Essays and Studies 2000 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000): 15.

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theoretical works on the new literatures, and, further on, with lists of works classified according to genre, so as to avoid the undesirable “study of the writing in various parts of the Commonwealth as separate national literatures.”34 His list of writers included, among others, names such as Mansfield and Munro within the short-fiction category; Walcott and Les Murray in poetry; Mandela and Gandhi as orators; Soyinka as dramatist; and a longer catalogue of novelists: Achebe, Anand, Gordimer, Harris, Frame, Lessing, Naipaul, Narayan or White, to name but a few. Other attempts at outlining the boundaries of postcolonial canonical writing include Wolfgang Zach’s English Literature and the University Curriculum (1992), a compilation of data taken from reading-lists at some thirty universities throughout the world, suggesting the increasing importance accorded to new writing in the context of general survey courses on English literature from all ages. Among the top twenty-five authors listed, eight belong to a Commonwealth country. Patrick White comes in the list before figures such as Yeats or Dickens; Achebe precedes T.S. Eliot, Milton or Virginia Woolf. Other mentions include Atwood, Naipaul, Soyinka, Narayan and Rushdie, alongside more classical figures such as Fielding, D.H. Laurence, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Bernth Lindfors, who undertook a similar survey study on African canonformation; had this to say about his enterprise: During the past few years I have been filling some of my free hours with arithmetical games aimed at establishing reliable statistical methods for ranking anglophone African authors in a hierarchical scale that reveals their standing, past and present, in the eyes of the public and in relation to their peers […] I have been employing simple mathematics in an effort to discover scientifically, and without the least trace of subjective bias, the configuration of the anglophone African literary canon […] I have been trying to discover the canon, not to invent it or to construct it.35

Although presented as a casual inquiry, the fact is that this is a well-documented and thorough analysis, based on various sources such as Black African Literature in English (a bibliographical compilation by Lindfors himself) with nearly 12,000 entries. In addition, there is a survey of prescribed authors and books across African anglophone universities; again, the study is comprehensive, covering some two hundred courses, thirty universities, and fourteen different countries. The combined results from bibliographical and academic 34 A.L. McLeod, “Introduction” to The Canon of Commonwealth Literature (New Delhi: Sterling, 2003): 14. 35 Bernth Lindfors, “Big Shots and Little Shots of the Anglophone African Literature Canon,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 14.2 (1992): 89.

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sources are illustrative and reflect the fact that, by any standards, some figures are undisputable and come close to the idea of a contemporary African canon in English: Soyinka, Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Armah, Clark, and Okara; other writers are mentioned in two different groups, the first made up of authors mainly favoured by critics (Tutuola, Ekwensi, Mphahlele, Head, and Emecheta), the second, by teachers (La Guma, Aidoo, Rotimi, Sutherland, and Mwangi).36 The wide net of literary prizes is one more source of canon-formation and, probably, the most visible. Among them, the prestigious Whitbread or the David Cohen awards have both a fair share of postcolonial nominees and winners. However, the Booker is arguably the most significant prize in the process of recognizing writing from the former colonies. Malcolm Bradbury has emphasized the importance of this British award in “focusing public attention on the serious fiction coming not only from Britain but from other countries (it covered fiction written by citizens of ‘the Commonwealth)’.”37 He is not the only critic to have paid attention to the importance of the Booker for the expansion of postcolonial writing into the canon. In a volume entitled The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, Luke Strongman states: As a prize for a novel written in English, the Booker is a measure of the porosity and assimilative strength of English language as an agent of cultural exchange that is currently engaged in negotiating identities beyond the binarisms of ‘English’ and ‘Other’, ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. The Prize represents a British Commonwealth notion of literary response following empire.38

If we take into account the impact of literary prizes on canon formation there is no doubt that the Nobel awards bestowed on Patrick White, Soyinka, Gordimer, Walcott, Naipaul, and Coetzee have contributed, to a large extent, to furtheringe their careers; furthermore, thanks to them, postcolonial literature and studies have made inroads in the contemporary canon and academic establishment. A West Indian scholar such as Carol Marsh–Locket admits the importance of these rites of official recognition, especially when talking about Caribbean literature, for a long time neglected or confined within local reading circles and striving to gain recognition for their cultural manifestations: When Derek Walcott received the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, the relatively new body of English-speaking or Commonwealth Caribbean 36

Bernth Lindfors, “Big Shots and Little Shots of the Anglophone African Literature Canon,” 89–97. 37 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, 380. 38 Luke Strongman, The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire (Cross / Cultures 54; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 234.

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literature found an “official” place in the literary canon […] For the people of the Commonwealth Caribbean, with its legacy of British colonial education […] the awarding of the prize to a son of the soil forced a major reconsideration of England as the cultural center.39

Paula Burnett states that some members of the ‘black academy’ have tended to despise both Western prizes “as manifests of the old imperialist power structure and myth of the world”40 and, at the same time, the winners themselves, who are held to be guilty of some kind of complicity with the former. In spite of this, Burnett analyses the mostly positive response by Caribbean scholars, journalists, and politicians to Walcott’s award in 1992, remarking: The strategy to generalize the significance of the prize seems motivated by the wish to read the event as having meaning not just to St Lucia but for the wider community. To relate it to the contribution of Caribbean culture to the arts worldwide is a valid and imaginative response.41

Similarly, Ezenwa–Ohaeto talks about the “deluge of eulogies,” alongside minor complaints, following the announcement of Soyinka’s Nobel award, to conclude that The Nobel prize in its controversial entry into the literary landscape of Africa clearly contributed to highlighting the varied issues that animate Nigerian and African literature […] Much more significantly the Nobel prize made it possible for the Western world to pay a deserved attention to African literature.42

Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman have written about the prominence of Australian writing on a world-wide scale by measuring the impact of the 1973 Nobel Prize awarded to Patrick White, and similarly by the Booker received in 1982 by Thomas Keneally and in 1985 by Peter Carey.43 along these lines, Graeme Turner, considering that the Booker bestowed on Carey marked the onset of a “burst of promotional activity” that involved both Australian scholarly publications and the media, concluded that “In Australia, the quickest 39 Carol P. Marsh–Lockett, “Centering the Caribbean Literary Imagination,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.2 (1993): 1. 40 Paula Burnett, “Hegemony or Pluralism? The Literary Prize and the Post-Colonial Project in the Caribbean,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.1 (1993): 7. 41 Paula Burnett, “Hegemony or Pluralism?,” 10. 42 Ezenwa–Ohaeto, “Reflections and Reactions: Literature and Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize in Nigeria,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.1 (1993): 26. 43 Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction, 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989).

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route to being a national figure is still to make it big overseas.”44 However, several critics have pointed out the importance of nationally awarded prizes in the consolidation of the Australian canon. Brian Kiernan has stated that there are clear nationalistic overtones in the recognition of a distinct Australian literature.45 Similarly, Xavier Pons refers to the thriving activity of the Australian political establishment in founding awards, in a process that virtually left no federal state without one of these official acts of recognition: “Victoria was a little late in riding this particular wave, and did not start its Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards until 1985”; Pons adds that “prizes and awards are political / social as much as literary phenomena especially in a post-colonial context.”46 This would help to explain a trend that had its zenith in the 1970s, right at the time when Premier Gough Whitlam was pressing ahead for progressive and nationalistic legislation that included the adoption of a new anthem to replace the traditional (and imperialistic) “God Save the Queen.” Pons is ready to admit that the awards have been equated with the process of national canon-formation: A list of the winners, who include writers such as Patrick White, Randolph Stow, Thea Astley, Tom Keneally, Jessica Anderson, Peter Carey, Rodney Hall, Tim Winton, Chris Koch, Elizabeth Jolley, Glenda Adams, David Malouf, etc., reads like an Australian Hall of Literary roll call.47

Anthologies are another major factor in canon-formation; these materials, usually intended for school and university students, exert an obvious influence in the promotion or consolidation of writers and works. Like any other ingredient in canon-formation, they tend to be controversial because of the inclusion of certain figures or the inevitable exclusion of others. In the 1960s, G.R. Coulthard published an anthology of Caribbean literatures in the major European languages spoken in the region. As far as literature in English is concerned, the author perceived a surge in writing activity in the mid-twentieth century, connected with an awakening of national consciousness. In the preface to this anthology, some figures (Naipaul, Hearne, Walcott) are men-

44 Graeme Turner, “Nationalising the Author: The Celebrity of Peter Carey,” Australian Literary Studies 16.2 (1993): 135. 45 Brian Kiernan, Studies in Australian Literary History (Sydney: Sydney Studies, 1997): 14. 46 Xavier Pons, “‘And the Winner is…’: Literary Prizes in Australia,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.1 (1993): 40. 47 Xavier Pons, “‘And the Winner is…’,” 41–42.

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tioned as “the best in world writing”; included in the compilation there are also authors such as George Lamming and Sam Selvon.48 John Thieme, in the introduction to his Arnold anthology, admits that including an author was perceived as an act of canonization; however, he attempted to achieve a high degree of inclusivity by also choosing “less wellknown figures” who could contribute pieces that were “stimulating and exciting in themselves”;49 the expected big names are obviously present, without any noticeable absence, if only because of the scope of the selection, with over two hundred authors in the anthology. Similarly, Donnell and Welsh, in their anthology, start by admitting: The Caribbean canon has been traditionally dominated by a number of seminal works from the 1950s and the 1960s, the period when Caribbean literature ‘boomed’ in the metropolitan motherland, London. The writings of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite have been the staple diet of Caribbean literature studies and undergraduate courses for the past two decades.50

Their intention seems to pay due attention to such tradition but, at the same time, to open up the field, even to the point of presenting the reader with “a variety of pace and terrain which a meandering journey entails.”51 This means that while some of the canonical figures acknowledged above are missing (Naipaul and Harris) there is a broad representation of younger or lesserknown writers. As stated above, the selection of authors to be included in anthologies, readers or general surveys of literary history is usually controversial, like any other issue related to canon-formation. Kenneth Ramchand, in a review of Chinweizu’s anthology on twentieth-century African writing, brings out the ideological motives and restrictions operating in the selection of texts and authors; some complaints have no real justification, since they refer to the exercise of the role and rights of the anthologist in the preparation of any text,52 but Ramchand denounces the fact that “Chinweizu wants to re-draw the map of African literature, and this intention determines who is excluded 48

G.R. Coulthard, Caribbean Literature: An Anthology (London: U of London P , 1966): 9. John Thieme, The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, ed. Thieme (London: Arnold, 1996): 6. 50 Alison Donnell & Sarah Lawson Welsh, The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Donnell & Welsh (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 7. 51 Donnell & Lawson, The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, 7. 52 Kenneth Ramchand, “Voices from Twentieth Century Africa, ed. Chinweizu (London: Faber, 19879,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.3 (1989): 86–87. 49

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from the gathering and how the book is structured.” Ramchand later provides the grounds on which his objections are based: “He castigates those who believe that African literature is ‘a new fledgling’ twentieth-century product that came of age with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Wole Soyinka in 1986.”53 The reviewer cannot resist giving rise to the average reaction at checking the contents of any anthology, the wish to amend the unavoidable omissions, very often his own favourite authors or works: Chinweizu’s anthology is a very interesting compilation that can give pleasure to the non-professional reader. It also makes the points about African Literature that the editor wants it to make. It would have done better if there had been some selections from Gabriel Okara, Tchicaya U Tam’si, and a more sympathetic representation of Soyinka.54

A review by Sumana Sen–Bagchee of an anthology of Caribbean poetry edited by McDonald and Brown is unusually complimentary about the selection made. The reviewer congratulates the editors on their sparing use of their “power to exclude”;55 the results, with over sixty poets, is deemed “more inclusive than exclusive,” since they have perceived the need to recognize other voices, other than canonical figures such as the “big two,” Walcott and Brathwaite; even the choice of poems, privileging new over the well-known poems, seems a “healthy disregard for the conventional,” if only because the editors have been wise enough to also include some more familiar pieces that the reviewer finds comforting to see. However, not even in such a benign review do we fail to find familiar objections to the selection made, and the reviewer concludes by saying: “I strongly feel an urge to ask why not include even one Canada-based woman poet.”56 As a conclusion, it can be said that canon-formation is one of the most controversial and debated issues in contemporary literary studies. It is now clear that this is a continuous process whereby some authors are progressively neglected by readers and academics, while others come to the fore. One of the distinctive features of this process in recent decades has been the importance accorded to ideology and social context. Many of the new names who have joined the ranks of canonical writing are primarily identified as members of formerly marginalized or minority groups. This is the case with women, black, or postcolonial writers; whether their inclusion is a matter of literary 53

Kenneth Ramchand, “Voices from Twentieth Century Africa,” 87. Ramchand, “Voices from Twentieth Century Africa,” 87. 55 Sumana Sen–Bagchee, “The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992),” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (1993): 178. 56 Sen–Bagchee, “The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry,” 179, 179, 180, 181. 54

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merit or a consequence of the sudden ideological imbalance is a hotly contested matter, especially from established scholars and politicians who tend to be identified with a conservative political agenda. As part of the debate on canonicity, I have mentioned a number of sources such as anthologies, editorial comments, prologues, journal articles, and compilations, all pointing in the direction of the existence of a number of postcolonial writers who raise no doubts about their canonical status. Although only a temporal perspective (or the mere cumulative effect of the passing of time) is a guarantee of reliability, some critics have expressed the need to discuss and enquire about the postcolonial canon. This is the case with A.L. McLeod, who states: “After fifty years, there ought to be a consensus on what constitutes the canon of Commonwealth literature. But the establishment of canons is notoriously difficult, time-consuming, and contentious.”57 This need for an assessment of the canon might be interpreted by many as one of the necessary steps in the consolidation of the study of postcolonial and new literatures as a distinct and thriving academic field that is still flourishing and expanding into emerging related areas. WORKS CITED Bennett, Arnold. Literary Taste, ed. [with additions] Frank Swinnerton (1909; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938). Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon (1994; London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). Burnett, Paula. “Hegemony or Pluralism? The Literary Prize and the Post-Colonial Project in the Caribbean,” Commonwealth 16.1 (1993): 1–19. Cain, William E. “Opening the American Mind,” in Canon vs. Culture, ed. Jan Gorak (New York & London: Garland, 2001): 3–16. Calder, Angus. “Farewell Editorial,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (1987): 3–4. Coulthard, G.R. Caribbean Literature: An Anthology (London: U of London P , 1966). Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature (1992; Edinburgh: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 2000). Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction (1995; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Ezenwa–Ohaeto. “Reflections and Reactions: Literature and Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize in Nigeria,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.1 (1993): 21–27. Gelder, Ken, & Paul Salzman. The New Diversity. Australian Fiction, 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989). Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London & Atlantic Highlands N J : Ablex, 1991).

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A.L. McLeod, “Introduction” to The Canon of Commonwealth Literature, 5.

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Gugelberger, Georg M. “Decolonizing the Canon: Considerations of Third World Literature,” New Literary History 22.3 (1991): 507–24. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1993). Hawley, John C. “Introduction: Voice or Voices in Post-Colonial Discourse?” Critical Studies 7 (1996): x–xxvii. Hubbell, Jay B. Who Are the Major American Writers? A Study of the Changing Literary Canon (Durham N C : Duke U P 1972). Kermode, Frank. Forms of Atttention (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1985). Kiernan, Brian. Studies in Australian Literary History (Sydney: Sydney Studies, 1997). Kolbas, Dean E. Critical Theory and the Literary Canon (Boulder C O : Westview, 2001). Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1972). Lindfors, Bernth. “Big Shots and Little Shots of the Anglophone African Literature Canon,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 14.2 (1992): 89–97. Marsh-Lockett, Carol P. “Centering the Caribbean Literary Imagination,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.2 (1993): 1–5. McLeod, A.L. “Introduction” to The Canon of Commonwealth Literature (New Delhi: Sterling, 2003): 1–16. Nasta, Susheila. “Introduction: Stepping Out: Reading the ‘New’ Literatures in a Postcolonial Era,” in Essays and Studies 2000 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000): 1–16. Ohmann, Richard. “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975” (1983), in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1984): 377–401. Pons, Xavier. “ ‘ And the Winner is…’: Literary Prizes in Australia,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 16.1 (1993): 38–45. Pope, Rob. The English Studies Book (London: Routledge, 1998). Ramchand, Kenneth. “Voices from Twentieth Century Africa, ed. Chinweizu,” review, A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 20.3 (1989): 84–87. Said, Edward W. “Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1995): 21–39. Sen–Bagchee, Sumana. “The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992),” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (1993): 178–81. [Review.] Strongman, Luke. The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire (Cross / Cultures 54; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002). Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London & New York: Continuum, 2001).ed. ——, ed. The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (London: Arnold, 1996). Turner, Graeme. “Nationalising the Author: The Celebrity of Peter Carey,” Australian Literary Studies 16.2 (1993): 131–39. ½¾

Beyond Revolution Re-Writing Violence and the Future of Postcolonial Studies

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of violent outrage performed increasingly in the name of religious and political ideals (jihad and ‘democracy’) forces a need to acknowledge and reassess the nature of violence and its repercussions within the postcolonial debate on academics and culture. Since September 2001, academics have sought to come to terms with the reality of violence beyond the constructs of national, racial or religious ‘identities’. Arguing for the inclusion of new modes of discourse on violence and revolution in academics, this essay questions whether postcolonial academics go far enough in addressing the ‘problem’ of violence in today’s world. As the world becomes more than ever in need of non-violent means of conflict-resolution, one can query whether the centralization of violence within postcolonial reformulations of national identity needs to be rethought – and whether, too, there is a role for academics in locating solutions. The failure of history and other grand narratives to make sense of today’s world has compelled postcolonial studies to problematize and deconstruct concepts of ethics, desire, Self/ Other, local /global in terms of power, gender, access to resources, and agency, etc – and while these reassessments have forged some limited knowledge on race, gender, culture, and ecology, what is left is a void in the real understanding of a way forward – a future application of this discourse to life. Any postcolonial analysis necessitates locating violence within both literary and social articulation – drawing upon the now popular concepts and discussion of diasporic melting-pots, alienation, and exile. While postcolonial studies was formulated to deal with theoretical issues impinging on literature and the arts originally having to do with resistance and theories of resistance, many of these issues have not only been superseded in the interplay between ONTEMPORARY WORLD AWARENESS

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local and global, but social concerns within the academic field of postcolonial studies have to some extent become the mainstream dialogue. How far have academics kept up with the fast-moving trends in today’s world events and mood –the international moves for peace, for example, the reconciliation represented and endorsed by Nelson Mandela? Since, as Noam Chomsky puts it, every resort to violence is “a gift to the jihadists,”1 such issues should now be granted priority in postcolonial studies, as a means of locating an alternative to violence. Such situations as we have at present, where a mutually offensive war turns into one where each side claims to be on the defensive, perpetuate cycles of violence that ultimately play into the hands of further imperialist incursions into the sovereign rights of nations, and are the opposite of Frantz Fanon’s vision of cultural renewal. Fanon, the main instigator of psychic and social rebellion in North Africa and beyond, urged the native academic and intellectual to take an active role in revolution, and to participate in the reinterpretation of traditional culture with an aim to challenge the colonial situation and “to change the order of the world.”2 Deeply affected by his own experiences of racism in Algeria, Fanon argued for an active traditional culture as the focal point of resistance: “It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation.”3 A recent reappraisal of Fanon claims that his work is as relevant today as it was when written, since, “as Fanon proposes, today’s struggle is not to resurrect the past, but to change the unbearable present and the potentially (now a fact) bewildering future.”4 But what “new future” are the intellectuals of today hoping to achieve? The escalating violence today calls for a rethinking of Fanonian revolution and some move away from the original positioning of violence as a foundation of postcolonial studies. It is now a question of how far postcolonial thought has moved beyond retribution to formulations of peace. In the context of postcolonial studies, Gayatri Spivak has written of epistemic violence, Edward Said of the violence of orientalism, and Homi Bhabha of the volatile “hybrid” experience of forced relocation. More recent theoretical discussions locate the rise of terrorism since September 2001 as a key to reformulate globalization in terms that challenge the relevance of Bhabha’s work on the Third Space and the possibilities inherent within migration. 1 Noam Chomsky, “Controlling the oil in Iraq puts America in a strong position to exert influence on the world,” The Independent (24 January 2005): 29. 2 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): 2. 3 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 83. 4 Abdul A. Abdi, “Frantz Fanon and Postcolonial Realities: A Temporal Perspective,” Wasafiri 30 (Autumn 1999): 51–54.

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Migration, moreover, linked with forced or illegal immigration and exploitation of migrant workers, often “demonstrates some of the most negative aspects of globalisation.”5 It is largely recognized that global communications and terrorism inform each other. Recently, in a special edition of the journal Interventions on “the war on terror,” globalization is linked by Arvind Rajagopal with cosmopolitan terror and problems of cultural intranslatability, and terrorism itself is interestingly defined by Rosalind Morris as “premeditated politically-motivated violence against innocent people.”6 Morris continues her argument by discussing how America’s current almost unique relationship to violence is paradoxical – a society basking in consumerist abundance has been manoeuvred into a life in the grip of fear. While this production and reception of fear by and within the U S A remains largely un-theorized, the production of such worldwide fear would have been inconceivable even the few decades ago in Orwell’s world of 1984. In the trajectory of Edward Said, it could be argued that the new formulations for political activism lie away from armed violence and towards reconciliation. Yet attempts at processes negotiating peace, and the specific issues and problems that arise in the course of attempted peace processes, remind us how much more difficult it is to end a conflict than it is to initiate one. Yet, beyond violence, what alternatives exist? Several prominent authors have spoken out against the illegality of current warfare in terms of their personal conviction,7 yet such topics have barely been approached in fictional literature or literary or cultural theory. The field of trauma studies does address traumatic historical events and proposes attempts to “work through” problematic memory related to “open wounds and unspeakable losses of a dire past,” combining a truth-seeking and ritual approach with the hope of engaging in the process of creating practical “conditions for a more desirable future.”8 Theorizing after the horrors of World War II, Albert Camus, a FrenchAlgerian and contemporary of Fanon, insisted that rebellion was an act of “moderation,” of humanity and love, the source of historical renewal and life. In The Rebel, Camus outlines his concept of the ethics of rebellion: a fight against “falsehood, injustice and violence” that refuses to give in to despair. 5

April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2001): 100. Arvind Rajogopal, “America and its Others: Cosmopolitan Terror as Globalisation” and Rosalind C. Morris, “Problems of Cultural Translation and Untranslatability,” Interventions 6.3 (2004): 317–29 and 401-23 respectively. 7 Brian Eno, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Richard Dawkins, Michael Faber, and Haifa Zangana, Not One More Death (London: Verso, 2005). 8 Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer 1999): 696–727. 6

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His adage “I rebel – therefore we exist” again linked intellectuals with revolutionary engagement but from a humanitarian viewpoint, declaring that “art and rebellion will only die with the death of the last man on earth.”9 Yet Camus’ conception of rebellion has (as, indeed, has that of Ernesto Che Guevara) been largely ignored in comparison to Fanon’s,10 thanks famously to his having been accused of cultural myopia with regard to the French presence in Algeria. His novel The Plague is now seen as a classic psychological depiction of the responses of human consciousness to terror and trauma, and an enactment of strategies of survival. Yet from a postcolonial standpoint, Edward Said argues in Culture and Imperialism, Camus ignores, if not actively writes out of the text of The Plague, any depiction of the native Algerian other than as a shadowy ‘other’. Yet it could be argued that evidence also exists to counter this argument: Camus’ short story “The Guest,” for example, raises some of the problems inherent in the colonial situation of hybridity in which Camus found himself. The story brings up the difficult question of whom or what constitutes being indigenous versus colonial intrusion. Where does a person in the state of hybridity belong? Daru, the schoolmaster in “The Guest,” was born in Algeria and “everywhere else, he felt exiled.”11 For Camus, the land of Algeria retains its independence as a fundamental space beyond human absurdity and tyranny, a Bhabhian Third Space perhaps, whose unrepresentable nature ensures that the meanings and symbols of culture remain fluid and problematic. More recently, Nadana Dutta argues how the very concept of ‘otherness’ still needs to be addressed in the global world, since ‘tolerance’ itself reconstructs the Self/ Other binary. In a major step away from blame, he suggests that the self and the other, however, must come face to face “with one another in wonder at strangeness and difference, without desiring to tame, translate or familiarize in any way.”12 This concept of the tolerant acceptance of otherness is perhaps at the core of the world’s present need to accept difference within unity. The current trend of non-tolerance of any perceived racial, religious, or political difference is increasing within both First- and Third-World (or 9 Albert Camus, The Rebel, tr. Anthony Bower, intro. Sir Herbert Read (L’homme révolté, 1951; tr. 1953; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1962): 28, 267. 10 In Camus’ case, this is perhaps as a result of academic fashion, while Guevara’s seems part of the general discomfort and politically motivated exclusion of South America, and of Cuba from the Caribbean, in postcolonial studies in general. 11 In Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, tr. Justin O’Brien (L’Exil et le royaume, 1957; tr. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966): 82. 12 Nadana Dutta, “The Face of the Other: Terror and the Return of the Binarisms,” Interventions 6.3 (November 2004): 431–50.

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Global North /South) countries to such an extent that voices of humanitarian aid and global peace are lost in the tumult of hatred. Whereas in the past, concepts of violence focused on migration, marginalization, and racism, in the new era of global mass communication and global terrorism it is important to include the parameter of religiously sanctioned violence and to problematize how it is marked out from political violence. While in Africa, for example, religious sanctions were previously deployed to consolidate notions of white racial superiority, religion is now being used as motivation for the growing opposition to neocolonialist exploitation. While wary of following a Western liberal line of thinking, which searches exclusively for social or psychological explanations, a more in-depth approach must be employed – one that can often be harnessed to literary representations. In the light of current public interest in Africa due to the much-publicized work of aid agencies, it is interesting to isolate the problematization of violence in African literature. Locating the theme of experiences and resolution of violence in the works of such authors as Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi, and Tahar Ben Jalloun (all North African writers) addresses problems of cultural conflict and political and economic imperialism, as well as implicating gendered violence. The South African author J.M. Coetzee also deconstructs violence and history in a way that questions the extent to which literary (and historical) texts are culpable in replicating the very violence they seek to expose and condemn. Language is also famously at the forefront of the decolonization process, whether the writers choose to reject the colonial language of oppression or to accept it, like Assia Djebar, as one of the spoils of war. Fanon famously uses Algeria as his blueprint for revolution, and more recent events have given a bitterly ironical twist to this choice of location as being the locus for the voice of nationalist freedom. Now it is the free expression and creativity of authors and journalists that is being violently censored. Assia Djebar (who, in the late 1950s wrote pieces for Fanon’s revolutionary newspaper El-Moudjahid), addresses in her novels the problems inherent within two centuries of colonial violence in Algeria. Focusing on the gender implications of the fight for national independence, she writes particularly of the “violent silencing”13 of women since independence. In Djebar’s novels, through the complexity and ambivalence of conflicting views on the predicament of women torn between tradition and modernity – frequently symbolized by the veil – she exposes and problematizes colonial history. Her own attitude towards the traditional (non-politicized) veil remains unresolved, as 13

Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994): 225.

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does her relationship to Algeria itself. In her 1999 novel So Vast the Prison, she refers to Algeria as a monster: “do not call it woman any more .. . not even a madwoman.”14 She sees Algeria now as a land of tears – and blood. Djebar’s recent non-fiction work Algerian White also documents the horrors of the closing decades of the twentieth century. Concerned with the lost compatriot voices of journalists, intellectuals, playwrights, and poets (from Fanon and Camus to more recent Algerian writers) who have died as a result of suicide, illness, mishap or assassination, Djebar movingly re-creates conversations and events to honour the bravery of their lives and writing. She catalogues the atrocities in the contemporary “Algeria of blood,” serial murders wrought by the “madmen of God”: a religious fundamentalism that “has decided to take power at any cost.”15 Implicating women in the Algerian colonial conflict both as victim and, because of the absence of indigenous women in the “public space” of society, as cause of the increasing violence between colonizer and colonized, Azzedine Haddour perceives violence – from a different perspective – as ultimately “the only mediating agency of social intercourse.”16 In today’s world, one implication of inter- and intra-state violence is exile and displacement. Two Arab women writers, Haifa Zangana and Nawal El Saadawi, who were incarcerated without trial as political prisoners under the governments of Iraq and Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s, personalize this experience. (El Saadawi was jailed under President Sadat, and Zangana in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.) Combining the personal and the political, these two Arab women, centralizing the effect of the traumatic experience of imprisonment and exile, document their autobiographical experiences from a perspective of alienation and exile, where exile is an experience of having “endlessly to choose between submission and submission.”17 The experience of being a victim of violence in conflict is articulated in their writing from the ostensibly safe space of exile. Within the Arab world, autobiography is further problematized, since it is a defiant act of assertion of one’s individual identity as opposed to and distinct from social identity within the group. Yet writing itself can be a therapeutic technique in terms of understanding both self and society,

14

Assia Djebar, So Vast the Prison, tr. Betsy Wing (Vaste est la prison, 1995; New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999): 356. 15 Assia Djebar, Algerian White, tr. Marjolijn de Jager & David Kelley (Le blanc de l’Algérie, 1995; New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000): 127, 226. 16 Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000): 128. 17 Haifa Zangana, Through the Vast Halls of Memory, tr. Paul Hammond & the author (Paris: Hourglass; 1990). 10.

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and coming to terms with violent experience is not easily achieved, but further implicates the complications of violence and the role of the writer. El Saadawi’s two autobiographical works Daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking Through Fire (2002) address the social, cultural, and political problems of her country, Egypt, while problematizing both her own and Arab women’s identity in general. El Saadawi’s autobiographical works, including her account of her prison experience, Memoirs from a Woman’s Prison, emphasize how such experience is extended in exile, and both her novels and her autobiography are located on the borders between fact and fiction. Concepts of what constitutes history have, of course, been challenged and rewritten by and following Hayden White and Robert Carr, and further deconstructed by writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie. While history and fiction are “language games deployed in different contexts,”18 in the case of autobiography this differentiation may not be so clear-cut. The situation in autobiography is as paradoxical and contradictory as in some postmodern fiction, where “Lying is never simply opposed to truth, but is a sort of hybrid overlapping of different registers of narrative, a ‘rhetoric’.”19 Whereas Hayden White distinguishes between factual and historical statement, another trajectory in comparing historiography and fiction is proposed by Dominick LaCapra: One might argue that narratives in fiction may also involve truth-claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery or the Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods.20

This flexibility allows for a blurring of the distinction between these categories in El Saadawi’s works (and one that is comparable to that in Rushdie’s fiction), as is her collapsing of the distinction between the personal and the political – and can be seen as a means of approaching and replicating textually the violence of personal and national experience. Her purpose in writing is to challenge and indict the violence of economics, religion, and politics. El Saadawi explains “pen and paper are a thousand times more threatening to the system than a bullet fired from a gun. When a tyrant dies he can be replaced.

18

Bill Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture (London: Continuum, 2001): 136. 19 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, 136. 20 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore M D & London, Johns Hopkins U P , 2001): 13.

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When an idea survives it can move a nation.”21 While emphasizing her outrage and sense of injustice, her protagonists refuse to be victims of patriarchal oppression, whether expressed in terms of religion or of politics. As Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in his essay “Liberalism, Individuality and Identity,” “A free self is a human self.”22

A Global Society Since the new millennium, we have moved out of the postcolonial, postindependence era into a situation of global, if not galactic, imperialism. In his seminal work on conflict studies, Martin Shaw summarizes thus: crises in world politics need to be seen not primarily as inter-state crises (in which some other “actors” sometimes get involved) but as global crises, which are structured by the interactions of state and society, and constituted by media and other institutions in civil society as well as by states.23

He is concerned above all with “the question that arises [of] whose voices are heard, and how? If Western civil society is the core of global civil society, just as the Western state is the core of the global state, how do non-Western voices become heard?”24 The postcolonial debate is now moving towards inclusion of ideas more centrally located within concepts of the global – where the global is defined as a mosaic of local needs and rights. While also incorporating the all-important larger issues of the global environment, sustainable development, and other issues of the human/ environment interface highlighted in the work of, for example, Vandana Shiva, concepts of global citizenship rise above the agenda of violent solution to issues of land and of religious and social rights. As Martin Shaw observes in his analysis of the growth of globalization, Elements of a global culture have been coming into existence for some centuries, although they coexist with elements of a more local and national character. Global institutions have proliferated in the economic, cultural and

21

Nawal El Saadawi, “Democracy, Creativity, and African Literature,” in The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed, 1997): 204. 22 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 326. 23 Martin Shaw, “Global Voices: Civil Society and Media in Global Crises,” in Human Rights in Global Politics, ed. Timothy Dunne & Nicholas Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 214. 24 Shaw, “Global Voices,” 214–32.

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political spheres. Values like democracy and liberty, largely Western in origin, have been increasingly globalised.25

Cultural hubris, in fact, plays an increasing role in the trauma and turbulence of today’s ethnically fluid and culturally hybrid world. Many peoples and cultures do not necessarily recognize democracy as a means of improving their social and geopolitical existence – it is seen as a threat to traditional modes of existence – which in turn is regarded as a threat to the ‘liberties’ enjoyed by the ‘democratic’ nations.26 Although the force of globalization is seen by many to ride on the back of neocolonization, issues of globalization have to be reassessed, not merely in terms of colonization, economics, and trade etc, but by addressing the way a concept of a global country becomes a legitimate ‘alternative’ to one world superpower. Some sociologists have expressed the notion of global responsibility in terms of citizenship in Planet Earth, stressing our shared dependence on nature.27 As a journalist, John Pilger argues that imperialism is being replaced by new values – he suggests that the voice of “the rest of the world” is fast becoming the alternative super-power, a force of human renewal against inequality, poverty, and war.28 Recent discussions of global citizenship emphasize obligations across borders, tolerance of other cultures, truly international communities that imply the ideal of a world community. Cosmopolitanism is also associated with the quest to end war between nation-states and establish an international ethic of human rights transcending borders. The definition of the global citizen denotes a coherent understanding of a relationship between human rights and human duties and cosmopolitan beliefs, including a commitment to prevent increasing world poverty, and the destruction of ancient cultures and the natural environment.29

25

Shaw, “Global Voices,” 216. For example, a novel by Hilary Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, dramatizes this problem, as an Arab woman explains to a newly arrived Englishwoman, alien to the Arab world: “You see, everything that you hold self-evident [. . . ] that democracy is good, that liberalism is good in itself [. . . ] we have never taken these ideas as naturally true”; Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1984; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997): 229. Asian feminists have similarly criticized generalizations made by Western feminists about ‘women’, ‘patriarchy’, and ‘democracy’, concepts that cannot be applied universally or cross-culturally. 27 April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship, 3–4. 28 John Pilger, “The Other Tsunami,” New Statesman (6 January 2005). 29 April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship, 10. 26

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Martha Nussbaum, one of the leading advocates of world citizenship, suggests the importance of cosmopolitan education, an education of both the intellect and the emotions to combat the politics of nationalism.30 In her essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” she looks at the political and economic consequences and argues that such an education is essential if children are to respect the rights of others. Our first allegiance, according to Nussbaum, should be to no form of government or temporal power, but to “the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.”31 The role of academics as educators is to create the academic basis for a rethinking of our society, grounded as it is on the glorification of violence and war. As educators we should be urging a re-education that stresses the nonfeasability of war as an option for future conflict-resolution and addressing the needs for reconstruction in the fullest sense. Education can create the desperately needed link of understanding, friendship, and compassion among all cultures. As Fanon concluded his 1959 speech “Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom,” we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation [and …] the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values.32

Increasingly, education is recognized as having a central and vital role in creating unity in the world – a world in which we, paradoxically, find the juxtaposition of instantaneous communication and the sharing of media and entertainment, on the one hand, and the strengthening of bastions of cultural identity and xenophobia, on the other. Yet education for global citizenship must have a more profound basis than mere goodwill. Educators, N G O s and U N bodies struggle to locate the modalities of education that will facilitate the unification process without threatening cultural, religious, and ethnic identity. The way forward from this dilemma is to identify the element that is common to all knowledge, the feature that is universal to all who study. Within many disciplines, this understanding is emerging in the framework of studies on consciousness.33 Within postcolonial studies, however, consciousness, under30

In Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship, 156 Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in Nussbaum el al., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed Joshua Cohen (Boston M A : Beacon, 1996): 7. 32 Frantz Fanon. “Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom,” speech delivered at the Congress of Black African Writers (Rome 1959), in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 190–99. 33 The interdisciplinary study of human consciousness has become mainstream to the extent of it being the subject of two major journals (the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 31

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stood here as the source of language and human creativity, has largely been excluded, and the field is in danger of lagging behind twenty-first-century thought in other areas, remaining in the Newtonian pre-quantum world-view. During the latter half of the twentieth century, great strides were made in our understanding of the physical and natural world. Pioneers of science such as Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Bohr discovered, as they probed ever more deeply into the inner functionings of nature, that principles of unity and universality emerged. In the most recent of these developments, in the construction of a unified field theory, it has been discovered that identical principles of intelligence underlie fields of nature as disparate as the inner workings of the nucleus and the atom, the long-range force of electromagnetism, and the force of gravity, which holds together our solar system, galaxy, and universe. The element of these recent discoveries that makes them so important is that they create a link between the objective world and the inner subjective world of consciousness. The comparison between the physical world and the understanding of consciousness is not a trivial one. Many commentators have noted the similarities, parallels, and equivalents between the quantum-mechanical/ classical relationship in physics and the expressions found in the literature of many cultures and epochs of human history, which speak of a fundamental level of intelligence or consciousness underlying the phenomenal world. They allow us to quantify and understand consciousness as an integrating reality underlying all diverse knowledge and experience, and to seek an understanding of human consciousness as a state of undifferentiated wholeness. The real revolution for our time, I would suggest, is to be addressed within this framework of consciousness studies. This mode of approach provides a means of deconstructing the Self/Other dichotomy that is only possible through an understanding of the full range of human consciousness.34 This paradigm also calls for inclusion of the broader recognition that much postmodern thought is based on Indian philosophy. While postcolonial theorists have long urged a rewriting of a people’s past to reformulate both national for example): and the topic of several international conferences. The implications of consciousness studies in literature and the humanities are dealt with in books such as Culture and Consciousness by William S. Haney II (Lewisburg P A : Bucknell U P & London: Associated U P , 2002). 34 The possibility of growth of higher consciousness is seen clearly from the perspective of scientific research. In the human paradigm of this state, there is high degree of coherence in brain function, and increased mental and physical performance, reflecting the highly integrated and unbounded nature of the experience. See, inter alia, Charles N. Alexander et al., “Growth of Higher Stages of Consciousness,” in Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Human Growth, ed. Charles N. Alexander & Ellen J. Langer (New York & Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 286–341.

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and individual identity, the source of literary and critical expression is overlooked, if not actively refuted as invalid. Foucault and Derrida both drew upon concepts from Upanishadic and Vedantic systems of thought.35 These philosophies are based on the explication and experience of higher consciousness, in which the possibility of living full individual intelligence in turn awakens a total potentiality in every field of life. This realization of the full potential of intelligence is seen as a unifying principle. Notwithstanding the laudable standpoint of the anti-humanist refutation of a constant ‘self’, this anti-phenomenological version of identity has not ultimately resulted in a decrease of the location of the Other as alien rather than same, nor in a decrease in inter-racial hate-crimes and in violence between nations and communities. Since consciousness is at the basis of the global conceptualization of law, ethical responsibility, and human rights, the return to a notion of a unified self and the existence of consciousness can now be included as a reputable and valuable field of study. It is only on this basis that reformulations of violence can take place. WORKS CITED Abdi, Abdul A. “Frantz Fanon and Postcolonial Realities: A Temporal Perspective,” Wasafiri 30 (Autumn 1999): 51–54. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 305–32. Ashcroft, Bill. On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture (London: Continuum, 2001). Camus, Albert. Exile and the Kingdom, tr. Justin O’Brien (L’Exil et le royaume, 1957; tr. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). ——. The Plague, tr. Stuart Gilbert (La Peste, 1947; New York: Random House, 1949). ——. The Rebel, tr. Anthony Bower, intro. Sir Herbert Read (L’homme révolté, 1951; tr. 1953; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1962). Carter, April. The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2001). Chomsky, Noam. “Controlling the oil in Iraq puts America in a strong position to exert influence on the world,” The Independent (24 January 2005). Djebar, Assia. Algerian White, tr. Marjolijn de Jager & David Kelley (Le blanc de l’Algérie, 1995; New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000). ——. Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade (London: Quartet, 1985). ——. So Vast the Prison, tr. Betsy Wing (Vaste est la prison, 1995; New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). ——. Women of Algiers in their Apartment (London: Quartet, 1980). 35 See, for example, Ute Schaub, “Foucault’s Oriental Subtext,” P M L A 104.3 (May 1989): 306–16, and William S. Haney, II, Literary Theory and Sanskrit Poetics: Language, Consciousness, and Meaning (Lewiston N Y : Edwin Mellen, 1993).

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Dunn, Timothy, & Nicholas Wheeler, ed. Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999). Dutta, Nadana. “The Face of the Other: Terror and the Return of the Binarisms,” Interventions 6.3 (November 2004): 431–50. El Saadawi, Nawal. “Democracy, Creativity, and African Literature,” in The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed, 1997): 188–208. ——. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (London: Women’s Press, 1986). ——. Walking Through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi (London: Zed, 2002). Eno, Brian, Harold Pinter, John Le Carré et al. Not One More Death (London: Verso, 2006). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; New York: Grove, 1967). ——. Studies in a Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An V de la révolution algérienne, 1959; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965). ——. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Haddour, Azzedine. Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000). Haney, William S., II. Culture and Consciousness: Literature Regained (Lewisburg P A : Bucknell U P & London: Associated U P , 2002). ——. Literary Theory and Sanskrit Poetics: Language, Consciousness, and Meaning (Lewiston N Y : Edwin Mellen, 1993). LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2001). Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994). Mantel, Hilary. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Morris, Rosalind. “Problems of Cultural Translation and Untranslatability,” Interventions 6.3 (2004): 401–23. Nussbaum, Martha. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” (1994), in Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed Joshua Cohen (Boston M A : Beacon, 1996): 3–20. Pilger, John. “The Other Tsunami,” New Statesman (6 January 2005). Rajagopal, Arvind. “America and its Others: Cosmopolitan Terror as Globalization,” Interventions 6.3 (2004): 317–29. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993). Schaub, Ute Liebmann. “Foucault’s Oriental Subtext,” P M L A 104.3 (May 1989): 306–16. Shaw, Martin. “Global Voices: Civil Society and Media in Global Crises,” in Human Rights in Global Politics, ed. Timothy Dunne & Nicholas Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 214–32. Zangana, Haifa. Through the Vast Halls of Memory, tr. Paul Hammond & the author (Paris: Hourglass, 1991).

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2 W AR AND R EMEMBRANCE

Territorial Terrors Colonial Spaces and Postcolonial Revisions – Some Basic Concepts 1

G ERHARD S TILZ

H

U M A N S , L I K E O T H E R A N I M A L S , are subjects in, and subject to, time and space. They cannot physically exist outside time, and they remain space-bound beings wherever they go. Moreover, on grounds of their shape, origins, and primary modes of perception, humans are not only a space-bound species in general terms but also place-related beings in a specific, individually relevant sense. This may not be immediately evident in cultures where mobility is vitally important and highly treasured (such as in some primeval nomadic cultures of seasonal transhumance, or under some postmodern cult of global nomadism). Yet even for those humans who have adopted and cultivated modes of multiple location, place remains an ineluctable primary condition of orientation and well-being. This, I hold, is mainly due to

– the natural processes of our primary sensual and perceptual orientation; – the ways of our physical and mental conditioning and education; and – our habitual modes and techniques of storing memories and knowledge. Places in our context should be defined as those spaces that can be marked out by a particular terrestrial location, containing an identifiable centre, possibly surrounded by a familiar environment, and demarcated on its periphery 1

This essay, from its first outlines, rapidly developed into lengths and dimensions which cannot possibly be reproduced here. Its scope has triggered a joint transatlantic graduate project between Tübingen University and the University of Maryland, whose contributions are being published by Königshausen & Neumann in Würzburg.

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by more or less disputable and negotiable boundaries. Such boundaries may be invisible but still respected by other humans, or they my be manifestly fenced in or walled in for the physical protection or detention of their inmates. Places can be claimed, occupied, shared, and defended by individuals, partners, families, siblings, or larger social groups of various definitions: communities, tribes, nations, races, terrestrials. Such spaces, claimed, possessed, and defended by individuals or communities, have been called territories – a word-formation which, perhaps revealingly, follows the formation of ‘dormitory’ (as the O E D has it) – the peaceful space surrounding the sensitive core of our territorial privacy, where we can hide our naked, unprotected selves. ‘Our territory’ therefore forms the centre of our familiar world from which the outside world becomes safely accessible. The concept of our ‘home territory’ is structured in widening circles. We start from our cradle as our primary sleeping-place, the nucleus of our dormitory and its immediate domestic environment. We learn to be at ‘home’ in our ‘familiar’ neighbourhood or vicinity, in our village, our suburb, our town, our district, our country. We tend to define these territories as ‘ours’ by widening at the same time our circles of group identity and our claims of group ownership – and we insist on (and often dearly pay for) ‘belonging’ to such territory-owning groups: our families, siblings, fellow villagers and citizens, countrymen and compatriots, ending up, in peaceful times, with our fellow global villagers. There does not seem to be any problem in this unless our group allegiance is doubted, threatened or refused, or unless individuals or groups transgress mutually accepted or even hereditary boundaries and claim ownership in territories previously unclaimed by these individuals or groups. In such cases, fields of territorial conflict become apparent, are controversially defined and contested. Since our primary notions of home, orientation, and the very principle of our spatial existence are threatened by territorial controversies, ‘terror’ becomes both the passive experience and the active instrument that characterizes territorial threats and impositions. Such terrors are as old as the mythical loss of paradise, but their age-old implications have not blunted our present-day sensitivities. Analysing and understanding the mechanisms at work in the making and the experience of territorial terror is a complex task, but it may serve peaceful purposes in our terror-ridden times. In order to simplify matters for a possibly clarifying conceptual approach, I propose to distinguish between four crucial territorial concepts developed in Western societies. These concepts denote different types of contested space and are usually associated with certain behavioural patterns which are assumed to be relevant or even instrumental for their construction or destruction. Both, concepts and behavioural patterns, shape our daily lives and they are experimentally and often hotly debated

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(and, indeed, occasionally defused) in the largely sanction-free realms of literature. My four crucial types of contested space, arranged with some anthropological and historical hindsight, are: 1) 2) 3) 4)

HOME, HOME COUNTRY, COLONY, METROPOLIS.

These types are not the only real or imagined concepts of place that matter in human concerns; indeed, we will need to talk of adjoining, oppositional, and complementary types such as ‘Abroad’, ‘Foreign country’, ‘Wilderness’ or ‘Jungle’. But they seem to be those types of place where the conflictual interplay of territorial claims, fears, and solutions has been most passionately, productively, and destructively developed. All of these types of place can be discursively defined and conceptualized under seven aspects which lead to assumptions about their making, their use, and their maintenance. These aspects correspond to the following simple questions: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

what is their creative rationale? what are they good for? how are they acquired by individuals? how can they be threatened or lost? how can they be defended or maintained? how do we see others found in the same place? what is their ideal perfection?

1. ‘Home’, under these aspects, becomes (a) the place of one’s first orientation in the world, the ‘central’ node on which our personal identity has been nurtured, the place to which one ‘belongs’ and returns, as it promises peace, rest, and roots. Home is not necessarily the native place but primarily the place (b) needed as a safe nest for individual development and defended as an inviolable refuge for recovery and reassurance. Unless acquired (c) by birth, home can be taken into possession by buying, building, shaping, and reshaping it. It is privileged over other forms of residence by acts of special care supporting its value and permanence. Home can be lost (d) by selling or deserting it and can be threatened by eviction or destruction. For its identity-forming qualities, its loss can cause the special disease of homesickness. Home is often defended and maintained (e) by extraordinary physical, emotional, and financial efforts which can go well beyond sober calculations of market values. Home

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is supposed to be most highly valued in settled societies.While its privacy does not require explicit standards of care, home usually enjoys the law’s special protection against public interference. In our home, others (f) are either seen as cohabitating family members or as welcome friends and guests, or they are warded off and attacked as unwelcome intruders. Home (g) is ideally seen as intact, centred in the self, and, in turn, reassuring the self.2 2. In one’s ‘home country’, some ideas of home are expanded beyond our

own room, house, and premises. It is hard to define the ideal size of a ‘home country’ on anthropological grounds, since so many culture-specific and historical factors have petrified the borders of all home countries we know. For its creative rationale (a) the idea of a home country might be primarily assumed to encompass an area sufficiently large to make sure that the ordinary needs of life can be satisfied peacefully, reliably, and efficiently. This presupposes a shared language or dialect as a medium of communication, it requires a basic consensus concerning morals, customs, and business practices, it relies on a viable communication system, and it reinforces an in-group identity which has been sharpened by the experience of and agreement on the characteristics of one or several out-groups. The size of a home country can vary from an enclosed alpine valley settled by people who drink the same water and agree to speak the same dialect, to a large nation-state in which the several dialects or even languages spoken are considered to be irrelevant in view of an integrative educational system providing a feasible lingua franca. Other integral communication systems can be based on icons rather than linguistic signs, such as a national river, road or railway system, a postal communication network or a common market, which keeps people together sharing the same space-defining iconography. Yet, in any case, ‘homeland’ ends where ‘foreign parts’ begin. Home countries are defined (b) by group claims which are underwritten by a majority of group members. Groups subscribing to the same home country may be large enough to be called ‘tribes’ or ‘nations’. They preferably define and claim their home country as the place of their ancestors, be it as a ‘Vaterland’ or a ‘mother country’. ‘Home country’ claims the inherited place of one’s imagined community, well beyond the family tree. A ‘homeland’ or ‘native country’ is usually acquired (c) by birth and by ‘belonging’ to the resident group of countrymen. Changing one’s home country by moving somewhere else involves a difficult process of leaving, re-orientation, and final acceptance as an outsider among an already established group of residents. The integration process is beset with territorial sensitivities (and potentially terrors) on both sides. The newcomers are expec2

For the existential value of home, see Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Mensch und Raum [Man and Space] (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963).

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ted to prove that they do not pose a threat but, rather, provide valuable support to established structures.3 A home country can be lost (d) by voluntary emigration or by being forced into exile. Groups can lose their home country by making (or gradually finding) it uninhabitable. Ancient nomadic strife for good pastures, the scramble for Lebensraum, has, in the course of history, been continued in wars of displacement and expulsion. In the twentieth century, their moral indefensibility and their territorial terrors were covered up under the treacherous terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘humane resettlement’. Strategies of (e) maintaining and defending one’s home country usually begin with the cultivation of civic virtues under law and order, whenever internal conflicts have to be kept in check. But they include the whole repertoire of armed defence, from home guard and guerrilla tactics to the option of invading a foreign country, should it become a source of territorial terrors. Evidently, this complex interface of defence and aggression throws up ethical debates which should not be left to the powers of one country’s executive. In one’s home country, others (f) are seen as countrymen. Strangers are usually tolerated as friendly guests or visitors so long as they do not threaten territorial integrity and familiar modes of communication. However, both countrymen and strangers can be redefined as intruders, aliens, and terrorists, if found to be suspicious of (or actually caught in) subversive practices. The people’s disappointed desire and need for peace and security in their home country facilitates and fosters mass hysteria. This has been and still is exploited by governments anxious to keep up a good reputation of caring for their subjects. Space in one’s home country is ideally seen (g) as self-contained, though sufficiently diversified for one’s immediate economic and aesthetic needs. The official educational institutions as well as the national and regional news media make it appear familiar and reliably structured. 3. A colony is a split affair. For colonizers, a colony’s creative rationale (a) is

to make the world their home, to use it and transform it along largely familiar principles and structures. For the colonized, this may not seem to promise a welcome change to their home. But, in the contact zone,4 where the colonizers 3 For the socio-psychological mechanisms in this process I am obliged to Norbert Elias, The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems (London: Frank Cass, 1965). I have dealt with the literary implications of this process in “Ethnic Australia and the Migrant Experience: Traumatic Departures – Poetic Arrivals,” in Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia, ed. Igor Maver (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996): 275–86. 4 Mary Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992): 6–7, established this term as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each

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have to negotiate with the colonized, there are usually found a suffiently large number of mediators who are ready to adapt to the mostly powerful but often also fascinatingly rewarding ways of the invaders. Certainly, the invaders also adapt to some extent, if only by picking up scraps of the local language or paying the locals in currencies already established. Colonies, starting with the marginal contact zones, are therefore deeply hybrid territories, split between the colonizers and the colonized. This split is imported into the very psyche of both players. Colonies are, on the one hand, places of imperial expansion, of economic acquisition or other modes of missionary transformation; they are, on the other, undoubtedly places of territorial invasion, of alien spoliation, of forcible expropriation and discrimination; in an historical perspective, they often appear as sites of collaborative subservience and of many other ingenious forms of missionary submission, subversion, and hybrid productivity. A colony’s reward (b), seen from the colonizer’s view, is felt to be different from his or her home country, but it is not felt to be foreign or alien in all respects. In fact, from the early Greek colonies in the Mediterranean, colonial spaces were the testing-ground for the validity and success of the structures, instruments, and methods of cultivation which had proved productive at home. From the view of the colonized, a colony’s reward may be seen to be vested in profitable negotiation and collaboration with the colonizer, either with a view towards eventual political independence, or irrespective of any public benefit. ‘Home’, for the colonizer, is thus an elliptical notion, with the one focus still in the old world, while a gradual shift of experience strengthens the colonizer’s belief that the new world is becoming ‘home’. The achievement of emotional ‘arrival’ in the colony as a new home has often been claimed within a lifetime, but in fact this process can take a number of generations. Colonies have occasionally been acquired (c) by the colonizers through sheer force at the point of a gun. But this was the exception rather than the rule. The subtler ways of permits and tradeposts granted by the local rulers in their own interest proved to be a much less violent and much more viable mode of entry for colonial acquisition and occupation. In many cases this led to the gradual arrogation of power under an asymmetrical, exploitative coloother and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. [. . . ] ‘Contact zone’ in my discussion is often synonymous with “colonial frontier.” But while the later is grounded within a European perspective (the frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe): ‘contact zone’ is a attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subject previously separated by geographical and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term ‘contact’, I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppresed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination.”

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nial rule, but also, in rare cases, to forms of beneficial und responsible government. For the colonized, there is of course no need to ‘acquire’ the colony (which, after all, is their home country). But sooner or later the hybrid character of the colony demands that the colonized adapt their habits and customs (often including their language) to the colonizers if they wish to profit from the imported culture. Colonies can be threatened or lost (d) through the political weakness, commercial lassitude, and missionary fatigue of the colonizer. Such revelations are usually triggered by growing resistance among the local population, which can break out in sudden mutinies or achieve its goal after prolonged struggles for independence. Territorial terrors (both performed and experienced) accompany every phase in this process. As long as colonies appear to be worth keeping by the colonizer, or – changing our perspective – as long as the colonial systems appears tolerable and /or even promising to the colonized, colonies are defended and maintained (e). The instruments of such phases of colonial stability are conservative force and humanitarian missions, on the one hand, and willing collaboration accompanied by profit-oriented subservience, on the other. The colonial ‘Other’ (f) is conveniently, often polemically, stylized in terms of a clear antithetical structure of stereotypes, which frequently does not accord with the diversified reality of the contact zone. There is the backward, primitive, undeveloped, but also helpless and underprivileged type of the colonized, on the one hand, despised or commiserated with (or said to be despised and commiserated with) by the colonizer; and there is the proud, arrogant, aloof, reckless, unappoachable, and superior colonizer, on the other hand, feared or revered (or said to be feared and revered) by the colonized. It is one of the most rewarding and fruitful fields of postcolonial literature and postcolonial studies to deal honestly and realistically with these stereotypes. Colonial space is ideally seen (g), on the one hand, as a fertile, productive garden, dependent for seeding on the colonizing country, but largely useful and altogether manageable to the colonizer; on the other hand, the colonized will see their country as a naturally fertile, cultivated home, both basically and ultimately independent from the colonizer’s original home country. In quite a number of colonies, the latter view has even been adopted by the colonizers’ descendants, after independence. 4. ‘Metropolis’, finally, the last of our crucial and contested types of place, is an old yet immensely productive spatial project. In its creative rationale (a), ‘metropolis’ can be seen as a locus which conceptually inverts the notion of colony. Embodying the principle of making your home the world (instead of making the world your home), it incorporates the postcolonial global experiment in a single cosmopolitan place. A metropolis (b) was defined in classical

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Antiquity above all as the seminal place for a host of colonial cities – the ‘mother city’ providing for her offspring an architectural, administrative, and communal model of urban cohabitation. Metropolis has become, as a result of colonialism, a city with a big heart. A modern metropolis ideally offers a neutral place in the midst of a diversified assembly of independent native countries. Here the world is supposed to meet on equal terms in a civilized, open-minded, liberal atmosphere of mutual respect. The conflicts and contradictions between home and the world, and, along with this, the uneasy and unresolved hybridities of the colonial past are said to have been overcome in the metropolis turned cosmopolitan. A metropolis of this kind will be shaped – rather than acquired (c) – by the mutual trust of world citizens who participate in the liberal acceptance of others as equals, while acknowledging their different background. This does not work without a code of ethics which is largely accessible and acceptable to all citizens of the metropolis. Above all, this code is neither meant to be partisan, nor can it be an exclusive product of the firstcomers. It is an integral if not ‘global’ ethic,5 so that ideally there is no ethnic barrier for outsiders in a metropolis. Cosmopolitanism, however, is based on a precarious balance. In a metropolis, this balance can be threatened or lost (d) by illiberal majorities, by radical (fundamentalist) minorities, by segregation and ghettoization. Cosmopolitanism can be defended, reinforced, and maintained (e) by convincing the metropolitan citizens of the necessity of liberal education rather than by insisting on qualified constituencies and reserved seats. ‘Others’ (f) in the postcolonial metropolis are ideally seen not as sinister and incalculable exotics but as potential partners. Metropolitan space, in order to guarantee its beneficial purposes, must be freely accessible in public areas and buildings. However, a metropolis must make sure, at the same time, that private homes remain safe and unmolested from both criminal assault and undue public interference. The project of such a metropolis is undoubtedly still in the making, at the stage of an unfulfilled utopia, and there have been disappointments as old as the myth of Babylon’s dispersion. But the idea of a cosmopolitan Jerusalem remains a necessary and fruitful utopia nevertheless. It is operative in competitive variants in many parts of the world. ½¾

Falling back behind these ideals, fears and processes of internal corrosion, external invasion or violent loss can fill each of these crucial types of place 5 Which may include but is not limited to the features of Hans Küng’s religious project proposed in Declaration Toward a Global Ethic: Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, ed. Hans Küng & Karl–Josef Kuschel (Munich: Piper, 1993).

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with territorial terrors. Under threat, individuals and groups tend to mobilize and take recourse to atavistic, pre-civilized patterns of behaviour for their selfdefence and survival. Such problematic developments are envisaged and – to a certain extent – defused in the alternative worlds of fiction. Thus, H O M E can become the site of embittered resistance and uncontrolled violence if the owner feels disowned by intruders and therefore threatened in his identity. We find highly sensitive tratments of such territorial terrors in, for example, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and Mudrooroo’s Doctor Wooreddy’s Description for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983). Similar terrors can be unleashed even within cohabitating groups by the domineering and inconsiderate behaviour of one of its members. Dominant male behaviour in self-assertive women’s writing, whether Indian, South African, Caribbean or otherwise, is prone to fall into this category of territorial terrors. Territorial terrors within or against one’s N A T I V E C O U N T R Y tend to lead to war against the disturber of peace, if that disturber cannot be dealt with by the police but is identified as a foreign group or agency. Much of the literature supporting national independence or indigenous-rights movements tends to locate the major source of territorial terrors with the alien disturber of peace: for example, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child (1964), Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979), and Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986). The illusion of successful C O L O N I A L E X P A N S I O N can be repealed or relinquished by the colonial power under the impression of territorial terrors performed by the colonized. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) can be seen as a disturbing case in point. On the other hand, the territorial terrors which a colonizing power is able and willing to perform, can, at least temporarily, silence or break the communal spirit of independence in a group, a tribe or a nation. Anglo-Indian ‘Mutiny’ novels have amply covered this field, from Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896) to John Masters’ Nightrunners of Bengal (1956). Finally, the utopian experiment of a cosmopolitan M E T R O P O L I S can be impaired, interrupted, or even upset by territorial terror waged from within. Literature has reflected this since Wilkie Collins’ or Conan Doyle’s mystery novels and detective stories set in nineteenth-century London; on the other hand, the authors of ghetto literature, whether highlighting the threatened spaces of New York’s Harlem or of London’s Hackney, are still grappling with the terrors of cosmopolis created by dominant groups or agents, as they define and maintain their territories. ½¾

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In any of these conflicts, however, literature and the educational reading and comprehension of literary texts proves to be an invaluable and irreplaceable site of negotiation. Literature can take the role of a passionate but non-violent public and educational forum on which we may possibly understand and come to terms with contested spaces and their burning questions before they kindle new forms of terror. WORKS CITED Primary Reading Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (1958; Oxford: Heinemann, 1986). Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace (1999; London: Vintage, 2000). Grace, Patricia. Potiki (1986; Auckland: Penguin, 1987). La Guma, Alex. Time of the Butcherbird (1979; Oxford: Heinemann, 1987). Masters, John. Nightrunners of Bengal (1951; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Mudrooroo. Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983; Melbourne: Hyland House, 1996). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Weep Not, Child (1964; London: Heinemann, 1981). Rao, Raja. Kanthapura (1938; Delhi: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1989). Steele, Flora Annie. On the Face of the Waters (1896; London: Heinemann, 1897).

Secondary Sources Bollnow, Otto Friedrich. Mensch und Raum [Man and Space] (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963). Elias, Norbert. The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems (London: Frank Cass, 1965). Küng, Hans, & Karl–Josef Kuschel, ed. Declaration Toward a Global Ethic: Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (Munich: Piper, 1993). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Stilz, Gerhard. “Ethnic Australia and the Migrant Experience: Traumatic Departures – – Poetic Arrivals,” in Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia, ed. Igor Maver (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996): 275–86.

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In the Enemy’s Camp Women Representing Male Violence in Zimbabwe’s Wars

P AULINE D ODGSON –K ATIYO

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have emerged in Zimbabwean literature over the past twenty years: writing representing women’s oppression; and writing describing the experiences of soldiers in the liberation war of the 1970s. Some Zimbabwean fiction, most notably Chenjerai Hove’s Bones (1988), foregrounds issues of gender within the context of the effect the liberation war has had on the civilian population. What is more unusual, though, is to find Zimbabwean women writers describing and attempting to understand violence perpetrated by male soldiers against women. This essay examines two graphic representations by women writers of male violence in Zimbabwe’s wars, Yvonne Vera’s representation in The Stone Virgins (2002) of the dissident Sibaso and the underlying forces which have led to his return to killing in post-Independence Zimbabwe and Alexandra Fuller’s representation in Scribbling the Cat (2004) of the ex-Rhodesian soldier K as both predator and victim in late Southern African settler history. The essay also shows the ways in which both writers reveal the contradictions and ambivalences in the process of healing. WO NOTABLE TRENDS

He Has Lived to Tell Many Illicit Versions of the War The Stone Virgins depicts the savage aftermath of the liberation war. Vera describes dissident activity in Matabeleland in the 1980s and the oppression of the local population by the elite national army unit, the Fifth Brigade. The novel is centred on two sisters, Thenjiwe, who is brutally killed by the exZ I P R A fighter Sibaso, and the other, Nonceba, whom he rapes and mutilates. Between the two sisters is the archivist Cephas Dube, the lover of Thenjiwe and friend of and carer for Nonceba. Vera is known as a writer who breaks taboos, particularly in her depiction of male violence against women and

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children. She also probes the male unconscious in order to reveal how ordinary men become violators. In her portrayal of the guerrilla turned dissident, Sibaso, Vera represents what Horace Campbell, writing on Zimbabwean nationalism, has referred to as “deformed masculinity.”1 As in the official version of Zimbabwean history – the nationalist story of the liberation war and Independence – Sibaso claims for the guerrilla the right to represent the state of the nation. However, his version of the war and of present reality is shown as a perversion of history. Vera’s position on Sibaso is expressed in Nonceba’s narration, “He has lived to tell many illicit versions of the war, to recreate the war.”2 Sibaso acts as a commentator on the liberation war and the failure of Independence in his weaving of his own story, but his use of a complex imagery of types of spider suggests that the history of the war has many different strands, none of them entirely trustworthy. Sibaso’s vision relies on hyperbole and empty rhetoric: “Our country needs this kind of hero [...] who is in flight towards an immaculate truth” (75). Sibaso has left behind part of his past identity in abandoning his own name and adopting a war or chimurenga name. He has “crossed many rivers” with the name Sibaso “no longer on my lips, forgotten. It is an easy task to forget a name” (74). Sibaso is also without a home. In the liberation war, guerrillas were sent to areas away from their homes so that they would not be sympathetic to the local population and would punish those believed to be sellouts or sorcerers. The guerrillas were called ‘children’ by the local people, yet they had more power than the traditional elders.3 Sibaso has lived within this contradiction, but to be “without a name” in Vera’s fiction is a dangerous and tenuous state in which home and family are denied.4 At Independence, Sibaso returns to his family’s old home in Njube but does not find his father. He does, however, find a relic of his past. A copy of Solomon Mutswairo’s novel Feso (1956) has been left in the house and Sibaso realizes that the book belongs to him. Described by George Kahari as an allegorical romance, Feso celebrates a precolonial Shona past which thrives on the values of cattle and land ownership. A poem calling on the spirit of Nehanda to free people from

1 Horace Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation (Claremont: David Philip, 2003): 1. 2 Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins (Harare: Weaver, 2004): 73. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1991): 149–50. 4 In Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name (Harare: Baobab, 1996), the protagonist Mazvita, a victim of rape, cannot name her child. See also Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning (Harare: Baobab, 1998), on the importance of names.

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oppression is included in the text5 and this was recited at nationalist rallies during the war. Sibaso had once been inspired by the nationalist cause. He remembers reading Feso at university and now, as he opens the book, he finds inside it a map with an arrow pointing to the route he took to leave the country and, between the map and the first page, finds a crushed spider “weighed down by time” (110). For Sibaso, the war has not finished; “Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong” (89). He hides among the rocks, caves, and shrines of Gulati, and their mystery and ancient history weigh heavily upon him. He sees ancient rock paintings of two women, virgins who were sacrificed with a dead king. During his attack on Nonceba, she becomes one of the sacrificial virgins, “a painted memory,” “a dead past” (71). As he rapes her, Nonceba thinks, “He is a predator, with all the fine instincts of annihilation” (62). Vera’s description of Thenjiwe’s beheading and Nonceba’s rape and mutilation juxtaposes the brutality of Sibaso’s acts with words that usually denote kinship and kindness. His physical closeness to Nonceba makes him a “companion” (63) and “he cradles her like a wounded child”; Nonceba almost removes “his lullaby from this scene”; Sibaso “offers words that could heal” (65). In an interview with Jane Bryce, Vera talks about how she choreographed the scenes of violence, “The death becomes like a dance, the way the man kills this woman is almost sexual, its skill and passion and intimacy, while maintaining the violence and blackness of the scene, which was true of the experience of Matabeleland.”6

His Discovery Sounded Official Cephas, in contrast to Sibaso, seems to be a man who records and preserves events for posterity rather than a man who participates in them. Yet Cephas does participate as he evolves a form of historical practice that departs from conventional academic history. A brutal contemporary history has to change the historian’s practice as bearing witness and working towards healing and reconstruction become as important as objectively analyzing primary and secondary sources. I want to look at this closely in relation to Breaking the Silence (1997), a report by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (C C J P Z ) and the Legal Resources Foundation (L R F ) on the violence in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s. The summary report 5

George Kahari, The Rise of the Shona Novel: A Study in Development, 1890–1984 (Gweru: Mambo, 1990): 44–49. 6 Jane Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera,” in Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, ed. Robert Muponde & Mandi Taruvinga (Harare: Weaver & Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 224.

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(1999) outlines the data used as evidence. This includes written records from the 1980s produced by missionaries, journalists, lawyers, and historians; medical records including hospital record cards and x-rays; evidence from graves and mine shafts; and evidence collated from interviews conducted in the 1990s. The summary report has been published in Ndebele and Shona as well as English so that “people in affected regions can read how their history has been told, and people in unaffected regions can learn about it for the first time.”7 The report states that, although there was a Unity Accord signed in December 1987, true unity cannot take place until the government admits what happened. Following a broad post-apartheid South African model, it adds “from truth will come reconciliation.”8 In The Stone Virgins, Cephas approaches Nonceba in the mid-1980s, immediately after her ordeal and before the Unity Accord. Nonceba, therefore, has reason to be suspicious of Cephas and how he obtained his knowledge of her mutilation and her sister’s death. Nonceba is still traumatized and is not yet ready to tell her story to a relative stranger.9 When Cephas visits her in Kezi, she remembers him as the man who kept vigil at her hospital bed and she now fears that his presence will force her to encounter what happened in her recent past. Michel de Certeau, commenting on Freud’s return of the repressed, states: History is “cannibalistic,” and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations; forgetting, which is not something passive, a loss, but an action directed against the past; and the mnemic trace, the return of what was forgotten, in other words, action by a past that is now forced to disguise itself.10

As Cephas walks towards her, Nonceba attempts to project him back into the hospital room, a room over which she has drawn “a dark and heavy curtain” (134). Since she cannot literally do this, she has many questions in her mind: Who is he? Why has he come? How did he get through the soldiers’ road blocks? Is he a policeman who understands “the right punishment to mete out to a deceased past, her past?” (135). Cephas’s name, like his message to her, 7 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe & Legal Resources Foundation, Breaking the Silence: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980–1988; A Summary (Harare: C C J P Z & L R F , 1999): 1. 8 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe & Legal Resources Foundation, Breaking the Silence, summary report, 3. 9 My use of this description plays on the different meanings of ‘relative’ and attempts to convey Nonceba’s ambivalent feelings about Cephas and his relationship to her sister. 10 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986): 3–4.

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lies somewhere unread. As he begins to talk to her, “the information he holds back seems crucial to her” (138). Cephas tells her that he is an archivist and that, when he was cutting newspaper clippings, he saw an article about what had happened to her and Thenjiwe. He adds that since he had once been close to Thenjiwe, he knew he had to find her sister. This revelation makes Nonceba angry, in part because “he has put her name in a file. Stored her. Pinned her down” but also because he is “claiming Thenjiwe’s memory in terms she cannot even imagine” (140). Cephas wants to take her to the safety of Bulawayo and away from Kezi, which he describes as “a naked cemetery where no one is buried and everyone is betrayed” and where “there is no certainty of life, only death. To die here is to be abandoned to vultures and unknown graves” (143). This brief metaphoric description of Kezi encapsulates the horror and uncertainty of rural Matabeleland but so, too, does Nonceba’s response as she wonders whether he knows why Thenjiwe was murdered: After all, the most unimaginable event is not only possible, but probable, in Kezi. As he says, it is a naked cemetery. This is what he means, surely, that there is not even a thin line between life and death, in Kezi. Is he standing on that faint line? Is this his special task, to make sure that the dead cannot choose their dreams, or the living. This is what the men loose in the bush are doing and the soldiers – both equally dedicated to ending lives. (145–46)

Her refusal, on this first occasion when they have spoken, to separate Cephas from the dissidents or the soldiers implicates the historian in what has happened to her and Thenjiwe and in the violence perpetrated in Matabeleland. How does Nonceba know to whom it is safe to talk? Later, when they share a home in Bulawayo, she asks him, “What did you file today?” (163). Cephas does not respond but the narrator uses this question to return to Cephas’s error in the way he told Nonceba how he had heard about her sister’s death and her rape and mutilation,”He should have simply told her that he had been reading the paper like anybody else. He must have sounded very suspicious to her, a year ago, to link his discovery of her and her sister to his work. His discovery sounded official” (163). Collecting and archiving is Cephas’s work as killing is the work of the Fifth Brigade authorized by the country’s leadership. Sibaso’s work is also killing. He may be a maverick now but he has learnt to kill within the organization of a guerrilla army which imposed the authority of the ‘children’ on the traditional social structures. The ambiguity in Nonceba describing violence in a vocabulary that foregrounds kindness is also present in the language of truth and reconciliation. Keeping vigil, bearing witness, and giving testimony have come to have positive connotations because they are ways of uncovering the truth and may lead to healing, but they are always either con-

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tiguous with or after the horror, which cannot be erased. Julie Frederikse has documented how the Rhodesian Psychological Operations unit would display guerrillas’ bodies and force people to look at them.11 The anthropologist Richard Werbner comments that the Rhodesians “made the violation of the person into a deliberately savage form of psychological warfare. Their sadistic tactics were intended to turn the people’s own sense of humanity against them in physically loathsome perversions.”12 Similarly, both of the liberation armies, Z A N L A and Z I P R A , publicly punished alleged sell-outs by beating, torture or death witnessed by others and the Fifth Brigade held night meetings during which groups of women were forced to beat each other while others watched. The “staccato narration” of Nonceba’s hospital card gives the bare details of what has happened to her, “inflicted as by a sharp object .. . could be a blade .. . victim did not see the instrument ... grievous harm . .. lips cut off … urgent surgery required ... skin graft” (165). Nonceba’s attack was by a dissident and, so, could be reported but violent acts committed by the Fifth Brigade and other government forces who were, as Breaking the Silence makes clear, the perpetrators of most of the political violence in Matabeleland in the 1980s, were largely unreported in Zimbabwe. A hospital record card, even if it only tells impersonally a small part of the story, is nevertheless valuable evidence in the cause of human rights. Thenjiwe’s death and Nonceba’s rape and mutilation are set within the wider spectrum of political violence. Soldiers come to Thandabantu store and torture to death the store-keeper Mahlathini. The description of Mahlathini’s death is given in horrifying detail but the horror cannot be spared because “they made a perverse show out of his death” (121) and “Mahlathini’s death would not be registered. There would be no memory desired of it. It was such a time; such a death” (122). In the hospital, Nonceba learns of a traumatized woman who was given an axe by soldiers and told that if she did not kill her husband, they would kill her sons. Vera is one of the few Zimbabwean writers who have described the reign of terror of the Fifth Brigade, named Gukurahundi, the name meaning the sweeping away of chaff with the spring rains.13

11 Julie Frederiksë, None But Ourselves: Masses vs. Media in the Making of Zimbabwe (1982; Harare: O T A Z I / Anvil, 1990): 127–29. 12 Richard Werbner, “In Memory: A Heritage of War in Southwestern Zimbabwe” in Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe & Terence O. Ranger (Oxford: James Currey, 1996): 194. 13 Werbner discusses the shifting meanings of the Shona word Gukurahundi in nationalist discourse, Tears of the Dead, 161–62; “In Memory: A Heritage of War in Southwestern Zimbabwe,” 198. For an earlier use of the term Gukurahundi in the suppression of the Nhari

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Vera is in no doubt that what the Fifth Brigade and the government bring is war. In an unusually short chapter of the novel, chapter five, Vera explicitly states that another war has started after Independence, “Memory is lost. Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981” (59). Cephas tells Nonceba, “No one knows how many people have died. No one knows when it will all end, and if it will end” (143). At the end of the novel, Cephas feels that “perhaps he has become too involved in replicating histories” (165) and he returns to the task of building a bee-hive hut which is to be installed in a model of the kraal of the nineteenthcentury Ndebele king, Lobengula. The Stone Virgins, though, has demonstrated the importance of the remote past to the recent past, the present, and the future. The historical shrines and landscape of Southern Matabeleland were sites of war in the 1970s and 1980s and, in the historian Terence Ranger’s words, “the whole landscape of the Matopos was scarred by these visual memories of violence.”14 Vera has re-created this destruction and desecration of the landscape but has also articulated the community’s continuing sense of loss and grieving.

He Looked Cathedral In the travel narrative Scribbling the Cat, Alexandra Fuller describes a journey she undertakes with the ex-Rhodesian soldier K from Zambia to Zimbabwe and Mozambique to allow him to confront his use of extreme violence in the liberation war. The first part of the story is set in Zambia and describes Fuller’s initial impressions of K and their early conversations. The second part describes K’s reliving of memories of the war during their journey and their encounters with other former Rhodesian soldiers. As a child, Fuller lived with her British family in Rhodesia during the war years of the 1970s, and, then, in Malawi and Zambia – experiences she describes in her well-reviewed memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002). Although now resident in the U S A , Fuller, who frequently returns to Zambia to visit her family, considers herself an African writer. In an interview with Dave Weich, she contrasts her work with that of the settler writer Karen Blixen, stating that she wants to dispel the romantic mythology of Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937).15 However, Tony Simoes da Silva compares Fuller’s

Rebellion of 1974, see David Martin & Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1981): 166. 14 Terence O. Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 1999): 231. 15 Dave Weich, “Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller” (2004): http://www.powells.com /authors/fuller.html

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Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight to the colonial autobiographies of Blixen and Elspeth Huxley. He argues that Fuller “overtly revisits the colonial imaginary archives of a love affair with Africa so well articulated in Karen Blixen’s narrative.”16 Scribbling the Cat is not as easy to categorize as Fuller’s childhood memoir. Her descriptions of Africa and Africans in Scribbling the Cat place it within the tradition of settler writing in Eastern and Southern Africa but, beyond this, it is positioned within a wider contemporary Western ‘humanitarian’ discourse of Africa as a tragic continent beset by wars, famine, natural disasters, disease, and the corruption of its rulers. Scribbling the Cat is dedicated to two of the characters in the book, K and Mapenga, and also to “two African writers who stared war in the face and chose not to look the other way.”17 The first is Alexander Kanengoni, a former Z A N L A combatant whose novels on the war of independence include the influential Echoing Silences (1997). The second writer is Dan Eldon, a photojournalist for Reuters, killed on an assignment in Somalia in 1993. Thus, in these two dedications, Fuller puts war within two contexts. The first is the local war she experienced herself and the second is that of the ubiquitous wars of Africa, waged by African dictators and bringing perennial pain, hunger, and poverty to people who deserve better, a constant theme in Fuller’s writing and interviews. K, the man with whom Fuller travels, is a former Rhodesian Light Infantry (R L I ) soldier, a veteran of the Zimbabwean liberation war who fought in Zimbabwe and Mozambique and who now owns an isolated farm in eastern Zambia near Fuller’s family. Describing her first impressions of K, Fuller emphasizes his physical attractiveness, his prowess, and what she sees as his self-sufficiency: Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily beautiful, but in a careless, superior way, like a dominant lion or an ancient fortress. He had a wide, spade-shaped face and wary, exotic eyes, large and khaki colored. His lips were full and sensual suggesting a man of quick, intense emotion [. . . ]. He looked like he was his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation – a living, walking, African Vatican City. As if he owned the ground beneath his feet, and as if the sky balanced with ease on his shoulders. He looked cathedral. (20)

I have quoted Fuller’s description of K at some length to illustrate its incongruity. The Christian religious imagery contrasts with Fuller’s use of an orien16 Tony Simoes da Silva, “African Childhoods: Identity, Race and Autobiography,” Mots Pluriels 22 (2002): http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/MP2202tss.html 17 Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2004): dedication. Further page references are in the main text.

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talist discourse in her description of K’s physicality and sexual attractiveness. K, like Fuller, is a product of Rhodesian society but, in this description, he is the object of the female gaze. This female orientalist gaze, in contrast to the normative orientalist gaze, constructs the male colonial subject as ‘Other’, producing unstable and contested meanings. K’s position is less ideological than Sibaso’s. The war gave him camaraderie and the responsibility of looking after other men but he gives Fuller the impression that he fought to stay alive rather than for a cause. After the war, K conformed to the stereotype of ex-Rhodesian soldiers, drinking heavily, brawling, and having broken-down marriages. Now following the death of his young son, K is a born-again Christian, reading the natural signs he believes God sends him, one of which, a cow bone, he relates to a dream he has had in which he tries but fails to release a black woman from a grave. K tells Fuller that God has told him he has “to go back there and let her go” (111). Fuller comes to understand the meaning of this on their journey.

I Own This Now. This Was My War Too When K explains that he is going to tell Fuller about a terrible incident and that this may destroy their friendship, she is at first excited by this, “I felt somehow that if I knew this one secret about K – this one, great, untold story – then everything else about him would become clear and I could label him and write him into coherence” (147–8). She wants to know this secret because “then I would know what I was doing here and how I had arrived here and I’d know more about who I was” (148). When K goes on to tell her that she is the only person he would trust with it, her response is ambivalent: “I wanted his story, but I didn’t want his trust. And now I could tell that K’s story wasn’t something I wanted to carry with me back into my other life. Into the life-asmother, life-as-wife. The insistently bright, loudly optimistic life that was my real life.” (148). K confesses that on one of his missions he instructed his men to beat and torture a young woman in order to make her tell them where guerrillas were hiding. When she refused to tell them, K forced hot sadza into her vagina to make her speak. The woman died two weeks later, but K managed to escape a manslaughter charge by pleading insanity. Fuller’s exposure to K’s brutal act results in her acceptance of collective responsibility, “I own this now. This was my war too. I had been a small, smug white girl shouting,‘We are all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickandthin.’ I was every bit that woman’s murderer” (152). Adam Fifield, reviewing Scribbling the Cat in the Washington Post, argues that Fuller exaggerates her own complicity in order

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to see parallels between herself and K.18 However, the sins of the fathers are visited on their descendants in the Freudian memory-traces of the experiences of previous generations. Fuller has displaced this to some extent. Her representation of her own father is of a relatively benign if slightly eccentric man. He was a member of the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit (P A T U ) but he himself describes this as “a bunch of bumbling farmers buggering around in the bush without much of a clue” (33).19 K has more experience than Fuller’s father of the horror of the war. His position moves between being that of the ‘Other’ whom Fuller is studying, labelling and writing “into coherence” to being that of the ‘father’ who educates her about the war. Behind K is the patriarchal organization of the Rhodesian state with its use of propaganda and ‘psych ops’ against the nationalist guerrilla armies. However, another forerunner to Fuller is represented in the framing of the book. Fuller clearly believes that she is indebted to Kanengoni. Each of the two parts of Scribbling the Cat begins with a quotation from Echoing Silences. In Kanengoni’s novel, the Z A N L A guerrilla Munashe Mungate is forced to kill a woman and her child after the Nhari Rebellion (1974), a failed attempt to replace the Z A N U leadership. The killing haunts Munashe, who takes part in a spirit-possession ritual in order to be cleansed of the violence he has committed. Fuller’s second quotation from Echoing Silences finishes with Munashe telling his friend, Chenai, “There is no way I can reconcile myself with the ghosts of war without beginning in Mozambique” (93).20 Kanengoni’s revelation of the violence and trauma of a soldier in one of the liberation armies enables Fuller to write of the violence and trauma suffered by a soldier on the other side in the war. Behind Munashe is the Z A N L A High Command who authorized the reprisals and, by extension, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s liberation hero and President, whom Fuller has described as a corrupt and despotic leader and whom Kanengoni still supports. Indeed, it is the way the world now sees Mugabe and the government of Zimbabwe that allows Fuller to resurrect a Rhodesian soldier and make him into a tragic figure. 18

Adam Fifield, “Scribbling the Cat,” Washington Post (30 May 2004): BW7 [review]. It is Fuller’s father who has provided the title for the book. Warning Fuller against involvement with K, he tells her: “curiosity scribbled the cat”; Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 45. ‘Scribble’ is slang for ‘kill’. 20 In fact, Fuller slightly misquotes Kanengoni. Munashe says: “There is no way that I can reconcile myself with the ghosts of the war without beginning in Mozambique”; Alexander Kanengoni, Echoing Silences (Harare: Baobab, 1997): 66 (my emphasis). Unlike Fuller, Chenai does not accompany the ex-guerrilla on a journey to Mozambique but prevents him from going by informing his family of his return from the war; Kanengoni, Echoing Silences, 68. 19

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Towards the end of the journey when K has failed to lay his ghosts to rest and Fuller has failed to heal him, she admits that “It had been a broken contract from the start” (238), that K had told her his story because he thought he was in love with her, and she had listened to the story because she thought she wanted “to write him into dry pages” (238). Ironically, Fuller’s reportage is less revealing than Vera’s fiction. Uncertainty about the form of Scribbling the Cat derives, in part, from the blurring of boundaries – the boundary between truth and fiction21 and the complex boundaries between Fuller as amateur psychoanalyst trying to heal K, Fuller as embryonic anthropologist trying to explain K, and Fuller as equally guilty Rhodesian in whose name K’s violent acts were carried out. Fuller’s narrative is episodic and her stories and views are told with cynical humour. With the exception of the story of the young woman K killed, events experienced by K and his friends are recreated in the crude language of an adult comic book. A childhood incident Fuller remembers is instructive. When she is afraid because she thinks there are terrorists hiding under her bed, her sister tells her that there are terrorists “afraid to go to sleep in case they have you under their beds” (74). The problem is that the violence of the soldiers and guerrillas in Zimbabwe’s wars is not a child’s story; nor does it fit into Fuller’s romance manqué with K. The identities of the writer Alexandra Fuller who narrates K’s story and the character known by her childhood name of Bobo Fuller who is a player in that story occupy shifting positions. In her narration, Fuller confesses her complicity in Rhodesian atrocities and her childhood naturalization of settler ideology. However, in her role as player, Fuller becomes a victim in a gendered discourse which sees women as the objects of male desire and excludes them from active roles in serious pursuits such as war. In one episode, K and another former Rhodesian soldier Mapenga play a macabre game of hide-andseek with Fuller in Mozambique. After leaving her to wander around lost in the bush, the men suddenly appear, pretending to spray bullets at her, telling her, “We could have shot you anytime” but that she is safe because “it’s not for real” (219). Fuller occupies the ambiguous position of the settler–invader woman described by Helen Tiffin, in which “in this imperial murder story” of colonization “she is both killer and victim; writer, reader, pupil and teacher; accessory to murder, yet often a (complicit) victim herself.”22 21 In an interview, Fuller states that when she submitted a journal article, an early version of Scribbling the Cat, to the New Yorker, the magazine checked that what she had written was true. See Dave Weich, “Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller.” However, in her “Author’s Note” to Scribbling the Cat, Fuller tells readers they will not be able to find K; “I have covered our tracks as a good soldier always does.” 22 Helen Tiffin, “The Body in the Library: Identity, Opposition and the Settler–Invader Woman,” in The Contact and the Culmination: Essays in Honour of Hena Maes–Jelinek,

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Anthony Chennells, writing of Rhodesian war novels, shows how early settler affection for the natives as primitive and close to nature changes when the native “refuses to remain objectified and be written as primitive”23 and instead works within a nationalist political ideology. Fuller’s admiration for the young woman K, tortured and killed, is qualified by her comment that the woman was “too young to have been as brave and upright and courageous as she was” (154). Fuller’s attempt to use history to analyze the current political position in Zimbabwe fails, because, in her commentary on the war, she is too keen to keep an equal balance sheet between the Rhodesian state and the nationalist political parties and their armies, “Acts of stunning bravery and of spectacular cowardice were committed on both sides. Neither side was exempt from atrocities. Both sides were brutalized by the experience” (38).

Replicating Histories Fuller is both an insider and an outsider in K’s society and, given that both K and Fuller now live elsewhere, that society is, anyway, no longer Zimbabwe but a Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia) of the mind. Fuller’s love affair with Africa leads her to search for a new primitive and, to some extent, she finds this in K and the other ex-Rhodesian soldiers described in Scribbling the Cat. Ruined by civilization, they return to the wilderness. However, their stories and Fuller’s can never be more than a series of episodes on the margins of Zimbabwean history. In contrast, Vera’s re-creation of the past in The Stone Virgins is a transformative intervention in Zimbabwean historiography. In her nonlinear narrative, the cyclical and monumental time of nature and eternity challenges the conventions of nationalist and patriotic history. The process of healing plays an important part in the telling of history but, for Vera, as for Nonceba and Cephas, it is not necessarily progressive and may take a “circuitous route” (163). Sibaso fears the burden of both remote and recent history that he finds in the hills of Gulati. Cephas, in his restoration of Lobengula’s kraal and in his caring for Nonceba, a victim of a recent tragic history, comes to understand that history requires attention to the specific details of nature, material culture and the range of human experience.

ed. Marc Delrez & Bénédicte Ledent (Liège: L3 English Department, University of Liège, 1997): 215. 23 Anthony Chennells, “Rhodesian Discourse, Rhodesian Novels and the Zimbabwe Liberation War,” in Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe & Terence O. Ranger (Oxford: James Currey, 1996): 111.

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WORKS CITED Blixen, Karen [Isak Dinesen]. Out of Africa (London: Putnam, 1937). Bryce, Jane. “Interview with Yvonne Vera” in Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, ed. Robert Muponde & Mandi Taruvinga (Harare: Weaver & Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 217–26. Campbell, Horace. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation (Clarement: David Philip, 2003). Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe & Legal Resources Foundation. Breaking the Silence: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980–1988 (Harare: C C J P Z / L R F , 1997). ——. Breaking the Silence: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980– 1988: A Summary (Harare: C C J P Z / L R F , 1999). Chennells, Anthony. “Rhodesian Discourse, Rhodesian Novels and the Zimbabwe Liberation War,” in Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe & Terence O. Ranger (Oxford: James Currey, 1996): 102–29. De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, tr. Brian Massumi, foreword by Wład Godzich (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P ,1986). Fifield, Adam. “Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier,” Washington Post (30 May 2004): BW7. [Review.] Frederikse, Julie. None But Ourselves: Masses vs. Media in the Making of Zimbabwe (1982; Harare: O T A Z I / Anvil, 1990). Fuller, Alexandra. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (New York: Random House, 2002). ——. Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2004). Hove, Chenjerai. Bones (Harare: Baobab, 1988). Kahari, George. The Rise of the Shona Novel: A Study in Development, 1890–1984 (Gweru: Mambo, 1990). Kanengoni, Alexander. Echoing Silences (Harare: Baobab, 1997). Martin, David, & Phyllis Johnson. The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1981). Mutswairo, Solomon. Feso (1956; Cape Town: Southern Rhodesian African Literature Bureau & Oxford U P , 1957). Ranger, Terence O. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Harare: Baobab, 1999). Simoes da Silva, Tony. “African Childhoods: Identity, Race and Autobiography,” Mots Pluriels 22 (2002): http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/MP2202tss.html Tiffin, Helen. “The Body in the Library: Identity, Opposition and the Settler-Invader Woman” in The Contact and the Culmination: Essays in Honour of Hena Maes– Jelinek, ed. Marc Delrez & Bénédicte Ledent (Liège: L3 English Department, U of Liège, 1997): 213–18. Vera, Yvonne. Butterfly Burning (Harare: Baobab, 1998). ——. The Stone Virgins (Harare: Weaver, 2002). ——. Without a Name (Harare: Baobab, 1996).

