Commonwealth Essays and Studies

43.1 | 2020 Exception

Cécile Girardin (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/1688 DOI: 10.4000/ces.1688 ISSN: 2534-6695

Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth)

Electronic reference Cécile Girardin (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.1 | 2020, « Exception » [Online], Online since 30 October 2020, connection on 25 November 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ces/1688 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.1688

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The “state of exception,” as defined by Giorgio Agamben, has often been evoked in postcolonial contexts as a means of accounting for the way in which exceptional circumstances are used to justify depriving people of their rights under the law. This issue addresses how exception is represented in postcolonial literatures, through the depiction of states of emergency, zones of exception, and various processes of marginalization. In all eight case studies, laws can be seen as subject to interpretation because they represent forms of writing and therefore reflect subjectivity; the authors highlight how their enforcement requires strong ethical principles to protect human freedom and dignity. Literature registers effective resistance when it delineates singular paths – often exceptional ones – towards empowerment in a way the historian cannot.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Exception Introduction Cécile Girardin

Snuffing Out the Moon: Kino/Bio Politics, Movement and the State of Exception David Waterman

Detention Camp and State of Exception in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand Bhawana Jain

“You’re Just a Housewife. What on Earth Could You Possibly Do?”: The History of the Bangladesh War of Independence Told by Women in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age Sabine Lauret-Taft

Unconventional Memoirs: Mary Fortune’s Account of Life on the Diggings Alice Michel

An Exception to European Epistemological Rule: The Representation of Indigeneity in the Works of Mudrooroo and Alan Duff Laura Singeot

Fairy Tale, Tragedy, Fantastic: Three Generic Exceptions in the Short Stories of Anita Desai Elsa Lorphelin

“With the Exception of [Ali] Banana:” Second World War Bildung in the Burmese Jungle in Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy (2007) Cédric Courtois

Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) André Dodeman

Reviews

Marta Dvořák, Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear Danielle Schaub

Patricia Neville, Janet Frame’s World of Books Claire Bazin

Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana, and Nicole Thiara, eds., Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-Imagined Cécile Girardin

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds., Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices Alexandra Poulain

Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary Kathie Birat

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Exception Introduction

Cécile Girardin

1 Common wisdom expressed in the phrase “the exception confirms the rule” encapsulates the peculiar status of exception: both an oddity and a foil to a source of authority, both a stand-alone, one-of-a-kind object of awe, and an empty vessel waiting to be ascribed meaning. In the field of political science, the “state of exception,” though inherent to all human organizations, has routinely become synonymous with counterterrorism, which threatens the law and human rights in the name of “the idea that only exceptional measures can deal with enemies on whom state violence should be able to fall without limits” (Mbembe 2016, 49; my translation).1 In the field of arts, exception, although it does not bear the inflexible stamp of the law, connotes individual achievement in need of official recognition. In some cases, an artistic exception conjures up the unconventional and the eccentric, calling for legitimacy and incorporation into a canon; in others, it stands for genius and gains a particularly positive value in and of itself. Exception can then be viewed as central to the very idea of creation, where the author, if s/he wants to be heard, needs to be singular and out- of-step.

2 Trying to grasp the full scope of such an elusive concept has been the focus of the nine authors of the following essays. Exception proves to be a particularly potent concept to make sense of the innovative content and form of postcolonial literature, combined as it is with a thematic obsession with politics, especially the politics of exceptional measures to be seen in wars, insurrections, revolutions, terrorist actions. Postcolonial writing has always been concerned with the outside, the socio-political contexts, and, by excavating what used to be excluded in history books, it has contributed to the making of a historiographical corpus. This awareness is acute throughout this issue, with all authors strongly engaged in a reflexion on the tension between language and its democratic potential in the face of domination, not to say tyranny.

3 Proposing to explore the functioning of the notion of exception in postcolonial literature involves paying attention to the political and the poetic formations at work. The essays by David Waterman, Bhawana Jain and Sabine Lauret pay due respect to the dark, threatening rule of dehumanization introduced by states of exception. A situation

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central to decolonization wars and the establishment of postcolonial societies, the state of exception turns democracy into a mode of government to be questioned. As Mbembe’s argument has it, the colony remains the nocturnal side of democracy, “hiding a primordial and foundational void, the law that has its origins in lawlessness and which institutes itself as law, out of the law” (2016, 42; my translation).2 Those essays are followed by five others that explore the many ways in which poetic exception enables the emergence and the construction of self in postcolonial contexts. Alice Michel, Laura Singeot, Elsa Lorphelin, Cédric Courtois and André Dodeman address the creativity of artists who either are considered marginal or view themselves as exceptions, writing against the grain of received literary traditions and genres.

4 David Waterman studies Snuffing Out the Moon (2017), a novel by Pakistani writer Osama Siddique, which traces four millennia of South Asian history through the prism of movement, migration, expulsion, and exodus. The state of exception, rather than being temporary or exceptional, seems to be a permanent means to consolidate power. Drawing on Agamben and Schmitt, the article shows that emergency measures to which the sovereign resorts contribute to blur the border between what is legal and what is not.

5 Similarly, Chris Cleave’s novel The Other Hand (2008) features refugees as dehumanized through legitimate power and violence, in the “zone of non-being” that is the refugee detention camp set in England. Bhawana Jain focuses her analyses on the African protagonist, triply relegated to the margins as a woman, refugee and teenager. Bordering on the idea of “Homo Sacer,” she is at risk in both her homeland and her hostland, but the novel eventually outlines new forms of relationality and reciprocity across the boundaries of race, gender and class.

6 A novel that chronicles the action of Bengali nationalist civilians during the 1971 War of Independence that led to the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people, A Golden Age (2007) by Thamima Anam invites the reader into the lives of women. The novel filters exceptional political conditions (cancelled elections, religious, ethnic and gendered violence) through the mundane, and retrieves people’s memories of a time of collective frenzy. In this story of an exceptional generation coming of age with political exception, Sabine Lauret-Taft chooses to read the protagonist’s destiny as an allegory for nation-building and resistance in Bangladesh, as she reclaims her body, her status as mother and woman, and her ability to make herself and other women heard.

