Chapter Five the Shared Trauma, Amnesia and Drama
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PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH DJILLALI LIABES UNIVERSITY OF SIDI BEL ABBES FACULTY OF LETTERS LANGUAGES AND ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Fragmented Wo/men Identities in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephonejh to Heaven Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Fulfillment for the Degree of Doctorat in Comparative Literature Presented by: Supervised by: Mrs Djamila MEHDAOUI Prof. Belabbes OUERRAD BOARD OF EXAMINERS: President: Prof. Fewzia BEDJAOUI DLU, Sidi Bel Abbes Supervisor: prof. Belabbes OUERRAD DLU, Sidi Bel Abbes Examiner: Dr. Belkacem BENSEDDIK DLU, Sidi Bel Abbes Examiner : Prof. Faiza SENOUCI University of Tlemcen Examiner: Dr. Djamel BENADLA University of Saida Examiner : Dr. Abdellah BARAKA University of Mascara Academic Year: 2019 – 2020 Dedications This Doctoral thesis is lovingly dedicated to all those who fought for our freedom from the stamps of the colonizer. I do, dedicate it, also, to every woman who launched her silence and inward cry against the bullet of traditional thinking that assigned her in the margin. I do, dedicate it, also, to my best and dear family: my parent, children, brothers, sisters, my husband Ali and to all my friends. I Acknowledgments I would like first, to express my gratitude and appreciation to my thesis supervisor: Prof. Belabbes OUERRAD from Djillali Liabes University of Sidi Bel Abbes, for his guidance, assistance, genuine support. I am extremely grateful for his patience, flexibility, support, understanding and continuous encouragement to work slowly but surely. His kindness and interest in the completion of my Doctoral thesis helped me much in researching and writing with pleasure. I would like also to thank hugely Prof. Fewzia BEDJAOUI, for having organized Magister Studies in Post Colonial Woman Literature and therefore opened many theoretical and literary debates in feminist studies. She gave us the opportunity to examine works of women writers through novels and drama and particularly the role of literature in reflecting and perpetuating cultural attitudes. I would like to express all my sincere feelings of gratitude and acknowledgment for her intellectual suggestions, literary penchant and artistic talent towards the Women’s Question. I would like, also, to thank the honorable board of examiners, especially Prof. Faiza SENOUCI from Tlemcen University, Dr. Djamel BENADLA from Saida University, Dr. Belkacem BENSEDDIK from Djillali Liabes University, and Dr. Abdellah BARAKA from Mascara University, who granted me part of their precious time to read and evaluate my thesis. II Abstract This Doctoral thesis is a comparative analysis of the Indo-Trinidadian, Irish and Canadian writer Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and the Afro-Jamaican and American writer Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987). The two women writers deal with the great cultural and identity changes that Western colonialism has brought on its “white ships” to humanity in every walk of life. The post-colonial era still suffers from unhealed pains, dangerous sores and ruthless annihilation provoked by the evil deeds and long-lasting systems involving oppression, hostile milieu of distancing, isolation and amnesia. The pursuit of liberation is but a wild dream even after the departure of the civilizer. However, it is the age and the turn of the silenced voices to raise their concerns, to spell the bitterest experience and tackle many complicated issues inherited from the fertile womb of colonialism and its “civilizing mission” . The main focus in this study is thus to shed light on how traumas intervene in shaping the postcolonial history and cultural identity, especially in Trinidad and Jamaica. Related issues examine how identity is constructed upon severe colonial interventions and lots of series of repetitive brutal systems of oppression and exploitation. Both writers insert multiple traumas of slavery, violence, rape, disorder and acute tragedies to prove the split of the post- colonized people’s minds, language, memory and even sexuality. Shani Mootoo situates them in the wider context of a reiterated psychological suppression, while Cliff puts them in the broader sense of creating a room of the historyless. Key words: historyless, identity, colonialism, traumas. III TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedications……………………………………………………………………...…...…I Acknowledgements………………………….…………………………………….… II Abstract………………………….……………………...……………………… …...III Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………IV General Introduction………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One: Under the Politics of Erasure and Melting the Self.........................10 1.1 Introduction………………………………………………….