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Weich, Dave. “Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller” (2004): http://www.powells .com/authors/Fuller.html Werbner, Richard. “In Memory: A Heritage of War in Southwestern Zimbabwe,” in Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe & Terence O. Ranger (Oxford: James Currey, 1996): 192–205. ——. Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1991).

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Shared Place and Maimed Bodies Flesh of the Past, Soul of the Future (or Vice-Versa) in Once Were Warriors

C HANTAL K WAST –G REFF

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to look at how the clash of civilizations and culture influences and interacts with the body, using the example of Maori fiction and cinema. In this case, the cultural context is usually defined as postcolonial, which is another way of saying one of oppression and potential if not evident violence. The Maori have been forced to live, if not under the aegis of imperial regime, then in a dominantly white society, and have, some of them, over time become New Zealand’s underclass. The film director Lee Tamahori, himself a Maori, places the issue in a strangely optimistic perspective, stating “Unlike other indigenous peoples of the world, there was no genocide ever practiced upon the Maori and they were never forcibly removed to other areas, so, by and large, our history is one of an appreciation of both cultures and intermarriage amongst them.” But he is realistic enough to add: “but that’s a bit of an illusion because the gap between rich and poor is widening and that has tended to make the Maori much more of an underclass.”1 As an ‘underclass’, Maori are not only poor but they are also seen – or see themselves – as having lost their soul, because they have lost touch with their own powerful ancestral culture. The cultural fact of decaying tradition closes off any real link to a proud history. The issue I am looking at here is in how the Maori people are depicted, in fiction and cinema, as attempting to recapture their ‘soul’ by manipulating their body in what may be called a “Maori Revival.” The obvious example and touchstone is Tamahori’s movie Once Were Warriors. It is an emotion1

PROPOSE

“An Interview with ‘Warriors’ Director Lee Tamahori” (February 2005): http://www .finelinefeatures.com/warriors/waintv.htm

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ally powerful movie, a masterpiece and milestone in the history of (New Zealand) cinema. The movie was shot in 1994 along the lines of Alan Duff’s controversial novel published in 1990.2 Both novel and film depict the life of a Maori family in a run-down area of Auckland – father, mother, five kids – and end with the suicide of the adolescent daughter, who has been raped by Uncle Bully (in the film) and by her father (in the novel). In Once Were Warriors – described in nzbooks as “grimly realistic,” “angry, disgusted and honest,” and “written from a Maori perspective”3 – the policy of exclusion is both implicit and evident. There is no possibility of assimilation, despite what Tamahori said in his aforementioned interview. But ‘assimilation’ is not even the point: the point is, how does one survive when there is no hope at all? how do the low-down regain their pride (or mana, to use the Maori word for the complex Polynesian concept of authority that engenders communal respect)? The only way out, the only way, seems to be through the body. There is certainly no dichotomous opposition between body and soul, as some would have it. If the issue is about regaining the soul, it is also about claiming one’s body and finding pride in it. The violence done to the people, any type of violence, whether physical or emotional, translates to their whole being, body, soul, and spirit, or whatever other category one may make; to the whole self. What I am interested in is reading the body and reading meanings onto the body, and possibly ‘translating’ the body. It is then possible to theorize the body as the lived experience of the individual and the group. The body is clearly a discursive place, as feminist and gender theories have made amply clear. It is the physicality of suffering, oppression, and exclusion we are looking at here, and the ‘corpo-reality’ of the marked body. Marking the body, in the contemporary world, has more often than not to do with the creation of a body to fit-and-suit, beautiful or provocative or ‘different’. In Once Were Warriors, the body is absolutely central: marking the body is not, in this context, the making of a fairytale body; although it may be that, too, in some ways. In Warriors, Nig, one of the boys and the elder son, joins a gang. In the process, he is first beaten up, in an extremely brutal way – one wonders how people do not die in their body or remain crippled for the rest of their lives when beaten up like that. (But maybe they do, on an emotional level.) Nig is then permitted to display a facial tattoo or moko on one side of his face. What could be called a rite of passage is the submission to pain, more than the moko itself. The moko is the traditional Maori face-carving: the marks are chiselled into the skin and flesh (not only of men but also of high-born women). Maori 2 3

Alan Duff, Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem, 1990). nzbooks (January 2005), http://www.nzbooks.com

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men could be recognized by their distinctive patterns, as moko carvings were regarded as revealing a person’s true identity. Moko is language itself. In the film we are looking at, it is the ultimate reward, and certainly a sign for all to see, a permanent, life-long commitment to the group. We will all go along with the notion that the body undoubtedly shows cultural belonging and un-belonging. Writing on the body is a ‘way out’ as much as a ‘way in’. A scar is a seme of a lived experience. When the scar is inflicted by the community, it is also a seme of cultural belonging. When it is selfinflicted it is not only the sign of a lived experience or a sign of belonging, but also the sign of where an individual stand towards the community, an innovative re-creation of the image of the self and, more often than not, a sign of unbelonging. The facial tattoo or moko in New Zealand may thus be seen as the corporeal sign of belonging to an ancestral community – real or imagined – or to a contemporary gang system which has little to do with what the ancient moko symbolized. In Western societies, moko designs have come to be seen as aesthetic designs which the young –- or the famous, such as Mike Tyson or Robbie Williams – wear because they ‘like’ it. Paco Rabanne and the French designer Gaultier used the moko in a way that was judged by many as inelegant and exploitative. Because the moko is considered a very personal thing by the Maori, Inia Taylor, a well-known Maori artist who constructed the skin designs in Warriors, made sure to avoid having them ‘tell’, and the film did not contain tribal affiliations and very little personal information.4 In all cases, the moko can be seen as the creation of another self rewritten, palimpsest-wise, over the body. It makes sense, then, to talk about the ‘bodysign’, or the ‘body signed’. No one will doubt that a scar is a sign that can be read. The same is true, to an even larger extent, with all voluntarily inflicted scars, such as tattoos, piercings, mokos, and the like. The sign is inscribed on the body either by accident (accidents) in the course of the progress of life, and each sign links the individual to her own history and the history of her people. What is inscribed on the flesh is thus the chosen or surviving memory of a lived experience, of a life-experience. There is evidently a social impregnation and order of what a body should be, if only in matters of clothing, behaviour, and body ornament. When the body is confronted by oppressive social pressure, it reflects integration, exclusion, and identification. In Once Were Warriors, the Maori are depicted as poor, instinctive, gross sometimes, but also utterly human, and in many ways loveable. They are the cast-offs of society, beyond redemption, except for Gracie, the girl who writes 4

“Burke’s Backyard 33/2003: ‘Maori Tattoos’ ” .burkesbackyard.com.au/2003/archives

(February 2005), http://www

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and tells stories, the original good girl. We are well aware that all protocols of exclusion and rejection create social diseases (violence, unemployment, alcoholism, and welfare dependency), as indeed depicted in Warriors. In a society which is constructed like this, there is little or no hope for the young. Where can the drive for living on and surviving be found then? There is a glimmer of hope for redemption there, in that girl, aptly named Grace. But Grace ends up hanging herself, broken and defeated by the damage done to her body and her soul. The violence done translates onto the body. The individual integrates it at various levels of perception and ultimately translates that violence onto his/her own body. The question is, who survives and what are the means of survival? Pain is not the point; survival is. Survival, then, is in relation with the capacity to regain touch with the mana, ancestral culture and pride. It is about the body walking tall and proud. In Warriors, Grace – the messenger of hope – crumbles because her body and her soul are molested, and because she finds no understanding and no help, and can see no hope. Then there is no hope. The two elder boys find other ways. The way for Nig is the gang, the way for Boogey is, as turns out, the detention centre. What he learns in that place of detention and rehabilitation is to “carry his moko inside.” He learns taiaha (a Maori ancient form of self-defence, where boys fight with a stick). He learns to do the haka (a welcoming song of mock-belligerence that the Maori used to perform before a battle, and which we have all become familiar with, mostly because the All Blacks perform it before their rugby matches, hopefully not because the Spice Girls attempted to do so before one of their shows). Boogey learns to tame and to externalize his anger; he learns to be strong, to feel the power of his ancestors in and through his body. But Nig earns his tattoo the hard way; his moko is not ‘the real thing’, not a traditional moko, as “a manifestation of who you represent, your genealogy, and (what) is to do with the lives of your ancestors before you that made you.”5 Still, it is an image of all that, as a film is an image of a reality. Boogey has not learnt the haka from his ancestors. Each boy builds his own defencemechanism and reconstructs the symbolism of the past, of the pride of the people he belongs to, each in a different way and manner. There is a need to reconstruct a link with the past, between past and present. Only that link gives hope for the future, when no hope can be found in social structures and the culture of the present. Another example of this can be

5

Mia Kassem, “Contemporary Manifestation of the Traditional Ta Moko,” NZArtMonthly (March 2003).

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found in extra feature on the D V D issue6 – a documentary on a Maori woman named Ana Tia, who works to rehabilitate Maori men in prison. She starts each session with chanting – “I call on the spirit of our ancestors to help bring the youth in trouble back to the culture.” She teaches the men to stand tall, literally – showing them how to position their back and thighs and hips – as well as metaphorically. She teaches them how to do the haka, which none of them had learnt from their people. The woman teaches them all these, although they are not “women’s things,” since there is no man around to teach them. Some examples in more recent films point to the possibility of constructing a new link, of creating a new process that did not exist in the old times, as in Whale Rider,7 where the solution is (also) a sort of gender crossing, with the girl becoming the “whale rider” and the leader of her people.8 The film is based on the book The Whale Rider by the Maori novelist and poet Witi Ihimaera. It is described as the story of “one young girl (who) dared to confront the past, change the present and determine the future” in an article whose title is “a Girl Shall lead them.”9 Whale Rider tackles the same issues of abuse, racism, and poverty as Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors, these being the first two such Maori-themed film adaptations to be released internationally. Whereas Tamahori and the novelist Alan Duff before him explore the brutal side of the urban Maori, Ihimaera insists on respect for the elders and ancestors in a village community. Pai has the mana, but she is trapped inside the body of a girl. Her deeply spiritual approach certainly does open doors for the children of tomorrow, even though the girl is sacrificed – or, rather, “commits sacrifice” in the end. The idea is to embody a thing of the past – the facial tattoo and the body practices – in the social practices of the day, with feeling and spirit. It is to translate a capital and strength of the past into the present, into the ‘common’ place and ‘shared zone’ of the present where body and honour can be regained. This certainly implies acceptance on all sides. The ‘oppressed’ (to use a vague, uncertain term) need to find the strength to summon the spirit of their ancestors and the soul of times long past. The ‘powerful’ (to use another 6 Once Were Warriors, dir. Lee Tamahori, adapted by the playwright Riwia Brown from Alan Duff’s eponymous novel (Avalon Studios / Communicado Productions / New Zealand Film Commission / New Zealand On Air; New Zealand 1994; 99 min.; D V D issued 2001). 7 The film was released in France under the title Paï. 8 Witi Ihimaera, Whale Rider (Auckland: Reed, 1987): film (as The Whale Rider) dir. Niki Caro (ApolloMedia / New Zealand Film Commission / New Zealand Film Production Fund / New Zealand On Air / Pandora Filmproduktion / South Pacific Pictures; New Zealand / Germany 2002; 101 min.). 9 whaleriderthemovie, www.whaleriderthemovie.com [accessed February 2005].

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vague, but not uncertain term) need to find it in themselves to ‘let go’, to ‘let it be’ without passing moral judgment and laying opprobrium on those who put their bodies in danger and put themselves at risk. This is the price to pay for a future in terms of survival and humanity. A ‘shared future’ may certainly be seen as (a) utopian ideal. It would be, as I see it, the acknowledging of a shared zone of mutual responsibility, when all human beings may be considered as vital and essential participants in the project of conceiving the future. If I use the word ‘utopia’, it is because the notions of power and race are so strong, and poverty is a fact. But I also believe that a place must be found before it can be shared (in acceptance and respect). The vector (or vehicle) through which that place can be found is the body, in what it shows of the individual, the group, a society, and its values. This is why I so strongly believe in the redeeming quality of bodily transformation. Respect for the ‘corpo-reality’ of the other is in the air these days. The marking of the body is now found acceptable, albeit marginal. It is no doubt a commitment for life where tattoo and moko are concerned, and it is a powerful statement. A great number of recent movies and novels from New Zealand show tattooed bodies. Not that this is not controversial, of course, and highly polemical for the Maori themselves. What I called the ‘Maori Renaissance’ earlier is a first step. The ‘common place’ could be the site of honour regained, and honour may essentially be regained through the body. The use of body markings can be compared to some sort of alternative therapy, because, as Beth, the wife and mother in Warriors, says, “who needs anything else when you got the strength of history supporting ya?”10 Bodies are not merely “passive, inert surfaces onto which inscriptions are etched and social practices are played out.” Like Hélène Cixous, we will regard bodies as “active sites and even resources for producing new kinds of knowledge.”11 What new kinds of knowledge there are to construct and discover is not absolutely clear. If in Warriors we are presented with a redemptive view of the body, this is not so in the movie that is presented as its sequel, What’s Become of the Broken Hearted.12 Here the mother seemingly finds a better life with the welfare officer, the second daughter is forgotten, Boogey appears only briefly in the story, and Toot, Gracie’s friend, still sniffs drugs. The story centres on the fist-happy and 10

Duff, Once Were Warriors, 121. Cited by Alison Bartlett in Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writings (Toowoomba: A S A L – Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998): 70. 12 Ian Mune, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted (New Zealand Film Commission /Polygram Filmed Entertainment / South Pacific Pictures; New Zealand 1999; 103 min.). 11

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heavy-drinking father and his lost soul, and on Nig, the son who had joined a gang in Warriors. His moko is still there, covering the same half of his face, and has not got any further. At the beginning of The Broken Hearted, Nig is set up and shot by his own gang. The story then unfolds over the apparent notion of redemption and father-and-son relation. But it is, as I see it, hardly anything more than just another (violent) street-fighting movie. The body is more central than ever, in pain and blood. But where that leaves mana and the spirit of the ancestors I am uncertain of. Nevertheless, there certainly is a ‘Maori Revival’ these days. There were times when the New Zealand government discouraged tattoos, considering them a thing of the past-to-be-forgotten. The moko was in decline already when, in 1907, the Tohunga Suppression Act made it illegal. The revival began in the 1970s and 1980s. A number of young Maori adults now take on the moko as a gesture of protest, in order to emphasize the alienation of a lost culture. It is a way of acquirng a back-bone. Strength is found in the past and applied to the present. The moko is the symbol of a culture being revitalized and the soul of a people regained. WORKS CITED Bartlett, Alison. Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writings (Toowoomba: A S A L – Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998). Burke’s Backyard 33/2003. “Maori Tattoos,” February 2005. [http://www.burkes backyard.com.au/2003/archives]. Caro, Niki, dir. Whale Rider (ApolloMedia/New Zealand Film Commission/New Zealand Film Production Fund/New Zealand On Air/Pandora Filmproduktion/South Pacific Pictures; New Zealand/Germany 2002; 101 min.). Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem, 1990. Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider (Auckland: Reed, 1987. Kassem, Mia. “Contemporary Manifestation of the Traditional Ta Moko,” NZArt Monthly (March 2003). Mune, Ian, dir. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted (New Zealand Film Commission / Polygram Filmed Entertainment / South Pacific Pictures; New Zealand 1999; 103 min.). Tamahori, Lee. “An Interview with ‘Warriors’ Director Lee Tamahori” (February 2005): http://www.finelinefeatures.com/warriors/waintv.htm ——, dir. Once Were Warriors (Avalon Studios / Communicado Productions / New Zealand Film Commission / New Zealand On Air; New Zealand 1994; 99 min.).

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Historical Trauma, lieu de mémoire, Source of Collective Renewal Parihaka in the Poetic Imagination of Aotearoa New Zealand

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Have you heard of Parihaka Between Maunga Taranaki And the sea Where Te Whito o Rongomai And Tohu Kākahi Preached Passive resistance, not war? Have you heard of Parihaka Where Taranaki iwi Gathered Seeking a way to keep their land? Non-violence was their choice Peace their aim Raukura their badge Ploughs their only weapons. They pulled down fences Pulled out pegs Then ploughed whatever The settlers claimed was theirs. [. . . ] Have you heard of Taranaki iwi Denied a trial, Chained like dogs

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In sealed caves and tunnels? [. . . ] If you haven’t heard of Parihaka, Be sure Your grandchildren will And their children after them, History will see to that. But for now, He waiata tenei mo Parihaka – Aue, aue, a-u-e –

T

H I S I S H O W J . C . S T U R M begins a tripartite poetic account of historical events, culminating on November 5, 1881, in the destruction of a Maori village, located between the Tasman Sea and Mount Taranaki on the North Island of New Zealand.1 On the surface, the “Parihaka affair” may resemble many other evictions of indigenous communities from their ancestral lands by a colonial government eager to make room for growing numbers of white settlers, and determined “to force Maori to submit to European law and admit to European supremacy.”2 But the chain of events leading up to the invasion, the charisma of the people resisting it, and the history of its remembrance distinguish Parihaka from cultural clashes erupting elsewhere in the British colony in the aftermath of the so-called Land Wars during the second half of the nineteenth century.3 Opting for active forms of non-violent resistance and symbolic assertion of land ownership which would become more famous through Mahatma Gandhi one generation later, the Parihaka people successfully challenged British justifications for Empire-building based on a claim to cultural and moral superiority of European civilization. Indigenous people who answered verbal abuse with bible quotations, and physical threats to life or liberty with Christ-like equanimity, who greeted land surveyors and confiscators with hospitable meal invitations, military attackers with childrens songs, did not fit the stereotype of the bloodthirsty primitive savage, as opposed to the innocent, peace-loving white settler: they 1 “He Waiata Tenei Mo Parihaka,” in Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, ed. Miringa Hohaia, Gregory O’Brien & Lara Strongman (Wellington: City Gallery/Victoria U P , 2001): 203. 2 Hazel Riseborough, Days of Darkness: The Government and Parihaka; Taranaki 1878–1884 (Auckland: Penguin, 2002): 8. 3 Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003): 221, recounts a similar, but less well remembered eviction of a Ngai Tahu community in the Upper Waitaki Valley, South Island, in 1879. Under the leadership of Te Maiharoa the group had peacefully re-occupied grazing land near Omarama as an expression of nonviolent protest against questionable land ‘sales’.

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questioned the political and ethical legitimacy of the colonial enterprise as a whole. Peaceful resistance made Parihaka intolerably dangerous for settler–politicians and sealed the fate of the community in the short term; but political and economic defeat came along with a moral victory which survived physical annihilation and secured its remembrance in the long term. The shockwaves emanating from the remote epicentre of interracial conflict were felt all over the archipelago: mobilizing colonial volunteers – eager to defend the interests of their Taranaki peers with military means – may have triggered a surge of proto-nationalist feeling among European immigrants; but Parihaka also reshaped indigenous alliances, divided settler society, and provoked critical comment, including artistic responses, right from the start.4 The story of Parihaka entered the storehouse of collective memory and gained almost mythic status in the New Zealand consciousness. The site itself became what the French historian Pierre Nora has called a lieu de mémoire,5 a ‘realm of memory’: a location where only vestigial traces of a disrupted or destroyed way of living bear witness to its former bloom, and where storytelling must substitute for what was lost. Material relicts become central elements in these narratives, because they authenticate what is remembered by anchoring it locally, by binding it to the soil. Owing to the symbolic depth of ground space, it embodies duration of a kind which outlasts the memory of an individual or a cultural artefact. Once a mental link has been established between the soil and an event, the continuity of the former will reinforce or even extend the memory of the latter. In this way, what was left of Parihaka after 1881 became a reference-point for the collective memory, here understood as a culture-specific reservoir of texts, images, and rites which are in constant use, are regarded as shared knowledge, and help to stabilize a group identity.6 As could be expected, different things were remembered by different groups of people, at different times, and in different ways. For Maori New Zealanders, in one respect Parihaka carries positive connotations, keeping alive 4 See, for instance, Jessie Mackay’s 1881 poems “Departure of the Timaru Volunteers for Parihaka” and, more famously, “The Charge at Parihaka,” a parody of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” or satirical verses on Parihaka published by Alexander Stuart in 1882, quoted in Dick Scott, Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (Auckland: Reed, 1975): 104, 118, 131. 5 Pierre Nora, ed. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols., tr. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. & intro. Lawrence D. Kritzman (Les lieux de mémoire, 1984–92, 7 vols.; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1996–98). 6 For an introduction to research on interactions between collective memory and cultural identity, see Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann & Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 9–19.

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the memory of a centre of “cultural and spiritual replenishment” at a time of crisis.7 But it is also a traumatic site bearing witness to physical abuse, rape, pillage, displacement, and cultural uprooting. Last but not least, it is sacred ground where the two charismatic leaders and “prophets,” Tohu Kakahi and Te Whiti O Rongomai, were buried in 1907, the former “among all the others in the cemetery,” with “its only headstone the cloud that hangs near the mountain,”8 the latter distinguished from his kin by a tomb with a Victorian gothic stone memorial.9 For colonial administrators, the Parihaka eviction became an embarrassment that they tried to remove from local newspaper headlines as quickly as possible. Repeated attempts of later governments to erase Parihaka from geographical maps, and thus from the collective memory of a deeply divided society, failed.10 The memory survived in the unofficial, oral histories of the tribal communities affected by the events and was constantly renewed by anniversary gatherings at the site.11 After World War II, later generations of 7

King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 212, 220–21, and James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1996): 213, 245, 261, also discuss the significance of Parihaka for the development of pan-tribal (i.e. both, intertribal and supratribal) formations during the nineteenth century whereby collective identities of traditional tribal society were reshaped or superseded by a new “sense of ‘Maoriness’.” 8 Scott, Ask That Mountain, 193. 9 Combining elements of the indigenous burial ritual with a culture of remembrance influenced by Victorian graveyard aesthetics (most perceptible in a cone-shaped marble pillar with inscriptions in English and Maori): Te Whiti’s death memorial reflects his role in life as a cultural mediator at a time of radical change. The continuing importance of Te Whiti’s tomb as a focal point for Parihaka commemorations is documented by Fiona Clark’s cibachrome photograph, “The Memorial of Te Whiti o Rongomai at Parihaka, Dawn 6am November 6th 1981” (reproduced in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 161). A typology of commemorative sites, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grave memorials, has been developed by Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1994; Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003); see especially 298–339. Contrary to Assmann’s sharp distinction between ‘sites of remembrance’, stabilized by the stories related to them (Erinnerungsorte), and ‘traumatic sites’, characterized by stories remaining untold or untellable, owing to psychic blockade or social taboo (“traumatische Orte”), however, Parihaka is a site with multiple associations and functions, where trauma does not stand in the way of re-telling and the formation of new narratives. 10 In his “Introduction” to Ask That Mountain, 7, Dick Scott reports government attempts to extinguish the memory of Parihaka until far into the twentieth century, e.g., in the “prestigious A Descriptive Atlas of New Zealand (1959). In that labour of five years, Parihaka has been removed from the map of Taranaki and a non-place, Newall – named after the constabulary officer who arrested Te Whiti and Tohu – is shown instead.” Scott adds that the 1976 edition of the atlas reinstated Parihaka and dropped Newall. See also Riseborough, Days of Darkness, 180–81. 11 Belich, Making Peoples, 262.

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Pakeha New Zealanders (New Zealanders of European descent) in search of a postcolonial collective identity took a new interest in colonial history, the role of their forebears in the settlement of the country, and related intercultural conflicts. Dick Scott’s The Parihaka Story, a small volume first published in 1954, re-edited in an extended version as Ask That Mountain in 1975, and now a New Zealand classic with regular reprints (e.g., 1976, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1991, 1994, 1998), became an eye-opener across ethnic and social divides, offering history lessons people had never learnt at school. Among the more conscientious Pakeha New Zealanders, it triggered shock, shame, anger towards their government, even a sense of betrayal for having been excluded from a full knowledge of the collective past. Highlighting the interdependence between public forgetting, remembering, and political power, Parihaka inspired younger historians and journalists to challenge and rewrite earlier historiography,12 and a number of New Zealand poets13 and painters14 to find their own truth(s) about the place. In more recent years, the variety of artistic responses to Parihaka has been augmented by dramatists,15 novelists,16 and

12

See, for example, Riseborough, Belich, and King, as cited above. See, for example, poems related to the Taranaki Land Wars and Parihaka by James K. Baxter, Warren Dibble, Hone Tuwhare, Barry Mitcalfe, W.H. Oliver, and Sam Hunt. 14 See, for example, Gordon Walters’ two Koru paintings (“Te Whiti,” 1964, and “Tohu,” 1973), the various explorations of the Parihaka theme by Colin McCahon (including his famous “Parihaka Triptych,” 1972), Ralph Hotere (especially his “Te Whiti” series), Michael Smither (e.g., “Ask That Mountain” and “Parihaka, South-Taranaki,” both 1973), and Tony Fomison (e.g., “That Man that Mountain Taranaki,” 1979, and “Te Whiti o Rongomai ae he Tohu Pai,” 1981). Too many paintings, installations, carvings, sculptures, and photographs on Parihaka to be listed in this footnote have been created since the early 1990s. 15 See, for example, Harry Dansey’s play Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross, first performed 1972 (1974; Auckland: Longman Paul, 1978), Mervyn Thompson’s and William Dart’s song-play Songs to the Judges, first performed 1980 (Wellington: Kiwi Pacific Records L P recording, 1982), or Brian Potiki’s play Hiroki’s Song, first performed 1990 (no published print-version available). 16 See, for example, Edmund Bohan, The Matter of Parihaka (Christchurch: Hazard, 2000), a historical detective novel and part of a novel series set in colonial New Zealand and centred on “Inspector O’Rorke.” Blending historical fact and fiction, the book interweaves the history of the earlier Land Wars, the death of von Tempsky, and the mysterious disappearance of his sword, with the murder of a wealthy South Islander and an official investigation of crimes committed by police and constabulary in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Parihaka village in 1881. John Hinchcliff’s more recent attempt at writing the first genuine historical novel on the place, Parihaka (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2004): has been praised by some readers as an accessible and enjoyable account of a significant chapter in New Zealand history, despite its somewhat dilettantish composition, wooden characterization, and historical inaccuracies. 13

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musical composers,17 often in a process of mutual enrichment across medial boundaries.18 Producers of radio and television documentaries,19 museum curators, and art-gallery directors20 have also heightened public awareness of the persisting explosive force of Parihaka memories in a society still struggling to come to terms with its multicultural heritage. Probably the most ambitious project to date has been the Millennium exhibition at the City Gallery in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, in the year 2000. According to its organizers, ‘Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance’ is a timely exhibition to begin the new millennium, a time to take stock of our past and look to the future. It underlines the significance of Parihaka in the past and future of this country. The Teachings of Te Whiti and Tohu of mutual respect and understanding are important lessons for all New Zealanders.21

How difficult mutual understanding still is more than a hundred years after the destruction of the original Parihaka may best be illustrated by the fact that it took seven years of confidence-building and planning cooperation before an urban art gallery and an alienated, culturally marginalized, rural community were ready to stage this multimedia event. Pre-existing and newly commissioned paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations were complemented by poetry readings, screenings of videos, floor talks by inhabitants of 17

See, for example, Anthony Ritchie’s 1994 composition for vocal sextet or six-part choir, based on Jessie Mackay’s “The Charge of Parihaka,” William Dart’s compositions for the song-play Songs to the Judges (quoted above), as well as contributions by popular musicians like ex-Split Enz singer and guitarist Tim Finn (“Parihaka,” 1989), David Grace (“Parihaka,” 1993), and Moana and the Moahunters (“Titokowaru,” 1998). 18 The poet John Caselberg’s 1969 edition of The Voice of the Maori inspired painters like Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon; Ralph Hotere also experimented with language excerpts from poems by Hone Tuwhare, Cilla McQueen, and from traditional Maori proverbs and waiata; artists Theo Schoon and Gordon Walters acknowledged the influence of prehistoric Maori rock paintings on their own work; painter Michael Smither provided a cover design for Scott’s Ask That Mountain which in turn inspired the poet James K. Baxter and the poet–historian W.H. Oliver. 19 In his “Introduction” to Ask That Mountain, 7, Dick Scott mentions a radio documentary by Alwyn Owen (nd): and a television documentary by Michael King and Barry Barclay (aired in 1974). 20 Art exhibitions on Parihaka before Wellington 2000 included “Taranaki Saw It All,” organized by James Mack (Waikato Museum and Art Gallery, 1972), Peter McLeavey Gallery’s display of Colin McCahon’s Paul to Hebrews (Wellington, 1981), and the “Parihaka Centennial Exhibition & Art Auction” (Govett–Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Taranaki, 1981). 21 Mahara Okeroa, Paul Rangi-Punga, & Paula Savage, “Acknowledgements,” in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 14.

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Taranaki district, a lecture series and discussions between academics and the general public. History was no longer presented as the exclusive domain of professional historiographers; nor did it remain a mere theme reflected and represented in art. The search for an alternative way of relating to the past resulted in a polyphonic, cross-disciplinary, and intercultural dialogue. Over a period of several months (26 August 2000 to 19 January 2001), the revision of national history from a decolonized (multi-)perspective took on a genuinely performative character in the communal act(ivity) of mourning, of remembering a shared, hitherto suppressed, traumatic past in the public sphere.22 The significance attributed to this event was further emphasized by the publication of a book which surpasses the conventional functions of an exhibition catalogue and is itself no little piece of composite art: not only does it commemorate Parihaka as an historical site relevant for all New Zealanders;23 it also preserves Wellington’s particular way of remembering Parihaka at a particular moment in history and recommends it, to the inhabitants of New Zealand and to the outer world, as a cultural achievement in its own right.24 In addition to reproductions of old and new fine art exhibits,25 historical photographs, statements by cultural representatives of the Parihaka community, and new academic research,26 the editorial board had commissioned ten new poems on Parihaka.27 22

It thereby reflects a changed attitude towards the collective past which, ten years earlier, had been criticized quite harshly by Nelson Wattie: “In Germany there has been considerable public concern about the psycho-social consequences of repressing memories of the cruel and brutal miseries which provided a basis of experience for the lives of presentday Germans. In New Zealand there is almost no public concern about the consequences of repressing memories of the brutal realities which provided part of the foundations of modern society”: Wattie, “The New Zealand Land Wars in Novels by Shadbolt and Ihimaera,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross / Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990): 433–34. 23 Paul Morris, “The Provocation of Parihaka: Reflections on Spiritual Resistance in Aotearoa,” in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 116, even recommends the inauguration of November 5 as a new national holiday (“Parihaka Day”). 24 This judgment is shared by Laurence Simmons’s book review of the exhibition catalogue, “Bearing Witness,” Landfall 301 (2001): 167–73. 25 Fine art newly commissioned for the exhibition includes works by Paratene Matchitt, Laurence Aberhart, Anne Noble, Michael Shepherd, Darcy Nicholas, Séraphine Pick, John Walsh, Chris Heaphy, John Pule, Shane Cotton, Brett Graham, Fred Graham, John Baxter, Tame Iti, and Natalie Robertson. 26 It includes essays on the political history of Parihaka (Hazel Riseborough, “Te Pāhuatanga O Parihaka,” 19–42): on art history (Wystan Curnow, “Muriwai To Parihaka,” 139– 44; Gregory O’Brien, “Ploughing: Ralph Hotere’s ‘Te Whiti’ Series,” 148–53; Lara Strongman, “Your History Goes Way Back: Tony Fomison and Taranaki,” 154–68), and on literary history related to Parihaka (Jane Stafford, “ ‘ To Sing This Bryce & Bunkum Age’: Colonial Poetry and Parihaka,” 179–85; Paul Millar, “ ‘ The Rent Due for a Scull’: James K.

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Printed on the last pages of the volume and therefore all the more visible, contemporary verbal art is literally given the (preliminary) ‘last word’ in an ongoing process of institutionalized public remembrance. Owing to the capacity of poetry to personalize the historical experience and to condense it into highly compacted, memorable images, these texts provide a visionary outlook transcending the scholarly exegesis of historical sources and complementing the color plates with visual representations of Parihaka. For Paula Savage, “Parihaka is paradoxically one of the most shameful episodes, and one of the most remarkable and enduring stories in New Zealand’s colonial history.”28 Precisely because of its semantic polyvalence, Parihaka became a site where new collective identities have been generated and negotiated by the descendants of the victims and of the perpetrators of 1881 ever since. The second half of this essay will examine artistic strategies employed by poets on both sides of the cultural divide to express collective identity. It will focus particularly on thematic and stylistic links between the poems commissioned for the Wellington exhibition as well as between the poems and some of the paintings which were exhibited on the same occasion.

“Poetry for Parihaka, 2000” The heading of the poetry section is in itself programmatic: poems are presented as socially relevant, combining aesthetic momentum with moral authority, poets as cultural mediators or healers offering a remedy for (rather than writing about) a community suffering from unresolved tensions. The selection of contributors, and the arrangement of the poems as a sequence, both aim at ethnic and gender balance: five Maori authors are complemented by five Pakeha authors, five male by five female voices, suggesting a first step towards the realization of the political vision of the exhibition: “improved mutual understanding” in the new millennium must be based on participation, on fair sharing of discursive authority. Arranged in a pattern which could be called rhythmic, two female Maori are followed by two male Pakeha poets, before the order is replaced by alternating female Pakeha and male Maori voices.29 Poetic forms vary and include recourse to the Polynesian as Baxter and the Legacy of Parihaka,” 186–91; Gregory O’Brien, “ ‘ Not By Wind Ravaged’: Some Configurations of Parihaka in Poetry, Drama and Song, 1950–2000,” 192–202). 27 The book publication of Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance was accompanied by a music C D of the same title, offering acoustic samples of traditional Maori chants and modern musical compositions related to Parihaka, as well as the ten newly commissioned poems, read aloud by their authors. 28 Paula Savage, “Parihaka: The Weighty Legacy of Unfinished Business,” in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 10. 29 The poems are arranged in the following order: J.C. Sturm, “He Waiata Tenei Mo Pari-

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well as to the European heritage of New Zealanders, presented as equally respectable cultural traditions;30 individual modern free forms (Potiki, Orsman, Taylor, McQueen, Campbell), alternate with groups of poetic vignettes (Smither, Sullivan, Hawken). A high degree of formal diversity is bridged on the content-level by a general preference for personalized imaginary visualizations of key events related to the Parihaka conflict, frozen moments rendered from the point of view of semi-fictional eye-witnesses. Many of these witnesses, especially Maori people, women in general, and white men of lower social rank, belong to status groups which for a long time had been overlooked or left voiceless by traditional historiography. J.C. Sturm, for example, in the second part of her “Waiata,” called “A Tricky Business,” reconstructs the thoughts of Parihaka villagers, at night in their fields, pulling out surveying-pegs under cover of darkness: A tricky business Finding those pegs Pulling them out In the dark; Come first light Packing their owners Theodolites and all Over that river: Not of Babylon – No one sat down, Not the Rubicon – Some came back, Not the Styx – well Maybe for some. No, that river had Has a Taranaki Maori name. (204)

haka” (203–205); Roma Potiki, “Rain Over Taranaki” (206); Chris Orsman, “Volunteer” (207); Ian Wedde, “From Book Five of Commonplace Odes” – 5.1 “To Taranaki,” 5.2 “To Ernst Dieffenbach,” 5.3 “To Beauty” (208–209); Elizabeth Smither, “Twelve Little Poems About Parihaka” (210–11); Robert Sullivan, “Poems From Another Century, For Parihaka” (212–13); Dinah Hawken, “The Sound of Places and Names” (214–16); Apirana Taylor, “Parihaka” (216); Cilla McQueen, “Fuse” (217); and Alistair Ariki Campbell, “Parihaka Grieving” (218–19). Quotations from these poems are henceforth cited intratextually. 30 While Sturm’s waiata extends the oral tradition of rhetorically sophisticated ‘laments’, songs of grief and mourning, in the written medium, Wedde’s odes emphasize his cultural roots in the poetic tradition of Western Antiquity.

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Robert Sullivan renders the beginning of the attack on the village from the point of view of the children of Parihaka, singing and skipping before they are scattered by cavalry on the marae: I. Big Voice I’m big I’m six, so I am not afraid. I have my skipping rope, and my hair is tied in braids. My friend is here. He turns the rope as we sing our song. I hope the horses on the road won’t hang around for long. Because! II. Little Voice We can feel them coming. The horses’ feet, and the guns on wheels, make the ground rumble. We keep skipping and singing. The soldiers get close enough to touch us. But we keep skipping and singing. The soldiers aren’t very friendly. They yell at us. One picks me up and drops me on the roadside. His friends laugh at me. Say I’m fat. Then the rumbling starts again. My friend gets stood on by a horse. I feel very scared. (212)

Elizabeth Smither offers glimpses of the prisoners Te Whiti and Kohu on an (enforced) sightseeing tour to monuments of technical progress around Christchurch, seen through the eyes of their reminiscing South Island “Gaoler,” John Ward: I escorted them around the Industrial Exhibition the Botanical Gardens, the cathedral where the bells chimed out. At night they saw the gas lamps lit. Ear to a telephone, ride on a steam train. Would nothing move them to confess the might and cleverness of the pakeha? “So what did you like best?” I asked Te Whiti. And he replied, “The river.” (210)

In the interest of a better understanding of the past, however, empathetic approaches are not limited to the perceptions of victims, but also explore the highly varied motivations of representatives of the British Empire. They aim

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at a more differentiated view of historical figures, many of whom for a long time may have been all too easily dismissed as equally guilty. Chris Orsman, for example, portrays the misguided idealism of a male white youth, zooming in on Parihaka at dawn in November 1881 as a volunteer soldier, whose personal diary identifies him as “William Orsman, Nelson City Rifles,” an ancestor of the author: Great-grandfather, you were high-minded enough at nineteen years to realise that the fight was no fight – though you longed for it. The enemy lodged within, crouched and defensive behind the heart’s palisades. I volunteer you as a single figure in the tableau beyond, someone to set right in your youthful ignorance and hopes what you helped to destroy (207)

Robert Sullivan exposes the racial arrogance of John Bryce (then Minister for Native Affairs) in the fictional construct of an interior monologue, delivered literally and metaphorically from a ‘high horse’, during the advance on Parihaka: Yes it’s a beggar of a trip, but there’s elections again. Can’t have the natives getting uppity now that we’ve got the upper hand. The bloody cheek of George to liken me to Caesar! There’s nothing like a few guns, and shells, to show who’s boss. Bloody George! That’s the last time I talk to him. Never again! (212)31

Dinah Hawken focuses on the utopian dreams of an immigrant family who see their hopes for a better life already turned into a nightmare while they are still on the road to their newly bought Taranaki farm: 31 A visual parallel can be found in Séraphine Pick’s painting “Riki and Ruru” (2000, reproduced in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 99). It gives a panoramic view of a landscape with Mount Taranaki and the village of Parihaka in the upper third, historical Parihaka inhabitants framed by Te Whiti and Tohu in the middle, and, separated by a ploughing Maori, colonial soldiers, and settlers surrounding the Native Minister John Bryce in a red coat on his famous white horse, treading in an area coloured blood-red and limited by orangecoloured flames, in the lower third of the picture.

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To get to Kakaramea from New Plymouth in 1866 my great-grandfather Joseph, with my great-grandmother Jane and Ada, Ella, Nina, Mable, a new baby boy, and a friend, James MacCrae, trekked for 3 weeks on Maori coastal tracks to take up land he’d bought from his mates in the Rangers. [. . . ] In one place, where the Pā was inland from the coast, and I wish I knew its name, a woman took the baby boy and disappeared into the steep, flax and toi-toi-covered hills. Jane remembered Joseph wounded. Lying all night in the sandhills at Waireka. His younger brother John out chasing cattle, shot and tomahawked. Lightly buried under fern (214–15)

An alternative or additional strategy chosen by some poets is to centre their narratives on twentieth-century journeys of modern every(wo)man figures (of varying ethnicity), either to Parihaka itself or to some other New Zealand location that has strong associations with the historical events. Roma Potiki follows a twenty-year-old Maori girl travelling along the shore of the Tasman Sea near Parihaka, still reverberating with gloomy echoes of the past: Today I know what it is like to be a tourist tip-toeing an unmarked path amongst the dead and the shattered living. The radio tells me there will be rain over Taranaki today

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and as I look up I see Uenuku’s thin fingers stretched from sky downward to the place where no arrangement of mirrors will deflect judgment [. . . ] I get a lift, travel past paddocks of lumbering beige cows munching on clover near a ring ditch pa parading as a peaceful picnic spot to the uninitiated. (206)

Dinah Hawken juxtaposes white middle-class childhood memories of Taranaki district, remembered as a happy postwar holiday landscape where all references to Parihaka have been overwritten, with the retrospective disorientation of a grown-up female speaker when she discovers the true name of Parihaka and its shameful history: To get to Parihaka from Wellington you pass through Paekakariki [. . . ] travel north to Wanganui, Kakaramea, Mokoia, Hawera, Ohawe, Opunake, and you are almost there. The places of my childhood are named and then – monumental like Taranaki, wished extinct, but truly active behind cloud – there is all that is not named. [. . . ] How we loved Opunake, so close to Parihaka. Though Parihaka was a word that wasn’t said. That we hadn’t heard. [. . . ] I question and examine what I have. Days of Darkness, Ask That Mountain,

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I Shall not Die, the Taranaki claims, my great-uncle’s notebook, my feelings, conscience, dreams (214–15)

Cilla McQueen’s fictional excursion to Otago Peninsula, South Island, confronts her speaker with a landscape dominated and divided by cultural artefacts pointing back to Parihaka: A long stone wall runs beside the road [. . . ] a blue-black drystone wall built by the Māori prisoners from Parihaka. (217)

All of the poets derive central verbal images from natural or man-made components of New Zealand landscapes in order to root individual or collective memories in the local soil. The most prominent and most frequently recurring object is Mount Taranaki (up to 1986 officially called “Mount Egmont”); a dormant volcano rising over 2,500 meters above the remains of Parihaka, it perpetually combs the water out of the moist winds from the Tasman sea so that its upper half is often invisible.32 Equally sacred to Maori people as a traditional burial site for chiefs, as a hideout in times of danger, and as a protagonist in Maori myths and legends, its altitude and its effect on the local climate have always stimulated the human imagination and resulted in powerful images. Taking up traditional Maori perceptions of geological formations as alive, as gods or ancestors, many poets (both of Maori and of European descent) present Mount Taranaki as an anthropomorphized entity with human features, bearing eternal witness to the injustices of Parihaka. The close association of the mountain with the raided village at its foot (also suggested by the title of Scott’s book Ask That Mountain) has by repeated use become so ‘commonplace’ as to have turned into a metonymic relationship: for many poets and painters Mount Taranaki now stands for and speaks for Parihaka.33 The image of a mountain in mourning, hiding its (“his”) face behind dark clouds, with tears running down its (“his”) cheeks, connects J.C. Sturm’s

32 This rather gloomy aspect of Mount Taranaki has been made very memorable by Michael Smither’s 1973 painting “Parihaka, South Taranaki,” representing a stylized, predominantly grey and green landscape, void of humans whose impact is, however, suggested by the baldness of the hills, with a bright shingle beach in the foreground, and a double mountain peak veiled by dark clouds filling out the upper end of the picture. 33 A visual equivalent is Tony Fomison’s 1979 painting “Taranaki, the Mountain of Course” (reproduced in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 127). showing a hairless dark-brown head with a human face, seen at an angle from below against a pale, bluish-white sky.

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“Waiata” for Parihaka with Roma Potiki’s “Rain over Taranaki,”34 and also with Ian Wedde’s ode “To Taranaki.” Blending Maori mythology and modern Western concepts of institutionalized collective remembrance, Wedde reconstructs the volcano as a cultural hybrid, as an ancestral figure and as the curator of an open-air museum: an “old museum, where at the limit of the blue / Sky [...] the glassy vitrine of air” stops and “traps” “sad spirits,” trying to rise up from “under its glassy lid.” The tired witness expresses a longing for emotional relief from the traumatic past, for a forgetting which is made impossible by his own presence, standing literally and massively in its way: How can the pyramid sink back into earth And rest? How can this old curator at last Turn away from the maudlin narratives that have made The gods oblivious, and from the sad wrecks of things That also long for oblivion, to be freed from memory And cast back into the peaceful archive of geology – (208)

The metaphoric association of vertical furrows (or ravines) in the scree fields of the mountain with traces of tears in a “grave, grief- / Stricken face” in Wedde’s poem establish a link with another recurring image in Parihaka poetry: horizontal furrows in the fields around the village. Te Whiti’s ploughmen had expressed their spiritual and material attachment to confiscated land by spectacular sessions of symbolic ploughing, of inscribing a message of protest into the local ground – an historical fact which several Maori painters have reinterpreted as a Maori tattoo, chiselled into the body of Papatuanuku or Earth Mother.35 Opting for the European plough (rather than the traditional 34 While in Sturm’s poem the mountain itself is presented as mourning (“Maunga Taranaki / Covers his head with cloud,” 205), in Potiki’s poem mountain and persona are blended into one entity: “An elusive waiata / tilts me / as early evening rainwater / collects behind my eyes / and pain and revenge are / twin clouds / gathering” (206). 35 See, for instance, a painting by the Niue-born artist John Pule with the title “The Prophets Showing Us How Far We Must Go to Achieve Human Freedom” (2000, reproduced in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 98). The greater part of the canvas is covered with horizontal lines, alternating between dark red and black, with a tiny space in the upper centre showing a black Christian cross and related motifs, and a small black-and-white picture within the picture in the lower left-hand corner, showing a stylized Mount Taranaki, with a human figure on its top reaching out for a (coffin?-) shaped cloud, and two cross-ornamented entities, probably symbolizing the two prophets, Te Whiti and Kohu. Ralph Hotere’s 1972 painting, “Te Whiti: The Sinews of the Earth Mother” (reproduced in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 124), also shows a number of fine horizontal lines (in brown and yellow) on a background held in earth tones (predominantly dark-brown and olive), enlivened only by orange coloured letters (“N G A U A U A O P A P A T U - A - N U K U ”), a Maori version of its title.

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kō or digging stick) to challenge colonial domination, Te Whiti had shown a keen awareness of symbolic implications.36 In addition to becoming a sort of short-hand for the symbolic reclamation of land by pacific means, Parihaka ploughing and ploughs came to be associated with the ordeals suffered by the arrested ploughmen, deported and held without trial for years in South Island prisons, and, more generally, with the theme of uprootedness, exile, and homelessness.37 For New Zealand artists in the year 2000, it took on yet another, rather more positive connotation, as they themselves were metaphorically ploughing: i.e. digging, excavating, turning common ground upside down to uncover what was hidden, revisiting Parihaka in order to assign new meaning to an old lieu de mémoire.38 Poets resemble Te Whiti’s ploughmen in that they, too, inscribe symbolic signs into surfaces; messages which in both cases consist of linear patterns which will be remembered as long as there are people willing and able to decipher them. The Maori poet J.C. Sturm adds yet another spin to the ploughing metaphor by association with a “bitter harvest” (205), reaped from Pakeha-dominated supremacist politics. She extends the underlying idea of land cultivation, of literal and spiritual nourishment, in order to express a rather sceptical attitude vis-a-vis Pakeha New Zealanders’ willingness to offer more satisfactory replenishment to Maori New Zealanders. Her pessimism accords with the Pakeha poet Chris Orsman’s “volunteer” who vents his sense of disillusionment and shame (after the military campaign) in a ploughing metaphor: “Everything we carried was a dead weight: // sabres and carbines, the lumbering Armstrong gun / ploughing a single furrow to Parihaka // across the ripening fields” (207). Orsman’s juxtaposition of Te Whiti’s warriors as defending their rights with ploughs (i.e. peaceful means), and colonial soldiers “ploughing” with weapons points out the inversion or, rather, perversion, of the biblical suggestion of turning swords into ploughshares: it exposes European barbarism, disguised as an altruistic mission. The “earth-wound” left in the 36

For the highly ambivalent connotations of ploughs and ploughing, within the European tradition of visual and verbal art as well as in contemporary Maori art, see O’Brien, “Ploughing,” which includes references to William Blake, Russian modernism, Paul Klee, Paul Van Gogh, and Georges Braque. 37 A close equivalent in the fine arts is Barry Brickell’s 1981 installation “Kūhaha Doorway” (photograph in Parihaka, Hohaia et al., 166). It consists of a wooden house door, framed by fired terracotta tiles showing symbols and inscriptions related to the two prophets of Parihaka. A big plough overarching the upper end of the door is complemented by smaller reliefs including, for example, images of Te Whiti and Kohu, the three albatross feathers, and a little owl. 38 They self-consciously exploit the multiple meanings of ‘turning over’ in the sense of ‘making a new beginning’ and ‘overturning’ in the sense of ‘radical change’, of ‘ground’ in the sense of ‘soil’ as well as ‘background’, ‘underground’ or ‘surface’.

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“wake” of the false “plough” by Orsman’s semi-fictionalized “great-grandfather,” here poetically remembered (re-membered, re-constructed from notes in a personal diary and an album photograph), interlocks with Roma Potiki’s discovery of “water bleeding / running through old cuts / as fresh as newly turned earth” on the flank of Mount Taranaki (206). Orsman’s and Potiki’s “wound[s],” inflicted on vertical or horizontal stretches of land, can also be associated with a terrible form of palimpsest, more intensely explored in Robert Sullivan’s poem “Graffiti,” a reminder of the legal consequences of written Maori consent to the founding document of the British colony. Speaking for itself, a personification of the fateful “signature” to the “Treaty of Waitangi” (made forty years before the destruction of Parihaka and by many Maori perceived as the beginning of systematic land robbery) declares: Like the cloth makes the man, so the land makes me. Te Whiti and Tohu Kākahi are of a long line, many acres, connected to the land. The newcomers have scribbled me over them, over land, everywhere. (212)

It is a remarkable irony of history that, when Te Whiti’s ploughmen were deported to the South Island, so as to prevent them from further scribbling of symbolic messages into the ground, they were condemned by their (unwitting) oppressors to continue with exactly that activity, albeit in a different medium, stone. The traces left behind by Parihaka prisoners, condemned to forced labour in a quarry, are visible to the present day. As a three-dimensional record of the past, their drystone dykes run “from the head of the harbour / all the way along the peninsula northwards” and upset Cilla McQueen’s imaginary visitor to the lonely Otago peninsula. As a spatial link, the wall connects Parihaka with the location of temporary exile of Te Whiti’s ploughmen, breaking rock until the rock broke them.39 As a temporal link, it connects past injustices with present injustices – for instance, the institutionalized racism alluded to in the concluding lines of the poem: “on the car radio, news / of an unarmed Māori man / shot dead by the police last night, in Waitara.” The wall evokes fear of a permanently divided society and further violent eruptions of interracial conflict, here interpreted as the legacy of an unresolved past for an uncertain future: “This wall runs back in time – [.. .] 39 According to Scott, Ask That Mountain, 88–89, Parihaka ploughmen and fencers imprisoned in the South Island for up to two years were relieved in batches between April 1881 (starting with those “desperately ill”) and June 1881.

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The wall runs back towards the city / a fuse slow-burning through the generations / ready to flare.” The image of the “fuse,” derived from an age-old metaphor for dangerous, potentially destructive memories (both in the sense of violence remembered and of memories which might trigger violence), also functions as a subtle directional pointer towards Mount Taranaki in the north: a dormant volcano with the potential to spit fire in belated retaliation. Messages inscribed in surfaces to remind or to remember, overwritten and – temporarily, at least – forgotten; substrata slashed or injured by different types of metal tools (ploughs, guns, knives, ink pens); there is no shortage of lines and furrows radiating from Parihaka, keeping the memory of human suffering alive and carrying it far beyond the geographical limitations of Taranaki district. For J.C. Sturm, in a surprising paradox, the lieu de mémoire can even ‘go on the move’ itself and carry “home” to those ploughmen who died in the caves of Anderson’s Bay (now a suburb of Dunedin) before their official release: “In nineteen eighty-seven / Taranaki iwi placed / A Taranaki boulder there / Memorial to their tupuna / Imprisoned without trial / In the airless dark” (205).40 This petrified reminder in turn corresponds to a biblical ‘first stone’ thrown by the European aggressors in a poem by Dinah Hawken and enlarged into a “monstrous rock / of injustice” rolled “into the resilient / village of Parihaka in 1881” (215). The female Pakeha author explicitly names and accepts the guilt of her ancestors as a necessary first step towards reconciliation among the later-born. The example of Parihaka poetry illustrates many functions of literature in the construction of the collective memory as an essential prerequisite for the formation of collective identities: Poetry provides a medium for the (mimetic) enactment of individual or collective memories. It can also reflect back onto the extraliterary culture of remembrance and commemoration, thereby altering collective self-perceptions and self-definitions. Pointing out blind spots in official versions of the past, poems can reintegrate overlooked or suppressed memories (or counter-memories, belonging to memory minorities) into the dominant collective memory of a bi- or multi-cultural society. Metaphors and related types of trope play a particularly interesting role in this context: Reducing the complexity of heterogeneous phenomena (such as social conflicts) and translating them into compact mental images of high intensity, they can become cultural symbols (or cultural affect-preservers) that keep historic 40

The modern gravestone from Taranaki thereby makes a movement not quite unlike that of a female stone in Maori mythology, Toka-a-Rauhoto, an “ancient carved boulder” “which acted as a pilot, or guide, keeping well in advance of Taranaki,” when that mountain, as a consequence of his involvement in an unhappy love-story, fled from its original home at the centre of North Island to the West Coast. A summary of the myth is given by Strongman, “Your History Goes Back,” 157.

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events accessible to later-born members of the community. Moreover, they can function as intertextual links connecting separate texts into a new, meaningful entity – monologues into a dialogue: they thereby illustrate fundamental operating principles of human memory, which never develops in isolation but is always socially interactive, both in individuals and, on the political level, between groups, depending on and responding to pre-existing collective memories. In the case of Parihaka, literature offers an experimental space (within and between texts) where the meanings of an historical trauma can be re-examined and negotiated. The ten newly commissioned poems in the year 2000, then, not only illustrate the importance of a multi-voiced remembrance of an historical event; read as a continuum, the poems dramatize the act of (re)writing history and symbolically anticipate the necessary dialogue between the two cultures in an artistic performance. Shifting the Taranaki boulder back and forth between them, Parihaka poets may thereby help to transform a massive stumbling-block in the way of social peace into a touchstone of interracial reconciliation. WORKS CITED Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1999; Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003). Assmann, Jan. “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann & Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 9–19. Belich, James. Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1996). Bohan, Edmund. The Matter of Parihaka (Christchurch: Hazard, 2000). Campbell, Alistair Ariki. “Parihaka Grieving” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 218–19. Caselberg, John. The Voice of the Maori (Christchurch: Nag’s Head, 1969). Clark, Fiona. “The Memorial of Te Whiti o Rongomai at Parihaka, Dawn 6am November 6th 1981” (reproduction of a cibachrome photograph, 2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 161. Curnow, Wystan. “Muriwai To Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 139–44. Dansey, Harry. Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross (1974; Auckland: Longman Paul, 1978). Fomison, Tony. “Taranaki, the Mountain of Course” (reproduction of a painting, oil on canvas, 2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 127. Hawken, Dinah. “The Sound of Places and Names” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 214–16.

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Hinchcliff, John. Parihaka (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2004). Hohaia, Miringa, Gregory O’Brien, & Lara Strongman, ed. Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance (Wellington: City Gallery/Victoria U P , 2001). Hotere, Ralph. “Te Whiti: The Sinews of the Earth Mother” (reproduction of a painting, acrylic and ink on paper, 2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 124. King, Michael. The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003). McQueen, Cilla. “Fuse” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 217. Millar, Paul. “ ‘ The Rent Due for a Scull’: James K. Baxter and the Legacy of Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 186–91. Morris, Paul. “The Provocation of Parihaka: Reflections on Spiritual Resistance in Aotearoa” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 105–16. Nora, Pierre, ed. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols., tr. Arthur Goldhammer, tr., ed. & intro. Lawrence D. Kritzman (Les lieux de mémoire, 1984– 92, 7 vols.; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1996–98). O’Brien, Gregory. “ ‘ Not By Wind Ravaged’: Some Configurations of Parihaka in Poetry, Drama and Song, 1950–2000” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 192–202. ——. “Ploughing: Ralph Hotere’s ‘Te Whiti’ Series” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 148–53. Okeroa, Mahara, Paul Rangi-Punga & Paula Savage. “Acknowledgements” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 14–15. Orsman, Chris.“Volunteer” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 207. Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance (Wellington: H R L Morrison Music Trust Recording, 2000). Pick, Séraphine. “Riki and Ruru” (reproduction of a painting, oil on canvas, 2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 99. Potiki, Roma. “Rain Over Taranaki” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 206. Pule, John. “The Prophets Showing Us How Far We Must Go to Achieve Human Freedom” (reproduction of a painting, oil on loose canvas)” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 98. Riseborough, Hazel. Days of Darkness: The Government and Parihaka; Taranaki 1878–1884 (Auckland: Penguin, rev. ed. 2002). ——. “Te Pāhuatanga O Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 19–42. Savage, Paula. “Parihaka: The Weighty Legacy of Unfinished Business” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 10–13. Scott, Dick. Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (Auckland: Reed, 1975). Simmons, Laurence. “Bearing Witness,” Landfall 301 (2001): 167–73. Smither, Elizabeth. “Twelve Little Poems About Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 210–11. Stafford, Jane. “‘To Sing This Bryce & Bunkum Age’: Colonial Poetry and Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 179–85.

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Strongman, Lara. “Your History Goes Way Back: Tony Fomison and Taranaki” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 154–68. Sturm, J.C. “He Waiata Tenei Mo Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 203–205. Sullivan, Robert. “Poems From Another Century, For Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 212–13. Taylor, Apirana. “Parihaka” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 216. Thompson, Mervyn, & William Dart. Songs to the Judges (Wellington: Kiwi Pacific Records L P recording, 1982). Wattie, Nelson. “The New Zealand Land Wars in Novels by Shadbolt and Ihimaera,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross/Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990): 433–47. Wedde, Ian. “From Book Five of Commonplace Odes” (2001), in Parihaka, ed. Hohaia, O’Brien & Strongman, 208–209.

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3 W RITING W OMEN

Becoming a Writer in Morocco L EILA A BOUZEID

E

V E R S I N C E I W A S I N T H E F O U R T H G R A D E , my reading has been exclusively in Arabic. I loved my native language and was fascinated by its calligraphy. My greatest pleasure as a child was not in play, but in books. Not surprisingly, I got good marks in composition and dreamed of becoming a journalist or radio announcer, or both. The first part of the dream came true when I was still an undergraduate. I began publishing articles in Moroccan newspapers and contributing to the Arabic Service of the B B C . After university, I began producing a one-hour daily programme for the Moroccan National Radio Network. I became a newsperson with Moroccan T V as well. I should have been very happy but was not. Something was missing. I took on a new job, and started translating Rom Landau’s biography of Mohammed V into Arabic. I well remember the feeling that came over me as I turned the pages of the book. Now, at last, it felt as if I was putting a finger on what I really wanted. I felt as if I were starting to grasp the features of a dim dream. Some time later, I wrote a memoir of the eighteen months I had spent in London in 1968 and 1969, and this was published in Tunisia. This encouraged me to take a step further and have a go at writing fiction. I began with short stories. Eight were printed in national publications, and broadcast by the B B C , and I felt confident enough to begin work on a novel. The year was 1980. I was recently out of work and needed to occupy my time. I turned a small room of my house into a study. The project was daunting but I dived in. At first I felt like someone driving for the first time. Confronting a blank piece of paper every day was a challenge. I do not remember how much I wrote on the first day but it would take a year of daily labour before I was finished. Some days I could not go beyond a sentence. Others were spent polishing words and structures.

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During that year in my little room I was inhabited by the characters and events of my story, and by its atmosphere and mood. My mind was always at work, searching for the right words. Sometimes they came when I was shopping, or driving, or waiting at lights, or late at night when I would jump out of bed, go to the desk, and write, fearing the words would sneak away before morning. Perhaps others find the process of writing a novel relaxing, but I did not. It was a difficult, painstaking task. I dislike superfluous speech by nature, but writing a novel requires that you fill stacks of papers as eloquently as you can. In Year of the Elephant, I endeavoured to drop every word that did not serve some purpose. This explains the book’s succinctness and why some Moroccan reviewers have compared it with modern poetry. Content came easily enough, consisting of the people, places, and events around me. Most of the characters are a composite of several real people. Zahra, the protagonist of Year of the Elephant, is somewhere between imaginary and real. Women like her existed in the early days of independence, women who fought with their husbands in the resistance movement, only to be later rejected and abandoned for being too traditional, by those same husbands who had joined the new bourgeoisie and now judged their wives unable to keep up. Thus, Year of the Elephant reflects an important period in Morocco’s political and social history. Reaction to the book from Moroccan men was hesitant, as if they were not sure what to do with the unfamiliar phenomenon of a woman writer. Some concentrated on the novel’s form, and called the style “poetic, easy, pleasant and attractive, denoting feminine sensitivity and grace, and evidence of a cultured mind, skilled in observation [.. .]. The text emerges as a fine embroidery of language and emotion.” Those who saw substance beyond form seemed taken by surprise. One asked me: “How is it that you’re interested in serious topics?” apparently convinced that the natural theme for an Arab woman was love. Others were surprised by the verisimilitude of the book. One reader said to me: “I kept telling myself: ‘This is true! Why didn’t I ever see it before?”’ The strangest reaction came from the Middle East, where an Egyptian professor said: “She could have been one the best Arab women writers if she were not Moroccan.” It seemed that if being a woman was a ‘drawback’, being a Moroccan woman was twice so. Before long I was asked: “What do Moroccan women think of the book?” In fact, there had been very little commentary from women, save from my circle of relatives, who described the book as “beautiful.” Women in my culture tend to keep what they think to themselves as a matter of course. As for

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me, perhaps I had succumbed to the stereotype that women don’t speak because they don’t think.. Publication of the book in English was undertaken simultaneously by the University of Texas Press and the American University in Cairo Press. It went smoothly and exceeded expectations. Year of the Elephant was widely reviewed in the United States and used as a text. The same year (1989), Elizabeth Fernea from the centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas asked me to write a memoir of my childhood, for an anthology of childhood narratives from the Middle East. It would never have occurred to me to write about childhood. Uncovering one’s private life is considered bold and indecent in Arab society, especially when done by a woman. Since the memoir was intended for a foreign audience, and as it was an opportunity to correct certain misconceptions about Muslim women, I accepted the offer. I wanted to show that, as a Muslim woman myself, I was free to take up a pen and openly express my perspective on the reality in my country. Thus, writing my autobiography had become something of a mission. The translation of Year of the Elephant was already clarifying some of the common misconceptions about Islam and Muslim women, as remarked by Michael Hall from the University of Melbourne in Australia: Year of the Elephant stands in sharp contrast to the lurid images of ‘mad ayatollahs’ and ‘fanatical fundamentalists’ all too common in the Western media and academic discourse alike. [. . . ] Throughout the text, Abouzeid reinforces an essentially positive image of Islam as a force for social justice and liberation. It is of course unlikely that she set out to challenge negative Western stereotypes about Islam when she wrote Year of the Elephant, as the novel was written in Arabic for an Arab-Islamic readership that does not share Western prejudices and misconceptions regarding Islamic religion and culture. Once translated into English, however, the text presents an immediate challenge to Western discourse on Islam, opening the question of the role and value of translation within the field of postcolonial literature.1

As one American reader remarked, “I always thought that Morocco was the Morocco of Paul Bowles.” Eager to provide a different perspective on my country, I wrote Return to Childhood in Arabic and did a literal translation into English. I had been asked to write from fifteen to thirty pages and was afraid I would not even be able to do that. My childhood did not feel like a 1

Michael Hall, “Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant: A Postcolonial Reading,”

S P A N : Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Lan-

guage Studies 36.1 (1993): http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN /36/Hall.html [accessed 17 December 2006].

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bubbling source of inspiration, but once I had taken it up, the material began to flow. I was amazed that details and events came up from my memory with such clarity. This went on for two months, by which time I had filled enough pages to make a book. As I revised the manuscript, I decided the work was valuable and should be published in Arabic, too. I contacted an Arab publisher, who said: “If only these were the memoirs of Brigitte Bardot!” confirming my suspicion that I would never have produced them had I had an Arab audience in mind. I found myself facing a number of problems. Intended for a foreign audience, would not the book’s sharp tone and openness be judged offensive? I worried about the reaction of my family, in particular. I ended up putting the manuscript in a drawer and forgetting about it for more than two years. When it was published at last, not only did my family approve, but they were very enthusiastic. The national press and critics received it warmly as well. Both Year of the Elephant and Return to Childhood have been subjected to postcolonial and feminist readings. I used to accept the first more readily than the second. ‘Women’s writing’ struck me as a limiting and even derogatory classification. However, as I became better acquainted with the theory of feminist criticism, I discovered, to my surprise, that it was entirely applicable to my writing. I realized that if women do belong to a large society where they have the same origin as men, they also “constitute a kind of sub-culture within the framework of that larger society.” Women’s creative writing would thereby demonstrate a unity of “values, conventions, experiences and behaviors impinging on each individual,” as Elaine Showalter wrote.2 I discovered that I had been producing women’s writing as unconsciously as I had produced a discourse on Islam, not in a quest for any feminist identity or a confrontational crusade to challenge negative stereotypes about Islam, but simply because I had set down my experiences as a Muslim woman. When writing The Last Chapter, I again went through that awe I have been talking about. Talking of something and living it are two different things, like the difference between someone who writes up research and someone who writes fiction. The first has a stack of notes to write from and the second has nothing but a pen and a piece of paper. Western studies of Year of the Elephant emphasized “voice of women,” “the question of identity,” “Islam,” “Language.” Moroccan studies stressed “the non-linearity of time,” “legend and politics,” “catharsis,” “writing specificities.” 2

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Novelist from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1977): 11.

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For me, writing is a hardship from which I need a recovery; that is why I do not write at length. And I am amazed by writers who publish one book after another while having a permanent job, like the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani and the French Romain Gary, both outstanding writers of the last century. The first was a writer, a politician, and a journalist. The second was a diplomat who published novels in a row using both his real name and a pseudonym. Both seemed in a hurry to say what they had to say before the bell tolled. Both, in fact, passed away before long. Kanafani was assassinated and Gary committed suicide. When I am writing, I, too, am afraid that my bell might toll before I get to the end of the book, but I am unable to assume a second job. Moreover, devoting my time to a book ensures that it is completed more quickly. Anyway, I cannot hit two birds with one stone and do not buy that ready-made answer: “I can combine house and office work. It’s a matter of organisation.” In my society, writing, in spite of its hardship, is seen as unemployment. The truth is, that writers are the most contented people in these times where notions of materialism and capitalism are dominant, because they have chosen merchandise that has no financial value. Also, writing in my society is considered idleness, and an educated woman’s idleness is not accepted in Morocco, where people do not ask a woman any more whose daughter she is but what she does for a living. This question has been embarrassing to me. If I say, “I’m a full time writer,” people reply, “Yes, but how do you make a living?” “I do freelance work, for foreigners, mind you,” I answer, because it is common knowledge that intellectual work in Morocco is not paid for. Being a woman writing in Morocco is not an overwhelming problem so long as one can convince the male intellectual institution of the value of one’s work. A greater challenge for me so far has been to be a writer at all. WORKS CITED Hall, Michael. “Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant: A Postcolonial Reading,” S P A N : Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36 (1993) http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv /S P A N /36/Hall.html [accessed 17 December 2006]. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Novelist from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1977). ½¾

Middle Eastern Women’s Roles Transformed The Gendered Spaces of Ghādah al-Sammān and Sahar Khalīfah

K IFAH H ANNA

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of ‘gendered spaces’ forms just one dimension of many others affecting Arab women’s status, still “gendered spaces provide the concrete, everyday-life grounding for the production, reproduction, and transformation of status differences.”1 From here stems the necessity of paying more attention to the social and political gendering of spaces in Arab patriarchal countries. This essay discusses the transformation of Middle Eastern women’s roles, particularly Lebanese and Palestinians, within their gendered spaces during times of war and national crisis. I will explore these issues in the fiction of two Arab women writers, Ghādah al-Sammān and Sahar Khalīfah,2 whose literary depictions of contemporary Middle Eastern women highlights the effects of assigning Arab women inferior status to men which subsequently delays the recognition of their gender as well as national identity. This illustration will help in the understanding of the problems women endure during times of revolution, war, and national crisis while they are still suffering from the essential original problems within the general framework of Arab patriarchal societies. I have chosen the Syrian author Ghādah al-Sammān and the Palestinian author Sahar Khalīfah, both well-known in the Middle East, because, in their writings, they depict the everyday struggle of contemporary Middle Eastern women in the context of patriarchy. Yet both writers have demonstrated a 1

LTHOUGH THE DISCUSSION

Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P ,

1992): 233. 2

I follow the I J M E S rules of transliteration from Arabic into Roman alphabet.

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strong concern for nationalist issues alongside feminist ones in much of their writings. Through this provocative combination of these two pivotal concerns they offer us distinctive and challenging material with which to explore literary depictions of transformations in and challenges to the limitations of gendered spaces – ‘the street’, ‘the home’, ‘the battlefield’ – in the Middle East, particularly during the Lebanese civil war and the Intifada. I have chosen to explore the above-mentioned issues by referring to alSammān’s Kawābīs Bayrūt (Beirut Nightmares) 1976 and Khalīfah’s Bāb alSāhah (The Gate of the Square) 1990. Al-Sammān’s Beirut Nightmares is “a horror fantasy on an aspect of the war the writer had witnessed.”3 It is a record of events and thoughts which cover seven days in a series of nightmares written in journal format while the protagonist was trapped with her cousin ‘Amīn, her uncle, and their cook in a house in Beirut during the notorious Hotels Battles of October and November 1975.4 Desperate to leave the confinement, especially after her flat was almost destroyed and she had to move to her uncle’s flat and be in the company of three men, the protagonist portrays what it is to be a woman under siege alongside men during the intense battles of the Lebanese civil war. Khalīfah’s The Gate of the Square is set in the West Bank town of Nāblus amid the turbulence of the Intifada. It narrates principally the stories of four ordinary poor and middle-class women: the midwife Zakiyyah, her sister-inlaw Um ‘Azzām, the social-sciences student Samar, and Nuzha, who is the daughter of Sakīnah, the owner of al-Ddār al-Mashbūha, ‘the house of illrepute’5 where these four women’s lives intersect. The house’s own local history nonetheless recapitulates the significant pressures on the social order in which it is situated6 and the effects of such social pressures on these four women’s lives at the specific time of the Intifada. 3 Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1988; 1987): 5 4 Cooke, War’s Other Voices, 43 5 After the death of her husband, the young widow Sakīnah’s has to find a way to earn a living to bring up her children. Having no education, she starts working as a seamstress. With increasing financial pressure owing to the occupation, Sakīnah turns her home into a house of entertainment where she and her daughters play music, sing, and entertain their guests, rich Palestinian merchants / traders and sometimes Israelis. Generally speaking, in a Middle Eastern context, such a house would be accused of being of ‘ill-repute’ (a brothel). However, the writer leaves such a definition ambiguous, keeping the reader unsure whether the house is a brothel or not. Interestingly, however, the Fidā’een, accusing Sakīnah of being a spy for the Israelis and hosting them in this house, later on kill her. 6 Barbara Harlow, “Partitions and Precedents: Sahar Khalīfeh and Palestinian Political Geography,” in Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse N Y : Syracuse U P , 2002): 115–16, 124–15.

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In the context of this essay, ‘gendered spaces’ refers to the separate spaces that women and men are condemned to in a patriarchal Middle Eastern society. Within such communities, women are usually confined to the precinct of the house, where domestic work is their main occupation. By contrast, men occupy all the spaces outside of the house – in this case, the street. In some communities even the spaces within the house are divided into male and female. However, patriarchal societies impose some changes on both middleand lower-class women’s spatial institutions, forcing them out of the home and into the work-force. Initially, this first step led to the double exploitation of women by men, both in the house and outside it, as Arab women were forced to “face a whole range of new problems resulting from the social changes to which they are exposed.”7 It is a patriarchal strategy to benefit from women’s efforts and, at the same time, to preserve the women’s dependency, thus ensuring patriarchy’s continuity. The next step towards breaking spatial confines was taken, mostly, in times of war and national crisis, where women’s participation in the struggle was increasingly in demand. In much the same way in which the American Civil War gave American women more opportunites to obtain education by enrolling in the universities “due to the shortage of men and the universities’ needs for tuition,”8 the Lebanese civil war and the Intifada helped Lebanese and Palestinian women out of their daily domestic routines to participate in the wider struggle. However, while Lebanese society was more accepting of the expansion of women’s roles than the Palestinian, in neither case is there any notable change in the traditionally assigned gendered spaces. The question here will be: Is the war another means of double exploiting women or is it a new dawn, of greater freedom and fewer barriers? In that sense, Zakiyyah, the midwife in Khalīfah’s The Gate of the Square, highlights the new range of responsibilities and problems Palestinian women have to deal with after the collapse of the Intifada. In her attempt to answer the question asked by the social-sciences student, Samar, who wants to know what changes took place for women during the Intifada, Zakiyyah says: “Frankly, nothing has changed except their distress. There is more distress for them…. They have more and more worries, still the old ones and the new ones just multiply.”9 Zakiyyah is, in a sense, referring to the feminist struggle in Lebanon and Palestine during the last few decades where women have had – in the context 7

Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (London: Zed,

1980): xii. 8 9

Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, 157. Quoted in Barbara Harlow, “Partitions and Precedents,” 129.

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of colonialism – to participate in wars perpetrated mainly by men, with the expectation of going back to their confined spaces at the end of the fight. Thus, this temporary change in women’s positions is not to be considered a transformation out of their matrimonial confined spaces. Rather, it is an expansion of the matrimonial boundaries to include the street as well as the battlefield where husbands and sons are fighting against each other, in the case of the Lebanese civil war, or against Israelis, in the case of the Palestinian Intifada. Women’s responsibilities and worries have grown with this expansion, while the quality of their spaces has remained mostly the same. But Zakiyyah herself is complicit in the perpetration of the system where ‘nothing has changed’, thus representing a wide range of contemporary Middle Eastern women. Since “the powerful cannot maintain their positions without the cooperation of the less powerful […] If a given stratification system is to persist, then, both powerful and less-powerful groups must be engaged in its constant renegotiation and re-creation.”10 In the same way, Arab women play a part in the assignment of their gendered spaces and the preservation of their traditional roles. Khalīfah illustrates such a situation when, in response to Um ‘Azzām’s complaint about her husband’s bad treatment and “incorrigible practice of beating her,” Zakiyyah asks her to “lower her voice,” as “someone might hear” her.11 Zakiyyah then asks Um ‘Azzām to go back to her house and husband in order to avoid a social scandal, disregarding the poor woman’s suffering and pain. Zakiyyah wants to keep the social prestige of her family intact no matter what kind of suffering Um ‘Azzām is going through. This desire to preserve the status quo even during the time of the Intifada with all the surrounding chaos is a good example of Palestinian women’s fear of changing the prevailing status differentiation. For Zakiyyah, social traditions and constraints are more important than Um ‘Azzām’s feeling of peace and dignity. However, Zakiyyah herself forgets that the conversation with Um ‘Azzām takes place in al-Ddār al-Mashbouha (the house of ill-repute), a space they are not supposed to be in according to their respectable social status. Such a shift has come along with the Intifada and its requirements.12 Yet Zakiyyah could not apply the same shift to Um ‘Azzām’s case.

10

Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, 17. Barbara Harlow, “Partitions and Precedents,” 127–28, referring to Khalifah’s Bāb alSāhah, 159–68. 12 Usually, Zakiyyah would not pass the threshold into the house of ill-repute. However, she had to go there when her nephew, Hussām, one of the fidā’een, was injured in one of the conflicts with the Israelis and had to hide there. In this way, the Intifada entails new changes to already established spaces. 11

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However, one of the most interesting facts about the transformation within gendered spaces concerns male characters occupying female spaces during times of war or national crisis. Khalīfah offers a fascinating example in The Gate of the Square when Hussām, and later some other fidā’een, guerrillas, have to seek refuge from Israeli soldiers in the house of ill-repute – Sakinah’s house, which became Nuzha’s after the murder of her mother. Such an incident is very important in the sense that it shifts the identity of that house from being one of ‘fallen’ women to that of a space of national symbols, the fidā’een – who are men fighting for the honour of the country. In protecting the honour of the land, these men seek refuge in a dishonourable female space. This shift would not occur if the time were not the time of struggle for liberation. Such incidents during the daily fight in Palestine bring about the gradual intersection of masculine and feminine spaces in Palestine. In the same way as Khalīfah’s The Gate of the Square is the story of these four women’s daily lives within their own gendered spaces, al-Sammān’s Kawābīs Bayrūt (Beirut Nightmares) is narrated by a woman. All the incidents are told from her point of view. Her voice occupies all the spaces within the novel as well as outside it. In Beirut Nightmares, al-Sammān gives “the woman the role of the creative creature.”13 However, while Khalīfah is mostly concerned with middle- and lower-class women, al-Sammān pays more attention to upper-middle-class, educated bourgeois women. Thus al-Sammān’s presentation of gendered spaces is quite different. Throughout the novel, the protagonist has more courage and challenges the meaning of events more than do the male characters who are supposed to be her protectors. She is more practical in reacting to the incidents, exhibiting a bravery that the male characters lack. Al-Sammān tells us about her heroine, who has been left by her brother, who ran away, abandoning her in the house located at the centre of the battle raging outside. However, she kept everything under control while the other three men – her uncle, her cousin, and their male cook, with whom she had to stay until the ceasefire – played the weak role usually ascribed to female characters, as we will see presently. After the sudden death of her uncle, the protagonist is astonished by her adult cousin’s seeking her help and support. She muses: “how odd that a man should ask a woman for protection! Her contempt, with time and proximity, was turning to hate.”14 However, the protagonist plays the masculine role perfectly by addressing her frightened cousin, ‘Amīn, in a masculine way. She 13

Paola De Kapwa, al-Tamarrud wa al-Iltizām fī Adab Ghādah al-Sammān (Rebellion and Compliance in the Literature of Ghādah al-Sammān) (Beirut: Dār al- Talī‘ah, 1992): 70–71, referring to ‘Afīf Farrāj, al-Hurriyyah fī Adab al-Mar’ah, 146, and al-Sammān’s Nightmares, 191–92. 14 Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices, 45.

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responds to his request to stay the night in the same room with her to allay the shock of his father’s death by saying: “OK, then. You can sleep wherever you please. But I beg you, don’t wake me up again tonight! If you don’t let me get some sleep, I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle the catastrophes that tomorrow sends our way.”15 The way in which al-Sammān’s protagonist addresses her cousin is similar to the way an Eastern male is supposed to speak to his female cousin. Then the protagonist continues, thinking ironically about the whole situation: As for us, here we were … a woman, two men and a cadaver, with me playing all the parts except for that of the female. After all, who but I had been leading the “cadaver transport operation,” comforting the afflicted and encouraging the faint-hearted?16

Once more, if it were not for the fight and the need to stay with her cousin and uncle, the protagonist would never have had the chance to discover her superiority over her male cousin. By moving from her own flat to theirs, from her own space to theirs, she is supposed to be under their protection. Ironically, she is the one who protects and supports the three men around her even if such a change in the socially assigned roles occurs within the limits of the male household. While the protagonist is practical and courageous in her trials to escape from the house where she was trapped by sniper-fire, helped by friends in an armoured car, her cousin is passive and surrenders to the situation by waiting for his father to make the decision to escape or stay. In his attitude, ‘Amīn, the cousin, evokes the so-called passivity of Arab women; the protagonist says: As for ‘Amīn, I saw a glimmer of envy flash across his eyes. He was envious of my freedom. After all, in some sense I’d taken on the role of the free “young man” in my family, whereas he, despite being a male, played the role of the traditional Eastern ‘female’ in his father’s household. All the men in tribal societies unwittingly play the role of the ‘Eastern female’ in relation to their fathers!17

In this example, al-Sammān sarcastically transforms the gendering of spaces into gendering of actions, with masculine characters playing the passive roles while the only female character is assertive and active. Later on in the same passage, al-Sammān, like Khalīfah, refers, via the protagonist’s contemplation 15

Ghādah al-Sammān, Beirut Nightmares, tr. Nancy N. Roberts (London: Quartet,

1997): 251. 16 17

Ghādah al-Sammān, Beirut Nightmares, 252. Beirut Nightmares, 121.

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of ‘Amīn’s situation, to women’s partial responsibility for their so-called passivity. ‘Amīn, embodying the female role in the family, espouses ‘the same attitude as his father’ – to stay in the house despite his own desire to leave. This reminds the reader of women’s frequent inability to articulate their own wishes and thoughts. The protagonist ponders: “Was it possible that he’d been so thoroughly brainwashed that he’d lost his love of life, that ‘life’ for him had become synonymous with material possessions?”18 Through ‘Amīn’s embodiment of female passivity, al-Sammān illuminates Middle Eastern women’s frequent surrender to patriarchal society. Nonetheless, al-Sammān’s illustration is still limited to a certain class of educated bourgeois women and is not applicable to the whole of society. Khalīfah shows more interest in portraying lower-class uneducated women who are mostly unaware of their status; trapped as they are by basic domestic duties, they are ready to sacrifice whatever they have for the sake of community survival. Here emerges the importance of education and knowledge in assigning women’s roles in a patriarchal society and the difference this knowledge makes to women’s participation in the national struggle. It is the conviction that “if knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in [women’s] subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.”19 Accordingly, when the need for women’s participation in daily activities increases during times of national crisis, their involvement will still be subsidiary and dependent on that of men. Consequently, al-Sammān’s protagonist, the educated woman, is more aware of the physical and social distinctions between her and her cousin and the limitations of their spaces, while Khalīfah’s female characters react more instinctively, unaware of their status. Thus the firefight makes al-Sammān’s protagonist aware of her humanity rather than of her femininity in her efforts to escape from the battle. Her awareness and her sense of being superior to her cousin enable her to take crucial decisions and give her more confidence to break out of the prevailing gender limitations. Khalīfah’s characters, on the other hand, during the Israeli soldiers’ door-to-door search for the fidā’een, care more about the safety of the fidā’een, who represent patriarchal society, as part of their responsibility to ensure community survival. Feeling inferior to the fidā’een, Khalīfah’s characters preserve the respective boundaries and limitations of gendered spaces. In conclusion, in Khalīfah’s and al-Sammān’s novels we explore the difficulties encountered when Lebanese and Palestinian women attempt to align 18

Ghādah al-Sammān, Beirut Nightmares, 121. Kate Millett, ‘Theory of Sexual Politics,” in Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart– Davis, 1971): 42. See also Spain, 168, for the same argument. 19

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their gender issues with nationalist ones in the context of national struggle. In this respect, Khalīfah in The Gate of the Square “poses importantly the urgent demand within a national struggle for the recognition of women’s rights as human rights.”20 Needless to say, the same demand has been made by alSammān in Beirut Nightmares, yet differently. As we have already seen through both writers’ literary depictions, gendered spaces are still prevalent in Arab patriarchal societies under different economic, social, and political conditions. Although some very temporary transformations are offered by changes in economic and / or political circumstances, the boundaries between the two sexes remain very obvious. This continues to hamper the recognition of Arab women’s human rights, thus impairing any contribution to the development of their societies. Therefore, in order to work on transforming or incrementally modifying patriarchal Arab societies, we need to start working on the most basic gendered spaces: the home and the streets. These spaces, divided as they are by the demands of a patriarchal society, serve patriarchy by establishing the basic traits of gendered social conditioning. Since “it is fundamentally impossible to change society without changing personality,”21 which is formed by family in the gendered space of the home, in order to subvert women’s subordination in their patriarchal societies a way has to be found out of their confined gendered spaces. However, during times of war and national crisis there is neither enough time nor adequate space to accomplish such changes. Thus a crucial transformation of women’s status is not to be expected at the end of a war or national crisis, since women are more likely to revert to their assigned prewar spaces. Such a return is not immediately apparent, as it might happen gradually. Yet the recognition of this gradual and temporary shift of status within spatial institutions is very important for feminists, as it forms the basis of their call for an equitable and hopefully permanent degendering of spaces. WORKS CITED Al-Sammān, Ghādah. Beirut Nightmares, tr. Nancy N. Roberts (London: Quartet, 1997). Cooke, Miriam. War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1987; Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1988). De Kapwa, Paola. al-Tamarrud wa al-Iltizām fī Adab Ghādah al-Sammān (Rebellion and Compliance in the Literature of Ghādah al-Sammān) (Beirut: Dār al-Talī’ah, 1992). 20

Barbara Harlow, ‘Partitions and Precedents,” 125 Kate Millett, “Instances of Sexual Politics,” in Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart– Davis, 1971): 22. 21

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El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (London: Zed, 1980). ——. The Naked Face of Woman in the Arab World (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-Arabia lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 1977). Farrāj, ‘Afīf. al-Hurriyyah fī Adab al-Mar’ah (Freedom in Women’s Literature) (1975; Beirut: Mu’asasat al-’abhāth al-’arabiyyah, 1980). Harlow, Barbara. “Partitions and Precedents: Sahar Khalīfeh and Palestinian Political Geography,” in Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse N Y : Syracuse U P , 2002): 113–31. Khalīfah, Sahar. Bāb al-Sāhah (The Gate of the Square) (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1990). Millett, Kate. “Instances of Sexual Politics,” in Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart–Davis, 1971): 3–22. ——, “Theory of Sexual Politics,” in Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1971): 23–58. Spain, Daphne. Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P , 1992).

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Going Through Twentieth-Century Malta in the Company of Francis Ebejer’s Heroines B ERNADETTE F ALZON

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M A L T E S E L I T E R A T U R E one is faced with the problem of what exactly is meant by Maltese literature. Is it literature written in the Maltese language or literature written by Maltese authors regardless of the language? In this article I have chosen to concentrate on the novels, written mostly in English, of Francis Ebejer (1925–93), one of the major literary figures on the Maltese scene, who wrote several novels, mostly in English, and quite a number of plays, most of which are in Maltese, along with other publications. A brief excursus into Maltese literature or, rather, into the Maltese narrative genre will reveal that nineteenth-century novels in Malta followed the tradition of the historical novel, of which Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, first published in 1827 and later in 1842, was a masterpiece that certainly had acolytes among aspiring Maltese authors. It is also interesting to note that the first author to start writing an historical novel in Malta was Sir Walter Scott, who, in 1831, visited Malta in search of inspiration for a novel on the Great Siege, but then continued his writing in Naples. Early Maltese historical novels were usually imbued with sentimental and patriotic values, often accompanied by nationalistic propaganda, mostly under the influence of the Risorgimento in nearby Italy. After the first traditional historical novels written in Italian, towards the latter part of the nineteenth century we also find historical novels written in Maltese and with a Maltese setting, more easily understood by the population, of which the larger part was illiterate. The choice of the Maltese language is especially important in the case of novels intending to convey a patriotic message. HEN ONE SPEAKS OF

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The patriotic question in Malta was bound up with that of language. On the one hand, we had the cultured Maltese, who saw in the adoption of the Italian language for scholastic, legal, and religious purposes, accompanied by the Maltese language, a remedy for the island’s anglicization and the guarantee of a Maltese national identity. Others favoured the use of Maltese in all fields, an idea which, on nationalist grounds, could hardly be rejected, but which was considered highly impractical. The adoption of the English language for cultural and practical use, as well as because of the growing political prestige of Great Britain, might have been a solution, one which, however, was only accepted in the closing years of the nineteenth century. It was, in fact, only in 1934 that English and Maltese were declared the official languages of Malta, when the growing aggressiveness of fascist Italy, its strong propaganda machine, and the realization that it had many influential supporters of its cause on the island alerted the English to the danger of a predominance of the Italian language and the political consequences of such a state of affairs. The realistic novel which was becoming popular on the continent, not least as a reaction to the romantic novel, was not well accepted in Malta by most of the Maltese authors still anchored to the traditional narrative genre, as well as by the ever-powerful clergy, who protested against the display of what were considered immoral situations in realistic literature (see Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola). The first realistic novels (such as those by Giusé Ellul Mercer), as a consequence, only began to be published in Malta in 1935. With a few exceptions, therefore, historical novels with a Maltese setting continued to be produced until the 1960s. The interruption of this tradition also had much to do with the birth, in 1966, of a literary movement, Movimént Qawmien Letterarju (movement of literary rebirth), which dealt with new themes and linguistic forms in keeping with international, albeit perhaps not quite current, literary tastes. This literary change coincided with changes in Maltese society – the gaining of independence in 1964 and the development of industry and tourism, which stimulated an appraisal of other modes of being besides the British colonial one or nostalgia for past Italian glories. Maltese narratives now, belatedly, began to concentrate on the individual – no longer the hero as representative of a nation, in the case of a Malta struggling for nationhood, but often as a weak human being with his own personal existentialist problems, defeated by circumstance and in particular by the sense of unease which, in this case, had concrete roots in Maltese soil – weighed down as the hero is by cumbersome and suffocating local beliefs and dogmas. In his search for inward well-being, the hero of these novels first tries to escape from his past by making a move from village life towards the more

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cosmopolitan centres such as Sliema, but when this move proves to be insufficient, he emigrates to other lands. As many anthropologists have pointed out, however, the Maltese carry with them an extreme love for their country, which condemns them to be permanently in search of a niche in which they can shuck off their sense of not belonging. It is also important to note that emigration did not simply provide an existentialist literary theme, but in the 1950s and 1960s was dramatically, and for reasons of survival, taking away thousands of Maltese who unwillingly, and despite their attachment to Malta and to the Mediterranean area (the first emigrants, in fact, had chosen to emigrate to other Mediterranean shores), had to leave for faraway countries like America and Australia. It was in such a social and literary context that Francis Ebejer was born in 1925 in Dingli, a small village in the south of the island, of a father “whose family had supported the British cause in the fracas” of the 1930s and a mother “whose people were well disposed towards La Bella Italia.”1 Francis Ebejer would seem to be going against the literary mainstream in view of the fact that in his highly symbolic literary output the quest for a personal identity, at the basis of his characters’ sense of unease, is not pursued away from Malta, but is accompanied by a search for the roots and national identity in both the precolonial past and the postcolonial future. It is a search which meanders through the naturalistically represented surrounding landscape. Ebejer makes “the general quest for a proper perspective, the ‘life-line’ through a conscious awareness of historical continuities, one of his major themes, irrespective of whether he was thinking and writing in Maltese or English.”2 He sees the necessity to turn to the past as compared to an everevolving future and insists on the importance played in this task by memory. As in other contemporary literary works, Ebejer’s characters are, in their various ways, engaged in “seeking the ineffable truth [... ] one’s truly inner self.”3 The difference with Ebejer’s characters lies in the fact that, in resolving their identity-crisis, they generally refer back to the past in terms of History (with a capital H) or, rather, Maltese History, and not to that personal and unresolved psychological past which is usually the basis of most existentialist crises, especially in modern literature. Ebejer’s third novel, In the Eye of the Sun, bears the following preliminary statement: “All human characters in this book are imaginary. The land is

1

Francis Ebejer, “The Bicultural Situation,” in Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature, ed. Daniel Massa (Malta U P , 1979): 211. 2 Francis Ebejer, The Bilingual Writer (Mediterranean – Maltese and English) as Janus (Malta: Foundation for International Studies, 1989): 15. 3 Ebejer, The Bilingual Writer, 22.