7 Alice Michel addresses the exceptionality of Mary Fortune (1833–1909) on multiple levels. An adventuress and writer born in Ireland who travelled the world and followed the gold rush in Australia, her unconventional work as a journalist and author of fiction was excluded from literary history before being recently excavated and reassessed. The article addresses “Twenty-Six Years Ago,” an autobiographical account of her experience in the goldfields, and of writing in the colonial era in a way that was not consistent with the idea of womanhood that prevailed at the time.

8 Laura Singeot explores how Alan Duff (Once Were Warriors, 1990) and Mudrooroo (Master of the Ghost Dreaming, 1991) craft their narratives as exceptions to Western constructs of ethnicity. By rejecting filiation in a literal sense (in these stories, fathers are eminently crossed out and rejected) in favour of affiliation, as theorized by Edward Said, the novels depict the emergence of a self that is neither Westernized nor assigned to Indigenous stereotyping.

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9 Pondering on the apparent exceptionality of the short story in Anita Desai’s oeuvre, Elsa Lorphelin shows how three stories from her collection Diamond Dust (2000) widely borrow from other genres (tragedy, fairy tale and fantasy) in order to deconstruct them and appropriate them for her own purposes, thereby opening up new interpretative horizons for the short story, a genre generally known as unstable. The article explores the narrative techniques that enable the author to trivialize the tragedy, subvert the fairytale and make Otherness a central and unifying concept, thus making the so-called Western genres universal.

10 In a similar play on Western literary codes, Cédric Courtois argues that the Nigerian war novel Burma Boy (2007), by Biyi Bandele, adopts the genre of the Bildungsroman to deconstruct it in a most effective way. Picturing the Burma campaign during the Second World War when Nigerian soldiers were sent as cannon fodder, the narrative rewrites history from the point of view of the marginalized, exceptional child soldier from the colonies gone mad. This narrative approach undercuts the idea of writing from a unique, unified, stable point of view.

11 Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), which focuses on a dislocated community in need of social and spiritual reconstruction in the interior of British Columbia, is exceptional because it resists formal categories. André Dodeman demonstrates how Watson’s modern experimentation with language (the highly condensed syntax and the prevalence of prose poetry, in particular) makes the text stand out from the realist tradition of the first half of the twentieth century. Watson produced a text obsessed with the inability to communicate, without ever lamenting on or even pointing at the particulars of ethnic origins. Thus she manages to draw universal meaning from a marginal community and finally suggests the possibility of new beginnings and cultural transformation.

12 Looking at postcolonial writing through the prism of exception, one is struck by the democratic potential of writing: in the very act of writing the exception, whether it is political or intimate, lies the ability for the subaltern to lose his/her status of subaltern, as Gayatri Spivak would have it. Every subject of modernity depicted in the works under scrutiny seems to embark on such a liberating journey once the act of speaking out is made possible. Speaking, or writing for that matter, enables one to be wrested out of one’s own singularity, and to become the third person that is the characteristic feature of fiction. As the arrangement of the essays suggests, the shift from exception to its adjectival development, the exceptional, marks the raison d’être of fiction, the source of its particular value: “Literature is this existence that does not let itself be distinguished from what it demonstrates, and must, therefore, continually repeat this demonstration. It must constantly produce something exceptional, and it can only do it with common material” (Rancière 2004,191; my translation).3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MBEMBE, Achille. 2016. Politiques de l’inimitié. Paris: La Découverte.

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RANCIÈRE, Jacques. 2004. Aux bords du politique. 1998. Paris: Gallimard.

NOTES

1. “l’idée selon laquelle seules des mesures exceptionnelles peuvent venir à bout d’ennemis sur lesquels devrait pouvoir s’abattre sans retenue la violence de l’Etat.” 2. “Cette face nocturne cache un vide primordial et fondateur, la loi qui trouve son origine dans le non-droit et qui s’institue en tant que loi hors la loi.” 3. “[L]a littérature est l’existence qui ne se laisse pas distinguer de sa démonstration et doit, par conséquent, répéter continuellement cette démonstration. Elle doit constamment faire de l’exceptionnel et elle ne peut le faire qu’avec du banal.”

AUTHOR

CÉCILE GIRARDIN

Université Sorbonne Paris Nord Cécile Girardin is a Senior Lecturer at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She has published numerous articles on South Asian fiction and non-fiction (Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Hamid Mohsin, V.S. Naipaul, among others) and edited Continuité, classicisme, conservatisme dans les littératures postcoloniales (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013).

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Snuffing Out the Moon: Kino/Bio Politics, Movement and the State of Exception

David Waterman

1 Osama Siddique’s debut novel, Snuffing Out the Moon (2017), is (to paraphrase Mohsin Hamid in Exit West, 209) a migration through time. Like the Buddha “travelling through multiple lives on the road” (Siddique 2017, 18), the novel is set across four millennia in the Indus Valley, moving between eventful periods in this region’s history: 2084 BCE (The Land of the Indus), 455 CE (The Land of the Buddha), 1620 (The Land of the Mughal), 1857 (The Land of the Sahib), 2009 (The Land of the Wakeel), and finally 2084 (The Land of Tomorrow). Shifting between these six different historical eras in South Asia, Siddique – deploying literary genres from folktale to historical fiction to sci-fi – charts a politics of movement, or “kinopolitics,” as defined by Thomas Nail, who has become an influential philosopher by placing the movement that defines the migrant at the center of the history of political power: Kinopolitics is the politics of movement, from the Greek word kino, meaning movement. If we are going to take the figure of the migrant seriously as a constitutive, and not derivative, figure of Western politics, we have to change the starting point of political theory. Instead of starting with a set of preexisting citizens, kinopolitics begins with the flows of migrants and the ways they have circulated or sedimented into citizens and states—as well as emphasizing how migrants have constituted a counter-power and alternative to state structures. In short, kinopolitics is the reinvention of political theory from the primacy of social motion instead of the state. (Nail and Settle 2016) 2 Migration is never innocent of political motivations and repercussions; as Nail insists, “the migrant is the political figure of movement” (2015, 11). Mohenjodaro, a beautiful model city, is now falling into ruin because of decadence and a caste of priests who have usurped religion from the people and turned it into a political weapon, a near- totalitarian situation which, accompanied by natural catastrophes, forces exodus. The “Land of Tomorrow” – the fictional name of a future period and the title of the last historical section of the novel – sees the globe divided into competing Water