………….………..13 1.2 Postcolonialism between Pre and Post Tragedy…………………………….....14 1.2.1 Postcolonialism as a Story of Black Commodity inside White Ships ……15 1.2.2 Postcolonial Literature between Logic and Craft…………………………23 1.2.3 Postcolonial Theory and the Power for Change.........................................28 1.3 Postcolonial Identity between Construction and Deconstruction…………...32 1.3.1 Diaspora/Diasporan Ientities……………………………………………….36 1.3.2 Fluid Identities……………………………………..……………………...39 1.4 The Ghost of Colonialism /Imperialism ……………………………………....40 1.4.1 Another Evil of Neo-colonialism………………………………………....44 1.4.2 The Logic of Other (ing) and the Skill of Marginalizing………………....46 IV 1.4.3 Orientalism as the Heart of the “Other” …………………………………..49 1.5 Feminism and the New Politics of Women……………………………………..52 1.5.1 Feminism between Singular Aim and the Plurality of Voices………..……53 1.5.2 Three Waves of Feminism………………………………………………..54 1.5.3 The Struggle under the Plurality of Voices…………………………..…....62 1.5.4 Black Feminism and Different Sorts of Oppression…………………….....64 1.5.5 Womanism….. ……………………………………………………….........65 1.5.6 Femininity between the Reality of Tradition and Feminist’s Illusions……..67 1.5.7 Feminist Theory and New Women’s Map………………………………...69 1.5.8 Post-colonial Feminist Theory…………………………………………….70 1.5.9 The Weapon of Resistance………………………………………………...72 1.5.10 The Philosophy of Deconstruction………………………………….......74 1.5.11 Women's Self Dictionaries……………………………………………….80 1.5.12 Building Self-Definition………………………………………………….82 1.6 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..85 Chapter Two: Revising Excavated Histories through Bleeding Pens …………..89 2.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………...91 2.2 The Muted History Speaks……………………………………………………....92 2.2.1 The Language of Greed ………………………………………………..…99 V 2.2.2 Under Man’s Wickedness………………………………………...……....104 2.2.3 A Crime against Humanity ……………………………………………….113 2.2.4 The Spirit for Change ………………………………………………………..116 2.3 Between Two Axes……………………………………………………………...120 2.4 Wounded Ink……………………………………………………………...……125 2.4.1West Indian Wounded Ink………………………………………………126 2.4.2 Antillean Wounded Ink…………………………………………………135 2.4.3 The Art of Revolution …………………………………………………..139 2.4.4 Recovering the Hidden History………………………………………...141 2.5 The Islands of Sacrifices………………………………………………………..147 2.5.1 The Trinidadian’s Soul …………………………………………………147 2.5.2 The Jamaican’s Soul ……………………………………………………151 2.5.3 Oral Tradition and the Spirit of Living…………………………………..153 2.6 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….156 Chapter three: Narratives of Reiterated Colonial Tragedies, Damages and Dangers…………………………………………………………………………..….160 3.1Introduction……………………………………………………………………..162 3.2 Shani Mootoo’s Philosophy of Challenge……………………………………...163 3.2.1 Between Life and Writing Barricades…………………………………..163 VI 3.2.2 On the Edge of Foreign Cultures………………………………………..172 3.3 Hints from the Novel Cereus Blooms at Night………………………………...176 3.4 Trinidad and Not Another Place……………………………………………....181 3.5 The Similar Queerness, Colonialism and Alienation…………………………184 3.6 Torn Bodies and the Ray of Brightness ……………………………………….193 3.6.1 Between Trauma and the Cereus Healing………………………………..193 3.6.2 Hope beside the Cereus………………………………………………….210 3.6.3 Silent Colonization……………………………………………………….212 3.6.4 “Unnamed” Issues in Cereus Blooms at Night……………………………218 3.7 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………223 Chapter Four: Claiming a True Identity They Taught Me to Despise…………..227 4.1Introduction……………………………………………………………………..229 4.2 Michelle Cliff between Lesbianism and Historical Revisionism…………….228 4.3 American’s Hints and Echoes………………………………………………….236 4.3.1 The Purest Mode of Living………………………………………………236 4.3.2 Between Religious Myth and Reality…………………………………….239 4.3.3 Narratives of a Raising Sun………………………………………………240 4.3.4 Voices of Inspiration…………………………………………………..…241 4.4 Caribbean Feminism…………………………………………………………...243 4.4.1 Indo-Caribbean/ Women and Feminism………………………………244 4.4.1.1 Chutney Music as a Spirit of Resistance……………………………….248 VII 4.4.2 Afro-Caribbean Feminism ……………………………………………...…..249 4.5 Clare Savage between the Agenda of Two Novels……………………………251 4.5.1 Abeng and the Politics of Crystallizing History and Hyphenated Identities……………………………………………………………………………..251 4.5.2 No Telephone to Heaven and Constructing the Deconstructed ………..255 4.6 Between the Logic of the Other and Crafting the Self……………………….255 4.6.1 Clare Savage Inside and Outside Birthed and Buried Jamaica…………..256 4.6.2 Boy Savage and the Psychology of Whiteness …………………………262 4.6.3 Kitty and the Belief of Africa is not Black………………………………265 4.7 Claiming Wholeness She Had Always Been Denied………………………...266 4.7.1 Non Western Figures of Identity, History and Home………………….…266 4.7.2 Between the Negro Phobic