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real.”4 Ebejer’s strong attachment to his native land is, as already mentioned, typical of the love of the Maltese for their island home, something often commented on by foreign visitors to the island. This attachment to the land with its geographical and historical connotations is deeply felt throughout the novels, playing against different Maltese settings, depending on the period they represent. At this point, before turning my attention to Ebejer’s novels or, more specifically, to the role played by his female characters, I think it necessary to have an idea of the social role played by Maltese women in real everyday life over the past century. An important – indeed, predominant – role in Maltese social life has always been played by the Catholic Church or, rather, its representatives on the island, who were even perturbed by the demands for change made by the Vatican itself in the 1960s. It might be difficult for non-Catholics to understand the determined interference of the Church in lay matters in Malta. St Paul’s anathema towards women was, in Malta, taken quite literally and had its effects on social and legal matters concerning women. Suffice it to say that Malta, even now, is the only country in Europe that does not allow divorce. In the years in which Ebejer’s fiction was being written, society, under ecclesiastical pressure, decreed that a woman’s place was in the home and that she had to dress and behave in what they considered an appropriate manner. A woman was allowed to work only in family concerns and – in spite of the fact that the Second World War had led to an increase in the employment of women and that in 1959, when the industrialization programme was started, new employment opportunities were provided for unskilled female workers – it was only in the 1960s that married women obtained the legal right to work outside the family and only in the 1970s that they were granted equal pay, even though women, after a strenuous struggle, had gained the right to vote in 1945. Maltese women’s struggle for emancipation took place, therefore, on three fronts: against male opposition; under a patriarchal political system; and under the watchful eye of an even more patriarchal Catholic Church. One realizes how ingrained in society this discriminative attitude towards women was when one thinks that even an extremely energetic female leftwing minister of education, Agatha Barbara, rejected the suggestion that married female ex-teachers should be recruited on a full-time basis. In a letter to the Second Secretary of the Prime Minister on 11 May 1956, she writes: In spite of the difficulties mentioned earlier I feel that women employees should continue to have their services terminated on marriage. In the absence

4

Francis Ebejer, In the Eye of the Sun (London: Macmillan, 1969): foreword.

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of this requirement I fear we might be faced with numerous sick leave certificates for obvious reasons. In the circumstances I do not advise any alteration in the clause referred to.5

To understand the extent to which Maltese law regarded women as legal minors, one has to have a look at the Amendments to the Civil Code regarding the family published by the Ministry for Home Affairs and Social development in 1993. Prior to this date, to cite only some of the then-existing discriminatory laws against women, the husband alone administered the property which the couple acquired during marriage; the husband could sell his wife’s property without her consent, and only he had authority over the children. Single women shared these and other disadvantages with insane persons, minors, interdicted persons, and persons of notoriously bad character until 1973, while married women continued to do so right up to 1993. It has, in fact, been noted that before 1973 the only way for an intelligent independentminded woman to avoid subjecting herself to husband or father was to choose the religious life and become a nun, where she was given the possibility to become a leader within the convent and the Church. In Malta, women’s groups, of which there have been quite a number in the past decades, did not fight, as other women’s liberation groups on the Continent were doing, for feminist issues, but for social and legal ones. However, the existence of a Commission for the Advancement of Women within the Ministry for Social Policy and the fact that it produces a publication on the values of women and men in the Maltese islands in a comparative European perspective , is perhaps a tangible sign of change. Ebejer’s first two novels are set in the 1950s in a Malta that is still a colony. Both style and content are realistic and the characters represent the predominant classes and the existing social problems on the island. In the first novel, Wreath of Maltese Innocents (1958), the conflict is between the working class and the last remnants of the nobility, who, together with the upper classes, are hand in glove with the omnipresent clergy in the power-game being played on the island. The plot of this novel echoes that of the most famous nineteenth-century Italian novel I Promessi Sposi, the heroines of both novels bearing the name Lucia (in Maltese written with a ‘j’). The story, however, is adapted to a Maltese social setting. The clergymen here are two: the powerful Monsignor Assalon Xiberras de Balyard, who belongs to a Maltese family of noble lineage and is uncle to John, a lieutenant in the R.A.F., the man with whom Lucija, daughter of a wine-shop owner, is in love. The Monsignor, in the role 5

Joseph M. Pirrotta, Fortress Colony: The Final Act 1945–1964, vol. 2: 1955–1958 (Malta: Studio Editions, 1991): 213.

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of Manzoni’s ‘bravi’, does his powerful best to prevent the ‘pollution’ of his family’s noble blood by preventing the marriage from taking place. The second clergyman is a poor friar, Lucija’s confessor, who, in the equivalent role to that of Manzoni’s Don Abbondio, is threatened by the Monsignor into not officiating at the marriage between the two lovers. Malta, in the novel, is described as rent by political strife, as in effect it was, between the two major political parties – the Labour or workers’ party and the Nationalist or conservative party. Lucija’s father is a Labour man, humiliated by his dead wife’s family, richer and of a better class. His resentment in the novel is also directed at what he calls “the so-called Christian spirit,” which he feels is the prerogative of those on top: Toni had heard that in some countries things were not so bad, that class hatred was outdated – a thing of the iniquitous past, somebody had told him. He did not know if that were true or not. But it certainly was not true where his own country was concerned: There were so many things that needed changing here, he thought ferociously.6

– and this, according to Toni, could only be brought about by the election of a Labour government. And yet, we are told that, despite his criticism, Toni still celebrated all the masses he could for his dead wife as proof of the strong religious feeling ingrained in all Maltese. When the pregnant Lucija retires to a convent for unmarried mothers, similar to the Irish convent of the Magdalens, we are presented with a very harsh picture of the treatment reserved for those considered as ‘fallen women’. Lucija outshines the male characters in this novel and is the real heroine of the story, in that she plays the part not of a victim, but of a self-searching heroine of the twentieth century who, in the face of the enormous pressure put upon her, makes up her own mind and refuses what she feels to be a shot-gun wedding on John’s part, yet one that would obviously have presented us with the happy ending. Having lost the child she had been bearing, she decides to take up the monastic life, a choice which, as indicated above, was made in those days by strong-willed women who, although still within the limits of convention, in some ways went against it by deciding for themselves. The role played by the male characters in the novel is that of anachronistic men attached to the their personal past and to the island’s past, well symbolized by the figure of John’s father, whose main occupation is that of tracing his ancestors’ history. It is Lucija, a woman, who, with her decision to retire from society, initiates the search for identity on the part of the female characters in Ebejer’s

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Francis Ebejer, A Wreath of Maltese Innocents (Malta: Bugelli, 1981): 22–23.

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novels. She is the prototype of what the perspicacious Monsignor Xiberras calls “ a new breed of Maltese women.”7 In Ebejer’s second novel, Wild Spell of Summer, known also as Evil of the King Cockroach (1960), the female protagonist is Rosie, daughter, this time, of a Valletta cheese-cake maker and seller. The role of villain is occupied by a member of the new bourgeois class, the owner of a pastry factory, who is represented as trampling on the cultural traditions of the island and who tries to sexually abuse Rosie. The clergy is represented by Dun Mattew, whose psychological weakness betokens the weakening power of the clergy, their misdemeanours here brought into the open, as in the case of Rosie’s husband, who, we are told, had been sexually abused in his childhood by a priest. Rosie is surrounded by men with either feeble or thwarted characters, such as her crazed half-brother, who tries to murder her. The story has a metaphoric substratum representing the sordidness of the characters – for example, the enormous cockroach in Rosie’s father’s cellar which dominates everything from the very beginning, and the decaying orange in the kitchen fruit bowl, both seemingly accompanying a process of psychological deterioration in the characters leading to the final catharsis, when Rosie is almost murdered by her brother Gorg. Rosie appears to be the only positive character in the novel; towering above the squalor around her, she contines the evolution of that new breed of women that we first saw in Lucija. She, in keeping with the custom of the times, works in the family business, her father’s pastry shop, but is capable of making her own decisions and, against all odds, marries the man she loves and wants. Rosie, like the male protagonists in other novels, leaves the town she was born and raised in, choosing instead to live in the countryside with the family which, with her own forces, she has managed to build. In the novel In the Eye of the Sun (1960), the protagonist is Joseph. Here Ebejer abandons the naturalistic narrative register for an allegorical interpretation of reality which perhaps best expresses the sense of isolation and unease felt by Joseph and which, as already indicated, is a feeling frequently experienced by the characters in Maltese novels of this postcolonial period. Joseph’s return to his native village in a metaphysical search for his origins has a tragic epilogue ending in his death. The female characters in this novel do not hold the stage. Both Yvonne in the cosmopolitan town of Sliema and Karla in her home village are in love with the brilliant but troubled Joseph. They are both educated women and, in Karla’s case, willing to give up a future career to be with her beloved. Neither of them, however, can prevent Joseph’s tragic fate. The overpowering image in this novel, taken from real life and present in almost all the other Ebejer novels, is that of the prehistoric temples close to 7

Francis Ebejer, A Wreath of Maltese Innocents, 107.

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the protagonist’s and Ebejer’s village, Dingli. In these temples, four in all on the Maltese islands, statues of obese women, fertility goddeses, have been found, proof of the existence of an ancient matriarchal society. The belief in the sacredness of women might have given rise to the need felt by Maltese men to keep them sheltered and protected, inherent in the Maltese tradition sustained by male domination, the clergy, and the Civil Code. The image of the prehistoric temples dominates the characters and their actions in Leap of Malta Dolphins (1982), in which the protagonist Marcell, like Joseph before him, turns his back on the rapidly changing society and becomes a sort of tramp, or what would then have been called a drop-out. Unlike Joseph, however, Marcell does not seem to be tied up with personal psychological problems. His search for inward fulfilment or self-awareness seems to be over and his efforts are now directed outward, towards society, which he wants to save from the damaging effects of material progress and industrialization. Marcell becomes messenger and apostle to the blind prophet Sarid, who lives on a hill overlooking the changing village near a cluster of prehistoric temples and preaches a fanatical return to nature and to the island’s origins. Marcell’s active involvement in Sarid’s cause leads first to violence and death in the village and then to his final retirement to a solitary life with his second wife and their child on Sarid’s hilltop. The Maltese nobility are here again brought on the scene, this time personified by Lenarda, Marcell’s first wife, who goes against her parents’ wishes and marries the proletarian Marcell. Lenarda, however, seems not to fulfil the role played by Ebejer’s women – that of bringer of positive and forward-thinking values. She is psychologically unfit to play this role, and is killed off at the end of the novel. Marcell then turns to the docile and nature-loving Dirjana, who bears him a child, while Lenarda had even refused him his conjugal rights. After his first two novels, where the female protagonists had held centre stage, Ebejer concentrates more on his male characters and seems to be turning his back on the process of emancipation embraced by the women in his early novels, much as he refuses the process of modernization of the island, which he deems ugly and ruinous. In keeping with this new philosophy, he firmly believes in a return to a naturalistic and traditional Maltese way of life in which class and gender conflict have no reason to exist. In Requiem for a Malta Fascist (1980), written after the publication, in America, of his surrealistic novel Come Again in Spring in 1979, his only novel not set in Malta, Ebejer makes a return to a naturalistic mode of writing without abandoning completely the symbolism which has become part of his style. Set in the ‘fascist’ period of the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the Second World War, this book is considered to be one of Malta’s most important political novels. Here the protagonist, at the beginning of the story, un-

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characteristically for Ebejer’s fiction, moves from hinterland and roots to an urban, more cosmopolitan way of living, represented by the towns of Sliema and Valletta, only to move back again to his native village at the end, always accompanied by the surrealistic figure of his deformed and mentally handicapped cousin, Kos. The political events in Malta leading to and accompanying the Second World War are here described against a realistic Maltese setting, with Maltese characters slipping into their native tongue to lend more vividness to the action and to underline the mixture of the various nationalities present on the island. This novel is perhaps the most ‘male’ of all, and the role of the two principal female characters is that of trait d’union between Lorenz and Paul, with one of them – Elena – the object of desire of both men, whose close relationship and even their desiring the same woman gives rise to the suspicion of homosexuality between them: And I loved Paul. Through this woman, strained to him inside this woman, time and time again, more strongly after each time, with all my longing…. The stream of all my years.8

A mixture of realism and symbolism in Ebejer’s style is one of the elements which allows him to endow local reality with universal significance. Such a style gives birth and life to the characters, and, more specifically with regard to the present essay, to the female characters. These, in many respects, represent the women of Malta, but necessarily form part also of the author’s literary design and ideas regarding the future of a country which he unquestionably loved. WORKS CITED Abela, Anthony M. Values of Women and Men in the Maltese Islands: A Comparative European Perspective (Malta: Commission for the Advancement of Women. Ministry for Social Policy, 2000). Blouet, Brian. The Story of Malta (Malta: Progress, 2004). Brincat, Giuseppe. Malta: Una storia linguistica (Udine: Università degli Studi di Udine, 2003). Callus, Angela. Ghadma minn Ghadmi Grajjet il-Mara u jeddijietha (Malta, 1992). Cassar, Carmel. Society, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Malta (Malta: Mireva, 2000). Cassar, George, & JosAnn Cutajar, ed. Social Aspects of the Maltese Islands: A Comparative European Perspective (Malta: Indigo, 2004). 8

Francis Ebejer, Requiem for a Malta Fascist (or The Interrogation) (Malta: A.C. Aquilina, 1980): 201.

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Cassola, Arnold. The Literature of Malta: An Example of Unity in Diversità (Malta: Minima, 2000). Ebejer, Francis. “The Bicultural Situation In Malta,” in Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature, ed. Daniel Massa (Malta: Malta U P , 1979): 210–16. ——. The Bilingual Writer (Mediterranean–Maltese and English) as Janus (Malta: Foundation for International Studies, 1989). ——. Come Again in Spring (New York: Vantage, 1979). ——. Evil of the King Cockroach (London Macgibbon & Kee, 1960). ——. In the Eye of the Sun (London: Macdonald, 1969). ——. Leap of Malta Dolphins (New York: Vantage, 1982). ——. Requiem for a Malta Fascist (or The Interrogation) (Malta: A.C. Aquilina, 1980). ——. A Wreath of Maltese Innocents (Malta: Bugelli, 1981). Mallia–Milanes, Victor, ed. The British Colonial Experience. 1800–1964: The Impact on Maltese Society (Malta: Mireva, 1988). Ministry of Home Affairs and Social Development. Equal Partners in Marriage. Amendments to the Civil Code Regarding the Family (Malta, 1993). Pirrotta, Joseph. Fortress Colony, vol. 1: 1945–1964; vol. 2: 1955–1958; vol. 3: 1958– 1961 (Malta: Studia Editions, 1991). Polacco, Christopher. An Outline of the Socio-Economic Development in Post-War Malta (Malta: Mireva, 2003). Vassallo, Mario. From Lordship to Stewardship. Religion and Social Change in Malta (The Hague: Mouton, 1979).

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Aesthetic (Dis)Continuities in the African Gendered Space The Example of Younger Nigerian Women’s Writing

T AIWO O LORUNTOBA –O JU

The stream that forgets its source will dry up. —Yoruba proverb

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is evident in the literature of the younger generation of African women writers compared with that of the ‘old ladies’. A compelling hypothesis is that the shift is occasioned by a deepening conflict of identity, accentuated by the colonization–globalization continuum and leading progressively to loss of awareness of, or disregard for, the tenets of indigenous African aesthetics. This essay attempts to track this growing shift on the twin levels of content and form which constitute the aesthetic of the gendered space on the African continent. Within this aesthetic matrix, as now well established, is a content that evinces a counter-patriarchal temper (a ‘writing-back’ and/ or ‘voice-throwing’ at patriarchy), and a form that bears palimpsestic traces of traditional African aesthetics. African culture and the corresponding literary aesthetic have undergone untold transformations over the decades, but such elements of an indigenous aesthetic are still considered a mark, if not the mark, of authenticity in African writing. This essay examines, against this matrix, representative texts from the works of some second- and third-generation female Nigerian women writers. Inevitably, preliminary questions also arise regarding the nature of an ‘African’ feminist aesthetic, how to appraise its constituents without appearing clannish or culture-static, and what appears to be its prognosis. The essay concludes that the sort of aesthetic discontinuities that seem evident in the work of younger-generation Nigerian women writers tends to place the future of an African feminist aesthetic in jeopardy. However, this conclusion asN AESTHETIC GULF

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sumes first of all the existence of a considerable consensus regarding what this aesthetic phenomenon really is, or should be.

‘Feminist’ or ‘African’? Defining African Feminist Aesthetics The problem of defining an African feminist aesthetic mimics similar definitional issues in global feminism. The question here is how exactly the question should be phrased: Should it be a question of ‘What is this “feminine” in feminine writing?’ or a question of ‘What is African in this feminist aesthetic?’1 The question has obvious implications for any quest for continuities or discontinuities in an African feminist aesthetic, since it is the answer that necessarily determines what parameters to privilege in ascertaining the constituents of an ‘African feminist aesthetic’. But the question has repeatedly proved to be only a second order of questions in African feminism. The first order of questions and the one most persistently asked is: how well does the umbrella term ‘feminism’ itself sit with African women writers, critics, and activists? Even within global feminism, to at least a number of female writers, the term ‘woman writer,’ ‘feminine’ or ‘feminist writing’ appears pejorative. Their objection is that the term tends to carry the same assumptions, prejudices and implications that provoked a deliberate focus on a feminine or feminist genre of writing in the first place. While a focus on the female subject and écriture féminine may have forced consciousness of this category on to the global literary scene, it may also, ironically, have resulted in a critical practice that consigns women’s writing to a literary periphery or a literary Otherness. Joyce Carol Oates’s outcry exemplifies the dilemma here, when she complained of the tendency to discuss her, as a writer, “under the great lump ‘Women writers’,” within which category only her works that apparently fit the description ‘feminine’ are discussed, while others are simply ignored.2 Such ‘shuffling aside’ is evident not only in critical practice but also at mainstream (read: male-stream) conferences where discussion of women’s works hardly forms the locus of plenary sessions; instead, the works are consigned to a ‘women’s studies’ corner.3 Reaction to this apparent segregation is 1

The former question is as phrased by Monique Wittig in 1983, albeit with satirical intent, since her position is ultimately to deny the existence the gender-distinguished sentence or language. Here the question is asked for real and not in jest. See Wittig, “The Point of View: Universal or Particular,” Feminist Issues 3.2 (1983): 64. 2 See Joyce Carol Oates, “Is There a Female Voice? Joyce Carol Oates Replies?” in Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Mary Eagleton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 292. 3 The term ‘women’s studies’ being inherently contrastive, it is instructive that we never have a ‘men’s studies’ counterpart, which might have been the equitable contrast. The assumed contrast is thus with a generic (mainstream) category which, presumably, is male.

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varied and complex, and includes the so called ‘female affiliation complex’, which is defined in terms of the relative textual distance that a woman writer consciously maintains from the male-stream in her works.4 Within this global context it becomes a distinctive challenge and a matter for conscious contemplation whether a writer who happens to be female should be referred to as simply a writer or as a woman writer. Complicating this contention within global feminism is the absence of a unified parameter by which a feminine or feminist aesthetic is defined. The well-established reason for this is that there is not one but several feminisms, especially in a situation where attempts to define the term ‘woman’ alone yield a multiplicity of views owing to the presence of contending determinants, not least race, ethnicity, social background, ideological influences, and individual temperament.5 Apart from racially and ethnically sensitive distinguishing terms such as ‘black feminism’, ‘African feminism’, etc., interesting terms and parameters have been developed to distinguish texts within feminism according to the varying degrees of femininity or of feminism; hence, for example, Showalter’s distinction between the ‘feminine’, the ‘feminist’, and the ‘female’ texts.6 Specific terms and parameters may or may not work, depending on the context. Analysts have thus often been forced to take a broad view of what constitutes a feminist aesthetic. Clearly, then, the shuffling of women’s works willy-nilly under the category ‘women’s studies’, feminine, feminist or African feminist studies is inappropriate. Recognition of the different shades of feminism is crucial for a successful analysis even if, as Patricia Collins points out within the context of black feminism, the line of distinction is not always easy to “define.”7 The point here is that these quarrels and uncertainties within Western feminism are replicated within African women’s writing, and for good reason. For example, it may be wondered why the writer of a text as ‘bearded’ as the Botswanan Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (a text whose complex introspection, albeit written “under severe mental strain,” is often approached with 4 See Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1: The War of the Worlds (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1988). 5 Among other acknowledgements, Showalter’s theory, based on a model of women’s culture, recognizes “important differences between women as writers,” and also emphasises that “class, race, nationality and history are determinants as significant as gender.” See Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985): 260. 6 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (London: Virago, 1977): 12–14. 7 Patricia Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York & London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2000): xi.

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trepidation and which tends to break all the rules of construction traditionally associated with ‘female’) should be classified only as ‘women’s writing’ or the writer as a ‘woman writer’ with the implication or insinuation of concern with women’s issues combined with a lucid or tentative expression? The same question can be asked of the Nigerian Zulu Sofola’s King Emene and Wedlock of the Gods, plays which, while not being technically complex, may sometimes be regarded with suspicion, as rather strong links in the chain of patriarchy. Strictly speaking, the term ‘woman writer’ continues to be used only in a generic manner and as a convenient umbrella-term covering the writings of persons who are biologically female irrespective of their ideology or the temper and texture of their works. More important currently are the questions within the various forms of feminism in Africa which first of all seek to differentiate themselves from both Western (white) feminism and secondly from African-American feminism. This distinction is phrased often as “resistance” to “the hegemonic implications of existing feminisms,”8 or the un-African “gendering of the institution of motherhood,”9 as well as the engagement of “feminism’s politics of location” and “breathing into feminist theory and practice the specificity of [African] cultures,”10 among other critical engagements of Western feminist discourse. Details of these distinctions along with distinguishing terminology (‘womanism’, ‘stiwanism’, ‘motherism’, etc) and their explication need not be elaborated here.11 Within the distinctions we still find that ‘common denominator’ of all feminisms – a concern with gender relations, especially the positionality of women within the power-structure of society as perceived within different cultures, and opposition to the marginalizing or domination of women in any form. This common denominator constitutes a defining principle of an African feminist aesthetic as practised contemporaneously. The feminist concept in Africa is, however, considerably broadened beyond this common denominator: i.e. beyond mere concentration on ‘women’s empowerment’, to include elaboration of the role the woman in the general emancipation of society. In this conception, ‘women’s liberation’ is regarded 8

Mary E.M. Kolawole, “Reversing Gender Myths and Images in Buchi Emecheta’s Novels,” in Gender Perceptions and Development in Africa, ed. Mary E. Modupe Kolawole (Lagos: Arrabon Academic Publishers, 1998): 161. 9 Oyeronke Oyewumi, “Family Bonds / Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25.4 (2000): 1097. 10 Obioma Nnaemeka, “Foreword: Locating Feminists/Feminisms,” in Susan Arndt, The Dynamics of African Feminism (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2002): 10–11. 11 See, among others, Susan Arndt’s recent extensive survey in The Dynamics of African Feminism.

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as only one aspect of the total motherhood vocation of spreading a protective shield over all of society and humanity. Motherhood is repeatedly theorized as a defining and conscious attribute of African woman’s identity.12 The ‘woman’ is someone functioning in some capacity as a social being – girl, sister, woman, wife, mother, but sometimes even as ‘boy’, ‘man’, ‘husband’ or ‘father’ in a given set of circumstances. And s / he is involved on these various levels in the task of emancipating society.13 These issues are formulated from within a global as well as particular (in this case, regional) gender consciousness, in which specific African concerns come to the fore. There is also subregional diversity, which must be acknowledged as well. For example, as variously pointed out in the research literature, questions of race and colour are more likely to merge with women’s issues in the writing of South African women, while ‘in-lawism’ and widowhood may come to the fore in Eastern Nigeria, or the problem of seclusion and genital mutilation in the north, to cite random examples. From casual observation, there is a slight predominance of women’s writing in Eastern Nigeria, another possibly significant manifestation of diversity which has not been the subject of theoretical explication. Again, however, such sub-regionality within African feminism does not invalidate the broad agreement regarding the African feminist enterprise and creativity referred to above. For the purpose of this essay, I do not intend to concern myself with subtle thematic distinctions within African feminism, important as such distinctions may be in other contexts; hence, I use the terms feminism/ womanism inclusively. Given such broad agreement on what constitutes African feminism, as noted above, the second-order question returns to the fore, concerning which element should predominate in an African feminist aesthetic. Again, should the question be “what is feminine in this aesthetic” or “what is African in this feminist aesthetic”? This question, and its answer, also mimics the drawn-out debate on the issue of ‘authenticity’ in ‘African’ writing in general. The answer, or what may be considered the broad consensus, from Obi Wali through Chinua 12 Apart from the elaborate ‘motherist’ theory of Acholonu which elaborates this conception fairly extensively (See fn 11 above), attention can also be drawn to, among others, Julia Wells’ phrasing in referring to this African, and also African-American, orientation as “maternal politics” based on “concepts of the sanctity of motherhood,” which she distinguishes from feminism. See Wells, “Maternal Politics in Organising Black South African Women: The Historical Lessons,” in Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 1998): 253. 13 Ify Amadiume’s elaboration of the Igbo matriarchal system casts much light on this generic multiplicity within the African system; see Amadiume, Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case (London: Karnak House, 1987).

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Achebe, Es’kia Mphalele, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgī wa Thiong’o, Chinweizu et al., that an African work of art should evince an “irreducible Africanness.”14 Despite the acrimony that attended this debate in the past, this consensus is so broad that questions relating to the authenticity (including language) of African literature are asked only out of a theoretical necessity, from the need to relate current statements to existing frameworks. It should be noted that the dominant categorization of women’s literary works and the distinctions drawn within African feminisms have generally privileged the thematic focus of the different works over and above their aesthetic import. Hence, for example, what distinguishes African feminism (including womanism, motherism, negro-feminism, stiwanism, etc.) from global feminism is defined basically in terms of African social, cultural, and political concerns, particularly African notions of family and gender relations, rather than, or at least more than, an African mode of expression. Accordingly, African feminist texts tend to be classified more in terms of such thematic concerns and the corresponding authorial slant, perspective or objective, while the relative Africanness of the language and style of the authors concerned is considered a secondary issue.15 The twinness of the African feminist / womanist aesthetic and the integrative nature of the term ‘aesthetic’ is seen in the appreciation of the ‘old ladies’ of African feminism in these works. A look at the works of many younger Nigerian writers reminds us again that the apparent ‘givenness’ of Africanness in literary texts produced by African writers of whatever gender is more apparent than real. In order words, the ‘African’ component of an African feminist aesthetic cannot always be taken for granted. The contention in this essay is that the integration of aspects of indigenous culture and aesthetics should always be theorized as a necessary condition for the Africanness of the texts and be consciously applied in discussions of African women’s writing. The call for an indigenous or indigenized aesthetic as a condition for authenticity must be constantly made and texts should be analyzed not just in terms of feminist themes but also in terms of their being steeped in an indigenous African aesthetic. Invariably, therefore, the search for the Africanness of literary texts produced by African writers (male or female) must employ an ethno-cultural perspective. This, supported by the tools of linguistics and stylistic analysis, enables the analyst to elicit artefacts and living elements of culture embedded 14

A term employed by Biodun Jeyifo in The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London: New Beacon, 1985): 26. 15 However, a good number of critical works have also adduced elements of African oral literature in the works of African women writers. Examples include works by Nnaemeka, Arndt and Kolawole cited in this essay, among others.

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in or integrated within texts. The ethno-cultural approach is inevitable, particularly in tracing continuities between elements of tradition and contemporary literary culture. Linguistic and stylistic elements are elicited at the level of word and discourse, and questions are asked about usages and their relations to indigenous aesthetics, particularly which cultural thought-patterns govern lexical and other usages. This, in my view, is what distinguishes a feminist stylistics in general from an African feminist stylistics in particular. In the former, for example, questions relating to lexical usage would concern the “gender-specific” nature of words used, whether “terms used to describe males or females have sexual connotations” or “positive or negative connotations.”16 In the latter, in addition to such, we would also ask whether lexical usage and imagery have a locus within indigenous African aesthetics in the form of African oral traditions, traditional African lexical choices, including relexification, traditional imagery, metaphors and sundry idiomaticizing through employment of nuances of African thought and culture.

Continuities: The Old Ladies and the Garden Continuities with indigenous aesthetics have been elicited in the works of the ‘old ladies’ of African literature (including, with regard to Nigeria, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Zulu Sofola, among others). What we have in general in their works is an integrated complex of orality and womanity. Many of these frontline women writers credited their concern with oral literature and cultural elements and the corresponding occurrence of these in their works to what Nnaemaka, following Alice Walker, has described as “a measured walk in their mother’s gardens.”17 What may also have helped these older writers is their degree of proximity to indigenous culture and arts by virtue of their age. A similar pattern is established in male literature where pioneering figures often reminisce over a close interaction with the indigenous tradition, in consequence of which indigenous usage suffuses their works in the indigenous languages as well as in English. The second generation of Nigerian women writers, though not yet the ‘old ladies’ by chronological and literary reckoning, also demonstrates closeness to oral tradition. The practitioners in this generation integrate related usages in their works. Their explanation is similar: a chronological closeness to the source of oral tradition – the moonlight, and women and men telling stories – and a conscious effort to integrate the same into their works. Writers of this generation include the likes of Ifeoma Okoye, Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo, 16

Sara Mills, Feminist Stylistics (London: Routledge, 1995): 201. Obioma Nnaemeka, “From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re) Inscription of Womanhood,” Research in African Literatures 25.4 (1994): 137. 17

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Mobolaji Adenubi, Bunmi Oyinsan, Tess Onwueme, Stella Oyedepo, and many others. They combine a feminist / womanist concern with a mode of expression that bears unambiguous traces of indigenous aesthetics. The effortlessness by which they resort to indigenous usages is seen in most of their works and they themselves have often expressed consciousness of the requirement of authenticity in the African aesthetic process.18 This concern manifests itself conspicuously in their works. However, the same cannot be said of some among the younger generation of women writers.

Breaking the Silence: ‘Breaking the Thread’? Breaking the Silence is a collection of short stories in which nineteen mostly young Nigerian female writers were assembled under the auspices of W R I T A (The Women Writers of Nigeria). Although most of the young writers in the collection had previously published creative work in one form of the other, the collection nonetheless projects a significant presence as “the first anthology of creative writing by Nigerian women in more than a century of scribal creativity in Nigeria,” according to its prefatory notes. A couple of ‘matronage’ voices representing earlier writers of the century are also present in the collection, particularly Mabel Segun, whose daughter, Omowumi Segun, a third-generation writer, is also included in the anthology. Also, there are a number of second generation writers such Adimora–Ezeigbo, Ifeoma Okoye, Mobolaji Adenubi, and Bunmi Oyinsan. A collection such as this thus offers an opportunity for a chronological perspective on Nigeria’s feminist aesthetic. Samples from the entry of three of the second-generation women writers in the collection are presented below in order to justify the submissions above about writers of the second generation following the old ladies and their conscious attempt to integrate aspects of indigenous aesthetics into their feminism.

Excerpts From “The Departure,” by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. Amadi held the carved wooden door which was slightly ajar. [. . . ] Each time he spent the night with Ahuruelu it became more difficult for him to release himself from her magnetic embrace. He chuckled as he thought of her soft but firm thighs entwined around his massive torso and those searing breasts

18

See, for example, Susan Arndt, African Women’s Literature: Orature and Intertextuality (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1998): 100.

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pressed close to his heart like the twin gourds hugging the hips of a tapper as he descends from a palm tree with the precious frothy wine. (25)

From “Erewari and Nwoke,” by Bunmi Oyinsan But he always returned, even when Erewari was no longer that girl whose feet trod resolutely on whichever ground she walked; her legs like the shoots of a young banana tree, deceptively soft to look at. Her waist riding those legs as they held up the roundness of her stomach. When he first met her, her round well-fed stomach looked so firm, it was hard to imagine it stretching out to accommodate his seeds. (121)

From “The Importance of Being Prudent,” by Mobolaji Adenubi Olukosi had to quickly explain the riddle to his children who also joined in the laughter. They all felt satisfied that Araka was now at peace with them. They however remained mindful of the warning of Olukosi’s mother, “It is not everything about oneself that one tells to another. Restrain your tongue a little. Keep some of your secrets to yourself. Kere o! Kere o! Residents and visitors in Ife Ooye, Heed the admonition of Olukosi’s mother, Who told her son to keep some of his secrets to himself. He heeded her advice and saved his life. Restrain your tongues, residents and visitors in Ife Ooye: Be prudent! Kere o! Kere o! (84)

Even without the benefit of the full texts, we can find in the three extracts an inkling of the writers’ concern with gender relations or African feminist (including womanist) issues, on the one hand, and a concern with African indigenous aesthetics, on the other. It should be emphasized that the extracts cannot tell the full story. For example, in “The Departure” there is the theme of male philandering or debauchery and its tragic consequences, which is not evident in the extract. Also, in the second and third stories respectively we witness the travails of womanhood and a matriarchal perspective on motherhood, which are not fully revealed in the extracts. However, it is sufficient for our purpose that the extracts do intimate the writers’ concern with gender relations. In “The Departure,” by Ezeigbo, the writer integrates her thematic concern with an African myth of reincarnation. As the myth goes, a freshly departed soul can be restored to the body if there is a timely intervention by an endowed person or by someone who is diligent and who has clean hands and a

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clean mind. In this story, Ezeigbo juxtaposes two episodes involving two corpses whose souls had just departed from their bodies and are travelling in a ghostly ‘copy’ of their bodies, as apparitions. In two separate incidents, two persons from the community, out at dawn, have the opportunity, of which they are unaware, to intercept these souls and cause their return to their lifeless bodies. One of these persons is Amadi. Amadi encounters the apparition, but, taking it for real, avoids it in order also to avoid detection. The problem is, that Amadi is actually rushing back in that dawn from an illicit tryst with a concubine; hence his avoidance of the apparition. The apparition thus continues into limbo, and its body back home remains lifeless. The other person is Amuche, who, on encountering the apparition and likewise taking it for real, expresses concern at its demeanour and grabs at it, whereupon the apparition disappears. Thus intercepted, this soul flees back into its own body back home and the lifeless body jerks awake, to the amazement and joy of the gathering mourners. And now the feminist subtext: Amadi is male, Amuche is female. And the womanist subtext: Amuche as woman expresses a motherist concern for this person who is looking ghostly and lost. Amuche the woman saves a life in the throes of transition. She is a diligent woman who is out at dawn proceeding towards the market to await her customers, whereupon she encounters the apparition on her way there. Observable here is a socio-economic significance and moral distinction. Unlike Amuche, Amadi the male is out at dawn on an illicit tryst. Amuche is also specially endorsed, via the narrative voice, as “a remarkably brave woman who had learnt to take control of things in adverse of fearful situations early in life” (30). She had also “lost her husband only after five years of marriage” (30), but that had not been a deterrent in any way. The feminist subtext is undoubtedly present and it may be as subtle or as loud as particular readings. There are expressions in the extracts that possibly indicate a gender-power construction. For example, in the first extract, ironic female strength and matriarchal authority are expressed through oxymoronic juxtaposition as in “soft but firm thighs” and other expressions such as “magnetic embrace,” “he always returned to her,” “her deceptively soft looks,” and “Olukosi’s mother [.. .] Who told her son.” The expressions can be analyzed as theme-laden and as expressing a gender-power construction or some response to patriarchy. Such expressions are present in large numbers in the full stories. However, what is of greater interest here is the integration of elements of indigenous usage in the texts, as we have seen in the yoking of the story with a feminist theme and indigenous myth in the summary above. Discrete elements of indigenous expression are also woven into the text on various levels, as in the following examples drawn from the above extracts:

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“those searing breasts pressed close to his heart like the twin gourds hugging the hips of a tapper as he descends from a palm tree with the precious frothy wine” “her legs like the shoots of a young banana tree” “Kere o! Kere o! “

These examples contain discrete indigenous imagery with an unambiguous reference to African landscape, vegetation, and produce. In the first example in particular, the items “carved wooden door,” “twin gourds” “palmwine tapster” and “precious frosty [palm] wine” evoke images of Africa from where the imagery is drawn. We also have a complex yoking of a sexual encounter with aspects of African lore. Palm-wine is a drink of the gods and the tapster their messenger. In the third example, we observe the integration of thematic concern with the indigenous mode of expression in the full story. Adenubi’s story is preceded and concluded with the town-crier’s ululation Kere o! Kere o!, an indigenous formula of summons which is untranslatable. The ululation once preceded public announcements in those long-gone African days before the advent of telegraphic communication technology. Today we find such usage also appropriated in the modern genre of radio and television advertising, particularly in Yoruba-speaking areas of Nigeria. In the olden days, the surrounding messages were considered urgent and they had profound implication for the lives of members of the community, just as happens in this story. The ululation is also recognizable as an element within the structure of indigenous folktale, as an inaugurating and /or closing sequence, again as in the story. Adenubi’s story relates a life-threatening situation in a domestic setting. The theme of mother as life-giver and a wise being to be relied upon in all matters, including those of nature and nurture, occurs in the text, along with other themes that are of concern to the womanist. The element of indigenous aesthetics is quite unmistakable in these examples, in this case the employment of indigenous myth and images in addition to the use of proverbs and aphorisms, all interwoven with feminist / womanist concerns. In my view, this sort of combination is a necessary condition for what would be regarded as an African feminist aesthetic. Although a caveat must always be introduced in order not to run the danger of overgeneralization; one would contend that such integration of indigenous aesthetics with feminist themes, as exemplified in the works of the ‘old ladies’ of African feminism and women writers of the second generation, is largely missing from, or not very pronounced, in the works of the younger generation of Nigerian women writers. An aesthetic gulf or discontinuity is evident. The reason is not difficult to fathom.

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Discontinuities: The Young Ladies and the Supermarket If the moon and the garden (or farm) are manifest symbols of the older generation of Nigerian women writers’ connection to tradition, the neon-light and the supermarket are those of the younger generation. They are mostly “brought up where the sun never sets”19 and may often find it difficult to appreciate the moonlight. The sociol ambience of the writer is an inevitable component of her literary output. Most of the writers of the young feminist vanguard are obviously from a background that heightens the possibility of imbibing a feminist consciousness but the corresponding factors tend simultaneously to distance them from indigenous culture and a consciousness of indigenous aesthetics. The first obvious factor that is inevitable is age, which reduces the degree of proximity to and contact with indigenous orature. The second is the socio-historical fact of colonization, the consequent truncation of African history and diffusion, even erosion, of indigenous culture. The third is the socio-political fact of neo-imperialism and conspiratorial ideology of globalization and attendant forced migration. With specific regard to Nigeria, this combines effectively with the inept and parasitic stranglehold of a local comprador class whose manipulation of the society and economy not only leads to economic and political stagnation but also stunts the development of local languages and cultures while forcing a migrant culture on the citizenry. With specific reference to gender is the internationalist, transnationalist dimension of contemporary patriarchal constructs in Africa which seem to alienate the modern female elite, creating or accentuating a romantic/ materialistic view of the West. The ultimate implication of these factors is a continuous and relentless distancing of African writers from their indigenous languages and culture as they gravitate more and more towards an ‘international’ idiom. Let me illustrate such sociological background and the threatened discontinuity of indigenous aesthetics in the works of younger Nigerian female writers with three examples of such writers who sport impressive literary and international credentials. There is Toyin Adewale–Gabriel, co-editor of Breaking the Silence and holder of a Masters degree in English. She is also the author of Naked Testimonies (poems), two texts in German, Die Aromaforscherin and Flackernde Kerzen, and editor of 25 New Nigerian Poets, plus a résumé that 19

Words taken from the lyrics of Bongos Ikwe (and the Groovies), who in the early

1970s composed songs for the Nigerian Television Authority series titled Cockcrow at

Dawn (now defunct). The song was an ode to Lara, one of the female characters, who was having difficulty adjusting to the local ways in the village, having been brought up in the city, where the sun never sets.

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includes reading to audiences in Nigeria, the U S A , South Africa, Austria, Sweden, Luxemburg, and Germany. Another is Lola Shoneyin, editor of Khalam, a literary journal and also holder of a Masters degree in English. Her publications include So All the Time I Was Sitting On an Egg and Song of a Riverbird, both books of poems, as well as sundry short stories in various publications. She is a participant in sundry international writers’ meetings, including the International Writers Programme of the University of Iowa, U S A . Originally raised in London, she is now back, a migrant, in London. There is also Mabel Evwierhoma, holder of a doctorate in theatre arts. She lectures at the University of Abuja, but was ‘last seen’ at the African Language Association at the University of Winsconsin–Madison. She is the author of Out of Hiding and A Song As I Am, both books of poems. The feminist credentials of these writers are not in any doubt, even though a close study is required to place them in a precise, non-impressionistic fashion within specific African feminist frames. Toyin Adewale is the founder of W R I T A , whose feminist mission statement has been referred to above. She described herself to Sentinel Poetry as “a woman writer”: i.e. writing “consciously as a woman for all of humankind” and “speaking for man, woman and child.”20 Her entry in Breaking the Silence is titled “Boxer’s Shorts.” The story explores the theme of male debauchery, particularly rape, an ugly incident situated psychologically at the core of gender (man–woman) power relations. The entry reveals hardly any concern with indigenous African aesthetics, as the following excerpt, which is quite typical, demonstrates. For the first time I really look at him. He is Somali, tall with high cheek bones. Coffee coloured, he has long slim fingers. His shirt is open at the neck and tucked into khaki trousers. His feet are sheltered in loafers. His eyes are red, the red of the setting sun. [. . . ] He opens the door and invites me to make myself comfortable. I take him at his word and ask to use the bathroom. It is painted powder pink. As I sit on the toilet, my eyes are drawn to an array of satin panties in different colours blue, black, red, green, aquamarine, turquoise, pink, all strung up on a home dryer. They are beautiful, exquisitely designed like creations straight out of the Victoria secret catalogue. (“Boxer’s Shorts” 139–40).

Apart from the feminist orientation of the story, it can be credited with an excellent prose and delectable imagery, all drawn however from a global or 20 Interview with Nnorom Azunoye,“My E-conversation with Toyin Adewale–Gabriel,” Sentinel Poetry Online 12 (November 2003): http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/magazine1103 /page17.html [accessed 2 December 2003].

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universal code of descriptions – where ‘global’ tends progressively to mean English – complete with colour codes unknown to indigenous aesthetics and even, fortuitously for our example, a Victorian referent. Hardly would one find a sprinkling of elements of indigenous African aesthetics in this text, which therefore situates it within the scheme of aesthetic discontinuities relative to the old ladies. Adewale’s excellent poetry collection Naked Testimonies is thematically diversified, in keeping with her stated concern with humankind in general, but the female subject also recurs with a telling frequency. Her orientation tends to be transformative, as she attempts to give new names to old phenomena and recast patriarchal attitudes in new light. However, equally absent here are images and idioms drawn from the indigenous aesthetic landscape. Similar comments can be made about the writings of Mabel Erwierhoma and Lola Shoneyin. Erwierhoma (born Tobriese) is also the author of Nigerian Feminist Theatre: Essays on Female Axes in Contemporary Nigerian Drama (1998) There are profuse and direct references to Feminist themes in her poetry, including the first entry in her Out of Hiding, which is titled “Matriarchy.” The poem literally sounds the death knell of patriarchy and sneers at ‘matriarchs’ who, having suffered patriarchy for so long, are ironically unhappy at its demise: Our matriarchs have refused to smile ... They mourn the legacies of dented patriarchy . . . (“Matriarchy” 1)

In “My Body,” negative allusion or attribution to the female anatomy is directly challenged: Me and my body are one whole And no hole. . . My body . . . . . . And they say my body is weak! (“My Body” 22).

One of Lola Shoneyin’s own earlier writings was a short story with the revealing title, “Woman in her Season,” which features a cheating husband and a retaliatory lesbian relationship between the cheated wife and another wo-

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man.21 Her So All the Time I Was Sitting On an Egg is described in the blurb by Odia Ofeimun as “a daring performance” which “reclaims the sensibility of the modern woman.” Shoneyin herself coined the term ‘clitoranguish’ to describe the condition of womanhood and the tone of her poetry. I tend to locate her works in the African radical feminist category but this is only the result of an initial survey which would need a closer study to affirm. Her “She Tried” in the ‘clitoranguish’ section of her collection elaborates the dilemma of the female in society in a patriarchal society. “She” tries to become a fulfilled professional, a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher or writer, but all her effort at self-realization is pooh-poohed, since it does not conform to patriarchal conceptions of womanhood. She then she resigns herself to life as just a biological and trado-cultural female and nothing more: So, she tried to be a woman They pat her on the back And showed her the kitchen, the garden . . . and the bed (“She Tried” 13)

The tone is satirical and there is no mistaking the castigating intent and the attempt to prick at the heart of patriarchy. In some other poems she employs outright invective to put forward her disgust, but again in idioms that are not readily recognizable as indigenous African. In this collection, unlike in the other works by the other younger writers cited above, one finds the occasional insertion of loan or untranslated words, such as abule and ayo in the poem titled “Affectation” (32) and the insertion of a Yoruba proverb in translation in the poem “You didn’t Know” (61-62), or the relexification “looking for their good eyes” in the same poem. However, such occur too sparingly to affect the overall ‘globalized’ diction of the collection. Instances in which we find an integration with indigenous aesthetics are few and far between. The summary above certainly cannot account for the tremendous contribution of these writers to a feminist aesthetic, but is just sufficient to affirm the feminist component of their works. What seems to be missing or not so pronounced in this aesthetic is the African component, in the form noted earlier, of African oral traditions, traditional African lexical choices, including relexification, traditional imagery, metaphors, and sundry idiomaticizings through the employment of nuances of African thought and culture. The distinction between the globalizing idiom of this latter group of writers and the indigenizing aesthetic of the former echoes Gabriel Okara’s distinction between the 21

See Pius Adesanmi, “Lola Shoneyin: A Poet’s Penkelemesi Years,” Sentinel Poetry 2 (2 October 2004): 27.

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piano and the drum,22 one being representative of Western ‘global’ idiom, the other representative of an indigenous aesthetic. One would certainly like to hear more of the sound of the drum: i.e. a deeper integration of the works with traditional African aesthetic matrix, in the works of younger Nigerian women writers.

Whither African Feminist Aesthetics? The question what constitutes African literary aesthetics needs to be asked specifically of contemporary African women’s writing. The view expressed in this essay has been that a necessary condition for naming a piece of work as belonging to the category ‘African feminist / womanist aesthetic’ is the integration of elements of African indigenous aesthetics with African feminist/ womanist themes. Viewed from this perspective, a definite aesthetic gulf seems evident in the literature of the younger generation of African women writers compared with that of the ‘old ladies’. The frontline of African feminisms is occupied by the likes of Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ, Buchi Emecheta, among others. While the position of these writers in the African canon in assured, it is indeed appropriate to look at what some of the younger African women writers are ‘doing’ in the attempt to prognosticate on the future of African feminist aesthetics. The works of frontline Nigerian women writing such as Nwapa, Emecheta, and Sofola as well as those of second generation women writers such as Nwoye, Adimora– Ezeigbo, Adenubi, and Oyinsan exhibit the complement of feminist themes and indigenous African usage, but the same cannot be said of many writers at the younger end of the continuum. The works of Toyin Adewale, Lola Shoneyin, and Mabel (Tobriese) Evwierhoma have been cited briefly above to illustrate this situation. While these writers have produced excellent prose and poetry and their feminist credentials are not in doubt, their works need to aspire more to an integration with indigenous African aesthetics. Whether this is truly possible in view of their background and the unrelenting tyranny of the ‘globalization’ trend and its corresponding and systematic disintegration of indigenous languages and cultures as highlighted in the foregoing is a different order of question. However, a conscious integration of elements of indigenous aesthetics with African feminist themes does enhance the authenticity of the works within the context of the African aesthetic matrix. More ominously, unless the younger Nigerian women writers adopt the integrative aesthetic strategy of the earlier groups, the future of an ‘African’ feminist

22

Gabriel Okara, “Pianos and Drums,” in A Selection of African Poetry, ed. K.E. Senanu & Theo Vincent (London: Longman, 1976).

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aesthetic may well be in jeopardy. The works produced will be feminist, no doubt, but it is doubtful that they would be very much ‘African’. WORKS CITED Adenubi, Mobolaji. “The Importance of Being Prudent,” in Breaking the Silence, ed. Adewale–Nduka & Segun, 73–84. Adesanmi, Pius. “Lola Shoneyin: A Poet’s Penkelemesi Years,” Sentinel Poetry Quarterly 2 (October 2004): 24–29. Adewale–Nduka, Toyin. “Boxer’s Shorts,” in Breaking the Silence, ed. Adewale– Nduka & Segun, 137–42. ——. Naked Testimonies (Lagos: Mace Associates, 1995). ——, & Omowumi Segun, ed. Breaking the Silence (Lagos: The Women Writers of Nigeria & Mace Associates 1996). Adimora–Ezeigbo, Akachi. “The Departure,” in Breaking the Silence, ed. Adewale– Nduka & Segun, 25–34. Amadiume, Ify. Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case (London: Karnak House, 1987). ——. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed, 1987). Arndt, Susan. African Women’s Literature: Orature and Intertextuality (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1998). ——. The Dynamics of African Feminism (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2002). Azunoye, Nnorom. “My E-conversation with Toyin Adewale–Gabriel,” Sentinel Poetry 12 (November 2003). Sentinel Poetry Online (3 December 2003): http: //www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/magazine1103/page17.html Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York & London: Routledge, 2000). Gilbert, Sandra M., & Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1: The War of the Worlds New Haven C T . Yale U P , 1988). Evwierhoma, Mabel. Out of Hiding (Ibadan: Sam Bookman, 2002). Head, Bessie. A Question of Power (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann Educational, 1974). Jeyifo, Biodun. The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London: New Beacon, 1985). Kolawole, Mary E Modupe. “Reversing Gender Myths and Images in Buchi Emecheta’s Novels,” in Gender Perceptions and Development in Africa, ed. Mary E. Modupe Kolawole (Lagos: Arrabon Academic, 1998): 159–76. ——. Womanism and African Consciousness (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1997). Mills, Sara. Feminist Stylistics (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Foreword: Locating Feminists/Feminisms,” in Susan Arndt, The Dynamics of African Feminism (Trenton NJ & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2002): 9–15. ——. “From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re)Inscription of Womanhood,” Research in African Literatures 25.4 (1994): 137–57. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Is there a female voice?: Joyce Carol Oates Replies,” in Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Mary Eagleton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 292–93. Okara, Gabriel. “Pianos and Drums,” in A Selection of African Poetry, ed. K.E. Senanu & Theo Vincent (London: Longman, 1976). Oyewumi, Oyeronke. “Family Bonds / Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25.4 (2000): 1093–98. Oyinsan, Bunmi. “The Importance of Being Prudent,” in Breaking the Silence, ed. Adewale–Nduka & Segun, 137–42. Shoneyin, Titilola. So All The Time I Was Sitting On An Egg (1996; Ibadan: Ovalonian House, 2001). ——. Song of a Riverbird (Ibadan: Ovalonian House, 2001). Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985): 243–70. Sofola, Zulu. King Emene: The Tragedy of a Rebellion (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1975). ——. Wedlock of the Gods (London: Evans Brothers, 1973). Tobriese, Mabel. Nigerian Feminist Theatre: Essays on Female Axes in Contemporary Nigerian Drama (Ibadan: Sam Bookman, 1998). Wells, Julia. “Maternal Politics in Organising Black South African Women: The Historical Lessons,” in Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 1998): 251–62. Wittig, Monique. “The Point of View: Universal or Particular,” Feminist Issues 3.2. (1983): 63–70.

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Smells, Skins, and Spices Indian Spice Shops as Gendered Diasporic Spaces in the Novels of Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora

C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAM

We carry our spices each time we enter new spaces the feel of newness is ginger between teeth1

T

I have undertaken to investigate in the novels by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Mistress of Spices, 1999), Radhika Jha (Smell, 2001), and Preethi Nair (One Hundred Shades of White, 2003), are the Indian spice shops. The protagonists of these novels are all involved with Indian spice shops to diverse extents. These shops cater to the cultural tastes and culinary demands of Indian diasporic communities in cities like the ones described in these novels; in short they bring pieces of India to the diaspora. They sell foodstuffs, spices, handicrafts, Bollywood film videotapes and music cassettes, sari material and shalwar kameezes, all products from different Indian regions. The palate of consumer products is HE GENDERED SPACES

1 Lakshmi Gill, “Immigrant Always,” in Shakti’s Words: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women’s Poetry, ed. Diane McGifford & Judith Kearns (Toronto: T S A R , 1990): 33.

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diverse in regional differences, often to be found in one shop or even whole rows of shops catering perhaps for Northern, Central, and Southern Indian tastes and preferences. I consider the Indian spice shop a contact zone in the Indian diasporic situation, where Indians of different walks of life come to buy the goods they need and want in order to re-create their diverse versions of lived Indian culture. The shopkeeper is often representative of this ‘authentic’ Indian space in a diasporic setting and serves as an authority on the kind and quality of commodities and, by extension, on the cultural context in which they are produced and consumed. The space of the shop also allows for possible contacts to other ethnic groups as well as the mainstream societies, depending very much on whether these move into the shop space to explore and perhaps take advantage of the products on offer. The motivation behind such contact situations might be a desire on the part of non-Indians to get to know Indian foodstuffs and other commodities and thus satisfy their curiosity about Indian culture. Thus I propose that the Indian spice shop is a transcultural space of intersection, meetings, and cultural interaction and negotiation. Seeing that the politics of location is ineluctably linked to the politics of identity, it is more than apparent that Indian women of the diaspora engage with the process of negotiating diasporic space for themselves, which accommodates the intersection of “diaspora, border and dis /location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes.”2 Elizabeth Russell points out the potential creativity as well as the dis-ease that comes with occupying that space of intersection: This living between cultures in an in-between space where meaning collapses can be potentially creative; on the other hand, it can lead to displacement, alienation, exile and loss, a sense of not belonging anywhere.3

This patchwork space throws up ambivalences. It either fosters positive and constructive identity formation processes on an individual level, allowing for the development of possible transcultural mentalities, or it provides a haven, a means of escape from the dark side of diasporic experience: e.g., racism, sexual harassment, domestic violence and subjugation, as well as the inability to function as an independent articulate subject, in which case an isolation of the mind does not prove at all productive. Examples of such patchwork spaces, where contact zones are created and potential transgressions of cultural loyalties are thus laid bare or where psychological refuge is offered are Tilo’s 2 Elizabeth Russell, “Indian Women Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing and Subjectivities, ed. Elizabeth Russell (Cross / Cultures 52; Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2002): 79. 3 Elizabeth Russell, “Indian Women Theorizing the Diaspora,” 181.

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‘Spice Bazaar’ in Oakland, California in Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices, the Parisian ‘Epicerie Madras’ in Jha’s Smell, and Nalini’s Indian pickle shop (which remains unnamed) in Edgware, a London suburb, in Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White .

Ideas of Space Like gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, space is a construct; it is produced socially, economically, politically, culturally but also aesthetically in literature and art. As a construct, it is not stable but in process (like identity). According to Martina Löw and Michel de Certeau, space is dynamically and actively produced, evincing constantly shifting relative arrangements between people, places, and cultural and social goods. Löw and de Certeau share the idea of space as being actively constructed; they attribute great significance to spaceconstituting practices. De Certeau maintains that “Space is a practiced place,”4 while Löw observes that space is a “relational arrangement of living beings and social goods in place”;5 thus, place is spatialized by practice. At this point, it would be expedient to elucidate the idea of this particular diasporic contact zone, that of the Indian spice shop, as a social space, where, as Mary Louise Pratt observes, “disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other.”6 The term ‘contact zone’ is used by Pratt to describe “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations.”7 Pratt explains, further, that such a contact zone is “an attempt to provoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories nor intersect.”8 In her study Cultures in the Contact Zone, Susanne Reichl focuses on transcultural communication in the contact zone, a term borrowed from language-contact phenomena.9 Reichl points out the dynamics of these paths where people are always on the move, where cultural trajectories intersect with increasing frequency. She uses Pratt’s definition of the contact zone to describe spaces where transcultural interactions which do not privilege domi4 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L’invention du quotidien, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984): 117. 5 “Raum ist eine relationale (An)Ordnung von Lebewesen und sozialen Gütern an Orten”; Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000): 271. 6 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992): 4. 7 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 8 Imperial Eyes, 7. 9 Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: W V T , 2002): 40–41.

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nant discourses but engage in active communication and translation across diverse cultural continua.10 Mary Louise Pratt suggests that the transcultural is prevalent in the contact zone and defines it as involving “subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.”11 In this vein, Katja Sarkowsky points out that the contact zone serves as a suitable tool for explaining transcultural spaces of encounter, where meaning and identity are negotiated. A close look at spatiality understood as a dynamic process of simultaneity and its functions in literary texts [. . . ] may reveal how the complex cultural agendas [. . . ] are negotiated not ‘in’ but ‘through’ the construction of different narrative spaces. These spaces are not static cultural containers but present ambivalences and contradictions and are constitutive for transcultural processes.12

Indeed, space, as numerous critics have argued, does not merely provide a background for cultural arrangements; rather, it is an integral part of cultural and political processes. A close look at spatiality understood as a dynamic process of simultaneity and its functions in literary texts by Indian diasporic women writers shows how the complex agendas of Indian women’s diasporic literature are negotiated not ‘in’ but ‘through’ the construction of different narrative spaces. James Clifford points out that “space is never ontogically given. It is discursively mapped and corporeally practiced.”13 David Tomas corroborates the fact that if space is a practised place, as maintained by de Certeau, then it is through the body that places are transformed into spaces through everyday activity.14 A transient intercultural space like a contact zone is what Tomas describes as transcultural space, because this space has its special interstitial qualities, a certain rootedness in destabilized territorial zones: Transcultural spaces are predicated on chance events, unforeseen and fleeting meetings, or confrontations that randomly direct activity originating from either side of geographic or territorial, natural or artificially perceived 10

Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone, 42-43. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 12 Katja Sarkowsky, “Beyond the Contact Zone? Mapping Transcultural Spaces in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach,” in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze–Engler & Sissy Helff, with Claudia Perner & Christine Vogt–William (A S N E L Papers 12; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2008): 323–38. 13 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997): 54. 14 David Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Boulder C O : Westview Press, 1996): 10. 11

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divides that separate and distinguish peoples with different constellations of customs, manners and language. These spaces are therefore the product of fleeting intercultural relations, of special kinds of spatial and communicational dynamics that unfold during the course of [. . . ] contact situations between Western and non-Western peoples.15

Tomas is also convinced that transcultural spaces are constantly being produced in a variety of intercultural situations. Thus space is cast and patterned according to the vicissitudes of social behaviour, they open, close, traverse, puncture and penetrate – space is not just shaped by social behaviour but, in turn, influences, moulds, and formats social behaviour itself.16 Thus, for my purposes here, the contact zone is a location where cultures are in constant contact with one another; the constant confrontation of diverse cultural identities, allowing for the use of the term with reference to cityscapes like London, Paris, and Oakland, can be seen in the novels I will be analyzing here.

Spice Spaces I propose that the Indian spice shops in the novels mentioned are gendered contact zones; for one thing, the proprietors are all women who are newcomers to the cities that are the settings of these novels. Another factor that contributes to the feminization of the ostensibly public space of the Indian spice shop in these cities is that the female protagonists whose lives revolve around the maintenance and operation of these spice shops cater for the material and psychological needs of their respective diasporic communities while simultaneously risking and initiating contact with those of other ethnic groups, which make up the ‘mainstream’ of the host countries. This caretaker role goes beyond the lucrative economic aspect of importing and selling products which are of authentic Indian origin to members of Indian diasporic communities. The spice shops in two of the novels examined here have adjoining kitchens where the protagonists often engage in private encounters with their female customers, employees, and family members; a circumstance that also contributes to the feminization of this particular space in these novels.17 The reader sees the protagonists engaged in their seemingly mundane task of dispensing their wares, as well as their advice and assistance, to 15

Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, 1. Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, 9. 17 The Indian spice shops in Mistress of Spices and One Hundred Shades of White have adjoining kitchens, which serve as important spaces of interaction and coomunication. These kitchen spaces will be dealt with in the framework of a chapter in my dissertation project, which entails the investigation of cooking practices, food, and foodways and the accompanying cultural translations in diasporic imaginaries. 16

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fellow Indian women of the diaspora and customers of other ethnic groups and diverse walks of life who happen on the Indian spice shops.

Mistress of Spices Tilo, the mistress of spices, runs a “Spice Bazaar” in Oakland, California. Tilo is not only the proprietor of the spice store; she also lives and sleeps there. When Tilo moves into the shop, she changes into an old woman, in keeping with the Spice Laws, which do not allow her to indulge herself or to initiate contact with any of her customers on a more personal level. Tilo was sent to the Oakland Indian diasporic community to provide psychological nourishment for the migrants and their children, helping them to deal with their feelings of displacement and estrangement as well as to assist them in their attempts to integrate and be accepted by the mainstream of their new host country. It is Tilo’s life’s work, a responsibility conferred on her by the First Mother from the magical Island of Spices, where Tilo and others like her are trained: “‘Remember,’ said the Old One, the First Mother, when she trained us on the island. ‘You are not important. No Mistress is. What is important is the store. And the spices’.”18 The Mistresses’ own personal needs and desires were to be denied – indeed, a Mistress was not to know such things. The Spice Mistresses are not even allowed bodily contact with those in their care, however much their instinctive reaction might be to dispense comfort through the simple act of touch; “It is not allowed for Mistresses to touch those who come to us. To upset the delicate axis of giving and receiving on which our lives are held precarious” (6). When she first arrives at the shop, waking out of the magical transmigrative sleep laid on her by the First Mother in her old woman’s body, she feels “the store hardening its protective shell around [her]” (58). The spice shop seems to be an extension of Tilo’s body and her sense of self; it influences all her thoughts and actions. Indeed, one might be tempted to think that the spice shop itself is a form of purdah conferred or imposed on Tilo by the Spices to ensure that her loyalties are with the spices and thus, by extension, with the culture – Indian – they represent in the novel. Tilo’s wares – the spices, herbs, and diverse curative recipes – are requested as cures and restoratives for specific problems. Often she dispenses them voluntarily, sometimes without the customers knowing, thus keeping to the Mistress Code and offering her help from a distance without initiating actual physical and emotional contact with anyone. 18

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mistress of Spices (London: Black Swan, 1997): 5. Further page references are in the main text.

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The spice store is a symbolic space of transplanted Indian culture in an alien land; it is also conspicuous in its incongruence in the cityscape of Oakland, California. Yet it proves to be a refuge for the old and the new immigrants of the Indian diasporic community in this city: The store. Even for those who know nothing of the inner room with its sacred secret shelves, the store is an excursion into the land of might-have-been. A self-indulgence dangerous from a brown people who come from elsewhere, to whom real Americans might say Why? (5)

This store does not just have spices, rather it has all the other Indian cultural consumer paraphernalia common to the Indian diasporic retail scene, which pander to the homesick yearnings of the Indian community – basmati rice, Indian mithai, numerous kinds of dhal and other Indian vegetables, video tapes and music cassettes, all containing echoes of a far-off homeland which some have never even seen and others still dream of returning to. The Mistress herself looks like a memory, a tradition personified [. . . ] a bent old woman with skin the colour of old sand, behind a glass counter that holds mithai, sweets out of their childhoods. [. . . ] it seems that I should always have been there, that I should understand without words their longing for the ways they chose to leave behind when they chose America. Their shame for that longing, like the bitter-slight aftertaste in the mouth. (4–5)

At this point, I believe it would be expedient to observe that the Indian culture is intrinsically transcultural, given the diversity of cultural facets and traditions in India and the perceptions thereof. The reader sees the diverse Indian people who come to her spice shop to buy the foodstuffs as well as acquire Tilo’s advice – Haroun, who is Kashmiri, Geeta’s grandfather, who is a Bengali from Jamshedpur, Lalitha, newly arived in Oakland from Kanpur, Jagjit and his family from Jullundhar in the Punjab, the bougainvillea girls, who are ostensibly second-generation Indian-Americans, the rich Indians who have lived in the U S A for quite some time and made their fortunes there. Thus the spice shop space becomes a public space where the Indian diasporic group identity can be articulated and actively lived in all its diversity. As a wise woman, a witch, a seer, and a healer, whose main responsibility is to care for the Indian immigrant community in this vicinity, Tilo is aware of the secret desires and difficulties faced by this group of people, especially those of the Indian women. She often surprises her customers by giving them what they need in order to tackle their everyday business of living in a new society and negotiating between the cultures they come into contact with.

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Initially terrified at her perspicacity, many return, wanting her help in dealing with their diverse situations: For a moment I hold their glance, and the air around us grows still and heavy. [. . . ] Their glance skittery with fear with wanting. “Witchwoman,” say the eyes. Under their lowered lids they remember the stories whispered around night fires in their home village. They will come back later [. . . ] I will take them into the inner room, the one with no windows, where I keep the purest spices, the ones I gathered on the island for times of special need. I will light the candle I keep ready and search the soot-streaked dimness [. . . ]. I will chant. I will administer. I will pray to remove sadness and suffering as the Old One taught. I will deliver warning. That is why I left the island [. . . ] left it for this store, where I have brought together everything you need in order to be happy. (6)

Tilo is able to live vicariously through certain experiences thanks to her magical ability to maintain mental contact with certain of her customers, gaining access to their personal life-spaces and realities. When I lie down, from every direction the city will pulse its pain and fear and impatient love into me. All night if I wish I can live it, the ordinary life I gave up for the spices, through the thoughts that roll into me. [. . . ] Each thought is a pattern of what that will shape itself into words, into a face, and around it a room if I try hard enough. [. . . ] here is another image. A woman in a kitchen cooking my rice. [. . . ] Inside my head her thoughts knock against one another, falling. [. . . ] The men, where are they? Their thoughts give off the smell of parched earth in a year of failed monsoons, lead me into rooms hung with pictures [. . . ] A girl [. . . ] and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue. (60/63)

She is often sought out as an ‘authentic’ cultural authority by adherents to ‘the Indian culture’ and its responsibilities; for example, Geeta Banerjee’s grandfather, who deplores his grandaughter’s ‘Western’ modern life-style and instigates a family rupture because Geeta is in love with a young Chicano man. Since Tilo herself is teetering on the transgressie brink of falling in love with a Native American man who comes regularly to the spice shop, she feels that she has to break the spice-imposed bounds of the shop’s confines, and physically ventures out to find Geeta and talk to her on her own territory: i.e. in her office, offering her advice and support so that the young woman can find the strength to make her own decisions as well as to bridge the rift in her family. Here Tilo commits a transgression that is necessary to effect transcultural negotiations: she moves out of her self and her store’s confines in order to touch and contact others – a step that is important for her in exercising autonomy and in finally coming into her own.

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[. . . ] when I woke in this land the store was already around me, its hard protective shell. The spices too surrounded me, a shell of smells and voices. And that other shell my aged body pressing its wrinkles into me. Shell within shell within shell [. . . ] today I plan to stretch my wings, to crack perhaps the shells and emerge into the infinite spaces of the outside world. It frightens me a little. I must admit this. [. . . ] Outside America is flinging itself against the walls of my store, calling in its many-tongued voice. Give me strength to answer. (125)

Tilo actually also goes to a department store to buy appropriate clothing so as to be able to blend in; she breaks another spice rule – she pays attention to her appearance, adapting it to the acceptable standards of outward appearance as dictated by the ‘establishment’. She breaks this rule with increasing frequency in the course of the novel after this initial transgression. Geeta is not the only woman Tilo becomes personally involved with; there is also Lalitha, whom Tilo surreptitiously helps break out of a violent and loveless marriage (97–107). Although Tilo was warned to only dispense her care to her own people, she constantly goes against this rule as well by initiating contact with the African-American man Kwesi as well as with Raven, the Native-American man she falls in love with. Tilo is aware not just of the unhappy and the suffering or the curious; she is aware of the diversity of life going on around her and finally tires of adhering to the spice rules: “it’s my desire I want to fulfil for once” (82). In order to pursue her desires, Tilo engages in different personal encounters which make her reflect on her present situation, trammelled by the laws of the spices. Tilo’s transgressions and newfound freedom exact a price: the spices punish her by upbraiding her, only grudgingly granting her their powers, and gradually withdrawing their favour from her. Why should we, when you have done that which you should not? When you have overstepped the lines you willingly drew around yourself? [. . . ] Do you admit your transgression, your greed in grasping for what you promised to give up forever? Do you regret? (106)

Torn by conflict, Tilo’s attempts to step out of the space assigned to her in order to gain a measure of autonomy for herself are tinged with regret; transcultural negotiations are not free of agony.

Smell The protagonist Leela’s active engagement with the world beyond her aunt’s sequestered home in Paris begins with her perceiving the unsettled compromise between her sense of being Indian and her intimations of what it could mean to be French and her own yearning to be part of the new world she finds

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herself in. This takes place in her uncle’s spice store in Paris, where she ponders her present situation as a Indian migrant woman in France: Standing in the doorway, I suck in the air of their worlds – the dry metallic smell of the air conditioning, the salty smell of dried perspiration, coffee, cigarettes and then something I do not recognize. It brushes ever slightly against the nostrils, so fine and delicate that it is hard to pin down. The people don’t notice [. . . ] and if they do, they don’t care. I long to be part of them, to wrap myself in their arrogance, my feet keeping time with theirs. To me they seem like gods. And I long to be as invulnerable as they are.19

The most significant experience that Leela has in her uncle’s “Épicerie Madras” is her witnessing the battle of the scents between French baguette and Indian spices: When the wind blew hard, as it did very often that spring, the smell of fresh baguette would fight its way into the Epicerie Madras to do battle with the prickly smell of pickles and masalas. It would enter the store confidently, making light of the [. . . ] shelves of cooked foods [. . . ] – it would pause , some of its strength diminished by the pungent foreign odours. Another gust [. . . ] bursting through the open door would bring reinforcements and the smell of the baguette would venture farther into the store. It would pass over [. . . ] and finally turn the corner into the back room where I sat. There hemmed in on all fronts by the heady perfume of cardamom, tumeric, cinnamon and coriander and cut off from reinforcements [. . . ] it would make its last stand, until overwhelmed by the alien hosts. In those last moments of reckless courage it would invade my nostrils. I would hold my breath seeking to give it shelter till my traitorous lungs would betray me. With a whoosh of defeat, I would let my breath out and let the spices of my native land, a land I had never seen, reclaim me.20

This ‘battle of the scents’ mirrors Leela’s innate need to be able to fit in, to find a home, to be accepted as well as to accept herself . The Épicerie Madras is obviously an aberration in the Parisian landscape; its alien scents infringe on the French national space. The scent of French baguette ventures into the shop on an exploratory expedition (even a smell betrays colonialist behaviour in Leela’s olfactory world) in order to find out about this new entity that is so defiantly ‘un-French’. This encounter enables her to perceive the exercise of cultural contact, conflict, and negotiation on a microcosmic level in this contact zone, the diasporic space of the spice store, a reflection of Leela’s own awareness of her rootless migrant status and her own negotiatory activities 19 20

Radhika Jha, Smell (London: Quartet, 1999): 47. Radhika Jha, Smell, 3.

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especially with regard to her own type of Indianness, which was lived out in Kenya, a fact that her Aunt Latha never allows her to forget. This spirit embodied here in the scent of the French baguette is, however, itself an immigrant scent, as it were, in the new foreign territory of India transported to France; it is at last inundated by its experience of the “alien hosts,” the scents of the imported Indian spices and foodstuffs. Leela, of course, tries to save the baguette scent, in her attempt to imbibe Frenchness, in order to be accepted, embraced; in the end, she is unable to go against the natural process of breathing; expelling the little Frenchness she has inhaled, she must to go back to her ‘naturel’ of being Indian, surrounded by the spices that are the hallmark of Indian cuisine, a conspicuous sign of Indian culture – a culture to which she is now a stranger, due to her life as hitherto lived in Kenya. Yet it is after this battle of the scents that Leela finds her way through the Parisian landscape; it seems that she might have actually saved a little of that French transgression in the baguette scent for herself. Leela discovers that she possesses an extraordinary sense of smell; this olfactory function is the primary means by which she perceives and secures points of access to the new host country she is now in and where she seeks her sense of self on her own terms. This olfactory sense helps her understand the secrets of cooking, the way to blend spices, to reveal potential new taste combinations, thus ensuring that she will, in the future, be able to produce new hybrid or, rather, fusion cuisine (which appeals not just to the Indian palate), allowing her to establish contact with certain levels of French society, notably the avantgarde, upper-middle-class, white-moneyed set. This ability, as it is developed in the course of the tale, helps her to discover her inner strengths and weaknesses, ways of integrating herself into and adapting to the diverse situations confronting her as well as contributing to her understanding of the people involved in her life. Going into these diverse facets of Leela’s development in the novel would exceed the scope of the present essay. Suffice it to say that Leela’s eyes are opened in her uncle’s spice store to the possibilities of transcultural transgressions that she later engages in.

One Hundred Shades of White Nalini sets up her own pickle shop in Edgware (a London suburb) with help from her Irish friends Maggie and Tom, a few years after she moves to England with her children and after she is subsequently abandoned by her husband. This in itself seems to be a transcultural set-up, with an Indian family and an Irish family working and living together, their fortunes bound up with Nalini’s pickle shop. Nalini’s acceptance of her new home country is compounded in her invention of a new kind of pickle; this happens shortly before she sets up her shop:

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The mango and lime pickles were doing very well and I decided it was time to introduce a new range: apple, cinnamon and chilli. Ripe, sober English cooking apples blended with a mixture of temperamental chillis, a hint of toasted fenugreek and asafoetida for vision, all grounded with lightly fried onions and mustard seeds. In those bottles were a perfect combination of stable West and fiery East. It was an acceptance on my part, an assimilation of cultures, fused together with the coarse sweetness of cinnamon. I needed to find a name for our brand and after much discussion we decided on ‘The Abundance of Spice’.21

The pickle shop is a spin-off from Nalini’s ‘cottage industry’ of making pickles from her home – it is a new beginning for her and ensures her a measure of independence. She also marries Ravi Thakker, a Ugandan Indian, one of her former customers, who supports her enterprise. It is her friend Maggie who helps her in the pickle shop, tasting, bottling, and packaging, as well as serving the customers. Here Maggie, having learnt from Nalini about Indian spices, their characteristics and functions in cooking, the diverse combinations necessary for different pickle recipes, helps the customers choose the right pickles for themselves (reminiscent of Vianne in Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, who finds the right kind of chocolate to cater to a particular customer’s needs22). The shop was like a magnet that drew many broken hearts [. . . ] We had an array of customers: matriarchal Indian women who seemed to know how to hold their families together; young Jewish and Polish women who knew what they wanted out of life; middle-aged affluent English women who looked like they had everything under control; single men, married men and old men. All entered with an air of certainty. Unbeknown to them, the sound of the chimes and the various smells disarmed them and made them feel safe, they felt secure in the store and they didn’t even know it. At first they bought random jars without saying anything, trusting that their instincts were guiding them and then they came back, buying different flavours so they could make a decision on which ones they preferred. [. . . ] Others could not quite decipher which their particular favourites were and so changed their order every week. [. . . ] Maggie diagnosed this as symptoms of loneliness and talked as much as she could to make up for it. [. . . ] She had incredible perception and often knew what people needed. She didn’t thrust her advice on 21

Preethi Nair, One Hundred Shades of White (London: HarperCollins, 2003): 108. “I know all their favourites [. . . ] I have no desire to probe further into their lives than this. I do not want their secrets or their innermost thoughts. [. . . ] I like these people. I like their small introverted concerns. I can read their eyes, their mouths so easily. [. . . ] I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations [. . . ]”; Joanne Harris, Chocolat (London: Black Swan, 1999): 56. 22

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Smells, Skins, and Spices them, but would recommend and then they would engage in conversation with her, confirming the diagnosis she had in mind.23 .

Maggie is Nalini’s alter ego in this sense, because she caters to the public aspect of packaging and sales of Nalini’s pickles – the authentic Indian article. She seems to have been imbued with an extrasensory gift (reminiscent of Tilo’s magical Mistress persona), through her friendship with Nalini and her tutelage with regard to spices and pickle-making. It is not quite clear why Nalini herself avoids contact with her customers. Is it because she was uncomfortable about making contact, since she did not feel integrated and accepted enough by British mainstream society? Or is because she concentrated on the more pragmatic aspect of keeping up with the market demand for her pickles? Despite her success on both the economic and the personal level, Nalini sells this first shop when her former husband Raul appears on the scene in order to get in touch with her children Satchin and Maya; she does this to pay him off to prevent him from doing exactly that. She severs this initial anchor in her new life in England which had given her a sense of purpose, independence and agency, in order not to lose her children. The second shop that Nalini opens is smaller than the first and marks a different stage in her life: she has overcome her grief at the death of her son in a car accident and is ready to get reacquainted with her grown-up daughter Maya, who returns from Spain upon receiving the news that Maggie is dying. In this shop, too, “people somehow manage to find what they need. Most of our customers brought their doubts, regrets, guilt and worries to the shop. [.. .] People came in and they went out lighter, letting go of what they needed to.”24 In this second shop, however, Nalini actively takes care of her customers herself instead of leaving everything to her second daughter Ammu or one of her shop assistants (Maggie, by this stage, has died of breast cancer). Here Nalini takes over the role of motherly advisor and cultural informant, offering help to her customers through her pickles. She no longer needs the interpretative skills of her white Irish friend to mediate and translate her Indian culture into a more acceptable entity for the British mainstream. She becomes more active and confident in seeking contact with her customers in comparison to her earlier lack of involvement. Nalini’s pickle shops now seem to be more clearly spaces for her own and her daughter’s personal development – spaces for them to negotiate their movements and their circumstantial and personal conflicts.

23 24

Preethi Nair, One Hundred Shades of White, 128–29. Nair, One Hundred Shades of White, 269-70.

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The adjoining kitchen of the pickle shop, where the pickles are made, is a feminized space where mother and daughter, as well as friends and employees, engage in more private dialogue leading to a better understanding of their diverse predicaments and personal situations as Indian diasporic women. Nalini finally accepts her daughter and her outlook on life as a second-generation Indo-British woman bent on making her own way in life, while Maya comes to accepts what her mother has had to go through in the move from India to England, in the subsequent abandonment by her husband, and in the ways in which she made life possible for herself and her children in the new host country. Both characters engage in different strategies in accepting and breaking rules and crossing cultural boundaries in their dealings with the people around them. The pickle shop is the central scene of this process.

Conclusion In my readings of the spice shops in these three novels, I have looked at the extent to which cultural loyalties permit dynamic female self-positioning or rigidly regulate social spaces of interaction for Indian women in diasporic situations. These spice shops serve as backdrops as well as spatial instigators of transcultural interrogation and strategies, paving the way for greater autonomy on the part of the protagonists. The root problem addressed here is the transformation of ways of thought among these women, such that they become capable of redefining their lived reality in public and private spaces. They negotiate their positions within their families and their cultural responsibilities as well as learning to meet and shape the expectations of the local diasporic communities they move in. One has to to able to throw that transcultural switch, as it were, in one’s mind on a private and personal level before one can actually implement one’s chosen transcultural strategies in the public spaces of the new host society. WORKS CITED Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997). De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (L’invention du quotidien, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984). Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Mistress of Spices (London: Black Swan, 1997). Jha, Radhika. Smell (London: Quartet, 1999). Löw, Martina. Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 2000). Nair, Preethi. One Hundred Shades of White (London: HarperCollins, 2003). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992).

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Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: W V T , 2002. Russell, Elizabeth. “Indian Women Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities, ed. Elizabeth Russell (Cross / Cultures 52; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 77–98. Sarkowsky, Katja. “Beyond the Contact Zone? Mapping Transcultural Spaces in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach,” in Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze–Engler & Sissy Helff, with Claudia Perner & Christine Vogt–William (A S N E L Papers 12; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2008): 323–38. Tomas, David. Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Boulder C O & Oxford: Westview, 1996). ½¾

Generational Change Women and Writing in the Novels of Thea Astley

M AUREEN L YNCH P ÈRCOPO

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T H E A A S T L E Y in August 2003 seemed to occasion an essay in remembrance of her writing, and an opportunity to return to the novels of an author whose work I greatly admire. The aspect of Astley’s writing I intend to analyze in this essay is the question of ‘generational change’ as apparent in the representation of women in her fiction.1 To what extent did Astley during her forty years of literary activity move into the sphere of ‘feminist’ writers? To what degree did she write within a ‘gendered’ space? Together with the new generation of women writers from the 1970s onwards, how did she question the role of ‘patriarchy’ during these years? These questions will be approached by focusing on the presence or absence of women as protagonists in her fiction, on the highlighting or downgrading of their fictional roles, together with a brief consideration of the critical evaluation of her narrative style during the different stages of her writing career. Astley, as one who has been presented as writing with a ‘male’ or ‘neutral’ voice, and has more recently been seen by critics as a ‘feminine’ or a ‘feminist’ writer, clearly did not remain static in her approach. For many years she placed a form of self censure on her experience as a woman, for she saw Australian society in those days as tending to exclude women from creative roles. Her writing favoured male figures as chief protagonists, often the object of biting criticism. In her mature works, however, not only did Astley develop an ability to manipulate time and points of view, where the individual narrative themes and voices are divided into complex HE UNEXPECTED DEATH OF

1 This essay was developed from seminar studies with several of my dissertation students at the University of Cagliari, in particular Patrizia Desogus, whose contribution I wish to acknowledge here.

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sub-stories that enrich her presentation and narrative style, but she also shifted decisively towards an emphasis on women as protagonists, figures who stand in opposition to male culture. Thea Astley’s fourteen novels and three books of collected stories cover a period of forty years or so. But if we attempt a brief examination of this cycle of writing, how and when do her women emerge? To what extent can their struggle for independence from a maledominated culture be considered successful? Does independence bring with it a fair measure of security or happiness? Notably, women are the protagonists of both the author’s first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), and her last, Drylands (1999).2 But the Elsie of the first is a resilient young woman, determined to find her independent way in life, while the Janet of the last appears deeply disillusioned, an outsider whose only victory, it seems, will be in leaving the ‘drylands’ of the title. This final work presents a very bleak outlook, is savage in its denunciation of surrounding male complacency, bigotry, and even brutality. It is saved from apparently almost complete feminine defeat only by the stubbornness of the runaway Lannie, who successfully asserts her independence as an individual. But apart from these, her first and last novels, how did Astley, in the intervening years, deal with the representation of women? The reader is soon aware that after the initial presentation of Elsie in Girl with a Monkey, in a novel which focuses on a winning, if unconventional female protagonist to the detriment of the refused and weaker male lover, the novels that follow tend to highlight female powerlessness or to show women as undervalued. Of the two lovers in A Descant for Gossips (1960),3 it is the woman who, although stronger and of a more independent mind than her partner, is forced to move to another town when their relationship becomes known. If the adult Helen is unconventional in her disregard for local morality in her affair with Robert, she, too, is defeated by the prevailing standards. Even more so is the teenager Vinny, forsaken by Helen in her flight. Both women are ineffectual in controlling their fates, but for the girl, overcome by disregard and neglect, loneliness leads to a suicidal end. In the middle years of her production, Astley – as she declared in an oftenquoted interview – feeling that she had been “neutered by her upbringing,” decided that the only way her writing would have “any sort of validity” would be to present her works through a male voice.4 Astley’s first poems were, in fact, published under the pen-name of ‘Philip Cressey’. This “writing as a 2

Thea Astley, Girl with a Monkey (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1958), and Drylands (Melbourne: Viking, 1999). 3 Astley, A Descant for Gossips (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1960). 4 Candida Baker, “Thea Astley,” in Yacker: Australian Writers Talk About Their Work (Sydney: Picador, 1986): 42.

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man”5 engendered male protagonists who are the focal points of the central works – for example, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Acolyte (1972), and A Kindness Cup (1974).6 All of these present a controlling male narrative focus, but the writer defended her authorial position, implying that hers was a neutral one. Having been deprived by her upbringing and by the society in which she lived of the possibility of writing with a ‘feminine’ voice, she had arrived at that of a ‘neuter’, albeit making use of male protagonists. The use of a masculine focus in these years raised criticism which saw her choice as “support[ing] and prolong[ing] the social system of negative, patriarchal determinations.”7 Astley, however, had already indicated in her 1986 interview with Candida Baker, her inability to write about “women’s themes,”8 such as those favoured by the feminist movement from the end of the 1960s. This did not mean, however, that the lesser female characters of these years were exempted from her critical view. As Kerryn Goldsworthy has noted, she was quite able to demolish their weaknesses, usually with a “disposable insult [, which] is a form she has under total control.”9 It is only with the publication of An Item from the Late News (1982)10 that we arrive at a feminine narrative voice, that of Gabby. At the same time, however, as Pam Gilbert has remarked,11 the narration is focalized on the male figure of Wafer, so that, as in the preceding works, we are once again dealing with a male protagonist. The female narrative voice of this novel has, in fact, been seen as an example of “ungendered anonymity.”12 With the publication of her next works, Reaching Tin River (1990), the novella “Inventing the Weather” (1992), and Coda (1994),13 any barrier to the use of a female protagonist and perspectives has, however, been overcome. 5 Stephen Milnes, “The Negative Determinations of Literary Criticism: Thea Astley and Writing as a Man,” Antipodes 8.2 (1994): 105. 6 Astley, The Well Dressed Explorer (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1962), The Acolyte (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1972), and A Kindness Cup (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1974). 7 Milnes, “The Negative Determinations of Literary Criticism,” 105. 8 Baker, “Thea Astley,” 43. 9 Kerryn Goldsworthy, “Thea Astley’s Writing: Magnetic North,” Meanjin 42 (December 1983): 480. 10 Astley, An Item From the Late News (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1982). 11 Pam Gilbert, “Thea Astley,” in Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1988): 110. 12 Debra Adelaide, “Thea Astley – ‘Completely Neutered’: Gender, Reception and Reputation,” Southerly 57.3 (1997): 183. 13 Astley, Reaching Tin River (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1990), “Inventing The Weather,” in Vanishing Points (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1992), and Coda (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1994).

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We now find not only a female narrative voice but also leading feminine figures. Soon after, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996)14 offers multiple narrative voices, including that of the Indigenous narrator, Manny Cooktown, but, in the opening and sustaining voice of Mrs Curthoys, is also centred on female protagonists and their experiences, treating themes and questions related to women’s problems and lives – marriage, child-bearing, concern for the weaker, together with subordination, dependency, neglect – and rebellion. In these works, Astley has overcome any inhibitions about giving prominence to women’s voices; and it is in the 1990s that critical readings begin to indicate a ‘feminist’ tendency in her writing. Her approach, although in later years definitely one pursuing a form of ‘feminine’ awareness, was not seen initially as ‘feminist’. Brian Matthews, writing of the women in her 1979 short-story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple,15 saw them as examples of Astley’s known sympathy for ‘misfits’ and ‘outsiders’, all of whom are equally ‘victims’, whether male or female.16 In the same period, Elizabeth Perkins and Pam Gilbert both saw her work as ‘feminine’. In her often-quoted 1985 reading of A Kindness Cup, Perkins, as a feminist critic, regarded that work as “ambiguous,” in that it offers a “‘feminine’ awareness struggling to orient itself in a masculinist society.”17 ‘Feminine’ is here distinguished from ‘feminist’, in that there is no opposition of values in search of predominance, but only a different conception of the world. This is not, therefore, an “ideologically determined feminist novel,”18 but one which sets apart those who do not adhere to masculinist values. The losers are not only women, together with, of course, the victimized Indigenes, but also other men such as Lunt – viewed here as having virtues which are stereotypically seen as ‘feminine’: those of caring for others, patience, and gentleness. Gilbert too, writing in 1988, viewed the earlier texts, A Kindness Cup (1974) and An Item from the Late News (1982), together with Beachmasters (1985), as having a ‘feminine’ undercurrent which threatened but did not overcome masculine domination.19 After the 1980s, however, when referring to the novella “Inventing the Weather” in Vanishing Points (1992), Perkins’ view has changed. In her com14 Astley, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (Ringwood, Victoria: Viking, 1996). Hereafter referred to as Rainshadow. 15 Astley, Hunting the Wild Pineapple (Melbourne: Nelson, 1979). 16 Brian Matthews, “Before Feminism – After Feminism,” in Romantics and Mavericks: The Australian Short Story (Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1987): 20. 17 Elizabeth Perkins, “A Life of its Own: A Deconstructive Reading of Astley’s A Kindness Cup,” Hecate 11.1 (1985): 13. 18 Perkins, “ A Life of its Own,” 13. 19 Gilbert, “Thea Astley,” 113.

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ments on the figure of Julie, she now writes that Astley’s stance embodies clear feminist virtues, terming Julie “a new creation” and underlining the fact that Vanishing Points is the first of Astley’s North Queensland novels in which “masculinist violence is juxtaposed with feminist evasion tactics.”20 Other later critics, such as Elaine Lindsay and Debra Adelaide,21 both note a decided change in Astley’s approach from the mid-1980s, not only with regard to the presence of women in her fiction but also in the subject-matter and mode of their treatment. Lindsay notes the way in which Astley distances herself from institutionalized religion, as well as her strong criticism, in particular, of male religious figures, new elements in her writing which find their basis in second-wave feminism, but which are here directed towards the establishment of a place for women in the ecclesiastical sphere, in opposition to a patriarchal culture and in defence of a feminine spirituality. Lindsay observes what she terms “feminist strands” in Astley’s narratives dating from the publication of the 1987 collection It’s Raining in Mango,22 while Adelaide, writing in 1997, sees a decided change in approach in Reaching Tin River and Coda, which are described as “feminist texts” by virtue of their focus on a female narrative voice, that of Belle in Reaching Tin River and Kathleen in Coda, with a convincing and fearless exploration of the domestic scene, an area into which the author had not before ventured but had “shunned for much of her writing career.” Here Astley is now considered to be “firmly on feminist ground.”23 In summing up these critical views, there seems little doubt that they reveal conclusions which see the author as moving into a ‘feminist’ sphere, as undoubtedly influenced during the 1980s by women’s struggle for equality, and pursuing this valorization through her representation of women as protagonists. These assume a narrative voice, offering, in opposition to the dominant masculine culture, decidedly feminine perspectives, concerns, and opinions, whether in the social or the spiritual sphere. These aspects of her work were to be lent increasing emphasis in the publications of the 1990s. Susan Sheridan has commented: 20

Perkins, “Hacking at Tropical Undergrowth: Exploration in Thea Astley’s North Queensland,” in Queensland: Words and All, ed. Manfred Jurgensen (Brisbane: Outrider / Phoenix, 1993): 386. 21 Elaine Lindsay, “Reading Thea Astley – From Catholicism to Post-Christian Feminism,” Antipodes 9.2 (1995): 119–22; Debra Adelaide, “Thea Astley – ‘Completely Neutered’,” 182–90. 22 Lindsay, “Reading Thea Astley,” 119. It’s Raining in Mango, which won the inaugural Steele Rudd Award for the best short-story collection in 1988, has also been viewed as a novel. 23 Adelaide, “Thea Astley – ‘Completely Neutered’,” 184, 190.