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Conglomerates amid “the growing number of Displaced and Migratory Persons” (Siddique 2017, 254), leading to war and the desertion of warriors to the camp of the Regressives who hope for a simpler, more meaningful life, rather than remain in a society where travelling to the past is forbidden. Civilian populations and monks take to the road in 455 CE in an effort to survive, both physically and spiritually, the onslaught of invading hordes: “A new people had arrived and they would murder and pillage for so long that no house would resemble a human dwelling and courtyards with calm images of Lord Buddha would look like slaughterhouses” (367), transforming the society forever. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the cataclysmic social mutations which resulted from it, further illustrates the genuine historical consequences of politically- regulated movement: “[T]he everyday terms of existence were far from illusory. They lived real lives. Increasingly uncertain lives. The old order was in its last throes and a new one stood by the side of the deathbed” (42). Whether at the level of an individual or of an entire society, “the social compulsion to move produces certain expulsions for all migrants” (Nail 2015, 2), exclusions of those who are seen as a threat to national identities and national economies because they fall outside the social order which seems to guarantee the disciplined bodies and minds which are the core of biopolitics as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality: [T]echniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions […] operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. (1990, 141) 3 When confronted with such existential threats and resistance, real or imagined, a sovereign often resorts to emergency measures, what Moira Fradinger, after Agamben and Schmitt, calls a “zone of exception,” wherein the border between legal and illegal becomes blurred: “the law legally suspends itself, in order to preserve itself. A lawless space is thus legally bound: its violence is rationalized by the rhetoric of constituency survival and temporarily tolerated by the legal institutions” (2010, 17). Those who move are forced into this grey zone, both inside and outside the law. Snuffing Out the Moon traces four millennia of history, showing that the state of exception, rather than being “exceptional” or temporary, instead seems to be a permanent means to consolidate power, and that kinopolitics – or the politics of movement – is a technique of biopolitics and at the center of the state of exception as well.

4 Nail clearly states that “the figure of the migrant has always been the true motive force of social history” (2015, 7), and Siddique’s novel lends itself to a kinopolitical approach to historical evolution. The novel, divided into five “books” each containing six historical periods, opens with a description of Mohenjodaro, 2084 BCE, a thriving, vibrant city along the mighty Indus river, traders coming and going, in short a model city which gives the impression of permanence, of always having been there. Yet if the primary basis of kinopolitics is the “analysis of social flows” (Nail 2015, 24), a secondary feature is the junction, or perceived stasis: But this relative stasis is always secondary to the primacy of the social flows that compose it. A junction is not something other than a flow. It is the redirection of a flow back onto itself in a loop or fold. […] The junction then acts like a filter or sieve that allows some flows to pass through or around the circle and other flows to be caught in the repeating fold of the circle. (24, 27)

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Seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that a city like Mohenjodaro at some point had to be created through movement, thus making Nail’s claim unambiguous, that in fact, “settling down is the first kinopolitical event” (39). Given the vocabulary of social flows, it is perhaps not a coincidence that water imagery is abundant in Snuffing Out the Moon, and indeed Mohenjodaro is literally being drowned by heavy rains. In fact, its infrastructure has not been maintained due to the laxity of civic leaders since a fraudulent priestly caste has taken power. One young man, Prkaa, disgusted with the charlatans who have corrupted his city, is living in exile in the nearby forest; as an exile, or one who has been expelled, Prkaa is deprived of social status, “resulting in, or as a result of, […] movement” (Nail 2015, 35). Whether Prkaa has chosen exile or has been expelled ultimately does not matter, since “migrants […] are not free to determine the social conditions of their movement […]. Expulsion is a fundamentally social and collective process because it is a loss of a socially determined status (even if only temporarily and to a small degree)” (Nail 2015, 36; original italics). Prkaa, though treated as a barbarian, as one who is outside the political order (Nail 2015, 15) by the city dwellers, is not naïve; he understands that the decline of the once-great city is due to the priests who have taken power, referred to as “illusion-makers” (Siddique 2017, 138).

5 In the novel, we are told that organized religions developed out of fear, becoming “a framework for tackling all the terrors of the unintelligible and the unknown” (Siddique 2017, 155), and evolved into a system of socio-political exploitation meant to control human beings, which is perfectly in line with Foucault’s definition of biopolitics. We are equally reminded that an aforementioned junction is necessary to organized religion, a community of people living together and believing together (Nail 2015, 155): Religion could no longer be left to mere men. It enfolded a possibility too immense to ignore any more, it encapsulated a tool too ingenious to neglect. […] [I]t was only a matter of time before priestly persuasion evolved into exhortation and then into diktat. [The priests] required obeisance. They required submission. They even required a sacrifice no less than freshly shed blood. […] The officiators of the new religion increasingly thought it fit to play a cardinal role not just in the domain of the spiritual but also in that of state, politics, commerce and even in the private lives of men and women. And who was to question them? (Siddique 2017, 156–57) 6 Even when their hoax is exposed and the voice of “god” has turned out to be a man hiding in a tree, this caste of sovereign priests, who have been sacrificing human beings, manages to remain in power. Their “technologies of the self” whereby “processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power” (Agamben 1998, 5; original italics), had been particularly efficient. If the creation of subjects is necessary to the sovereign, the state of exception is not a preexisting situation, but rather the means by which this caste of sovereign priests “creates and guarantees the situation that the law needs for its own validity” (17) within a society facing an apparent state of emergency, namely the aforementioned torrential rains and flooding.