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It is undeniably true that Astley’s fiction does not propose any reasons to expect liberatory changes in the world it portrays. Survival, and the recovery or attainment of some degree of moral integrity are about as much as we can hope for along these lines in an Astley novel. Bur her changed rhetorical stance – to write as a woman and not as a man – give her new grounds from which to mount her welcome attacks on stupidity and malice.24 ½¾

I would now like to take a closer look at, and attempt a more detailed evaluation of, the female figures of these years, for all three novels of the 1990s, although diverging in their thematic bases – whether this be that of the ageing ‘granny’ as a burden in Coda, or the racism and discrimination of The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, or rebellion against the impending doom threatening small towns, written literature, and culture in Drylands – all three novels focus on the place and importance of women in twentieth-century Australian society. These female figures can be seen as grouped into several different categories: there are those who can still be designated as ‘submissive’, as ‘victims’ of males, and others who are presented as offering decidedly independent opinions. They are, in fact, described by the author as “outspoken.”25 We then have those who are more clearly ‘emancipated’ from male subservience, and yet others whose lives may be described as ‘dedicated’. Women as victims are particularly evident in the figures of Daisy in Coda and Mrs Brodie, the ailing wife of Captain Brodie in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. They have traits in common with the two feminine figures, the sisters Hilda and Ilse, Holberg’s wife and his lover, in the earlier work The Acolyte. Victims of psychological or physical violence, Daisy and Mrs Brodie have devoted themselves to their marriages and families; they are entirely subservient to their husbands. Characterized by passivity and a state of resignation towards their condition, which undergoes no change, Mrs Brodie, excessively modest, is seen as “hangdog – absorbed in her children […] pregnant […] confounded by masculine command.”26 Daisy, described through the thoughts of Kathleen, the leading figure in Coda, is kept “regularly pregnant” by a husband who is prone to “beat her up.”27 Forced to move to a long-distant town in order to follow her husband’s career, in old age she is abandoned by 24 Susan Sheridan, “Thea Astley: A Woman Among the Satirists of Post-War Modernity,” Australian Feminist Studies 18.42 (2003): 270. 25 Astley, Coda, 133; Rainshadow, 22. 26 Astley, Rainshadow, 171, 172. 27 Astley, Coda, 30.

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her six children. In this work, Astley offers no solution, no way out of this condition. Both Daisy and Mrs Brodie are destined for narrative death, which comes for Daisy unexpectedly, in shadow and solitude; for Brodie’s wife, conversely, it is climactic and described in dramatic detail. In the next and final novel, Drylands, however, for the battered Ro and exhausted Lannie, a stronger authorial stand has been taken: ambiguous escape with the children for Ro, a new independent life after collapse and recovery in a nursing home for Lannie. Women, ‘outspoken’ both in their behaviour and in the language they appropriate, can be found in both Coda and The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. Kathleen, the independent-minded ‘granny’ determined to flee the ‘coda’ of life in a nursing home, and Leonie, one of several narrative figures in Rainshadow, are given voice in their views on feminine independence. Together with Mrs Curthoys, Leonie’s mother and the opening narrator in Rainshadow, they hold authorial focus both at the level of ‘racconte’ and as first-person narrators. In a setting which concludes before the advent of feminist contestation, the rebellious Leonie states, ”I think I’ve been born before my time,”28 but nevertheless aggressively voices her feelings about sexual (and racial) discrimination, finally leaving her conservative older husband, who had ‘seduced’ her at the age of seventeen, to live an independent if not enthusiastic life in the south with her daughter and sister. It is only in the next generation, however, with the leap forward in time and with the emergence of Annette, Leonie’s daughter, that we see the advent of the ‘emancipated’ woman, intent on her independent career and little interested in matrimony. Tinker, Leonie’s contemporary and friend, on the other hand, is defined as a “feminist apologist before her time,”29 although her unrestrained behaviour is ambiguously represented. It is interesting to note, however, that Astley, in a setting of the late 1930s, puts phrases into Tinker’s mouth similar to others she had used in earlier novels,30 and which she later reasserted in a 1996 interview with Mandy Sayers: “More and more as I age, I find it intolerable that the laws and moral tenets of behaviour are administered by males when the males commit 90 per cent of the crimes.”31 For the author, in an Australian context of the 1990s, little change had taken place over the years. There still remained much for women to struggle against.

28

Astley, Rainshadow, 233. Rainshadow, 245. 30 Rainshadow, 261; Coda, 156; It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures From The Family Album (New York: Putnam, 1987): 75. 31 Mandy Sayers, “Thea Astley Comes Out of the Shadows,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 September 1996), Good Weekend: 19. 29

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One remaining group of Astley’s women needs to be mentioned: those who have dedicated their lives to offering equality and opportunity to those less fortunate than themselves. Into this group can be inserted the women missionary figures, both Catholic and Protestant, who act individually, without restraint by a church hierarchy, in carrying out what they consider to be their calling. These include the three nuns – teachers and nurses – from “Inventing the Weather,” seen by one critic as “rebels against church and society, rich in spiritual wealth, youthful and vital well after normal retirement age.”32 They have ventured into the far north of Cape York, without government or church aid, in order to assist the local Indigenes. As with the Protestant missionaries, Miss Starck and Miss Weber, in Rainshadow, their Christianity is represented as founded in faith and charity, but their female collaboration offers, as Thompson has pointed out, a “nice feminist touch,”33 as these women enlist other women in their reaction to racial prejudice and in support of their life-missions. On the other hand, those who try to work within ecclesiastical institutions, such as Sr Cornelius in Rainshadow, are seen as hampered by an overpowering patriarchal structure and culture. Astley’s final novel, Drylands, set in an isolated town in Queensland’s ‘back country’, continues the author’s rebellion against what she views as prevailing Northern masculinist mores. With its focus on general female helplessness, male bigotry, and male brutality, and acutely pinpointing the contemporary decline into a form of “literate barbarism,” it is savage in its denunciations. Female defeat is here almost complete, and avoided only by the escape of the fleeing, beaten-up Ro, with her broken arm, injured cheek, and small children, and the stubbornness of the runaway Lannie, who, in her desperate, exhausted rebellion against her role as a household drudge, after her recovery in a nursing home, asserts her independence as an individual – this by returning to a work place and leaving her egocentric husband to cope with their grown family of six boys. As is usual in the later novels, the thematic material is divided, to become almost a series of linked short stories, for the focus here is on the ‘dryland’ itself, not only on the physical, but also the metaphorical drought which is destroying the small-town community in a form of cultural and psychological aridity. There is ample evidence of the apprehension with which the author views the degradation of small-town Queensland and the general sliding into ‘literate barbarism” indicative of a national pejoration at this time. A system of patriarchal culture imposed on women and Indigenes alike seems to triumph in this situation. 32

Nigel Krauth, “Two Cyclones Joined,” Australian Book Review 144 (September 1992): 6. Helen Thompson, “The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow,” Women’s Writing 5.2 (1998): 280. 33

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Astley’s love of the written word, of the beauty of music, and of the natural world is emphasized in this last work in the figure of her protagonist Janet, as love in marriage appears in Janet’s short-lived happiness with Ted, after whose death she remains stranded in the town of Drylands. It is also there as “amity,” “tenderness,” and “love” between Joss and her American husband, Clem.34 But this has been newly found only at the cost of their being run out of Drylands, to seek a future in Clem’s native land. As in previous works, Astley’s compassion for Indigenous Australians, which has become an acknowledged strength in her writing, is also prominent – in this case, in the emphasis given to the championing and understanding of Benny Shoforth, who suffers at the hands of the prominent, avaricious townsmen and his denigratory, unacknowledging half-brother. His position as a male loser, engendered by his indigeneity. is counteracted, however, by the sheer violence and meanness of several of the other male characters. As is usual in a reading of Astley, in Drylands the writing is brilliant, the wit barbed; but the satire is heavy, verging on caricature. The denunciation of the continuing, almost stereotypical masculine authoritarianism which holds sway in Drylands is equalled only by the accusations directed at the cultural barbarism epitomized in bar and T V ‘entertainments’, youth illiteracy, and ‘girlie’ and ‘women’s’ magazines. The focus tends to be on extremes. There is little investigation of ‘greyness’ in the portrayal of these figures. In spite of its having won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 2000,35 Drylands seems a rather sad note on which to end a career of writing. Although the ability and craftsmanship of the author well sustain the fiction, it seems to give the victory to that which Astley has always derided. Indeed this aspect of Drylands leaves the reader with a feeling of disillusion when compared to the previous publications Coda and Rainshadow, both of which, despite a certain, although not quite similar equivalent of pessimism, do offer hope, at least through the focalization of several of the rebellious women figures. In these two works we feel that not all is lost, and that, as one critic wrote of It’s Raining in Mango, although “prodding mercilessly at great Australian sore spots, undeceived about our history, our transgressions, [remain] hopeful of our salvation.”36 Here, instead, it seems too late for most of Astley’s women. Their search for independent happiness remains largely thwarted. Perhaps a minimum of possible reprieve is to be found for the protagonist in the final page of Drylands, however. Following the mindless destruction of 34

Astley, Drylands, 282. Further page references are in the main text. The Award for 2000 was shared equally by Astley for Drylands and Kim Scott for Benang. 36 Cath Kenneally, “Tales of Dusty Death,” Weekend Australian Review (4–5 September 1999): 12. 35

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Janet’s bookshop and what she ironically terms the ‘deconstruction’ of her typescript, the reader finds she is “delighted to find she didn’t care […].” There is a reference to “a kind of victory, a kind of defeat” (293). Janet’s victory will be in leaving Drylands, her thoughts turning to a remembered haven, named for Rimbaud, ‘Bateau Ivre’, “its cock-eyed roof […] as insolent as a navvy’s cap.” For Janet, “refinding [it ] would be like the search for the ultimate Eden. For Elysium, Asgard, Heaven”; but she has no illusions. “Quests, crusades, illusory ideologies crumbled and ran away like sand”; her thoughts continue to suggest that “there was something out there,” but “she doubted she would ever discover” (294). In these lines, little hope of resilience is to be found. The unknown, probably youthful, intruders who have wrecked her flat have left written on her mutilated typescript the dismissive advice: “G E T A L I F E .” She is about to respond with the resigned phrase, “T O O L A T E ,” but then she hesitates; and here the emphasis falls on her hesitation. It seems to herald a refusal to give in, to accept defeat. For it is not only Janet the woman who has been attacked. It is, above all, Janet the lover of the written word, the book-seller and writer; and she is still “drunk on the pen” (294). Is it too late? As in other Astley conclusions, the ending remains ambiguous, but the resignation is prominent. Although acknowledging the possibility of searching for, and one day finding, “A L I F E ,” it seems to accede to resignation, the emphasis focusing on the “the idiocy, of her wasted years,” which nevertheless makes her “laugh even more.” The final, repeated words with which the novel closes are: “no endings no endings no” (294). The refusal of closure evident in this (un)ending – in effect, this absence of an ending – seems to suggest, both for the writer and for the woman, a will to continue, a refusal to acknowledge the failure of her aspirations. Is it too late for Janet to “G E T A L I F E ” on her terms – to continue her search for a more equal, more literate world, with the possibility of a greater acceptance of moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values? The author offers no clear-cut answer. If, as in Astley’s subtitle, and in Janet’s thoughts, this is “a book for the world’s last reader” (6), hope may lie in the fact that there have indeed been many ‘last readers’ of Janet’s story, of Astley’s novel, among whom ourselves. So perhaps it is not too late, despite Astley’s bleak outlook, if not for Janet, at least for her similars. WORKS CITED Adelaide, Debra. “Thea Astley – ‘Completely Neutered’: Gender, Reception and Reputation” Southerly 57.3 (1997): 182–90. Astley, Thea. The Acolyte (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1972).

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——. Beachmasters (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Australia, 1985). ——. Coda (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1994). ——. A Descant for Gossips (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1960). ——. Drylands (Melbourne: Viking, 1999). ——. Girl with a Monkey (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1958). ——. Hunting the Wild Pineapple and Other Related Stories (Melbourne: Nelson, 1979). ——. “Inventing the Weather,” in Vanishing Points (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1992). ——. An Item from the Late News (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1982). ——. It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album (New York: Putnam, 1987). ——. A Kindness Cup (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1974). ——. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (Ringwood, Victoria: Viking, 19969. ——. Reaching Tin River (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1990). ——. The Well Dressed Explorer (Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1962). Baker, Candida. “Thea Astley,” in Yacker: Australian Writers Talk About Their Work (Sydney: Picador, 1986): 28–53. Gilbert, Pam. “Thea Astley,” in Coming Out from Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1988):109–28. Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Thea Astley’s Writing: Magnetic North,” Meanjin 42 (December 1983): 478–85. Keneally, Cath. “Tales of Dusty Death,” Weekend Australian Review (4–5 September 1999): 12. Krauth, Nigel. “Two Cyclones Joined,” Australian Book Review 144 (September 1992): 5–7. Lindsay, Elaine. “Reading Thea Astley: From Catholicism to Post-Christian Feminism,” Antipodes 9.2 (1995): 119–22. Matthews, Brian. “Before Feminism – After Feminism,” in Romantics and Mavericks: The Australian Short Story (Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1987): 16–22. Milnes, Stephen. “The Negative Determinations of Literary Criticism: Thea Astley and Writing as a Man,” Antipodes 8.2 (1994): 105–109. Perkins, Elizabeth. “Hacking at Tropical Undergrowth: Exploration in Thea Astley’s North Queensland,” in Queensland: Words and All, ed. Manfred Jurgensen (Brisbane: Outrider / Phoenix, 1993): 337–86. ——. “A Life of its Own: A Deconstructive Reading of Astley’s A Kindness Cup,” Hecate 11.1 (1985): 11–18. Sayers, Mandy. “Thea Astley Comes Out of the Shadows,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 September 1996), Good Weekend: 17–21. Scott, Kim. Benang (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999). Sheridan, Susan. “Thea Astley: A Woman Among the Satirists of Post-War Modernity,” Australian Feminist Studies 18.42 (2003): 261–71. Thompson, Helen. “The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow,” Women’s Writing 5.2 (1998): 279–81. ½¾

4 I SLANDS AND THE S EA

Poems From Malta

D ANIEL M ASSA Statements in Black Stranger, to my story listen – look into my eyes Shall I translate my utterance ? Ħolm ma nfittixx Looking at truth askance: I seek no dream rather the end of dreams I would cross over to the other islands now where my man is plunging his knife in red coral a gift I had stayed behind then seeking the yellow blue flower but the king’s men ran their shadows all over me poured oil in my navel tallow wax in my ears dressed me in sheets of gold foil made me dream dreams and said weave In my fever we wove the sleep of exile and our soul unctuous dreamt the dream of barrenness long years

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DANIEL MASSA

This morning a sting-ray – bonn we call it – washed ashore on the sand bar I cut its gills out and its entrails one hour later it spat grit and clam shells in my face its sting dripping venom they told me you’re expecting with this sew clothes for your child The king’s men have taken a pollen count taken name and address their UV indexes forecast protect us O you king’s men your rightness rejects us your whiteness infects us this is a barren land with people watching for rain-clouds and in the temple out for your white king’s men Caught out in the census they injected my spine with rat bane fired rings of blue suns forbade my son to be born Caesarian by the shore a promise of water At the second hour the white men’s shadow ran over my daughters sundials turned my daughters to stone they slept in rock quarries were bitten by scorpions by day they wandered in the shade that destroys many At the third hour the octopus that spits in the darkness will breed in our churches coming out of the sacristy at the east end by the apse its tentacles mangle my Byzantine blue You made me utter violet delirium for young and old purple dreams but now I’m awake I take my man diver’s knife his white gift of wrath

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Poems From Malta

and cut through layers of foil my son to be born Come out of the shade honey skin daughters sail with me to the water blue this is a shallow sea where octopi breed and the king’s men run shadows upon you even at noon We’ll sail one of the fishing boats towards the nets stretching taut in silence waiting the breaking of the waters sons to be born I swim towards my man diver’s offering his arm a spray of sea-urchins dripping in glorious resurrection like suns glinting red

Mediterranean Shearwater Chant chanted to music yet unwritten They swore they’d get the shearwater we’ll kill the shearwater they said and barring any mishap which the good Lord prevent we’ll batter the bird into bait for our fish-traps they said Our wolf-whistler hurling curses we sped towards Miġer Ilma in fibre-glass and outboard and when we broke red coral we crossed ourselves with sea-spray with ropes we scaled the rock face to lure the great shearwater into our nets of sunrise

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DANIEL MASSA

In flight almost invisible it soared along rock fissures planing the waves for mullet it fed its young on mackerel plunged fish into their gullet And when its haunts we spotted we got us out stout netting covered its breeding places and waited for the getting At shadow time an omen our leader had a seizure and then immediately after our moaning turned to laughter our whistling man stopped cursing our drummer man stopped drumming our leader started frothing we’d netted the shearwater We spat in our hands and chanted fists reaching out to heaven we’ve got the shearwater they said its beauty lures fish for our daughters go get the shearwater they said Our leader he stopped frothing You kill the shearwater he said I crept up the upper fissures in fear scaled up the rock face and as I held it throbbing its wheezing seemed to bless me its silence turned to nurse me I twisted its neck to the east but would unwind and free it spat right in the eyes of the beast but would untwist and free it At five past the hour the whistling-man stopped whistling our leader he stopped breathing the drummer man stopped drumming he’s letting the shearwater go they said

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185

Poems From Malta

there’s hell thunder for this blunder we’ll pound the man’s flesh into bait they said we’ll roast on skewers his flesh they said pluck out his eyes apologize there’s no reason for this treason I twisted its eyes to the west that’s how you do it best my thumb riding its wind-pipe outstretched its kicking wingspan and told the men I’d killed it In flight almost invisible we fled from Miġer Ilma in fibre-glass and outboard and when news reached the village the liturgy had started they sang about our pillage the western sun was setting Maids danced in public worship they marked our brows with sunlight they chanted how we’d snared it into our nets of sunrise outstretched its dark brown feathers Intoning hymns of glory the whistling man was praying he glossed the way we’d killed it they vowed the Lord had willed it May the Lord be praised they said he killed the great shearwater they said its feathers lure fish for our daughters to feed our people they said We’ve trapped the great shearwater We’ll feed our people they said We’ll feed our people We’ll feed … ½¾

A DRIAN G RIMA The First Small Boat

Here are 400 hundred Sudanese, he says, 400 hundred machines of fear, who will soon be freed from the camps. And, instead of jumping on the first small boat to Sicily, or disappearing into the silence of a blue sky, they will mount to Castille* and take it for their own. And our soldiers, he says, our boys, cannot contend with them – perhaps there are two hundred, say, all’altezza? I have my keys in my pocket and in a fury of patriotic bravery I see myself wrestling with them for they’re the only ones on my back right now… In the garage, there are two inch-thick iron pipes; and I need to find where I put the clamps… If I don’t find anything, I’ll face him, I’ll speak to him, to see if he hands me his stick, these are ugly times and sacrifices are needed. Will he lend it to me before they reach Castille? Will they go on foot or perhaps by bus? Or will they go straight across the harbour in a little boat? In my mind, again I hear the v: these are very vicious, violent men,

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Poems From Malta

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trained for war and my skin turns to goose flesh and my blood boils inside. Lost as I am in this silent abyss of dark I don’t realize that the speech has finished and they’ve already brought us the pizza. — Translated by AC *“Castille”: a reference to the Office of the Prime Minister of Malta

As Another Voice in this Confusion There’s all my guilt piled up on top of me in the middle of the street before my wounded home. My hands wait at my side they are heavy, uselessly bare. Already, in the middle of the street that blackness slices through my breath and I’m aware of lots of faces staring to see what I will do. Instead of waiting for the silence to spread slowly inside me like expired sedation, or collapsing, jacket and all, in the abandoned corridor smeared by this black curse; instead of passing my limp fingers over the tortured veins of the door panel lying rejected on the ramp of our garage; instead of wandering from room to room pausing, in one by one, to grasp thoughts of the children and the woman I love, sleeping, suddenly fleeing from the ferocious fog, growing confused by the hatred inside me; instead of babbling to myself,

188

ADRIAN GRIMA

I listen to muted phrases offered by all and sundry, pretending I know what they’re on about, understanding what’s going on while they let on that they believe me I know… and when out of the blue amongst so many faces, spaces, you appear as yet another voice in the upheaval that is my mind, and I hear another sequence of details and decisions, instead of hugging you and blurting out my guilt I try and hear in your voice the years we’ve lived together your butterfly hands, your curling hair and I think I hear the silent break of love. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

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M ARIA G RECH G ANADO

Line and Sphere In her ninth month I felt my body turn in to my mother. I had booked an internal in the same hour as my daughter’s weekly check. Your uterus is very small, our gynae said, dispensed with me, then turned to check the pulsing globe of hers. A sense of timelessness sucked us into a vortex in my mind whirling into my mother, who was dead, and yet had dropped me into the future as I had dropped my daughter, and this new birth might drop when I’d dropped dead. Both line and sphere, earth and heaven are in Leonardo’s St Anne’s family with its pyramid of generations

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MARIA GRECH GANADO

on each other’s knee, the tactile link of limbs, circle of spirit ... while my own thanks the doctor, pays its dues and leaves. How can we grasp the breadth of Leonardo’s vision till a first grandchild heaves?

‘A’ is for…. the polished one held at the window almost reflects the garden and you reflect on paradise – how it was lost how Snow White slept and even innocence grew a tree, eventually, to lay its foe prostrate – red tempting fruit with, at its core, first sin, first exile, first letter of the Alphabet worming winding binding both world and word engendered every time ‘A’ is for Apple, and your mouth waters to taste the flesh. ½¾

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I MMANUEL M IFSUD The story of a woman who lives in Blatnica, Slovakia Mária Letriková gets on the bus with eyes protruding the years of red snow. Her ears resound with gunshots from the trees, her eyes are shadows of terrified partisans, her lips the last words of the fallen, in her hands she holds the blue dust of poor burials. Nothing’s in her heart but the marble slab they stuck at the last corner of the village which had sheltered its heroes. Mária Letriková’s hair has turned into a wish – it has become a memory lost to all except the hills, the river, and the falling snow. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

Weariness We stroll together barefoot, until we reach the shore, our hands listless at our sides. Weariness is the old woman beckoning us to stop walking on this winding road, to let ourselves free-fall into the sea, to let the waves show us the road as before.

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IMMANUEL MIFSUD

There is nothing to do but sit at anchor; the white lassitude hangs from our mouths; some sand takes soundings from its slumber, some lukewarm spindrift falls with a splash; a slight squall, looking for a place to curl up; an old moon, shedding tears in his sleep. — Translated by Maurice Riordan

Medana Sunrise, Slovenia Behind you, love, a beautiful sun rises, and your hair grows longer with each new hour, with every gust which blows out of the blue, the hills are full of grapes about to burst. I wished I could have grabbed this dawn, changed it into a keepsake, to carry with me wherever I may go. For sometimes appearances can be deceiving. The rain falls heavily and the sky is dark. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado ½¾

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N ORBERT B UGEJA Ballade for a Redhead Where does this wind come from? Where from this darkness? Whe are these ripe words falling from the trees? From the street’s end a voice was heard announcing: “the city’s lost itself in the poet’s hair!” Deep in the green bone-marrow of time-worn doors, accents which slept through centuries crack open, sentences invade the narrow alleys, words ride the rain like earrings, each syllable woven into a red mane which screams its way amongst the curling streets. In rue de l’union at five a.m. the elderly Arab gazes at the sky: “Somewhere a slightly alien phrase must have been uttered, and the city’s lost control of her own body.” On the city’s outskirts, a little girl emerges, her eyes dancing together with the roadsigns: “why all this wind, mama, why all this darkness?” And then she gets up on her bike without another word and disappears in the anarchy of cadence. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

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NORBERT BUGEJA

Las Ramblas, 15.45 p.m. The Sailor sits beneath the bastions of El Corte Inglés, a scrawny cat, gnawing at the sun with his vile oaths and unknotting the yarns that prod him in his sleep. The very shape of him, like waves of vintage radios stinks in between one country and another, snatches words uttered, and those slain, and then transmits the moral of the story – an olive-skinned giggle, a filterless cigarette and two italians trailing a one-nighter. Hola mujer, ¿que pasa? Ostia puta. If you come into the complex and start climbing one floor after another, you can look down and see him curse from every point of view: trussardi, zegna, fnac and valentino regard you with a slightly bizarre beard downing the sun beneath a scorching beer… And if you get to the top floor and gaze, down at this city that loves you by the rate you may be late – by then the Sailor will have picked the pick of tales to date. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

Photo no. 7 From me to you there’s a second, a laugh, there’s a full clothesline looking out to sea. After the larking at It-Toqba z-Zghira* I tried to reach you. And maybe because there are no lights in this house, in its still-echoing hallway, in the rooms upstairs and down, at the bottom of this well

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Poems From Malta

195

that moans and mumbles your barren words, I found no one. By myself in your kitchen, my starving intestines grumble about the boy who wanted to be born and found himself hanging on the parched breast that sprouted in the wasteland; almost like a city which everyone has fled. And it is useless to hide behind ancient walls, and to walk barefoot along your mothers’ roads, inhabiting the ruins of your beauty with pride; since you were never a mother, you will never be. From your neighbour’s door a girl exploded, her eyes, two cannonballs crossed on the cornetto at the small door of her mouth. She gazes at you, she does not try to reach you. Like a mine on the port sea bed which never blasted she regards you, the peeling paint, and laughs for a second, at you, lying that you are beautiful. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado *It-Toqba z-Zghira is an inlet beneath the bastions of the historic maritime city of Vittoriosa in Malta.

Bonjour tristesse (some hours after Sagan) Between this city’s legs a young woman weeps, yesterday’s worries staining her uniform, on her face the green of thie white registers and the sadness recycled in the office. A young man wears a laugh and a black blasphemy, the sleepless night engraved upon his tie: he recalls how often he almost slipped on the uncertain words lounging against the pavements. For what he’d heard was right, this city of faceless looks

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NORBERT BUGEJA

and white staircases had never come into its own. In the morning she hurries by without a nod, at night there’s not a soul with whom to talk… This morning I rubbed my eyes, wiped off the jam and thought of you. Offering me the first one of the day, and that forced smile. It’s the boss. She wouldn’t give in to him last night. Good morning. — Translated by Maria Grech Ganado

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Currents and Swells in Maltese Identity Representations of Community in Maltese Poetry in English Since Independence

S TELLA B ORG B ARTHET

C

O M M U N A L I D E N T I T Y E M E R G E S from the interface between the subjective position of the individual and his or her social and cultural situation. This becomes, in turn, a highly effective modulating influence on individual behaviour. Though we may barely be conscious of it, our sense of identity is often a cue to our responses, suggesting ways in which we relate to others and to the world in which we live. Identities are represented in art and are operative in the development of technology. Produced in culture, identities are regulated and consumed in society. Artistic representations of communal identity are necessary for the cohesion of society. Communities often make use of art in creating myths and traditions to promote social cohesion. This is art as a function of society. As an example, the mbari festivals held to honour the earth goddess among the Igbo of Nigeria unite villagers in creating sculptures that give shape to the villagers’ sense of community. As Chinua Achebe shows, mbari set out to include “all significant encounters which man makes in his journey through life, especially new, unaccustomed and thus potentially threatening encounters.”1 In a similar way, Maltese poetry has often provided forms through which new relationships could be explored. In the past in Malta, threatening encounters took place when one master replaced another – Romans, Arabs, Knights of St John, British. New administrations would cut across older loyalties and create new affiliations – often at

1

Chinua Achebe, “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” Kunapipi 12.2 (1990): 3.

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the cost of the lives and fortunes of our forefathers. The Maltese often resisted masters – from Aragon and Sicily, from France and from Britain. At the same time, centuries of foreign domination made many ordinary Maltese people complacent about being governed by outsiders. The desire to remain tied to its patrons can be seen in the pursuit of unity with Italy in the years leading up to the Second World War and, in the late 1950s, in the attempt of the Malta Labour Party to obtain full integration with Britain. As Godfrey Baldacchino puts it, Independence in 1964 was for many Maltese a ‘second-best’ option that they accepted, rather than the result of some hard struggle to overthrow a colonial master.2 At the same time, it is important to note that a foreign governing class did not stop the growth of Malta’s statehood and nationality. Henry Frendo traces the origins of modern Malta to the coming of the Knights of St John. These regarded Malta as their home or at least as a permanent base and “laid the infrastructure of a state” through the construction of towns and villages. As Frendo notes, the Maltese insurrection of 1798 shows that culture, nationality, and politics had by this time shaped Maltese identity.3 Despite changes in administration, Maltese identity remained fairly stable until the late 1960s. The writings of the national poet Dun Karm encapsulate this identity – in poems such as “Nhar San Gwann,” “Lil Malta ta’ Llum u ta’ Ghada,” “Lil Malta,” and “Progress,” the Maltese are characterized by their deference to the authority of the Catholic Church, the near-worship of the figure of the chaste Mother within the traditional family, a rural or pure form of Maltese language, and the fear of anything modern or foreign.4 Such extreme conservatism in culture and art suited most Maltese until the end of the Second World War, when developments in industry, tourism, and communications started remaking both land and mind scapes. In the mid-1960s, young writers portraying contemporary Maltese identity did this primarily by rejecting established values. As Daniel Massa puts it, writers such as Victor Fenech, Lino Spiteri, Mario Azzopardi, Francis Ebejer, Frans Sammut, Alfred Sant and others “seemed to reject the sclerosis of aging institutions, and in an attempt at renewal threatened withdrawal from ‘the older cultures’.”5 2

Godfrey Baldacchino, “A Nationless State? Malta, National Identity and the E U ,” West European Politics 25.4 (October 2002): 195. 3 Henry Frendo, “National Identity,” in Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. Henry Frendo & Oliver Friggieri (Ministry of Youth and the Arts, Malta): 51–59, 4–5. 4 In Dun Karm: Il-poeziji migbura, ed. Oliver Friggieri (Malta: Klabb Kotba Maltin, 1980). 5 Daniel Massa, “Contemporary Maltese Literature: An Interim Report,” in Contributions to Mediterranean Studies, ed. Mario Vassallo (University of Malta, 1977): 266.

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Both the achievement of independence in 1964 and the proclamation of Malta as a republic in 1974 signalled a break with the past that should have inspired the poets and writers of the 1960s. This happened to some extent in the use of the Maltese language for writing about local experience; Maltese writers were asserting freedom from colonization in the act of writing in their native tongue. At the same time, however, Maltese writers very often expressed doubt and disappointment rather than joy at the birth of both independent and republican Malta. The masses may have decried the one and extolled the other along party lines, but writers were mostly critical or ambivalent. In Victor Fenech’s “Malta Sunflower,” the poet speaks of a Malta that remains the “eternal whorehouse of the superpowers” despite independence and republicanism.6 Like writers from other newly independent countries, Fenech realizes that a new economic form of colonialism has simply replaced the older form based on military superiority. Lillian Sciberras, too, expresses scepticism in “They messed about with the word independence.” Here Sciberras considers three crucial dates: 1964, 1974, and 1979 – independence, the proclamation of Malta as a republic, and the departure of British forces from Malta. Sciberras finds no new beginning in any of these but simply the replacement of imperialism with neocolonialism. The imperialists in uniform are gone: they will be made illegal, while their partners the imperialists in civilian clothes will stay right next to us applauding with us.7

The same scepticism about Maltese political and cultural autonomy is to be found in Mario Azzopardi’s “Republic” and in Daniel Massa’s “New World” and “Skin Diver’s Republic.” Scepticism about independent and republican Malta was mostly caused by what poets saw as the failure of politicians to live up to their new responsibilities. If the emigration of many Maltese in the 1960s reflects political and economic failure, then the desire of some writers to ‘emigrate’ to a ‘greater’ culture may suggest that these writers felt similarly disheartened about Maltese culture and language. The poet’s desire to identify with a virile British 6

In Limestone 84, ed. Daniel Massa (University of Malta, 1978). Lillian Sciberras & Mario Vella, After the Republic: poems (University of Malta, 1979): 65–67. 7

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culture emerges sharply in Fenech’s “London Pictures.” At the same time, his sense of alienation in London makes him hate what he loves. Open Browning’s heart – Italy Open mine – London. For all it is I love (hate). This massive masculine city.8

The poet expresses the same divided sensibility in relation to Malta in “Malta Sunflower.” Here he grieves for the smallness of the land, hence the weakness of its culture. The somewhat forced attempt to express enthusiasm for the republic in the penultimate stanza soon evaporates, leaving him parched and weary. Although more than two decades have passed, national consciousness for the Maltese seems to have remained, as Godfrey Baldacchino put it, “elusive.” The reason for this may well be a lingering dependency-complex, left over from a long colonial past. I feel that the work of strengthening our language, our literature, and other local art forms must continue, as this gives the Maltese the artistic opportunities they need so much. What is equally important – particularly now that national consciousness has to meet the challenge of accession to the European Union – is to bring our ideas of what constitutes cultural identity up to date. Much of the poetry of the 1960s, 1970s, and even later depicts an essentialized Maltese identity, often using archaeological remains as a metaphor for a fixed skeletal character that has been lost and must be retrieved. See, for example, John Cremona’s “The Oracle, Halsaflieni Hypogeum,” Victor Fenech’s “Fertility Goddess,” Oliver Friggieri’s “There’s and Old Motherland,” and Marlene Saliba’s “A Dream in Stone.”9 Poets who turned to a mythical past of fertility goddesses and temples or to a traditional village life which is forever lost were often trying to anchor a society they perceived to be in flux. They created texts to restore an imaginary fullness to the broken rubric of our lives. Although the Maltese will continue to need the root nourishment of its distant past, Maltese culture will also have to accommodate the different pasts of both Maltese returned emigrants and more recent immigrants from Europe and Africa. Current studies suggest that cultural identity can and, indeed, must 8

In Limestone 84, ed. Massa. In Cross Winds: An Anthology of Post-War Maltese Poetry, ed. Oliver Friggieri (Scotland: Willfion Books, 1980): 27-28. 9

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recognize both divergent pasts and a common history in the making. In his highly influential essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall suggests that Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.10

Hall’s innovative concept of identity takes account of contemporary migration. Throughout the Western world, societies have become mixed and the concept of a unitary identity is no longer viable. In Malta, too, whether it is because of Maltese living abroad or foreigners living here, being Maltese no longer means what it used to. As Hall shows, we should stop thinking of identity as “an already accomplished fact” and think of it as “always in process” and “always constituted within, not outside, representation.”11 The search for a stable identity still haunts poets and at times brings them close to despair. Hopelessness characterizes a collection of poetry by Oliver Friggieri, written in Maltese, translated into English by Peter Serracino Inglott, and published in 1993 under the title A Distraught Pilgrim. In “We’re gurgling water,” Friggieri’s sadness and despair about his homeland are expressed in a “strange anthem twinborn with us,” the very death-rattle of the Maltese. We’re gurgling water nobody will drink because its waves contain a lethal salt. We’re stones displaced from ancient temples Of gods in despair, sickened unto death At war among themselves. We’re pendula Whose energy is dwindling down to nought.12

Serracino Inglott points out that in Friggieri’s poetry, the forms used redeem the hopelessness expressed, the act of enunciation itself ‘propitiating’ the Nemesis responsible for the modern condition and enabling the poet to act. In “There’s an Old Motherland,” the land is dying even as the Maltese “go on / seeking it where it’s not / hearkening to the noise of its catacombs and tombs.”

10

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage, 1997): 52. 11 Hall, “Cultural identity and diaspora,” 52. 12 Oliver Friggieri, A Distraught Pilgrim (Universal Intelligence Data Bank of America, 1993): 13.

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Yet although both land and poet are dying, the poet will re-create our identity anew: … someday I’ll reach you and make myself a necklace of beads out of your own bones, your voice I’ll make an instrument to play some one of those superstitious songs and out of memory I’ll spin a tale like those of the ancient gods and giants.13

In an “Interim Report” on the contemporary novel, written in 1977, Daniel Massa highlights the present Maltese writer’s social identity [as] being marked by a withdrawal from social convention that has resulted in a negative condition, a sense of deprivation, and the lack of a dimension essential to the continuing creative effort.14

Massa writes of the need to “signpost new directions,” and despite the pessimism of much of Friggieri’s work, “There’s an Old Motherland” may certainly point towards what Massa calls the “therapy” of “trying to establish a sufficiently deep and concrete relationship with present reality, by directing endeavor outwards, by attempting to link different people’s imagination.”15 One central reality that had changed in Malta was religion. The Catholic religion had long been the linchpin of Maltese identity. The church structured the village communities, was the focus of local customs, mobilized the feelings of ordinary people, and permeated all their thought and action. Writers such as Dun Karm, Patri Cuschieri, and Guze Aquilina provided a corpus of writing where the positive defining characteristics of the Maltese were fixed as essentially religious and strictly Roman Catholic.16 The writers of the mid1960s hurled their protests at this establishment. Victor Fenech, Mario Azzopardi, Frans Sammut and others often attacked the Church as the institution that perpetuated the status quo. Important as this dissent was in its time, it could not by itself liberate the Maltese writer. In dismantling a social framework wrought of traditional religious sentiment, the writers of the 1960s focused on a subjective reality that often became paranoid, as the protagonists of their novels often did. Writers 13

Friggieri, A Distraught Pilgrim, 35. Massa, “Contemporary Maltese Literature: An Interim Report,” 266. 15 “Contemporary Maltese Literature: An Interim Report,” 273. 16 See Dun Karm: Il-poeziji migbura, ed. Friggieri, and Il-Muza Maltija: Antologija ta’ poeti Maltin, ed. Guze Aquilina (A.C. Aquilina, 1964). 14

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turned inwards, developing a negative condition that threatened creativity. Daniel Massa’s interim report invited writers to strengthen their hold on reality – and, in his own poetry, signposted ways in which this could be done. A recent study by Adrian Grima highlights the innovative power of Massa’s poetry; as Grima shows, Massa is one of the “very few poets” who can move towards the ‘Other’ by ignoring accepted distinctions.17 To use the words of his “Interim Report,” Massa attempts “to link different people’s imagination.” In doing so, Massa’s poetry opens new roads and fleshes out Stuart Hall’s “identities in process.” As an example of new signposting in Maltese poetry, I will now focus very briefly on Massa’s treatment of religion. Rather than rejecting Christianity as other Maltese revolutionaries did, Massa creates completely fresh forms of spirituality in his poetry. In “Resurrection,” the image of the risen Christ, saviour and healer, is used to urge braver souls to action against our colonial masters and their successors. And the one and the few scraped the chalk from their heels and walked towards the sudden garden the sound of the sea Brother, brother, brother, look at the man who has risen, rise and walk. Sister, sister, sister, look at the man who has loved, keep your eye on the sun and do not look behind you – the chalk yet clings to your heels.18

In “Apprentice Diver’s Invocation,” Christ is an octopus; its tentacles would round the hand, holding the poet against his will. He would be much more at ease without this bond in a world of “fascists.” Blinded by the immensity of the crucifixion, he cut the octopus open with his diver’s knife “and stretched it on the sands of the republic / to dry.” The rings of the tentacles, however, do not die. In the last stanza, the poet, returns to his earlier invocation to his woman to swim away from “the sun-scorched land / where the shallow seas breed danger.” Come out of the shade my woman swim out of the shallow seas 17

“Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature” (doctoral dissertation, Department of Maltese, University of Malta, 2003). 18 Daniel Massa, “Resurrection,” in Limestone 84, ed. Massa, 44.

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and I will give you my diver’s knife my gift of wrath.19

In my reading of this poem, love of his woman leads the poet to overcome his rejection of Christ’s saving tentacles. Other readers have read this poem very differently; the multiplicity of possible readings attest to its rich suggestiveness, its ability to penetrate deep into our consciousness and nourish emerging, plural identities. Such innovative approaches to religion continue to inform Maltese poetry, as is shown by a brief look at female poets – Maria Grech Ganado and Lillian Sciberras – writing today. Maria Grech Ganado fuses a religious theme with gender politics in “Ribcage,” the poem that gives its name to Ganado’s 2003 collection. This poem starts with a playfully witty exchange between the poet’s mother and father about the biblical account of the Creation. My mother had her own interpretation of the rib story. My father laughed and said Adam was put to sleep so he couldn’t stop God creating woman. She smilingly insisted that had he been awake he would have asked for two.20

The poet’s anger about men soon makes the reader forget the smile, however. Women are dominated, oppressed, and exploited – yet, in their ignorance, they continue to love men who “try all they can in a godless world / to propagate the aura of that prime image – man.” In Ganado’s poetry, men are often predatory in their relationship with women and this sometimes keeps the poet channelled in anger. Much freer, more complex and sophisticated is the treatment of another biblical figure, Cain, in an eponymous poem. Cain, ancestor of mankind, addresses the reader directly, establishing a warm relationship with him or her. Cain has been set on a long, narrow path; his destination “remains a blur” while all around are bushes of thorns, cacti of flower, purple, crimson, scarlet, so my head swims in red.21

Cain cannot possibly helping looking and being overcome by these colours, though he moves his legs faster in an attempt to remain on the narrow path. In 19 20 21

Daniel Massa, “Apprentice Diver’s Invocation,” in Limestone 84, ed. Massa, 51. Maria Grech Ganado, “Ribcage,” in Ganado, Ribcage (Malta: Minima, 2003): 48. Ganado, “Ribcage,” 48.

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a moment, Cain’s “head erupts in colour” – he has fulfilled his destiny, the murder of his brother Abel But I stumble and discover a tender body, the piercing of thorns in flesh, of paths that sway.

Cain anticipates the wrath of God and his punishment, yet, perhaps like all of us, he has done no more than fulfil the being that God had created and destined I fall and hear and smell the coming of the flood, and, yes, I am afraid. But, Lord, how sweet, how full, this taste of blood.

In contrast to Ganado, Lillian Sciberras emerges as more accepting, peaceable, and contemplative. She is often moved to a prayerful attitudes through the love of nature and humanity. In the poem “In your eyes of dark amber,” she describes an act of communion that leads both to God and to the friend to whom the poem is addressed Then towards the journey’s end when time is done and life is all but spent I’ll pray the source of all beginnings to lead me by the hand, back to those amber eyes, to walk the path with you again.22

Nature is the peace-giver in “Ducks in the Evening,” where the lyric persona receives priestly offices not from some solemn cleric but from a group of ducks that inspire the speaker to still the mind and listen for a meaning despite the hubbub of Spinola Bay: The ducks in the bay silently gathered around each other at dusk observing the shimmering lights on the water, fixing their gaze on the moving sea, as if something missed out by the rest of us was concealed there, waiting to be seen. Was it a prayer, offered to the evening I quietly wondered, and thought

22

Lillian Sciberras, “In your eyes of dark amber” (unpublished; 5 July 1996).

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perhaps, it may have been.23

Attitudes to religion in Maltese poetry have moved from orthodoxy to rebellion and rejection, and from there to much freer approaches. Contemporary poetry show that the sense of divinity is still with the community. Rather than adopting traditional devotional attitudes, however, poets question God and search for meaning in a rapidly changing world where the wisdom of ages no longer seems to apply. The poetic treatment of religious themes is an example of how Maltese culture has become diversified, hence more capable of reflecting plural identities at a time when economic, political, and social realities are posing new challenges to our country. WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” Kunapipi 12.2 (1990): 1–10. Baldacchino, Godfrey. “A Nationless State? Malta, National Identity and the E U ,” West European Politics 25.4 (October 2002): 191–206. Cremona, J.J. Malta Malta (Malta, Klabb Kotba Maltin, 1980). Frendo, Henry. “National Identity,” in Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. Henry Frendo & Oliver Friggieri (Ministry of Youth and the Arts, Malta): 51–59. Friggieri, Oliver. A Distraught Pilgrim, tr. Peter Serracino Inglott (Universal Intelligence Data, Bank of America, 1993). ——, ed. Cross Winds: An Anthology of Post-War Maltese Poetry (Scotland: Willfion Books, 1980). ——, ed. Dun Karm: Il-poeziji migbura (Malta: Klabb Kotba Maltin, 1980). Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage, 1997): 51–59. Massa, Daniel. “Contemporary Maltese Literature: An Interim Report,” in Contributions to Mediterranean Studies, ed. Mario Vassallo (University of Malta, 1977): 264–75. ——, ed. Limestone 84 (Malta: University of Malta, 1978). Sciberras, Lillian, & Mario Vella. After the Republic: poems (Malta: University of Malta, 1979).

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23

Lillian Sciberras, “Ducks in the Evening” (unpublished; written at Spinola Bay, 18 January 2001).

Finding Nemo Puzzling Maltese Identity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

K EVIN S TEPHEN M AGRI

T

H E B L A C K A T L A N T I C : Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy explores how emigration to the European West by ship affected black African identity. Gilroy writes, “Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.”1 ‘Double consciousness’ – an awareness of a split identity in oneself – is also relevant to travellers to and from Malta. Natives of this island endure a cultural identity both separate from and part of a European identity: for example, their native Maltese tongue – a blend of Arabic grammar and European vocabulary – points to a hybridized genealogy between East and West. Overpopulation and economic hardships have motivated a significant Maltese diaspora since the nineteenth century.2 Today, large populations of Maltese emigrants and their descendants are globally dispersed, especially throughout the English-speaking world, in Australia, the U K , the U S A , and Canada. Thus, Maltese emigrants and their children (including myself, a first-generation Canadian of Maltese-born parents) are aware of their own ‘double consciousness’. For this reason, I am interested in the enigmatic “sailor, belonging to a Maltese vessel,” in Poe’s detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”3 1

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge

M A : Harvard U P , 1993): 1. 2

Arthur G. Clare, “Features of an Island Economy,” in The British Colonial Experience,

1800–1964: The Impact on Maltese Society, ed. Victor Mallia–Milanes (Msida, Malta: Mireva, 1988): 151–53. 3 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), in The Short Fiction of

Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart & Susan Levine (Indianapolis I N : Bobbs–Merrill, 1977): 194. Further page references are in the main text.

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Poe’s sailor has seen, and therefore knows much about, the world, including the solution to a Parisian mystery that baffles other Europeans. Yet, the sailor’s identity – whether Maltese, French, or something else – is unclear. He is a traveller with neither a clear national nor unambiguous ethnic identity. Through strategies of concealment or “camouflage,” the sailor’s “mimicry [.. .] is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history,”4 thereby frustrating attempts to know him. He also has no proper name, but I suggest that his ‘no one’ existence entitles him to the archetypal rank of “Nemo.” The most famous Nemo, of course, is Odysseus, who escapes the bondage of the rigid Cyclops. Whereas the Cyclops suffers blindness because he is too stubborn, the fluid-like Odysseus with his “Nemo” alias can endure change. Change is also the epitome of Poe’s sailor. Before exploring our sailor’s identity, let us introduce the plot, theme, and characters of Poe’s short story. Historians of detective fiction often cite Poe’s three short stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rôget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), as establishing the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps the most famous of detective fiction writers, was an admirer of Poe’s work. Indeed, the heroes of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” resemble Doyle’s duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson: Poe’s Holmes is the “Frenchman” Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, an eccentric amateur detective who delights in demonstrating his analytical skills; Poe’s narrator is the roommate and sidekick of Dupin, a nameless traveller from abroad (another Nemo perhaps?) who communicates the story in the English language. The setting is early-nineteenth-century Paris, the multi-ethnic metropole of the French empire. Our narrator prefaces the murder story by discoursing on the analytical powers of the mind. He meditates on the movement of pieces in the games of chess and draughts, and the psychology of whist players. Chess “pieces have different and bizarre motions”; “In draughts, on the contrary, [...] the moves are unique and have but little variation” (175– 76). All this talk of games, motion, and “proficiency” (which the narrator defines as the “perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources,” 178) is a meta-theory on comprehending national and ethnic identity. The act of solving the murder mystery functions as an example of “disentangling” a literary and racial puzzle through “analysis” (175). The detective teaches how to solve the crime, but leaves the second mystery – the identity of the sailor (whose migratory existence, like the pieces and cards of the parlour table, is also based on frequent “motion”) – unwound. The narrator concludes his preface, saying that “It will be found, in fact, that the 4

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1991; London: Routledge, 1994): 91.

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ingenious [problem solvers] are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic” (179). Let it be shown that the sailor’s identity must be found similarly by a reader with the same ingenious, fanciful, imaginative, and analytical powers. The murder story demonstrates the analytical powers of Dupin. Our heroes read two newspaper articles published in the Gazette des Tribunaux about the “E X T R A O R D I N A R Y M U R D E R S ” of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter (182). The journalist interviewed more than half a dozen individuals of various professions and – important to the ultimate mystery – various European national identities. Many of those interviewed had heard “shrieks” and “screams of some person (or persons) in great agony” and, consequently, forced their ways into the house to aid the victims (183). None of the interviewed witnesses saw the suspects, though many heard two unfamiliar voices (see Table 1). Table 1 Witnesses’ Accounts of Unfamiliar Voices (a) Voice 1: the “gruff voice” (of the Sailor) Name of Witness His Language Language Heard Isodore Musèt French French Henri Duval French French – Odenheimer Dutch French William Bird English French Alfonzo Garcio Spanish French Alberto Montani Italian French (b) Voice 2: the “shrill voice” (of the “Ourang-Outang”) Name of Witness His Language Language Heard Isodore Musèt French Spanish Henri Duval French Italian – Odenheimer Dutch French William Bird English German Alfonzo Garcio Spanish English Alberto Montani Italian Russian The witnesses agreed that one “gruff voice” belonged to a Frenchman, for these witnesses heard such profanities as “sacré,” “diable,” and “mon Dieu” (183–84). The witnesses, however, disagreed on the second “shrill voice” (183); they could not decipher the sex of that second speaker or the language it spoke. Isodore Musèt, a Frenchman, believes the “shrill voice” spoke in

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“Spanish” (183). Henri Duval, also a Frenchman, “was convinced by the intonation that the speaker was an Italian” (183). Monsieur Odenheimer, “a native of Amsterdam” (184) – and therefore presumably a speaker of Dutch – knows no French, but told the journalist through a translator that the “shrill voice” also spoke French. To William Bird, “an Englishman,” the voice “Appeared to be that of a German” (184). Alfonzo Garcio, “a native of Spain,” claimed that “The shrill voice was that of an Englishman – is sure of this” (184–85). Lastly, Alberto Montani, an “Italian,” “Thinks it the voice of a Russian” (185). Each of the six witnesses, each ignorant of their European neighbours’ languages, believes the strange “shrill voice” spoke a different European dialect; yet each witness is certain that the “gruff voice” spoke French and assumes (perhaps erroneously) that he must be a “Frenchman.” If the witnesses cannot identify the language and nationality of the speaker of the “shrill voice,” then the reader should beware of accepting the witnesses’ conclusions about the speaker of the “gruff voice.” The witnesses are unreliable. Nevertheless, the Parisian police arrest and imprison the wrong man, and close the case. Consequently, Dupin performs his own investigation to set matters right. Dupin uncovers the truth: the shrill voice belongs to an individual from “the Eastern Indian islands,” specifically “Borneo” – that voice belongs to the murderer – a voiceless “Ourang-Outang” (193, 195, 193). The witnesses had misread the ape’s bestial sounds and, thereby, misread both the language and the national origin of the beast. The gruff voice that the witnesses identified correctly as speaking French belongs to our friend Nemo, a “sailor, belonging to a Maltese vessel” (194). Dupin meets the sailor and receives – in the French language – a full account of the involvement of the sailor and his pet orangutan in the accidental killing of the mother and daughter. Nemo’s confession allows our detective-hero to liberate the wrongly accused man. The murder mystery is solved, but another mystery is unresolved: who and what is the sailor? My answer is far from elementary. The witnesses falsely attributed languages to the orangutan, thereby misleading the police with the assumed racial profile of the suspect. The investigators had only the unanimous agreement that the second suspect spoke French, so probability suggested that the speaker himself was a man of France by birth and raising. However, a polyglot migrant could be an exceptional example to this reasoning. The man initially convicted is thoroughly French: he speaks French and his name – Adolphe Le Bon – signifies a French genealogy. In contrast, the identity of the nameless French-speaking sailor heard by the witnesses is not clear. The lack of a name is an absent signifier that, consequently, cannot validate the sailor’s presumably French origin. Despite this lack, Dupin identifies our

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sailor erroneously as a Continental man – Dupin calls the sailor repeatedly a “Frenchman” (i.e. “all the witnesses agreed in supposing the gruff voice to be that of a Frenchman,” “A Frenchman was cognizant of the murder,” 188, 193, etc.), yet one’s spoken language (i.e. the French langue, a ‘linguistic dialect’)5 is a reliable identifier of neither ethnic nor national origin. The witnesses each “spoke of it [the orangutan’s dialect] as that of a foreigner” and, in these “tones,” these “denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognise nothing familiar!” (188). Dupin’s observation that the “very peculiar shrill (or harsh) and unequal voice, about whose nationality no two persons could be found to agree” (191) states clearly that the witnesses assume that langue dictates “nationality.” Benedict Anderson’s concept of a “nation” being “an imagined political community”6 is helpful for our understanding of the characters’ assumption. Anderson argues that shared vernacular language, separate from other vernacular languages, is used often as a major defining element in the construction of nationalisms;7 Anderson especially notes this tendency in mid-nineteenth-century Europe: Insofar as all dynasts by mid-century were using some vernacular as language-of-state, and also because of the rapidly rising prestige all over Europe of the national idea, there was a discernible tendency among Euro-Mediterranean monarchies to sidle towards a beckoning national identification.8

However, in Poe’s mystery, the misread dialect of the orangutan expresses the unreliability of language functioning alone as a conclusive sign of origin. Attributes other than name and language can be more telling, such as the Maltese-ness of the sailor’s ship. According to Dupin, all people – including “madmen” – “are of some nation, and their language, however incoherent in its words, has always the coherence of syllabification” (192). Dupin assumes that all people belong to a nation, an idea comparable to traditional belief on nationalism: “The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept – in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender.”9 Dupin assumes that the nation to which people belong has a distinct form of verbal communication. The solution to the murder mystery depends upon the 5 See “langue,” especially (“1d”): in Collins Robert French–English, English–French Dictionary (1978; Glasgow: HarperCollins, 4th ed. 1995): 462. 6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991): 6. 7 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 40–41. 8 Imagined Communities, 85. 9 Imagined Communities, 5.

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uncovering of language and nationality. Thus, it is no coincidence in Poe’s craft that Dupin contacts the sailor by way of a classified advertisement in the newspaper aptly called Le Monde (‘The World’), “a paper devoted to the shipping interest, and much sought by sailors” (193). It is in this advertisement that the sailor is attributed to “belonging to a Maltese vessel” (194). Our narrator asks the ultimate question: “How was it possible,” I asked, “that you should know the man to be a sailor, and belonging to a Maltese vessel?” “I do not know it,” said Dupin. “I am not sure of it. Here, however, is a small piece of ribbon, which from its form, and from its greasy appearance, has evidently been used in tying the hair [of the ourang-outang or of the sailor?] in one of those long queues of which sailors are so fond. Moreover, this knot is one which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese. I picked the ribbon up at the foot of the lightning-rod. It could not have belonged to either of the deceased. Now if, after all, I am wrong in my induction from this ribbon, that the Frenchman was a sailor belonging to a Maltese vessel, still I can have done no harm in saying what I did in the advertisement. If I am in error, he will merely suppose that I have been misled by some circumstances into which he will not take the trouble to inquire. But if I am right, a great point is gained.” (194)

Dupin admits here his uncertainty about the nationality of the sailor despite attributing to him “Frenchman” status. Dupin’s answer – “I do not know it” – has an ambiguous antecedent. The obvious reading would interpret “it” as ‘that you should know the man to be a sailor, and belonging to a Maltese vessel’; yet, as a meta-fiction, the genderless pronoun could refer to the sailor’s character (since characters are really only concepts). The verb “know” can also be problematic: we must remember that the action and dialogue are imagined to occur in French and the readers receive an English translation from our narrator. Our narrator reminds us of this fact when he says, “I have said that the whims of my friend were manifold, and that Je les ménageais: – for this phrase there is no English equivalent” (194). Of course, there really is an English equivalent – “I handled them tactfully” (246n18). The inclusion of this throw-away line is essential for its power to remind the reader of the ongoing theme of linguistic interpretation. ‘To know’ can be retranslated into the French as either ‘savoir’ (‘to know facts, details, dates, results’)10 or ‘connaître’ (‘to be acquainted with intimately’ as in the expression connaistoi toi-même: i.e. ‘know thyself’).11 In the context of my argument, ‘savoir’ is to have superficial knowledge; ‘connaître’ is to truly understand. In the con10 11

See “savoir” in Collins Robert, 746. See “connaître” in Collins Robert, 171–72.

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text of the story, the preferred meaning is ambiguous.12 Furthermore, “this knot is one which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese” is also made ambiguous by the dropped noun expected to follow “Maltese.” Should it read (to give only two possibilities) ‘Maltese sailors’ or ‘Maltese vessels’? If it should read ‘this knot is one which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese [sailors]’, then Maltese – as a signifier of nationality – suggests that the “Frenchman” sailor is essentially of Maltese ethnicity. If the line should read ‘this knot is one which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese [vessels]’, then the ethnic identity of our sailor is still ambiguous, for Nemo may simply be a native of France working on a boat owned by Maltese employers who have taught the Maltese habit of knot-tying. These grammatical puzzles of translation and ellipsis contribute to the overall theme of problematic linguistic identification. Just as the witnesses had difficulty interpreting the orangutan’s speech, so, too, does the reader have difficulty interpreting Dupin’s. The sailor’s career requires frequent travel to foreign ports, so the sailor archetype can represent Homi Bhabha’s ‘liminal’ figure: the sailor is simultaneously in-between geographical “space” and “in-between the designations of identity.”13 The sailor’s observation and interaction with foreigners gives the migrant the ability to ‘pass’ within or ‘mimic’ the culture. That ability can destabilize identity: “It [mimicry] problematizes the signs of racial and cultural priority, so that the ‘national’ is no longer naturalizable.”14 Knowing that, to pass, the migrant must appear inconspicuous, Dupin reasons that “It is not [the sailor’s] policy to attract attention either to [him]self or to the beast” (194). To pass, the sailor must mask at least two aspects: his appearance and his dialect. Our narrator describes Nemo: He was a sailor, evidently, – a tall, stout, and muscular-looking person, with a certain dare-devil expression of countenance, not altogether unprepossessing. His face, greatly sunburnt, was more than half hidden by whisker and mustachio. He had with him a huge oaken cudgel, but appeared to be otherwise unarmed. (194)

12

Charles Baudelaire uses “savoir” in his translation: — Comment avez-vous pu, — demandai-je à Dupin, savoir que l’homme était un marin, et qu’il appartenait à un navire maltais? — Je ne le sais pas. (my emphasis). — Poe, “Double Assassinat dans la Rue Morgue,” tr. Charles Baudelaire, in Histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe, in Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Conard, 1932): 1–49. 13 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1991; London: Routledge, 1994): 4. 14 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87.

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In his appearance, our sailor is not unusual for a man of his profession. His sunburnt skin, however, can hide his ethnicity – we are uncertain of his natural complexion and, therefore, of his racial type. His facial hair also masks his physical identity. His dialect is the second important feature which permits or denies the ability to ‘pass’: “He bowed awkwardly, and bade us ‘good evening’, in French accents, which, although somewhat Neufchatelish, were still sufficiently indicative of a Parisian origin” (194). If the sailor wishes to keep his origin hidden, he will speak a Parisian French to the best of his ability. By all means, he would avoid speaking in a strange or exotic dialect, since, as Edward Said notes, foreigners are often perceived to be disruptive, untrustworthy, and to be feared: On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are ArabOrientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things.15

If Nemo is of Maltese origin, his Arabic dialect could be viewed with suspicion, especially if we regard the historical context of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: Arab pirates on the Barbary Coast were still a threat for European and American travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century.16 A Maltese sailor would be wise to hide his Maltese language in case it could be misinterpreted by xenophobic Europeans. One’s spoken language can also mask one’s origins. For example, Nemo could have been in Malta (possibly born in Malta) where he learnt French during or shortly after the reign of the Knights of St John (many of whom were natives of France); otherwise, Nemo could have learned French on board a vessel or in port – probably by a speaker with a Neufchatelish accent – thus explaining how Nemo’s accent could be a mask of his possible non-French genealogy. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a mystery story about identifying ethnicity and nationality, primarily through dialect-recognition. The witnesses’ attempts to identify the orangutan fail because they use faulty criteria (i.e. their own ignorance of linguistic differentiation) on a creature devoid of a national or ethnic identity. Identifying the national and ethnic identity of the orangutan’s accomplice is also irresolvable. Although the witnesses all agree that the sailor spoke French, the misreading of the orangutan casts doubt on the reliability of the witnesses. Even Dupin himself admits to our narrator his 15

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; New York: Random House, 2003): 49. On the involvement of the American navy in the Tripolitan War (1801–1805), see Donald Sultana, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an American Naval Hero and a Mysterious Duellist in Malta,” Melita Historica 11.2 (1993): 114. 16

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uncertainty about the sailor’s origin. One’s dialect, as demonstrated in Poe’s detective story, is not a reliable clue to uncovering one’s identity; likewise, the fact that Nemo “belongs to a Maltese vessel” may or may not indicate a wholly Maltese origin. Nonetheless, his Neufchatelish dialect and Maltese knot-tying do demonstrate a hybridization of cultures. If nothing else, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” demonstrates Bhabha’s assertion that “The question of the representation of difference is therefore always also a problem of authority,”17 for Poe’s text reveals that Western authority is flawed, from the misreadings of the voices by the witnesses to the ambivalent identifying of the sailor by our detective-heroes. So, who is our sailor? He is the agent that brings an Eastern threat – the orangutan – to Europe and a witness to the murders. The sailor, like the narrator, is a foreigner and significantly possesses no name. He is a Nemo, a ‘no one’, like Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Pixar’s title character in the animated film Finding Nemo. Nemo is an archetype for the man who explores the seas and his own identity simultaneously. This talk about Poe’s sailor and Homer’s Odysseus as “Nemos” came full circle at the 2005 E A C L A L S Conference in Malta: according to Maltese folklore, one of the Maltese islands was itself Calypso’s enchanting isle. In conclusion, I wish to suggest that all travellers – especially those who encounter Malta or the enigma of Maltese identity – are Nemos: people seeking to understand a shared and fluid identity that defies simple explanation. WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (1991; London: Routledge, 1994). Clare, Arthur G. “Features of an Island Economy,” in The British Colonial Experience, 1800–1964: The Impact on Maltese Society, ed. Victor Mallia–Milanes (Msida, Malta: Mireva, 1988): 127–54. Collins Robert French–English, English–French Dictionary (1978; Glasgow: HarperCollins, 4th ed. 1995). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993). Poe, Edgar Allan. “Double Assassinat dans la Rue Morgue” (1841), tr. Charles Baudelaire, in Histoires Extraordinaire par Edgar Poe; Œuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Conard, 1932): 1–49.

17

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 89.

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——. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841): in The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart & Susan Levine (Indianapolis I N : Bobbs– Merrill Educational Press, 1977): 175–97, 244–46. Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; New York: Random House, 2003). Sultana, Donald. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an American Naval Hero and a Mysterious Duellist in Malta,” Melita Historica 11.2 (1993): 113–28.

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The Sea and the Erosion of Cultural Identity in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef M ELANIE A. M URRAY

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R I L A N K A H A S B E E N D E P I C T E D as a paradisal island, as the second ‘Eden’, in mythological references and in narratives of early travellers. The novel Reef, written in 1994 by Romesh Gunesekera, who was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in England, depicts a Sri Lankan paradise. I suggest that this portrayal is self-consciously positioned within an imaginary context, correlative to Sri Lankan mythology, while also frustrating colonial, orientalist depictions of islands as exotic and regressive. Images of mouth-watering food cooked by the protagonist, Triton, evoke an Edenic location, but the erosion of the coral reef by the ocean can be understood as symbolically erasing the island and its identity. The sea as an erosion of cultural identity in this novel is metaphoric and can be understood in the context of the civil war in Sri Lanka. However, the ocean is also a link to other islands/ nations. Triton’s exile to England is a continuation of his “voyage of discovery.”1 The novel can be read as an implicit interrogation of notions of the island as timeless and insular, reflecting Gunesekera’s transnational identity through an emphasis on movement and regeneration. This essay will focus on how, in the novel, the ocean represents connection and fluidity; a site for renewal, contesting land-locked boundaries. In my discussion of the novel’s defiance of stereotypical notions of the island I will make reference to Homi Bhabha’s ideas of “double relation.”2

1 Romesh Gunesekera, Reef (London: Granta, 1998): 174. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 2 Homi K. Bhabha, “Minority Culture and Creative Anxiety,” in Re-Inventing Britain (conference, School of Oriental and African Studies; London: British Council, 1997): 2.

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Reef tells the story of a young boy, Triton, who becomes a servant and cook for Salgado, a marine biologist, in Sri Lanka. The language and imagery of food have prompted many critics to describe this novel in terms of exotic evocations where the focus on Sri Lanka as an idealized island nation against a backdrop of political turmoil depicts an image “set in a spoiled paradise,” “a sensuous feast of delight,” and “A kind of Asian Tempest, drenched in the unreal, tropical colours of dream” (The Times and Guardian, on Reef: back cover). Exotic depictions such as these fail to recognize the novel’s portrayal of island paradise as a dream; an imaginary realm in which the delectable descriptions of food become increasingly predatory, signifying the island’s being consumed by the consequences of political and ethnic turmoil in the newly independent nation of Sri Lanka. Set in Sri Lanka in the early 1960s, Reef follows Triton’s life up to his exile to England in the 1980s; these two locations are indicative of the author’s migrant position, as he left Sri Lanka for the Philippines as a young teenager with his parents, and was sent to England at the age of seventeen for his education. I suggest that the novel advocates a sense of ‘sharing places’ by depicting the ocean as a connection between islands and nations, specifically that of Sri Lanka and England. Although the ocean symbolizes the erosion of cultural identity, it is also envisaged as regenerative. Salman Rushdie has stated that the urge to reclaim ‘home’ is articulated by migrant writers in their fiction as imaginary homelands,3 but Gunesekera’s Reef more specifically exposes the fictionality of home and also the fictionality of the representation of islands in European discourse. He insists that belonging has more to do with people than with place;4 nevertheless, his two homelands, Sri Lanka and England, are together present in his work and constitute a diasporic consciousness which, to use Avtah Brah’s phrase, “places the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ in creative tension […] while […] critiquing discourses of fixed origins.”5 The tension between home and dispersion is articulated in Reef when Salgado finally returns to Sri Lanka while Triton remains in England, reflecting Gunesekera’s double relation, a diasporic consciousness situated between two worlds. As Homi Bhabha states, a double relation is a hybrid translation, a process of cultural cross-reference, and an ambiguous movement of transit without celebratory closure.6 Gunesekera’s work implicitly explores how

3

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Penguin, 1991): 10. 4 www.salidaa.org 5 Avtah Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 192–93. 6 Bhabha, “Minority Culture and Creative Anxiety,” 2.

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islands have been imagined by European discourse, and, to use Brah’s phrase, questions “how and why originary absolutes are imagined.”7 The first chapter, entitled “The Breach,” is crucial to the understanding of the novel and indicates a diasporic distance from Sri Lanka. The retrospective narrative, which is told from the perspective of Triton, situates the world of Sri Lanka in an imaginative realm. The first chapter is set in the present, when Triton, a Sinhalese and now living in London for several years, encounters a Tamil boy newly arrived in England and working at a petrol station. Their meeting prompts Triton to remember his childhood on an island six thousand miles away. As the boy asks, “You in this country a long, long time then? […] starting with nothing?” Triton thinks “he too was painting a dream” (2). Triton proceeds to paint his dream by narrating the story of his journey to the present. The rendering of the journey as a dream indicative of his migrant’s perspective is a self-conscious strategy which separates imagination from reality in portraying the island as a ‘microcosm’, a self-contained world as imagined by early travellers. The problem faced by a diasporic writer in representing one’s homeland from memory and also in representing the reality of a distanced homeland plagued by ethnic strife is expressed in this novel. The imaginary context draws attention to the literary representations of islands as paradisal and also questions the vulnerability of an island state in postcolonial Sri Lanka during the 1960s and early 1970s. However, the island as remembered by Triton becomes less paradisal and increasingly vulnerable to the political turmoil and ethnic conflict. The dream-like fantasy world, which is framed at the beginning and the end by life in England, encapsulates the memory of life in Sri Lanka. The depiction of Sri Lanka as a cocooned world distinct from present reality focuses on memory and a sense of loss, prompted by Triton’s encounter with the refugee. Thus, this initial chapter signifies a gap between past and present, and imagination and reality, but also creates a link between Triton, a Sinhalese, and the Tamil boy; a situation which would have been problematic in the 1990s in Sri Lanka, where the two ethnic groups were in conflict. England is a refuge for the young Tamil as it was for Triton on his arrival twenty years earlier. Triton’s memory takes him back to Sri Lanka when his life was secure in the safety of Salgado’s world as his servant, but which becomes increasingly insecure in the days of political upheaval. This dream positions the island in an imaginative context analogous to that of the European voyagers who thought of islands as remote and isolated

7

Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 197.

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microcosms:8 small worlds which became metaphors for Europe.9 Gunesekera’s depiction of the island as a microcosm is not suggestive of a metaphor for Europe but instead reveals its vulnerability in its postcolonial state as a newly independent nation. He exposes the paradise myth as a construction of travellers, colonizers, and precolonial indigenous mythology, but also asserts the island’s potential to survive. In a postcolonial context, in the years after independence, ethno-political turmoil shrouds the island. Salgado’s concern with the preservation of the reef can be understood as a metaphor for the preservation of the people. The quotation from The Tempest, “Of his bones are coral made,” which is the epigraph in Reef, suggests fragility and links man to his environment and thereby initiates the metaphor for the human condition, that of impermanence and mortality, indicating a collective vulnerability. While allusions to The Tempest in postcolonial narratives often focus on the power-relations of Prospero and Caliban, the essence of this novel, which the epigraph signifies, is the fear of loss – both of man and coral – which the two main characters, Salgado and Triton, who are caught up in the insecurity and fragility of the island in this period after independence, represent. Gunesekera manages to show us Triton’s artistic perspective while placing him within the intellectual world of Salgado. Moreover, I suggest that Triton and Salgado are representative of Gunesekera’s dual consciousness as a transnational writer. As Salgado explains with scientific rationalization, either you choose to “observe and classify, or you choose to imagine and classify” (59): a distinction represented by these protagonists. The coral metaphor symbolizes an erosion of identity in a period of turmoil, and is conveyed by Salgado in scientific language. Triton’s more imaginative feelings reveal a fear expressed through predatory images of food. Predatory images of ‘consuming’ and ‘devouring’ implicitly refer to the threat of invading elements: i.e. erosion of the reef and the threat of violence due to political unrest. Gunesekera claims in his first book, Monkfish Moon: “There are no monkfish in the ocean around Sri Lanka,” using this false declaration to demonstrate that the perceived beauty of Sri Lanka conceals the reality of war, implying there are predators.10 Gunesekera’s assertion that the monkfish in the Indian Ocean are “very ugly, very nasty creatures with pre-

8 John R. Gillis, “Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds, 1400– 1800,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond & Vanessa Smith (London & New York: Routledge, 2003): 25–26. 9

See also Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). 10 Romesh Gunesekera, Monkfish Moon (London: Granta, 1998): preface.

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datory characteristics”11 can be related to Reef, in which the language of food conveys predatory images which signify impending doom. The essence of the novel confirmed in the quotation “of his bones are coral made” evokes images of life and death. The mouth-watering sensations of food preparation and eating are overwhelming as both coral and food become metaphors for man and his environment being devoured. The scene of the Christmas party is the central part of this novel, with the anxious preparations culminate in eating and talking. Western food is imagined as exotic: provision of the Christmas turkey causes anxiety about keeping it fresh before cooking, and apprehensive debate over how to cook this “exotic bird” (87) and how to negotiate “the angle of the bacon on top of the breast” (77). After the meal, when there are masses of flesh left on the turkey, Triton removes it from the bones, “like an animal devouring its prey, like eating but without consuming […] the thrifty hunter” (94–95). However, very soon preying guests, admirers, oglers, and hangerson continually arrive in Salgado’s house: “they craved my cooking […] they kept coming, hankering after our food […] they would pile their plates high with mountains of rice and big pools of chicken curry, and then find a perch where they could fill their bellies and suck the marrow out of every bone” (133, 148). The ‘conspicuous consumption’ described in relation to a murdered entrepreneur, the death of whom is briefly told and who later “disappeared from everyone’s thoughts” (135, 137), is paralleled by the devouring of food. Corresponding images of food and the coral reef by Triton and Salgado are used to express idealistic views of paradise and nature in order to stress the breach between destruction and preservation. The mining of the coral reef for shortterm economic gain in the tourist industry reflects economic instability. The feeling of everything being “out of reach” (123) is illustrated by the market scene, which particularly conveys a sense of insecurity. A beautiful blue parrot fish contrasts with the violent and ferocious images of fish being hacked in the fish market, as sea creatures, sharks, and dolphins are butchered. Outside the “small pieces of bleached white coral marked the municipal parking lot” conjure up images of bones and skulls, while the dying, bleached coral signifies a sense of doom (118). Fear of the encroaching ocean persists and is delineated by the telling of the Buddhist tale ‘A Thousand Fingers’ (165–67), which tells of a mass murderer who collected the fingers of his victims in a garland until his conversion by the Buddha. This tale is juxtaposed in the novel with the assumed drowning of Salgado’s friend, a government employee, and the fact of the bodies found on the beach, which are indicative of 11

Ajay Singh, “Tales Born in Anguish,” Asiaweek.com (5 March 1999): online.

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political atrocities (173). The combination of the Buddhist folktale12 and reality presents an impending doom in the “turbid water” (168). While the ocean, for Triton, seems to signify impending doom, Susheila Nasta suggests that “the reef of the novel’s title becomes […] a suggestive metonym for forces not only of irreparable human loss, but also of connection and reconstitution.”13 Salgado speaks of the erosion of the coral reef: This polyp is really very delicate. It has survived aeons, but even a small change in the immediate environment […] could kill it. Then the whole thing will go. And if the structure is destroyed, the sea will rush in. The sand will go. The beach will disappear […] it is only the skin of the reef that is alive. It is real flesh: immortal. Self-renewing. (48)

Fear of the total destruction of both man and coral is illustrated in Triton’s recollection: “Mister Salgado said the sea would be the end of us all […] I felt the sea getting closer; each wave just a grain of sand closer to washing the life out of us” (60). This reveals Triton’s fear of destruction, further illustrated when Salgado speaks of Gondwanaland, a reference to Ceylon when it was part of India, Australia, and Antarctica, before becoming submerged by flood. Salgado’s warnings refer to the legends of Patala Lanka and Noah’s Ark; however, water is also a source of life and a symbol of regeneration. The reference to the island’s connection to the mainland contests the island’s insularity, and Salgado’s discussion of the reservoirs built using engineering feats of great precision in 200 B C , also contests notions of the island as isolate and regressive, and advocates a sense of hope and survival, as he says “water: [is] the source of our life, and death” (85).14 Salgado’s dialogue is addressed to guests at the Christmas dinner party, the central scene in the novel. Here Salgado refers to Sri Lanka as a mythical paradise: “Remember this was also known as the Garden of Eden. It panders 12 The Buddhist tale is a story of enlightenment in which Angulimala, a mass murderer who collected the fingers of his victims on a garland, was stopped by the Buddha, who converted him. 13 Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002): 215. 14 The fear of being submerged by the ocean links to a Sri Lankan storytelling legend where the ‘original’ Lanka, Patala (sunken) Lanka, is said to be mostly submerged; Patrick Harrigan, “Lanka’s cosmography down the Ages,” http://kataragama.org/research /cosmography-downtheages.htm [accessed 4 Feb 2004]. References to the mythological submerged Ceylon contest the island’s insularity and also refer to a metaphor to encode wisdom, to ‘dig’ for patterns of deeper meaning beneath the surface. Gondwana was a land mass when Ceylon was joined to India, Australia, and Antarctica, and, according to the Ramayana, Lanka separated becoming partly submerged in the sea because of the misdeeds of Ravana; http://www.travelsrilanka.com/roots/pre_history.php

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to anyone’s chauvinism, you know: Sinhala, Tamil, aboriginal. Choose a religion, pick your fantasy. History is flexible” (85). Sri Lanka has been depicted as a paradisal island in mythological references as the second ‘Eden’ and in narratives of early travellers. The peak of Sri Prada is also called Adam’s Peak, where, according to Islamic folklore, Adam and Eve were banished after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. However, for Europeans, according to Jean–Pierre Durix, “exotic islands have often been regressive imaginary places outside time and history, enclosed environments that individuals seek to conquer and dominate in order to build their private gardens of Eden.”15 By alluding to Adam’s Peak, the sacred site for several faiths, and reflecting on Sri Lankan origins, Salgado simultaneously puts forward a hybrid sense of paradise and disrupts the tradition of European island narratives which reflect on origins. Gunesekera here re-works traditional European island narratives which celebrate the Empire’s origin by staging this scene to display syncretic ideals. The divine adventures of early travellers in pursuit of the Old World were based on both truth and myth appropriating biblical narratives to islands. Paradisal depictions changed from early spiritual quests for Eden to those in colonial times as quests for economic opportunity. These early allegories of Eden later became romanticized as metaphors for Europe (after the ‘discovery’ of the New World).16 Stephen Slemon suggests that “within the discourse of colonialism allegory has always functioned as an especially visible technology of appropriation […] a way of subordinating the colonised.”17 However, the reference to Sri Lanka as Eden in Gunesekera’s Reef correlative to this Sri Lankan myth looks back to a precolonial era, and, although ironic in the times of postcolonial conflict, this allusion to Eden is suggestive of the potential for peace in a plural society, a society which, during the 1960s, was affected by political tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamils. Furthermore, Triton’s exotic interpretation of European colonizers emphasizes the fictionality of European representations of islands in the age of discovery. As Salgado speaks, Triton is “spellbound”:

15 Literary Archipelagoes, ed. Jean–Pierre Durix (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 1998): 10. 16 By the seventeenth century, the island as a ‘little new world’ becomes an analogue not only of the Garden of Eden but also of the whole world. See Richard Grove, Green Imperialism, 46. 17 Stephen Slemon, “Monuments of Empire: Allegory / Counter-Discourse / Post-Colonial Writing,” Kunapipi 9.3 (1987): 8. Slemon uses, as an example of allegorical reference, Columbus’s naming of Caribbean islands as “an anterior set of signs that is already situated within an overarching, supposedly universal, metaphysical and political master code of recognition” (8).

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I could see the whole of our world come to life when he spoke: the great tanks, the sea, the forests, the stars. The past resurrected in a pageant of longhaired princes clutching ebony rods; red-tailed mermaids; elephants adorned with tasselled canopies and silver bells raising their sheathed, gilded, curved tusks and circling the bronze painted cities of ancient warlords. His words conjured up adventurers from India north and south, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, each with their flotillas of disturbed hope and manic wanderlust. They had come full of the promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove, and found a refuge in this jungle of demons and vast quiet waters. (85)

Sri Lanka’s hybridity is put in its historical context by Salgado and also romanticized by Triton, whose vision of early colonizers influences his later exile to England, when he ironically claims that he is “an explorer on a voyage of discovery” (174). This discussion during the Christmas party establishes Sri Lanka as a site of hybridity and plurality, as the island’s identity has been formed by travellers. Gunesekera’s focus on the island’s origins can therefore be understood as advocating plurality and movement; a changing environment, contesting remoteness by its accessibility. As political events become fiercer and more alarming, just prior to the uprising by Sinhalese Marxists in 1971, Salgado leaves for England with Triton. Triton opens a snack-shop in London; a pale imitation of Salgado’s dream of a marine park and floating restaurant in a Sri Lankan bay, where he says “we could have farmed for the table and nurtured rare breeds for the wild” (177). However, for Triton, the bay where Salgado envisioned a sanctuary was a frightening experience: I slowly began to see that everything was perpetually devouring its surroundings […] the crunching of fish feeding on the white tips of golden staghorn. My own fingertips seem to whiten before me as trigger-fish, angelfish, tiger-fish, tetrons, electrons and sandstone puffer-fish swirled around me, ever hungry. (177)

On a visit to Wales, in the chapter “Strandline,” the pebble beach reveals “the debris of a whole new world” to Triton (171). Triton’s discovery of Irish moss, moon jelly, cockle-shells, frisbees, and nylon rope, as “petrochemicals stained the air in mauve and pink as deliciously as the Tropic of Capricorn off our coral-spangled south coast back home” (172), prompts him to ask Salgado if it is the same sea as back home. Salgado explains: “maybe […] as the coral disappears, there will be nothing but sea and we will all return to it” (172). But the sea is also regenerative and all one ocean; as Salgado says, “the same little polyp grows the idea in another head” (176). The title of this chapter, “Strandline,” suggests being washed up in England and alludes to visions of Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest, but the debris of past histories is linked by

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the ocean creating a kind of historical flux. Now the ocean becomes a metaphor for shifting historical patterns, and England, as a refuge, is a site for ‘rebirth’ indicative of a diasporic consciousness. This can be compared to the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott’s poem “The Castaway,” in which a sense of creativity is restored to the isolated artist inspired by Crusoe. Walcott’s response to being a castaway, rejected or ‘shipwrecked’, promotes a positive projection for the future by starting anew in an ‘Adamic’ sense. The beach and sea are evoked as sites of renewal and growth: “If I listen I can hear the polyp build. / The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea. / Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.”18 By aligning the position of Crusoe to that of West Indian writers, Walcott focuses on solitude and craftsmanship, placing emphasis on the creativity of language. In “Crusoe’s Journal” he writes: […] even the bare necessities of style are turned to use, like those plain iron tools he salvages from shipwreck, hewing a prose as odorous as raw wood to the adze;19

For Walcott, Crusoe is Adam, Columbus, God, a missionary, and a beachcomber, but more specifically Crusoe’s survival is a triumph of determination. Although Walcott is referring to the Caribbean, the immortal and self-renewing polyp of the reef evokes the same message of hope and renewal as found in Reef, where the sea is also regarded as a connection that links the island to other nations, enabling diasporic movement and multiple locations. While Salgado returns to Sri Lanka, Triton stays in London and muses: “are we not all refugees from something” (174). England becomes a site of ongoing selfdiscovery: an identity in process, without replicating “the processes of imperial imposition and consolidation.”20 Without “celebratory closure,”21 Salgado says, “in our minds we have swum in the same sea […] an imagined world” (176). The two characters Salgado and Triton represent the tension between staying and leaving. Salgado returns without fulfilling his dream of a beach sanctuary, while Triton, fearful of events in Sri Lanka, decides to stay in England. 18

Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber,

1992): 58. 19

Walcott, Collected Poems, 92. Diana Brydon & Helen Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions (Sydney & Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1993): 78. 21 Bhabha, “Minority Culture and Creative Anxiety,” 2. 20

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This novel links the two locations of Sri Lanka and England through the author’s transnational identity and his diasporic consciousness, which advocates a sense of sharing places. Moreover, Reef creates a new imaginative depiction of home/ islands /worlds from the dual perspectives of life in England and in Sri Lanka and exposes the fictionality and limitations of colonial island discourses. Reef is a story of survival. It is also a story which links countries and places. The threatening sea envisioned in Triton’s imagination figuratively conveys a fear of the unknown in a time of political turmoil and ethnic strife. The sea as an erosion of cultural identity in this novel can be understood metaphorically in the context of the civil war in Sri Lanka. The metaphor of coral reef/ bones offers a sense of renewal and hope, while Reef challenges the colonial allegory of islands as allegories of Europe. Since this novel was written, the sea has been threatening in reality. Romesh Gunesekera has written of the tsunami tragedy of December 2004 in the Sri Lankan Daily News. His comments provide a fitting summary to this discussion. He speaks of the beaches in the late-1980s as a scene of political atrocities, but says he never thought the sea would turn so malign. He continues: perhaps after this catastrophe people will learn to somehow work together, despite their politics, within countries as they will have to between countries […] [and] reconstruct the damage not only from the sea but from the war and from deeper inequalities […] then at least the children who survived might have a chance.22

WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. “Minority Culture and Creative Anxiety,” paper delivered at British Council conference on “Re-Inventing Britain,” School of Oriental and African Studies, London (1997). Brah, Avtah. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). Brydon, Diana, & Helen Tiffin. Decolonising Fictions (Sydney & Mundelstrup: Dangaroo 1993). Durix, Jean–Pierre, ed. Literary Archipelagoes (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 1998). Gillis, John R. “Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds, 14001800,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond & Vanessa Smith (London & New York: Routledge, 2003): 19–31.

22

Gunesekera, “Out of Tragedy, a Plea for Peace,” Daily News (5 January 2005).

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Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). Gunesekera, Romesh. Monkfish Moon (London: Granta, 1998). ——. “Out of Tragedy, a Plea for Peace,” Daily News (5 January 2005). ——. Reef (1994: London: Granta, 1998). Harrigan, Patrick. “Lanka’s Cosmography Down the Ages”: http://kataragama.org /research/cosmography_downtheages.htm [accessed 4 Feb 2004]. Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Salidaa. “Romesh Gunesekera,” Salidaa: http://www.salidaa.org.uk/salidaa/?=9000 00018&page=archiveItem [accessed 14 Dec 2004]. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991). Singh, Ajay. “Tales Born in Anguish,” in Asiaweek.com (5 March 1999): www .asiaweekcom/asiaweek/99/0305/feat6.html [accessed 7 July 2003]. Slemon, Stephen. “Monuments of Empire: Allegory / Counter-Discourse / Post-Colonial Writing,” Kunapipi 9.3 (1987): 1–16. Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1992).

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The Otherless Other, or The Anonymity of Water Unmapping Ondaatje’s ‘Sand Sea’ Self in Minghella’s The English Patient *

S AVIOUR C ATANIA

AND I VAN

C ALLUS

Here lies one whose name was writ in water — John Keats

I

N A N I N S I G H T F U L R E V I E W of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Gary Kamiya implies that the film adaptor’s most formidable task must have been visualizing the “army of ghostly lovers” haunting Michael Ondaatje’s novel. In Kamiya’s view, Minghella could only manage to “capture […] something” of the text’s crucial love theme because Ondaatjean love “contains an absence, an inwardness, a mysterious loss, at its heart – and language captures that absence and mystery better than film.”1 That Kamiya elucidates neither what constitutes Ondaatjean absence in The English Patient nor what Minghella’s ‘something’ amounts to in its film version in no way minimizes the relevance of his statement. In fact, Kamiya’s suggestion that Minghella’s The English Patient depicts loss and absence goes beyond the routine recognition in many other reviews that “The heart of the film lies in the sorrow of discovering what you’ve lost when it’s already gone.”2 Most of those appraisals, in never really associating the absence motif with Ondaatje’s novel, provide us with less than Kamiya’s ‘something’. In what follows, then, we would like to engage with the quality and extent of this ‘something’ that Minghella allegedly captures.

* To Yvonne – the patient we’ve never known. 1 Gary Kamiya, “The English Patient,” Salon (1996): http://archive.salon.com/nov96 /movies2961118.html 2 Damian Cannon, “The English Patient (1996),” Movie Reviews UK: http://www.film.unet.com/Movies/Reviews/English_Patient.html

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In referring to the absence in Ondaatje’s texts as a kind of ghostliness, Kamiya evokes what Amy Novak specifies as Ondaatje’s “Derrid[ean] spectrology” – a realm of elusiveness where characters manifest as absent–present wraiths.3 Of vital importance in this context is the way Ondaatje wields the Patient’s concept of Herodotus’ history of mankind as a “piecing together [of] a mirage.”4 This is the classical cue to Ondaatje’s postmodern take on characterization, mindful of what both is and is not there. Like the Patient’s Herodotus, what Ondaatje weaves is a tapestry of (non-)identities – identities so indeterminate that they melt into intermeshing relationships where self-individuation totally collapses. Fluidity defines the Ondaatjean ‘I’: In Ondaatje’s text […] there is no central subject. No figure, male or female, white or black, is established as the One. […] In fact, the novel suggests that all characters are part of one whole and that they are different versions of each other.5

Perhaps no other Ondaatjean phrase encapsulates the veracity of what Eleanor Ty says here than the Patient’s reference to the Sahara desert beyond Uweinat and the Gilf Kebir as a “Sand Sea” (5). For what the Sahara retains of its long dried rivers and lakes is the fluidity it once had in its endlessly shifting sands. Ondaatje’s vision of humanity as elemental fluidity is evidently inspired by this notion of the Sahara desert as the embodiment of a ‘sand sea’ essence. Significantly, it is with the pre-dynastic Sahara tribes whom he calls “water people” (14) that the Patient implicitly identifies when he claims “I have always had information like a sea in me” (18), a fluidity which he injects into other identities he appropriates. Hence the Patient’s transmutation of the Almásy–Katharine Clifton affair into a desert heat that liquifies the adulterous lovers to a metonymic fusion of “damp forearm[s]” (152) and “sweat[y] shoulder[s]” (156). Drifting on the Patient’s waves of passion, Almásy and Katharine dissolve into the moistness of their warmth. It is, to rephrase Ty, this dissolution of identities that constitutes the centreless centre of Ondaatje’s The English Patient. For what survives of the One’s identity in such Ondaatjean fluidity is what Novak labels the Derridean absence or spectre – a spectrality which implies that, since there is essentially no One, there can be no corresponding Other. All lovers are otherless others in Ondaatje’s The 3 Amy Novak, “Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient,” Studies in the Novel 36.2 (2004): 227. 4 Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (1992; New York: Vintage, 1996): 119. Further page references are in the main text. 5 Eleanor Ty, “The Other Questioned: Exoticism and Displacement in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” International Fiction Review 27.1–2 (2000): 15.