7 Twenty-five hundred years later, in “The Land of the Buddha,” the city of Mohenjodaro has all but disappeared under the sands of time. In the city of Takshasilla the monks have settled in the Jaulian monastery, the ruins of which will, in their turn, form the backdrop for the Deep History Center sixteen hundred years later. A senior scholar, Buddhamitra, is reproaching his brothers with their sedentary habits, as they remain in

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the sangharama when the tradition of the Buddha was to “go forth into the world” (Siddique 2017, 23). Buddhamitra adds: “the wheel of time takes yet another turn and the world around us is changing. […] Surely, we need to be aware of what is happening beyond the walls of our monastery? Whether we like it or not, events transpiring outside can disrupt our quiet, reclusive lives within…” (23). The outside world is simply moving in, as it always does. Buddhamitra is not only worried about religious tradition; he has been having visions of invading hordes wiping out their current civilization (124), and taking to the road will be their only hope for survival, both for themselves and for the message of the Buddha they carry. And so the monks become exiles, although they take it in stride as the normal functioning of the wheel of time, or in the terms of kinopolitics, as the motive force of history: “Civilizational existence was nothing more than the tiresome sequence of horde after horde crossing deserts or descending from mountains, persecuting and uprooting those who had settled and flourished in the plains, only to be displaced in turn by the next series of marauders” (311).

8 Two forms of kinopolitical movement can be seen in this kind of situation, according to Nail: the invading hordes are nomad barbarians who “engage in one continuous raid following only the flows of blood and treasure – always searching for a home denied to them by political disenfranchisement” (2015, 138), while the monks become refugees, seeking asylum with their brothers in a distant monastery (135). The permanence of movement also becomes clear. If earlier we mentioned junctions as the points of perceived stasis, we now enter a system of circulation, or a “regulation of flows into an ordered network of junctions” (Nail 2015, 29), wherein the migrant (in whatever form, whether nomad, exile, refugee…) never really arrives at a destination (245; see endnote), especially given that invasions of one kind or another are a permanent feature, indeed a driving factor, of history.

9 Agamben links the phenomena of insurrection, invasion and resistance to the state of exception, highlighting the paradox that while the state of exception might seem to apply to abnormal, exceptional situations, within the concept of “‛global civil war,’ the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (2005, 2). Siddique’s novel develops a similar argument yet stretches much farther back in time to show that such techniques of government are nothing new, and will probably not change in future societies either, and certainly not during periods of imperial rule.

10 In 1620 CE, “The Land of the Mughal,” we find Manmohan setting off on the Shah Rah- e-Azam, the grand road “on which rode those who shaped their own destinies and indeed those of empires. Soon, he too would walk on it to escape a life of crushing tedium” (Siddique 2017, 25). As a young son to a large, poor farming family, Manmohan is a mere subject, a vagabond forgotten by history; the historical figure is Emperor Jahangir, The Seizer of the World, a genuine sovereign with effectively no limits to his power (Agamben 2005, 8). Jahangir is a conqueror who has dramatically expanded his empire through what Nail refers to as a centripetal force: In this way, territorial kinopower collectively brings the outside in. Thus, neither expansion nor expulsion is the effect of a single or central ruler, law, or power. Centripetal force does not emerge from the center; it emerges from a decentered periphery. It is the kinetic conditions for a social center. A single center can be created only by slowly accumulating from a heterogeneous periphery of individual farmers and even multiple territories. (2015, 43; original italics)

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Nail draws attention to the problem, saying that the migrant has been understood historically from the “perspective of states,” in other words by those who have written the historical record, narratives in which the simple farmers and foot soldiers like Manmohan are ignored (2015, 4; original italics). But, of course, great empires also come and go despite their historical influence and impact.

11 Another major historical transition of empires highlighted by Snuffing Out the Moon is 1857 and the Indian Mutiny – or the First War of Indian Independence – the state of exception par excellence declared by the East India Company and the British Crown in response to Indian demands for full independence from British colonization. The British blame an itinerant maulvi, or teacher of Islamic law, Ahmadullah Shah, who “had travelled across northern Hindustan, inciting rebellion wherever he went” (Siddique 2017, 109), and they are concerned as well by the mystery of travelling chapattis across the country, which are suspected of being coded messages and which, disconcertingly, are delivered much more quickly than the post (104). When considering rebellions, Nail refers to the wave as the most appropriate form of motion to describe this kind of social movement: A wave transports a qualitative change or social force of solidarity or collective disruption. […] A social wave simply transports a disturbance through a social collective that unifies the collective without the source of the transport originating from any single point. […] Social revolt travels rapidly in between the formal channels of power, through “word of mouth,” print, association, and all manner of viral underground communications and secret meetings. Thus, a social wave is a distinctly mass or common phenomenon that requires a multitude of mutual pedetic motions in order to transmit a social disturbance among heterogeneous elements. (127; original italics) 12 Even though the Indians refuse to leave their homeland, their rebellion consists of movements nevertheless, the kind of Brownian, or pedetic movement described above. Rebellions, Nail reminds us, “are about seizing power directly without fleeing” (2015, 147). During this time of social upheaval, many travelled underground figuratively as well as literally, in elaborate systems of tunnels: “There was some comfort that all of them – whether stately or mean – almost always harboured those who were fleeing something and that too in great haste; an equalizing of humanity when it was underground, not unlike the egalitarian state in which all found themselves sooner or later, whether concealed in elaborate crypts or in dusty, untended graves” (Siddique 2017, 203). The British make prisoners of many of the Indian soldiers and civilians, all of whom are assumed to be guilty by association, people whose lives mean nothing, whose bare life status can be read on their bodies: “For they were men in limbo, moving about like wayward specters in the twilight. […] They looked like debased men, and they walked like debased men, their eyes were those of debased men…” (289). Later in the novel, more prisoners are taken, but they will not remain prisoners for long: “The stragglers were to straggle no more. Such was the order. There was to be a blanket and permanent ban on all their movements. Now such a ban could only be truly implemented on lifeless bodies…” (393). These people are to be killed – but not sacrificed, since that would make martyrs of them – because they are stragglers, because they cannot move fast enough, because they cannot keep up.

13 In the context of a large-scale social revolt such as the Indian Mutiny, Nail describes the genesis of resistance as part of what he calls the “holy trinity of proletarianization (expulsion from property, urban labor and biological fecundity)” which then “gave

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birth to the social movement” allowing local struggles to evolve “into social and national struggles. […] [T]he proletariat became the propertyless majority and their motion became a larger social movement” (2015, 159; original italics). Although the resistant Indian seems motionless in his/her refusal to move, in fact s/he continues to do so, moving “together in the picket-line, the public demonstration, the occupation….” (172). As we have seen, the self-proclaimed sovereign, in this case the East India Company and the Crown, reacts by repression, arrests with indefinite detention and killing, using the most basic logic to justify the state of exception, that of “necessity,” which, Agamben reminds us, “has no law” (2005, 24). It ultimately destroys, through martial law and emergency powers, the very democracy (albeit limited) which the state of exception was supposed to defend, simply because there are no limitations on the exercise of power, no system of checks and balances (see Friedrich 1950, 584; also Agamben 2005, 8). While Indian independence was still ninety years in the future, the Mutiny was nevertheless a significant challenge to the sovereign, and indeed the East India Company found itself divested of that role, replaced entirely by the Crown in 1858, although Queen Victoria would not be officially proclaimed Empress of India until twenty years later. Another consequence of the Revolt would be a forced exodus of Muslims from Northern India, especially Delhi, which would later have an effect on Hindu-Muslim intercommunal relations up to and during Partition in 1947 and after, indeed right up to the present (Hashmi 2017).

14 Contemporary Lahore is the setting for the sections entitled “Wakeel,” which focus on an old woman who is the victim of weak institutions and corruption. A gang of strongmen has occupied her house and refuses to pay rent, while the lawyer who is supposedly representing her case is simply taking her money while colluding with her tormenters. She is bound to, and yet abandoned by, the law (see Agamben 2005, 1). The law has become weak, and thus less effective – even powerless – due to the lack of violence in two ways, “the violence that posits law and the violence which preserves it” (Agamben 1998, 40). When the legal system becomes weak, like a watchdog which barks incessantly but never bites, the door is left open to those who understand that there are more efficient ways of governing than democracy and respect for the law.

15 This is the case as a senior army general decides to take power through a coup d’état, a state of exception which allows for a more efficient, albeit less humane, system of administration: “General Sahib had decided that no longer could the fate of the nation be left to the civvies […]. General Sahib was a man of action and had little patience for the law. […] General Sahib was a man of action and had even less patience for history” (Siddique 2017, 267–68; original italics). Although Al-Wakeel is one of Allah’s ninety-nine names – The Trustee, The Disposer of Affairs, The Guardian – Wakeel can be defined linguistically as “the person who efficiently represents him [sic] or does what he is incapable of doing on his behalf” (Understand al-Qur’an Academy). While the old woman eventually finds an honest lawyer to represent her, perhaps more important to our discussion in terms of kinopolitics is the man who takes pity on the woman and steps in to help. The man, Billa, is an outlaw himself, fleeing for his life, yet before leaving his hideout he becomes the figure of Robin Hood, the sort of popular vagabond myth of the highwayman which Nail suggests, “supports peasant struggles, disguises himself as a beggar, hates the clergy, and fights the sheriff and his men” (2015, 150). In the current context of a military dictatorship, led by a sovereign General who has little patience for the law, the old woman has not completely lost her legal status yet requires someone from outside

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the law to defend her against the injustices of the state of exception and weak legal institutions (see Agamben 2005, 3).

16 Snuffing Out the Moon also takes us to the future, although not that far off, in 2084, to a world divided into competing Water Conglomerates. The Rohtas Fort Encampment, inspired by a real sixteenth-century fort near the city of Jhelum, is ultramodern and technologically advanced, kept secure by Airborne Monitoring and Patrol Scooters (AMPS) flown by skilled pilots. Every so often, one of the patrols manages to take a long-distance picture of those who are exiles, living outside the Fort, called Regressives by the city dwellers as they “seemed to belong to another age” (Siddique 2017, 60). One of the pilots, Naya, is curious about these people, and wonders why photos of them are so rare, and why “the Regressives were hardly spoken about. They were simply out there. Except when they needed to be checked” (61). The photos are on display in the Fort, until one day when Naya’s close-up pictures of a family are also posted and cause quite a sensation, at least until they are censored a few minutes later – the man in the Regressive family is wearing the same kind of military-issue trousers that all AMPS pilots wear (63). Thus he is not simply an exile but a deserter, desertion being an extremely politically-charged form of movement or migration.

17 Nearly four years earlier, Combat Specialist Prashanto went missing after a seek and destroy mission, and was ultimately classified as Missing in Action (Siddique 2017, 84) after his AMPS inexplicably crashed in the jungle while pursuing some Regressives caught trying to divert water from the Conglomerate for their own use (79). Now that Naya’s photos have unintentionally identified Prashanto, the authorities order an immediate recovery mission, classified as code red and confidential, with the addendum “Damnatio Memoriae” – no record is to be made of the operation (75; original italics), as a means of avoiding any martyrization: “Didn’t one know how icons were born? If one neglectfully allowed a mythos to develop around someone or something, it became almost impossible to contain it at a later stage. ‘The Burning Man,’ ‘The Tank Man,’ ‘The Falling Man,’ ‘The Passion of the Che’… various iconic images from some time earlier in the century flashed through [the Resident Reviewer’s] fast-paced mind” (74–75). The Water Conglomerate has become a totalitarian society, controlling information and discouraging those who wish to consult historical archives, dismissed as “the countless fabrications fed to people over millennia in the name of a discipline that used to be called history” (62).