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English Patient, for their ‘sand sea’ nature erodes them into an elemental absent presence. Such phantomness is aptly designated by the blank on Ondaatje’s page defining the equally spectral Bedouins who save the Patient. For, as Stephanie M. Hilger suggests, “There is no term for a signified that cannot be mapped.”6 It is quite understandable, therefore, that Kamiya should have concluded that such spectrality transcends cinematic mapping, and that Minghella could consequently only capture the shadow of Ondaatjean phantomness. Yet there may be more to it than that. Whether Minghella actually succeeds in visualizing the unmappable ‘sand sea’ region of Ondaatjean fluid characterization has been the focus of much critical debate among film scholars. David L. Kranz rightly sees these as having “produce[d] a diversity of opinion, if not an interpretative muddle.”7 Jacqui Sadashige argues, for instance, that Minghella distorts Ondaatje’s “fluid interplay of discourse and identity [by] reassur[ing] us that the English Patient is Almásy.”8 However, this overlooks the fact that Minghella roots his Patient /Almásy identification in what Douglas G. Stenberg accurately terms Ondaatjean “anthropomorphic and geomorphologic images and metaphors.”9 The result is a “sea” fluidity that captures more than Kamiya’s “something” of the Patient / Almásy anonymity suggested by Ondaatje. There is nothing reassuring about Minghella’s Patient as Almásy, not least because what Almásy bequeaths to the Patient is not, as John Bolland states, a “fix[ed] identity,”10 but a facial spectrality. For Minghella’s Almásy, it should be stressed, is more than a variation on Gaston Leroux’s Opera Phantom, since, long before liquefying his facial features in a scorching plane crash, what Almásy clearly projects is a faceless face. Equally important is the fact that Minghella’s Katharine partakes of Almásy’s spectrality and that, revealingly, they fall in love as absent presences. Consider, for example, the seduction sequence where Katharine delivers Herodotus’ Candaules / Gyges / wife story to the gathered male explorers. In Thomas Harrison’s words, Almásy reacts by “lurk[ing] in ’the shadows […] just as Gyges is said to watch from the shadows as the Lydian Queen un6 Stephanie M. Hilger, “Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Rewriting History,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6.3 (2004): http: //clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-3/hilger04.html 7 David L. Kranz, “The English Patient: Critics, Audiences and the Quality of Fidelity,” Literature / Film Quarterly 31.2 (2003): 100. 8 Jacqui Sadashige, “Sweeping the Sands: Geographies of Desire in The English Patient,” Literature / Film Quarterly 26.4 (1998): 248. 9 Douglas G. Stenberg, “A Firmament in the Midst of the Waters: Dimensions of Love in The English Patient,” Literature / Film Quarterly 26.4 (1998): 257. 10 John Bolland, Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002): 84.

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dresses.”11 Rather than a furtive figure, however, Minghella’s Almásy literally embodies the surrounding darkness, and so does Katharine, whose identity is equally eclipsed. Much closer to Minghella’s thematic concerns is Juliana Geran Pilon’s comment about Katharine’s “figure blur[ring] while the focus sharpens on [Almásy].”12 What Pilon alludes to occurs in a long uninterrupted shot of Almásy staring at Katharine. It is really the second in a series of three rack focusing effects whereby Minghella alternately shifts only the lovers’ focal planes. They are thus propelled into a liminal realm where they mutually sharpen and blur beyond the others’ gaze. By relying on focus racking, not only does Minghella convey the lovers’ ethereal fluidity which they instinctively interchange, but he actually renders their reciprocal mutability erotically spectral as they allure each other through their mirage-like essence of being absently present. Here Minghella captures the moment of the birth within Katharine and Almásy of that transgressive yearning which transmutes them into communing mirages. Far from “construct[ing] and fetishiz[ing] an essential interior self,” as Sadashige claims, “[by] locat[ing] [it] in a person’s ability to love,”13 Minghella distils Ondaatjean love’s shifting ‘sand sea’ spirit by embodying it in the desert’s most insubstantial and transient phenomenon. Falling in Minghellian love is like falling into a mirage to embrace the phantom within and without. In the manner of Herodotus, whom Ondaatje’s Patient imagines trading mankind’s mirages in desert oases, what Minghella trades with Ondaatje for his Almásy and Katharine is the self-erasing selves of their literary equivalents. It is. in fact. precisely as self-eroding mirages that Minghella’s lovers are quintessentially Ondaatjean. Significantly, Ondaatje’s seduction episode rivals in its uncanny filtering of the Patient and Katharine the phantomness of Minghella’s focus racking. To the Patient, Katharine’s recital of Herodotus’ tale opens an analogous spectral dimension where lovers interact as absent presences. For once, Katharine breaks into the Patient’s heart; she becomes a phantom of delight fading before his eyes. Or so does the Patient re-create her, much to Caravaggio’s amazement: “Her eyes only on the page where the story was, as if she were sinking within quicksand while she spoke” (233). Then, just as weirdly, Katharine resurges into the Patient’s vision: “She stopped reading and looked up. Out of the quicksand” (234). To Hana, again, the Patient emphasizes the insubstantiality of Katharine’s substance: “I was conscious of the airiness of her weight” (171). So light of being is Ondaatje’s 11

Thomas Harrison, “Herodotus and The English Patient,” Classics Ireland 5 (1998): 49. Juliana Geran Pilon, “The English Patient: A Classical Tragedy of Love and Paradox,” Humanitas 10.1 (1997): 90–98. Online: http://www.nhinet.org/pilon.htm 13 Sadashige, “Sweeping the Sands,” 250. 12

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Katharine that, like her Minghellian counterpart, she appropriates the immaterial materiality of a mirage by floating in and out of sight. Equally mirage-like is Ondaatje’s Patient, who likewise evokes the fleeting figure of Minghella’s Almásy by hovering between light and darkness: “Katharine Clifton began to recite something and my head was no longer in the halo of the campfire” (143). As a spectral figure, the Patient also functions as a mirror of Ondaatje’s Almásy, for it is specifically as absent presences that their anonymity intermeshes. Thus, when Ondaatje’s Patient asks Caravaggio, “Were you there in Cairo with them tracking me?” (255), he is actually identifying with Almásy as phantom or, rather, with the “nothing” (255) which the British forces find in the desert while tracking Almásy, whom Caravaggio registers as “a vacuum on [the] charts” (253) of British intelligence. That kind of identification is also evident from the pivotal thematic connection which the Patient forges with Almásy when he depicts him pining for Katharine’s love as an explorer submerged in a mirage: “He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it” (246). The echo of the seduction episode is unmistakable even though the mirage experience is diametrically different – for Almásy, without Katharine’s love, drowns in the same quicksand mirage that enchants the Patient’s heart. To the loveless Almásy, Katharine becomes Morgana Le Fay, the paragon of vampiric mirages within Arthur’s realm. Only by regaining Katharine’s love can Almásy hope to retrieve his absent present identity. Like the Patient, Almásy is another ghostly lover whose spiritual mirage thrives if it is sustained by love. What has been called Ondaatje’s Derridean ‘border space’14 is thus a liminal world where only spectral love reigns. Minghella is Ondaatjean to a remarkable degree, then, in spectralizing his Patient/ Almásy identification by developing it in the absent present terms of the Almásy /Katharine mirage affair. Significantly, Minghella visualizes his Patient as the lovelorn Almásy by creating an Ondaatjean variation on the ‘mirage’ plight of the latter’s literary counterpart. For Minghella’s Almásy, unlike Ondaatje, finds himself locked not in but out of Katharine’s mirage when bereft of her sustaining love. Nowhere does Minghella convey this rejection more painfully than at that moment during the disastrous dinner sequence when Almásy fails to respond to Katharine blurring and sharpening in resistance. By not racking Almásy’s focal plane here, Minghella leaves him tragically present in Katharine’s absent presence, thereby rooting him in a hellish presentness where he cannot reach Katharine through his lack of absence. Without love, Minghella’s Almásy lives beyond the grace of Katharine’s spectral space or, as Ondaatje’s Patient labels this uncharted territory, in 14

Novak, “Textual Hauntings,” 227.

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the “pure zone” (246), where identity is but what is not. Lack of love maims Almásy’s mirage, for as Ondaatje’s patient comes to realize, what nourishes the spirit of the mirage is the power of love. Hence the Patient’s description of Almásy as Katharine’s lover: “He has been disassembled by her” (155) – a dispersion which he appropriates when, switching from third-person to firstperson narration, he wistfully yearns: “To fall in love and be disassembled. I was in her arms” (158). Deprived of Katharine’s love, Minghella’s Almásy becomes not the vampirized mirage of his Ondaatjean counterpart, but a reassembled one that regains its absent present state by disassembling with Katharine again. It is with this Almásy of the faceless face that Minghella’s Patient, like Ondaatje’s, identifies himself. Consequently, even as Almásy, Minghella’s Patient retains the spectrality or ghostliness of his Ondaatjean equivalent, for both Patients inhabit an elusive dimension of mirage identities, where ultimately not only Almásy but every other character blurs into the sick man’s phantomness. It is in its dissection of the lovers’ spectrality, their Derridean being of nonbeing, that Minghella’s The English Patient comes closest to embodying Ondaatje’s ‘mirage’ vision of existence by likewise concretizing it in terms of evanescent “sand sea” elements. Stenberg actually misses this seminal point when he compares Minghella’s The English Patient and its Ondaatjean source on the premise that “water symbolises the essence of Almásy’s love for Katharine.” Rather than water, what paradoxically defines the Almásy /Katharine obsession, is water absently present in the fluidity of the desert. Much more relevant to how Minghella intermeshes Katharine and Almásy as “sand sea” mirages is another observation by Stenberg: “In the film, [Almásy’s] drawing of Zerzura and the location of the Cave of Swimmers seem to be one.”15 The drawing Stenberg mentions is that of a range of rocks which an old Arab accurately describes to Almásy as “a mountain the shape of a woman’s back.”16 Consequently, by locating the Cave of Swimmers within this specific region, Minghella imbues it with the same female characteristics which Ondaatje attributes to Zerzura, the lost oasis. Significantly, this image of female landscaping recurs in the film, for, as one reviewer has observed, it is “later echoed in Katharine’s silhouette as she lies in bed.”17 That Minghella reworks here Katharine’s literary equivalent is made clear by the moment where Ondaatje’s Patient, quoting the Kitab al Kanuz, informs Hana about “Zerzura [being] named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan” (153). 15

Stenberg, “A Firmament in the Midst of the Waters,” 257. All soundtrack quotations from Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient refer to the Miramax / Buena Vista videocassette (D610066). 17 MaryAnn Johanson, “Desert Places: The English Patient,” The Flick Filosopher (20 March 1999): http://www.flickfilosopher.com/oscars/bestpix/englishpatient.shtml 16

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By identifying Zerzura as a female blend of water and sand, Ondaatje transforms this elusive oasis into Katharine’s alter ego – for Katharine, as a quicksand wraith, not only combines the same fluid elements, but actually shares Zerzura’s spectral tendency of looming in and out of vision. Like Zerzura, Ondaatje’s Katharine is forever a mirage – the “vacant horizon” (97) of the Stephen Crane poem she recites. What defines Katharine transcends the “bathroom steaming with liquid air” (174) which the Patient once shares with her to incorporate instead the more essential quicksand mixture of water and dust that survives, absently present, in her demise: “now there is no talcum on her arm, no rose water on her thigh” (173). Through her “sand sea” fluidity, Ondaatje’s Katharine mutates Zerzura’s acacia trees into willows of the Gilf Kebir. Katharine attains then what Lilijana Burcar terms Almásy’s “bodytranscendental” long before Almásy daubs her dead body with the “colourful fluid” (248) he steals from the cave drawings. For Ondaatje endows her with that which Burcar erroneously believes he solely reserves for Almásy – a “body [that] oozes with universally invested meanings.”18 Hence Minghella’s representation of Katharine’s rock silhouette, whereby his equally bath-addicted heroine, by appropriating the landscape features of the ‘Cave of Swimmers’ region, is transfigured into a mermaid of the desert. By making his Katharine a painter, Minghella enhances her Cave essence – for Katharine thereby becomes a living means through which the Sahara pictographs swim back to life as her painted replicas. And by re-creating the Cave Swimmers in their original state as paint, Katharine reaffirms their paradoxical pecularity as earthen liquidity. However, she also implicitly embodies the unknown Uweinat painter’s vision of humanity as a sand sea of no fixed identity, destined to ride the ever-changing crest of anonymous dunes and waves. Nowhere is Katharine’s fluidity more fluidly captured than in the opening shot of her absent presence painting her swimming doppelgänger on sandlike canvas. This sustained shot anatomizes a successive metamorphic process whereby what looks initially like some kind of hieroglyph gradually becomes a scorpion-like figure and finally a faceless swimmer. But Katharine’s ‘sand sea’ trajectory reaches its aesthetic apotheosis when Almásy, like his literary counterpart, liquefies her corpse into a cave painting of Uweinat. Worth emphasizing here is the fact that Minghella’s Katharine, like Ondaatje’s, radiates that transcendence throughout her relationship with Almásy and that, consequently, their interacting bodies never become what Hsuan Hsu

18 Lilijana Burcar, “Mapping the Woman’s Body in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Canadian Literature and Culture in the Postcolonial Literature and Culture Web: http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/canada/literature/ondaatje/burcar/burcar1.html

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calls “erotic compliments to the maps hanging from Almásy’s walls.”19 Significantly, the hollow at the base of Katharine’s neck proves as inscrutable to Almásy as the rock indentation he likewise scrutinizes, for its name completely eludes him. What Almásy’s topographic surveying of Katharine’s body establishes, indeed, is that her desert contours are unmappable. So is Almásy’s body, for it likewise simulates the uncharted desert terrain, as the incident where he almost perfectly matches his hand with a carved one in the same rock indentation clearly indicates. Minghella’s lovers, like Ondaatje’s, are therefore elementally unfathomable. Theirs is, as Ondaatje’s Patient remarks, “a whirlwind romance” (258), whose “sand sea” manifestation attests to a transcendental bodyscape that no cartography can survey. But this statement can be viewed in truer perspective in the stunning sandstorm sequence. Minghella, inspired by the “three storms” (137) which Ondaatje’s Patient evokes for Hana, plunges Katharine and Almásy into an ominous sandstorm that dislocates the “sand sea” world into their spectral bodyscape. Thematically crucial here are the windy sand sheets that buffet Minghella’s lovers, making them “disappear […] into landscape” (139). Or again, as the Patient says, they “take in sand like a sinking boat takes in water” (137). Minghella’s conceit of drowning Katharine and Almásy within “sand drifts as if [they are] going under an ocean”20 is visually conveyed by sand dunes swirling around them like heaving waves. This is the closest Minghella comes to immerse the lovers into what Ondaatje’s Patient sees as “the palace of winds” (261) – a ‘sand sea’ version of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with similar sinister associations blowing through the windswept inhabitants. For while both Katharine and Almásy joke about the Harmattan, Herodotus’ red wind, they actually display its bloody imprint on their ochre-coloured facial features. One reviewer has complained about “the sameness of [the film’s] orange tones,”21 but they are in fact thematically pivotal in establishing what may be termed the Harmattan texture of Minghella’s The English Patient. For Minghella’s lovers are cave swimmers whose bronzed bodyscape attests to their Harmattan destiny of having to traverse a “sea of darkness” (17). Hence Minghella’s appropriation of Hassanein Bey’s vision of a sandstorm that obliterates everything: “The sky is shut out […], the universe is filled” (137). Equally stygian is the lovers’ firmament, for their stars twinkle into dust. Enacted thus in the 19

Hsuan Hsu, “Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella’s Adaptation of The English Patient,” CLCWeb. Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6.3 (2004): http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-3/hsu04.html 20 See Anthony Minghella, The English Patient: A Screenplay (London: Methuen, 1997): 68. 21 Frazer Bryant, “The English Patient,” Deep Focus: http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker /englishp.html

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midst of darkling, ravishing sand, their love-making vanishes into a nonevent. Katharine could have asked Almásy the same elemental question which the latter, as Patient, asks Hana: “Is there sand in my eyes?” (27). Theirs, then, is truly the bodyscape of a ‘sand sea’ mirage whose fluidity is ever shifting, ever blurring, and what this transcendence leaves in its wake is an absent present trail. For what Katharine traces on the truck’s sand-silted windowscape looms beyond any form of materialization. Hence its unmappable nature. What manifests, in fact, on Katharine’s vanishing hand is the Patient’s face, with its gazeless gaze. An inspired superimposition on Minghella’s part, for only such a gaze can penetrate this spectral world, where nothing but nothingness takes shape. That the spectral gaze is a shared feature of Minghella’s lovers is also evident from the equally crucial sequences depicting Almásy carrying Katharine in and out of the Cave of Swimmers. What is thematically revealing is that the way Almásy holds Katharine in his arms deflects their eyes to two diametrically opposed paths. Going in, Almásy gazes into the Cave’s interior while Katharine, who is actually facing him, turns her look outward. Going out, however, reverses the process – now Almásy gazes out, while Katharine’s dead eyes linger inside. A dialectic of gazing, or what Mark A. Cheetham and Elizabeth D. Harvey label “the paradigmatic double perspective,”22 is thereby created out of Minghella’s fusion of the lovers’ gazes. But what Minghella’s integration of antithetical glances generates is evidently the spectral gaze as Ondaatje embodies it in the ancient Egyptian god Wepwawet – “the jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking” (259). Again, it is Ondaatje who inspires Minghella’s notion of making the lovers incarnate Wepwawet’s gaze at the Uweinat Cave by his description of the Patient carrying Katharine from the Cave of Swimmers, “her body facing back over [his] shoulders” (171). By adapting Ondaatje’s reworking of what Cheetham and Harvey call “a tradition of the cave as passage to the underworld [where] commerce between the living and the spectral shadow” becomes possible,23 Minghella propels the lovers’ stormy transcendentalism to that mythological liminality where, like Ondaatje’s Patient, they appropriate the oxymoronic divinity of Wepwawet – a “mind travelling east and west in the disguise of a sandstorm” (248). That Minghella’s ‘sand sea’ lovers transcend the whirlwind destiny of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca da Rimini by attaining the sandstorm sacredness of the Egyptian canine deity of mummification is also attested by the image Ondaatje’s 22

Mark Cheetham & Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Obscure Imaginings: Visual Culture and the Anatomy of Caves,” Journal of Visual Culture 1.1 (2002): 107. 23 Cheetham & Harvey, “Obscure Imaginings,” 105.

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Bagnold employs to divinize the dunes: “The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth” (136). The Wepwawet/ lovers integration is, in fact, crucial to an understanding of the mythic spectrality of both Minghella’s and Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Indeed, what Ondaatje’s Patient bequeaths to Minghella’s clearly soars beyond the winding sheet that makes them both mummies of the Sand Sea, as Caravaggio perceives: “Caravaggio watches the pink in the man’s mouth as he talks. The gums perhaps the light iodine colour of the rock paintings discovered in Uweinat” (247). Through Caravaggio’s uncanny association, strikingly evocative of Bagnold’s, the Patient’s mouth becomes, like Minghella’s Cave at Uweinat, a portal to an ancient Egyptian netherworld of dissolving identities, where the jackal god Wepwawet is also simultaneously both Duamutef and Anubis. Hence the Patient’s self-fragmenting speech, which baffles Caravaggio by annihilating the speaker’s identity: “Who is he speaking as now?” (244). Or again: “Who was talking, back then?” (247). By drowning the Patient “rid[ing] the boat of morphine” (161) into sandstreams of consciousness, Ondaatje pitches his self-eroding reminiscences to the mythological transcendentalism of Anubian hieroglyphics, as Caravaggio and /or the Patient painfully intuits: “Death means you are in the third person” (247). Significantly, only by appropriating the tripartite nature of the canine Death of ancient Egypt can Ondaatje’s Patient inhabit realms of timelessness, where the Villa San Girolamo now signifies the Oxford Union Library then, and where, consequently, the dying Patient lives as Almásy / Wepwawet in the still unknown Katharine. Hence the Patient’s definition of love as “a consuming of oneself and the past” (97). That much is revealed by the Patient’s Herodotus diary as well, for “all that is missing [there] is his own name” (96). Kristina Stankevicuite rightly describes Ondaatje’s Patient as a postmodernist version of Herodotus’ Histories – but his “collection of stories,” rather than “glue[ing] [him] into a whole,”24 as she says, glues the Patient into a mosaic of fragments. Textual postmodernism finds in Ondaatje’s Patient its quintessential parchment: a narrator whose fragments mummify him into an absent presence. It is in the spectral sense of drowning in love through phantomness that Minghella’s The English Patient is profoundly Ondaatjean, for Minghella’s Katharine and Almásy, just like Ondaatje’s, are manifested from the limits of liminality to love as absent presences. And if Almásy has a “cartographic gaze,” as Hsu claims, it is still spectrally that this gaze surveys Katharine’s 24 Kristina Stankeviciute, “Constructing the Postmodernist Identity: The Case of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Respectus Philologicus 3.8 (2003): http:filologija.vukhf.lt /3-8/stank.htm

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bodyscape. Minghella’s Almásy needs, really, no Patient’s reed mask to eclipse his nomadic Bedouin saviours, for Almásy’s gaze, like Katharine’s, partakes of Wepwawet’s and, like theirs, it perpetually drifts and whirls till it blurs into utter gazelessness. Significantly, what Minghella’s cartographer paradoxically maps are the unmappable contours of Ondaatje’s phantomland. Minghella, namely, blows his sandstorm lovers over the edge into “Felhomaly” (170), the Wepwawet state where the living intermesh with the dead, a state which Ondaatje’s Patient aptly terms “the dusk of graves” (170). Minghella’s Hana literally distils her Patient / Almásy’s soul when she tells Caravaggio: “He’s in love with ghosts” (43). Minghella’s The English Patient is a love story that tells of haunted haunters. Theirs are ‘sand sea’ hearts and what they clasp is each other’s mirage, for Minghellian love looms light, like an Ondaatjean revenant. This is equally borne out by the Hana/ Kip affair, which Minghella, like Ondaatje, develops in parallel spectral terms. A case in point is the Hana/ Kip courtship episode which Mingella pivots on the ‘absent present’ motif of the Katharine/ Almásy seduction scene. Significantly, Minghella blurs Hana’s figure by racking her focal plane the moment she discovers Kip’s snailshell lamp trail. Kip reciprocates Hana’s blurring reaction when she enters the monastery stables by likewise looming absently present in his shadowy appearance. Not only is Minghella’s Hana “in love with ghosts,” as she readily admits to Caravaggio, but she seems ghostly herself when, like Katharine and Almásy, she alternately sharpens and blurs. Minghella’s Hana is clearly the right spectral mate for a Sikh sapper whose allure lies in his shade. Such Minghellian spectrality, whereby Kip and Hana respectively appropriate the insubstantiality of a dark blob and an oil flame, recalls once again Ondaatje, and evidently the eerie wake beside the living dead Patient during which Kip observes the flickering fluidity of Hana’s face: “the candlelight swaying, altering her look” (114). In Hana’s eyes, however, Kip looks similarly phantasmal: “He was unaware that for her he was just a silhouette, his slight body and his skin part of the darkness.” That Ondaatje’s Hana and Kip, like Minghella’s, are essentially spectral is also evident from their initial piano room meeting, for not only is Hana “unconscious of [Kip’s] entrance” (76) as he hovers, like Minghella’s chiaroscuro Almásy, between “moments of lightning” (75) and the ensuing “darkness” (75), but Kip, too, fails at first to see her, even though “his eyes took in the room […], swept across it like a spray of radar” (76). Like Minghella’s, Ondaatje’s Hana and Kip court each other as absent presences. This uncanny episode is not unlike the one where Kip, while defusing a bomb with Hana’s help, loses conscious sight of her, and Hana ends up with “her presence erased” (102). As Carla Comellini observes, “the word erase

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recurs frequently in The English Patient.”25 The notion of erasure or, more crucially, that of self-erasure, is indeed central to the Ondaatjean absent presence. Only as absent presences do Hana and Kip, like the Patient /Almásy and Katharine, transcend Edward Said’s concept of transnational communal affiliation to become real citizens of the Patient’s utopic oasis – a sand sea of (non)-identities: “Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert” (139). Significantly, through Hana’s identification with Kip as “the browness of a muddy storm-fed river” (105), Ondaatje’s younger lovers define their absent presence in terms of the mud /water fluidity coursing through the Patient’s Katharine. What Ondaatje’s description of Kip emerging from the bomb pit evokes, in fact, is the Patient’s vision of Katharine ascending as a quicksand phantom: “He began to feel his brown legs being pulled from the grip of the mud, removed like an ancient corpse out of a bog” (215). Nor are Hana and Kip as ‘sand sea’ reflections of Katharine and the Patient / Almásy less spectralized by the jackal deity; what saves Hana and Kip from their Hiroshima holocaust separation is their Wepwawet being of non-being, living absently present in each other’s mirage of existence, nationless, raceless, beyond any mappable region – so that what Hana inherits from her father’s sanctification of canines, with their “cathedral” paws (8) Kip passes on to his boy, who “can almost guess the wishes of dogs” (301) and actually “imitat[es] their stroll, their look” (301). This is the hour of Wepwawet, whose spectral gaze the dog-loving Caravaggio also displays when “shadow[s] of leaves” (55) liquefy his face, thereby whirling him back, together with Hana and Kip, into the Patient /Katharine’s Sand Sea, whose fluid anonymity dissolves them like the “magic waters” (271) of the Punjab. That Minghella visualizes his spectral Hana and Kip in equally ‘sand sea’ terms is also quite evident. Thus, Hana practically floats into the Patient’s life as a nurse on a sandy beach and then, more intimately, as a reflection, in the ruined monastery’s fountain. The Patient/ Hana liquid integration, however, reaches its ebbing climax when Hana steers his “boat of morphine” (161) to the Lethean waters of oblivion, thereby fulfilling his dream of dissolving into the nymph of the Sand Sea. By immersing the Patient in a Sand Sea of morphine, Hana also grants Katharine’s wish that Almásy should cut out his El Taj plant heart. Significantly, true to desert lore, Almásy and Katharine’s heart fluid resurges in the absent present tears which Hana sheds for her Patient. Hence the thematic aptness of Minghella’s vocal blending of Hana and Katharine reading the Cave letter – a blending which Minghella deepens 25 Carla Comellini, “Geography and History as Literary Themes and Devices at Work in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” in Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries, ed. Isabella Maria Zoppi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998): 354.

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by intermeshing the piano music on which Hana unknowingly drifts into Kip’s heart with Almásy’s “Szelerem, Szelerem,” a Hungarian folksong whose Arab-sounding chanting haunts Katharine. Hsu rightly emphasizes Minghella’s “dissolution of boundaries,” whereby Hana and Kip, like their Ondaatjean counterparts, actually succeed, to use Richard Corliss’s words, in “re-enact[ing] the arc of Almásy and Katharine’s desperate affair.”26 Admittedly, there is something thematically lacking in Minghella’s handling of Ondaatje’s ‘Wepwawet’ characterization, since neither Hana and Kip nor Caravaggio, for that matter, display the jackal gene of their literary equivalents. But Minghella still retains the “mysterious connection across space and time”27 which Ondaatje establishes between Hana and Kip – though not in overt Wepwawet terms. Nowhere is this more subtly conveyed than in the Arezzo chapel sequence, where Minghella, unlike Ondaatje, makes Kip send Hana – and not his medievalist friend – soaring in a rope-and-pulley tour of the famous frescoed walls. The clerestory episode, as Minghella reconceives it, paradoxically enables him to intensify the enigmatic Ondaatjean ways in which his two sets of lovers fluidly interchange. In fact, by having Kip suspend Hana in the church, not only does Minghella convert her floating image into what Stenberg calls “a shadowy echo of the figures in the Cave of Swimmers” (256), but he also implicity associates her with the canine god of the Egyptian underworld – for in Minghella, as in Ondaatje, the Uweinat Cave is Wepwawet’s lair. Significantly, Hana’s state of suspension also mirrors Katharine’s selftransmutation into a cave painting: Hana literally hovers in a fresco’s identity, specifically that of Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the Queen of Sheba, whom Ondaatje describes as the “Queen of Sadness” (72). What Kip, therefore, acquires by helping Hana to master the Ondaatjean “art of acqueducts”28 is Almásy’s cartographic skill in mapping the sadness within. By implicitly identifying the ecstatic Hana with what he likewise calls “the Sad Queen,”29 Minghella makes her re-live the emotional paradoxicality which Katharine feels when she tells Almásy in the bath sequence that her happiest moment is also her saddest. What Hana evidently shares with Almásy and Katharine runs deeper than their fondness for bathing. And so does Kip’s similar taste, for his plight in the bomb pit flooded with muddy water immerses him in the same murky depths which Hana and his literary equivalent experience in the 26

Richard Corliss, “Rapture in the Dunes,” Time (11 November 1996): 82. Raymond Aaron Younis, “Nationhood and Decolonization in The English Patient,” Literature / Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 7. 28 See “The Siyabaslakara,” in Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting (London: Bloomsbury, 1998): 52. 29 See Minghella, The English Patient: A Screenplay, 120. 27

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Arezzo church: “The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and darkness of a well” (72). Very relevant here is Hsu’s observation that the Arezzo chapel sequence is essentially “a love scene” in which Hana and Kip, through a process of intermeshing counterweighting, “make love without so much as touching one another.” Viewed in this perspective, Hana and Kip come to embody another spectral aspect of the Almásy / Katharine relationship – their invisible ‘sandstorm’ lovemaking. Consequently, Hana and Kip need never return to the Arezzo church, for they never really leave the place, just as Katharine and Almásy never forsake the desert cave. Hence their Ondaatjean mystical union; wherever they wander, they will always haunt the cave cloister. Whether the Ondaatjean / Minghellian lovers transmogrify into a Renaissance fresco or an African rock painting, their heart follows the same tragic trajectory – that of consuming itself, as “an organ of fire” (97), by dissolving its emotional plaster into its anonymous essentials of sand and water. Such ‘sand sea’ essences remain perpetually private, however. No imperial power can penetrate their ‘mirage’ state, since their Derridean being of non-being is humanly unmappable. It is a realm beyond the ken of cartography. As Ondaatje’s Hana asks Clara, “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” (296). Hence Minghella’s poignant ending, where Ondaatje’s Tuscan avenue of “cypress trees” (45) suddenly shimmers and blurs like the Zerzura mirages that never were. It is in this self-mutating sense that Minghella’s lovers, like Ondaatje’s, are all eroded others, even to themselves, and that they transcend their otherness by embracing its otherlessness – for theirs is an ever-fluid identity flowing from and ebbing into nothing. We can never drink their liquid spirit, for, like water wraiths, they vanish between our open mouths and cupped hands. We can only “swallow […] absence” (141) in The English Patient, since what Minghella’s film incarnates is Ondaatje’s “rumour of wells” (261). WORKS CITED Bolland, John. Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002). Burcar, Lilijana. “Mapping the Woman’s Body in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Canadian Literature and Culture: http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow /post/canada/literature/ondaatje/burcar /burcar1 .html Cannon, Damian. “The English Patient (1996),” Movie Reviews UK: http://www.film .u-net.com/Movies/Reviews/English_Patient.html Cheetham, Mark, & Elizabeth D. Harvey. “Obscure Imaginings: Visual Culture and the Anatomy of Caves,” Journal of Visual Culture 1.1 (2002): 105–26.

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Comellini, Carla. “Geography and History as Literary Themes and Devices at Work in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” in Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries, ed. Isabella Maria Zoppi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998): 345–54. Corliss, Richard. “Rapture in the Dunes,” Time (11 November 1996): 82. Frazer, Bryant. “The English Patient,” Deep Focus: http://www.deep-focus.com /flicker/englishp.html Harrison, Thomas. “Herodotus and The English Patient,” Classics Ireland 5 (1998): 48–63. Hilger, Stephanie M. “Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Rewriting History,” CLCWeb. Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6.3 (2004) http: //clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-3/hilger04.html Hsu, Hsuan. “Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella’s Adaptation of The English Patient,” CLCWeb. Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6.3 (2004): http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-3/hsu04 .html Johanson, MaryAnn. “Desert Places: The English Patient,” The Flick Filosopher (20 March 1999): http://www.flickfilosopher.com/oscars/bestpix/englishpatient.shtml Kamiya, Gary. “The English Patient,” Salon (1996): http://archive.salon.com/nov96 /movies2961118.html Kranz, David L. “The English Patient: Critics, Audiences and the Quality of Fidelity,” Literature / Film Quarterly 31.2 (2003): 99–110. Minghella, Anthony, The English Patient: A Screenplay (London: Methuen, 1997). Novak, Amy. “Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient,” Studies in the Novel 36.2 (2004): 206–31. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (1992; New York: Vintage, 1996). ——. Handwriting (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). Pilon, Juliana Geran. “The English Patient: A Classical Tragedy of Love and Paradox,” Humanitas 10.1 (1997): 90–98. Online: http://www.nhinet.org/pilon.htm Sadashige, Jacqui. “Sweeping the Sands: Geographies of Desire in The English Patient,” Literature / Film Quarterly 26.4 (1998): 242–54. Stankeviciute, Kristina. “Constructing The Postmodernist Identity: The Case of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Respectus Philologicus 3.8 (2003): http :filologija.vukhf.lt/3-8/stank.htm Stenberg, Douglas G. “A Firmament in the Midst of the Waters: Dimensions of Love in The English Patient,” Literature / Film Quarterly 26.4 (1998): 255–62. Ty, Eleanor. “The Other Questioned: Exoticism and Displacement in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” International Fiction Review 27.1–2 (2000): 10–19. Younis, Raymond Aaron. “Nationhood and Decolonization in The English Patient,” Literature / Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 2–9.

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The Sea and the Changing Nature of Cultural Identity I SABEL M OUTINHO

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DENTITY IS A DIFFICULT CONCEPT TO DEFINE.

Two years ago, Gayatri Spivak began addressing an international conference in Melbourne by claiming provocatively that while theory asserts that identity does not exist, activism says that identity is what we must fight for.1 Identity can be said not to exist because it is not something palpable, or immutable, or capable of being pinned down once and for all. Nevertheless, while it is one of the most contested issues in contemporary cultural theory, most of us have a fairly strong feeling of identity, which we experience as a sense of personal continuity linking us back to the way of living we are accustomed to and simultaneously allowing us to adapt to change without too much personal destabilization. Identity gives us a sense of belonging (to family, to community, to place), one that we must learn to negotiate, particularly in times of great historical upheaval. Writing of the challenge to what was once “the fundamentally static notion of identity [...] at the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism,” Said underlines the fact that, by the nineteenth century, “this kind of ‘identity’ thought [...] had become the hallmark of imperialist cultures as well as those cultures trying to resist the encroachments of Europe.”2 As the twentieth century brought about change upon change, especially the formal end of colonialism, and did so at an increasingly fast pace, so too have our notions of identity

1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, plenary address to the “Dialogues Across Cultures” conference organized by the Institute for Indigenous Studies (Monash University, Melbourne, 12 November 2004). 2 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994): xxviii.

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been further called into question and continued to be ever more critically scrutinized. Emphasizing the fact that identity is acquired progressively, Stuart Hall proposes a most fruitful working definition of cultural identity, which he sees “as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”3 Hall distinguishes between two different approaches to an understanding of cultural identity: one is the process of “imaginative rediscovery” (224) of “one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves,’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (223). The other way of thinking about cultural identity is to see it as “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’:” Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. [. . . ] they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. […] identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (225)

It is in this sense of cultural identity as undergoing constant transformation and as a matter of our own positioning within it that the juxtaposition of the image of the sea with the notion of identity seems particularly felicitous, given that both one and the other are in perpetual motion and mutation. Furthermore, considering the sea-borne nature of the great majority of imperial ventures that gave rise to colonialism and to the historical circumstances in which so many peoples saw their sense of individual and collective continuity violently disrupted for centuries, it is particularly appropriate to investigate the extent to which the sea has shaped or continues to shape a feeling of cultural identity in countries with a colonial history. Portugal was one of the first European nations to navigate the oceans in order to conquer outposts on remote shores from which to derive commercial profit (be it gold, spices, or slaves). Although its empire was geographically extensive, its penetration of the territories it claimed for the crown was never substantial. Thus, the Portuguese empire, although acquired from as early as the fifteenth century, remained for a very long time essentially a network of commercial factories on the coasts of Africa and India, though less so in those of South America. In Africa, the real colonizing push: i.e. the Portuguese occupation and exploitation of the territories behind the coastal enclaves, 3 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222. Further page references are in the main text.

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began much later, in the final years of the nineteenth century. However, the territories that were to become Portuguese colonies in Africa remained under colonial rule for much longer than did most other European overseas domains. It was as late as 1975 that five African nations gained their independence from Portugal. These are separate countries, now living under variously differing social and historical circumstances, and with distinct (and often heterogeneous) cultural identities. But they have in common the choice of Portuguese as official language, which means also, for the purpose that interests us here, as the adopted vehicle for literary expression.4 The narratives I propose to examine here have all been written in post-independence times. Three are historical novels: from Angola, Pepetela’s A Gloriosa Família (1997), and from Mozambique, Guilherme de Melo’s Os leões não dormem esta noite (c.1988) and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Ualalapi (1987). The fourth, by Germano Almeida, from Cape Verde, has a contemporary ‘postcolonial’ setting. The authors, as is often the case in countries with a long colonial history, have all been educated in the European tradition, which no doubt explains the predominance of the novel, a genre of European origin, in their work. I start with Pepetela’s novel because it is the one with the earliest setting: Luanda in the 1640s. Pepetela is the best known and most widely respected Angolan novelist, an “archetypal nationalist writer with a guerrilla pedigree,”5 one whose creative priority has always been to defend the ideals of the revolutionary period of Angolan independence and to promote a national spirit, an angolanidade (Angolan identity), in his literary production. A Gloriosa Família is his most historical and least symbolic novel. Within the field of contemporary fiction in Portuguese, it is also particularly striking in that its first-person narrator is a slave.6 This man is the property of Baltazar Van Dum, the patriarch of the illustrious family of the title. Readers accustomed to Pepetela’s highly symbolic fiction, in which an octopus or a turtle or a porpoise, bats or ravens, can play a major role, may well read the opening

4 Although Portuguese is the official language of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea–Bissau and São Tomé e Príncipe, each of these five countries has a different variety of Portuguese. And although many of the writers from these countries choose to write in Portuguese, the category ‘Lusophone literature’ is an artificial creation which dangerously reduces different literary realities to a supposedly homogeneous entity. 5 David Brookshaw, “Narration and Nation-Building: The Angolan Novels of Pepetela,” in Fiction in the Portuguese-Speaking World: Essays in Memory of Alexandre Pinheiro Torres, ed. Charles M. Kelley (Cardiff: U of Wales P , 2000): 108. 6 Fiction narrated from the point of view of a slave or, indeed, dealing with slavery is much more common in other European languages, particularly English, than in Portuguese.

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pages of this novel thinking that it is told by a dog, for it opens with the puzzling words: “My owner, Baltazar Van Dum.”7 The first chapter is crucial for the discussion of the transformation that displacement by sea helps to enact upon cultural identity. Van Dum is a Fleming, born into a Catholic family near Bruges, who as a young man joined the Spanish army, then at war with the Dutch. He later moved on to Portugal, at the time under Spanish rule, felt attracted to the sea and ships, and embarked for Luanda, where he established himself in 1616, producing a huge amount of children, legitimate and illegitimate, over the next twenty-five years. In Luanda, he identifies himself more willingly with the Portuguese than with the Dutch, because the former are Catholics and the latter, Calvinist heretics. This, then, would seem to be a matter of religious affinity. However, we soon realize that it is above all else a question of maritime commercial interest. Disembarking in Luanda, his eyes take great pleasure in the “divine blue sea” (“o azul divino do mar,” 18), but what he cries out is the name he coins for Luanda: Bay of All Dreams – because he is aware that, “exactly opposite, on the other side of the Atlantic, there is the Bay of All Saints” (“mesmo à frente, do outro lado do Atlântico, havia a Baía de Todos os Santos,” 18), the Portuguese colony in Brazil. And all his dreams are of wealth, of which he amasses great quantities, as a slave trader. In the Luanda of the early 1640s, which has just been conquered by the Dutch, we see a melting-pot of different people going about their business: the Portuguese, who have held sway until recently but are being obliged to flee, a few French-speaking Flemish, the newly arrived Dutch, some French, some Englishmen. This is indeed a fairly representative parade of European imperialism. Bill Ashcroft reminds us of the significance of ocean travel both in the old colonial context and in the new world order: Just as the physical globe as it is now understood cannot be divorced from the ideological power of Europe, so it cannot be divorced from the chief practical means of that power – ocean travel – which ‘unified’ the world by making it the accessible domain of European travel.8

Apart from irreconcilable religious identities that may or may not determine enmities, what the Europeans living in 1640s Luanda have in common is the fact that they all arrived by sea – and, of course, their greed. It is the desire for wealth, here measured in terms of the numbers of slaves one manages to catch 7 Pepetela, A Gloriosa Família: O Tempo dos Flamengos (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1998). All translations of passages from this and the following novels in Portuguese are mine. Further page references are in the main text. 8 Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001): 129–30.

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and export by sea, that opposes one individual or one group to another. Nationality does not generate any strong perception of identity or common interest, the most sought-after allegiance being the one to whatever maritime power is better able to provide protection to the slave ships at sea.9 As to the perception of identity on the African side, we have the precious (and in Portuguese rare) point of view of a slave. As a slave, this man has been divested of his identity, the first external sign of which is his namelessness. He has totally internalized this dispossession. He often refers to the fact that two slaves, or other slaves, walk before his master, but he, who is supposed to be his master’s shadow, always behind. If he carried guns he would be a good bodyguard, “but unarmed [he] doesn’t even know what [he] is” (“Mas desarmado nem sei o que sou,” 15) – what he is, he wonders, not who he is. Most often he does not even get a glance from his master, as a dog left outside waiting might, so that he comes close to doubting his very existence: “Como se eu não existisse. Mas existiria mesmo?” (125) [As if I didn’t exist. But did I really exist?]. Nevertheless, this slave knows where he comes from and has a sense of belonging ‘to his own’ – he is from “the kingdom which Ngola Kiluanje unified, the fatherland of the Ngola, my own” (“o reino que Ngola Kiluanje unificou, a pátria dos Ngola, a minha,” 19). He was taken from the territory of Queen Jinga Mbandi, whose most precious slave he used to be, and he is a mulatto, “the son of a Lunda slave and a Neapolitan missionary” (“filho de uma escrava lunda [… e] de missionário napolitano,” 24). The advantages of having a slave narrator are multiple and give this novel its distinctive tone. First of all, the narration from the point of view of a Ngola slave immediately reverses eurocentric habits, even in a novel purporting to follow the life of an European man and his family. It establishes a positioning in which the European becomes the Other, observed by the gaze of a narrative I who is African and sees the world from an African perspective. This is a slave who comes from the country to the east of Luanda, who has not endured, but is well aware of, the most common fate of the majority of slaves captured by the Portuguese: namely, transportation to Brazil or any other colonial destination across the seas. As a slave, he is dispossessed of even the right to his identity, but he is the insider here, and his observations and critical ap9

Irritated by some comment he hears from the director of the East India Company, Baltazar Van Dum exclaims: “então o sacana apela ao meu patriotismo, mas patriotismo de que Pátria, a minha não é a mesma dele, eu sou flamengo do sul, e se está a pensar na língua, deixe de tretas, a língua não é tudo e sobretudo não faz negócios, se até irmãos se matam quando os negócios se metem pelo meio” (71) [the bastard appeals to my patriotism, but patriotism for what mother country, mine is not the same as his, I’m from the south of Flanders, and if he is thinking of our language, forget it, language isn’t everything, language doesn’t make business, even brothers kill each other when trade interests stand in the way].

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praisals of the Europeans place the whites squarely in the position of outsiders. That is precisely the reversal of perspective this novel achieves, though, of course, five centuries too late for any beneficial cultural exchange in real imperial times. Furthermore, the slave who observes these events presumably also writes them down in this, his first-person narrative. His owner values him for the attention with which he registers everything that occurs in his life and alerts him to potential dangers. While the master is hot-tempered and given to drinking, the slave remains composed and attentive, recording events and movements with the utmost concentration and rigour. He knows he has the advantage of knowing more than his master: “E só ele e eu soubemos [.. .] o meu dono não sabe que eu sei. Como não sabe muitas outras coisas. Eu sei, é o que importa” (15) [Only he and I found out (... ) my master doesn’t know that I know. Just as he doesn’t know many other things. I know, that’s what matters]. The slave’s wisdom approximates that of the elders, “the kotas, they who know everything about life and men” (“os kotas, esses que sabem tudo da vida e dos homens,” 18). Reduced to silence, the source of the slave’s authority is his fine hearing capacity: he always sits as close as possible to the Europeans whose actions he wants to follow in order not to miss a word, and he often validates his observations by claiming that “he heard.” In this way, then, this narrator-slave dispels several eurocentric myths: most importantly, his writing challenges the assumption of the superiority of the white man’s written culture, which tends to look down on oral cultures and the oral history tradition as inferior. Furthermore, it undermines the standard legitimizing device of the European legal system, the privileged status of the eye-witness. Instead, this African is a valuable hearing witness, and, though a slave, he can read and write, an exceptional feat “during the time of slavery” when “writing and freedom were directly associated with each other.”10 Finally, he quietly instils an African view of the world, with its respect for the knowledge and experience of the elders. This is the only form of agency left to the enslaved: to underline the position of the Europeans as outsiders on this continent, whose reality they have never managed to understand from inside. This imaginary slave narrative thus contributes to the construction of what Paul Gilroy calls “a distinct interpretation of modernity,” achieving the sort of “utopian transformation of racial subordination” that we have come to identify in many narratives of the black Atlantic.11 10 Mineke Schipper, Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging (London: Cassell, 1999): 28. 11 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993): 71.

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Nonetheless, it remains clear that this narrator has suffered the most violent erasure of identity: the total deprivation of liberty, with its attendant loss of all rights, even the mere possession of a name. And although he was not originally made a slave by his present European master, for it was Queen Jinga who gave him to the latter as a present, he watches the sea with trepidation. The sea brings to the bay of Luanda the Dutch invaders from their stronghold in Brazil. If these were to kill his master for treason, they might transport him to the New World across the dreaded Atlantic, and they would certainly strike a further blow to the slave’s identity, one that he has not suffered in the Flemish household; for he is the son of an Italian missionary, and a devout Catholic himself (notwithstanding the fact that he simultaneously believes in the African deities and spirits), and the latest sea-borne invaders would impose their Calvinism on him. ½¾

The next two novels I wish to examine are by Mozambican writers, the one, Guilhermo de Melo, so by adoption only,12 and the other, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, by birth. Regardless of the many differences between both novels in their approaches and narrative styles, the two make important points on the question of the transformations that the sea, as conveyor of the European imperial powers, operated on the cultural identity of the peoples they conquered. Written within a dozen years of Mozambique’s independence, both Melo’s Os leões não dormem esta noite [the lions do not sleep tonight] and Khosa’s Ualalapi narrate the rise to power of Ngungunhane, the last emperor of the Gaza Empire, conquered by the Portuguese army in 1895, after ferocious resistance from the emperor’s warriors. In Os leões, Ngungunhane’s spirit returns to his country of birth after ninety years in exile, while in Ualalapi the narrative closes with the memory of the last emperor as told by a grandfather to his grandchild, the narrator of the novel. The choice of the figure of the conquered emperor of Gaza as the focus of both novels no doubt corresponds to a desire for affirmation of ancestry, cultural roots, and shared historical tradition, in a recently independent country needing to foster a feeling of national identity.13 But the fact that both novels also choose to emphasize the defeated African’s spiritual return or his physical continuity through his descendants is also undeniably an assertion of ultimate triumph, a righting of 12 Guilherme de Melo is one of several writers who were living in Mozambique at the time of independence and had to choose between Mozambican and Portuguese citizenship. 13 Pepetela serves a similar purpose for Angola in his 1990 novel Lueji: O Nascimento dum Império, which relates the birth of the Lunda Empire through the rise of Queen Lueji.

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history’s colonial error, and a proclamation of the indestructible vigour of a cultural identity which survived all the vicissitudes of history. In Os leões não dormem esta noite, the captured Ngungunhane, the bloodthirsty ruler of the Nguni people, is sent into exile first in Portugal, then in the Azores islands. He embarks on a ship called África, a name he considers cruelly ironical. Just like the Angolan slave in the previous novel, the emperor from southeastern Africa, now a prisoner, admits he is afraid of the sea: “Tenho medo, para quê negá-lo?, diante daquela lonjura de água em movimento” [I am afraid – what would be the point in denying it? – of that vastness of water in motion], and of the big ship: “aquela embarcação imensa e complicada, tão diferente das pirogas e lanchas em que atravessávamos os nossos rios” [that huge and complicated ship, so different from the piraguas and barges which we use for crossing our rivers].14 The moment of embarking acquires symbolic significance for Ngungunhane, who realizes that his exile at the other end of the seas signals the beginning of a new era for his people: “é todo um povo que ajoelha e curva a cabeça e consente que lhe coloquem, à roda do tornozelo, a grilheta da servidão” (178) [a whole people who kneel down, bow their heads and consent to receive around their ankles the chains of servitude]. Humiliation, then, is the first element of the cultural crushing of the emperor associated with the sea voyage. The emperor’s mother, who will not follow him into exile, is the only one who still keeps her serenity and dignity, “her erect and firm posture” (“o seu porte erecto e firme,” 180). And it is again in symbolic terms that the mother explains the magnitude of the change being imposed on the Gaza people: the Portuguese will despise her because they will attribute her refusal to accompany her son to fear of the sea; she, however, chooses to stay in Mozambique for the sake of keeping “the seed” alive.15 The emperor’s mother is not a principal character and her action could hardly be considered a spectacular “scene of tricksterism triumphant.”16 Nonetheless, her staying on in the conquered country and her determination to keep “the seed” alive are indeed a most significant gesture of resistance and defiance. From here onwards, all the changes that seaborne colonialism and the defeated emperor’s exile overseas will bring to the Gaza people are presented in terms of the opposition between land (“the seed,” jungle, vegetation, the Nguni people’s natural environment) and the seas, even salt-water fish, which the emperor says tribal tradition prevents him from eating. He and his people are only allowed to eat 14

Guilherme de Melo, Os leões não dormem esta noite (Lisbon: Ed. Notícias, 2nd ed., nd): 185. Further page references are in the main text. 15 The novel’s third part, which deals with Ngungunhane’s overseas exile, is entitled, precisely, “A Semente” (the seed). 16 Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2003): 27.

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river fish, so foreign is the ocean to their culture. While the Nguni are people of the bush (“mata”), the foreigners have come from the sea (“mar”). “Mata” and “mar” stand for irreconcilable cultural identities, at a time when the emperor of the land knows that his people will be subjugated by the invaders from the sea. Ngungunhane is first exiled to Lisbon and then must endure a second sea voyage to imprisonment in the Azores: “Uma vez mais, porém, o mar aqui está à minha frente. Inquieto, desassossegado (192) [Once again the sea is here before me. Agitated, restless]. The novel does not focus on the long sea voyage. Rather, we see the prisoner already in the Azores, where people are different and difficult to understand, for they speak “as if the seas permeated their voices” (“era o mar que lhes perpassava na voz,” 193). On the island prison, new forms of cultural coercion begin to be applied to the exiled emperor: a priest is assigned to convert him and his wives. The God of the Christians makes no sense to Ngungunhane, but he pretends to heed the preachings out of courtesy to the kindly priest. Thus, the imposition of a foreign spiritual world is associated, albeit indirectly, with displacement across the seas. Here, it is no longer colonialism that is represented as arriving by the ocean, but it is the emperor of Gaza who is subjected to a different world-view, which threatens his own, when he is at the mercy of his capturers on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic. Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s Ualalapi also deals with the figure of Ngungunhane, his seizing of power, his cruelty and despotism in the treatment of his people.17 The novel recovers ancestral myths of the precolonial empire of Gaza, always presented as background to the portrayal of the lives of common people affected by the emperor’s actions. Ualalapi is the warrior forced to kill Ngungunhane’s brother so that the future emperor can usurp power. Various portents following this violent seizure of power are narrated in detail, helping to re-create the world of ancestral beliefs of the Nguni people before colonization. As in Guillermo de Melo’s novel, the setting is the countryside, the rural villages, the forest, and occasionally the rivers, of the Gaza Empire. The sea appears only in the last two chapters of the novel. The importance of its symbolic presence reveals itself in the chapter entitled “O diário de 17

Pires Laranjeira, Literaturas Africanas de Expressão Portuguesa (Lisbon: Universidade Aberta, 1995): 326–28, reads Ualalapi as an “ethnic and historical novel” in which “history sometimes becomes a fantastic or magical story, in the manner of South American magical realism,” stressing that in the end the novel amounts to a “symbolic panegyric of [Mozambique’s] independence.” The critic also points out certain parallels with Guilherme de Melo’s Os Leões Não Dormem Esta Noite, which he reads, in similar vein, as “historical fiction” with elements of “ethnologic literature,” likewise inspired by a “nationalist preoccupation” (my tr.).

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Manua” [Manua’s diary]. Manua is Ngungunhane’s son, who, three years before his father’s capture by the Portuguese troops, sailed to Lourenço Marques, the colonial capital, on a Portuguese ship. In this chapter, the focalization is with this young man, whose diary, the readers are told, was found inside a skull. The references to the sea clearly mark the beginning of the colonial era, both culturally and officially. First we read that the “glaucous” sea (an epic adjective par excellence, in the Roman Virgil as in the Portuguese Camões) which now witnesses Manua’s departure to the colonial capital is the same which saw the arrival of “a one-eyed voyager” in Mozambique: o mar glauco e revolto levantava ondas [. . . ] como a do viajante zarolho que por estas terras aportou com um volumoso manuscrito entre as mãos e que mais versos fez.18 [the glaucous, agitated sea stirred the waves [. . . ] just as when the one-eyed voyager disembarked on these shores with a voluminous manuscript in his hands, and he wrote more verses].

Without ever naming him, the details, of course, describe a well-known episode in the life of Camões, the sixteenth-century poet who celebrated Portuguese maritime history, and who, many argue, is responsible for the Portuguese self-image as a people of sea voyagers and discoverers of new worlds.19 The connection is thus clearly established between precolonial and colonial Mozambique through Manua and his sea passage to Lourenço Marques. In a striking chronological disruption, departing for the colonial city three years before his father’s fall to the colonial authorities, the son of the defeated emperor of Gaza is already familiar with the work of the epic poet of Portuguese imperialism. And if the clear reference to Camões initially feels completely out of place in this novel until now so focused on the traditional way of life of the Gaza people, it soon becomes clear that the sea is seen as the vehicle for an acculturation that ought to make the young man feel ashamed of himself. His first gesture on the ship is to eat sea fish. The fact that in doing so he goes against the centuries-old Nguni custom (“contrariando o hábito secular 18 Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Ualalapi (Lisbon: Caminho, 1990): 97. Further page references are in the main text. 19 In fact, I refer to two events in Camões’s life, documented both by his early biographers and by the poet himself. Frank Pierce, in Os Lusíadas, ed. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): xi, gives the following summary: “Camões went to Macao in China […] and […] on his way back to Goa [in India] he was shipwrecked at the mouth of the river Mekong (in modern Vietnam): where he saved the manuscript of his epic from the waves.” The poet appears to be referring to this episode in Os Lusíadas, Canto X , stanza 128. In Ualalapi, the further reference is to Camões’s later journey from Goa to Mozambique, before he returned to Portugal.

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dos nguni,” 98) leaves us in no doubt that his cultural identity is changing. Likewise, his humiliation is beginning. The next pages describe the dire consequences that follow his consumption of sea fish and Portuguese wine on board ship: he suffers an unstoppable flow of vomit, which spreads all over his cabin, all over the ship, and even to the sea around the ship, until the commander comes to knock on his door (already addressing him with the familiar: i.e. in this context, scornful pronoun “tu”): — Tens a sorte de seres filho de rei, rapaz – disse o comandante. Caso contrário, limpavas esta merda toda e atirava-te depois pela borda fora, seu preto. . . (98) [You’re lucky that you are a king’s son, boy – said the commander. Otherwise, I’d make you clean all this shit and then I’d throw you overboard, you nigger. . . ]

Because of the emphasis the narrative places on physical sickness, Manua’s brief passage on the Indian Ocean along the coast of Mozambique inevitably reminds us of the dreaded Middle Passage which slaves transported across the Atlantic to the Americas had to endure.20 But the sea brings much more than sickness. It is above all directly linked to Manua’s cultural change and to the beginning of his colonial humiliation. His degradation goes further and further: as a student in colonial Lourenço Marques he writes in his diary that his father is “an ignorant sorcerer” (“ignorante e feiticeiro,” 99). The following passage is worth quoting in full, for its importance in explaining the process of acculturation that so deeply destabilizes the sense of identity of the colonized: O comandante do navio nada entende de feitiço. Se compreendesse alguma coisa talvez entendesse o facto de eu ter sido dos poucos na minha tribo que teve acesso ao mundo dos brancos, à sua língua, aos seus costumes e à sua ciência. Mas ele não pode entender o mundo negro, os nossos costumes bárbaros, a inveja que norteia a nossa vida [. . . ]. Quando eu for imperador eliminarei estas práticas adversas ao Senhor, pai dos céus e da Terra. Serei dos primeiros nestas terras africanas a aceitar e assumir os costumes nobres dos brancos, homens que estimo desde o primeiro dia que tive acesso ao seu civismo são. (100) [The ship’s commander cannot understand witchcraft. If he did, maybe he’d realise that I have been one of the few in my tribe who has had access to the white world, to their language, their mores and their science. But he cannot 20 Curiously, the sea passage is not emphasized in Os Leões Não Dormem Esta Noite, where the voyage endured by Ngungunhane would have been much longer and more terrifying than Manua’s in Ualalapi.

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understand the black world, our barbaric customs, the envy that guides our lives […] When I am emperor, I shall eliminate these practices so contrary to the Lord, father of the heaven and earth. I will be one of the first in this African land to accept and assume the noble customs of the white men, whom I have admired since the first day I had access to their wholesome civics.]

Tragically, now that Manua has come to see his own people’s traditions as “barbaric” and those of the white man as “wholesome civics,” the Portuguese on the ship have nothing but scorn for this “shitty nigger” (“preto de merda,” 100, 102), this “wretched nigger” (“preto malvado,” 101), whom they would much prefer to throw into the sea. Manua dies three years later, afflicted by the madness that is so often associated with the psychological fracture inflicted by colonialism, with Ngungunhane’s witch-doctor blaming the young man’s death on his having eaten fish from the sea. And if there could remain any doubt about the connection between the sea and the violent disruption to Mozambican cultural identity, on Manua’s last visit to his brother, on the day of his death, he observes the sun, the baskets full of grasshoppers, the women carrying water on their heads, the huts – the signs of his people’s traditional way of life – until his apocalyptic watery visions begin: “Viu as águas a cobrirem o império e Ngungunhane a boiar nas águas, incapaz de nadar” (107) [He saw the waters submerging the empire and Ngungunhane floating on the water, unable to swim]. The novel finishes with Ngungunhane’s last speech to his people, just before boarding the ship on which he will sail into exile overseas. The conquered emperor’s final words are a ferocious tirade against the evils colonialism will bring to his people. He blames the white man’s obsession with paper for Manua’s death, hinting at the imposition of the written culture so foreign to the African oral tradition – “papéis [...] como se não bastasse a palavra, a palavra que vem dos nossos antepassados” (118) [papers (.. .) as if the word were not enough, the word that comes from our ancestors], before embarking on a series of irate prophecies: the imprisonment of blacks, their humiliation when the white men copulate with black women, cowardice, the shame of children of mixed blood, unheard of diseases, imposition of Christian beliefs, madness, impotence, homosexuality, paedophilia, fratricide, and other wars, floods, and portents of all kinds. Here there is no direct mention of the seas – the imperial route – but as the speech progresses its tone approximates more and more that of the dire prophecies spluttered at the Portuguese by Adamastor, the giant at the southern tip of Africa, who foreshadowed disaster upon disaster for the ships daring to venture into the seas.21 The final prophecy is 21

See the Adamastor episode in Camões, Os Lusíadas, Canto V , stanzas 39–60.

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about famine: in their desperation the people will look for grasshoppers to eat, but there will be none left, and they will have to enter the sea and eat its fish. The concluding image is of Ngungunhane’s departure over the seas: “As águas em volta estavam revoltas [...] o navio a abrir as águas afastando-se da costa” (124–25) [The waters around the ship were turbulent (...) the ship (started) opening the waters, sailing away from the coast]. Finally, it is time to turn our attention very briefly to fiction from yet another African country where the official language is Portuguese. Cape Verde has a longer tradition of literary prose than either Angola or Mozambique, and the country’s history, too, is totally different, especially with regard to the study of cultural identity, because the archipelago was uninhabited when Portuguese navigators discovered it in the late 1450s or early 1460s. Its population eventually grew from a handful of Portuguese settlers and a large majority of African slaves transported from mainland Africa for plantation work. Cape Verdean writers have always claimed a different cultural identity, never forgetting to assert an important feeling of distinctive Africanness.22 And the sea has always been a major contributor to the strengthening of the Cape Verdeans’ sense of collective belonging, because of the isolation the ocean imposes on the insular society. The country’s best-known writer today is Germano Almeida. He began his prolific career as a novelist in the late 1980s, after co-founding the review Ponto & Vírgula (1983–87), which played a major role in the consolidation of a Cape Verdean perception of cultural distinctiveness. Almeida’s latest novel, O Mar na Lajinha (2004) [the sea at Lajinha], stands exactly at the other end of the spectrum as far as the topic that interests us here is concerned, but it provides an indispensable counterpoint for the study of the interaction between sea and cultural identity. O Mar na Lajinha is set in contemporary times and is entirely built around the presence of the sea as the focus, catalyst, and guarantor for the feelings of belonging of a group of people who gather at the Lajinha beach for their early-morning swim. The book consists of much storytelling, involving their conversations, arguments, reminiscences, and very often bragging about sexual prowess, always with the sea at Lajinha as the pervasive image, nurturing environment, and narrative focus. Most of the group’s acquaintances and friendships were made right here at the beach, sometimes in the sea itself (“Foi ali dentro do mar que conheci a Pantcha,” [It was right there in the sea that I met

22 See Pires Laranjeira’s chapter on “Periodização” for the differences between the cultural and identitarian phases he distinguishes as “Cabo-verdianismo,” “Cabo-verdianidade,” and “Cabo-verdianitude.”

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Pantcha]),23 just as it is in the sea itself that many of the conversations and some fights take place. The group, representative of Cape Verdean society, includes some “veterans,” some (relatively) more “recent” members, and a few “spurious elements” (16), who joined not long ago and therefore do not yet have the full confidence of the inner circle. Other elements: namely, “people returning from the diaspora or just visiting the city” (“pessoal vindo da diáspora ou de passagem pela cidade,” 16), are mentioned and tolerated, so that there is no feeling of “cultural insiderism,”24 but they clearly do not form part of the main group. Then there are those who simply walk on the beach but do not swim in the sea, and although they may well have been doing so for a great many years, they remain somehow outsiders, acquaintances rather than part of the inner sanctum, this being truly ratified by immersion in the sea. The gesture of exclusion implicit in this stratification is but a goodhumoured, token protest, which, rather than excluding, serves to confirm the feeling of belonging generated by the sea that encircles (encloses) the island; for it is the sea that joins these people, and it is the sea that confers a strong sense of community on those who belong here. Two short passages reveal beyond any doubt the role of the sea in building this community’s sense of cultural identity, both also displaying Germano Almeida’s characteristic sense of humour. The first one involves a young Portuguese man, whom the narrator describes with an irony verging on tenderness: “o próprio João Branco, um jovem português na altura ainda em processo de colonização e portanto ainda pouco habituado a esses banhos matinais” (59) – the Portuguese young man is not yet accustomed to these early-morning swimming sessions, because he is still in the “process of colonization” thst foreigners must undergo in Cape Verde, a delightful formulation of postindependence reversal of historical process. The second one comes in the opening lines of the second part of the novel, when the narrator affirms in an apparently serious tone: Todos os companheiros da Lajinha ainda se recordam da manhã em que pela primeira vez o Oceano Atlântico se juntou a nós dentro do mar (135). [All the Lajinha friends still remember the morning when the Atlantic Ocean first joined us in the sea].

Given the geography of the Cape Verde islands, right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, these opening lines are at least puzzling. But soon we dis23 Germano Almeida, O Mar na Lajinha (Lisbon: Caminho, 2004): 14. Further page references are in the main text. 24 Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post-Colonial Literature (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1998): 20.

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cover that ‘Oceano Atlântico’ is the name of an old friend of one of the group’s members, who eventually catches up with him while swimming in the sea. And the meeting with Oceano, as the young man is known to friends, symbolically and humorously reflects the demographic history of the archipelago, where miscegenation soon took place between the Portuguese explorers and settlers and the African slaves, both groups having come over the same ocean, and eventually mingling like the waters of the Atlantic and the sea at Lajinha. While we must not forget that most present-day Cape Verdeans are descendants of the long-suffering human beings whom colonizers and slavers “uprooted and re-routed”25 from the African mainland to wherever they needed their labour, it is equally true that this novel shows no sign whatsoever of historical rancour. On the contrary, the characters here portrayed are cheerful, socially mature members of a community defined (rather than confined) by the sea. They have long forgotten the traumatic experience of sea transportation and are wholly at peace with themselves on this island where they have contentedly “re-rooted” themselves. They do not view their island as a place of confinement or a source of isolation, but really as a very attractive site of “defined boundaries and a desirable self-sufficiency.”26 ½¾

To view the sea as an agent of erosion of identity would be a beautiful image but a rather awkward phrase in the colonial context: if taken literally, it would serve to confirm the by now largely discredited belief that colonialism – which most often arrived by sea – destroyed, or at least eroded, indigenous cultural identity. The various African peoples presented in the pages of these novels have managed to preserve a cultural identity which was still distinct and robust after long years of colonial rule. Identity may be a difficult concept to define, but it is not necessarily an easy feeling to erode. While the sea is indeed capable of eroding cliffs and rocks, there is nothing rock-solid or ossified about identity that could stand to be eroded. The novels we have explored here certainly contribute to our better understanding of the extent to which cultural identity has been subjected not only “to the continuous ‘play’ of history” but, very specifically, in the colonial context, and borrowing Stuart Hall’s sensitive phrasing, to the continuous ‘play’ of the sea. Whether the ocean be seen as bringing the menace of foreign invaders, as in A Gloriosa Família, endangering cultural autonomy, as in Os leões não dormem esta noite and 25 26

This is the title of Rice’s first chapter. Bongie, Islands and Exiles, 20.

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Ualalapi, or as nurturing a sense of both separateness and belonging by protecting an insular society, as in O Mar na Lajinha, the sea is a pervasive symbol of the cultural change brought about by the colonial confrontation. And it is thanks to the ever-changing, malleable nature of cultural identity, thanks to its profound capacity to endure transformation, that the people of so many colonized countries have succeeded in preserving some sense of continuity and in developing new aspects to their identity, which keeps evolving – despite, against, and even because of succeeding waves of seafaring colonial invaders. WORKS CITED Almeida, Germano. O Mar na Lajinha (Lisbon: Caminho, 2004). Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001). Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post-Colonial Literature (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1998). Brookshaw, David. “Narration and Nation-Building: The Angolan Novels of Pepetela,” in Fiction in the Portuguese-Speaking World: Essays in Memory of Alexandre Pinheiro Torres, ed. Charles M. Kelley (Cardiff: U of Wales P , 2001): 107–16. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993). Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. ——. “¿Quién necesita la identidad?” Temas 37–38 (2004): 168–82. Khosa, Ungulani Ba Ka. Ualalapi (Lisboa: Caminho, 1990 [1987]). Melo, Guilherme de. Os leões não dormem esta noite (Lisbon: Editorial Notícias, 2ª ed., n/d.). Pepetela. A Gloriosa Família: O tempo dos flamengos (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1998). Pierce, Frank, ed. Luís de Camões: Os Lusíadas (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1981 [1973]). Pires Laranjeira, with Inocência Mata & Elsa Rodrigues dos Santos. Literaturas africanas de expressão portuguesa (Lisbon: Universidade Aberta, 1995). Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2003). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994). Schipper, Mineke. Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging (London: Cassell, 1999).

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Diaspora in Cary Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) T HOMAS B ONNICI

The Caribbean Novel in the Limelight

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of colonization of the Caribbean islands and northern South American mainland has produced an equally idiosyncratic novel and thematics. Unlike the typifical settler and invaded colonies, the Caribbean has been characterized by double-invasion colonization.1 The analysis of the contemporary novel in the context of culture in the English-speaking Caribbean area, including Guyana in South America, is becoming more important as the colonial experience recedes while migration and communication networks are intensified. It seems that due to certain peculiar factors such as adopted languages, multiple citizenship, and diasporic attitudes,2 Caribbean writers have built a ‘Black Atlantic,’3 or, rather, an intercultural and transnational formation which links black communities across the sea, while acknowledging their differences. The ambiguous multicultural links and non-affinities between the Caribbean, Britain, the U S A , and African countries are enhanced in the massive migration of Caribbean peoples after World War II, during the 19601970 Independence years, and the restrictions imposed by the British government on all Commonwealth members in the 1980s. Although conspicuous in their literary achievements, the striking ambiguity of the Caribbean writer has been described thus by David Dabydeen: 1

HE PECULIAR NATURE

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). 2 E.A. Markham, Hinterland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989). 3 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).

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‘England’ is our Utopia, an ironic reversal, for Raleigh was looking away from the ‘squalor’ of his homeland to the imagined purity of ours, whereas we are now reacting against our ‘sordid’ environment and looking to ‘England’ as Heaven.4

The aim of this essay is to analyse the representation of diaspora and displacement in the novel Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips. Always triangular, linking Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the U K / U S A , Phillips’s narrative shows not only the havoc of displacement throughout the historical slave period but also the repercussions in the Negro’s identity. An investigation of the pre-transnational type of dislocation, physical and subject-harrowing, will ensue.

Diaspora and Displacement Diaspora is the free or forcibly displacement (Heidegger’s unheimlich and Unheimlichkeit) of peoples from their homeland into new regions. Colonialism triggered both types. In the case of voluntary settlers and colonizers, noncolonized space has to be transformed into a colonized site, with all that this implies in language, invention of terms, revision of the original landscape, and the necessary processing of a different mentality. This process, imbued with colonial hegemonic practices, influences a postcolonial culture or, rather, it is the start of a culture which is neither a repetition of the mother country’s nor a strict adaptation to the local native one. A diasporic identity may thus produce a positive hybridity. In native peoples who were not physically displaced by colonization, another type of dislocation has taken place: their culture was hierarchized, while the Western variety has been imposed through a hegemonic religion, education, administration and justice. In the case of forced and modern diasporas, the dissolution of the displaced subject is deeper and more extensive. In the context of a hegemonic and patriarchal environment, a new landscape, a different language and a new labour system are enforced. Family members are dispersed, concepts are disrupted and culture is imploded. Rootlessness predominates, albeit flimsy and elusive memories (frequently religious and cultural) of the past and of home may still be extant. However, in the course of time, Negro slaves and their descendants in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the U S A restructured new and powerful cultural forms through which they built a new identity and subjectivity. If the above forms began to be constructed in the past, a similar severing from roots and a reconstruction are on the way in the modern diaspora communities. Representation and imitation in postcolonial writing 4

David Dabydeen, Slave Song (Coventry: Dangaroo, 1984): 84.

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“hinge on the act of engagement which takes the dominant language and uses it to express the most deeply felt issues of post-colonial social experience.”5 Actually, the place from where the colonial subject has been evicted or the colonial space in which s/he has settled connotes the sum total of her/his history, language, culture and experience. It may not necessarily mean a physical space but an environment in which s/he is culturally integrated. Through European colonialism and other causes triggering the diaspora, the subject’s notion of place is disrupted and s/he doesn’t belong anywhere. The more immaterial the colonial subject of space, the profounder her/his diasporic unrootedness is. Spivak6 distinguishes between the old and new diasporas, respectively proper to the pre-transnational and transnational world. The former “were the result of religious oppression and war, of slavery and indenturing, trade and conquest, and intra-European economic migration which, since the nineteenth century, took the form of migration and immigration into the United States.” The latter comprise “Eurocentric migration, labour export both male and female, border crossing, the seeking of political asylum, and the haunting in-place uprooting of ‘comfort women’ in Asia and Africa.”7 Crossing the River portrays the first type of diaspora and follows its repercussions in the contemporary world of fragmented human beings. Phillips portrays and enhances the diaspora through fragmentation at the textual and thematic levels. The past is remembered in a fragmentary way, characters live fragmentarily and the stories are developed by the interlacing of fragments. It is left to the reader to sort out the gaps, silences and absences in this “chaotic” fictional world with all its indeterminacy.

Crossing the River Crossing the River is made up of four great narratives of different eras in African-American history and diaspora, spanning, in all, over 250 years. The Prologue narrates the harrowing experience of an eighteenth-century African father who sold his two sons and a daughter, now called Nash, Martha, and Travis, into slavery. In the first narrative, Nash Williams, a former slave, the property of Edward Williams, is repatriated to Africa in 1834 as a Christian missionary. The second narrative involves Martha during the pre- and postCivil War period (1861–64) and the abolition of slavery in the U S A (1865). Martha Randolph is going west, to California, to begin a new life after the horrific experience of slave life. While the third narrative is the 1752 logbook 5

Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001): 5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice 10.2 (1996): 245–69. 7 Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New,” 245. 6

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of Captain James Hamilton: a bewildering chronicle narrating the steady accumulation of human livestock slowed down only by prices and death, the fourth narrative deals with Joyce, a white married Englishwoman, who, in the context of World War II, falls in love with a black U.S. serviceman called Travis, the third child sold into slavery, who, in a world of loneliness, racism, and bias, becomes Joyce’s lover and father of her son Greer. The Epilogue is a worldwide vision of the African father who sold his children. Temporal and spatial considerations are now nil and the human experience of the Negro in Brazil, Santo Domingo, the U S A , and Trinidad, with his culture, his music, his dances, and his multi-varied language, resounds in the memory and in the life of African descendants, the countless and nameless members of the contemporary diaspora.

Eastward: Like Wind-Driven Seeds Nash Williams has to be analysed as the prototype of the African diaspora in the U S A and the diaspora of the American Negro in Africa, his own ‘homeland’. The silence of the text with regard to his ancestors in Africa and in the U S A is highly significant. There are indeed no references to his father and only scant mention of his aging and illiterate mother. The only father he acknowledges is not the biological one but the one who raised him on the plantation and gave him the English family name. Diaspora-based homelessness explodes the tribal and community identity cherished in Africa and highlights the fundamentally non-communal attitude and impersonality experienced in the U S A and elsewhere. Such non-identity is reinforced by religion and culture ingrained in the ex-slave. No mention is made of the African religious stance of his ancestors, its practices, its beliefs and morality. Other African religious customs have been obliterated, together with the centuries-old culture coupled to them. Nash’s memory has been circumscribed and truncated within the few years of his own conscious life. In the meantime, another identity is formed, diametrically and positively opposed to the original. Seemingly no overt trace is left of the former. The present Christian memory is sufficient to identify and subjectify Nash and make him act accordingly. The second factor reveals the superiority that pervades Nash as a Christian and as a missionary in Africa. The tragic annihilation of Nash’s ancestral culture is so deep and his adoption of the European hegemonic position so overwhelming that he adopts the strategy of the master-narrative to judge, condemn, counsel and transform the Other. Nash’s power position is revealed when he writes that many U.S. ex-slaves in Liberia have a tendency for lying about and doing nothing […], stealing [. . . ] like the natives. […], dance to the discordant tune of drunkenness, […]. So I beg of

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you servants to pay attention, attend school, and seize the opportunity to learn […]. If they should refuse to attend school or heed your words, you must punish them.8

At the start, Nash’s overt aim is religious and his enthusiasm and optimism are not lessened by health problems, tropical diseases, the difficulty of learning the local African language, the hard work of tilling the soil, the lack of guarantee of a good harvest, and the perils of wild animals. However, the ideology underlying the religious position is deconstructed by a firm attitude in organizing life according to U.S. standards and customs. Following the capitalist trade experience, Nash discovers the importance of being a landowner, selling his farm surplus, and adopting a strict labour regime on his farm. In fact, when Nash sees himself with two tasks, the building of God’s kingdom and the development of his own piece of land, the latter is given priority and the former becomes very close to being a secondary issue. Empirebuilding and its culture, including religion, becomes Nash’s chief aim in his African diaspora. His constant asking for tools and the subject-matter he teaches to the native Africans reveal his deepest intentions. A proposed school education based on the Bible, dictionaries, history, geography, and arithmetic will surely reproduce the American educational system in foreign, differently cultured people. It is based on the false assumption that the American type of education is politically neutral and essentially applicable the African natives. Further, Nash, the “repatriated” man, hierarchizes the colonial subjects and the Others (African Negroes), who are different from him (a ‘white’ man). Although he feels that the dignity of the human person, negated in the U S A , is bestowed upon him (“I am Mr Williams”9), paradoxically he others the nonAmerican Negro and the diasporic place. Africa is now “this land of darkness,” harking back to Prospero’s definition of the othered Caliban, Liberia is a “dark and benighted country,” the African language is a “crude dialect,” the village is “heathen,” the natives are “savage,” “superstitious,” and “muchmaligned,” the intense heat makes the American Negroes turn native, denoting apostasy and immorality. It is unbelievable, he argues, that “these people of Africa are called our ancestors.”10 Henceforth Nash’s narrative develops into the ideological stance of a master narrative. Besides civilization, ‘truth’ becomes the paradigm of the non-native, American Negro or European, and, consequently, a dictatorial manner of exercising authority emerges. However, the diasporic condition triggers his subjectivity. The further Nash is from American culture and the deeper he goes into Africa, the more con8

Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (1993; New York: Vintage, 1994): 18–21. Phillips, Crossing the River, 33. 10 Crossing the River, 32. 9

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scious he is of his agency. The 1842 and last letter to Edward Williams, received in Monrovia, is a document evidencing a further distancing from American ‘civilization’ and the right to be Other and to exist as such. The African type of family with its polygamy and numberless children, the study of the African language, the tribal gathering, the pride of having a heathen family which, nevertheless, is friendly to Christians, the praise of the women’s generosity of heart and dedication to their male family head are laid bare. Nash acknowledges that his transformation from a “good Christian coloured gentleman” into “this heathen whom you barely recognize”11 will surely shock an American citizen, but he feels safe in declaring a type of freedom in Africa which was denied to him in the U S A . The criticism he launches against his country’s policy with regard to slavery and to the lack of freedom in the U S A speeds and enhances his desertion (he now refers to “your America”) from the U S A , the land of diaspora, and a commitment to Africa which “open[ed] up my eyes and cast off the garb of ignorance which had encompassed me all too securely the whole course of my life.”12 Nash’s stance in his new diaspora reveals his anagnorisis: he is now deeply aware of his freedom, his africanization, which includes his happiness in a simply agricultural life, his living as a simple member of a tribe without any authority and the futility of the Christian religion and its missionary stance. Now, this contrasts Edward’s reactions of revulsion, disgust, hopelessness and abandonment when he arrives at the native village and finds Nash’s true position. In fact, turning native is considered a betrayal. Although Nash Williams is not a European settler but an ex-Negro slave sent to Liberia and thus, at least theoretically, repatriated to his homeland, he is expected by his American patrons to keep his Christian religion and background, differentiate himself from the native Africans by shunning their polygamous marriage system, their heathen ceremonies, their wild lore and savage customs, and to be a herald for the white men’s entry into a highly potential trading place. Nash’s hybridity becomes a threat to the American self. From the latter point of view, the cultural diversity Nash has adopted contaminates him with native practices and makes him lose his distinctness as an American-bred person. This is especially true when we consider that in the European and the American mentality the hybrid is imagined deep in sexual transgression and miscegenation. On the material plane, deterioration seems to break down and totally marginalize the europeanized Negro; on the spiritual plane, the Negro in his diaspora has gained true knowledge and freedom, unknown to him under the white man’s regime. 11 12

Phillips, Crossing the River, 61. Crossing the River, 62.

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Westward: Community Building The story of Martha is told in the context of postbellum Emancipation when the protagonist is dying in Denver, Colorado, on her way to California. Martha’s journey covers her arrival to the New World, passing through Virginia, the crossing of the Missouri, the settling in Kansas, and her final stop in Colorado. Although Nash’s eastern journey to the heart of darkness is a missionary task to civilize the native Africans, or rather, a planned continuation of slavery under disguise, Martha’s journey is westward prospecting for a new life without having to pay heed to the white man and his ways. […] Prospecting for a place where things are a little better than bad. […] Prospecting for a place where your name wasn’t ‘boy’ or ‘aunty,’ and where you could be a part of this country without feeling like you wasn’t really a part.13

The forced displacement and diaspora of “the proud girl” provoke in her the right to freedom not merely from the white man’s inhuman regime but from the white man himself and his culture. Awareness of herself as a woman, a Negro woman, with a husband and a daughter, is perhaps Martha’s survival code in the context of a white-based, African-biased country, always ready to other coloured people. Although not given to overworking sentiment, there is a deep human touch in Martha. Her brutalized life did not extinguish her humaneness even though the white man always denied in practice the humanity of the African slave. The diaspora initiated a Negro-bonding and a community-building attitude in her. She married the Negro Lucas, with whom she had a daughter, Eliza Mae, but she lost both in the Virginia auction when the owner sold the property. After living for some time with the Hoffmans, she regained her subjectivity and her Negro identity by running away and establishing herself, with a Negro friend Lucy, at a restaurant and a laundry in Dodge on the Arkansas river, the frontier town on the Santa Fe Trail. During her ten years in Dodge, she befriended Chester, a local Negro storekeeper, perhaps a former fugitive from the slave states, who helped her with the business. Although Martha was forced to leave after Chester’s murder, she maintained her subjectification by working among Negroes in law-abiding Leavenworth. Her search for Eliza Mae, for more freedom and financial autonomy, however, made her think of becoming “part of the coloured exodus that was heading west.”14 In spite of Emancipation, Negroes knew that neither the southern states nor the traditional northeastern ones were a place for them. Both regions were contaminated by the 13 14

Phillips, Crossing the River, 73–74. Crossing the River, 87.

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supremacist ideology of the white man, his deep-rooted bias against the Negro. This latest Negro diaspora is called by Martha an exodus from Hell: in fact, she considers the West (California and the far-western states) a new place where blacks and whites could freely live together without any bias. Once more, Martha is a subject. There is a Negro-bonding in their accepting her, albeit an old woman, into their party. She does not set foot on the Promised Land, but her continued struggle for freedom and dignity is already an achievement. Martha’s diaspora is based on the principle that a return either to Africa or to the eastern U S A is stigmatized as Hell. The experience of the diaspora and her constant yearning for freedom reveal to her the dignity of the Negro. The diasporic Negro is not an African and his present culture is now radically different from that of the natives and their culture. Needless to say, there may be sympathetic gestures and symbolic attitudes between the African American and the native African, but the former’s return to a pre-slavery environment in Africa would be as much a violence as when his/her ancestors were displaced to the New World. It was later found that such a solution was much more complex, with postcolonial theory promoting a positive stance for the hybrid culture that ensued.15 “Going West” seems to be the better solution. The diasporic Martha has no faith in the white man and his civilization and her Negro-bonding becomes a strategy for survival and for a hybrid civilization in one’s own country. Further, ‘going West’ may mean shunning American culture as embodied in the Christian religion. The allure of African culture and its gods still haunts her consciousness, but no foregrounding is found to develop it. “In this Kansas, Martha sometimes heard voices. […] Voices from the past.”16 While these voices may be African, to which the narrator attaches the adjectives “dark” and “satanic,” those that Martha did not recognized may have been the signs of the Christian religion taught to slaves from the moment they set foot in the New World. Once more she perceives the radical upheaval that the Christian religion might cause in her mind. The Hoffmans may have been “nice” and “religious” people, but they were the masters imbued with the white man’s complex of superiority, power, and endeavour, blurring all that was different and non-white. Martha’s solution is flight to achieve her autonomy in work and freedom, even though the memory of loss haunts the fragmented subject and her disrupted family.

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Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 16 Phillips, Crossing the River, 79.

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Martha’s project is certainly not empire-building. The family raised in Virginia, the terrible pain of its dispersal, the maturing years in Kansas with a “friendly” family, her liaison with Lucy, her living with Chester and the disappointment brought by his decease, her integration in a large group of Negroes on their way to California – all this indicates a rush not for gold (empire-building), as thousands were doing at the time, but for the construction of a Negro community based on work, freedom, and individual autonomy. Her demise does not defeat her purpose and while she does not hinder her companions in founding this utopia, they do not relinquish their goal. The friendship and mutual concessions between the old woman and the Negro community on its way West are, according to recent criteria,17 a token of the success of their community-building mission.

Conclusion In the pre-transnational diasporic world, Nash and Martha find a path to individual fulfilment while travelling in opposite directions. Nash’s journey to Africa leads him to reject an alien God and eurocentric civilization. The adoption of a different cultural tradition may not suit the European or American citizen, but it reveals to the latter that there is a redeeming factor in turning native. The objectification and the lack of freedom that Nash experienced in the U S A produce radical subjectivity in an apparently disastrous diaspora. Besides, Martha’s journey westward is a constant exercise in subjectivity and citizenship. Outwardly, her displacement and constant homelessness result in a dead-end diaspora. But this only apparently so. The type of diaspora lived to the core constitutes community-building and the distant, albeit practical, yearning for true freedom as a hybrid society. WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1991). Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Dabydeen, David. Slave Song (Coventry: Dangaroo, 1984). Farrell, Mark. British Life and Institutions (London: Chancerel, 2000). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 17

Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1989), and Lois Kuznets, “Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 7.4 (1982): 10–15.

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Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Kuznets, Lois. “Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 7.4 (1982): 10–15. Markham, E.A. Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989). Phillips, Caryl. Crossing the River (1993; New York: Vintage, 1994). Richards, Jeffrey, ed. Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1989). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice 10.2 (1996): 245–69. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

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“They Are Us” Interview with Caryl Phillips

A DRIAN G RIMA

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HE MIGRANTS’

“ D E E P D E S I R E ” to get to Europe and to “participate,” says the acclaimed writer Caryl Phillips, “is about as fine a compliment as anybody could pay to the continent. Obviously, it breaks one’s heart to see – on arrival – so much disappointment, loss, and betrayal. Migrants are necessary to the moral, cultural, and social development of all nations. We should welcome them. After all, they are us.” Caryl Phillips, winner, among others, of the 2004 Caribbean American Heritage Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature, and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book for A Distant Shore, was recently invited to Malta to deliver one of the keynote speeches at the triennial conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (E A C L A L S ). The conference, chaired by Dr Stella Borg Barthet of the University of Malta, dealt with the theme “Sharing Places: Searching for common ground in a world of continuing exclusion,” and issues related to migration featured in a good number of papers. Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts, West Indies, was brought up in England, and now divides his time between London, St Kitts, and New York. He is the editor of two anthologies, has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema, and is the author of three works of non-fiction and nine novels, including Crossing the River and The Nature of Blood. He has been a Fellow of the New York Public Library, and has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992, Caryl Phillips was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. Currently Professor of English at Yale University in the U S A , he has also taught at universities in India, Sweden, Ghana, and Barbados. He is a

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Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His eighth novel, Dancing in the Dark, appeared in the autumn of 2005, and his ninth, In the Falling Snow, in early 2009. In an article entitled “Strangers in a Strange Land” (The Guardian, 17 November 2001), he reports from Sangatte in France where refugees risk their lives every day in the Channel tunnel trying to get to Britain: “Whether economic or political migrants, these people’s lives are broken and they are simply looking for a chance to begin anew. A chance to work, to contribute, to make something of themselves. To begin again at the bottom of the pile.” In another article, “Necessary Journeys” (The Guardian, 11 December 2004), he reflects on the time when, twenty years before, as an aspiring writer fleeing Britain’s race and class stereotypes, he decided to travel all over Europe and beyond. His travels eventually led him to write The European Tribe (1987), a chronicle of a year’s wanderings, to which he added a new epilogue in 2000, which is also, however, a book of powerful essays about Europe and what he calls the “European tribe,” a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, eurocentric history. “The gift of travel,” he wrote in “Necessary Journeys,” “has been enabling for me in the same way that it has been enabling for those writers in the British tradition, those in the African diasporan tradition, and those in the Caribbean tradition, many of whom have found it necessary to move in order that they might reaffirm for themselves the fact that dual and multiple affiliations feed our constantly fluid sense of self.” “Healthy societies,” writes Phillips, who is one of Britain’s key writers on the migrations and movements associated with the Atlantic slave trade, “are ones that allow such pluralities to exist and do not feel threatened by these hybrid conjoinings. [...] As a young writer, travel enabled me to understand the importance of constantly reinterpreting and, if necessary, reinventing oneself is an admirable legacy of living in our modern culturally and ethnically fluid world.” Adrian Grima (AG) met Caryl Phillips (CP) in Malta during the E A C L A L S conference. AG: In The European Tribe (1987) you wrote about how your first encounter as a Black Briton with New York and the U S A was stained with prejudice and verbal violence. Now you live in the U S A . Have you changed, or is it the U S A that has changed? CP: I don’t think that either of us have changed. I just think I’m now better equipped to understand what’s going on, and to write about it. Back then I was very much startled by the shock of the new.

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AG: In your talk at the E A C L A L S conference here in Malta you spoke about your renewed interest in writing for the theatre. What has prompted this return to your first love? CP: Of late I’ve written drama for the radio and for the screen, and I’ve begun to attend a lot more theatre. And I’ve also started to read the plays of the new generation of black British dramatists, work which seems both vibrant and I’m pleased to note is getting a lot of media recognition. All of these factors made me wonder about my own early years as a dramatist for the stage, and reflect upon why I no longer wrote stage plays. AG: What has caught your attention in the works of the new generation of British playwrights? CP: Well, I’m particularly struck by the intensity of the dialogue, which seems to be a great fusion of colloquial working-class English, and Caribbean creole. I am also somewhat taken with the raw depiction of violence, which today seems to play a much larger part in the lives of young British people than it did in my own time. AG: We often talk about the advantages of writing for the screen rather than for the stage. How can writing for the theatre be better or more effective than writing for the television screen or for cinema? CP: Well, an evening in the theatre, in the presence of good acting and good writing, can be simply electric in a very visceral way. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced in the cinema or in front of a television screen. There’s a ‘danger’ to the theatre when it’s really working at its best. AG: At the E A C L A L S conference you also spoke about how important government subsidies are for new writing. But many people in government here in Malta and elsewhere conveniently argue that writers should be left to their own devices and that they should establish “strategic partnerships” with business. How would you react to such a position? CP: Writers, particularly those who work in the theatre, have always been subsidized. Shakespeare relied upon subsidy, as did the Jacobeans, the Restoration dramatists, through to those of the late-twentieth century. This kind of ‘Darwinian’ thinking from governments is very convenient, but not very convincing. We have a right to expect decent roads, good schools and hospitals, and public safety in return for our taxes. I think we also should expect our taxes to subsidize art, and the most heavily cost-intensive artform is probably the theatre.