18 Prashanto, discussing why he left the Conglomerate to live with the Regressives, explains why he was unable to continue living in that environment, without a link to the past, without memory: The loss of perspective has resulted from the forced break with the past – a horribly gory and death-dealing past by all accounts, but there is an absolute restriction on excavating it, examining it, learning from it – except for the select few. We are supposed to live solely in the present and in the future. So that the contagion of the past does not deprave us. The past is a curse that we are supposed to have escaped. It can never be allowed to catch up with and degenerate those who have, through their endless toil, finally regenerated. It is the necessary damnation of memory, some say. But how can one live without memory? (Siddique 2017, 230) In terms of kinopolitics, this interdiction to consult the historical record in an effort to discover what “really” happened is not new. As Nail reminds us, those in power have always had power over the historical archive too, including the “countless fabrications” cited earlier:

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[M]igrants have created very different forms of social organization that can clearly be seen in the “minor history” of the raids, revolts, rebellions, and resistances of some of the most socially marginalized migrants. This is a challenging history to write because many of these social organizations produced no written documents, or if they did, they were systematically destroyed by those in power. It is not a natural fact that the history of migrants has become ahistorical, as Hegel argues – it is the violence of states that has rendered the migrant ahistorical. (2015, 4–5) 19 In this violent society, religious faith has been banned in favor of “the cult of science and the order of progress” (Siddique 2017, 232), religion having become a humanistic foil to a technocratic, authoritarian regime rather than as a means of political domination. Instead, water scarcity has become a political tool, indeed a weapon of war (252) which has pushed many into exile, not simply those called Regressives: In the wake of the Water Wars and after the so-called ‘Transformation,’ children, women and men had gone forth in caravans, small and large, clinging together for fear of persecution, and direly in need of water and security. After the stabilization of the extant global power balance among the Conglomerates, their places of exile became semi-permanent abodes. The reasons for their ouster were multifarious. Many had been turned away because they were deemed incapable of conforming; others had refused to conform and attune themselves to new post-religion lives. Yet others were born while their parents were in exile and knew of no other life […] they all had something in common – their collective rejection by those who now controlled the water reserves of the world. (233) This kind of expulsion is not surprising, Nail suggests: “The social conditions for the expansion of a growing political order (including warfare, colonialism, and massive public works) were precisely the expulsion of a population of barbarians who had to be depoliticized at the same time. This occurs again and again throughout history” (2015, 23). Such expulsion does not happen from a pre-established territory, in this case the Conglomerates’ zones of influence and walled forts; rather territory is created via the expulsion of those who stand in the way: “The territory is not the condition for movement, but the inverse. […] Before there is the territory, there is a process of territorialization” (42).

20 As we have said, historical research is strongly discouraged in this society; only near history studies, as they are called in the novel, are valued (Siddique 2017, 238). Alexander Al-Murtaza Afaqi was once a contemporary history specialist, renowned in his field, until he began to have doubts about what he was doing and about the ideological objectives his work served. So he is sent to the Deep History Studies Centre in Taxila, where in the shadow of the ruins of the Jaulian monastery, he is allowed to do his research, knowing that he is being monitored and that his work will at best be censored (236–40). Taxila is where Alexander Al-Murtaza Afaqi and people like him are confined when they are seen as “[n]ot yet volatile or seditious to qualify for surgical or chemical reorientation” (240). His work consists in comparing the role of water in the Indus Valley civilizations to that in his own time, millennia apart, while knowing his work will never be published (241).

21 Since her unwitting discovery of a deserter to the camp of the Regressives, Naya is also being subjected to questioning and scanning, treated as though she were a threat to the security of the Conglomerate, and is being considered for memory erasure, wondering aloud: “What kind of authority system played havoc with memory? What kind of society tolerated it without a word of explanation, without any disclosure? What did the authority have to hide and why?” (Siddique 2017, 246–47). During his interrogation

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with the Resident Reviewer, Alexander clearly shows that he understands the biopolitical justification for altering memory, defining it simply as “the age-old project of enforced normalization” (251). Both he and Naya will rebel. Alexander will leave microchips hidden inside several different statues, records of his writings that were not revealed to the Conglomerate, hoping that this historical archive, his personal, anti- conformist archive, will travel to the future without being destroyed as subversive (425). In the last lines of the novel, Naya will bail out of her AMPS to join the Regressives below, as Prashanto had done four years earlier (427). While defined as deserters by the Conglomerate, and hence as criminals deserving the death penalty – “ killed and yet not sacrificed,” according to Agamben (1998, 8; original italics) – Nail suggests that what Prashanto, Naya and the Regressives have accomplished is yet another form of social movement, that of the commune which “proposes an alternative to the state” (167). The commune is, thus, a “wave invention of the proletariat” (Nail 2015, 167), the wave provoking a qualitative change in society, as was mentioned above, that becomes a “permanent way of life” (139). As the Water Conglomerates seem to be in a constant state of conflict, both with each other and internally, security remains a top priority, thus justifying the state of exception and the resulting “generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (Agamben 2005, 14).

22 Snuffing Out the Moon, abundant with water imagery, is about migration through time and the social flows which drive history. At one point Prkaa seeks answers from his teacher: “I often wonder whether a civilization can always progress […]. The more I think about all this, the more I am convinced that the affairs of men sometimes follow a course that becomes irreversible. It is like a tide which, once it rises, abates only when the natural time for it to abate arrives” (Siddique 2017, 334). Prkaa is pessimistic about the possibility for a small group of people to change the tide of history for the better, and his pessimism is understandable. Those social flows, or the movement of peoples, are almost never random but instead the result of political pressures: expulsions and expansions, invading armies, marauding hordes, imperial projects, exiles and desertions. If biopolitics is the creation of docile bodies for the purpose of controlling people and ensuring normalization (Foucault 1990, 141), kinopolitics must be considered as a means of accomplishing much the same thing, through enforced, regulated movement. As part of this constellation of governance, we see that the state of exception, rather than being the result of an exceptional situation is in fact the necessary element which defines the sovereign, allowing the sovereign to then reduce human beings to bare life, both inside and outside the law, permitting “both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust” (Agamben 1998, 3). While the state of exception is often discussed as a relatively recent historical phenomenon, especially focusing on totalitarian regimes during World War Two and after, Osama Siddique’s Snuffing Out the Moon makes it clear that the exception has been the rule for thousands of years. Invoking necessity allows the sovereign to shape memories, to create collective amnesia, to rewrite history. Yet throughout Snuffing Out the Moon there are those who are nostalgic and curious, who seek to escape “the order of things” (Siddique 2017, 41), who try to see beyond appearances (15), those who doubt. Prkaa’s teacher replies to his question: “This city may falter, fall and wither away. Or it may not. But those capable of building one such as this will not die out. We too will survive” (335). If movement is a tool of social control, it is also a means of resistance, of escape, of survival.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published as Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1995).