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AG: How can reliance on government subsidies limit or even stifle new writing? CP: Well, it depends what kind of government you’re talking about. They’re not all benevolent. However, I wonder what kind of ‘interference’ one might expect from business in the form of say, American Express or McDonalds. I hate to think! AG: A friend of mine who has a leading role in the cultural field here in Malta looks back in awe at the Thatcher years; he’s convinced that Thatcher pulled Britain’s socks up by controlling the unions. I suspect that you have a different take on this one, especially where the Thatcher governments’ support of culture is concerned. CP: Yes, well let’s just say that your friend and I would probably disagree about the price of ‘pulling up one’s socks’. AG: Have the “tentacles of media colonization” in a world increasingly affected by “corporate globalization” continued to grow in recent years? How do they affect artists like yourself? CP: It certainly affects me in terms of my publishers. I am published, both tin the U S A and in Britain, by a huge media conglomerate that is based in Germany. It’s a different relationship to publishing, a less intimate and personal one, than when I first began over twenty years ago. As a result, I think that the choices that publishers make these days are much more informed by the market. AG: You have written about “the bubble of cheap tourism” in Spain. Have you seen the effects of such a bubble on Malta during your first visit here? What would you have written had one of your chapters been about Malta? CP: Well, I am not sure what I would have written about Malta as I didn’t arrive looking at the island(s) through critical eyes. However, I certainly noticed some ‘cheap tourism’. More than one Maltese person commented to me that the island was attracting the wrong type of tourist. This is also something I hear more and more of in the contemporary Caribbean. Those who arrive on package tours, or on cheap flights, tend not to put that much money back into the economy. I wouldn’t dare to comment on Malta, having spent so little time there, but it’s interesting how many of the comments I ‘recognized’ from my understanding of the Caribbean. AG: In The European Tribe you wrote about how “unemployment and the world economic crisis are nourishing” a “new European Fascism.” Non-

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Europeans, you wrote, “are not wanted.” In “West Germany it is a crime to scrawl ‘Judenraus,’ but not ‘Turkenraus.’ Europe is in danger of swaddling herself in a familiar hypocrisy.” Is Europe any better today, or have things actually taken a turn for the worse? Is racism among the European tribe still a “passion” rather than an “opinion”? CP: I don’t know if things are any worse, but I don’t think things are any better. There are still terrific problems all over Europe with regard to racism, immigration, and dealing with whomsoever is perceived to be the ‘outsider’. I hear the same arguments now that I heard back then. Sometimes the identity of the ‘outsider’ may have changed, but the social, religious, economic, and cultural raison d’être for exclusion is employed with the same degree of selfrighteous vigour. AG: Later on this year, on 4 October 2005, you will be reading with Chinua Achebe at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of the South Bank Centre in London. “We conclude our season,” announce the promoters, “with a unique appearance on stage together by two literary giants.” How do you look at Africa and African literature today? CP: I am no expert on African literature, but I read many African writers and I travel quite extensively in sub-Saharan Africa. Because of the example, energy, and brilliance of Chinua Achebe, we have at least two generation of African writers who have found their voice, and a publisher. People need their writers to provide them with a moral compass. This being the case, the continent of Africa, despite the underdevelopment, the poverty, and the socioeconomic problems, is in fine shape. The people have an alternative to the crassness of political ‘leadership.’ AG: A Distant Shore (2003) is a powerful novel about an African immigrant fleeing his unnamed war-torn country. It is a novel that is more relevant than ever to an island like Malta that is having to come to terms with immigration and the conflicting emotions that it stirs in those who are more used to being emigrants themselves. What are your feelings about Solomon’s fate? CP: Well, sadly, Solomon’s fate is that of many migrants in Europe. The deep desire to get to Europe and participate is about as fine a compliment as anybody could pay to the continent. Obviously, it breaks one’s heart to see – on arrival - so much disappointment, loss, and betrayal. Migrants are necessary to the moral, cultural, and social development of all nations. We should welcome them. After all, they are us.

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For more information about Caryl Phillips, including a list of articles and books about him and his works, interviews and links, and a list of selected articles, go to http://www.carylphillips.com/. Caryl Phillips’ visit to Malta was supported by the British Council, Malta. Adrian Grima www.adriangrima.com

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5 S HARED S PACES

Sharing Media Spaces The Kumars at No. 42

H ILARY P. D ANNENBERG

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K U M A R S A T N O . 4 2 is a recent new development in British television comedy which is significant for two reasons. First, The Kumars is a key manifestation of the overall growing cultural visibility of the ethnic minorities in British media. In recent years, the media policies of the two public service broadcasters within the British television system – the B B C and Channel Four – have led to a marked rise in television programmes by or about Britain’s ethnic minorities. These have taken the form of many different genres – from documentary through to comedy – and constitute a renewed attempt by these broadcasters to construct predominantly positive images of British ‘multiculturalism’.1 The Kumars belongs to the B B C ’s light-entertainment output and has been remarkably successful. Indeed, it was much more successful than originally anticipated by the B B C : it took its creator, Sanjeev Bhaskar, several attempts to convince the B B C that it would be worthwhile to transform his idea into a programme.2 The Kumars was first broadcast in 2001 and went into its sixth series in 2005. It has thus 1

HE

For historical accounts of the ethnic minorities in British media, see: Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television Since 1936, ed. Jim Pines (London: B F I , 1992); Stephen Bourne, Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television 1896–1996 (London: Cassell, 1998); Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television (London: Sage, 2002). 2 See “Living with the Kumars,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment /2856661.stm [accessed 1 October 2005]. For an account of the B B C ’s production and marketing strategies in the genre of situation comedy, also with reference to the development and global success of The Kumars at No. 42, see Hilary P. Dannenberg, “Marketing the British Situation Comedy: The Success of the B B C Brand on the British and Global Comedy Markets,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 10.2 (2004): 169–81.

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reached a much wider and more regular television audience in contemporary Britain than programmes belonging to the documentary or drama format. For this reason alone The Kumars deserves attention as a significant text in contemporary British media culture. The programme, however, warrants attention for another reason – its original format and generic hybridity. Indeed, it is most probably this aspect of The Kumars that has produced its resounding success, leading to the programme being sold abroad in its original version, and the rights for the programme format being sold to international broadcasters for local remakes.3 The Kumars is, in fact, a doubly hybrid text, because it mixes both cultural worlds and television genres. The programme mixes the fictional and the authentic, bringing fictional characters representing Britain’s ethnic minorities together with representatives of the real-world British media and entertainment establishment in an interview scenario. In terms of genre, The Kumars blends the situation comedy and the chat show: the Kumars are a fictional Indian immigrant family who are successfully established in British society. They are, in fact, so keen to become part of the British establishment that they have built a television studio in their back garden where their son, Sanjeev, interviews British celebrities in his own weekly T V chat show. Sanjeev’s father, mother, and grandmother are always present at the chat show, and, to Sanjeev’s dismay, generally do a lot of the talking and their own share of the interviewing while he is trying to conduct his celebrity interviews. The idea for the programme was developed by the Indian-British actor and writer Sanjeev Bhaskar, who also plays Sanjeev Kumar. In its shared media space and crosscultural dialogues, The Kumars at No. 42 creates the kind of “new transcultural forms within” a “contact zone”4 or “third space”5 that have been heralded as the hallmarks of cultural hybridity in postcolonial studies.6 The Kumars is a complex and varied text: it stages a 3 The original programmes have been sold across the world, from Sweden to South Africa and Australia. The programme’s format (fictional ethnic-minority family interviews real-world establishment celebrities) can be adapted to any society with an immigrant community, so that it has been sold to the U S A , Australia, Germany, Holland and Israel for conversion into local variants where the family’s identity is Hispanic, Greek, Turkish, Surinamese and Moroccan-Jewish respectively. 4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998): 118. 5 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 38. 6 “Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the crossbreeding of two species […] to form a third, ‘hybrid’ species”; Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, Key Concepts, 118. “It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory –

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polyphony of voices and shifting positions.7 The Kumars’ highly original format is due to its multi-levelled hybridity: on one level it is a chat show containing interviews with real-world celebrities, but its central thrust is created by the situation comedy framework depicting a fictional British-Indian family. On this fictional level, the four members of the Kumar family represent a range of characters which satirize and deconstruct Indian stereotypes (the other members of the family are Sanjeev’s father and mother, and his grandmother; all the characters are played by British-Indian actors, including the author and actress Meera Syal, who plays Sanjeev’s grandmother). The fictional framework is only the exclusive focus of the programme for a few minutes at the beginning of each episode when the Kumars are depicted in their living-room or kitchen preparing for the arrival of their celebrity guest, who then has to ring their door-bell in order to gain admission to the house. After being welcomed and introduced to the members of the family, the guest is escorted into the television studio at the back of the house for the interview section, which forms the main portion of the programme. Tensions and rivalries between the different members of the family also, however, play themselves out in the verbal interplay during the interviews, so that the fictional level of the action influences the dynamics of the whole programme. In the dialogue of voices generated while the Kumars all try to interview their celebrity guest, the Indian family outnumbers the representative of the establishment, so that their quizzing and cajoling of him or her can be seen as a form of cultural empowerment. The Kumars, however, not only contains comic jibes at mainstream white, post-imperial British culture in the interrogation of the guests; it is also a satirical representation of the social aspirations of Indian immigrants in Britain. The television studio that the Kumars have

where I have led you – may open the way to conceptualizing an inter-national culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. […] And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space,” we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves”; Bhabha, Location of Culture, 38. 7 By contrast, the dialogues staged in the Channel 4 comedy show Ali G, when compared with those of The Kumars, are built on a pattern of binary contrasts rather than on the flexible contact zone of shifting positions that can be observed in the cultural interactions of the Kumars and their guests. In terms of genre, Ali G is related to the Kumars, because it is a comic hybridization of the sketch comedy of impersonation and the current-affairs interview. Nevertheless, in terms of both characterization and dialogue The Kumars achieves a much more complex cultural dynamics. For a detailed comparison of the two programmes, see Hilary P. Dannenberg, “Hybrid Genres and Crosscultural Dialogues in Contemporary British Television Comedy: The Kumars at No. 42 and Ali G,” in Medialised Britain: Essays on Media, Culture and Society, ed. Jürgen Kamm & Bernd Lenz (Passau: Karl Stutz, 2006): 185–200.

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built in their back garden is a comically exaggerated representation of the standard trophies of middle-class affluence like the swimming-pool. However, the aim of the Kumars’ home expansion – to enable Sanjeev to break into the British media establishment – is at heart more subversive than conformist. This twin dimension of subversion and self-satire constitutes the programme’s major strength and its postcolonial significance. Because of its multiple crossing of cultural and generic boundaries, the innovative format of The Kumars at No. 42 creates comic but double-edged cultural situations in a half-scripted and half-spontaneous flow of dialogue. The Kumars’ real-world celebrity guests are partly acting a role within a domestic fictional scenario, partly narrating their life story according to the conventions of the chat-show genre, and partly engaged in a multicultural dialogue in which they, as representatives of the British establishment, are crossquestioned by representatives of an ethnic minority. In this dialogue of voices, the normal diasporic relations of ethnic minorities within the host-country society are reversed, because the Indian family outnumbers the British celebrity. The Kumars in turn quiz, cajole, and fawn (“darling”) over a representative of the cultural establishment. The varying interrogatory stances are partly dependent on which family member is asking the questions, but they are also a satirical articulation of the often contradictory voices, feelings, and responses of an immigrant community towards the established culture of the host country. The programme has therefore appropriated the genres of the sitcom and the chat show and converted them into a more complex and polyphonic crosscultural form of dialogue than the standard one-to-one interviews of the conventional chat show. Accordingly, in each half-hour episode, Sanjeev – at times supported, at times hindered by the other members of his family sitting on the sofa – interviews real-world celebrities. These exchanges are also intensified by the variety of interrogational styles. Sanjeev, the son and wouldbe (but not yet adept) chat-show host, asks naive or barely comprehensible questions, while the grandmother defies gender and ageist stereotypes by being the most knowledgeable and sophisticated interrogator of the family. At the same time, on the sitcomesque comic level of the programme, the various members of the Kumar family engage in verbal warfare and confusion with each other as they vie to participate in or steer the flow of dialogue with the celebrity guest – often to the extent that they further violate the generic laws of the chat show by taking over the main narratorial role by recounting anecdotes from their own (fictional) life stories. The very first episode of the The Kumars in 2001 already displays many of these features. Here he first celebrity guest in the Kumars’ ‘homemade’ T V studio (which is of course really a professional B B C auditorium with an appreciative live audience) is the successful film actor Richard E. Grant. Grant –

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who grew up in colonial Swaziland and whose family was part of the ruling elite there (Swaziland gained full independence from Britain in 1968) – is therefore, in contrast to his hosts, a product of white colonial elite culture. The second guest is the doyen of British chat-show hosts, Michael Parkinson: i.e. a figure from the very top of the real-world British media establishment and a key representative of the hegemonic culture that the fictional Sanjeev is trying to break into with his own chat show. The dialogue between the Kumars and Richard E. Grant foregrounds and plays with their respective positions as immigrants to Britain. At one point, Mr Kumar, with a combination of satirical naivety and a playful sense of cultural solidarity with reference to the British cultural and economic space they ‘share’, addresses Grant as a fellow immigrant: Transcript of The Kumars at No. 42 (2001) Mr Grant, you know what I’ve just realized? You were an immigrant into this country. R I C H A R D E . G R A N T : Yes. Mr Kumar: I was an immigrant into this country. (Grant gets up and shakes his hand; the audience applauds.) G R A N T : What passport have you got? M R K U M A R : Hold on. This is the thing I’ve just realized. We’re both successful. G R A N T : We are. G R A N D M O T H E R : Was that a question? S A N J E E V : Surprisingly, that’s an interesting line of questioning from Dad. (To Grant) Er, you know, do you ever still feel like an outsider? M R K U M A R : I’m glad you asked me that question. S A N J E E V : Dad, I’m talking to Richard. G R A N T : Yeah, quite a lot. (Passing question to Mr Kumar) What about you? M R K U M A R : I feel, you know, we immigrants have worked hard and we’ve put a lot of money into the coffers of this country. G R A N T : Definitely. M R K U M A R : Both of us. G R A N T : Yes. M R K U M A R : But to the ordinary idiot in the pub, we’re just a couple of freeloading black people. G R A N T : Exactly. [Audience laughs] MR KUMAR:

The dialogue makes its point by playfully ignoring Grant’s whiteness and his superior social status within British society. Mr Kumar constructs an obvious-

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ly utopian “third space” – an egalitarian zone in which he and the film star Grant are both simply upwardly mobile ‘black’ immigrants. This works to underline subversively the fact that, in real society, some immigrants are more equal than others. Here a comic third space is constructed only to be deconstructed. In addition, thanks to the programme’s elastic dialogue format, the interviewer (here Mr Kumar) is temporarily given the role of narrator in addition to asking questions about someone else’s life story. On one level this infringement of standard chat-show ‘decorum’, which is frequently practised by all members of the Kumar family in the dialogues with the celebrity guests, creates a comic sense of incompetence, precisely because they seem ignorant of the normal conventions of the chat show. On another level, however, the situation is representative of the way in which The Kumars breaks and bends the established rules in its own appropriation of an established media genre: accordingly, in this new form of the chat show, representatives of the ethnic minorities are allowed to tell their own narratives as opposed to listening to the voice of the ‘more important’ establishment (the celebrity guest). This transgressing of generic conventions thus creates a more egalitarian shared media space in which all participants are given a voice. The dialogue with Michael Parkinson contains variable positions according to which member of the Kumar family Parkinson is interacting with. Grandmother Kumar idolizes Parkinson, and upon his arrival she flings her arms around him and flirts with him outrageously (having first strategically applied body glitter to her cleavage – a detail which is all part of her character’s subversive treatment of the traditional Indian grandmother figure). Her behaviour has two different effects: it establishes Parkinson’s superior celebrity status but also hyperbolically enacts the ‘colonial’ respect for the British establishment felt by the older generation of British Indians. At the same time – like many aspects of the grandmother’s character – it works against traditional Indian female stereotypes by having an elderly Indian woman be explicitly amorous and take the initiative with a man she finds attractive. The dynamics of the interaction between Sanjeev Kumar and Michael Parkinson are different again. In introducing Parkinson, Sanjeev says “My next guest is more than an inspiration, he’s an equal.” In voicing his own competitive spirit in the race for media supremacy, Sanjeev (and by extension, his real-world creator and representer Sanjeev Bhaskar) clearly sees himself involved in a struggle with representatives of a media establishment dominated by white middle-aged or elderly men. In the postcolonial context, Sanjeev – in contrast to his grandmother – therefore shows a healthy lack of respect for white media hegemony, and a desire to assume a position at the top of the hierarchy. The additionally comic destabililization of this postcolonial empower-

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ment scenario, however, lies in the fact that despite his ambitions, Sanjeev is not yet a competent interviewer and must rely on his family, particularly his grandmother, to provide the professional quality of the programme’s interviews. ½¾

Another interview which offers many key insights into the programme’s multicultural dynamic is from a programme in the second series in which the main guest is the actor Patrick Stewart. This interview is a particularly good example of The Kumars working on several levels: it contains a statement of cultural empowerment by the ethnic minorities on their appropriation of the language of the colonizer; furthermore, Grandmother Kumar also articulates a form of postcolonial revenge for the indignities of colonialism. In addition, it celebrates non-British popular culture in contradistinction to British highbrow culture. In the interview, Stewart refers apologetically to the old language and class hierarchy of “B B C English” (according to which, particularly in earlier twentieth-century radio and television broadcasts, only middle- and upperclass southern British accents were deemed acceptable to represent the voice of the B B C ). Stewart’s defensive tone alone is indicative of the change in cultural climate and rigid social hierarchy that the very existence of a programme like The Kumars confirms. However, Grandmother Kumar’s declaration, in a clear Indian-English accent, that “this is B B C English now” is an open celebration of the Kumars’ appropriation of a medium from which ethnic minorities (and, indeed, in earlier decades, all those in the British peripheries outside the Southern English centre) were excluded. In the same vein, Grandmother Kumar counters Patrick Stewart’s apologetic narrative of the colonial arrogance of his own father’s behaviour in Indian restaurants in Yorkshire with the swift riposte: “We like it when someone makes the effort to insult us in our own language.” However, even more interestingly, this interview serves as an example of how, when the transcultural biography of the interviewed celebrity actually echoes or parallels the Indian diasporic experience, this leads to a dialogue of mirrored preoccupations about the loss of identity and authenticity. The actor Patrick Stewart has himself gone through many phases of migration and cultural transfer – a process which he recounts during the interview. His original identity is that of a Yorkshireman. As an actor, however, he relocated from the periphery to the centre of British culture and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company for many years (and in the process lost his authentic Yorkshire accent). Following this, having left British culture behind altogether

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he ‘became’ for many years, a galactically mobile fictional Frenchman in his role as Jean–Luc Picard, the Commander of the Starship Enterprise in the American science-fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation (and thus in real-world space he relocated again ― from Britain to the U S A ). Stewart is thus in an equal (if not greater) state of cultural limbo to the Indian-British diasporic subject. This loss of authenticity is savoured with obvious delight by the Kumars, who invite Stewart to talk about his own lack of an authentic Yorkshire accent in comparison with the family he has left behind on his migratory route away from his original homeland. In addition to depicting the position of the Indian immigrant community, this episode therefore also makes the point that even representatives of the ‘master voice’ of British culture can have fragmented identities: Transcript of The Kumars at No. 42 (2003) Well I’ll let Dad ask a question then. Mr Stewart, you’re from Yorkshire and like me, you’ve completely lost your native accent. P A T R I C K S T E W A R T : Do you think so? G R A N D M A K U M A R : Can you still do the Yorkshire accent? S T E W A R T : I believe that I can, in fact, I have used it in the last two stage plays that I’ve done. […] I believe that it’s accurate. My family, my authentic Yorkshire family, tell me that it’s phoney. But when I was a child (difficult to imagine, but …) I spoke not just with an accent, but with dialect. So when I began to act and it became clear that I had to be able to use R P , you know, Received Pronunciation, standard English – B B C English – what used to be called B B C English, but now, you know, no longer . . . No offence meant. S A N J E E V : No … We’re on it now. G R A N D M A K U M A R : In fact, this is B B C English now. [Audience laughter and applause.] S A N J E E V : That’s right. […] M R S K U M A R : […] Patrick, my father was in the army. Was your father in the army as well? S T E W A R T : Yes he was. My father was a regular soldier for ten years during the 20s and he spent most of those ten years, in fact, serving in India. K U M A R F A M I L Y I N U N I S O N : Ah ha! S T E W A R T : Yes, he was. M R K U M A R : Did he pick up any of the lingo? S T E W A R T : He did, as I suppose many British soldiers who served in India did during that time, and I finally got to the point where I would no longer take him to Indian restaurants in this country because he would see no SANJEEV:

MR KUMAR:

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discomfort for anyone in immediately reverting to his British army type in India, you know, the British army Raj type. So if he thought that the service wasn’t quick enough he would say “julli, julli.”8 Now that doesn’t go down well in the West Riding, obviously. G R A N D M A : No no, don’t worry. We like it when someone makes the effort to insult us in our own language. […] G R A N D M A : Patrick darling. Is there much difference between playing Shakespeare and the captain of the Enterprise? S T E W A R T : Very, very little. That’s an excellent question. When we first started filming Next Generation, I was continually being asked by the media about my background. The implication always was that by choosing to do a syndicated science-fiction television show I was somehow slumming. And this began to irritate me more and more and more until one day on camera, like we are here, I said, listen: All those years of sitting in different thrones of England acting Shakespeare with the Royal Shakespeare Company was only a preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise. [Both the Kumars and the audience applaud.]

The Kumars’ assault on the British establishment is therefore twofold. Its fictional scenario – Indian boy tries to break into British cultural establishment from his family’s living room – is an overtly fictional, fairy-tale narrative of upward mobility. Beyond this, however, the actual dialogues between the Kumars and their guests extend this cultural empowerment of the immigrant community through the individual ‘points’ scored in the dialogues with their establishment guests. The programme’s unconventional chat-show format therefore means that the many voices of the immigrant family challenge the single voice of the representative of the British establishment, and in doing so, creates a dialogue of cultural empowerment. However, the programme also contains interesting positioning with regard to high and low (British) establishment culture. The conclusion to the dialogue cited above is a particularly good example of this. Both the Kumars and their guest Patrick Stewart are united in their celebration of non-British popular culture (the Star Trek series) in contrast to British establishment culture as represented by the plays of Shakespeare. Similar to the juggling of positions represented by the split in attitudes towards British establishment icons represented in the different attitudes of Sanjeev and his grandmother, the programme is constantly juggling and reconfiguring its response to British host-country culture depending on the cultural positioning of each guest. This is one of the factors that make the dynamics of each programme so interesting and variable.

8

Anglo-Indian military slang for ‘hurry’.

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In the theories of Homi Bhabha and Robert Young, hybridity is presented as a way of looking at questions of culture and identity which is completely different from the binary poles of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (identity vs. alterity). In discussing forms of hybridity in the British novel, Young refers to “the uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” and “the meeting and incorporating the culture of the other, whether or class, ethnicity or sexuality”; this conceptualization of human culture and identities is based on a sense of a dynamic process of “cultural interaction” and not on static models of us vs. them which “stress separateness” and erect borders between cultural and ethnic groups.9 The changing and shifting positions taken up within the dialogues in The Kumars at No. 42 show clear features of the “meeting and incorporating” of cultures which Young refers to. The programme has the dynamism and fluidity of a cultural ‘contact zone’. WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bourne, Stephen. Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television 1896–1996 (London: Cassell, 1998). Da Ali G Show. Wr. Sacha Baron Cohen et al. (Channel 4 Television, 2000). Dannenberg, Hilary P. “Hybrid Genres and Crosscultural Dialogues in Contemporary British Television Comedy: The Kumars at No. 42 and Ali G,” in Medialised Britain: Essays on Media, Culture and Society, ed. Jürgen Kamm & Bernd Lenz (Passauer Arbeiten zur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft; Passau: Karl Stutz, 2006): 185–200. ——. “Marketing the British Situation Comedy: The Success of the B B C Brand on the British and Global Comedy Markets,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 10.2 (2004): 169–81. The Kumars at No. 42. Wr. Sanjeev Bhaskar, Richard Pinto & Sharat Sardana (B B C Television, 2001–2005). “Living with the Kumars,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2856661.stm [accessed 1 October 2005]. Malik, Sarita. Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television (London: Sage, 2002). Pines, Jim, ed. Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television Since 1936 (London: B F I , 1992). Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). ½¾ 9

Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995): 2–6.

Writing Second-Generation Migrant Identity in Meera Syal’s Fiction D EVON C AMPBELL –H ALL

Introduction

T

HROUGH A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

of fictional representations of

1960s – 1990s British Asian diasporic communities in Meera Syal’s novels Anita and Me (1996) and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee

(1999), this essay unpacks the significance of second-generation British Asian youth within these novels, and examines some of the factors contributing to the construction of their identities. Meera Syal is part of a recent generation of young British novelists whose fictions irreverently critique the genuinely multicultural1 nature of a society that possesses aspects of both East and West on the same soil. Yet the second-generation British Asian youth within these novels are shown to be less concerned with their state of cultural marginalization than with the material realities of their everyday existence, as they negotiate the tensions between their desires and the expectations of their firstgeneration parents. This fictional second generation unwittingly becomes an intermediary between an East and West that occupy the same physical space. Within these novels, well-established British Asian communities in the Midlands and London’s East End fictionally evidence Peter van der Veer’s argument that “non-Western cultures are no longer located outside the West, but form an

1 I have adopted Tariq Modood’s definition of genuine multiculturalism, which he describes as “allowing individuals and communities the right to be culturally different from their neighbours and to be understood in their own terms rather than in terms of racist and anti-racist stereotypes”; Modood, Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1992): 6.

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increasingly important social element of the Western cultural scene itself.”2 British cultural geography is changing. Meera Syal joins the ranks of those whose fiction is becoming gradually more representative of multicultural/ multiracial Britain. Suresht Renjen Bald argues that “in the last two decades, the fiction authored by [migrant] writers has expanded our understanding of the complex negotiations of identity that South Asian migrants and their children engage in every day in a dominantly white Britain.”3 Although van der Veer points out that “the reading of literary texts as a gateway to the analysis of migrant culture may […] have severe limitations,”4 Bald identifies the significance of migrant literature in the process of identifying and representing cultural change. Within the novels focused on in this essay, the Britishborn children of South Asian migrants are represented as indisputable physical reminders of these cultural changes. Equally, the host culture and the culture of origin are shown to play a significant part in the construction of the identity of these migrant children, who are both British and Asian, as well as a multi-faceted fusion of the two. These characters provide the physical location for a battle between the East of their parents’ expectations and the West of their everyday realities. Considering the arguments of Peter van der Veer, Suresht Renjen Bald, Laura Moss, Michael Cox, and Sujala Singh, I would like to discuss two of the fictional roles served by the youthful second-generation characters within these novels. I am particularly interested in how Syal uses second-generation youth as literary devices within Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee and a second-generation child as the narrator in Anita and Me. The dual-cultural positioning of second-generation migrant children renders them useful literary devices for deconstructing various aspects of multicultural / multiracial British society. In his essay “Art as Technique” (1917), Victor Shklovsky introduced the theory of ‘defamiliarization’ when he argued that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”5 In their state of innocence, children are naturally more motivated by immediate experiences than by logic or previous knowledge. Shklovsky’s concept provides a tool for identifying the areas in 2 Peter van der Veer, “‘The Enigma of Arrival’: Hybridity and Authenticity in the Global Space,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 92. 3 Suresht Renjen Bald, “Negotiating Identity in the Metropolis: Generational Differences in South Asian British Fiction,” in Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration, ed. Russell King, John Connell & Paul White (London: Routledge, 1995): 71. 4 Peter van der Veer, “‘The Enigma of Arrival’,” 103. 5 Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988): 20.

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which children and youth are used as fictional literary devices for deconstructing aspects of culture. This conveniently provides the very adult writer Meera Syal with a platform for offering social critiques. Bald argues that “migrants of South Asian origin and their British-born children struggle in different ways to counter their hosts’ constructions of them; but these struggles are limited and structured by the discourses that define them.”6 Considering Bald’s argument, I propose that in spite of the efforts made by the fictional migrants and their children within these novels to integrate into the host culture, factors such as traces of colonial guilt, fear of the ‘Other’ within, and unhelpful social stereotypes all colour the way in which the dominant culture accepts them.

The Questions The fictional space of domestic tension between first- and second-generation South Asian immigrants to Britain provides a fertile location to begin this discussion of how the identities of the British-born children of immigrants are portrayed as being constructed – and destructed – within the environment of the host culture. Three questions emerge as the discussion evolves. First, what is the significance of using children, particularly second-generation migrant children (and youth), as literary devices within these texts? The imagined space of second-generation childhood innocence provides a safe point of reference from which to examine popular conceptions of cultural hybridity. These children are represented as not only straddling the fence between British and Asian cultures, but also as fluctuating between childhood innocence and adult knowledge. Secondly, what is the literary purpose of using a potentially unreliable child as a narrator, or of privileging the child’s point of view within the unfolding texts? Children conveniently provide writers with a platform for addressing dangerous points of view without having to take adult responsibility for expressing these ideas. The British Asian child-narrator arguably serves a powerful function within the postcolonial text, by giving voice to the explosive fusion of the colonized anger of the East with the colonial guilt of the West within the context of a child’s innocence and irresponsibility. The representation of Meena Kumar, the ten-year-old protagonist of Meera Syal’s novel Anita and Me, provides a noteworthy example of using a child as such a literary narrative vehicle. Finally, what happens when these fictional children cross over the bridge from innocence to experienced adulthood? Of particular interest is the development of the characters of Chila, Sunita, and Tania in Syal’s novel Life Isn’t 6

Renjen Bald, “Negotiating Identity in the Metropolis,” 86.

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All Ha Ha Hee Hee, as they negotiate their developing second-generation identities. Syal uses these characters to undermine sentimentalized expectations of how ‘nice’ British Asian girls should behave, employing representations that subvert the traditional Bildungsroman genre and challenge unhelpful social stereotypes.

The Significance of Second-Generation Migrant Children What, then, is the point of engaging with fictional second-generation British Asian children and youth within these texts? Franco Moretti argues that “youth acts as a sort of symbolic concentrate of the uncertainties of an entire cultural system.”7 Naive children can be used to critique and expose moral inconsistencies. If maturity represents a universalism characterized by fixedness and stability, then surely youth represents the fluidity of relativism, in which moral absolutes are weakened by changing circumstances and the vagaries of imperfect human nature. One of the benefits of inhabiting this fictional hybrid space is the ability to comprehend more than one perspective. This ability to see beyond the immediately visible makes fictional migrant children useful not merely as the symbolic voice of the future, but also as the present voice of conflict between represented cultures. Michael Cox argues that “child observers, untainted by the effects of prolonged enculturation, bring to the narrative forefront those conflicts or core issues […] that arise between and among native and immigrant groups.”8 Following Cox’s logic, the child protagonist can thus be used to introduce and negotiate the tensions arising between the host and original cultures. The monoculturally white characters within these novels are represented as somewhat lacking in cosmopolitan sophistication. In contrast, these British Asian youth are portrayed as empowered by a cultural hybridity in which centre and margins are radically inverted. However, the centering of margins does not reflect the defining experience of the fictionally represented second-generation migrants within these texts. More significant is the representation of the battle of perceptions between what these characters think of as the ‘home’ culture (Britain) and what their parents think of as the ‘home’ culture (nearly always the subcontinent). Peter van der Veer’s argument about the shared physical space of East and West within Britain loses clarity and becomes problematic when Western and nonWestern cultures not only occupy the same physical space but battle within 7 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987): 185. 8 Michael W. Cox, “Interpreters of Cultural Difference: The Use of Children in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Fiction,” South Asian Review 24.2 (2003): 120.

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the same physical body. Fictional representations of second-generation British Asians suggest that their lives are characterized by intercultural tensions that are far from celebratory examples of the liberating nature of hybridity.9 East and West battle for primacy within the physical body of Meena Kumar, the feisty ten-year-old narrator of Anita and Me. She feels both inadequately Indian to please her parents and inadequately British enough to fit comfortably into her immediate environment: “I knew I was a freak of some kind, too mouthy, clumsy and scabby to be a real Indian girl, too Indian to be a Tollington wench, but living in the grey area between all categories felt increasingly like home.”10 Within the fluid, unstable space between childhood and adolescence, between Britishness and Indianness, Meena is able to narrate the events within her community from a defamiliarized point of view, supporting Victor Shklovsky’s assertion that “the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’.”11 If fiction is an artistic form of cultural expression that potentially represents varying aspects of society, then I must argue that fictional children and youth, especially those with dual-cultural perspectives, become crucially important literary devices that allow both writers and their readers insight into disparate cultural issues.

The Child as Narrator An adult writer fictionally rendering a child’s point of view faces the challenge of creating an authorial voice that successfully marries the writer’s adult experiences with the child’s innocent perspective. The tensions inherent in this project prevent its narrative stability. One of the contributing factors to the instability of this fictional narrative space is the power-struggle between Meera Syal as an adult writer and Meena Kumar, her child-protagonist, as each battles to become the dominant narrative voice. Meena’s childish hope that “maybe someone from the Big House [will] come out and save me”12 is subdued by the adult’s resigned narrative interjection “I realised, sadly, that whoever lived in the Big House would not break their solitude to save a little Indian girl who had been caught telling lies.”13 In direct contrast to the notion of the represented child-narrator as inherently unstable, Michael Cox argues 9 Such celebratory examples of hybridity can be found in Rushdie’s essays in his collection Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1982): as well as in Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the ‘Third Space’; see Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), and Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 10 Meera Syal, Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1996): 149–50. 11 Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 20. 12 Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 13. 13 Anita and Me, 15.

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that the child’s “naive point of view provides a perfect complement to […the] narrator’s fluent voice, which seems to undercut any tendency on the part of readers to draw on ready notions.”14 However, Cox’s argument does not take into account the unreliability of the child-narrator, or the subversive potential of this powerful literary tool. The child-narrator’s instinctive, unsophisticated responses to crises within her immediate environment offer a space in which a very adult Syal bluntly interrogates the dominant culture. Through the irreverent activities and observations of Meena Kumar, this novel challenges the accepted hegemonic ideologies of its social geography and historical situation. Meena immediately identifies herself as an outrageous storyteller, announcing in the preface to Anita and Me that “I’m not really a liar, I just learned early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.”15 This alludes to fluidity within the processes of identity-construction, in which second-generation children might be tempted to draw on unhelpful but dramatically exciting stereotypes to assert themselves as representing more than the simple sum of their cultural parts. Clearly, within the working-class 1960s environment of the fictional Midlands town of Tollington, any visible signifiers of class / race/ educational differences are likely to prohibit the seamless integration of an Indian immigrant family into the pre-existing social fabric. With her child’s perspective, Meena is portrayed as incapable of locating her otherness within the larger cultural context of an inherently racist corner of 1960s Britain. Syal deliberately chooses to engage a child’s point of view as a literary device. She thus allows herself to shed the authorial inhibitions that enable a polite sidestepping of awkward social issues. These include portrayals of violent racist attacks perpetrated by well-known members of the local community, and depictions of the effects of abuse within broken homes. That Anita and Me falls within the Bildungsroman tradition is clear from the transformative nature of the text. Meena as the child-narrator unknowingly documents her own development from innocent child to cynical adolescent. Roger Bromley argues that Anita and Me, like so many semi-autobiographical first novels, is an initiation narrative, a rite of passage and transition from the rural idyll of an eternal summer perspective to the dark and conflicted experience of a racialised and sexualised world.16

14

Michael W. Cox, “Interpreters of Cultural Difference,” 122. Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 10. 16 Roger Bromley, Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 144. 15

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Meena’s disturbing glimpse of the evidence of childhood sexual abuse within her neighbourhood forces her from childhood innocence into the murky world of adult knowledge, before she has the tools to cope with the understanding of what she has seen. “I wished I had not seen what I was sure I had seen, the row of bruises around Tracey’s thighs, as purple as the clover heads, two bizarre bracelets perfectly mimicking the imprint of ten cruel, angry fingers.”17 I read this as an authorial critique of the violence imposed on those who are without agency, such as children who do not yet have the cultural or linguistic referents to fully comprehend the implications of adult activities. That the results of such dreadful events are witnessed by a second-generation child heightens the implications, as such an incident inevitably represents the host culture as inherently flawed. This serves as a catalyst to propel Meena into acknowledging and developing the more Asian aspects of her developing secondgeneration identity. Michael Cox describes how “children allow the author to make the familiar unfamiliar, whether through sensory experience, deductive analysis, or the phrase that jolts a Pollyanna from living in an illusory world.” In a critique of the patronizing racism that categorizes so many of the Kumar’s experiences within the fictional Tollington community, Syal employs the shock tactic of an unwelcome epiphanic moment to thrust the child-narrator into a direct confrontation with the enemy. This moment comes for Meena when a local shopkeeper, hyperactive in the village church, announces that ‘We’re having a collection [for Africa]. They asked for a plough but we thought a few tins and preserves would tide them over for a bit.’ You could see it in his face, he’d made the connection, Africa was abroad, we were from abroad, how could we refuse to come along and embrace Jesus for the sake of our cousins?18

With such a realization that, despite her best efforts, her external self is perceived to be other than British, the identity that Meena has so successfully carved out for herself in her own imagination crumbles. In a leap from childnarrator to adult author, Meena describes how “the next morning, the cracks appeared which would finally split open the china blue bowl of that last summer.”19 Meena acts as a constant physical reminder within the text of the embodied voice of the new hybrid generation. She stems from a fictional second generation educated out of submissively accepting the status quo. Her noisy, 17 18 19

Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 142. Anita and Me, 21. Anita and Me, 274–75.

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unreliable narration not only allows readers an insight into cultural and ethnic tensions, but also introduces the issue of class into the text. When Meena confronts the local bully, Sam Lowbridge, after a racist attack on a local Indian bank manager, she insists: ‘I know you did it. I am the others, Sam. You did mean me.’ […] Sam gripped my wrists tighter for support. ‘You’ve always been the best wench in Tollington […] but you was gonna look at me, yow won’t be staying will ya? You can move on. How come? How come I can’t?’20

The recognition that class and education would enable the Kumar family to move away from the provinciality of Tollington empowers Meena to confront the inconsistencies of local prejudice. Tollington is portrayed as possessing an ability to unproblematically separate a racial hatred aimed at ‘outsiders’ from a local affection for the Kumar family, as is shown by Sandy’s remarks, “You’re so lovely. You know, I never think of you as, you know, foreign. You’re just like one of us.”21 Within her developing maturity, Meena begins to see the racist implications of such remarks. Meena’s growing sociocultural awareness provides a useful fictional platform for highlighting the struggle of second-generation British Asian children as they navigate the space between the traditional community-based life of their parents and the possibility of an independent, self-determined life within mainstream British culture. Irvin Schick argues that narration itself is a carrier of meaning, the channel through which an individual tells him / herself and others the tale of his/her place in the world [….] Human beings are social creatures, and from early childhood onward, narratives are an intrinsic part of their communal existence.22

This implies that narrative is an ongoing, lifelong activity through which individuals communicate both internally and externally the path of their identity construction. Narratives are the means by which writers construct fictional identities for a variety of characters, and by which they can either support or question cultural norms. In a direct challenge to outdated colonial notions of Anglo-British superiority, it is the South Asian migrants to the traditionally white community who bring signifiers of civilization (education, knowledge of the world outside Tollington, fluency in other languages) to the village. Yet for the child-narrator, political correctness and social liberalism are unknown 20

Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 314. Anita and Me, 29. 22 Irvin Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999): 20–21. 21

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quantities. This is especially apparent when the text introduces and contends with uncomfortable issues such as racist attacks and domestic violence, which are skirted around by the adult characters within the novel. Through engaging a child’s point of view as a literary tool, Syal allows herself to shed the authorial inhibitions that enable a polite sidestepping of awkward social issues. For example, Meena and her visiting, non-Englishspeaking Nanima are told by a local villager that he “served in India. Ten Years. Magical country. Magical people. The best.” Meena’s instant response is a quietly muttered “Shouldn’t have bloody been there anyway, should you?”23 Although Anita and Me is not marketed as a postcolonial novel, retorts such as Meena’s provide an adult writer with the opportunity of bluntly interrogating the cultural ignorance of Westerners who consider Indian and Indian culture as something to be consumed. Meena is not restrained by the courteous survival techniques that enable adults to live in conjunction with those they find objectionable. By using a fictional child to express emotions and actions rational adults cannot, Syal privileges a child’s point of view to directly address such issues as violent racism, well-intentioned ignorance, and economic hardship. Mrs Kumar informs her daughter that ‘We will never be rich, Meena, we’re too honest. But we will always have enough to buy all the important things, food, heat, a car. . . ’ I began to switch off. I did not want mama to remind me of all the things for which I had to be eternally vigilant and grateful, I wanted us to have enough money so that we could be selfish, ungrateful, and spoil ourselves shamelessly without having to do rapid sums in our heads as if we were permanently queuing at some huge check-out till.24

Such angry outbursts are allowed of children, who have not yet learned the social niceties that curb vitriolic speech. Yet this furious diatribe would be largely unthinkable for a mature adult, especially a first-generation migrant who had sacrificed so much to come to Britain. Meena rejects the reminders of their status as ‘others’ within the community who value the migrant’s dreams of adequate food, shelter, work, and transportation. As a child-narrator, Meena provides the author with a platform for highlighting the discrepancies between migrant expectations and the realities of their lives within the larger dominant culture. In her role as prime authorial voice, Meena becomes not only the omniscient narrator but also introduces the concept of these second-generation fictional youth functioning as unwitting translators between cultures. 23 24

Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 222. Anita and Me, 262.

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From Adolescence into Maturity What are the implications, then, of the shift from child-narrator to an adolescent narrator and, finally, to the narrative point of view of a young adult? Does this shift to a mature point of view sever the text from the traditional genre of Bildungsroman, as the child-protagonist comes to the end of his struggle between innocence and experience? I have so far discussed the usefulness of children as literary devices within the novel, particularly as narrator. Life Isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee presents an altogether different approach to the genre of what Mark Stein has called “ the black British novel of transformation.”25 Syal’s second novel is firmly ensconced within a fictional British Asian community in East London, where the battles are more intergenerational than intercultural. Syal has arguably written a ‘triple’ Bildungsroman that clearly rebels against accepted literary notions of focusing on the development of a single character from childhood through to adulthood. Not only does Syal offer equal treatment to the characterization of her three protagonists, but she very elegantly manages to shift authorial voice from among the three young women, lending a surprising maturity to a narrative focusing primarily on the agonies of the shift from adolescence to young adulthood. Life Isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee privileges the ‘everyday’ cultural hybridity of second-generation youth as the location for rebellion against the status quo. The British Asian children of migrants within this text clearly exemplify what Sujala Singh has identified as “the representation of youth as a signifier for the unstable, dynamic times”26 in 1970s–1980s Britain. This novel focuses on the social and personal consequences when the children of first-generation Indian immigrants are portrayed as growing up and away from their childhood community. In a moment of poignant self-reflection, one of the principal characters suddenly remembered why she had stopped attending community events [. . . ] She could not take the proximity of everything any more. The endless questions of who what why she was, to whom she belonged (father / husband / workplace), why her life wasn’t following the ordained patterns for a woman of her age, religion, height and income bracket. The sheer effrontery of her people, wanting to be inside her head, to own her, claim her, preserve her.27

25

For further discussion of Stein’s ‘novels of transformation’, see his recent text Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: Ohio State U P , 2004). 26 Sujala Singh, “Postcolonial Children: Representing the Nation in Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa and Shyam Selvadurai,” Wasafiri 41 (Spring 2004): 15. 27 Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (London: B C A , 1999): 13.

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By separating herself from the relentless flow of events within her community, this character distances herself from the specific activities that force her to confront her Asianness. Within the characterization of Tania, our reactions as mature adult readers are gently manipulated by the use of defamiliarization as a distancing mechanism that separates adult logic from childlike emotional reactions. Shklovsky argued that he saw “‘texts’, representations of reality, as a technique for defamiliarizing the social ideas of the dominant culture, and thus for challenging our automatic acceptance of these ideas.”28 Such literary devices are useful for identifying the boundaries of the status quo, in order to facilitate social critiques of the British Asian community represented in this novel. Considering Michael Cox’s use of Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization, this section considers how Life Isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee provides a platform for its second-generation youth – specifically the character of Tania – to defamiliarize and critique inconsistencies within the British Asian community. The confusions of cultural identity focus the themes of this novel, which cover the broad class/ race/gender spectrum, but always with Syal’s trademark humour. Like the British Bhangra music that “had come to them on bootleg tapes during [their] teen years,”29 the chaotic youth of the three protagonists threatens to undermine the carefully preserved Indian culture their parents had ironically sacrificed and then attempted to rebuild, in order to make a better life for their children. The drums they knew, their parents’ heartbeat, folk songs sung in sitting rooms, the pulse of hundreds of family weddings, but then the guitars, cold steel and concrete […] the frustration bouncing off walls in terraced houses in Handsworth, hurried cigarettes out of bathroom windows, secret assignations in libraries, hurrying home with a mouthful of fear and desire. The lyrics parodied I Love You Love Me Hindi film crooning, but with subtle, bitter twists, voices coming up from the area between what was expected of kids like them and what they were really up to.30

Bhangra and guilt are symbolically woven together in this passage, representing the intercultural tensions that attend cultural hybridity. The knowledge that their parents sacrificed established lives on the subcontinent to build a new and better life in an unwelcoming Britain for their future children weighs heavily on these characters. They represent the future of a rapidly shifting cul-

28 29 30

Victor Shklovsky, as cited in Cox, “Interpreters of Cultural Difference,” 130. Amitava Kumar, Bombay/London/New York (London: Routledge, 2002): 139. Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 41 (my emphasis).

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ture in which Asianness will be recognized by the mainstream British population as slowly catching up with whiteness as a core aspect of British identity. The three central characters arguably represent a ‘trinary’ opposition of content/ depressed / alienated. These might appear at first to be overused stereotypes of South Asian females, but Syal commandeers these characterizations as literary devices for critiquing the expectations of 1980s British culture. Chila is the traditionally ‘Asian’ British Asian girl, the “plump darkie with the shy stammer” who shocked them all “by bagging not only a groom with his own teeth, hair, degree and house, but the most eligible bachelor within a twenty-mile radius.”31 With a high threshold for disappointment grounded in her mother’s oddly sane advice not to expect too much from life, Chila’s contentment critiques both individualism and consumer frenzy. Syal uses Chila as a class referent to critique the snobbery inherent within self-conscious migrant communities. In such communities there is often uncertainty about one’s social position within a culture that often mistakes non-white skins as an indication of either inherent inferiority or spiritual superiority. I reckon […] he was more than a teensy bit embarrassed that his fiancée swiped cans of beans for a living, especially since I’ve met some of his friends’ wives who wear sequinned tracksuits and spend one morning a week helping with their husbands’ businesses and the rest of the time doing interesting charity events like Bhangra Nights for Bengali Flood Victims and posh dinners for Famine Relief.32

Chila’s honesty and complete lack of self-consciousness can be read as a dominant moral anchor within the text. Yet Syal stubbornly avoids sentimentalizing Chila. In a powerful textual glimpse into reverse prejudice, Syal uses a secondgeneration character to critique what Graham Huggan identifies as “the postcolonial exotic.”33 With just a brief comment from Chila, Syal confronts this tendency to romanticize and commodify the East as a luxury product that exists for the benefit of western consumers. “‘Loove your outfit, by the way. This stuff is really in at the mo. Is it D K N Y ?’ Chila looked down for a moment. ‘No, Bimla’s Bargains, Forest Gate, I think’.”34 Syal refuses to fall into the trap of romanticizing the ‘content’ contingent of this ‘trinary’ relationship. Chila is portrayed as unselfconsciously ironic throughout the narrative, 31

Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 12. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 33. 33 For a detailed account of this phenomenon, see Graham Huggan’s groundbreaking study The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 34 Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 53. 32

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which eventually reveals her to be neither as thick nor as nice as had been previously intimated by the progression of events within the text. It’s a good job that I’m thick, I reckon, because my world is small, tidy and hovered and I like that [. . . ] So I got myself the job at Leos on the check-out [. . . ] and I was good at it. I’m good with people [. . . ] especially the old Indian ladies who know I’ll let them prod the aubergines for freshness without glaring at them and chat to them in Punjabi or Swahili [. . . ] All life is in that supermarket […] and […] I knew I’d found my place.35

That conversational fluency in three languages should be considered an outstanding achievement in any circle appears to be lost on Chila, who is comfortable with a self-constructed identity characterized more by flunking out of school than by her extraordinary cultural savvy. Although at first Chila appears to represent the most traditional – and the most mature – element within the second-generation characters within Life Isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee, she becomes by the last chapter the most radical. By contrast, Sunita is portrayed as a vibrant, angry political activist who conveniently delineates the boundaries of the expected status quo for ‘nice’ British Asian girls by her rebellious verbal tirades against Asian men who, for revenge, spend their time pursuing and “shagging the women of [the] oppressors.”36 Suresht Renjen Bald’s previously mentioned assertion that British Asians are engaged in a struggle to counter British constructions of their identity is clearly illustrated by an episode that reveals a crucial incident in the formation of Sunita’s own identity. I’d had one boyfriend before [. . . ] but I got bored with having to explain stuff all the time. How come my parents came over here? What was the dot on the forehead? Why was my skin so beautiful? I felt like his social worker, not his girlfriend.37

This incident specifically outlined for Sunita the cultural stereotype she loathed – the interpreter of cultural difference. She wholeheartedly rejects the notion of a socially constructed identity in which (in the words of Connelly) “my identity is what I am and how I am recognised rather than what I choose, want or consent to.”38 In her blatant rejection of this ‘exoticized’ educative role of societally prescribed ‘Asianness’, Sunita instead employs her hard-won agency and chooses a path that horrifies the first generation. She becomes angry and 35 36 37 38

Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 32 – 33. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 85. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 84. Roger Bromley, Narratives for a New Belonging, 144.

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bitter, questioning conservative adult authority and rejecting the traditional path of marriage and children. Yet the ease with which Sunita gives up her law studies, protest marches, and Doc Martens for a shalwar kameez that resembles a “map of motherhood, marked by handprints, chocolate streaks and a recent vomit stain which bloomed from her breast like some damp crusty flower”39 is understandably problematic. Throughout the narrative, Sunita’s character provides a critique of marriage and of the ‘good’ behaviour expected of second-generation British Asian girls. Four weeks before my finals was not the ideal time to blow both our grants on a quiet visit to a suburban clinic. Yellow wallpaper. Isn’t that the title of a book? It’s what I remember most about that place. That and the gas mask coming down like a slap [….] If you can’t be good, be careful. My old village neighbour trilled that at us as we trooped off to school. I didn’t manage either, did I?40

This reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper (1890) locates Syal’s interrogation of the ‘normality’ of patriarchal domesticity in a society where young women are meant to have both choice and agency. Regardless of the rebellion of the youthful second generation, over time they become nearly as traditional as the first generation. As the ‘depressed’ contingent of the ‘trinary’ model of opposing factors within Syal’s narrative, Sunita serves primarily as a contrast to Chila. Sunita introduces tension in order to explode the accepted notion of the passivity of South Asian females. In an attack on the exploitation of the ‘exoticized’ cultural hybridity of British Asian girls, Syal introduces the Tania character. Tania appears to be a self-sufficient career girl who is shown to function independently of her British Asian roots. Yet, in true Machiavellian fashion, she conveniently calls upon the cultural marketability of her ethnic heritage whenever it suits. Searching for that cutting-edge subject that will make her reputation as an ‘ethnic’ filmmaker, “she scrolled through her proposal ideas: the new Asian underground music scene, the Harley Street scam in replacement hymen surgery for Asian and Saudi women, the balti kings of Birmingham.”41 The representation of Tania’s character as a second-generation filmmaker ironically facilitates her central textual role: that of an objective witness to the inconsistencies within the British Asian community from which she stems. By making an unsentimental documentary film about marriage that unflatteringly features 39 40 41

Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 14. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 88. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 61.

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her best friends’ seemingly solid relationships, Tania alienates herself from the very support network she will most need when crisis hits: her own secondgeneration friends who have known and loved her since childhood. Tania herself takes on the characteristics of a symbolic film camera, as she unemotionally documents, without any sense of community loyalty, the contradictory nature of a hybrid culture. This clearly reflects Victor Shklovsky’s premise that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’.”42 Through her film, Tania becomes a defamiliarized narrator, used by Meera Syal as a literary tool for unsentimentally deconstructing painful discrepancies within the represented life experiences of contemporary second-generation British Asians.

Conclusion That second-generation British Asian migrant youngsters occupy such central textual roles within these two novels indicates the usefulness of such socially and culturally hybrid characters as literary tools. Their dual-cultural perspectives offer myriad possibilities for defamiliarizing unflattering aspects of both the dominant and the immigrant cultures. In addition, their lack of a mature, adult perspective affords their creators a socially acceptable forum for critiquing the (often racist) dominantly white cultural hegemony. Representations of second-generation youth within these novels deconstruct the idealistic notion of the fluidity of their developing socio-cultural identities, highlighted by the racist stasis of a dominantly white fictional Britain. These novels shift the focus from a concern with national identity into a space of what Laura Moss calls an “everyday hybridity,” in which the concerns of the individual – in a childish way – take precedence over the larger concerns of the migrant community. This fictional hybridity arguably suggests a greater strength in adapting to the host culture than in attempting to maintain the vestiges of an impossibly pure original culture within an alien environment. Yet from these novels it is clear that the arena for struggle has dramatically shifted from a simple cultural binary of ‘insider/ outsider’ to a far more complex yet far more mundane ‘us’. It is the youth within these novels that carry the burden of anthropomorphizing these changes. It is interesting to note that Tollington, the fictional location of Anita and Me, does not appear to shift in any way; rather, it is Meena Kumar herself who develops a new sense of self and of the privileges of her British and Indian dual heritage. Of the trio of protagonists within Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, it is only Tania whose Indianness becomes the key to her epiphanic identity-crisis. Within each of these 42

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 20.

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characterizations, it is clear that the social concerns have shifted from the global to the local. Both novels at first glance appear to fall neatly within the Bildungsroman genre. However, I have argued that Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee demonstrates Meera Syal’s rebellion against the genre. This novel not only introduces three equally important protagonists but, more importantly, it also breaks through the glass age-ceiling of adolescence, as these children are not preserved in their early teens but revolt by growing up. Anita and Me and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee represent a quietly subversive new path for British literature. These novels not only interrogate British society but also significantly contribute to fictional discussions of the contemporary nature of postcolonial Britishness. WORKS CITED Bald, Suresht Renjen. “Negotiating Identity in the Metropolis: Generational Differences in South Asian British Fiction,” in Writing Across Worlds, ed. Russell King, John Connell & Paul White (London: Routledge, 1995): 70–88. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). ——, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000). Cox, Michael W. “Interpreters of Cultural Difference: The Use of Children in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Fiction,” South Asian Review 24.2 (2003): 120–32. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Kumar, Amitava. Bombay / London / New York (London: Routledge, 2002). Modood, Tariq. Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship (Stoke-onTrent: Trentham Books, 1992). Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1988). ——. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1982). Schick, Irvin. The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999). Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique” (1917), in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988): 15–30. Singh, Sujala. “Postcolonial Children: Representing the Nation in Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa and Shyam Selvadurai,” Wasafiri 41 (Spring 2004): 13–18.

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Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: Ohio State U P , 2004). Syal, Meera. Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1997). ——. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (London: B C A , 1999).

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Is ‘Sharing Places’ Viable in a Postmodern World Order? Salman Rushdie’s Novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet

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of The Ground Beneath Her Feet is concerned with the experiences of three protagonists who have decided to cast themselves adrift into the wide world from the cultural certainties of their respective families in India in order to pursue their artistic careers. Ormus Cama, the composer of rock ’n’ roll music, is a hybrid product of Indian and Western popular musical traditions. By choosing an unconventional career of a rock ’n’ roll musician he is rebelling against his parents’ conventional Indian Parsi culture based on the orthodox principle of Zoroastrian religion. Vina Apsara, the daughter of Indo-American mixed parentage,1 has become a highly successful Western pop singer who often sings music composed by Ormus. Vina, at one stage as a child, goes to India to live with her uncaring Hindu uncle and aunt – the Doodhwalas – who turn her out for her wayward American teenage behaviour. Vina then finds shelter with the Muslim-convert family of V.V. Merchant and his wife Ameer and son Umeed – alias Rai. When Vina returns to the U S A as a pop singer, both Ormus, who is in love with her, and Rai, now a freelance press photographer and her unrequited lover, follow her to the States. The three protagonists, Ormus, Rai, and Vina, have become drifting strangers in the West. The story is narrated as a running commentary by Rai, a keen observer of the twists and turns in the lives of the two pop artists.

1

HE STORY

Vina’s father is of Indian origin and her mother is an American. Early in Vina’s life her parents were separated because of marriage breakdown.

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In the novel, Rushdie’s Bombay stands as a metaphor for the global metropolis – as his narrator describes it, “a metropolis of many narratives […] discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies” and “to push and shove to find our way through, or out.”2 But the eventual repositories of the crowded stories of human beings, according to the narrator, are “the sunken graveyards, the layered uncertainty of the past” (54). The narrator continues: “The gaps in the earth through which our history seeps and is at once lost, and retained in metamorphosed form. The underworlds at which we dare not guess” (54). In these comments, the narrator seems to critique the Cartesian certainty with which human beings write the history of their civilization which they intend to last for eternity but which ultimately metamorphoses into the testimony of oblivion and ruination in the catacomb of fossils. It is in this postmodern / postcolonial world of global capitalism and communication systems that conduct inter-cultural and -personal relations in the presence of migrant stranger from the Third World, the issue of sharing places in the West becomes very complex. It involves sharing national space, resources, and power. It is a question of conflicts between the rights and status of what Zygmunt Bauman in “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers” calls the “disembedded” individuals to influence events that affect their lives and the embedded power of the establishments in Western metropolises. These disembedded individuals,3 as migrants to a country with cultures different from their own, are often considered as strangers and transgressors because their cultures are unfamiliar to the host population. This compels the migrants to form disparate units, reflecting the cultures of their country of origin, vying for their share of the host nation’s space and resources, which invariably results in political contestations. To these fragmented cultural groups is added another group of strangers, mostly indigent dropouts, who incessantly challenge the established social order. The national and global social situation is further complicated when individuals also belong to different occupational and recreational groups, each with its own distinctive cultural code. However, the affiliation of the members to these groups is constantly shifting, as they forsake their attachment to previous sub-cultures. The problem is twofold. One is, on the one hand, that of

2

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Vintage, 2000): 52. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Having uprooted themselves from Indian cultural background, the two protagonists of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Ormus and Rai, are now exiles in the U S A and therefore, according to Bauman, are “disembedded.”

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“identity and difference in a globalized world,”4 and, on the other, the issue of “making and unmaking stranger.”5 Both of these problems operate simultaneously on society’s ability to resolve conflicts and share places with various peripheral autonomous groups and individuals. In the first model, Alberto Melucci addresses the problems of the multiple identities of individuals and groups that make individual identity amorphous and constantly ‘metamorphosing,” and asks on what principle they are to share places without conflict. In the second model, Zygmunt Bauman sees solutions in the present world situation if everybody is ‘disembedded’ from his/ her social milieu and becomes a ‘stranger’. Rushdie, himself as a disembedded migrant, attempts to explore the predicament of strangers like his protagonists in Western society. Before I consider the positions of Rushdie’s three protagonists as strangers in the West, particularly in the U S A , I need to look at the present structure of Western society, in which, according to Melucci, “salvation is no longer guaranteed by historical destiny,” because the “rocky coastline upon which the ship of western nationalism has been wrecked” has also wrecked “its claim to absolute truth and its will to supremacy.”6 In this fluid situation that creates social tensions, the presence of immigrant strangers generates among the host communities suspicion of and hostility towards the newcomers. Significantly, in Melucci’s analysis, a nation is not necessarily composed of a homogeneous indigenous population, but is fragmented into various sub-cultural groups without much inner coherence. In that condition, the power of the nation seems to reside in an invisible group (as will be illustrated from Rushdie’s novel later) which projects an apparent unity of national purpose from under a symbolic banner around which the population is invited to rally in order to counter, as Bauman points out, the uncertainty that is a “permanent and irreducible” condition of the postmodern world.7 Even though all societies produce strangers, according to Bauman’s analysis, strangers in the postcolonial world of what Rushdie calls “the migrating age” are those who do not wholly “fit the cognitive, moral or aesthetic map of the world” in question. Rushdie’s protagonists are such strangers who, by introducing into their host country a

4

Alberto Melucci, “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London & New York: Zed, 1997): 58–69. 5 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London & New York: Zed, 1997): 46–57. 6 Melucci, “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” 67. 7 Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 50.

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new brand of rock ’n’ roll music hybridized with Eastern content, inevitably obscure the boundaries of its “cognitive, moral or aesthetic map.”8 In such a postmodernist view of the world when the strangeness caused by metamorphosis is the norm, one could ask: why clothe civilization with absolutist ideologies? As Rushdie’s narrator asks, why should we then, as in India, be obsessed by “place, belonging-to-your-place, knowing your place” (55)? Rai, Vina, and Ormus “came loose” by acting contrary to this obsession. For them, besides “the great struggles of man – good /evil, reason / unreason, etc” – as Rai says – “there is also that mighty conflict between the fantasy of home and the fantasy of away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey’” the never ending journey through strange places among strangers. In Rushdie’s literary world, if one has the language to communicate with humanity, like the songs of Ormus and Vina, to “cross all frontiers, even the frontiers of people’s hearts” (55), then, as the narrator argues, “perhaps you believe all ground could be skipped over, all frontiers would crumble before the sorcery of the time” (55). So, “off we go,” as Rai declares, “beyond family and clan and nation and race, flying over the minefields of taboo, until you stood at the gateway, the most formidable of all doors […]. At the frontier of the skin” (55). Rushdie’s metaphor of the Orpheus myth here seems an apt illustration of our earthly existence, which is not eternal but solitary and transient. In this myth, the soul of Eurydice, the lover of Orpheus, is carried across the mythical river Styx, rowed by the boatman Charon. Orpheus fails to bring her back from the underworld. Thus, according to Rushdie, our stories end up in “sunken graveyards” (54). If all societies accept Rushdie’s view of human existence, as presented by his narrator, then no internecine conflicts, such as between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, Shiaites and Sunnis in the Islamic world or Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, make any sense. According to Bertrand Russell,9 the philosophy of Orphism is also a battle of liberalism against extremism. It appears that Rushdie is also implying his own struggle as a liberal writer in a world of fanatics, like the Maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces for his liberal interpretation of Bacchism. Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology reminds us that “passion is tyrannical and enslaving.”10 When individuals forsake their passion for identity which is often festooned by religious dogmas, according to Rushdie’s narrator, they begin to see that their superhuman progenitors “shrivel into more or 8

Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 47. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1946; London: Routledge, 1995): 37. 10 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. & intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie, 1967; tr. 1976; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1997): 38. 9

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less unimpressive men and women.” The narrator continues, “The gods we worship, we discover, are not different from ourselves” (58). For, the word [god], as the narrator says, “sounds like a way of disposing of emotion. It was a place to put something that had no place else to go” (17). What Rushdie seems to be suggesting here is that when human beings are overwhelmed by the emotion of fear of uncertainty they passionately seek protection in what they believe to be their gods. But the narrator’s rationalism tells him that such passions are the causes of most internecine conflicts, since faiths define what Bauman terms the “cognitive, moral and aesthetic map” of society. If the only solution for sharing places in our present planetary condition is to believe that every person is a stranger and the world is a stage where each individual needs to negotiate with other strangers for his / her identity, the practical difficulty of such an exercise is likely to be immense. The history of postcolonial responses to such heterogeneity has been problematic, because in many countries to resolve conflicts between intersecting multicultural /multiethnic identifiable groups by a policy of distinction has been a failure. In many pluralistic societies the concepts of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicism have given rise to cultural and ideological conflicts, encouraging political tendencies of one group attempting to dominate over other minority groups.

Some Possible Models for Resolving Cultural Conflicts In order to formulate a politics of non-hegemonic resistance with a view to respecting the intersecting particularities of multiple identity positions, we can turn to Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg politics to begin with. Cyborg, as Haraway explains, “is a struggle against unity-through-domination or unitythrough-incorporation [that] […] undermines all claims to an organic or natural standpoint,”11 for in cyborg politics the assumption is that all group cultures are equally valid. The question, therefore, is how an individual living in an age of heightened reflexivity and enmeshed in multiple bonds of belonging in a proliferating number of symbolic worlds is to choose which identity to assume permanently. If the ordering state is to decide it for individuals, then it could be enforced, based on ‘the principle of incommensurability of different cultural forms’ and thus establish the link between racism and culture.12

11 Pnina Werbner, “Introduction” to Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbne & Tariq Modood (London & New York: Zed, 1997): 8. 12 Hans–Rudolf Wicker, “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London & New York: Zed, 1997): 34.

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Rushdie’s model of individuals who “come loose” from the restraints of pre-given identity, like his protagonists in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, echoes the one that Zygmunt Bauman argues for: “in the new experience of self-effacement the identity-building and the construction of order by the state lose meaning.” The nature of individual and group identities is such, as Bauman’s analysis shows, that “the difference which sets the self apart from the non-self, and ‘us’ from ‘them’, is no longer determined by the preordained shape of the world by command from high, but needs to be constructed and reconstructed.”13 Thus today’s strangers, as Bauman concludes, are both instrument of this process of construction and its by-products. They, therefore, by individualizing the process of identity-building, replace the universalist essentialism which is at first exercised by the state in its zeal for order, and then, in postcolonial mode, by ethnic groups and tribes. Rushdie illustrates, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, these tendencies of cultural groups to polarize by citing the history of modern societies beginning as tribes (343). His protagonists escape from their respective tribal societies when they declare, “off [we] go, off your turf, beyond family and clan and nation and race” (55). In Bauman’s view, it follows that individual freedom should transcend national and ethnic/tribal limitations and should be based on the universal right to choose and with it “ultimately individual responsibility for that choice.”14 “The chance of human togetherness, sharing common ground,” Bauman argues, “depends on the rights of the strangers, not on the question of who – the state or the tribe – is entitled to decide who the strangers are.” This seems a radical advance from Haraway’s concept of cyborg politics. However, Bauman’s idea appears a utopian ethical framework of individual choice and responsibility. But does it seem feasible in the present postCold War world for Rushdie’s protagonists who have already “come loose” from all essentialist restraints? Ormus Cama and Vina Apsar, now residents of the art world of rock ’n’ roll, and Umeed Merchant, a freelance photographer of the artists, are all strangers in the U S A . This is their strange world of ‘late capitalism’ of Fredric Jameson’s description.15 In it, colonialism has metamorphosed into neocolonialism or neo-imperialism, as Niall Ferguson16 suggests of the superpower, the U S A , whose cultural pre-eminence marches inexorably. Ormus and Vina have accepted responsibility for their choice of 13

Zygmunt Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 54. Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 56. 15 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London & New York: Verso, 1992): xxx. Further: “the development of the cultural forms of postmodernism may be said to be the first specifically North American global system” (xx). 16 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2005): 5. 14

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the stage for their musical career. In their decision to move to America they have found themselves not only as strangers sharing places with millions of other strangers but also as sharing with the fans their artistic perceptions of the reality of this postmodern world as well as their feelings about the injustices of the world’s unequal sharing of power. Ormus’s responsibility as a composer is therefore to his music and what it communicates to his audience whose hopes and fears he wants to articulate. For a stranger, Ormus’s musical theme is audacious because it criticizes U S A ’s Vietnam War and at the same time finds a resonance with the country’s large section of youths who are rebelling against their government’s foreign policy. In “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” Melucci argues that the individual choice as a stranger is a freedom that carries with it the burden of responsibility for the self-identity one chooses as well as the effect of that choice on other individuals. In Ormus’s case, it is his artistic responsibility to present an un-embellished truth about the reality of this world or all worlds as he perceives them. When the Negro spiritual singer Voight asks Ormus about his colour, Ormus replies, “Can’t we get beyond, […] under our skins” (375). For Ormus, humanity resides below the skin, as he sees it, “At the frontier of the skin wild dogs patrol” (375). In Voight’s opinion, Ormus is “the boy that sings about frontiers […], about going to the edge and crossing over” (377). Ormus has gone to the edge of his Indian society and crossed over the frontier of strangeness into a strange country in order to exchange and share his individual culture and crazy ideas (according to the narrator) with other strangers. In his process of translation Ormus, by challenging the ideology of American neo-imperialism, has “acquired powerful enemies” (380). As the narrator observes, the vested interest of U S war industry is uneasy about Ormus’s “Peace Ballads” and his outpouring of fury in his “Quake Album” (380). The military-industrial capitalists who benefit from America’s involvement in the Vietnam War wish that “someone should shut those uppity bigmouths once ‘n’ for all” (380; author’s italics). Ormus’s choice to “come loose” and become a protest musician has imposed on him the responsibility to voice the disenchantment not only of American youths but also youths all over the world who disapprove of U S A ’s Vietnam atrocities. Perhaps Ormus as a migrant is stretching America’s hands of hospitality too far! So his American musical agent, Yul Singh, reminds Ormus that “A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host’s best rug” (381). Singh cautions Ormus that “these are […] sensitive times, people [in authority] are touchy, skinless, you may be giving them too much truth […]. But you should keep under control your crazier sentiments” (382).

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Melucci reminds us that, in this society of highly individual consciousness, “reality is reflected and represented in a multitude of languages.”17 In the world, constructed out of images, as the narrator says, “we are no longer able to distinguish reality from the reality of the image.” If one is in control of the instrument that produces the image and relays it to home television screens, it is within the controller’s power to break down “the barriers between the world of dreams and the waking world” (388). In such a situation it is easy to project the power of nightmares to rule people’s lives. How could society be protected from manipulative powerful groups if highly reflexive individuals lack the defensive mechanism in such a world? Individuals like Ormus could only give expression to his vision of the forces that exercise immense power with no tolerance of dissent. The extent of this power is brought home to Ormus when a phone call from somebody in U S authority, known as Michael Baxter, to Yul Singh warns the composer of the undesirable content of his lyrics. Baxter’s words are, “We have some concern about certain lyrical content. There is no question of infringing any individual’s First Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand it correctly is not a US citizen” (381). So, don’t “piss on the host’s best rug.” This implies a state of paranoia among those in authority who are conducting an unpopular war in Indochina with a bunker mentality and dissimulation. The narrator therefore asks: “If all verities suddenly failed, could we survive the force of the event? Ought we to be building bunkers, arming ourselves, donning badges that identify us as fellow member of this reality and the feared (perhaps soon to be hated) other?” (389). Melucci’s picture of individuals enmeshed in multiple bonds of belonging as a consequence of proliferating social positions makes its appearance in Ormus’s vision of a post-Cold War world. As Rushdie’s narrator observes, in such a world “each of us has alternative existences in the other continuum”; therefore the question is “which of our possibilities will live on, which will disappear?” (389). Melucci asks the same question: We are subjected to mounting pressure to change, to transfer, to translate, […] into new codes and new forms of relations, […], the traditional coordinates of personal identity (family, church, party, race, class) weakens. It becomes difficult to state who we are: the question is ‘Who am I?’ (61)

Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet raises the same problem, that the multiple experience of the self obliges us to abandon any static view of identity and examine the “dynamic process of identification.”18 In the present 17 18

Melucci, “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” 61. “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” 69.

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world of multiple experience, can one really choose, as Melucci believes, and “come loose” at the same time? The experience of Ormus questions such a belief. In Ormus’s vision, the picture he sees of the world’s reality is this: It’s not up to you no more, you can’t choose if it is peace or war, just can’t make choices any more, your nightmare has come come true; […] when you don’t know wrong from right, or blind from sight or who to fight, […], so Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, as all the clocks refuse to tick, the end of history is in view. The earth begins to rock and roll, its music dooms your mortal soul, and there’s nothing baby nothing you can do. ’Cause it’s not up to it’s not up to it’s not up to you. (389–90).

If the end of history is in view, how can individual choices determine the course of history, even when, as Melucci concedes, the historical destiny of Western civilization is shown to be a figment of imagination? If the world is inhabited by “come loose” strangers, then they are, according to the narrator, “disenfranchised” in the present system of order-building states (390). Paradoxically, despite the overwhelming antagonism of the only superpower against his message, Ormus apparently has the freedom to discharge his responsibility as an artist. But should he then arrogate to himself the authority to be critical of the indifferent world, and berate the profligacy with which the “New World squanders its privileges,” its “hedonism” (391), by voicing his nihilistic message? Rushdie’s narrator now fears that we “may be losing our grip on our humanity. When we finally let go, what’s to stop us from turning into dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, jackals, hyenas, wolves?” (391) The serious question for global civilization is: “What’s to stop us from sliding, as darkness falls and (as in the Orphic hymn to Night) terrible necessity rules over all?” (391; author’s italics). This is an apocalyptic vision of the future of the world dominated by global capitalism within the subtle ideology of democracy and freedom which nevertheless will increasingly be inhabited by a disenfranchised mass of citizenry. In addition to this, as Ormus’s song describes, the worlds of the possessed and the dispossessed seem uncontrollably “in collision, two universes tearing into each other” and “destroying each other in the effort” (390). How should humanity avert the catastrophe which Rushdie’s narrator prognosticates for this historical moment of late modernity? What are our choices when they are not up to us, according to Ormus? Melucci’s answer to this predicament for humanity is “a hope for a meaningful human existence, reasonable in coexistence and in the experience of our limits.” For Melucci, if “values no longer bear the seal of the absolute

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truth, their only foundation lies in [human] capacity for agreements.”19 This shifts the responsibility for choice to individuals, “acknowledging,” according to Malucci, the “man-made character and temporal boundaries” of criteria and values that guide our choices. For Melucci, the conclusion is that, for individuals as well as the species as a whole, this means accepting a finite existence and the possibility of change. The politics this entails is what Melucci terms one of “the ‘new’ social movements” – “eminently personal politics, rooted in a profound need of the inhabitants of a global world to exist as autonomous individuals, capable of respect and communication.”20 It seems to evoke the portrait of Rushdie’s protagonist, Ormus, who, as a stranger, is characterized by a culture of “auto-couture” (95) determined by his own choice of what suits him best. Rushdie therefore sees in such individual autonomy his notion of the demythification of “divine paternity” (58). Language, culture, and myth, which together give meaning to social architecture, seem to invest human existence with an air of permanency. But this permanency is denied to an individual, like Ormus, who drifts as a stranger. In Rushdie’s view, this sense of permanency is an illusion, because, as his narrator argues, with the experience of the reality of life individuals begin to realize that their once superhuman progenitors “shrivel into more or less unimpressive men or women. Apollo turns out to be Oegrus, god and Joseph the carpenter end up being one and the same. The gods we worship, we discover, are not different from ourselves” (58). Thus translated into human terms, as the narrator argues, human beings use language to create the image of the eternal divine to which they are tethered with an inflexible leash and confined within defined boundaries. By demythifying human identity out of the archaic idea of culture, as Rushdie suggests in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the differences which iprompt societies to construct barricades against the influence of other civilizations can be dismantled. But to avoid the anarchy of chaos which the Radical Right fears will issue from such iconoclastic revolution, Melucci suggests a new ethic of individual responsibility and obligation. It is based on the understanding that human history has limits and therefore the notion of its eternity is an illusion that must be dispelled. Rushdie’s narrator points out that Michelangelo believed that the figures of his Titans lay impressed within the lumps of Carrara marble and therefore it was the artist’s duty to release them (63). Michelangelo also “sculpted the David simply removing everything in the stone that was not David” (63). Likewise, to discover true human identity, it is the artist’s responsibility to banish all dissimulations of language, and perhaps accept 19 20

Melucci, “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” 67. “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” 68.

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Hans–Rudolf Wicker’s view that “cultures and ethnic groups as actual, autonomous totalities do not exist or at least no longer exist.”21 Wicker’s view of the present situation of global societies complements Rushdie’s critique of the outdated notion of society as a “group of microorganisms grown in a nutrient substance under that controlled conditions” of illusory myths (95). In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vina and Ormus “come loose” from their respective cultural bondages of “religion, language, prejudices, demeanours, the works” (95) and negotiate their existence piloted by their individual auto-couture or auto-culture. In their existence as strangers lies their capacity to accept all cultures as valid and hybridize them in their rock ’n’ roll music, which is also a gift of American popular culture to the world. Rushdie’s notion of “auto-couture” seems to resemble Wicker’s view of “culture as the ability to take meaningful intersubjective action.” Wicker sees “the concepts of culture that face up to contemporary realities will no longer be preoccupied with the eternal and unchanging, and will make room for change as an implicit aspect of culture.”22 The suggestion Rushdie and Wicker make is that individuals as strangers, in changing their dispositions, live among other strangers and by agreement share places. Perhaps the feasibility of this world-view abides with international migrant artists like Ormus, but the unmooring of ordinary individuals whose very existence is sustained by their immediate communities with their culturally determined morality, however diffused, and aspirations becomes problematic. The question is how to think global and act local when the model Ormus exemplifies might not be a prescription for people who have to deal with life’s day-to-day problems. That the world has begun to think global and act local is so dramatically revealed in the international humanitarian response to the recent Indian Ocean tsunami disaster through the collective actions of local communities. If such human reaction in sharing grief, sympathy, and resources is not a transient phenomenon, then it constitutess an embryonic model for a world in which individuals and groups are not islands in themselves but, as strangers, share the same planet and thus devise the means to share it equitably and justly. In the context of what the narrator of The Ground says, “The world is what it is” (184), Ormus, as a stranger begins to think that “the world has veered sideways off its track,”, like a “runaway freight train,” “banging about out of control, upon a great iron web of switched points” (184). The narrator asks whether this is a sign of “a broken, altered time?” (184). If the “world were 21 22

Hans–Rudolf Wicker, “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” 36. Wicker, “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” 38.

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metamorphosing unpredictably, then nothing could be relied upon any more. […]. How to find moorings, foundations, fixed points […]?” The paradox for Ormus is that, having “rejected the unknowable” (184), he is now “plagued by the unknown” (184) such as the tsunami disaster. Even as a stranger, perhaps Ormus will concede Melucci’s observation that in a “Global World” society there is a radical need to coexist, to socialize – “the singular reduced to plural, uniqueness to communication.”23 It therefore implies that in the present state of world tensions, polarities, and shadows of “doom” and as the foundation of solidarity becomes fragile, as the narrator prognosticates, strangers cannot forsake human sociability and companionship. Political disasters like Vietnam which threaten the world most, and are beyond the control of individual strangers, are caused by the present unequal distribution of power and provision of resources, accentuated by the global operation of monopolistic capital and the injustices that go with it. Mighty empires rise and fall but the march of capital’s limitless thirst for expansion continues without any recognition of national boundaries. Unlike past colonialism, the present global capitalism of the West (principally the U S A ) exercises economic influence and control over far-flung nation-states without physically occupying them. This is the ideology of what Dr Kwame Nkrumah (1965) explains as neocolonialism;24 and Robert Young (2001) marks as the “last stage of imperialism.” Individuals as strangers are powerless to change the direction of the march of global capitalism, and Rushdie’s American media mogul, Mull Standish in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, exemplifies the practitioner of all-conquering global capitalism. Rushdie sees a similarity between “Islamic conquerors bursting out of Arabia to face the might of Persia,” once a “superpower” and now “rotten and decayed” (272) and Standish’s overwhelming pop-radio onslaught in Britain. Capitalism, which took off in the post-Reformation Netherlands, released a tectonic movement of human faults, as Rushdie’s narrator contends. He draws a similarity between the earthquakes caused by the tectonic movements along the earth’s fault lines creating “the slippages, the tsunamis, the landslides, […] the smashing of the real” (327) and “human Faults” (327). In the narrator’s view, the tectonic movements of global capital have released those faults of “irreconcilability” in human character that make collisions of civilization inevitable. The narrator therefore warns that it is “too late to reconcile the earth with itself.” “We must brace ourselves for the tectonic movements” in human conduct and “for the endgames of the self-contradictory earth” 23

Melucci, “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” 66. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 46. 24

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(327). Rushdie seems to be alerting his readers through Maria’s monologue in The Ground (325–27) that on a global scale “Realities are in conflict […] At such a moment the frontier between right and wrong action also dissolves”, when the might of the superpower, guided by the ambition of its monopolistic capital, reigns supreme over world politics. Consequently, the struggle to champion the rights of strangers as marginalized individuals has less chance of success when the world is faced with the shock of the U S A ’s neocolonial tectonic movements. In the circumstances, the notion of ‘sharing places’ based on Melucci’s proposed new ethic seems mere Panglossian optimism. In Melucci’s ethic of choice, the idea of individual responsibility is paramount. Although ethically it seems attractive, Melucci’s proposition encounters immense practical complexities, since, as Rushdie’s narrator points out, “the world is what it is” (184), the “road to shared humanity” in Bauman’s view, is “twisted.”25 Rushdie argues this situation with an illustration of the case of feminism, which Vina advances within the question of trust between her and Ormus: i.e. between men and women as an “aspect of modernity, its possibility and necessity created by our release from our tribe into the self” (338). Rushdie’s narrator, in the context of the “allegedly permanent” breakdown of trust between Vina and Ormus, cites women’s denunciation of men for the “ignoble history of their sex” (338). Now the narrator sees a “neat twist”: If men were not entirely individuals (and women are not) [being socially constructed], then they can’t be held entirely responsible for their actions, since responsibility is a concept that can exist only in the context of the modern idea of the auto-determinant self. (338)

So, the narrator argues, “As products of history, as mere culturally generated automata, we’re excluded from trusting and being trusted, because trust can exist only where responsibility can be – is – taken” (338). The twisted road to ‘shared humanity’ therefore contains too many chicanes for subterfuge such that we are doomed to be denied the ethics of choice which Melucci proposes. This is because, as Bauman argues, the ruling spirit of consumerism has replaced that of neighbourhood or family – “the changing pragmatics of interpersonal relations that grant or allow the acquisition of rights and obligations.”26 Does it mean, as Rushdie’s narrator fears, “that at top speed we’re rushing back into our skins and war paint, postmodern into modern” (343)? A frightening prospect for Rushdie, whose narrator sees the dreadful “demons, the demonized , the führers, the warriors, the veils, […] the paranoias, the dead, 25 26

Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 54–55. “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 51.

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the dead” (344)! Is there an escape from this impending catastrophe? In the narrator’s view, if the idea of “sharing places” poses insurmountable practical problems and we therefore abandon it in despair, the alternative for humanity is the nightmare of fear and anger. Rushdie’s narrator now considers this alternative: “anger is evidence of our idealism” (344), as terrorist groups would claim. If this is so, then, according to the narrator, “Something has gone wrong” and “It shouldn’t be this way: Anger as an inarticulate theory of justice, which, when you act it out, is called revenge” (344; author’s emphasis). Echoing Raymond Williams’ observation that no history of civilization is free from tales of barbarism, Rushdie seems to suggest that the history is full of the tales of revenge and counter-revenge which, both temporally and spatially, have assumed a global dimension in the present world. In his “The Twisted Road to Shared Humanity” Bauman identifies the cause of this in what he terms the concept of “secondary barbarization,” which he sums up as the overall impact of the modern metropolis on the world periphery. For Bauman, this “relentless process of polarization” receives its impetus from the “unquestionable and unqualified priority awarded to the irrationality and moral blindness of market competition, the unbounded freedom granted to capital and finance at the expense of all other freedoms.” Does the postmodern world show humanity the way out of its fate as Rushdie portrays in The Ground Beneath Her Feet? By citing E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1955: 1) Wicker describes classical culture as a complex whole “which includes knowledge, religious beliefs, art, morals, laws and customs … all the skills and characteristics human beings acquire as members of a society.”27 In his view, such a concept of culture “‘opens the floodgates of uncontrolled irrationalism’ – an irrationalism implicit in the concept of multi-culturalism as well.”28 For him, it “opposes the principles of a rational order of modernity with its universal norms and values based on the equality of all human beings.” This is reflected in the ideologies of both the Radical Right and Islamic fundamentalists – as exposed in the recent B B C 1 Panorama programme on 21 August 2005.29 Wicker’s analysis of culture, uncoupled from its classical concept, thus suggests that “the existence of social and political collectivities cannot be explained through culture, but only through social and political practice.” For him, “collective action and culture are to be considered as separate fields.”30 But the problem with Wicker’s concept of culture lies, in a twisted way, in his implicit acceptance of today’s 27 28 29 30

Wicker, “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” 31. “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” 34. bbc.co.uk/panorama Wicker, “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” 41.

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world as “one single horizontally and vertically integrated field of economic and social interaction, with an uneven distribution of power among its subfields”; hence it is a liberating force from the snare of the concept of culture as the now irrelevant ‘complex whole’. The world has yet to find a way out of this complex global situation in which culture, economics, and politics are nevertheless enmeshed. Rushdie’s characters, such as Vina and Ormus, perhaps believe that by “unmooring” themselves as exiled migrants from society bonded by classical cultural concepts, their music of rock ’n’ roll has created their own little world, unassailed by external realities. But, as marginalized strangers, in the context of the U S A ’s global politics their music, despite a strong cult following among rebellious peripheral youth, is of no significance in producing fundamental change in America’s foreign policy of intervention in the affairs of other nations if its interest so dictates. The notion of “sharing places” with the “disembedded” strangers seems to have no meaning for the impersonal force of global capitalism, which lacks sensitivity towards the human need for tolerance and mutual respect in a prospective society guided by the principle of freedom of choice and responsibility. Two things, therefore, counteract such a notion: the unequal distribution of power, and the still-persistent idea of culture as a “complex whole.” This is what Rushdie’s narrator has to say on matters of individual choice: “Ignore all Cassandras.” “In the end such prophesy is useless. You just have to live your life, make your choices, move forward until you can’t”(451). Thus, in the present world of unequal distribution of resources and power, in which the classical notion of culture still persists – demanding specific relations between element, symbols, behaviours, institutions, and structures of meaning, and dominating international events – for strangers on the margin of societies controlled by ideology, the notion of sharing places on equal terms with all human beings can only be an aspiration or a utopian dream. WORKS CITED Bauman, Zygmunt. “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood (London: Zed, 1997): 46–57. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, tr. & intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatology, 1967; tr. 1977; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1997). Ferguson, Niall. Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004): 3–7. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London & New York: Verso, 1992): ix–xxii.

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Melucci, Alberto. “Identity and Difference in a Globalized World,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity (1997), ed. Werbner & Modood, 58–69. Rushdie, Salman. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Vintage, 2000). Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy (1946; London: Routledge, 1995). Wicker, Hans–Rudolf. “From Complex Culture to Cultural Complexity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity (1997), ed. Werbner & Modood, 29–45. Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

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Sharing Nation Space Representations of India

T. V IJAY K UMAR

T

sparked off by the exchange between William Dalrymple (“a Scottish-born writer obsessed by India”1) and Ramachandra Guha (a Bangalore-based historian and author) about representations of India forms the immediate context of this essay. In the first part of the essay, I briefly summarize the debate and the issues involved. The second part contextualizes the debate in the continuing discourse on representation. And in the last part, I focus on one among several recent Indian novels in English to ask a few questions about representations of India. The Dalrymple–Guha exchange began with Guha’s objection to what he calls Dalrymple’s specious thesis: “Born to privilege, you cannot understand India; reared in a humble home, you must.” Guha ridicules Dalrymple’s “elite–mofussil thesis” as nothing but a transcription of the British colonial policy of “Divide-and-Rule,” and asserts that “it is how a writer tackles his subject that is important, not where he studied or lives.” Refusing to be “lectured on what constitutes good scholarship by one whose own knowledge of this country is so superficial,” Guha attributes the media’s indulgence in Dalrymple as the arbiter of literary taste in India to a “combination of (their) arrogance and (our) deference.”2 Dalrymple’s “thesis” appeared in his review of Pankaj Mishra’s latest book of non-fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. Dalrymple HE RECENT DEBATE

1 William Dalrymple’s self-description in his letter “I Stand, Misread,” written in response to Guha’s charge; Outlook (29 November 2004): www.outlookindia.com/rants .asp?date=11/29/2004&type=magazine [accessed 8 December 2006]. 2 Ramachandra Guha, “The Djinns of Conceit,” Outlook (22 November 2004): www .outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20041122&fname=Column+Guha+%28F%29&sid=1 [accessed 8 December 2006].

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trusts Mishra’s representation more than some others because of the author’s provincial background, and his “great virtue” of knowing the mofussil India intimately: In a field still dominated by the St Stephen’s mafia and the Doon School diaspora, Mishra is an outsider. He was born in Jhansi and grew up in dusty railway colonies around Uttar Pradesh, before taking a degree in the decaying anarchy of Allahabad University. In contrast to the optimistic platitudes of a diaspora writer like, say, Sunil Khilnani – educated abroad and clearly knowing nothing of the grim reality of the boondocks of Bihar – Mishra does not lecture the world about South Asia from the sanitised safety of an East Coast campus. Instead, he writes as a man who really knows, from hard experience, the provincial India he writes about and in which he still lives for most of the year.3

Dalrymple responded to Guha’s charge by saying that he usually rather enjoys Guha’s “slightly demented diatribes against his fellow writers,” but in the present case, Guha’s sour and embittered polemics “misquotes and misrepresents” his argument. “What I argued,” he clarifies, “was that his [Pankaj Mishra’s] background made him something of an outsider in the world of Indian writing in English, which is still dominated by authors from elite backgrounds, and that it gives his writings about mofussil India a real authority derived from personal experience.”4 The sharp exchange between the two writers, Dalrymple and Guha, and the spirited participation of readers from both India and abroad in the magazine’s online discussion, is, as I see it, part of an ongoing debate about who represents India and how, and which representations are better and why.5 In the present case of Dalrymple and Guha, the representational crisis involves not only the writer’s truth-claims but also the critics’ judgement of those claims. ½¾ 3

William Dalrymple, “The Beatnik Before Christ,” Outlook (8 November 2004): www .outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20041108&fname=Booksa&sid=1 [accessed 8 December 2006]. 4 William Dalrymple, “I Stand, Misread,” Outlook (29 November 2004): www.outlook india.com/rants.asp?date=11/29/2004&type=magazine [accessed 8 December 2006]. 5 William Dalrymple’s “The lost sub-continent,” The Guardian (13 August 2005): http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1547816,00.html [accessed 8 December 2006)] continues and extends the debate by drawing a similar distinction between Indian writers in India and Indian diasporic writers (home grown authors and “‘chutnified’ authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds”) and wonders “whether it will continue to be Indians in India mediating this country in the future – or will this increasingly come to be the preserve of the diaspora.” This ‘opinion’, too, has drawn quick and wide response from readers and also writers such as Pankaj Mishra, Tabish Khair, Amit Chaudhuri, and Siddhartha Deb.

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It would be easy but pointless to see the Dalrymple–Guha exchange merely in terms of outsider–insider, or orientalist–nativist binaries6 – the mofussil– metropolis divide has wider implications for, and adds a new spin to, the continuing discourse on representations of India. Richard Crasta’s Impressing the Whites, a polemical study of the colonized mind of the Indians, formulates the divide in terms of authentic and sponsored (“real and realer”) Indian representations. Crasta’s, whose own first novel The Revised Kama Sutra revealed his intimate knowledge of a mofussil Mangalore, argues in Impressing the Whites that an Indian writer’s authenticity and his success in the West are inversely proportional: the more West-rejected you are, the more authentic Indian you become. Leela Gandhi critiques the elite underpinnings of the new, cosmopolitan Indian novel in English and its hegemonic status at home and success abroad. Rubbishing the very idea of a ‘Stephanian School of Literature’, with which much contemporary Indian fiction in English has come to be identified, she argues that, “in valorising a certain class of writer in the name of enlightened cosmopolitanism,” enthusiasts of the new Indian novel in English ignore “the creative and cultural realities of another, possibly more troubled, India.” “The voice of this ‘other’ India,” she writes, “may not be as immediately accessible or aesthetically appealing to an international readership, but surely this is a matter of taste rather than value.”7 Interestingly, in both Crasta and Gandhi English is still the language on both sides of the divide – they draw the line instead on the basis of the location and the class origin of the writer. But there is another, older, and more persistent divide in Indian writing that revolves around the very question of language. Roughly stated, the position is that Indian writing in English alone represents ‘India’, while its ‘vernacular’ counterparts represent something less than India. Salman Rushdie’s valorization of Indian writing in English, in his introduction to an anthology of Indian writing, is based on his conviction that “parochialism is perhaps the main vice of the vernacular literatures.”8 Of course, in certain forms of postcolonialism, the national easily, and seemingly painlessly, merges with the international. Hence Rushdie’s sense of relief that 6 Siddhartha Deb, in fact, dismissed Dalrymple as a “colonial burra sahib making pronouncements about a world he really doesn’t know or care about”; “Face to Face: An Interview with Siddhartha Deb,” The Hindu (3 December 2006), Literary Review. 7 Leela Gandhi, “Indo-Anglian Fiction: Writing India, Elite Aesthetics, and the Rise of the ‘Stephanian’ Novel,” Australian Humanities Review (November 1997): www.lib.latrobe .edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-November-1997/gandhi.html [accessed 9 December 2006]. 8 Salman Rushdie, “Introduction” to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997, ed. Salman Rushdie & Elizabeth West (New York: Henry Holt, 1997): xiii.

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the post-Independence Indian writer in English is “too good to fall into the trap of writing nationalistically.”9 On the other hand, Amit Chaudhuri in his “Introduction” to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature questions both the language and the location of the writer: “Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America?”10 Despite Chaudhuri’s disclaimer that his “anthology is not a riposte to any other anthology,”11 in the many ways it counters Rushdie’s anthology, it indeed is. Chaudhuri writes that after Rushdie, Indian writing in English started employing magical realism, bagginess, non-linear narrative, and hybrid language to sustain themes seen as microcosms of India and supposedly reflecting Indian conditions. He contrasts this writing with the works of earlier writers such as R.K. Narayan, where the use of English is ‘pure’ and seemingly simple but the deciphering of meaning needs cultural familiarity. He also says that Indianness is a theme constructed only in Indian writing in English and does not articulate itself in the vernacular literatures. He further adds that “the post-colonial novel becomes a trope for an ideal hybridity by which the West celebrates not so much Indianness, whatever that infinitely complex thing is, but its own historical quest, its reinterpretation of itself.”12 Rushdie’s own example and the enormous success of Midnight’s Children initiated in the 1980s a phase in Indian writing in English in which novels were written and read as national epics or allegories, and the nation was narrated in a language and in forms that were ‘international’. To remain outside the pale of the global and to write ‘nationalistically’ is, perhaps, no longer possible today when a multinational culture seems steadily to erode the customary boundaries between different national literatures and distinct literary traditions. “At the present moment,” Michael Moses argues in his book The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, “when the global interpenetration of different literary and cultural traditions proceeds at an ever-increasing pace, it seems both provincial and futile to subdivide contemporary world literature

9

Rushdie, “Introduction,” xiii. Amit Chaudhuri, “Introduction: Modernity and the Vernacular,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xvii. 11 Amit Chaudhuri, “Introduction: A Note on the Selection,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xxxiii. 12 Amit Chaudhuri, “Introduction: The Construction of the Indian Novel in English,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xxx. 10

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into warring camps or to reinstate a new cultural Manicheanism.”13 In a similar vein, Bruce King asks: Where is the centre when the world increasingly resembles brain cells continually forming groups, fragmenting and re-forming into new nervous networks? And how can we still speak of British, American or even Australian traditions in the new multi-racial, multi-cultural societies that have formed in recent decades as a result of ethnic assertions, […] the continuing large migrations of the world’s people?14

Rendering the nation space notional, Rushdie once said “there are now many, many ways of being […] an Indian. Being an Indian in India is just one of those ways.”15 It is against these notions of nation and of national literatures that a novel like John Irving’s A Son of the Circus, “set in India” (but not “about” India, Irving insists in the preface), becomes interesting. I have spoken elsewhere16 about how Irving’s novel is symptomatic of the globalization of the Indian novel in English. I mention it here specifically because it problematizes the notion of national literature, and because it brings together the two dominant tropes of representing ‘India’: the English language and Bombay cinema. But perhaps the wind has changed, and it is now possible to see writing in which the local no longer consciously aspires to be the global or even, perhaps, the national. It is, of course, also a familiar feature of globalization that it brings in its wake the reassertion of sub-nationalisms, ethnic identities, and local specificities. If Rushdie’s novel is often seen as pioneering the reading of the Indian novel as national epic, and pitchforking the nation into the internation, it would be tempting to trace the beginning of the reverse trend – from the global to the local, from the metropolis to the provincial – to Arundhati Roy’s equally famous novel The God of Small Things. After all, the heroine of Roy’s novel actually journeys from cosmopolitan America to provincial Kerala. Roy herself remarked on how unlike her contemporaries she is in terms of her education and her domicile:

13

Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (New York: Oxford U P , 1995): xii–xiii. 14 Bruce King, New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction (New York: Oxford U P , 1995): 6. 15 Salman Rushdie, “A Fantasy Called India,” India Today (Special Issue 1947–1997; 18 August 1997): 58. 16 T. Vijay Kumar, “The Global Indian Novel in English: or Who Killed Mr Lal,” paper presented at I A C L A L S Annual Conference (2002).

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I don’t feel part of a pack. I grew up on the banks of a river in Kerala. I spent every day from the age of three fishing, walking, thinking, always alone. If you read other Indian writers, most of them are very urban: they don’t have much interest in, you know, air or water. They all went from the Doon School … to St Stephen’s … and then on to Cambridge. Most of those who are called Indian writers don’t even live here: Rushdie, [Vikram] Seth, Amitav Ghosh, [Rohinton] Mistry: they’re all abroad, while I’ve never lived anywhere except India.17 ½¾

In her 1997 essay already cited, Leela Gandhi had said that the voice of the ‘other’ India, the “more troubled” provincial India, “may not [as yet] be as immediately accessible or aesthetically appealing to an international readership.” In this last section of my essay, I submit that the voice of the ‘provincial’ India is not muffled, inaccessible or aesthetically unappealing any more. Neelam Saran Gour, Kaveri Nambisan, Anita Nair, Amitav Kumar, Amita Rathore, Pankaj Mishra, Tabish Khair, Siddhartha Deb, David Davidar, Usha KR, Siddharth Chowdhury, and Rupa Bajwa are among the writers (almost all of them “home grown,” as Arundhati Roy describes herself) who have written about the ‘other’ India with authenticity and conviction.18 Of these, I will now discuss very briefly Siddhartha Deb’s novel The Point of Return, not only because, like The God of Small Things, it is the writer’s first novel but, more importantly, because its protagonist also enacts a journey in reverse. Essentially a son’s tribute to his father, Siddhartha Deb’s novel articulates larger themes of homelessness, of the making and unmaking of nation states, and of historicizing memory – themes that figure in much of postcolonial writing. But almost the first thing the reader notices about the novel is the setting: the narrative is set in one of the northeastern states of India. The setting is significant because, although English is a state language of the majority of the 17

Arundhati Roy, quoted in William Dalrymple “The lost sub-continent,” The Guardian (13 August 2005): http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1547816,00.html [accessed 8 December 2006]. 18 Some of these recent novels are: Rupa Bajwa, The Sari Shop (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004); Siddharth Chowdhury, Patna Roughcut (London: Picador, 2005); David Davidar, The House of Blue Mangoes (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Siddhartha Deb, Surface (London: Picador, 2005); Neelam Saran Gour, Speaking of ’62 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995); Tabish Khair, The Bus Stopped (London: Picador, 2004); Anita Nair, The Better Man (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000); Kaveri Nambisan, Mango Coloured Fish (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998); Ameeta Rathore, Blood Ties (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001); K.R. Usha, The Chosen (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).

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northeastern states, this region has produced few writers in English, and almost no major Indian novel in English has used it as a fictional space in any meaningful sense.19 Set in this “remote” region of mainland India’s collective imagination (in Shillong, Meghalaya though the author fights shy of actually naming it), the novel tells the story of a failure – of a father and son to belong, to strike root, to designate a place as home, as the point of return. But the telling is made difficult because it is about lives lived unheroically, and perhaps unremarkably. The narrator Babu (we never learn the full names of any of the major characters) is a journalist in Delhi retracing, both in space and time, his journey back to his ‘home town’ in the hills. In doing so, he has to deal with the life of his father, Dr Dam, as well. Dr Dam is a veterinary surgeon, who retires as the director of a veterinary department. A selfabsorbed bureaucrat, out of sync with the reality outside his office, he is most at home among his files. He is a rationalist who doesn’t blame fate for the several setbacks in his life and career. But Dr Dam’s essential identity is, as it is of Babu, that of a refugee, a “dkhar,” a foreigner. His family, like fifty thousand others, had moved during the Partition in 1947 from their ancestral home in East Pakistan to first Assam and then, in 1972, to Meghalaya, when it was carved out of Assam as independent India’s twentieth state. As a “last-ditch attempt” to shake off “the stigma of the refugee,” and to lay a claim to the country he served for forty years, Dr Dam builds a house in Silchar.20 In this house, Dr Dam hopes to find, at last, a resting place from which “he could ultimately set forth on his final journey from the same emotional space at which he had arrived fifty-six years earlier, the space some of us call home.”21 But some refugees never find a home, and they never had one. “We are a dispersed people, wandering, but unlike the Jews we have no mythical homeland,”22 says Dr Dam’s neighbour, speaking of the Bengali diaspora. And, as Babu realizes, refugees can never claim a new identity: they were defined not by what they were – that was uncertain – but by what they were not. They were Indians because they were not Bangladeshis,

19

Asked why his novels are set in the Northeast, Deb said: “Because that’s where I grew up and because no one in mainstream India writes about it. There wasn’t and still isn’t any interest in the region”; “Face to Face: An Interview with Siddhartha Deb,” The Hindu (3 December 2006), Literary Review. 20 The ‘house’ as a metonym of personal, social, and national identity, made famous in postcolonial literature by, among others, Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. 21 Siddhartha Deb, The Point of Return (London: Picador, 2002): 32. 22 The Point of Return, 215.

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Hindus because they were not Muslims, Bengalis because they were not Assamese. They clung to their language fiercely, and yet they were not really Bengali, because they spoke a dialect that aroused only amusement and derision in the real centre of Bengali culture and identity, in Calcutta.23

Geography and politics are integral to the narrative of The Point of Return, and in quiet, undemonstrative prose the novel conveys the pain of unbelonging, of yearning for a home that is always elsewhere. The novel’s emotional and experiential range may be rather limited, and its language may at times seem stiff; but it more than makes up for this through its understanding of human relationships, and its nuanced evocation of place. The rainsoaked, wind-lashed northeast India, linked tenuously by the chicken’s-neck strip to the rest of the Indian subcontinent, will surely no longer remain ‘an area of darkness’ for the reader after Siddhartha Deb’s novel. But, besides the finely etched individual stories of modest lives lived in mofussil towns, what collective story do novels such as The Point of Return tell us about the ‘other’ India? More importantly, what does the emergence of ‘the mofussil Indian novel in English’ tell us about its social class, its ‘aspirations,” and its addressivity? I believe that answers to these questions will have a bearing on the representational monopoly of the Indian novel in English in general and the national /global Indian novel in English in particular. However, instead of answers (which I do not as yet have), let me try and contextualize the questions and hazard a few generalizations. To begin with, let me repeat that, in novels like The Point of Return, only the location is small-scale and provincial, not the vision or the perspective. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August (1988) had mocked the metropolitan assumptions about the mofussil towns being sleepy backwaters, places that held no surprises; and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things shows that even the remotest parts are not immune from the effects of globalization. One of Roy’s main characters often breathes the changed air as he walks “along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.” Collectively, the mofussil Indian novels in English may, I believe, provide an answer to the question a character in English, August asks: “What is Jane Austen doing in Meerut?” In these novels, as Amitava Kumar puts it, “provincial India emerges as a place where you can find oddly unexpected details of a complex dialogue with the West.”24 It is also a place, of course, of sleazy scandals and the imaginative ways in which the World Bank and some other rich development 23

The Point of Return, 78. Amitava Kumar, Bombay–London–New York: A Literary Journey (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002): 44. 24

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agency has been conned. In short, these novels narrate stories of an India about which many of us (living in India) can say, as does a character in Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, “Yeh meri duniya ki kahani hai. Main in logo ko janta hoon” (‘This is the story of my world. I know these people’). Finally, I consider the emergence in recent years25 of the ‘local’ Indian novel in English emblematic of the changing equations of power in India – provincial Bharat not only toppling metropolitan India from its position of power but also cocking a snook at its assumed self-importance. The remarkable surge in small-town self-confidence and its aggressive expression is part of a larger, ongoing process of de-elitization and the assertion of the un/derrepresented – provicializing postcolonialism, as it were. This trend is visible in several aspects of contemporary India. In politics, smaller parties that take pride in regional, sub-regional, caste, or linguistic identities have come to wield enormous clout and play a critical role in national politics. Elite institutions such as the Indian Administrative Service have been ‘nativized’, at least in public perception, by the large influx of candidates from ‘backward’ states. Although cricket is almost a pan-Indian religion, it is only in recent years that it has been truly ‘nationalized’, with several cricketers from small towns with no cricketing history breaking into the big league and changing the ‘rules’ of the game with their unconventional flamboyance. The glamour world, too, is no longer the exclusive preserve of the sophisticated city-bred – many of today’s biggest film and television stars, top fashion models, Mr/ Miss/ Mrs Indias, some of whom went on to represent India on the international stage, have all triumphed over their provincial backgrounds and shattered the stereotypes about small-town limitations with their spectacular success. It is this resurgent, vibrant, and self-confident mofussil India that is represented by the novels discussed in this essay. These novels of the ‘other’ India thus lay claim to a legitimate share in the nation’s representational space, so often occupied entirely by the metropolitan /national / global Indian novel in English. WORKS CITED Bajwa, Rupa. The Sari Shop (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). Bhattacharjea, Aditya, & Lola Chatterjee, ed. The Fiction of St. Stephen’s (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2000).

25 The small towns in earlier Indian fiction in English, Narayan’s Malgudi being the most famous of them, were often idealized or allegorized miniatures of ‘India’ presenting national issues on a local scale. In contrast, the small towns in recent Indian novels in English are much more particularized and they seem follow their own provincial agendas which may yet sometimes, surprisingly, coincide with ‘metropolitan’ concerns.

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Chatterjee, Upamanyu. English, August: An Indian Story (London: Faber & Faber, 1988). Chaudhuri, Amit. “Introduction: Modernity and the Vernacular,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xvii–xxii. ——. “Introduction: The Construction of the Indian Novel in English,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. xxiii–xxxi. ——. “Introduction: A Note on the Selection,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. xxxii–xxxiv. Chowdhury, Siddharth. Patna Roughcut (London: Picador, 2005). Crasta, Richard. Impressing the Whites: The New International Slavery (Bangalore: Invisible Man Books, 2000). ——. The Revised Kama Sutra: a novel of colonialism and desire with arbitrary footnotes and a whimsical glossary (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993). Dalrymple, William. “The Beatnik Before Christ,” Outlook (8 November 2004), www .outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20041108&fname=Booksa&sid=1 [accessed 8 December 2006]. ——. “I Stand, Misread,” Outlook (29 November 2004): www.outlookindia.com/rants .asp?date=11/29/2004&type=magazine [accessed 8 December 2006]. ——. “The lost sub-continent,” The Guardian (13 August 2005): http://books.guardian .co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1547816,00.html [accessed 8 December 2006]. Davidar, David. The House of Blue Mangoes (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). Deb, Siddhartha. “Face to Face: An Interview with Siddhartha Deb,” The Hindu (3 December 2006), Literary Review. ——. The Point of Return (London: Picador, 2002). ——. Surface (London: Picador, 2005). Gandhi, Leela. “Indo-Anglian Fiction: Writing India, Elite Aesthetics, and the Rise of the ‘Stephanian’ Novel,” Australian Humanities Review (November 1997): www.lib .latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-November-1997/gandhi.html [accessed 9 December 2006]. Gour, Neelam Saran. Speaking of ’62 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995). Guha, Ramachandra. “The Djinns of Conceit,” Outlook (22 November 2004): www .outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20041122&fname=Column+Guha+%28F%29 &sid=1 [accessed 8 December 2006]. Irving, John. A Son of the Circus (New York: Random House, 1994). Khair, Tabish. The Bus Stopped (London: Picador, 2004). King, Bruce. New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction (New York: Oxford U P , 1995). Kumar, Amitava. Bombay–London–New York: A Literary Journey (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002). ——. Passport Photos (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000). Mishra, Pankaj. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (London: Picador, 2004). ——. The Romantics (New Delhi: IndiaInk, 2001). Moses, Michael Valdez. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (New York: Oxford U P , 1995). Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr Biswas (London: André Deutsch, 1961).

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Nair, Anita. The Better Man (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000). Nambisan, Kaveri. Mango Coloured Fish (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998). Rathore, Ameeta. Blood Ties (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001). Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things (New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997). Rushdie, Salman. “A Fantasy Called India,” India Today: Special Issue 1947-1997 (18 August 1997): 58–63. ——. “Introduction” to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, ed. Salman Rushdie & Elizabeth West (New York: Henry Holt, 1997): vii–xx. Usha, K.R. The Chosen (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).

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Exploring Boundaries The North in Western Canadian Writing

J ANNE K ORKKA

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of Canadian prairie literature, there emerges a group of writers that I sometimes think of as a troublesome trio. The members are perhaps the most prominent contemporary fiction writers in Western Canada: Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch, and Aritha van Herk. Such a label may seem slightly whimsical, but it reflects the strong ties to the western land that all three share and explore in their writing, and the fact that despite (or because of?) these ties, they have unanimously, though separately, set course for the North. My aim is to explore the treatment of place in their writing, particularly the prominent position of the Canadian North, which has claimed an important position in several of the key texts by all three authors. The scope of this article, however, requires focusing attention on a limited portion of their work: location – particularly Western Canada – is a central theme in almost any text written by members of the trio, and also their engagement with the North spreads over a number of works. My main emphasis will be on their non-fiction, where all three directly discuss a shared interest in place – particularly the Canadian North – which has shaped their writing and whose influence is also visible in their representation of the West. Especially Kroetsch’s and van Herk’s writing is strongly marked by mapping the margins and boundaries of language use and narrative structure. Consequently, their essay-writing repeatedly returns to considerations of genre boundaries and demonstrations of how they are rendered fluid and sometimes almost nonexistent. Thus it is logical that also the influences of two very distinct regions of Canada begin to intertwine in their work, even if originally they may have provided a very different incentive for writing. Although Wiebe seems to be most comfortable with the form of the novel, he joins the other two in giving priority to storytelling over genre-specific forms of narrative: both he and N MY READING

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Kroetsch have on more than one occasion approached one and the same story with tools provided by both fiction and essay.1 The trio’s shared enthusiasm about Western Canada becomes evident especially in their fiction. For example, Wiebe has questioned established prairie history, particularly its representation of the First Nations, in the novels The Temptations of Big Bear and The Scorched-Wood People (1977), as well as his most important short story, “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” (1971).2 Van Herk’s female protagonist in her first novel, Judith (1978), takes up a male enterprise, farming, in a male-dominated land. Kroetsch’s initial fame owed a lot to his early novels The Words of My Roaring (1966) and The Studhorse Man (1969), which addressed and often took apart images of traditional, agrarian Alberta and realism in prairie literature. The later works of these writers have sometimes taken the reader around the world through both the plot and the map of literary influences, but it is striking to observe how consistently the key moments in these works may nevertheless take place on the Canadian prairies. Prime examples of this are Wiebe’s The Blue Moun1

In Wiebe’s case, the story of the nineteenth-century Cree chief Big Bear has inspired the novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and the essays “On the Trail of Big Bear” and “Bear Spirit in a Strange Land (All That’s Left of Big Bear),” both in A Voice in the Land, ed. W.J. Keith (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1981): which are discussions of the process of remaking Big Bear’s story. Another similar case is the manhunt for Albert Johnson in western Arctic Canada in 1932. Johnson, an enigmatic figure whose real identity remains disputed to this day, became involved in a quarrel over traplines and wounded and killed Northwest Mounted Police officers before being killed by them. Johnson’s story is retold by Wiebe in the novel The Mad Trapper (1980), and in the 1973 short story “The Naming of Albert Johnson,” in River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (Toronto: Vintage, 1995): 74– 91. Wiebe also explores the mystery from a more contemporary point of view in the essay “On Being Motionless” (incorporated into Playing Dead) and its shorter version “On Refusing the Story” (in River of Stone, 303–20). Kroetsch has explored Johnson’s legend in “The Poem of Albert Johnson,” in The Stone Hammer Poems (Toronto: Oolichan, 1975), and in the essay collection A Likely Story (1995), which discusses both Johnson’s legend and Wiebe’s interest in it. 2 In the short story, Wiebe explores both the story of a young Cree man called Almighty Voice and an unnamed narrator’s struggle to tell that story on the basis of insufficient evidence. Almighty Voice was originally wanted for stealing a cow, later for killing R C M P officers. In the end, he was killed in a manhunt where also several of his pursuers died in 1897; his guilt for the original crime remains unclear. The narrator’s success lies in discovering that a story based on remaining evidence is distorted and cannot be imposed on the past or a well-informed understanding of the past. His observations move from the initial “The problem is to make the story” – Rudy Wiebe, “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” in The Angel of the Tar Sands and Other Stories (1971; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982): 78 – to “I am become element in what is happening at this very moment”; Wiebe, “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” 85 (emphasis in the original). The narrator’s observations of his own struggle become exceptionally direct reflections of Wiebe’s approach to writing fiction as a process strongly embedded in history.

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tains of China (1970) and Sweeter than All the World (2001), novels that trace Mennonite history from Western Europe eastwards and finally to both Americas, especially Canada. The impact of place on writing may, of course, be realized in more than one way: for example, the focus may be on a particular setting, the interaction between a place and people settled in it, or on the effect of a particular milieu on the writer’s view of the process of writing. The last option becomes crucial in Kroetsch’s consideration of his own writing career in A Likely Story: The Writing Life (1995) and van Herk’s “In Visible Ink” (1991), an essay on travelling in the Arctic and its impact on language. Kroetsch sees a tendency in prairie writing to “contrive authentic origins”3 from the prairies as a response to languages that occupy the prairie mindset but originate elsewhere – whether in the European colonial past, the traditionally dominant position of Ontario within Canada, or pressure from the cultural monolith right across Canada’s southern border. The North may remain different from the West because of its geographical distance from these perceived spheres of influence and lack of large-scale immigrant settlement that the West has experienced, but both share the problem of pressure from external discourses that attempt to root themselves in the region and, in the process, redefine its character. Wiebe has become a kind of writer-in-residence for Alberta, where he has lived almost throughout his writing career. His writing is never about framing Western experience in Eastern Canadian terms. He does resist the English / French dichotomy as irrelevant to the experience of most Western Canadians, but this famous image of the two solitudes is not central to his work. George Melnyk’s informative The Literary History of Alberta rightly calls Kroetsch “Wiebe’s literary sibling,”4 as he constantly returns to the prairies in his writing, both fiction and non-fiction. This recognition, however, must be accompanied by acknowledging Kroetsch as Wiebe’s opposite as well, a writer-outof-residence for Alberta, who hasn’t lived in the province for decades. Yet the aptly named essay “On Being an Alberta Writer,”5 written during the long absence from the province, well describes what is perhaps the most persistent geographical focus for Kroetsch’s writing. Van Herk, then, was one of the first female voices, and perhaps the most significant, to establish herself in Alberta, a land traditionally marked by male activities: its farming tradition and cowboy mythology are central to many literary representations of the province. Such imagery includes both the sympathetic re-creations like W[illiam] 3

Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1989): 82. George Melnyk, The Literary History of Alberta, vol. 2 (Edmonton: U of Alberta P , 1999): 20. 5 Robert Kroetsch, “On Being an Alberta Writer,” Open Letter 5.4 (1983): 69–80. 4

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O[rmond] Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) and works by the 1960s generation of writers (particularly Kroetsch and Wiebe) who finally distanced themselves from such imagery but still acknowledged its influence. In recounting their experience with the North, all three writers address the region as an Other that – at least initially – overwhelms their attempts at representation. They have met something that has in recent years become the centre of enquiry in discussion on ethics in literature, especially as inspired by the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas: there emerges “the possibility that I might encounter something which is radically other than myself.”6 This amply encapsulates Levinas’ main argument as elaborated in his two most important works, Totality and Infinity (1969) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1981). His goal is not to establish moral codes, but to explore the problem of contact between the subject and the Other. In the book The Ethics of Deconstruction (1999), Simon Critchley offers perhaps the best summary of what motivates Levinas, and what also becomes a central topic for ethically motivated research into literature: The ethical is […] the location of a point of alterity, or what Levinas also calls ‘exteriority’ (extériorité), that cannot be reduced to the Same. Thus […] moral consciousness is not an experience of values, ‘but an access to exterior being’.7

For the trio, the North presents itself as the most radically Other that they have ever encountered. Consequently, it challenges their ability to transform perceptions of land into narrative, which they have acquired and revised in a Western Canadian setting. With their entry to the North, they have made contact with exterior being, but that announcement alone does not provide sufficient building-blocks for narrative, fictional or non-fictional. An exposure to that exterior being requires the authors to reconsider their own perception of literary voice, particularly in the selected non-fictional works where they expose their own voice directly to the demands of the North.

6

Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1996): 142. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (West Lafayette I N : Purdue U P , 2nd ed. 1999): 5 (original emphasis). Critchley quotes from the original French-language work, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976): 409. The English translation, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, tr. Seán Hand (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1990), uses the term “external being” (293). 7

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The North in Alberta Writing Of the three writers examined here, Rudy Wiebe has perhaps made the greatest effort to transfer his interest in the North to text. For this article, a key work is his essay collection Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989), which is fully dedicated to the exploration of the North, its people and their texts, spoken or written. Wiebe’s most widely known work on the North is the novel A Discovery of Strangers (1994), a retelling of the encounter between the Native people of what is today Arctic Canada and the first overland Franklin expedition that sought to map the most northern parts of the North American continent. As mentioned above, he has also in several texts addressed the legend of Albert Johnson, a man whose true identity vanished into the Arctic, primarily in the novel The Mad Trapper (1980) and Playing Dead. Further, some chapters of his second-latest novel, Sweeter than All the World (2001),8 take its Mennonite protagonist to the Arctic. The North has especially marked Wiebe’s later career, whereas Kroetsch began his career as a novelist with But We Are Exiles (1965), a novel that partly draws on his own experience in the North. He has since returned to the topic of the North in various contexts. For this article, the essay collection A Likely Story is especially valuable, as it contemplates living in, reading, and writing the North. As for van Herk, outside the book-length works Places Far from Ellesmere and her second novel, The Tent Peg (1981), her most direct engagement with the North is the essay “In Visible Ink,” a discussion of travel in the Arctic and its impact on language and writing. One of the first – and most striking – images of the North in the works of the trio does not even require diving into a text. Van Herk’s Places Far from Ellesmere carries the subtitle “a geografictione,” and indeed emphasizes the role of landscape and geography in the formation of this blend of essay and fiction. The text moves between Edberg (a small town in rural Alberta), Edmonton, Calgary and Ellesmere Island, one chapter for each location, combining what appears as autobiographical contemplation with an exploration of place and reading existing texts in /against new geographical locations.9 The cover of the book presents a striking image of two larger objects: one suggests a representation of the northern coast of Canada and the other places an object, clearly shaped as a woman’s body, in the ocean further north. Next to 8

Wiebe has since published another novel, First and Vital Candle (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2006), which features an urban protagonist who joins a band of Ojibway in Northern Ontario. 9 For example, the longest chapter of the book, “Ellesmere, Woman as Island,” discusses travelling in Ellesmere Island and the re-evaluation of the potential and meaning of text that the place inspires. A recurring theme is reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin and allowing that text to interact with the reader’s current Arctic surroundings.

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the woman is a small clipping of the actual map of Canada, revealing a part of the country’s western Arctic archipelago. On this partly imaginary map, the woman’s shape has replaced Ellesmere Island, Canada’s most northerly land mass. The cover illustration well reflects the geographic disarray of the four narratives found inside the book as they move between rural Alberta, the province’s two largest cities and Ellesmere Island. The cover also initiates the exploration of womanhood and place that is found at the core of the narratives: “Terror of women = terror of the north. Lost in one frozen waste or another, lost to women or the wiles of Ellesmere.”10 In this imagery, the woman/ the island occupy a position of extreme remoteness and inaccessibility – but also, as all members of the trio have shown, the extreme version of the Other11 that this particular position represents arouses constant attention and curiosity, and its appeal is reflected in their approach to the formation of text. How does the exploration of the North, then, intertwine with and shape the trio’s Western Canadian sensibilities as writers? In A Likely Story, Kroetsch discusses Wiebe’s Playing Dead and writes: “Published in 1990, Playing Dead must have, at the time, seemed marginal to Wiebe the novelist. At the moment, it seems his most telling text.”12 Kroetsch makes a good point: the collection shows Wiebe the novelist on a non-fictional journey through the Arctic land and mind-set, partly laying bare his personal understanding of experience in that world – through the mediation of text, of course, but without the particular distance provided by fiction. In Wiebe, some of the first steps on a narrative journey to the North were taken in his 1970 novel The Blue Mountains of China, which is situated in various locations all over the world – 10

Aritha van Herk, Places Far from Ellesmere (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College P ,

1990): 123. 11 As Derek Attridge observes in his cogent article on the ethics of literature and the nature of the Other, this term has become overused in recent academic discourse, but it is nevertheless very useful as a description of a singular entity that is entirely new; Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” P M L A 114.1 (1999): 21–22. Despite its singularity, which may seem to propose detachment and isolation, Attridge concludes that the Other can be only “a slight recasting of the familiar,” and it is necessarily Other to something (Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics,” 22). Such a description well fits the Canadian North as the Other encountered by Wiebe, Kroetsch, and van Herk: it is a place that does not exhibit the same characteristics and cannot be described in the same terms as their native West, but, for example, both the West and the North have occupied the position of the frontier in the Canadian context. Writers living outside the North encounter something entirely new when they enter the land; in Attridge’s terms, however, that same moment marks the entry of the singular other into a relation with the self (Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics,” 22). 12 Robert Kroetsch, A Likely Story: The Writing Life (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College P , 1995): 97.

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wherever the collective protagonist, the Mennonite people, are found. The novel closes on an image of two men on a roadside in Alberta, one of them on a metaphorical, epic journey towards a better world. He has translated this into walking to a destination whose exact location remains undefined, but he has set his course for the North.13 In Blue Mountains, Wiebe is still clearly the story-maker; if he is at the centre of the voices drawn together to form the narrative – and that is where Mikhail Bakhtin places the author14 – he has hidden himself well. Playing Dead, then, is partly an account of physically travelling in the North, inspired by Wiebe’s own experience, partly of ideas about the Arctic. The book marks the point where the writer’s voice sheds disguises and becomes a narrative of its own journey. The narrative journey to the North in Playing Dead therefore becomes both factual and figurative, a structural choice also employed by Kroetsch and van Herk in their essays about the North. The region is hence not only a source for new stories, but also a space in which the writer’s voice quite consistently gives up other efforts to reconsider itself. In doing so, the trio performs exactly what Levinas proposes as the most important challenge posed by the Other: the self is required to speak in recognition of the Other.15 Further, that recognition cannot mean reducing the Other to terms immediately familiar to the self.16 If the position of either party in the encounter is to undergo revision, it must first be the self.

Looking for the North When discussing the representation of the North, it is, of course, important to define the concept of the North. This, however, proves surprisingly difficult: 13 Rudy Wiebe, The Blue Mountains of China, afterword by Eva–Marie Kröller (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995): 271. 14 Although discussing Bakhtin’s approach to the novel in greater detail is beyond the scope of this article, his views on the constant interaction of different voices or languages in a text remain a strong undercurrent in my reading of Wiebe. In one of his key works, The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin concentrates on discussing the language of the novel, and postulates that the most successful works in the genre do not show the author in control of other languages or voices in the narrative; neither does s/he appear in any one particular language level, but is, instead, found “at the center of organization where all levels intersect”; The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (1975; Austin: U of Texas P , 1981): 48–49. Wiebe does not hide, disguise or try to erase his own voice in Playing Dead in the way an author would be likely to do in fiction. He does, however, put himself in direct contact with other languages originating in the North, never claiming an ability to control them, only arranging them through his Bakhtinian position “at the center of organization” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 49). 15 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic, 1981): 77. 16 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1985): 75.

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although the north as one of the four cardinal points is absolute, it instantly becomes relative with reference to any single geographical location. Sherrill E. Grace, a notable Canadian literary critic, repeatedly returns to the ideas and meanings of the North in her work. She gives one possible definition of the North in the Canadian context, illustrating its elusive nature: North can be just north of Toronto or the pays d’en haut beyond Montreal; it can subsume the vast Northwest; it most certainly encompasses the northern halves of the larger provinces, the three territories, and the Arctic, and it can represent the entire country – Canada-as-North.17

To further illustrate the relativity of the North: as a European, I sometimes find staring at the map of Canada on my office wall very helpful. It serves as an excellent reminder of the country’s nature as a semi-continental body encompassing a multitude of landscapes, some of which I have not yet seen in person. On that map, Thunder Bay does not seem to be far from the southern border of Canada at all – it is even below the famous 49th parallel dividing the western half of the continent. Yet that region is frequently referred to as Northern Ontario. Southern Ontario, in turn, seems to have Toronto as its focal point in people’s minds, although a considerable stretch of the Ontario peninsula remains south of the city. When looked at from a comparative perspective across the Atlantic, the concept of the North becomes even trickier to handle. Among the very few relatively large cities above the 60th parallel in the world, a perfect point of comparison with the scattered Canadian communities north of the 60th parallel (with geographical locations in mind) is located in Northern Europe, by the sea at the southern tip of Finland. There, just very slightly north of the 60th parallel, one finds Turku, a city of some 170,000 people. This places Turku north of Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, but slightly south of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. Latitude, however, does not serve as a workable basis for comparison between these locations: the climate and landscape of the southern half of Finland in no way resemble Canada’s three northern territories, but, instead, areas immediately north of the Ontario peninsula and in southwestern Quebec, perhaps towards the 45th rather than the 50th parallel in those two provinces. Geographically, in the absolute sense, the Finnish city of Turku may appear to be northern – even for Canadians – but relatively speaking, for people living in that region or elsewhere in Finland, it is in the south. Such views, whether they concern places 17

Sherrill E. Grace, “ ‘ A Woman’s Way’: Canadian Narratives of Northern Discovery,” in New Worlds: Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone Literature, ed. Martin Kuester, Gabriele Christ & Rudolf Beck (Munich: Ernst Vögel, 2000): 178 (emphasis in the original).

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in Finland or in Canada, reflect what Grace calls the North’s “fundamentally created status. North is not natural, real, a geological or meteorological matter”; instead, she emphasizes its nature as “a human construct, like Canada itself” and as “a discursive formation” whose influence extends over all of Canada.18 Renée Hulan provides another angle on the representation of the North in Canadian literature in her recent study Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (2002). She makes a distinction between metaphors ranging from “the sense of mystery and the unknown expressed in the works of Margaret Atwood to the very act of writing as articulated by Robert Kroetsch” and the North “as a setting,” which naturally refers to a certain geographical location, but also, in a less concrete sense, to the North as wilderness.19 From this division it follows that the North can be treated either as a place with fairly fixed characteristics, or, in the sense of Atwood and Kroetsch, as a story, which by nature remains transmutable and not permanently bound to any single location. Hulan is highly critical of the view that the North is one of the crucial building blocks of Canadian national identity today,20 or that the North could be best understood through making it a part of national identity.21 She appropriately points out that the great majority of Canadians live near the country’s southern border and an increasing number of them have Southeast Asian or other clearly ‘Southern’ roots; hence, they may not at all share a cultural assumption about being northern. Hulan’s critical stance towards such an assumption and its building-blocks does not, therefore, seem unfounded. Yet her enthusiastic engagement with literary representations of the North and the various settings throughout Canada where her material originates suggest that the North as a story is present even where it may seem culturally and geographically distant. This aspect of the North is, therefore, both more elusive and more subtle than the North as a physical setting: the trio’s work show that it has had a significant impact on, for example, Alberta narrative, thus making its way into southern Canadian experience even for people who may remain physically removed from what they view as north. Hulan’s study of the North discusses a number of different writers and their approach to the North, but the most extensive treatment is given to Wiebe. She provides an extensive response to both Wiebe’s general enthusiasm with the North and, in particular, Playing Dead. She finds the project of the book 18

Sherrill E. Grace, Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2001): 15 (emphasis in the original). 19 Renée Hulan, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2002): 6. 20 Hulan, Northern Experience, 3–7, 27–28, 185–87. 21 Northern Experience, 15–16.

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mainly postcolonial, as “it rereads Canadian history in order to articulate an independent national identity.”22 For Wiebe in Playing Dead, that national identity stems from Canada’s ‘nordicity’; the North is “both the true nature of our world and also our graspable destiny.”23 Wiebe’s position reflects the historical status of the Canadian North: it was often seen as a potential passage to other places, not a place to stay. A famous example of this are the three Franklin expeditions between 1819 and 1847 seeking the Northwest passage. The expeditions were an embodiment of, as Kroetsch puts it, “[explorers who] were not looking for land. They sought instead a passage.”24 In A Discovery of Strangers, Franklin survives his first expedition, but the Third Franklin Expedition, in which his whole crew of over a hundred men perished, demonstrated the North as an impenetrable Other: in Kroetsch’s words, as “an obstruction, a full emptiness, an unknown which baffled their very narrative of exploration /exploitation. The center vanished into the margin.”25 Indeed, Franklin’s final expedition left little trace in the land itself: the land devoured him, erased the centre. However, the North as a story absorbed him, allowing him to become a part of its own essence, albeit a reluctant one: at that time, the archetypal explorer did not really want the North – and certainly not death in the North – only a passage. In the 1840s, the North did not allow for such things as people without a long tradition of living in the region, or without the sufficiently advanced technology available for later generations. Margaret Atwood’s observation of Franklin’s role within the North as a story well reflects his fate: “for Canadians [the word Franklin] means a disaster.”26 This may not appear to be a very flattering statement, but fortunately, as Atwood continues, “Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it.”27 As there is an abundance of them in Franklin’s disaster, his place in the North as a story remains secure. Today, in the world of different economic needs and resources, the nature of passages and what is sought in the North has changed. In Canada, the West, of course, was originally the principal occupant of the role of the frontier or the ultimate margin for Anglo-Canadian newcomers. The land was immense, and sometimes presented a forbidding climate and landscape; worst of all, it was not broken down into settlement patterns useful to these new22

Hulan, Northern Experience, 167. Rudy Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1989): 111 (emphasis in the original). 24 Kroetsch, A Likely Story, 98. 25 A Likely Story, 98. 26 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: the Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995): 11 (emphasis in the original). 27 Atwood, Strange Things, 11–12. 23

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comers. The West, however, was to become a place of unlimited possibility; it remains immense and its climate requires healthy respect, but a network of permanent, growing, newcomer settlements has been in place for more than a century. By comparison, the North still continues to be more clearly marked by Aboriginal communities. The network of connections between communities – traditionally perhaps rivers, but today especially highways, railways and oil pipelines – that marks the cartographic presentation of the land in the western provinces is hardly visible. As Grace observes, “the idea of a northern eldorado or Eden has never been as convincing or unambiguous in Canada […] as the idea of a western paradise.”28 Wiebe, however, seeks to peel away existing labels that do not originate in the North in an attempt to acknowledge the persistent otherness of the region without an immediate domestication: “I desire true N O R T H , not P A S S A G E to anywhere.”29 As a concept, ‘true’ North is, of course, just as slippery and elusive as the North itself. However, what seems more important than inventing objective terminology for subjective interpretation is analysing the nature of a writer’s engagement with a particular region. Despite her rejection of a plausible northern national identity in Canada, a country where too much of undeniably Canadian experience claims to be entirely removed from the Arctic, even Hulan embraces the cultural and historical insight of Wiebe’s works on the North.30 Thus there seems to be no dispute over the question of whether the North is important in the Canadian context: it may be distant for most Canadians, but it cannot be labelled un-Canadian for that reason alone. Whether Wiebe can find a true North remains undecided: there remains a possibility of imposing yet another Southern label on the North while denouncing others. The search for a particular kind of understanding of the North cannot, however, mean erasing his more Southern self. What he seems to be after parallels the core of Levinas’ ethical thinking, the importance of recognizing the existence of the Other:31 whether or not he can find it, Wiebe is drawn towards an invisible point of transformation where the self does not perish, but where it is not immediately distinguishable from its surroundings, either. A northern analogue of such a process seems to be described in an Inuit poem by Higilaq recorded in 1900, a text that in its description of movement erases the boundary between desire and action. Wiebe quotes the poem to preface one of the chapters of Playing Dead: 28

Sherrill E Grace, “Articulating North,” in Literary Responses to Arctic Canada, ed. Jørn Carlsen (Lund: Nordic Association for Canadian Studies, 1993): 69. 29 Wiebe, Playing Dead, 114 (emphasis in the original). 30 Hulan, Northern Experience, 172. 31 See, for example, Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 47, 77, and Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (London: Athlone, 1999): 97.

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Wishing to begin to walk, Wishing to begin to walk, Wishing to begin to walk, To Kuluksuk I began to walk.32

The poem reflects neither the exact moment of the first step on the journey nor whether the destination was ever reached. Instead, as Kroetsch observes, its focal point is on “translating desire into motion,”33 transforming an idea to process. Kroetsch sums up the essence of the poem in the observation “We construct ourselves by constructing ourselves.”34 Indeed, the poem allows an idea of an action to accumulate until it transforms, with no apparent impulse from outside, into action. In a parallel development in the construction of Playing Dead, Wiebe is not tracking action or simply a northern location, but such aspects of the North as a story that reflect its indigenous properties; he is after constructs where the North does not need to be explained as an opposite to any other location, but where its inherent otherness is readily acknowledged. He may have started unveiling such constructs in channelling the energy taken by any other process to observation: “Indeed, walking alone in this enormous landscape where I am all eyes and no sight, […] I am steadily rendered more and more word-less. One could so easily, perhaps one must of necessity become a motionless dot of stillness.”35 This observation is not passive: in written form, it has become an idea, a story that is not bound to its geographic origin. That story is perhaps not ‘true’ North for all of Canada, but an aspect of the North that cannot be dismissed. For all members of my trio, the North has meant a space of personal reflection. Kroetsch was the first of the three to go north in person, already in the late 1940s. He gives a possible recollection of his motivations in A Likely Story. His goal was nothing less than to enable himself to become a writer: “I conceived of the novel, back in 1948, as the direct transport of experience onto a page. I went up north to have the necessary experience; the novel would take care of itself.”36 Though he was heading towards a particular place, hindsight provides the sudden realization that the young Kroetsch set out on a 32

Wiebe, Playing Dead, 79. Kroetsch, A Likely Story, 102. 34 A Likely Story, 102. 35 Wiebe, Playing Dead, 113. 36 Kroetsch, A Likely Story, 17. In this passage, the North appears a relatively unproblematized concept. Most often, the members of the trio treat it as an elusive object that escapes definition, or it may even function as an allegory of writing, as in Kroetsch’s case. In this particular instance, however, at least initially it is simply a location that is, geographically, sufficiently removed from the subject’s usual surroundings to qualify as a source of the required experience. 33

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quest not only, perhaps not even primarily, for experience, but for narrative. In 1995, Kroetsch blushingly recognizes that he shared a 1940s belief that one should deliberately “go out and have experience” before it is possible to write.37 The blushing may be partly explained by his subsequent career as a writer whose works demonstrate the importance of roots and experience that has not been deliberately sought out, maybe not even thought of as experience. In A Likely Story, he contemplates writing in a way that almost creates a manifesto for Western Canadian writing, and which certainly affirms the role of the North in that literature: [Western Canadians] are marginalized by the unspeakable full page of our knowing. History. Literature. America. Britain. Europe. The page announces itself as jam-packed, unalterably full. That is one of the strategies of the full page. But we who are twice marginalized cannot forget, dare not forget, the unspeakably empty page. The page that is our weather, our rivers, our rocks. […] I remember the books of my childhood that did not ever mention the prairie world I lived in. Full of words, those pages were blank. Perhaps the generative moment of my young writer’s life came when I realized I had not two pages to write upon but rather two margins to write in. I could write alongside, with and against, the blackly printed page of our inheritance. I could write alongside, with and against, the unspeakable white glare of what I call, metonymically, North.38

Kroetsch thus recognizes that without the exposure to what Critchley identifies as “exterior being”39 as provided by the North, he might not have found a space for his own literary voice among the discourses that occupy his native West. For him, the North is not merely a place to write about but, with its unique characteristics of light, space and difficult or limited access, it is analogous to the process of writing, where one text always has an impact on others and creating or accessing a particular kind of voice is never guaranteed. In particular, this aspect of the North is analogous to writing Western Canada, a region that did not present Kroetsch or Wiebe with a well-developed body of literature early in their career. In her essay “In Visible Ink,” van Herk discusses an experience of similar magnitude with the North (or the Arctic). Not unlike Places Far from Ellesmere, this brief essay successfully reads like a travel narrative, partly disguised as fiction, and a philosophical text on the essence of language and writing. The North for Kroetsch redefined his capability to conceive a narra37 38 39

Kroetsch, A Likely Story, 23 (emphasis in the original). A Likely Story, 95–96 (emphasis in the original). Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 5.

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tive about the West; for van Herk, it evokes the image of a page that Kroetsch alludes to, and, in the end, redefines nothing less than language: I am at last beyond language, at last literately invisible. Which is, reader, I confess, the state I ideally wish to attain. […] the time I spent at Lake Hazen in the northern part of Ellesmere Island taught me unreading, the act of dismantling a text past all its previous readings and writings.40 I cannot read these reaches. I have no language for arctic […]. I am quite simply unable to write of or through this polar spell. Instead, it inscribes me, takes over my gullible imagination and its capacity for words: invents me for its own absent-minded pleasure. Effaces my referentiality, a transformation without confirmation or chronology. I am re-invented by a great white page.41

Although van Herk writes that she became free of language in the North, she has denounced that freedom by writing that experience down. In the end, Kroetsch and van Herk seem remarkably unanimous about the relation of writing and the North: the latter does not automatically provide the means to write, but it is so large, so uniquely itself that it is able to resist homogenizing discourses, whose presence for Levinas reflects a Western tradition of consistent attempts to reduce the other to a reflection of the self.42 Despite such attempts, the mere presence of the North – or perhaps its absolute, unchangeable presence – collapses pre-existing narratives. In the process, the North provides the space for rearranging or reinventing those narratives, whether they at first appear to be bound to a place referred to as the North, the West or something entirely different. The northern land also appears to Kroetsch and van Herk as a white page, which alludes to being covered with snow in the winter or overwhelmed with light in the summer. Although Kroetsch speaks of “the unspeakable white glare”43 of the empty page, perhaps the ultimate terror for a writer, the glare of the northern white page has clearly enabled narrative for him and van Herk, not crippled their imagination. In Playing Dead, Wiebe strays more overtly from a first-person account of the relation of the place and his own writing into, for example, Inuit narratives – which, of course, as discourses arise directly out of the Northern land, and may serve as an invaluable intermediary. However, in the end he joins the contemplation of the great white page of the North: “Indeed, walking alone in this enormous 40 Aritha van Herk, “In Visible Ink,” in In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1991): 3–4. 41 Van Herk, “In Visible Ink,” 8 (original emphasis). 42 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 75. 43 Kroetsch, A Likely Story, 96.

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landscape where I am all eyes and no sight, […] I am steadily rendered more and more word-less. […] Nevertheless words will gather.”44 Thus Wiebe quite readily agrees that the North provides a momentary erasure of everything but its own presence.

… Trickling to the South The most important implication of this unanimity about the importance of going north is that three major voices of Western Canada all state that the region has had a profound impact on their approach to text. Although many readers may not be immediately aware of it, the North is cunningly trickling down south: it may remain geographically distant, but it has redefined aspects of narratives arising out of a Western Canadian setting through redefining the voices making those narratives. ‘True’ North probably remains a mythological location, but more Southern narratives, some of them strongly regional like the works on the West by my trio, remain permeated by the discursive formations representing the North. Where does this realization lead in future engagement with prairie writing? It emphasizes what Wiebe and Kroetsch have demonstrated in their writing: if the Canada you know is Ontario (or perhaps one of Canada’s relatively few metropolitan areas), and it very often is, then representations of the West may appear disorienting. In a recent interview, Wiebe sees this as a result of a strong emphasis on the bond between literary voice and a land where Anglo-Canadian presence is an undisputable but chronologically a relatively thin layer.45 Alternatively, if the literature you know is widely accepted as canonized in the English-speaking world, the tendency, as mentioned above, of prairie writing to “contrive authentic origins” from its immediate surroundings46 may prove equally disorienting. For Kroetsch, the railway announces the arrival of a new story to the West in Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear; a story of immigration, new economic realities, and reservation life, to name a few elements.47 That story, however, carried heavy eastern Canadian overtones. As the North trickles down to the south through narrative, it may provide space for another, more western story. The northern land is a place of extremes – space, light, frost (although at least the latter two are in a constant, though rhythmic, state of flux) – and does not easily allow for reorganizations like large-scale urbanization. The 44

Wiebe, Playing Dead, 113–14. Janne Korkka, “Where Is the Text Coming From? An Interview with Rudy Wiebe,” World Literature Written in English 38.1 (1999): 80–81. 46 Kroetsch, A Likely Story, 82. 47 Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words, 29. 45

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lack of such homogenizing processes dictates that once you are surrounded by the North, it is possible to exist only in direct interaction with it. It is part of Canada, a nation which still seems to have centre(s) in at least Ontario, Quebec, and the west, but the region refuses to translate into forms imposed by Ottawa political language or, as the trio demonstrates, Alberta narrative. And yet, paradoxically, the North is given credit for a major boost to Alberta narrative. As mentioned, Kroetsch at one point found that the margins of a page are not inhibiting, but provide the possibility to write. The endless white glare of the northern page, then, seems to provide the ultimate margin. That margin is so wide, so unyielding in remaining itself, that voices of another land, the West, can borrow it perhaps indefinitely, flourish within it, and take its lessons back home, provided that they realize that exposure to the North may frustrate all previous assumptions about its character. In the process, western voices do not lose their essence, but only become more grounded in landscape – western, northern, or their figurative amalgamations, possibly transforming a boundary between margin and text. WORKS CITED Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” P M L A 114.1 (1999): 20–31. Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Michael Holquist & Caryl Emerson (Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 1975; Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (West Lafayette I N : Purdue U P , 2nd ed. 1999). Davis, Colin. Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). Grace, Sherrill E. “Articulating North,” in Literary Responses to Arctic Canada, ed. Jørn Carlsen (Lund: Nordic Association for Canadian Studies, 1993): 65–76. ——. Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2001). ——. “ ‘ A Woman’s Way’: Canadian Narratives of Northern Discovery,” in New Worlds: Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone Literature, ed. Martin Kuester, Gabriele Christ & Rudolf Beck (Munich: Ernst Vögel, 2000): 177–202. Hulan, Renée. Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2002). Keith, W.J., ed. A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1981). Korkka, Janne. “Where Is the Text Coming From? An Interview with Rudy Wiebe,” World Literature Written in English 38.1 (1999): 69–85.

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Kroetsch, Robert. But We Are Exiles (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965). ——. A Likely Story: The Writing Life (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College P, 1995). ——. The Lovely Treachery of Words (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1989). ——. “On Being an Alberta Writer,” Open Letter 5.4 (1983): 69–80. ——. The Stone Hammer Poems (Toronto: Oolichan, 1975). ——. The Studhorse Man (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969). ——. The Words of My Roaring (Toronto: Macmillan, 1966). Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence, tr. Michael B. Smith (Altérité et transcendence, 1995; London: Athlone, 1999). ——. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, tr. Seán Hand (Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme, 1963; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1990). ——. Ethics and Infinity, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Éthique et infini, 1982; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1985). ——. Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 1974; tr. Dordrecht, Boston M A & London: Kluwer Academic, 1981). ——. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 1961; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969). Melnyk, George. The Literary History of Alberta, vol. 2: From the End of the War to the End of the Century (Edmonton: U of Alberta P , 1999). Mitchell, W.O. Who Has Seen the Wind (Toronto: Macmillan, 1947). Van Herk, Aritha. “In Visible Ink,” in van Herk, In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1991): 1–11. ——. Judith (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978). ——. Places Far from Ellesmere (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1990). ——. The Tent Peg (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1981). Wiebe, Rudy. “Bear Spirit in a Strange Land (All That’s Left of Big Bear),” in A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe, ed. W.J. Keith (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1981): 143–49. ——. The Blue Mountains of China, afterword by Eva–Marie Kröller (1970; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995). ——. A Discovery of Strangers (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1994). ——. First and Vital Candle (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2006). ——. The Mad Trapper (1980; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart–Bantam, 1981). ——. “The Naming of Albert Johnson,” in River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (1973; Toronto: Vintage, 1995): 74–91. ——. “On Refusing the Story,” in River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (1988; Toronto: Vintage, 1995): 303–20. ——. “On the Trail of Big Bear,” in A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe, ed. W.J. Keith (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1981): 132–41. ——. Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1989). ——. River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (Toronto: Vintage, 1995). ——. The Scorched-Wood People (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977). ——. Sweeter Than All the World (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2001).

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——. The Temptations of Big Bear (1973; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995). ——. “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” in The Angel of the Tar Sands and Other Stories (1971; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982): 78–87.

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Sharing Quebec Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens and George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité

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T T H E B E G I N N I N G O F T H E 1 9 7 0 S , in the midst of a fierce separatist struggle, the Quebec activist Pierre Vallières established a resonant parallelism between the second-class citizenship of black people in North America and the subordinate position of the French Canadians in Canada. Although the phrase “white niggers of America” (négres blancs d’Amérique) that Vallières coined at the time was a powerful slogan, it implicitly denied the very presence of black people in Quebec while voicing only the subject position of ‘pure-laine’ Quebeckers. Quebec nationalism has often blamed those that it classifies as ‘immigrants’ for the lack of success of the repeated referendums in the last decades of the twentieth century. For instance, 1995 witnessed the infamous words of Jacques Parizeau on the nationalist failure due to “money and the ethnic vote.”1 Yet Quebec has long been peopled by constituencies other than French Canadians and spoken in languages other than French. Perhaps the most literarily visible of those other communities have been the Montreal Jews, an English-speaking ethnic group that has produced writers such as Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen. But Montreal is also home to writers that call themselves Anglo-Quebeckers, like the novelist Gail Scott, and others of a range of backgrounds who might, like the Caribbean author Neil Bissoondath, simply want to be called ‘Canadian’. The incapacity of French Canadian nationalism to adapt to the changing demography of the province is deeply entwined with their language politics. As David McGimpsey remarks, 1

The complete speech he made after the defeat can be found on http://www.geocities .com/capitolhill/lobby/4652/parizeau.html

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Montreal is not a particularly vibrant place for English-language writing today. […] The possibility of enjoying a wider audience in Montreal is often stalled by government designs and by rhetorical strategies that hope to deny the diversity and continental potential of English writers from Quebec […]. To continue to speak and write in English in Quebec is […] to affirm a choice, to express an opinion, to take a risk.2

Counteracting essentialist stances, writers have set out to inscribe other languages and other life experiences onto the French-Canadian script. The purpose of this essay is to showcase two recent black Canadian examples taken from the performing arts. In 2000, the black Quebecker actress Lorena Gale created for a Vancouver company her dramatic monologue Je me souviens, while in 2004 the Africadian poet George Elliott Clarke completed Québécité, a commissioned libretto for a jazz opera. The former is set in Montreal while the latter is set in Quebec City. Both are written in English but, as their titles suggest, they appropriate the French language for their own purposes. Both plays share an aim – to inscribe a multicultural identity – and a place, present-day Quebec, while residing on the borders of dramatic genres and performing entertainment. Je me souviens (2000) brought the veteran actress Lorena Gale the recognition she deserved. It was nominated for the Governor-General’s Award for Drama in 2002 as well as for three Jesse Richardson awards. Born in Montreal and currently based in Vancouver, Gale had had her literary début with Angélique (1999), a play also set in Quebec with black Canadian characters. Je me souviens is obviously the motto of francophone Quebec, in allusion to their conquest by the English in 1763, which in the context of Gale’s oeuvre becomes a challenge and a gesture of political resistance: It is a legacy of the African diaspora to become rooted to a land where one is always seen as “other”. By virtue of my race alone I am immediately perceived as unnatural to my surroundings. Wherever I go in Canada there is a constant demand to explain, to justify, and defend my presence. It is as if race is exclusive of nationality; as if the criteria by which we define and measure what is Canadian or Quebecoise could not simply apply to me.3

The challenge to white Quebec identity is emphasized at both the beginning and the end of the play. The first scene, set in Vancouver, shows Lorena being told off by a young white Quebecker who has overheard her sharply criticizing the province, and complaining about the changes for the worse that she 2

David McGimpsey, “A Walk in Montreal: Wayward Steps through the Literary Politics of Contemporary English Quebec,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 165–66. 3 Lorena Gale, Je me souviens (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001): 11.

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has lately perceived there. When the young man denies her the right to speak, she confronts him in French and identifies herself as a Quebecker, too. The assumption that, because she is black, she can’t be a Quebecker puts her in a rage, so that the whole play can be interpreted as a long talk back to those restrictive notions of Quebec citizenship and identity. This topic returns at the very end, when Lorena addresses the audience to express her indignation at the remarks of Parizeau mentioned above, and at the implicit assumption that “because we are black and English-speaking, we did not have the right to love Quebec, to speak to that love, or to vote for it,” and she finally defines herself as “an expatriate Anglophone, Montréaliase [sic], Québecoise” (94). Yet with the magic words “je me souviens” Gale is also suggesting the autobiographical shape of her play, in which she conjures up a home that has been long lost, the Montreal of her childhood and her formative years. The play is a solo act, organized into twenty-six scenes in which the actress playacts herself as a child, adolescent, and adult, as well as impersonating a handful of other characters: her own mother Lillian, her white teacher Miss Bennett, the West Indian woman Ethel, etc. The play also skilfully deploys music to re-create the ambience of the 1960s and 1970s, with songs by Aretha Franklin or the Young Rascals, to name but two. In order to minimize the potential monotony of a one-person show, other voices and texts are introduced, sometimes by means of a screen on which slides are projected, or with voices off, thus setting up a dialogue of sorts. The use of the screen is similar to that of other contemporary political plays, and in particular resembles that of Guillermo Verdecchia’s solo act Fronteras Americanas / American Frontiers (1992), because Gale, like Verdecchia, uses the screen sometimes to complement her own voice, but also and perhaps even more frequently, to ironically contradict it, or the other way round.4 So, for example, in scene 16 the screen displays the mother’s five reasons for the growing child to stay away from white boys: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

They only want one thing. They don’t commit to black girls. They think all black women are whores. They make promises they can’t keep. They won’t respect you.

And just after that, Lorena’s own voice undermines the mother’s instructions on the screen by flatly stating to the audience: “But there are no black ones” (54).

4

For a discussion of Verdecchia’s play, see Marc Maufort’s Transgressive Itineraries (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003): 86–93.

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Interspersed with the autobiographical scenes, there are four that I would describe as ‘reveries’. In them, the actress / author describes, in French this time, a dream of being lost in the snow, all alone, and feeling trapped and unable to move. The dream is clearly symbolic of the search for identity of a black person in white Quebec, and the recurrent scenes thus contribute to imparting a global coherence to the otherwise heterogeneous materials Gale is working with. Finally, the dreamer finds the courage to take action, and walks on until she finds another person, who just happens to be herself, and then wakes up. The structure and components of the play thus follow the conventions of the Bildungsroman insofar as they manage to underline the process of identity-building in a racialized society. The initiative for Québécite came from the academic, and artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival, Ajay Heble, who commissioned the collaboration of the musician D.D. Jackson and the poet George Elliott Clarke for a jazz opera for the Festival’s 10th edition in 2003. The result of their joint efforts has been characterized as “a remarkable hybrid of music and dramaturgy.”5 This is by no means Clarke’s first experience in bringing together music and literature. His earlier work Beatrice Chancy was also an opera libretto, written for music composed by James Rolfe, premiered in Toronto in 1998, and later published as a play. As a matter of fact, he has voiced opinions to the effect that opera can be a powerful vehicle for issues of cultural difference: The issue of diversity is front and centre in the work I do, and it certainly was part of the opera that I had the pleasure of co-operating in writing. […] There are lots of Canadian stories that deal with diversity, cultural difference and racism that are just waiting to be done in operatic form. Riel has been done. There’s a wealth of material in the Quebec / Anglo Canadian story to be explored in operatic voice. I think it would be great to see Pierre Trudeau and René Levesque singing at each other! There are labour strife stories and many, many more stories that could be put on stage in the Canadian context. The possibilities are endless in terms of Canadian material to “opera-tize,” so to speak. It’s amazing that we haven’t had more opera, or more writers writing librettos – libretti, to be more precise – and more composers working in this area.6

5

Andrew Houston, “View and Reviews,” Canadian Theatre Review 118 (2004): 116. George Elliott Clarke & Linda Hutcheon, “Opera in Canada: A Conversation,” Journal of Canadian Studies 35.3 (Fall 2000): 184–98. In the same interview, Clarke expressed his interest in writing “a Canadian version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 1964 French film featuring Catherine Deneuve. And he continued: “I’d love to do something that examines relationships, most likely set in Quebec City.” These words already prefigure the advent of Québécité. 6

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Clarke’s play features two heterosexual couples, four characters of diverse racial origins who come to stand for present-day multicultural Quebec in a carefully contrived scenario. The two men are black, one Haitian and the other Africadian. The two women are Asian, one from India and the other from China. Two are Canadian-born while the other two came as children with their parents. Of the reasons for immigration mentioned in the play, two families are said to have fled totalitarian regimes, in Haiti and in China, while the upper-caste, educated Indian Brahmins came looking for better prospects. As Heble has pointed out, “Clarke’s emphasis on ‘le Québec de couleur’ represents a bold attempt to counter the demonization of the ‘other’ in attempts to fashion homogeneous national communities.”7 The use of music here, too, is significant, though obviously it goes far beyond the mere creation of ambience that we identified in Gale’s. It is part of the plot, as one of the characters is a musician, a jazz player who works at a jazz club that becomes a meeting-point for the couples throughout the play. It is an aesthetic choice, too, in that the music enhances the rhythm of the verse the characters speak in, just as the rhythm of the poetry in turn enhances the music being performed. Moreover, Kevin McNeilly has contended that the freshness, fluidity and improvization that mark jazz as a musical form highlight the identity-issues at stake in the play, so that “Québécité’s songs [.. .] persistently bear traces of an unassimilable otherness: tones, textures, and words that refuse to blend.”8 In a “Prelude” to the published version of the play, Clarke admits to having been inspired by a range of sources from the world of music (Miles Davis, James Brown, Oscar Peterson, Portia White) and cinematography (Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Camus, Jacques Demy, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Clement Virgo, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali). Within the play itself, many contemporary Canadian writers of colour are named: Ying Chen, Gérard Étienne, Dany Laferrière are mentioned alongside Lorena Gale and Yeshim Ternar. Other writers are alluded to in the names of the characters, such as Ovide Rimbaud, or in quotations framing the text, such as one from Ezra Pound. Thus, the play’s aesthetic, like its plot and character, is rooted in hybridity and diversity, and aspires to bring together high and low, music and words and images. Yet perhaps the most pervasive literary influence is Shakespeare. Certainly Québécité’s multiple mixed-race love plots with their twists and turns, all sorted out in the final happy double wedding, owes a profound debt to Shake7 Ajay Heble, “Postlude: ‘You know you break no laws by dreaming’: George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité,” in Québécité (Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2004): 98. 8 Kevin McNeilly, “This Ain’t No Time for Innocence: Québécité, a Jazz Opera by George Elliott Clarke and D.D. Jackson,” Canadian Theatre Review 118 (2004): 122.

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spearean drama, both to comedies such as Much Ado about Nothing, whose fast, witty repartee Clarke seeks to update, and to tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Othello, in the themes of family hatred and interracial marriage. Most of all, the resounding power of dramatic verse brings the contemporary play closer to its Shakespearean counterparts. Language is indeed a concern in the play. Unlike Lorena Gale, who establishes formal borders between the French and the English language, in Clarke’s play the characters, like the author and like the music itself, move fluidly and seamlessly from one language to the other, sometimes from line to line, sometimes even within the same sentence, in what is truly a bilingual show, where the two languages share the same consciousness and are aware of each other, for better or for worse. If anything, both are equally found wanting: COLLETTE:

If only English weren’t such anguish! If only French were not so gauche! MALCOLM:

That’s Canada’s anomalous calamity: Anglos muck up the Queen’s English; Francophones fuck up French.9

However, it would be wrong to assume that Clarke is not making a political statement in the play and that his is an unproblematic celebration of difference. Clarke is concerned with issues of racism in Quebec, too, but unlike Gale he is less concerned with the black /white divide than with deeply ingrained prejudice in all communities. Thus, the main obstacle to the union of Collette and Malcolm lies in her Chinese parents’ prejudice against black people. Collette’s mother threatens to commit suicide if she marries him, and her father banishes her from home. Heartbroken, Collette wonders if she should “destroy my parents’ hearts? / They dream of golden, Chinese grandchildren. / Can I coldly stab their dreaming hearts?” To which Malcolm coldly replies: “Are Chinese pure laine like some Québécois? / Am I a black sheep, a devil, dizzingly noir?” The parallelism between the Chinese concern with the preservation of the family line and ancestry and the Québécois fear of annihilation in the larger pool of English-speaking Canadians is bold and full of implications. Although Gale and Clarke share the aim of denouncing racism, they use different rhetorical devices to drive their moral home. In Je me souviens, issues of visibility and invisibility are often addressed. The construction of identity is here entwined with the ways one sees and is seen by others, both in 9

George Elliott Clarke, Québécité, 25.

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the characters’ reveries and in the autobiographical sections. In the reveries, emphasis is placed on the blindness and disorientation caused by the sheer whiteness of the snow. Several autobiographical scenes tackle the same topic. The geography lesson by Gale’s elementary school teacher Miss Bennett rehearses a number of stereotypes that she projects onto the child Lorena, while the screen slides show a turn-of-the-century tribal African and a nineteenthcentury photograph of African hunters surrounding a dead elephant: LORENA (AS MISS BENNETT):

Bunga of the Jungle. The jungle is a rain forest located in the Belgian Congo. The heart of deepest, darkest Africa. Can anybody tell us about Africa? Lorena? Silence. Bunga is an African. Africans are little primitive peoples with black skin – Lorena. And tight woolly hair – Lorena.10

The lesson ends with yet another powerful stereotype of liberal racism, as Miss Bennett produces a U N I C E F box and asks her students to raise money “for all the poor people in Africa. So, don’t forget to pick up your U N I C E F box before you leave the school. In fact, I’ll just leave one right here on Lorena’s desk. A helpful reminder” (41). Moreover, the play depicts the failure of Lorena’s attempt to merge into white Quebec through a relationship with a pure-laine young man, Marcel. The problems in their relationship go deeper than a racist rejection by him or by his family. Instead, Lorena feels unable to come to terms with their incapacity to see the ways in which society racializes black people. The problem is not that they ‘see’ blackness as inferior, but that they prefer not to see that there is a colour hierarchy at all. While Lorena is fascinated by the cover of a book depicting black people being burnt by the Ku Klux Klan, Marcel refuses to look, despite her repeated entreaties. Lorena then finally realizes that he can’t love her, because he doesn’t really see her: “Who I am is embedded in every cell of my skin. How can he love what he can’t see? What he won’t see?” (61). In Québécité, architecture and the law are revealed as complicit discourses in the construction of identity. It is no coincidence that Ovide is an architect and Laxmi a student of architecture, while Collette herself studies humanrights law. Even though performances of the opera in both Guelph and Vancouver seem to have made use of a fairly bare stage,11 the libretto itself con10

Gale, Je me souviens, 40. See Kevin McNeilly’s description of both events in his review “This Ain’t No Time for Innocence” (2004) for more information on this subject. 11

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stantly calls attention to the settings for each scene, which showcase the most recognizable among Quebec’s landmarks: the Château Frontenac several times, the cathedral, the Quebec Parliament, the ferry station, etc. Other familiar locations (the Montmorenci Falls, for instance) as well as the artistic styles of the buildings themselves are also evoked by the characters. Places seem to shape people in this play, with the city, its buildings, and its people establishing intimate and intricate relations. Like architecture, the law has the power to shape people.12 As they stand outside the Parliament building, Laxmi and Ovide reflect on their situation as citizens of Quebec in ways that recall Gale’s autobiographical thoughts: O V I D E : Must we spat outside Québec’s parliament? Ici nous sommes – tous – Québécois, suprémement. L A X M I : “La peau brune, mais le coeur québécois”? Tell that to the “pure laine” Québécois! Everybody here asks me if I’m Indienne, If I answer “Canadian,” they ask, “Since when?” When Parizeau, paranoid, blamed “le vote ethnique” For his Referendum loss, his disgust was chic. I knew then that all Québécois must be white Or could not be Québécois, not quite.13

The analysis of both plays thus underscores the commonality of topics and commitments in these two authors’ depiction of Quebec. But their work is complicit with other Black Canadian plays in how they engage the politics of the local and the global, and how languages and races are inscribed in a multiplicity of contexts. Rinaldo Walcott has remarked on such awareness: Black Canadian theatre is centrally concerned with piecing together all of the ways in which diasporic expressions of Blackness can fashion a commentary on nationally local and global conditions. What I mean by this is that the form, the performance, the texture, the content, the gesture of Black Canadian theatre engages its nationally local and its wider context.14

One of the recurrent settings of Québécité is the jazz club called “The Quiet Revolution,” a term alluding to the modernization of Quebec in the 1960s. It is my argument that what Gale and Clarke attempt to effect in their plays is a 12 Such preocupation with the law and how it impinges on people’s lives links the play to another Shakespearean intertext, Measure for Measure. I appreciate George Elliott Clarke’s remarks on this subject. 13 Clarke, Québécité, 66–67. 14 Rinaldo Walcott, “Dramatic Instabilities: Diasporic Aesthetics as a Question for and about Nation,” Canadian Theatre Review 118 (2004): 99.

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quiet revolution of sorts, too, in the way they strive to update Quebec’s notions of citizenship for a new century by means of bilingual, multicultural, multifaceted dramatic forms that take us beyond the either/ ors of yesterday. WORKS CITED Clarke, George Elliott. Beatrice Chancy (Victoria, British Columbia: Polestar, 1999). ——. Québécité (Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2004). ——, & Linda Hutcheon. “Opera in Canada: A Conversation,” Journal of Canadian Studies 35.3 (2000): 184–98. Electronic publication. Gale, Lorena. Angélique (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1999). ——. Je me souviens (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001). Heble, Ajay. “Postlude: ‘You know you break no laws by dreaming’: George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité,” in George Elliott Clarke, Québécité (2004), 97–101. Houston, Andrew. “View and Reviews,” Canadian Theatre Review 118 (2004): 116–17. McGimpsey, David. “A Walk in Montreal: Wayward Steps through the Literary Politics of Contemporary English Quebec,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000). 150–68. McNeilly, Kevin. “This Ain’t No Time for Innocence: Québécité, a Jazz Opera by George Elliott Clarke and D.D. Jackson,” Canadian Theatre Review 118 (2004): 121–23. Maufort, Marc. Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003). Walcott, Rinaldo. “Dramatic Instabilities: Diasporic Aesthetics as a Question for and about Nation,” Canadian Theatre Review 118 (2004): 99–106.

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Towards a Pedagogy of African-Canadian Literature1 G EORGE E LLIOTT C LARKE

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I C A N N O T D I S P R O V E its disreputable but formidable rival’s claims to preeminence, teaching might just be the ‘world’s oldest profession.’ Strangely, however, many of its Ph.D.’d practitioners, who direct thousands of minds over the course of decades-long careers, are casually placed in charge of unsuspecting classrooms without even a single course in pedagogy to their names. It is a curious employment, this role of being a professor, where one must strive to educate, but without any of the training that a kindergarten teacher is expected to have. I am a good example of this irony: I, too, lack expertise in the area of pedagogy. When I helmed my first class as an Adjunct Assistant Professor, at Queen’s University, in the Spring of 1994, purporting to offer guidance in Modern English Literature, I asked a senior professor to vet my syllabus to ensure that it reasonably represented the entirety of poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction in American, British, and Canadian literature between 1900 and LTHOUGH

1 This essay was drafted for presentations as the Robert Sutherland Visiting Speaker, at the John Deutsch University Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, on 9 March 2005; for the “Who are We? Otherness in Canadian Studies” Symposium in celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, on 11 March 2005; for the Plenary Address, European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Sliema, Malta, on 22 March 2005; and for the course in Later Life Learning, Innis College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, on 15 September 2005. A version without subject listings was published earlier as “Towards a Pedagogy of African-Canadian Literature,” in Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature, ed. Chelva Kanaganayakam (Toronto: T S A R , 2005): 47–64.

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1994. Charitably, he did so, but I still ended up with a syllabus that surprised a few of my students with its unstinting emphasis on queer identity, feminism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism, despite, perhaps, our strenuous efforts to avoid controversy. Something there is in literature, in the stories we tell, that insists on provocation. Thus, teaching literature can change everything by changing minds. Given the radical potential inherent in the task, teaching literature is an enterprise fraught, necessarily, with ideological pitfalls. Undoubtedly, Socrates understood this precept, and he paid with his life for his questioning of poetics and for his dissident views on governance, although he was not a writer and he sought no political office. Plato taught that the ideal Republic should banish poets (The Republic, Book I I I ), but in the actual polity in which Plato lived, it was the teacher, Socrates, who was expelled – martyred (as Plato recounts in the Phaedo). Even now, in bourgeois-democratic, multicultural society and liberal-progressive culture, to teach, say, Marxism, or the efficacy of terrorism, or sex education, is to welcome threats, censorship, and, occasionally, expulsion – from school, or from society itself, through jailing or exile.

‘Colouring’ Outside the Lines The teaching of racial minority literatures should not, ideally, involve such risks. Applying supposedly universalist paradigms, we can say, ‘They are like us and we are like them,’ even if the us-and-them paradigm executes a benign violence. Better yet, we can say, ‘Like us, they bleed; and they want the same things we want: prosperous, healthy, pain-free lives, plus peace, love, and happiness’. In practice, though, as literature keeps telling us, the principles of reception and interpretation – of understanding – are not that easy. South Asian-Canadian scholar Arun Mukherjee advises that “‘Western norms’ and ‘Western’ values” constitute a “‘Western’ narcissism, this fake universalism which is really Euro-American ethnocentrism talking about itself in the vocabulary of ‘the human condition’ at the same time that it denies the humanity of others.”2 As the South Asian-Canadian scholar Chelva Kanaganayakam indicates, Mukherjee’s “frustration with the constraints of the classroom arises from the normative position of Eurocentrism that masquerades as a form of universalism.”3 Mukherjee insists that “the dominant discourse in North Amer2

Arun Mukherjee, Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto:

T S A R , 1994): 14. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 3 Chelva Kanaganayakam, “Pedagogy and Postcolonial Literature; or, Do We Need a Centre for Postcolonial Studies?” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 729. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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ica dehistoricizes and depoliticizes everything so that non-white, non-male, working-class ways of apprehending reality seldom get a hearing” (6). She provides the example of “such classics as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice [1813] where large dinners are eaten in feudal homes with not a servant in sight as though the dinner had cooked and served itself!” (13). She also recognizes that when a racial minority complains about the depiction of its exemplars in a text, their concerns are dismissed: Let the black parents scream about racism in [Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens’] The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [1884]. We will continue to teach it as a classic. And we will continue to exclude texts that the blacks themselves have written. And, yes, we will talk about the spectre of censorship when we hear such talk. (6)4

The repression of a discourse of race within our – Canadian – literature and criticism (our classrooms) reflects our anxiety about our own racism: i.e. the preservation of Euro-Caucasian privilege and power. Indeed, the Canadian alarm about race and racism (a worry inspired, not because the social category and the social practice exist, but because they flourish here, in The Great White North), poses particular problems for the teaching of any racial minority literature. This point applies particularly to that literature I choose to term ‘African-Canadian’.5 Our national imaginary luxuriates in the tales of the Underground Railroad – fugitive African-American slaves seeking shelter in truly free, truly welcoming Upper Canada – and in the beautiful baritone of the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., sermonizing across the air of our very own C B C .6 We tune out, however, our own practice of slavery, and racial violence (see “The Charivari” incident in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush [1852]), and the resultant slave cemeteries, in Upper Canada. But we also choose to forget our very own Canadian, antiblack segregation, polite but forceful, conducted in sundry locales across the 4

Althea Prince is a stellar African-Canadian intellectual and writer. Originally from Antigua, she was actively involved in the Canadian Black Arts and Black Empowerment struggles in urban Canada in the 1960s, as well as in the Feminist movement. An author, with a doctorate in sociology, she provides incisive analyses of gender and race as lived experience, in both her fiction and her non-fiction. When she was Managing Editor at the Canadian Scholars Press International and the Women’s Press, she was instrumental in advancing new voices, academic and artistic, from marginalized communities 5 I know that other scholars are gracious enough to deem African-Canadian literature ‘black writing in Canada’. But this alternative nomenclature robs the literature of both its continental heritage and its historical connection to the clutch of invasive, British / French colonies-turned-provinces we now call Canada. 6 See King’s Conscience for Change (Massey Lectures, Seventh Series; Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1967).

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Dominion, casually inhibiting the careers and inconveniencing the lives of thousands of African Canadians – or coloureds, or Negroes – as we were then known. The price of our ignorance is, we teach To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) – a patriotic, rah-rah, Yankee, race-relations tract – instead of Any Known Blood (1997), by Lawrence Hill (1957–), which shows us the Ku Klux Klan at play in Oakville, Ontario, or instead of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), which reminds us of the unbearable fact of our dispossession and imprisonment of Japanese-Canadians during the Anti-Fascist War. Yet, to teach ourselves about African-Canadian literature is to gain entrée to the real history of this country, not the feel-good nostrums of the beer commercials and the televised heritage moments, which, as is glaringly obvious, studiously avoid labour strife, racial contretemps (including antisemitism), and Aboriginal vs. Crown contestation.7 To peer at African-Canadian literature is to come face-to-face with an analysis of confederate imperialism, voiced by the marginal blacks of African America and the migrant blacks of the Caribbean and the exiled blacks of Africa. Hear the Afro-Ontarian writer Carol Talbot (b. 1950s): “I am a voice crying in the wilderness, on the fringe of the diaspora.”8 To encounter African-Canadian literature is to lose one’s comfortable innocence regarding the experience of race in this country. The New Zealand scholar Mark Williams tells us “Race relations were […] crucial to colonial New Zealand’s sense of superiority” vis-à-vis Australia.9 Who could deny that we use the discourse of race to trumpet our moral superiority tête-à-tête with the U S A ? This unreal discourse renders us incapable of hearing the dissent of African Canadians from our adulation of our untainted, ‘European’ nobility. Most troublingly, given our fervent need to nation-build, to construct a society distinct from Britain, France, and the U S A , we must whitewash our history. There is nothing 7 But that is not to say we will hear a cascade of positives when we begin to allow African-Canadian voices to enter our heads and our classrooms. The French philosopher Jean– Paul Sartre warned, way back in 1948: “What would you expect to find, when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed? That they would thunder your praise?”; Sartre, Black Orpheus, tr. S.W. Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, [1963]): 7; original as “Orphée noir,” introduction to Nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (1948; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972): ix (“Qu’est-ce donc que vous espérez, quand vous ôtiez le bâillon qui fermait ces bouches noires? Qu’elles allaient entonner vos louanges?”). No, no, we have too much to remember, too much to forgive, to unthinkingly lavish paeans and elegies upon a civilization that found it just to seize foreign citizens, imprison and transport them across seas, and extract their labour without pay, and then to sell their offspring into bestial servitude. 8 Carol Talbot, Growing Up Black in Canada (1984; Toronto: Williams–Wallace, 1989): 95. 9 Mark Williams, “On the Discriminations of Postcolonialism in Australia and New Zealand,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 749.

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new here. Williams reports: “Both Australia and New Zealand since the 1970s have sought independently to fashion ‘postcolonial’ identities for themselves, yet in both cases the sources of new identity lie in a shared and embarrassing colonial past.”10 African-Canadian literature poses this challenge to Canada: Can you accept responsibility for your own past injustices – Stop talking about the U S A ! – and seek not to perpetuate them now or perpetrate them ever again?

Black Letters, White Alphabets Such urgent, even intemperate questions, Kanaganayakam tells us, “have been asked before and those who ask them often suggest answers hoping that the issues would be put to rest, only to realize later that their views get transformed to join the repertoire of questions” (725). In his germane article “Pedagogy and Postcolonial Literature,” Kanaganayakam warns that the ideas and approaches “we use to teach postcolonial literature […] often [mean] we become accomplices in subjecting postcolonial studies to a form of colonization” (732). To strengthen this charge, Kanaganayakam quotes Dipresh Chakrabarty’s argument that “concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history” (732). Wise is Kanaganayakam’s caution regarding our ability to teach minority, marginal, or postcolonial literature outside of supposedly European concepts. Yet we must also account for the powerful ways in which Empire-disseminated ideas (usually practised with much hypocrisy) were mediated by African, Asian, and Aboriginal counterarguments. For instance, the American Constitution evolved first to permit African slavery and then to forbid it.11 Practically every idea identified by Chakrabarty as ‘European’ in origin was modified and indigenized via struggles between settlers and natives, masters and slaves. In brief, the Enlightenment shone on everyone. Its illumination allowed ‘uncivilized’ Africans and ‘savages’ to see the deep cracks within and vast bloodstains upon the marble edifice of European civilization. Moreover, all the splendour of Rome, the majesty of Paris, the glory of London, and the magnificence of Madrid were founded on the gold looted from the Americas via the sweat and blood of African and Amerindian slaves, and, later, the coerced, migratory labour of South Asians and Chinese. When Jean–Jacques Rousseau wrote, in Du con10

Williams, “On the Discriminations of Postcolonialism in Australia and New Zealand,” 751. 11 See Article I V , Section 2, Clause 3, and then Note 11 (regarding its repeal).

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trat social (1762), “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” an African, toiling in Montreal or Mississippi or Martinique, could have answered, “No, monsieur, you are free; I am in chains.” Slavery and imperialism constitute the Original Sins of modernity. Thus, Paul Gilroy posits that the migrations of black intellectuals, during slavery and afterward, and their subsequent theorizations, produce “a Counterculture of Modernity.”12 Both Kanaganayakam and Chakrabarty must leave room, then, for the ways in which the marginalized speak back to their ‘downpressors’, and challenge, thereby, modern discourses of liberal humanism to produce humane behaviour, not excuse inhumanity. African diasporic discourses attempt, usually, to answer Machiavelli with Martin Luther King – if not Malcolm X. For instance, in his Foundations of an African Ethic (2000, 2001), Bénézet Bujo asserts: communitarianism in its critique of the ‘unfettered self’ or of ‘atomism’ against liberalism is entirely in keeping with African ethics, which rejects the idea that being a human person and acting responsibly is merely the result of having assented to rational principles, or arguing and thinking rationally.13

“For Black Africa,” Bujo goes on to state, “it is not the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’) but an existential cognatus sum, ergo sumus (‘I am known, therefore we are’) that is decisive” (4). In other words, the colonized and enslaved Others (of Europe’s imperium) retained alternative belief systems – philosophies and faiths – that checked the Occident’s violenceprone and money-hungry liberalism. Europe imposed modernity, via cannon and gun, but the subjugated made haste to force reform upon it. The concepts that Chakrabarty deems European were actually tested, disputed, refined, and even improved in the very realms that Europeans thought uncouth. In teaching African-Canadian literature, then, for instance, one may note the rhetoric of liberty employed by the master class, but applaud the ways in which African-Canadian slaves and free people worked to undermine the political economy of slavery via a counter-discourse foregrounding the hypocrisy and cruelty of the masters. See the African-American-cum-AfricanNova Scotian writer David George (c.1743–1810), who, in his memoir (1793), recognizes the irony of having had a vicious master whose “name was

12

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge

M A : Harvard U P , 1993): 1. 13 Bénézet Bujo, Foundations of an African Ethic: Beyond the Universal Claims of Western Morality, tr. Brian McNeil (Wider den Universalanspruch westlicher Moral, 2000; New York: Crossroad, 2001): 4.

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Chapel – a very bad man to the Negroes.”14 In the first sentence of Robin Winks’s The Blacks in Canada, we encounter again the voice of the archetypal black who wittily talks back to white authority. In this case, a black youth answers an apostle (or an apologist) of white Christianity: You say that by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin taken off then in order to be like you.” Thus in 1632 did “un petit nègre” rebuke the Jesuit missionaryPaul le Jeune for claiming that all men were one when united in Christianity.15

The Neanderthal practices of European modernism elicited, from its coloured victims, responsive discourses that had the effect of truly modernizing modernity. Part of the power of the revolutionary poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, which employs Greek myth to poeticize the reunification of archetypal African-Caribbean mothers and daughters, derives from the opening essay, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy,” by the Tobago-Canadian author M. NourbeSe Philip (1947–). Here she offers further proof that the violence of European conquest liberalism, in this case, visited upon African linguistics, met with an opposing indigeneity: The havoc that the African wreaked upon the English language is, in fact, the metaphorical equivalent of the havoc that coming to the New World represented for the African. […] Language of the people. Language for the people. Language by the people, honed and fashioned through a particular history of empire and savagery.16

In the end, “The linguistic rape and subsequent forced marriage between African and English tongues has resulted in a language capable of great rhythms and musicality; one that is and is not English” (23). The libertine aggression of slavery and colonialism was countered by the verbal inventiveness of its subjects, who, despite their disempowered status, altered the imposed European tongues, driving them toward a condition of music, but black music.

14

David George, “An Account of thr Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa, given by himself in a Conversation with Brother Rippon in London and Brother Pearce of Birmingham” (1793), in Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, vol. 1, ed. George Elliott Clarke (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1991): 32. 15 Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (1971; Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1997): 1. 16 Marlene NourbeSe Philip [as Marlene Nourbese Philip], She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island: Ragweed Press, 1989): 18.

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Kanaganayakam notices that because “postcolonial studies is a fallout from Empire and that English departments tend to be custodians of postcolonial literature, there are commonalities across the globe and these departments function in similar ways to inscribe certain forms of knowledge” (730). Given the duplication of models of enquiry from English department to English department, as well as the replication of syllabi and theoretical approaches, Kanaganayakam wonders whether practitioners of postcolonial studies “may be guilty of recolonizing the field” (728). His concern is a galvanizing one. But there may be no useful response other than to demand repeatedly that those who teach the literatures of the once-dispossessed and the twice-exiled anchor their pedagogy in historical and socio-political analysis. As Ato Quayson states, our duty is “to interrogate a social domain into view.”17 Mukherjee admonishes teachers: “What is needed is explication, not erasure and assimilation” (66). The texts of subalterns must be explained, set in their own original contexts of political disputation and social discord, not whitewashed – reduced to blandishments – by a wishy-washy universalism. Describing so-called Commonwealth novelists, Mukherjee reminds us they have had to build “structures which […] allow them to capture the spider-web of relationships which constitute community life in the developing countries” (25). These writers – and African-Canadian ones are no exception – tend to imbue their texts with the realism of lived experience (no matter how much ‘magic’ they may also invoke). In an elegant article, the Euro-Canadian scholars Herb Wyile and David Paré announce postmodernism’s embrace of multiplicity and contingency opens texts to alternate interpretations that may be beneficial to clients and readers alike; and, furthermore, that this emancipatory potential may be problematized but certainly not rendered invalid by postmodernism’s emphasis on relativism and indeterminacy.18

Their positive embrace of postmodernism apparently ignores, however, Mukherjee’s concern that, in literary criticism, “an upper-middle-class, usually male and white, point of view is presented with the authority of the universal” (6). She also wonders “whether it is possible to read texts by non-white writers, both male and female, in the framework of aesthetic theories developed in Euro-America” (13). Truly, postmodernism is yet one more aesthetic 17 Ato Quayson, “Symbolization Compulsion: Testing a Psychoanalytical Category on Postcolonial African Literature,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 759. 18 Herb Wyile & David Paré, “Whose Story Is It, Anyway? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Post-Modernism, Narrative, and Therapy,” Mosaic 34.1 (2001): 154.