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Stato di eccezione. (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

FOUCAULT, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books / Random House. Originally published as Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

FRADINGER, Moira. 2010. Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

FRIEDRICH, Carl J. 1950. Constitutional Government and Democracy. 1941. Second edition. Boston: Ginn.

HAMID, Mohsin. 2017. Exit West. London: Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Books.

HASHMI, Sohail. 2017. “1857-2017: The Mutiny which helped the British create Hindu-Muslim divide.” National Herald. 29 July. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/cafe/1857-2017-the- mutiny-which-helped-the-british-create-hindu-muslim-divide.

NAIL, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

NAIL, Thomas, and Zachary Thomas SETTLE. 2016. “Kinopolitics and the Figure of the Migrant: An Interview with Thomas Nail.” Identity Issue. The Other Journal: An Intersection of Theology & Culture, no. 27 (28 November). https://theotherjournal.com/2016/11/28/kinopolitics-figure-migrant- interview-thomas-nail/.

SIDDIQUE, Osama. 2017. Snuffing Out the Moon. Haryana, India: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin.

Understand al-Qur’an Academy. 2019. “And the answer is… Al-Wakeel!” 9 March. https:// understandquran.com/answer-al-wakeel.html.

ABSTRACTS

Osama Siddique’s 2017 novel, Snuffing Out the Moon, is a migration through time. Shifting between six different historical eras in South Asia between 2084 BCE and 2084 CE, Siddique charts a politics of movement, or what Thomas Nail calls “kinopolitics.” Snuffing Out the Moon traces four millennia of history, illustrating that the techniques of biopolitics and the related state of exception (or emergency measures) are often enforced through movement, and rather than being exceptional or temporary, seem to be a permanent means to consolidate power.

INDEX

Keywords: kinopolitics, biopolitics, state of exception, migration Indus Valley

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AUTHOR

DAVID WATERMAN

La Rochelle Université David Waterman is a Professor at La Rochelle Université, where he is a member of the research team CRHIA (Center for Research in International and Atlantic History), Co-director of the doctoral program Euclide and Director of the Asia Pacific Institute. He is currently working on Pakistani history, culture and literature in English, and his most recent book-length publication is Where Worlds Collide: Pakistani Fiction in the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Detention Camp and State of Exception in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand

Bhawana Jain

1 The figure of the refugee is often depicted in mass media as an archetype of the unrooted/uprooted, abject and intolerable being that is simultaneously excluded and included in the territorial boundaries of nation-states. Hence, this “disenfranchised, displaced” figure (Wilson 2017, 2) continues to threaten the fixed binary limits between us and them, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion to further problematize the notion of borders. On the one hand, some postcolonial theorists such as Arjun Appadurai use the suffix “scapes” (2003, 31) to celebrate the fluid circulation of migrants, in terms such as mediascape, technoscape, ethnoscape, financescape and ideoscape, across the borders in this era of globalization. On the other hand, border- crossing is seen as entailing danger, loss, trauma and even death for the refugees. Therefore, the figure of the refugee is perceived as a passive, invisible and vulnerable victim who belongs nowhere and remains unwelcomed everywhere even in literature. Caren Kaplan, for instance, argues that the term “refugee” is a critical trope that alludes to a “faceless political construct outside the sphere of literature and aesthetics” (1996, 120).

2 Chris Cleave’s novel The Other Hand1 challenges this stereotype associated with the figure of the refugee by analyzing it through a gender perspective. It focuses on the life of the young Nigerian protagonist Little Bee by tracing her physical and psychological changes from innocence to maturity and from being a Nigerian citizen to a refugee in the UK. She saw her family slaughtered and her village burnt during the Oil wars2 in Nigeria, after which she fled illegally on a cargo ship to Britain to join Sarah and Andrew, a British couple whom she had encountered in Nigeria, with the hope of finding refuge from the horrors of the past. She even renamed herself as Little Bee, in her yearning for a place of safety and comfort in the hostland. However, she ended up in a detention camp for refugees and asylum seekers. By focusing on the description of her ordeal there, this article seeks to uncover how the novel balances narratives of

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exclusion and violence embedded in this imposed “state of exception” (Agamben 2005, 109) with her agency, resistance and self-assertion.

3 The article will first analyze the complexities of a life that marks the refugee as the “other” and as a threat. The second part will focus on Little Bee’s sense of alterity in the detention camp. The final section will challenge the common perception of the refugee as the vulnerable, silent and abject “other” by emphasizing the power of resistance and self-assertion through Little Bee’s use of language and communication.

Refugee: a state of exception

4 The terms migration, refugee, exile, and diaspora are embedded within different political and socioeconomic realities. Claire Gallien warns that a failure to distinguish between such terms could dehistoricize the figure of the migrant and decontextualize writings on migration (2018, 723). In contrast to other types of migrants, Article 1A (2) of the 1951 United Nations Convention defined “refugee” as an international legal term for “a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality” (UNHCR 1979, 18). Central to this legal discourse is the principle of “non-refoulement,”3 which prohibits the host nations from forcing the refugees to return to their home countries if a violent situation still prevails there. Alastair Ager positions refugees in the “discourse of vulnerability” (1999, 18) as victims of external forces, and suggests that their lives straddle the gap between acceptance and non-acceptance, belonging and non-belonging in the host countries. Agamben draws on Hannah Arendt’s notion of statelessness and Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to show how refugees are dehumanized through legitimate power and violence. He also compares the refugee with the figure of the Homo Sacer (sacred man or accursed man) who in Ancient Roman law was someone who might be killed with impunity without having committed a murder (1998, 72).