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protocol of Euro-American provenance. However, as Wyile and Paré suggest, postmodernism feeds “a resistance to established, dominant narratives and emphasise[s] the importance of the social construction of subjectivity […] as the basis for a resistance to those metanarratives” (170). Their most useful assertion, though, is the simple note that “Experience is multi-storied” (164). Coupled with Mukherjee’s wish that we “encourage and reward students for reading and researching writers of their own ethnic background” (xv), so that they begin to question the curriculum and interrogate “the enveloping cloud of racism in which we live as a society” (13), it means one is both en vogue – and justified – in teaching African-Canadian literature. Certainly, the teaching of postcolonial texts, or of minority literatures, should be as uncomfortable and as discomfiting as the realities that forced them into being. Why should the teaching of a slave narrative make anyone feel good? When Marie–Josèphe Angélique, a slave woman in colonial Montreal, relates her life story, telling of how she was forcibly bred for the sake of profits for her master, and when we read of her torture and execution for arson in Montreal in 1734, we ought to feel disturbed.19 But we should read her story alongside the satirical sketches of the pro-slavery, British North American (Nova Scotian) intellectual Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who bids his main mouth-piece and most famous character, Sam Slick, to utter this infamous statement: “niggers […] those thick skulled, crooked shanked, flat footed, long heeled, wooly headed gentlemen, don’t seem fit for much else but slavery.”20 Such sentiments help us to understand why African peoples had to struggle so long and with such difficulty to achieve the abolition of slavery, and to appreciate that negrophobia and anti-black racism date back to the origins of European modernity.21 Similarly, when David George relates his experience of Virginian slavery – “the greatest grief I then had was to see them whip my mother, and to hear her, on her knees, begging for mercy”22 – 19

See Marcel Trudel, L’Esclavage au Canada français (1960; Montréal: Les Éditions de l’horizon, 1963). 20 Thomas Chandler Haliburton, The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville (First Series; Halifax, Nova Scotia: Howe, 1836): 176. 21 Although they may have been ignorant of the sources of their own racism, the two or more young white men, in – excuse the irony – a souped-up black car, who leaned out a window and screeched “N I G G E R !” at me while I was walking one night, in July 1993, back to the Queen’s University Graduate Residence in Kingston, Ontario, felt presumably some claim of ownership upon me. My reaction, however, was completely unlike my dissertation-writing, doctoral-candidate persona: I dropped the two bags of groceries I was carrying and went running down the middle of the street after the speeding car in an attempt to hurl a rock at its rear window. I had gone straight from the end of the twentieth century back to the Stone Age. 22 David George, “An Account of thr Life of Mr. David George,” 32.

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we must connect it, almost genetically, to the African-Nova Scotian (Africadian) singer–songwriter Faith Nolan (1957–) and her song, “Marie Joseph Angelique” (1986): She ran away from the home she could never call her own to burn Mount Royal down. She lit her torch of freedom and set the building on fire. She said, If I can’t be free, I will burn in the mire. Slave owners took her to the jail cell and whipped her body; then marched her through the town for the wicked to see; then they burned her at the town square. I heard her screams. My soul is my own for no man to keep.23

It is not difficult to move from Nolan’s agonizing song about Angélique to the Montreal native Lorena Gale (1958–) and her play Angélique (1999), where one reads, “Then is now. Now is then.”24 Gale bids us consider slavery as an earlier mode of black immigrant (woman) labour exploitation: “Unless otherwise stated, the slaves are working in every scene in which they appear, either in a modern or historical context” (3). In one scene in the play, Angélique’s master, François, “reaches around and removes A N G É L I Q U E ’s uniform, revealing period undergarments beneath her modern clothing” (34). Such anachronistic imaginings compel us to address slavery, not as a long-passed spasm of history, but as a living component of contemporary labour (and race) relations. Teachers of such texts must move just as fluidly in history, navigating canal systems of ‘periods’, toing-and-froing, as necessary, to allow for an adequate explication de texte.

23 Faith Nolan, “Marie Joseph Angelique” (1986), in Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, vol. 2, ed. George Elliott Clarke (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1992): 120. 24 Lorena Gale, Angélique (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2000): 3.

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Civics & The Humanities Critics may bridle at this impolitic emphasis on the politics of a text. Crucially, Kanaganayakam compels us to “defend […] the textuality of the text” (736). Although it “may well reflect several aspects of contemporary or historical reality, […] its primary function is to work within its own status as an artifact” (736–37). Aesthetics are the basis of the humanities, I agree, but so is civics. Hence, the poetics of a text should be excavated along with its politics. Kanishka Goonewardena pushes for a holistic criticism, asserting, trenchantly, for instance, that “those who do not want to talk about global capitalism should be silent about postcolonialism and diaspora.”25 Our central duty, as teachers, is to get the history right, which means utilizing several sources and approaches, from the anthropological and folkloric to analyses of the practices of political economy. Perry Anderson cautions us, sagely, that the major problem in contemporary historiography is “representation omitted rather than misrepresentation committed.”26 Thus, we must seek out histories that set forth narratives encompassing race, culture, gender, and class analyses. This must be one of the criteria, as the Indian scholar Sumit Sarkar witnesses, “for distinguishing between less and more valid versions of the past.”27 While Kanaganayakam holds, properly, that “writers would like their texts to be read and taught as texts rather than as position papers” (735), their plays, poetry, novels, short stories, essays, histories, letters, songs, libretti, journalism, and scientific analyses are wholly embedded within the discourses of their moment, while they also impinge on the discourses of our own. Perhaps it is the failure to explore the resonant, real-world contexts of texts that reduces their teaching to a rendering of rote interpretations that rout their upheavals. Mukherjee advises “simply teaching Third World literary texts does not change consciousness” (xii). The Euro-Canadian literary scholar Diana Brydon believes “postcolonial theories have yet to make a difference beyond the academy,” and feels that postcolonialism’s “entry into the academy has been additive rather than transformational.”28 Verily, a mere theory of postcoloniality – without a theory of neo-imperialism – becomes an abject

25 Kanishka Goonewardena, “Postcolonialism and Diaspora: A Contribution to the Critique of Nationalist Ideology and Historiography in the Age of Globalization and Neoliberalism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 672. I cannot resist noting that the first global industry was slavery. See also my play Beatrice Chancy (Victoria, British Columbia: Polestar, 1999): esp. 25. 26 Quoted in Goonewardena, “Postcolonialism and Diaspora,” 678. 27 Quoted in Goonewardena, “Postcolonialism and Diaspora,” 679. 28 Diana Brydon, “Postcolonialism Now: Autonomy, Cosmopolitanism, and Diaspora,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 692.

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helpmate of globalization. The South Asian-Canadian scholar Balachandra Rajan warns: The global enterprise […] will emphasize the local, the neighbourhood, the mosaic with its inlaid promise of stability, the solicitous concern of the imperium for exotic detail.29

– a catalogue of interests harmonious with postcolonialism as usually practised – or read. Ironically, though, as Rajan spells out, “Postcolonial dispositions of reading may be the best means of critiquing the rapidly compounding rhetoric of globalism” (723). Still, “postcolonial ways of thought must subject themselves to a sharp revisionary turn if they are to comment effectively on an imperialism radically different from its predecessors [because it is deterritorialized]” (723).

Accessing the African-Canadian Library The entrée of African-Canadian literature into the Canadian academy will provoke and stimulate discussions of the usually unspoken. For instance, if we teach “I Fight Back,” a poem by the Jamaican-Canadian Lillian Allen (1951–), we will accent the North American capitalist adventurism named in this stanza: ITT ALCAN KAISER

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce These are priviledged [sic] names in my County [sic] But I A M I L L E G A L H E R E [in Canada].30

In classic, African-diasporic fashion, Allen emphasizes the irony of the welcomed presence of American and Canadian transnational corporations in Jamaica, while her own body, black and female and Caribbean-raised (after the displacement effected by slavery), is not welcome in Canada. Beyond this reading, though, lurks yet another, a deeper analysis, one that should outline Canada’s unspoken, unheralded imperialism in the Caribbean. Indeed, in the 1870s, the Anglo-Canadian nationalist and British imperialist Canada First movement called for “closer trade relations with the West Indies, with a view to ultimate political connexion.”31 As a self-governing state in the Empire, 29 Balachandra Rajan, “Imperialism and the Other End of History,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 719. 30 Lillian Allen, “I Fight Back,” in Allen, Rhythm an’ Hardtimes (Toronto: Domestic Bliss, 1982): 15. 31 Quoted in Kenneth McNaught, The Pelican History of Canada (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1978): 157.

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one whose anglophone leaders viewed it as a conduit of British power in North America, some were tempted to move beyond the colonizing of the “North-West Territories” and to venture into the Caribbean. Although Canada could not establish a political dominion within the Caribbean, several of its transnational corporations – Alcan, the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotia Bank), and the Royal Bank of Canada, to name a few – did ‘invade’ the region. While Allen’s work – like that of NourbeSe Philip’s play Coups and Calypsos (2001) – allows us to contemplate aggressive, Canadian commercial and political policies in the Caribbean, we may inspect the writings of the white Anglo-Canadian author, William Stairs (1863–92), a Halifax, Nova Scotia native, for a better understanding of Canadian imperialism in Africa. Indeed, Stairs’ adventures in Africa in the late-Victorian era included “condoning decapitation and mutilation.”32 If we dare to recall Canada’s imperialist ventures, on behalf of or in support of Great Britain (when it was, by hook and by crook, ‘great’), we might better appreciate why the 1993 Somalia peacekeeping and food-distribution mission ended in elite, Canadian soldiers torturing two Somali youths and lynching one. In other words, we will grapple with the ways in which race and racism have always influenced Canadian foreign policy. In addition, we could follow up our revelations about the Somalia Affair with a reading of a poem, “Sister (Y)Our Manchild at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” by the Trinidadian-Canadian Claire Harris (1937–), treating this grotesque episode.33 To consider black immigration to Canada, one may examine a rich assortment of texts from African-Canadian literature, including a novel by the Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand (1953–), In Another Place, Not Here (1996). The Mauritian-Canadian literary scholar Geeta Paray–Clarke, in the section of her class notes titled “Canada, Toronto and Immigrants,” lists the various moments in Brand’s novel where one of the protagonists, Verlia, and her relatives in Sudbury, Ontario, respond to white Canadian, anti-black racism:

32 William Stairs, African Exploits: The Diaries of William Stairs, 1887–1892, ed. Roy MacLaren (Montreal & Kingston: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1998): dust-jacket flap. Fascinatingly, Stairs’ diaries, published wholly in 1998, are edited by the then-High Commissioner, for Canada, to the United Kingdom, the Hon. Roy MacLaren, whose editorial asides sometimes update the ethnocentric assumptions of Stairs. See my article “Writing the Pax Canadiana: Terror Abroad, Torture at Home,” in Building Liberty: Canada and World Peace, 1945–2005, ed. Conny Steenman–Marcusse & Aritha van Herk (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2005): 213–36. 33 Harris, “Sister (Y)Our Manchild at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” in Harris, Dipped in Shadow (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 1996): 51–62. But see also Sherene Razack’s brilliant analysis of the Somalia Affair, Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004).

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pp. 140–42: Verlia’s uncle and aunt who live in Sudbury do their best to blend with the whites and be accepted by them. They think that there is no racism, you only have to work hard and you will blend with the others. They want to pretend that they are not seen as being different from others. They do their best not to show their blackness…. p. 164: Verlia imagines how the Sudbury uncle and aunt are practising self-deception. p. 165: She sees her uncle’s life as that of capitulation and dying.34

This descriptive summary of significant passages foregrounds the interlocking complex of race and identity – or identification – in urban Canada. AfricanCanadian literature, in general, demands this confrontation with – this accounting of – the facts of white supremacy and black resistance in Canada. Because civic experience is multi-faceted and superficially ahistorical, the history and currency of African-Canadian cultures may serve to reveal the operations of oppressive state practices, both domestically and internationally, and foster probing of these institutions of domination. Most importantly, the examination of this literature allows readers to encounter fine and fiery texts that stimulate judgment and judgment calls. As Sartre declares, negritute [sic] is, in its essence, poetry. Upon this one occasion at least [i.e. the 1948 publication of Orphée noir], the most authentic revolutionary program and the purest poetry derive from the same source.35

– the black revolt, against imperialism, against racism, against second-class treatment. I sound Sartre again: to each epoch its poetry, for each epoch the circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class, to seize again the [revolutionary] torch, in creating situations which can express or surpass themselves only through Poetry.36

Perhaps that moment, that opportunity, filters through – I mean, also through – African-Canadian writers today.

34

Geeta Paray–Clarke, “In Another Place, Not Here: Dionne Brand,” lecture notes, 5. Typescript in the possession of the author. 35 “La Négritude [...] est, en son essence, Poésie. Pour une fois au moins, le plus authentique projet révolutionnaire et la poésie la plus pure sortent de la même source”; Jean–Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” in Nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (1948; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972): xliii–xliv. Tr. by S.W. Allen as Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence Africaine, [1963]): 64. 36 “À chaque époque sa poésie; à chaque époque, les circonstances de l’histoire élisent une nation, une race, une classe pour reprendre le flambeau, en créant des situations qui ne peuvent s’exprimer ou se dépasser que par la Poésie”; Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xliv; tr. Allen, 65.

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From Prelude to Practice37 My conclusion is a practical one: a provisional syllabus for African-Canadian literature. To design such an instruction vehicle, I must needs divide the literature into a series of themes or periods or both. However, in the case of African-Canadian literature, which possesses both a long history (beginning in 1785) and a relatively small group of contemporary literary texts (the majority dating back to 1964), periodization enacts, in itself, practically a thematization.38 My proposed categories are, nevertheless, not so much a product of historical dates as of chief concerns that reflect the different periods in which different groups of African Canadians arrived and settled. My tentative schema employs these ‘silos’: 1) Slavery (in Canada and experienced by proto-“Canadians”

elsewhere); 2) Settlement (i.e. narratives situated in the historic African-Canadian

communities); 3) Immigration (mainly since 1955); 4) Homelands (commentaries on originating colonies/nations)

and Diaspora (meditations on the African diaspora, via slavery, imperialism, and economic migration); 5) Urban (city-based, pop-culture-influenced contemporary writing); 6) and two generic categories, Criticism (academic writing or belleslettres); 7) and Juvenile. Naturally, this syllabus is only tentative, suggestive, selective, and brief. Readers possess total liberty to replace any of my catalogued texts with others of their own choosing. Finally, please note that I have deliberately and liberally intermixed non-fiction and imaginative texts.

37

According to Lee S. Shulman in “Signature pedagogies in the professions,” Daedalus

134.3 (Summer 2005), “Pedagogies that bridge theory and practice are never simple. They

entail highly complex performances of observation and analysis, reading and interpretation, question and answer, conjecture and refutation, proposal and response, problem and hypothesis, query and evidence, individual invention and collective deliberation” (56). A practical pedagogy must also value “uncertainty” that renders “classroom settings unpredictable and surprising, raising the stakes for both students and instructors” (57). 38 For a working history and bibliography of African-Canadian literature, see my “Surveys” section in Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2002): 323–448.

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A Provisional Syllabus for African-Canadian Literature 39 1) Slavery Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: n.p., 1849). [autobiography] Braithwaite, Diana. Martha and Elvira: A One-Act Play (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993). [drama] Clarke, Austin. Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food (Toronto: Random House, 1999). [memoir] ——. The Polished Hoe (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2002). [fiction] Clarke, George Elliott. Beatrice Chancy (Victoria, British Columbia: Polestar, 1999). [drama] Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: the Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2006). [history] Delisle, Louise. Back Talk: Plays of Black Experience (Lockeport, Nova Scotia: Roseway, 2005). [drama] Drew, Benjamin, comp. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada related by themselves; with an account of the history and condition of the colored population of Upper Canada (Boston M A : John P. Jewett, 1856). [Drew was not of African descent, but the narratives are by African Americans in Canada.] [compilation] Gale, Lorena. Angélique (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2000). [drama] George, David. “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa; given by himself in a Conversation with Brother John Rippon of London, and Brother Pearce of Birmingham,” Baptist Annual Register 1 (1790–93): 473–84. [autobiography] Henson, Jim. Broken Shackles ([Oshawa, Ontario?], 1889). Repr. as Broken Shackles: Old Man Henson from Slavery to Freedom, ed. Peter Meyler (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2001). [autobiography, narrated to John Foster Jr., who published under pseud., Glenelg.] Henson, Josiah. Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, Narrated by Himself (Boston M A : A.D. Phelps, 1849). [autobiography, narrated to Sam Eliot] Johnson, William H.H. The Life of Wm. H.H. Johnson: From 1839–1900, and The New Race [The Horrors of Slavery] (Vancouver, British Columbia: Bolam & Harnett, 1904). [prose] King, Boston. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a black preacher, written by himself during his residence at Kingswood School,” Methodist Magazine 21 (1798): 105–10, 157–61, 209–13, 261–65. [autobiography] Marrant, John. A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia) Born in New-York, in North America (London: Gilbert & Plummer, 1785). [autobiography]

39

Most of these titles do not appear in the Works Cited for the essay. Please also note that, while I give only the first date of publication for these texts, the vast majority are in print.

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Robertson, John William. The Book of the Bible Against Slavery (Halifax, Nova Scotia: [Robertson], 1854). [autobiography] Samuels, Ian. Fuga: Being a Selection from the Historical Document on the Nature of Slaves (Calgary, Alberta: housepress, 1998). [poetry]

2) Settlement Alexis, André. Lambton Kent: A Play (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1999). [drama] [Beal, William S. A.] Billy: The Life and Photographs of William S.A. Beal, by Robert Barrow & Leigh Hambly (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Vig Corps, 1988). [photographs]. Best, Carrie M. That Lonesome Road: The Autobiography of Carrie M. Best (New Glasgow, Nova Scotia: Clarion, 1977). [autobiography] Boyd, George Elroy. Consecrated Ground (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Blizzard, 1999). [drama] Carter, Velma, & Leah Suzanne Carter. The Window of Our Memories, vol. 2: The New Generation (St. Albert, Alberta: Black Cultural Research Society of Alberta, 1990). [history] ——, & Wanda Leffler Akili. The Window of Our Memories (St. Albert, Alberta: Black Cultural Research Society of Alberta, 1981). [history] Clarke, George Elliott. Execution Poems (Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2001). [poetry] ——. George & Rue (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2005). [fiction] ——. Whylah Falls (Winlaw, British Columbia: Polestar, 1990). [poetry] Compton, Wayde. 49th Parallel Psalm (Vancouver, British Columbia: Advance–– Arsenal Pulp, 1999). [poetry] Douglas, James. James Douglas in California, 1841; Being a Journal of a Voyage from the Columbia to California (Vancouver, British Columbia: Vancouver Public Library’s Press, 1965). [journal] Edugyan, Esi. The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2004). [fiction] Fauset, Arthur Huff, comp. Folklore from Nova Scotia (New York: American FolkLore Society, 1931). [Fauset was African-American, but much of this collected lore is by Africadians (Black Nova Scotians)] Foggo, Cheryl. Pourin’ Down Rain (Calgary, Alberta: Detselig, 1990). [memoir] Gale, Lorena. Je me souviens: memories of an expatriate Anglophone Montréalaise Québécoise Exiled in Canada (Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2001). [drama] Green, Truman. A Credit to Your Race: A Novel (Tsawwassen, British Columbia: Simple Thoughts, 1974). [fiction] Grizzle, Stanley G[eorge]. My Name’s Not George: The Story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada: Personal Reminiscences of Stanley G. Grizzle. With John Cooper. [memoir & history] Henderson, Anna Minerva. Citadel (Fredericton, New Brunswick: [Henderson], 1967). [poetry] Hill, Lawrence. Any Known Blood (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1997). [fiction] ——. Some Great Thing (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Turnstone, 1992). [fiction]

380

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

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McKerrow, Peter [Evander]. A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, and their First Organization as Churches, A.D. 1832 (Halifax: Nova Scotia Printing Company, 1895). [history] Oliver, Pearleen. A Brief History of the Colored Baptists of Nova Scotia, 1782-1953. In Commemoration of Centennial Celebrations of the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia (Halifax: [African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia], 1953). [history] O’Ree, Willy. The Autobiography of Willy O’Ree: Hockey’s Black Pioneer (Toronto: Somerville House, 2000). [autobiography, with co-writer Michael McKinley] Perry, Charlotte Bronté. The Long Road: The History of the Coloured Canadian in Windsor, Ontario, 1867–1967 (Windsor, Ontario: Sumner Printing & Publishing, 1967). [history] Peterson, Oscar. A Jazz Odyssey: the Life of Oscar Peterson (London: Continuum, 2002). [autobiography] Robbins, Arlie C[lara]. Legacy to Buxton (North Buxton, Ontario: A.C. Robbins, [1983]). [history] Ruck, Calvin W[oodrow]. Canada’s Black Battalion: No. 2 Construction, 1916–1920 (Halifax: Society for the Protection and Preservation of Black Culture in Nova Scotia, 1986). [history] Ruggles, Clifton, & Olivia Rovinescu. Outsider Blues: A Voice from the Shadows (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 1996). [essays] Sarsfield, Mairuth Hodge. No Crystal Stairs: a novel (Norval, Ontario: Moulin, 1997). [fiction] Saunders, Charles R. Black and Bluenose: The Contemporary History of a Community (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield, 1999). [prose] ——. Sweat and Soul: Saga of Black Boxers from the Halifax Forum to Caesar’s Palace (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press; Dartmouth, Nova Scotia: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, 1990). [history] ——. “A Visit to Africville,” in Africville: A Spirit That Lives On (exhibition catalogue; Halifax, Nova Scotia & Dartmouth, Nova Scotia: The Art Gallery, Mount Saint Vincent University, et al., 1989): 5-21. [short fiction] Sealey, Donna Byard. Colored Zion: The History of Zion United Baptist Church and the Black Community of Truro, Nova Scotia ([Dartmouth, Nova Scotia: Donna Byard Sealey, 2001]). [history] Sears, Djanet. Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2004). [drama] Shadd, Mary A[nn]. [Mary Ann Shadd Cary.] A Plea for Emigration, or, Notes of Canada West, ed. Richard Almonte (1852; Toronto: Mercury, 1998). [prose] Shadd, Ruth Ann. Breaking Loose: A History of African-Canadian Dance in Southwestern Ontario, 1900–1955 (Windsor, Ontario: Preney Print & Litho, 1995). [history] Slaney, Catherine. Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2003). [family history]

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Stevenson, Darryl, Pat Graham & Linda McDowell, ed. & comp. The Black Experience in Manitoba (Winnipeg: Communications Department of Winnipeg School Division No. 1, 1993). [history] Thomas, Verna. Invisible Shadows: A Black Woman’s Life in Nova Scotia (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nimbus, 2001). [autobiography] Tynes, Maxine. Borrowed Beauty (Porters Lake, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield, 1987). [poetry] ——. Woman Talking Woman (Porters Lake, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield, 1990). [poetry] Ward, Frederick. Riverlisp: Black Memories (Montreal: Tundra, 1974). [fiction] Williams, Dorothy W. The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montréal (Montreal: Véhicule, 1997). [history]

3) Immigration Armstrong, Bromley, with Sheldon Taylor. Bromley: Tireless Champion for Just Causes: Memoirs (Toronto: Vitabu, 2000). [biography]. Brand, Dionne. In Another Place, Not Here (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996). [fiction] ——. No Language Is Neutral (Toronto: Coach House, 1990). [poetry] ——. Sans Souci and Other Stories (Stratford, Ontario: Williams–Wallace, 1988). [short fiction] Brown, Rosemary. Being Brown: A Very Public Life (Toronto: Ballantine, 1990). [autobiography] Bunyan, H[ector]. Jay. [Hijay] Prodigals in a Promised Land ([1981]; Toronto: P U C Play Service, 2000). [drama] Clarke, Austin. Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2003). [short fiction] ——. Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1980). [memoir]. ——. The Survivors of the Crossing (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964). [fiction] Clarke, George Elliott. Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos (Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2003). [dramatic poem] Cromwell, Liz.. Canadian Jungle Tea: Poems (Toronto: Khoisan Artists, 1975). [poetry] Forsythe, Dennis, ed. Let the Niggers Burn! The Sir George Williams University Affair and its Caribbean Aftermath (Montreal: Our Generation – Black Rose, 1971). [anthology] Foster, Cecil. Slammin’ Tar (Toronto: Random House, 1998). [fiction] Fraser, J[oyce]. C[armen]. Cry of the Illegal Immigrant (Toronto: Williams–Wallace International, 1980). [autobiography] Gairey, Harry. A Black Man’s Toronto, 1914–1980: The Reminiscences of Harry Gairey, ed. Donna Hill (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1981). [autobiography] Goodison, Lorna. Travelling Mercies (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001). [poetry] Head, Wilson A. Adaptation of Immigrants: Perceptions of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: An Exploratory Study ([Downsview, Ontario]: York University, 1980). [prose] Joseph, Clifton. Metropolitan Blues (Toronto: Domestic Bliss, 1983). [poetry]

382

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

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Kwamdela, Odimumba. [John Ashton Brathwaite.] Niggers. . . This Is C A N A D A : Cold A-nti N-iggers A-nd D-efinitely A-merican (Toronto: twenty-first Century, 1971). [fiction] Shadd, Adrienne Lynn, with Carl E. James, ed. Talking About Difference: Encounters in Culture, Language and Identity (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1994). [essay compilation] Silvera, Makeda. Silenced: Caribbean Domestic Workers Talk with Makeda Silvera (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1983). [interviews]

4) Homelands & Diaspora Anderson, Ho Che. King: A Comic Book Biography (Seattle W A : Fantagraphics, 2005). [graphic biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.] Bennett, Louise Simone. [Mrs. Eric Coverley; Miss Lou], ed. Mother Goose / Jamaica Muddah Goose (Kingston: Friends of the Jamaica School of Art Association, 1981). [traditional rhymes] ——. Selected Poems, ed. Mervyn Morris (1982; Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s, rev. ed., 1983). [poetry] Blackwood, Yvonne. Into Africa: A Personal Journey (Toronto: Abbeyfield, 2000). [travelogue] Bobb–Smith, Yvonne. I Know Who I Am: A Caribbean Woman’s Identity in Canada (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2003). [prose] Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001). [memoir] Brown, Lennox John. “The Captive: Snow Dark Sunday,” in Ottawa Little Theatre (Ranking Play Series 2, Catalogue No. 43, September 1965). [drama] Bunyan, H[ector]. Jay. [Hijay] Prodigals in a Promised Land ([1981]; Toronto: P U C Play Service, 2000). [drama] Callender, Ophelia. [Calle Waterman, pseud.] as Calle Waterman. Poor Ophie: A Biographical Novel (United States: 1st Books Library, 2003). [fiction] Carew, Jan R[ynveld]. Black Midas (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958). [fiction] ——. Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1994). [prose] Clarke, Austin C[hesterfield]. [Tom.] A Passage Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel Selvon (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1994). [memoir] ——. Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food (Toronto: Random House, 1999). [memoir] ——. The Prime Minister (Don Mills, Ontario: General, 1977). [fiction] ——. When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (Toronto: Anansi, 1971). [short fiction] Clarke, George Elliott. Illuminated Verses (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2005). [poetry, plus photographs by Ricardo Scipio] Cooper, Afua. Copper Woman (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2005). [poetry] Crail, Archie. Exile (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Blizzard, 1990). [drama] Creider, Jane Tapsubei. Two Lives: My Spirit and I (London: Women’s Press, 1986). [autobiography]

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Curtis, Christopher Paul. The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963: a novel (New York: Delacorte, 1995). [juvenile] Darbasie, Nigel. A Map of the Island (Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2001). [poetry] Deen, Faizal. Land Without Chocolate: A Memoir (Toronto: Wolsak & Wynn, 1999). [poetry] Dyer, Bernadette. Waltzes I Have Not Forgotten (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2004). [fiction] Evanson, Tanya. Throwing Skin: South American Poems, 1997–1998 (Vancouver, British Columbia: Mother Tongue Media, 1999). [poetry, short fiction, journal] Foster, Cecil. Dry Bone Memories: A Novel (Toronto: Key Porter, 2001). [fiction] ——. Island Wings: A Memoir (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998). [memoir] ——. No Man in the House (Toronto: Random House, 1991). [fiction] Harris, Claire. Travelling to Find a Remedy (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Fiddlehead Poetry Books/Goose Lane, 1986). [poetry] Hearne, John. Voices Under the Window (London: Faber & Faber, 1955). [fiction] Kester, Norman. From Here to District Six: A South African Memoir with New Poetry, Prose and Other Writings (Toronto: District Six, 2000). [prose, poetry] Laferrière, Dany. An Aroma of Coffee, tr. David Homel (Toronto: Coach House, 1993). [fiction] ——. Dining with the Dictator, tr. David Homel (Toronto: Coach House, 1994). [fiction] Lewis, Sharon, & Maxine Bailey. Sistahs (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1998). [drama] Lewis, [Thelma] Theresa. Caribbean Folk Legends (Stratford, Ontario: Williams– Wallace, 1989). [traditional tales] Maart, Rozena. Talk About It! (Stratford, Ontario: Williams–Wallace, 1990). [poetry] ——. Rosa’s District 6 (Toronto: T S A R , 2005). [fiction] Mandiela, Ahdri Zhina. Dark Diaspora–in Dub: A Dub Theatre Piece (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991). [poetic drama] Manley-Ennevor, Rachel. [Rachel Manley Drummond.] [as Rachel Manley] Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996). [memoir] McWatt, Tessa. This Body (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2004). [fiction] Mezlekia, Nega. Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: Memories of My Ethiopian Boyhood (Toronto: Penguin, 2000). [memoir] Montague, Masani. Dread Culture: A Rastawoman’s Story (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1994). [fiction] Mordecai, Pamela. De Man: A Performance Poem (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1995). [dramatic poetry] ——. The True Blue of Islands (Toronto: Sandberry, 2005). [poetry] Norman, Alma. Ballads of Jamaica (Kingston: n.p., 1964). [poetry] Nortje, Arthur. Dead Roots (London: Heinemann, 1973). [poetry] Philip, M[arlene]. Nourbe[S]e. Harriet’s Daughter (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1988). [fiction]

384

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

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——. Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (Stratford, Ontario: Mercury, 1991). [fiction] Prince, Althea. Ladies of the Night and Other Stories (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993). [short fiction] ——. Loving This Man (Toronto: Insomniac, 2001). [fiction] Roach, Charles. Root for the Ravens: Poems for Drum and Freedom (Toronto: N C Press, 1977). [poetry] Sandiford, Robert Edison. Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle (Montreal: D C Books, 2003). [travelogue / memoir] Saunders, Charles R. Imaro (New York: Daw, 1981). [fiction] ——. Imaro II: The Quest for Cush (New York: Daw, 1984). [fiction] ——. Imaro III: The Trail of Bohu (New York: Daw, 1985). [fiction] Sears, Djanet. Afrika Solo (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1990). [drama] ——. Harlem Duet (1997; [Winnipeg, Manitoba]: Scirocco Drama, 1998). [drama] Senior, Olive. A–Z of Jamaican Heritage (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Educational Books (Caribbean), 1983). [prose] ——. Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (St. Andrew, Jamaica: Twin Guinep, 2003). [encyclopedia] ——. Gardening in the Tropics: Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994). [poetry] ——. Over the roofs of the world (Toronto: Insomniac, 2005). [poetry] Seremba, George Bwanika. Come Good Rain (Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1993). [drama] Silvera, Makeda. Remembering G and Other Stories (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991). [short fiction] Thomas, H. Nigel. How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? Stories (Saint-Laurent, Quebec: A F O Enterprises, 1996). [short fiction] Ward, Frederick. Riverlisp: Black Memories (Montreal: Tundra, 1974). [fiction] Watson, G. Llewellyn. Jamaican Sayings: With Notes on Folklore, Aesthetics, and Social Control (Tallahassee: Florida A&M U P , 1991). [prose] Wiwa, Ken. In the Shadow of a Saint (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000). [memoir] Zeleza, [Paul] Tiyambe. The Joys of Exile: Stories (Toronto: Anansi, 1994). [short fiction] ——. A Modern Economic History of Africa ([Dakar, Senegal]: C O D E S R I A , 1993). [history]

5) Urban Alexis, André. Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa (Toronto: Coach House, 1994). [short fiction] Anderson, Ho Che. Scream Queen (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005). [graphic] ——. Young Hoods in Love (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1995). [graphic] Anderson, Hopeton A. [Hope]. Slips from Grace (Toronto: Coach House, 1987). [poetry] Anthony, Terrence. Shadowtown: Black Fist Rising (New Westminster, British Columbia: Madheart, 1994). [graphic]

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Borden, Walter M. Tightrope Time: Ain’t Nuthin’ More Than Some Itty Bitty Madness Between Twilight & Dawn (1986. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2005). [drama] Boyd, George [Elroy]. Gideon’s Blues (Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2004). [drama]. Braithwaite, Lawrence. Wigger (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1995). [fiction] Brand, Dionne. Thirsty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002). [poetry] ——. What We All Long For (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2005). [fiction] Broox, Klyde. My Best Friend Is White (Toronto: McGilligan, 2005). [poetry] Brunhuber, Kim Barry. Kameleon Man (Vancouver, British Columbia: Beach Holme, 2003). [fiction] Carter, Rubin “Hurricane.” The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1974). [memoir] Chapman, Vanz. Roam: A Novel in 6 Tripz (Toronto: Gutter Press – Urban Books, 2004). [fiction] Clarke, Austin. In This City (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992). [short fiction] ——. The Question (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999). [fiction] Clarke, George Elliott. Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos (Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2003). [dramatic poem] Compton, Wayde. Performance Bond (Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp, 2004). [poetry] Cuevas, Ernesto R. Some Friends of Mine: Short Stories (Toronto: Williams–Wallace, 1986). [short fiction] Fearon, Rudyard [Rudy]. Spin: A New Book of Poetry & Free Soil, From the Poetry (C D - R O M , 2001]; Toronto: R W F , 2004). [poetry] Harris, Claire. Drawing Down a Daughter (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 1992). [poetry] ——. She (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 2000). [poetry] Harris, Seth-Adrian. SacredSpace/UrbanSprawl: Pohymns (Mississauga, Ontario: Fetus Fiction, 2004). [poetry; with compact disc and graphics by Robert Ciancamerla] Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Warner, 1998). [fiction] James, Darius. Negrophobia: An Urban Parable: A Novel (New York: Carol – Citadel, 1992). [fiction] Johnson, Kirk. Companion Pieces (Montreal: Cumulus, 1999). [poetry] Joseph, Clifton. Metropolitan Blues (Toronto: Domestic Bliss, 1983). [poetry] Kellough, Kaie. Lettricity: Poems (Montreal: Cumulus, 2004). [poetry] Laferrière, Dany. Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer: roman (Montréal: V L B , 1985). [fiction] ——. How to Make Love to a Negro: A Novel, tr. David Homel (Toronto: Coach House, 1987). [fiction] Mayr, Suzette. Moon Honey (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest, 1995). [fiction] ——. Venous Hum (Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp, 2004). [fiction] Moodie, Andrew. Riot ([Winnipeg, Manitoba]: Scirocco Drama, 1997). [drama] Mordecai, Pamela. Certifiable (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 2001). [poetry]

386

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

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Motion. [Wendy Brathwaite.] Motion in Poetry (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002). [poetry] Odhiambo, David Nandi. diss/ed banded nation (Victoria, British Columbia: Polestar, 1998). [fiction] Palmer, Hazelle. Tales from the Gardens and Beyond (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1995). [short fiction] Philip, M. NourbeSe. Caribana: African Roots and Continuities: Race, Space and the Poetics of Moving (Toronto: Poui, 1996). [essay] Prince, Althea. Loving This Man (Toronto: Insomniac, 2001). [fiction] Richardson, Karen, & Steven Green, ed. T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers (Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford, 2004). [anthology] Rigg, Brian: A False Paradise (Toronto: E C W , 2001). [poetry] Samuels, Ian. The Ubiquitous B I G (Toronto: Coach House, 2004). [poetry] Sears, Djanet. Harlem Duet (1997; [Winnipeg, Manitoba]: Scirocco Drama, 1998). [drama] Silvera, Makeda. The Heart Does Not Bend (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2002). [fiction] Woods, David. Native Song: Poetry and Paintings (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield, 1990). [poetry] Zapparoli, David. Regent Park: The Public Experiment in Housing (Toronto: Market Gallery, 1999). [photo exhibit catalogue]

6) Criticism / Belles-Lettres Aylward, Carol A. Canadian Critical Race Theory: Racism and the Law (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 1999). [prose] Bertley, Leo W. Canada and Its People of African Descent (Pierrefonds, Quebec: Bilongo, 1977). [history] Brand, Dionne. Bread Out of Stone (Toronto: Coach House, 1994). [essays] Carew, Jan. Fulcrums of Change: Origins of Racism in the Americas and Other Essays (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 1988). [essays] Case, Frederick Ivor. Racism and National Consciousness (Toronto: Plowshare, 1979). [essay] Clarke, Austin. Public Enemies: Police Violence and Black Youth (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992). [prose] Clarke, George Elliott. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2002). Crichlow, Wesley. Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2004). [prose] Dei, George J. Sefa, Leeno Luke Karumanchery & Nisha Karumanchery–Luik. Playing the Race Card: Exposing White Power and Privilege (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). [prose] Dorsinville, Max. Caliban Without Prospero: Essay on Québec and Black Literature (Erin, Ontario: Press Porcépic, 1974). [essay] Foster, Cecil. A Place Called Heaven: The Meaning of Being Black in Canada (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996). [essays]

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——. Where Race Does Not Matter: The New Spirit of Modernity (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005). [prose] Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). [prose] ——. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 2000). [prose] Hill, Lawrence. Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 2001). [prose] ——. Women of Vision: The Story of the Canadian Negro Women’s Association, 1951–1976 (Toronto: Umbrella, 1996). [history] Iton, Richard. Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000). [prose] Jackson, Richard. Black Writers and Latin America: Cross-Cultural Affinities (Washington D C : Howard U P , 1998). [prose] Kelly, Jennifer. Borrowed Identities (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). [prose] ——. Under the Gaze: Learning to Be Black in White Society (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 1998). [prose] Maart, Rozena. The Absence of Knowledge of White Consciousness in Contemporary Feminist Theory, or Consciousness, Knowledge and Morality (Toronto: Awomandla, 1999). [essay] McTair, Roger. The Black Experience in the White Mind: Meditations on a Persistent Discourse ([Toronto]: Roger McTair, 1995). [essay] Mensah, Joseph. Black Canadians: History, Experiences, Social Conditions (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2002). [prose] Nurse, Donna Bailey. What’s a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers (Toronto: Insomniac, 2003). [prose] Philip, M[arlene]. Nourbe[S]e. Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, 1984–1992 (Stratford, Ontario: Mercury, 1992). [prose] ——. A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays (Toronto: Mercury, 1997). [essays] ——. Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel (Toronto: Poui, [1993]). [essay] Prince, Althea. Being Black: Essays (Toronto: Insomniac, 2001). [essays] Saunders, Charles R. Black and Bluenose: The Contemporary History of a Community (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield, 1999). [prose] Shadd, Adrienne Lynn, & Carl E. James, ed. Talking About Difference: Encounters in Culture, Language and Identity (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1994). [essay compilation] Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel (New York: Greenwood, 1988). [essay] Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (1997; Toronto: Insomniac Press, rev. ed. 2003). [essays] ——, ed. Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000). [essays] Wallen, Thelma J. Multiculturalism and Quebec: A Province in Crisis (Stratford, Ontario: Williams–Wallace, 1991). [essay]

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Williams, Dawn P, ed. Who’s Who in Black Canada: Black Success and Black Excellence in Canada: A Contemporary Directory (Toronto: DP Williams & Associates, 2002). [prose] Zeleza, [Paul] Tiyambe. A Modern Economic History of Africa ([Dakar, Senegal]: C O D E S R I A , 1993). [history]

7) Juvenile Allen, Lillian. Rhythm an’ Hard Times (Toronto: Domestic Bliss, 1982). [poetry] Anderson, Ho Che. The No-Boys Club (Toronto: Groundwood, 1998). Badoe, Adwoa. Crabs for Dinner (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1995). ——. The Pot of Wisdom: Ananse Stories (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001). Brand, Dionne. Earth Magic (Toronto: Kids Can, 1979). Carew, Jan. Children of the Sun (1976; Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1980). Carey–Thompson, Thelma. I Saw Santa (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1993). Cooper, Afua. The Red Caterpillar on College Street (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1989). ——, with Adrienne Shadd & Karolyn Smardz Frost. The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2002). [history] Curtis, Christopher Paul. Bud, Not Buddy (New York: Delacorte, 1999). ——. The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963: a novel (New York: Delacorte, 1995). D’Oyley, Enid F[rederica]. Between Sea and Sky (Toronto: Williams–Wallace, 1979). Elwin, Rosamund, & Michele Paulse. Asha’s Mums (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1990). Foggo, Cheryl. I Have Been in Danger (Regina, Saskatchewan: Coteau, 2001). Henry, Gale. Grandpa’s Garden (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995). ——. Granny & Me (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1994). Keens–Douglas, Richardo. La Diablesse and the Baby: A Caribbean Folktale (Toronto: Annick, 1994). ——. Mama God, Papa God (Toronto: Tradewind, 1999). ——. The Nutmeg Princess (Toronto: Annick, 1992). Mollel, Tololwa M[arti]. The Flying Tortoise: An Igbo Tale (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1994). ——. Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper!: A Maasai Tale (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1991). Mordecai, Pamela. Don’t Ever Wake a Snake: Poems and Stories for Children (Kingston, Jamaica: Sandberry, 1992). Palmer, C[yril]. Everard. Baba and Mr. Big (Indianapolis I N : Bobbs–Merrill, 1972). ——. Big Doc Bitteroot (London: André Deutsch, 1968). ——. The Broken Vessel (Kingston, Jamaica: Pioneer, 1951). ——. The Cloud with the Silver Lining (London: André Deutsch, 1966). ——. A Dog Called Houdini (London: André Deutsch, 1978). ——. The Sun Salutes You (London: André Deutsch, 1970). Prince, Althea. How the East Pond Got Its Flowers (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991). ——. How the Starfish Got to the Sea (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1992). Roy, Lynette. Brown Girl in the Ring: Rosemary Brown–A Biography for Young People (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1992).

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Sadlier, Rosemary. The Kid’s Book of Black Canadian History for Children (Toronto: Kids Can, 2003). Sadu, Itah. Christopher Changes His Name (Richmond Hill, Ontario: Scholastic Canada, 1996). ——. Christopher, Please Clean Up Your Room! (Richmond Hill, Ontario: Scholastic Canada, 1993). ——. Name Calling (Toronto: Well Versed, 1992). Sandoval, Dolores. Be Patient, Abdul (New York: Simon & Schuster – McElderry, 1996). Tynes, Maxine. Save the World for Me (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield, 1991). Zeleza, [Paul] Tiyambe. Akamba (New York: Rosen, 1995). ——. Maasai (New York: Rosen, 1994). ——. Mijikenda (New York: Rosen, 1995).

WORKS CITED Allen, Lillian. “I Fight Back,” in Allen, Rhythm an’ Hardtimes (Toronto: Domestic Bliss, 1982): 15. Brand, Dionne. In Another Place, Not Here (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996). Brydon, Diana. “Postcolonialism Now: Autonomy, Cosmopolitanism, and Diaspora,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 691–706. Bujo, Bénézet. Foundations of an African Ethic: Beyond the Universal Claims of Western Morality, tr. Brian McNeil (Wider den Universalanspruch westlicher Moral, 2000; New York: Crossroad, 2001). Clarke, George Elliott. Beatrice Chancy (Victoria, British Columbia: Polestar, 1999). ——. “Surveys,” in Clarke, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2002): 323–448. ——. “Writing the Pax Canadiana: Terror Abroad, Torture at Home,” in Building Liberty: Canada and World Peace, 1945–2005, ed. Conny Steenman–Marcusse & Aritha van Herk (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2005): 213–36. Gale, Lorena. Angélique (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2000). George, David. “An Account of thr Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa, given by himself in a Conversation with Brother Rippon in London and Brother Pearce of Birmingham” (1793), in Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, vol. 1, ed. George Elliott Clarke (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1991): 32–39. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993). Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville (First Series; Halifax, Nova Scotia: Howe, 1836). Goonewardena, Kanishka. “Postcolonialism and Diaspora: A Contribution to the Critique of Nationalist Ideology and Historiography in the Age of Globalization and Neoliberalism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 657–90.

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Harris, Claire. “Sister (Y)Our Manchild at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” in Dipped in Shadow (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 1996): 51–62. Hill, Lawrence. Any Known Blood (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1997). Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “Pedagogy and Postcolonial Literature; or, Do We Need a Centre for Postcolonial Studies?” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 725–38. King, Martin Luther. Jr. Conscience for Change: Massey Lectures, Seventh Series (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1967). Kogawa, Joy. Obasan (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981). Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: J.P. Lippincott, 1960). McNaught, Kenneth. The Pelican History of Canada (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1978). Moodie, Susanna. “The Charivari,” in Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada (1852; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989): 193–216. Mukherjee, Arun. Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto: T S A R , 1994). Nolan, Faith. “Marie Joseph Angelique” (1986), in Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, vol. 2, ed. George Elliott Clarke (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1992): 119–20. Paray–Clarke, Geeta. “In Another Place, Not Here: Dionne Brand,” Lecture notes, 1– 5. TS in the possession of the author. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Coups and Calypsos (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2001). ——. [as Marlene Nourbese Philip] She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island: Ragweed Press, 1989). Plato. The Republic, in The Republic and other Works, tr. Benjamin Jowett (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1973): 71–207. ——. Phaedo, the Republic and other Works, tr. Benjamin Jowett (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1973): 487–552. Quayson, Ato. “Symbolization Compulsion: Testing a Psychoanalytical Category on Postcolonial African Literature,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 754–72. Rajan, Balachandra. “Imperialism and the Other End of History,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 707–24. Razack, Sherene H. Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2004). Rousseau, Jean–Jacques. Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique (1762; Paris: M.M. Bousquet, 1766). Sartre, Jean–Paul. “Orphée noir,” in Nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (1948; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972): ix–xliv. Tr. by S.W. Allen as Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence Africaine, [1963]). Shulman, Lee S. “Signature pedagogies in the professions.” Daedalus 134.3 (Summer 2005): 52–59. Stairs, William. African Exploits: The Diaries of William Stairs, 1887–1892, ed. Roy MacLaren (Montreal & Kingston: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1998). Talbot, Carol. Growing Up Black in Canada (1984; Toronto: Williams–Wallace, 1989).

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Trudel, Marcel. L’Esclavage au Canada français (1960; Montreal: Les Éditions de l’horizon, 1963). United States Constitution. www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html Williams, Mark. “On the Discriminations of Postcolonialism in Australia and New Zealand,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.2 (Spring 2004): 739–53. Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History (1971; Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1997). Wyile, Herb, & David Paré. “Whose Story Is It, Anyway? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Post-Modernism, Narrative, and Therapy,” Mosaic 34.1 (2001): 153–72.

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Notes on Contributors

L E I L A A B O U Z E I D was born in 1950 in Morocco. She writes in Arabic rather

than in French and is the first Moroccan woman writer of literature to be translated into English. After studying at the Mohamed V University, Rabat, and the University of Texas at Austin, Leila Abouzeid began her career as a radio and T V journalist, and also worked as a press assistant in government ministries and in the prime minister’s office. A former Fellow of the World Press Institute in St Paul, Minnesota, she left the press in 1992 to dedicate herself to writing fiction. Her publications include Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence (1990), Return to Childhood (1999), and The Director and Other Stories from Morocco (2006). H O D A B A R A K A T was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952. She moved to Paris in 1989 and works there as a journalist. Barakat writes in Arabic and her works have been translated into fourteen languages. Her novels include The Stone of Laughter (1990), which won the Al-Naqid prize; The Tiller of Waters (1998), which won the Naguib Mahouz Medal for Literature; and Disciples of Passion (2005).

After retiring from his teaching career, Dr A M R I T B I S W A S gained an MA in Humanities (Literature) with Distinction from the Open University, U K in 2001. Following four years’ research as a full-time doctoral student at the University of Northampton, U K , he was awarded his PhD in 2006. His research focuses on Salman Rushdie. T H O M A S B O N N I C I is Full Professor of Literatures in English in the Department of Literature and Linguistics, State University of Maringá, Maringá P R Brazil. His recent books include Short Stories: An Anthology for Undergraduates and Poetry of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, published in English; and, in Portuguese, Postcolonialism and Literature: Reading Strategies, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Theory, Literary Theory: An Historical

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Approach and Contemporary Trends, Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, and Resistance and Intervention in Post-Colonial Literatures. He is the editor of the scholarly journal Acta Scientiarum: Language and Culture and undertakes researches on racism, diaspora, and multiculturalism in South African, Caribbean, and black British literature. S T E L L A B O R G B A R T H E T is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Malta, where she teaches courses in postcolonial literature and theory, and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American fiction. She convened the conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (E A C L A L S ) in March 2005 and was appointed adjudicator for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize later the same year. She is the author of papers and book chapters, mostly on Maltese, Australian, and African fiction. Her current research interests include North African and African-American writing. N O R B E R T B U G E J A ’s writing seeks to explore the multiple expressions and

nuances of the urban ‘here and now’ in contemporary living. His poetry draws upon stories lived amid the suburbs of old ports-of-call and the deafening silences in the narrow backstreets of cities past their prime. The result is an array of portraits and self-narratives rendered in complex metaphors and woven into a series of evocative images. The critic Albert Marshall has described Bugeja’s poetry as “a blend of lyrical impulses and threads of rationalizations – an androgynous expression of Dionysian reverie and Apollonian contemplation. Bugeja deconstructs these universal polarities by the use of complex metaphors of intense beauty, sensual and seductive, rich in cultural connotation.” Bugeja’s first collection was Stay Fairy Tale Stay! Memoirs of a City Cast Adrift (2005) and his upcoming anthology, due later this year, is titled “Cities.” Norbert Bugeja is currently a Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar at the University of Warwick. I V A N C A L L U S is Head of the Department of English at the University of

Malta, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature and literary theory. He has published papers in poststructuralism, comparative literature, postmodernist narrative, and posthumanism. Together with Stefan Herbrechter, he is the editor of Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resistibility of Theory (2004), Theory Culture Criticism (2004), and Cy-Borges (2009), and is co-author of “Critical Posthumanism” (forthcoming). D E V O N C A M P B E L L – H A L L co-created and co-leads the JH English degrees

at Southampton Solent University, where she also teaches Writing Contemporary Fiction and Screenwriting. She completed her PhD at the University of Winchester in 2008. She has published articles and book chapters on the

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fiction of Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy (2003, 2006), Monica Ali and Zadie Smith (2007, 2009), and Cauvery Madhavan and Kamila Shamsie (2009), and has reviewed collections by Feroza Jussawalla and Raman Mundair (2004) and Shanta Acharya, Smita Agarwal, and Bashabi Fraser (2006). S A V I O U R C A T A N I A is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the Centre for

Communication Technology, University of Malta. His postdoctoral research includes screen adaptations of Victorian and gothic fiction, Shakespearean drama, and ancient Greek theatre. He has published in Literature/ Film Quarterly, Entertext, and Studia Filmoznawcze. He is author of a chapter on Kurosawa’s Macbeth in World-Wide Shakespeares (2005). Recent publications include articles on foreign film versions of Wuthering Heights and King Lear. He is currently working on papers featuring Luc Besson’s Lancelot du Lac, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and film adaptations of Poe’s tales. B R I A N C R O W is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Drama and

Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. He has previously taught in universities in Scotland, Nigeria, and Australia. He has written widely on postcolonial (especially African) theatre, including, with Chris Banfield, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theatre (1996). He is currently working on a book-length study of tradition and modernity in sub-Saharan African drama and performance. P I L A R C U D E R – D O M Í N G U E Z is Associate Professor at the University of

Huelva (Spain), where she teaches British and English-Canadian literature. Her research interests are the intersections of gender, genre, nation, and race. She is the author of Margaret Atwood: A Beginner’s Guide (2003), and the (co)editor of five collections of essays (La mujer del texto al contexto, 1996; Exilios femeninos, 2000; Sederi X I , 2002; Espacios de Género, 2005; and The Female Wits, 2006). Her latest publications have discussed the works of writers of black and Asian ancestry in the U K and Canada. She is currently at work on two (co)edited collections of essays on the Black Atlantic. B Ä R B E L C Z E N N I A is an assistant professor of English at McNeese State Uni-

versity, Louisiana. In addition to a book on English–German novel translation (Charles Dickens, 1992), she has published many essays on literary translation (novel and drama), on literature and early modern science, on the formation of personal and collective identities in eighteenth-century Britain, and on nation-building in New Zealand literature from its colonial beginnings to the present. She serves as field editor for eighteenth-century British literature and sub-field editor for eighteenth-century South Pacific studies (Australia, New Zealand) to E C C B : The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography. She is

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currently working on a book on expressions of collective identity in New Zealand poetry and on an essay collection on eighteenth-century celebrity culture. H I L A R Y P . D A N N E N B E R G is Professor of English Studies and Anglophone

Literatures at Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies. Her research focuses on narrative strategies in postcolonial fiction; plot and cognition in narrative; the representation of cultural identity in narrative fiction and media; and the development of women’s plots in the history of narrative fiction. P A U L I N E D O D G S O N – K A T I Y O is Head of English at Newman University

College, Birmingham. She was previously Dean of the School of Arts and Letters at Anglia Ruskin University and Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at London Metropolitan University. She lived in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, working for the Ministry of Education and the Institute of Mass Communication. Her research interests are African literature, particularly Zimbabwean, contemporary women’s writing, and postcolonial cinemas. She has co-edited (with Kimani Gecau & Emmanuel Ngara) Coming Home: Poems of Africa (1989) and (with Gina Wisker) Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing (2009). She has recently published articles on Charles Mungoshi’s short stories (in Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society, ed. Kizito Muchemwa & Robert Muponde, 2007) and on Zimbabwean identities in the diaspora (in Neo-Colonial Mentalities in Contemporary Europe, ed. Guido Rings & Anne Ife, 2008). G E O R G E E L L I O T T C L A R K E is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature

at the University of Toronto, Canada. Celebrated for his pioneering work on African-Canadian literature, he is also a noted writer, with prize-winning poetry collections, Whylah Falls (1990) and Execution Poems (2000); an acclaimed novel, George & Rue (2005); and three opera libretti, including Beatrice Chancy (1998). His latest books are Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke (2008), ed. Jon Paul Fiorentino, and I & I (2009), a novel in verse. B E R N A D E T T E F A L Z O N was born in Malta in 1951 and presently lectures in

the Faculty of Arts, University of Messina. Dr Falzon’s interests have focused mainly on four themes: the cultural and stylistic issues present in contemporary female literature; the cultural, political, and linguistic problems faced by both colonizers and colonized and expressed in the literature of colonial and postcolonial countries; the importance of direct speech in the novel, particularly with regard to the use of irony and the way in which this rhetorical figure affects the role of narrator and reader; the problems faced by authors of Maltese literature, Malta being a British colony from 1800 to 1964, with

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special reference to the languages spoken on the island and their use in the production of literary texts. These subjects have been analyzed in a number of articles published both in Italy and elsewhere, as well as in various papers delivered at international conferences. D A P H N E G R A C E has taught twentieth-century and postcolonial literature at

Eastern Mediterranean University (North Cyprus) and the University of Sussex (England), and is currently teaching at the University College of the Bahamas. Her book The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature was published in 2004. She has also published in the fields of women’s studies and transnational ethics. Interested in consciousness studies for over twenty years, she is a qualified teacher of transcendental meditation. She worked for many years in introducing and implementing programmes of meditation in education systems and institutions around the world, and has researched and written on the benefits of meditation. Her book “Relocating Consciousness: Diasporic Writing and the Dynamics of Literary Experience” is forthcoming. M A R I A G R E C H G A N A D O , poet, translator, and critic, was born in Malta in

1943. She has published three collections of Maltese poetry (the first of which won a National Book Prize in 2002) and two of English (the second of which won a National Book Prize in 2006). Her poetry in Maltese and in English has been translated into Italian, French, German, Greek, Spanish, Lithuanian, Finnish, Czech, and Catalan. It has appeared in English in the U K , the U S A , Australia, South Africa, and Cyprus. She has been invited to many literary events in different countries and co-organized an international conference with L A F (Literature Across Frontiers) in Malta in 2005. In 2008, thanks to an exchange scheme with Saint James Cavalier, Malta, she was a Resident Fellow for two months at the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts. Maria has also translated into English much of the contemporary poetry and prose written by Maltese writers today and published overseas. In 2000, she received the M Q R – Midalja ghall-Qadi tar-Repubblika (Medal for Service to the Republic). She has three children and one grandson. A D R I A N G R I M A (b.1968) lectures in Maltese literature at the University of

Malta. His book of poetry It-Trumbettier, in Maltese with English translations, placed second in the Premio Tivoli Europa Giovani for books of poetry published in Europe in 1999. Some of his poems have appeared in anthologies in Italy, Germany, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Israel, Austria, France, and Corsica. K I F A H H A N N A is a Visiting Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Davidson College, North Carolina. She received her M.Sc. degree in Com-

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parative and General Literature from Edinburgh University with a thesis on women and patriarchy in the writings of Nawal El Saadawi. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation at Edinburgh University. This focuses on the literary representations of feminisms and nationalisms in the writings of contemporary Arab women novelists, in particular Ghadah al-Samman and Sahar Khalifah. Her research and teaching interests broadly include twentiethand twenty-first-century Arabic literature, especially women’s writings; more specifically, the aesthetics of Arab women’s writings on gender and war, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. Ms Hanna will join the faculty of Trinity College, Connecticut, in September 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies. J A N N E K O R K K A is a Research Fellow at the Department of English at the

University of Turku in Finland. He is working in a project funded by the Academy of Finland, which focuses on empowering silenced voices in literature. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the work of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Korkka’s main research interests lie in the representations of place and discourses of alterity in Canadian writing. He is co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2008). His other internationally published work focuses on Wiebe and other western-Canadian authors, and includes interviews with Wiebe published in World Literature Written in English (1999) and The Conrad Grebel Review (2004). T V I J A Y K U M A R teaches literatures in English and supervises research work at Osmania University, Hyderabad. He has an MA and an M.Phil. in English from the University of Hyderabad, and did doctoral work on postcolonial African fiction at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests include postcolonial literatures, the Indian literary diaspora, translation, and educational television. He is a member of an international panel of reviewers for the Canada-based e-journal Postcolonial Text (http://pkp.ubc.ca /pocol/). He publishes mostly on postcolonial literatures, particularly Indian and African fiction, and has interviewed writers (Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Shashi Deshpande, Romesh Gunasekara, Amitav Ghosh, among others) for print and electronic media. His most recent work is the English translation of the early-twentieth-century Telugu classic Kanyasulkam, a play by Gurajada Venkata Appa Rao. Vijay Kumar was Treasurer of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (A C L A L S ) from 2001 to 2004 and Treasurer of its Indian chapter (I A C L A L S ) from 1999 to 2005. C H A N T A L K W A S T – G R E F F currently lectures at the Université de Nîmes and

has published in the field of Australian literature, particularly on body and

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399

image, the real and fiction, female madness, and silence. Her fields of interest and research are colonial and postcolonial writings, new literatures, gender relations, and Australian studies. M A U R E E N L Y N C H P È R C O P O has now retired from her position as a Researcher in the Department of Modern Philology and Literature at the University of Cagliari, but has continued to write on postcolonial and Australian studies. Her publications in this field include, among others, essays and articles on Thea Astley, André Brink, Robert Drewe, Christopher Koch, David Malouf, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick White, the Eliza Fraser myth, and, more recently, Richard Flanagan. She has also written on Australian cultural policy and practice. K E V I N S . M A G R I (doctoral candidate) is a writer, editor, lecturer, researcher, and theatre performer in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He studied at the universities of Waterloo and Western Ontario. His academic work has appeared in Scripta Mediterranea. Key areas of academic interest include nineteenthcentury British literature (especially literature of the Celtic periphery, gothic literature, and the Aesthetes), writings on Malta, and scholarly editing.

Professor D A N I E L M A S S A ’s tenure at the University of Malta included appointments as Head of the Department of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. A leading poet, he has published collections in both English and Maltese, including Kwartett (1966), Analiżi 70 (1970), Limestone 84 (1984), Xibkatuliss (1989), and Dgħajsa Karti (2001). In 1978, he organized the European A C L A L S Conference “Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature.” In 1982–83, he was Maître des Conferences for English Literature at the National University of Côte d’Ivoire. In 1985 he was on the Adjudicating Panel of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His publications include Across Cultures, George Orwell: Myths and Realities, and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”. In 2005, Professor Massa was Chairman of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His biography P S I : The Life Thought and Adventures of Peter Serracino Inglott will be published in 2009. I M M A N U E L M I F S U D (Malta, 1967) has published five poetry collections, one

of which, Confidential Reports (translated by Adrian Grima and Maurice Riordan), was published in Ireland. Another collection, Poland Pictures (translated by Maria Grech Ganado), was translated into Polish and read during a literary tour in December 2007. Mifsud has also published seven books of short stories. His Stejjer Strambi ta’ Sara Sue Sammut (Sara Sue Sammut’s Strange Stories) won the National Literary Award (2002) and was shortlisted for the European Premio Strega. Happy Weekend, a selection of stories translated into English, was published in 2006. Various works by

400

SHARED WATERS

½¾

Immanuel Mifsud have been published in international literary journals and anthologies and have been translated into English, Italian, French, Slovene, and other languages. I S A B E L M O U T I N H O teaches Portuguese and Spanish cultural and literary studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her principal area of research is contemporary Portuguese literature. She is the author of The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Literature (2008) and co-editor of The Paths of Multiculturalism (2000). She has published numerous articles and chapters on topics including contemporary Portuguese fiction, postcolonial literatures in Portuguese, literature and identity, literature and globalization, and the work of the Timorese novelist Luís Cardoso, in several international journals and volumes (R L A , Colóquio / Letras, the International Journal of the Humanities, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Creativity and Exile, Littératures d’émergence et mondialisation, etc.). M E L A N I E M U R R A Y has published articles in World Literature Written in

English and South Asian Literature in English: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jaina C. Sanga (2004) and also reviews in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her book Island Paradise: The Myth; An Examination of Contemporary Caribbean and Sri Lankan Writing appeared in 2009. She is the membership secretary for the Postcolonial Studies Association. T A I W O O L O R U N T O B A – O J U has been lecturing since 1984. Prior to that, he worked as a presenter, producer, and actor with the Nigerian Television Authority for several years. He was a national officer to the Association of Nigerian Authors (A N A ) and secretary of A N A in Kwara State 1992. He was also chairman of the Academic Staff Union of the University (A S U U ) at the University of Ilorin. Oloruntoba–Oju’ s works include a collection of poems, Losses, and a play, Awaiting Trouble, both published in 1993. G E R H A R D S T I L Z , Professor of English at the University of Tübingen (Ger-

many), b. 1940, studied in Tübingen, Vienna, and Wales, and held teaching positions at the universities of Bombay, Stuttgart, Northern Arizona, Adelaide and Halle/Saale. He has contributed substantially to widening the canon of ‘English Literature’ at German universities. Book publications and research papers cover English, Irish, Indian, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and comparative topics. Co-editor (since 1991) and executive editor (1995–2004) of the Z A A quarterly journal and Z A A monograph series (since 1997). Cofounder of A S N E L ; co-founder and chair (1992–95) of the German Association for Australian Studies. Convened the Tübingen E A C L A L S Conference in 1999 and E A C L A L S President 1999–2002. Recent books: Colonies, Missions, Cultures (ed. 2001); Missions of Interdependence (ed. 2002); Terri-

½¾

401

Notes on Contributors

torial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing (ed. 2007); and Postcolonial Literatures in English: Sources and Resources, vol. 1: South Asia (forthcoming). J E S Ú S V A R E L A – Z A P A T A is a professor of English Literature at the Univer-

sity of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), where he has held several posts, including Dean of the Faculty of Humanities; he also served as a member of the University Board. He has co-edited Diálogo de Culturas (1998), Lengua y Sociedad (2004), Linguistic Perspectives from the Classroom (2004), and several other volumes on applied linguistics and cultural studies. He is the author of a book on V.S. Naipaul, El retrato de la sociedad post-colonial (1998), and has also published a number of essays on writers such as Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Caryl Phillips, Nadine Gordimer, and Barbara Kingsolver. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Atlantis and is currently participating in research projects in Britain, Portugal, and Spain. A native of Singapore, C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M studied English, German, and psychology at the University of Essen, Germany. From 2002 to 2008, Vogt–William was a junior lecturer and research assistant in the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. She spent a year (2006–2007), at the University of York, England, as a Marie Curie Gender Graduate Fellow and completed her doctoral dissertation on “Women and Transculturality in Contemporary Fictions by South Asian Diasporic Women Writers.” Vogt–William has published on South Asian diasporic women’s literature from the U S A , Canada, England, and the Caribbean. She is the co-editor of and a contributor to Disturbing Bodies (2008), an essay-collection on artistic and literary representations of deviant bodies, as read by scholars of literary and cultural studies, using contemporary feminist and queer theories. Other fields of academic interest include Indo-Caribbean women’s poetry, Bollywood film, Asian diasporic fusion music, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy works. In June 2008, Vogt–William moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University.

½¾

Index

Abdi, Abdul A. 36 Abouzeid, Leila 107–12; The Last Chapter 110; Return to Childhood 109, 110; Year of the Elephant 108, 109, 110 Achebe, Chinua 24, 25, 26, 27, 59, 138, 198, 276; Things Fall Apart 59 Acolyte, The (Astley) 169, 172 Adelaide, Debra 169, 171 Adenubi, Mobolaji 140, 141, 143, 148 Adesanya, Afolabi 10 Adewale, Toyin 145, 148 Adewale–Gabriel, Toyin, Naked Testimonies 144, 146 Adimora–Ezeigbo, Akachi 139, 140, 148

Aidoo, Ama Ata 148 Alexander, Charles N. 45 Allen, Lillian 375 Almeida, Germano, O Mar na Lajinha 258, 259, 261 al-Sammān, Ghadah, Beirut Nightmares 113, 114, 117–20 Amadiume, Ify 137 Anderson, Benedict 212 Anderson, Perry 374 Angélique (Gale) 373 Angola 248, 252, 258 Anita and Me (Syal) 290–92, 294–98, 304, 305

Any Known Blood (Hill) 367 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 42 Aquilina, Guze 131, 132, 203 Arndt, Susan 140 Ashcroft, Bill 41, 249, 264, 281 Assmann, Aleida 86 Assmann, Jan 85 Astley, Thea 167–76; The Acolyte 169, 172; Beachmasters 170; Coda 169, 171, 172, 173, 175; A Descant for Gossips 168; Drylands 168, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176; Girl with a Monkey 168; Hunting the Wild Pineapple 170; “Inventing the Weather” 169, 170; It’s Raining in Mango 171, 173, 175; An Item from the Late News 169, 170; A Kindness Cup 169, 170; The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow 170, 172, 173, 174; Rainshadow 170, 172, 173, 174, 175; Reaching Tin River 169, 171; Vanishing Points 169, 170, 171; The Well Dressed Explorer 169 Attridge, Derek 341 Atwood, Margaret 344, 345 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice 366 Azzopardi, Mario 199, 200, 203 Bâ, Mariama 148 Baker, Candida 169 Bakhtin, Mikhail 342

404 Bald, Suresht Renjen 291, 292, 302 Baldacchino, Godfrey 199, 201 Barber, Karin 13 Baudelaire, Charles 214 Bauman, Zygmunt 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 320, 321 Baxter, James K. 87, 88, 90 Beachmasters (Astley) 170 Beatrice Chancy (Clarke) 357, 374 Beirut Nightmares (al-Samman) 114, 117–20 Belich, James 86, 87 Ben Jalloun, Tahar 39 Bennet, William 22 Bennett, Arnold 20, 21 Bhabha, Homi K. 36, 38, 209, 214, 216, 218, 219, 226, 269, 281, 282, 289, 294 Bhaskar, Sanjeev 280, 281, 285 Bissoondath, Neil 354 Blixen, Karen, Out of Africa 67, 68 Bloom, Harold 22 Blue Mountains of China, The (Wiebe) 338, 341, 342 Bohan, Edmund, The Matter of Parihaka 87

Bolland, John 232 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich 54 Bones (Hove) 61 Bongie, Chris 259, 260 Bongos Ikwe 144 Bradbury, Malcolm 25, 27 Brah, Avtah 219, 220 Brand, Dionne, In Another Place, Not Here 376 Brathwaite, Kamau 31 Breaking the Silence (ed. Adewale– Nduka & Segun) 140–47 Brickell, Barry 98 Bromley, Roger 295, 302 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights 237 Brookshaw, David 248 Bryant, Frazer 237 Brydon, Diana 374; & Helen Tiffin 226 Bujo, Bénézet 369 Burcar, Lilijana 236

SHARED WATERS

½¾

Burnett, Paula 28 But We Are Exiles (Kroetsch) 340 Cain, William 22 Calder, Angus 25 Camões 255, 257 Campbell, Alistair Ariki 91 Campbell, Horace 62 Camus, Albert 37, 38, 40, The Plague 38; The Rebel 37 Cannon, Damian 230 Cape Verde 248, 258, 259 Carey, Peter 28 Caro, Niki, Whale Rider 79 Carr, Robert 41 Carter, April 37, 43 Caselberg, John 88 Certeau, Michel de 64, 153, 154 Chakrabarty, Dipresh 368 Chatterjee, Upamanyu, English, August 331

Chaudhuri, Amit 327 Cheetham, Mark A., & Elizabeth D. Harvey 238 Chennells, Anthony 72 Chinweizu 30, 31, 138 Chomsky, Noam 36 Clampitt, Amy xii Clare, Arthur G. 208 Clarke, George Elliott, Beatrice Chancy 357, 374; Québécité 354, 355, 357–59, 360–61 Clifford, James 154 Coda (Astley) 169, 171, 172, 173, 175 Coetzee, J.M. 24, 27, 39, 41; Disgrace 59

Cohen, Leonard 354 Collins, Patricia 135 Collins, Wilkie 59 Come Again in Spring (Ebejer) 130 Comellini, Carla 241 Cooke, Miriam 114, 117 Corliss, Richard 242 Coulthard, G.R. 29 Coups and Calypsos (Philip) 375

½¾

405

Index

Cox, Michael 293, 295, 296, 300 Crasta, Richard 326 Crawford, Robert 20 Cremona, John 201 Critchley, Simon 339, 348 Crossing the River (Phillips) 263–70, 272

Curnow, Wystan 89 Cuschieri, Patri 203 Dabydeen, David 24, 262, 263 Dalrymple, William 324, 325, 326, 329 Dancing in the Dark (Phillips) 273 Dansey, Harry, Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross 87 Dart, William 87, 88 Daughter of Isis (El Saadawi) 41 De Kapwa, Paola 117 Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka) 13, 14 Deb, Siddhartha, The Point of Return 329, 331 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 225 Derrida, Jacques 45, 234, 311 Descant for Gossips, A (Astley) 168 Discovery of Strangers, A (Wiebe) 340, 345

Disgrace (Coetzee) 59 Distant Shore, A (Phillips) 272, 276 Distraught Pilgrim, A (Friggieri) 202, 203

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, Mistress of Spices 151, 153, 155, 156–59 Djebar, Assia, So Vast the Prison 39, 40 Doctor Wooreddy’s Description for Enduring the Ending of the World (Mudrooroo) 59 Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (Fuller) 67, 68 Donnell, Alison, & Sara Lawson Welsh 30

Doyle, Arthur Conan 59, 209 Drylands (Astley) 168, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 Duff, Alan 76

Durix, Jean–Pierre 224 Dutta, Nadana 38 Eagleton, Terry 22, 23 Ebejer, Francis 125, 127–31, 199; Come Again in Spring 130; Evil of the King Cockroach 129; In the Eye of the Sun 125, 126, 129; Leap of Malta Dolphins 130; Requiem for a Malta Fascist 130; Wild Spell of Summer 129; Wreath of Maltese Innocents 127, 128, 129 Echoing Silences (Kanengoni) 68, 70 Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (Mantel) 43 El Saadawi, Nawal 39, 40, 41, 115; Daughter of Isis 41; Memoirs from a Woman’s Prison 41; Walking Through Fire 41 Eldon, Dan 68 Elias, Norbert 55 Emecheta, Buchi 27, 136, 139, 148 English Patient, The (film, dir. Anthony Minghella) 230–43 English Patient, The (Ondaatje) 230, 231, 235, 239, 241 English, August (Chatterjee) 331 Erwierhoma, Mabel 146 European Tribe, The (Phillips) 273, 275 Evil of the King Cockroach (Ebejer) 129 Evwierhoma, Mabel, Out of Hiding 145, 146; A Song As I Am 145, 148 Ezeigbo 141, 142 Ezenwa–Ohaeto 28 Fanon, Frantz 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44 Fenech, Victor 199, 200, 201, 203 Ferguson, Niall 313 Feso (Mutswairo) 62, 63 Fifield, Adam 70 Finn, Tim 88 First and Vital Candle (Wiebe) 340 Fomison, Tony 87, 89, 96 Foucault, Michel 45, 46 Fraser, Robert 11, 13, 14 Frederiksë, Julie 66

406 Frendo, Henry 199 Freud, Sigmund 64 Friggieri, Oliver 199, 201; A Distraught Pilgrim 202, 203 Fuller, Alexandra, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight 67, 68; Scribbling the Cat 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72 Gale, Lorena, Angélique 373; Je me souviens ix, 354, 355–57, 359–61 Ganado, Maria Grech 205 Gandhi, Leela 326, 329 Gandhi, Mahatma 84 Garuba, Harry 10 Gary, Romain 111 Gate of the Square, The (Khalīfah) 114– 17, 120 Gelder, Ken, & Paul Salzman 28 George, David 369, 372 Ghanaian National Theatre 9 Gilbert, Pam 169, 170 Gill, Lakshmi 151 Gillis, John R. 221 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper 303 Gilroy, Paul 208, 251, 262, 369 Girl with a Monkey (Astley) 168 Gloriosa Família, A (Pepetela) 248–52, 260

God of Small Things, The (Roy) 328, 329, 331 Goldsworthy, Kerryn 169 Goonewardena, Kanishka 374 Gorak, Jan 22, 23, 24 Grace, David 88 Grace, Patricia, Potiki 59 Grace, Sherrill E. 343, 344, 346 Green, Martin 270 Grima, Adrian 204 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The (Rushdie) 308–22 Grove, Richard 221 Guevara, Ernesto Che 38 Gugelberger, Georg 25 Guha, Ramachandra 324, 325, 326

SHARED WATERS

½¾

Guillory, John 23 Gunesekera, Romesh, Monkfish Moon 221; Reef 218–27 Haddour, Azzedine 40 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler 372 Hall, Michael 109 Hall, Stuart 202, 204, 247 Handwriting (Ondaatje) 242 Haney, William S., II 44, 46 Haraway, Donna 312, 313 Harlow, Barbara 114, 115, 120 Harris, Claire 376 Hawken, Dinah 91, 93, 95 Hawley, John C. 25 Haynes, Jonathan 10 Head, Bessie, A Question of Power 135 Heble, Ajay 358 Heidegger, Martin 263 Herodotus 231, 232, 233, 237, 239 Hilger, Stephanie 232 Hill, Lawrence, Any Known Blood 367 Hinchcliff, John, Parihaka 87 Hiroki’s Song (Potiki) 87 Hotere, Ralph 87, 88, 89, 97 Houston, Andrew 357 Hove, Chenjerai, Bones 61; The Stone Virgins 61, 62, 64, 67, 72 Hsu, Hsuan 237 Hubbell, Jay B. 19, 21 Huggan, Graham 301 Hulan, Renée 344, 346 Hunting the Wild Pineapple (Astley) 170

Huxley, Elspeth 21, 68 Ihimaera, Witi 79 In Another Place, Not Here (Brand) 376 In the Eye of the Sun (Ebejer) 125, 126, 129

In the Falling Snow (Phillips) 273 “In Visible Ink” (van Herk) 338, 340, 348, 349 “Inventing the Weather” (Astley) 169, 170

½¾

Index

Irving, John, A Son of the Circus 328 It’s Raining in Mango (Astley) 171, 173, 175

Item from the Late News, An (Astley) 169, 170 Jameson, Fredric 313 Je me souviens (Gale) ix, 354, 355–57, 359–60 Jeyifo, Biodun 138 Jha, Radhika, Smell 151, 153, 159–61 Johanson, MaryAnn 235 Judith (van Herk) 24, 151, 337 Kahari, George 62, 63 Kakahi, Tohu 86 Kamiya, Gary 230, 232 Kanafani, Ghassan 111 Kanaganayakam, Chelva 365, 368, 370, 373, 374 Kanengoni, Alexander, Echoing Silences 68, 70 Kanthapura (Rao) 59 Karm, Dun 199, 203 Keneally, Thomas 28 Kenneally, Cath 175 Kermode, Frank 19 Khalīfah, Sahar, The Gate of the Square 113–17, 118–20 Khosa, Ungulani Ba Ka, Ualalapi 248, 252, 254–58, 261 Kiernan, Brian 29 Kindness Cup, A (Astley) 169, 170 King Emene (Sofola) 136 King, Bruce 328 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 366, 369 King, Michael 84 Kogawa, Joy, Obasan 367 Kolawole, Mary E.M. 136 Kolbas, Dean 20 Kongi’s Harvest (Soyinka) 14 Kranz, David L. 232 Krauth, Nigel 174 Kroetsch, Robert 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345, 347, 348,

407 349, 350, 351; But We Are Exiles 340; A Likely Story 337, 338, 340, 341, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350; The Lovely Treachery of Words 338, 350; “On Being an Alberta Writer” 338; Stone Hammer Poems 337; The Studhorse Man 337; The Words of My Roaring 337 Kumar, T. Vijay 328 Kumars at No. 42, The (B B C ) 280–89 Küng, Hans 58 Kusturica, Emir, Underground 5 Kuznets, Lois 270

La Guma, Alex, The Time of the Butcherbird 59 LaCapra, Dominick 37 Laranjeira, Pires 254, 258 Last Chapter, The (Abouzeid) 110 Lazreg, Marnia 39 Leap of Malta Dolphins (Ebejer) 130 Leavis, F.R. 22 Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird 367 leões não dormem esta noite, Os (Melo) 248, 252, 253–60 Levinas, Emmanuel 339, 342, 346, 349 Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Syal) 290, 291, 293, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305 Likely Story, A (Kroetsch) 337, 338, 340, 341, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350 Lindfors, Bernth 26, 27 Lindsay, Elaine 171 Lovely Treachery of Words, The (Kroetsch) 338, 350 McCahon, Colin 87, 88 McGimpsey, David 354 Mackay, Jessie 85 McLeod, A.L. 25, 32 McNeilly, Kevin 358, 360 McQueen, Cilla 88, 91, 96, 99 Mad Trapper, The (Wiebe) 337, 340 Malcolm X 369 Mandela, Nelson 26, 36

408 Mantel, Hilary, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 43 Manzoni, Alessandro, I Promessi Sposi 123, 127 Mar na Lajinha, O (Almeida) 258, 259, 261

Marsh–Locket, Carol 27 Martin, David, & Phyllis Johnson 67 Massa, Daniel 199, 203, 204, 205 Masters, John, Nightrunners of Bengal 59

Matter of Parihaka, The (Bohan) 87 Matthews, Brian 170 Maufort, Marc 356 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 361 Melnyk, George 338 Melo, Guilherme de, Os leões não dormem esta noite 248, 252, 253–60 Melucci, Alberto 310, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319, 320 Memoirs from a Woman’s Prison (El Saadawi) 41 Mercer, Giusé Ellul 124 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 327 Mike, Chuck 8 Millar, Paul 89 Millett, Kate 119, 120 Milnes, Stephen 169 Minghella, Anthony, The English Patient 230–43 Mishra, Pankaj, The Romantics 324, 332

Mistress of Spices (Divakaruni) 151, 153, 155, 156–59 Mitchell, W.O., Who Has Seen the Wind

SHARED WATERS

Mphalele, Es’kia 138 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare) 359

Mudrooroo Doctor Wooreddy’s Description for Enduring the Ending of the World 59 Mugabe, Robert 70 Mukherjee, Arun 365, 371, 374 Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, The (Astley) 170, 172, 173, 174 Mune, Ian, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted 80 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe) 208–15 Mutswairo, Solomon, Feso 62, 63 Nair, Preethi, One Hundred Shades of White 151, 153, 155, 161–63 Naked Testimonies (Adewale–Gabriel) 144, 146 “Naming of Albert Johnson, The” (Wiebe) 337 Nasta, Susheila 25, 223 Nature of Blood, The (Phillips) 272 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 59, 138; Weep Not, Child 59 Nigeria 9, 10, 13, 28, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146, 148 Nightrunners of Bengal (Masters) 59 Nnaemeka, Obioma 136, 139 Nolan, Faith 372 Nora, Pierre 85 Novak, Amy 231, 234 Nussbaum, Martha 43, 44 Nwapa, Flora 139, 148

339

Moana and the Moahunters 88 Modood, Tariq 290 Monkfish Moon (Gunesekera) 221 Moodie, Susanna, Roughing It in the Bush 366 Moretti, Franco 293 Morris, Paul 89 Morris, Rosalind 37 Moses, Michael 327

½¾

Oates, Joyce Carol 134 Obasan (Kogawa) 367 O’Brien, Gregory 90, 98 Ofeimun, Odia 147 Ogot, Grace 148 Okara, Gabriel 147 Okoye, Ifeoma 139, 140 Oliver, W.H. 88 Omotoso, Kole 10

½¾

409

Index

“On Being an Alberta Writer” (Kroetsch) 338

On the Face of the Waters (Steel) 59 Once Were Warriors (film, dir. Lee Tamahori) 76–81 Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient 230–43; Handwriting 242 One Hundred Shades of White (Nair) 151, 153, 155, 161–63 Onwueme, Tess 140 Orsman, Chris 91, 93, 98, 99 Othello (Shakespeare) 359 Out of Africa (Blixen) 67 Out of Hiding (Evwierhoma) 145, 146 Oyedepo, Stella 140 Oyewumi, Oyeronke 136 Oyinsan, Bunmi 140, 141, 148 Paray–Clarke, Geeta 376 Pardo, Arvid xi Parihaka (Hinchcliff) 87 Pepetela, A Gloriosa Família 248–52, 260

Perkins, Elizabeth 170 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, Coups and Calypsos 375; She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks 370 Phillips, Caryl 263–70, 272–77; Crossing the River 263–70, 272; Dancing in the Dark 273; A Distant Shore 272, 276; The European Tribe 273, 275; In the Falling Snow 273; The Nature of Blood 272 Pick, Séraphine 93 Pilger, John 43 Pilon, Juliana Geran 233 Pirrotta, Joseph M. 127 Places Far from Ellesmere (van Herk) 340, 341, 348 Plague, The (Camus) 38 Plato 365 Playing Dead (Wiebe) 337, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 350 Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 208–16

Point of Return, The (Deb) 329, 331 Pons, Xavier 29 Pope, Rob 24 Potiki (Grace) 59 Potiki, Brian, Hiroki’s Song 87 Potiki, Roma 91, 94, 97, 99 Pratt, Mary Louise 55, 153, 154 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 366 Prince, Althea 366 Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni) 123, 127 Pule, John 97 Quayson, Ato 371 Québécité (Clarke) 354, 355, 357–59, 360–61 Question of Power, A (Head) 135 Rainshadow (Astley) 170–75 Rajagopal, Arvind 37 Rajan, Balachandra 374 Ramchand, Kenneth 30, 31 Ranger, Terence O. 67 Rao, Raja, Kanthapura 59 Reaching Tin River (Astley) 169, 171 Rebel, The (Camus) 37 Reef (Gunesekera) 218–27 Reichl, Susanne 153 Requiem for a Malta Fascist (Ebejer) 130

Return to Childhood (Abouzeid) 109–10 Rice, Alan 253 Richards, Jeffrey 270 Richler, Mordecai 354 Rimbaud, Arthur 176 Riseborough, Hazel 84, 89 Ritchie, Anthony 88 River of Stone (Wiebe) 337 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 225 Rolfe, James 357 Romantics, The (Mishra) 332 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 359 Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie) 366 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 368 Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things 328, 329, 331

410 Rushdie, Salman 24, 25, 26, 41, 219, 294, 308–22, 326, 327, 328, 329; The Ground Beneath Her Feet 308–22; Midnight’s Children 327 Russell, Elizabeth 152 Sadashige, Jacqui 232, 233 Said, Edward W. 25, 36, 37, 38, 215, 241, 246 Saliba, Marlene 201 Sammut, Frans 199, 203 Sant, Alfred 199 Sarkar, Sumit 374 Sarkowsky, Katja 154 Sartre, Jean–Paul 36, 367, 377 Savage, Paula 90 Sayers, Mandy 173 Schick, Irvin 297 Schipper, Mineke 251 Schoon, Theo 88 Sciberras, Lillian 200, 205, 206, 207 Scorched-Wood People, The (Wiebe) 337

Scott, Dick 85, 86, 87, 88, 96, 99 Scott, Gail 354 Scott, Sir Walter 123 Scribbling the Cat (Fuller) 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72 Segun, Mabel 140 Segun, Omowumi 140 Sen–Bagchee, Sumana 31 Serracino Inglott, Peter 202 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure 361; Much Ado about Nothing 359; Othello 359; Romeo and Juliet 359; The Tempest 221, 225 Shaw, Martin 42 She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Philip) 370 Sheridan, Susan 172 Shiva, Vandana 42 Shklovsky, Victor 291, 294, 300, 304 Shoneyin, Lola 145, 146, 147, 148; So All the Time I Was Sitting On an Egg 145, 147; Song of a Riverbird 145

SHARED WATERS

½¾

Showalter, Elaine 110, 135 Shulman, Lee S. 378 Silva, Tony Simoes da 67 Simmons, Laurence 89 Singh, Ajay 222 Singh, Sujala 299 Slemon, Stephen 224 Smell (Jha) 151, 153, 159–61 Smither, Elizabeth 91, 92 Smither, Michael 87, 88, 91, 96 So All the Time I Was Sitting On an Egg (Shoneyin) 145, 147 So Vast the Prison (Djebar) 40 Sofola, Zulu 136, 139, 148; Wedlock of the Gods 136 Son of the Circus, A (Irving) 328 Song As I Am, A (Evwierhoma) 145 Song of a Riverbird (Shoneyin) 145 Songs to the Judges (Mervyn Thompson) 87–88 Sophocles 19 Sowande, Bode 8 Soyinka, Wole 13, 28, 31, 138; Death and the King’s Horseman 13, 14; Kongi’s Harvest 14 Spain, Daphne 113, 115, 116 Spiteri, Lino 199 Spivak, Gayatri 246, 264 Sri Lanka 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227 Stafford, Jane 89 Stairs, William 376 Stankevicuite, Kristina 239 Steel, Flora Annie, On the Face of the Waters 59 Stein, Mark 299 Stenberg, Douglas G. 232, 235, 242 Stewart, Patrick 286, 288 Stone Hammer Poems (Kroetsch) 337 Stone Virgins, The (Hove) 61, 62, 64, 67, 72 Strongman, Lara 89, 100 Strongman, Luke 27 Studhorse Man, The (Kroetsch) 337 Sturm, J.C. 90, 91, 96, 98, 100

½¾

411

Index

Sullivan, Robert 91, 92, 93, 99 Sultana, Donald 215 Sweeter than All the World (Wiebe) 338, 340 Swinnerton, Frank 20 Syal, Meera 282, 290–305; Anita and Me 290–92, 294–98, 304, 305; Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee 290, 291, 293, 299, 300–305 Talbot, Carol 367 Tamahori, Lee, Once Were Warriors 76–81 Taylor, Apirana 91 Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross (Dansey) 87 Te Whiti O Rongomai 86 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 221, 225 Temptations of Big Bear, The (Wiebe) 337, 350 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 85 Tent Peg, The (van Herk) 340 Thieme, John 24, 30 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 59 Thompson, Helen 174 Thompson, Mervyn, Songs to the Judges 87–88 Tiffin, Helen 71 Time of the Butcherbird, The (La Guma) 59

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) 367 Tomas, David 154 Trudel, Marcel 372 Turner, Graeme 29 Tuwhare, Hone 87, 88 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne) 216 Ty, Eleanor 231 Tylor, E.B. 321 Ualalapi (Khosa) 248, 252–58, 261 Underground (Kusturica) 5 Vallières, Pierre 354 van der Veer, Peter 291, 293

van Herk, Aritha 336, 338, 340, 341, 342, 348, 349, 376; “In Visible Ink” 338, 340, 348, 349; Judith 24, 151, 337; Places Far from Ellesmere 340, 341, 348; The Tent Peg 340 Vanishing Points (Astley) 169, 170, 171 Vera, Yvonne 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 71, 72 Verdecchia, Guillermo 356 Verne, Jules, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 216 Walcott, Derek 27, 31, 226 Walcott, Rinaldo 361 Wali, Obi 137 Walker, Alice 139 Walking Through Fire (El Saadawi) 41 Walters, Gordon 87, 88 Wattie, Nelson 89 Wedde, Ian 91, 97 Wedlock of the Gods (Sofola) 136 Weep Not, Child (Ngũgĩ) 59 Weich, Dave 67, 71 Well Dressed Explorer, The (Astley) 169

Wells, Julia 137 Werbner, Pnina 312 Werbner, Richard 62, 66, 291, 310 Whale Rider (film, dir. Niki Caro) 79 What Becomes of the Broken Hearted (film, dir. Ian Mune) 80 “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” (Wiebe) 337 White, Hayden 41 White, Patrick 28 Who Has Seen the Wind (Mitchell) 339 Wicker, Hans–Rudolf 312, 318, 321 Wiebe, Rudy 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350; The Blue Mountains of China 338, 341, 342; A Discovery of Strangers 340, 345; First and Vital Candle 340; TheMad Trapper 337, 340; “The Naming of Albert Johnson” 337; Playing Dead 337, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 350;

412

SHARED WATERS

½¾

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) 237 Wyile, Herb, & David Paré 371

River of Stone 337; The ScorchedWood People 337; Sweeter than All the World 338, 340; The Temptations of Big Bear 337, 350; “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” 337 Wild Spell of Summer (Ebejer) 129 Williams, Mark 367 Winks, Robin 370 Wittig, Monique 134 Words of My Roaring, The (Kroetsch)

Year of the Elephant (Abouzeid) 108, 109, 110 Yellow Wallpaper, The (Gilman) 303 Young, Robert J.C. 269, 289, 319 Younis, Raymond Aron 242 Zach, Wolfgang 26 Zangana, Haifa 37, 40 Zimbabwe 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72

337

Wreath of Maltese Innocents (Ebejer) 127, 128, 129

½¾