5 Within the postcolonial context, Edward Said perceives refugees as “speechless emissaries” as well as “large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance” (2002, 181). According to him, the refugee is a collective entity that inhabits “the perilous territory of not belonging” (177). Similarly, David Farrier in Postcolonial Asylum goes on to describe him as a “new subaltern” (2011, 5), drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s work. He argues that the refugee is a “scandal for postcolonial studies” 4 because his/her brutal and traumatic experience of interstices reconfigures the postcolonial concepts of diaspora, hybridity and third space, which have been conceived in a positive way as sites of agency, resistance and empowerment in the seminal works of Bhabha and Rushdie, among others. Therefore, the term “refugee” has come to include multiple and sometimes ambiguous connotations in the field of postcolonial studies. The Other Hand appears to offer a new perspective on the figure of a female refugee in the detention camp, which Xavier Marquez calls “a space of surveillance” (2015, 22).

6 The novel draws on the author Chris Cleave’s first-hand experience of these detention centers in the UK. In an interview, he says: For three days I worked in the canteen of Campsfield House in Oxfordshire. It’s a detention centre for asylum seekers – a prison, if you like, full of people who haven’t committed a crime. I’d been living within ten miles of the place for three

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years and didn’t even know it existed. The conditions in there were very distressing. I got talking with asylum seekers who’d been through hell and were likely to be sent back to hell […]. When we imprison the innocent we make them ill, and when we deport them it’s often a death sentence. I knew I had to write about it, because it’s such a dirty secret. (Little Bee author Q &A 2008) Cleave claims to use his knowledge of the global refugee crisis as well as his artistic mediation skills to give voice to the voiceless. The above-mentioned lines also highlight Cleave’s personal engagement to expose the inhuman treatment meted out to refugees by official organizations in the West. Cleave reiterates this in the novel by delineating the paradoxical relation between Little Bee’s state of innocence as an adolescent and her refugee experiences of death, displacement and trauma in the detention camp.

The detention camp: a space of exception

7 The novel opens in a peripheral and hidden setting called “Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre” (Cleave 2008, 17), encircled by “high razor wire fence” (29) from which sixteen-year-old Little Bee is being released after two years of detention without trial. The emphasis on “removal” stands in stark contrast with the epigraph of the novel, which the author quotes from an official textbook given to immigrants preparing for their citizenship test in the UK: “Britain is proud of its tradition of providing a safe haven for people fleeting [sic] persecution and conflict” (Life in the United Kingdom, 2005). Here, the author’s deliberate choice of the word “fleeting” instead of the word “fleeing” in the official textbook, and his insertion of “removal” in the name of the detention camp, emphasize the stereotypical figure of the refugee as an undesirable being who needs to be controlled, monitored and eventually deported. This is also reiterated in the ensuing depiction of Little Bee’s life in the detention camp, eventually culminating in her deportation to her home country.

8 Having been locked up in the exceptional space of the detention camp, Little Bee feels an intensified sense of homelessness, loss and trauma, as she is triply relegated to the margins as a woman, a refugee and an adolescent. She describes her experiences of alterity through an interior monologue in the following terms: How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy. (Cleave 2008, 2) The discrepancy between Little Bee’s age and the maturity of her remark reflects how new forms of systemic violence may strip this adolescent girl of dignity and agency and mark her as an undesirable outsider. The use of internal focalization in these lines also emphasizes her desire for mobility, symbolized by free circulation of money, while she is forbidden to cross the policed borders of the modern nation-state. Moreover, these lines reassert her status as a refugee girl, which is in stark contrast to the figure of the migrant whom Rushdie somewhat romantically described as “the man without frontiers, an archetypal figure of our age” (2002, 415).

9 Borrowing the words of Agamben, we could describe the detention camp where Little Bee is imprisoned as “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and

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rule, licit and illicit” (1998, 170). Standing on this threshold, Little Bee gives an insight into the camp in passages that express her viewpoint: It was cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at. Those cold years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up in the immigration detention centre, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration detention centre, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. (Cleave 2008, 11) 10 The lexical choice of “frozen,” “locked” and “forever” reiterates Little Bee’s feeling of stasis and her loss of self in the detention camp. The insistence on the lexeme “cold,” used four times in these lines, evokes Little Bee’s hopelessness in this dystopian setting, which is literally inscribed in her as she is forced to be “reborn” as an alienated and lonely creature. The trauma of her refugee condition is further exacerbated through her silent testimony, in which she conceives the detention camp as a counter-space of danger: Two years, I lived in that detention centre. I was fourteen years of age when I came to your country but I did not have any papers to prove it and so they put me in the same detention centre as the adults. The trouble was, there were men and women locked up together in that place. At night they kept the men in a different wing of the detention centre. They caged them like wolves when the sun went down, but in the daytime the men walked among us, and ate the same food we did. I thought they still looked hungry. I thought they watched me with ravenous eyes. So when the older girls whispered to me, To survive you must look good or talk good, I decided that talking would be safer for me. (Cleave 2008, 9) 11 Little Bee’s personal account individualizes her female refugee experience and captures her continuing trauma. The repetition of “two years” six times in the first chapter conjures up the haunting nature of her unforgettable ordeal. In addition, the insistence on the exposure of her adolescent female body to the unwanted gaze of male prisoners through the use of the simile “wolves” not only puts female inmates in the category of vulnerable and sexual objects, but it also reminds us of the colonial discourses that animalize black men (see for instance Fanon 1967, 112) and ironically turns them into victims. Besides, the constant pressure to adapt and conform to the detention camp’s norms as well as an insistence on the fraught relationship to ways of dressing in the camp, “To survive you must look good,” symbolize the forced commodification of the female body. Alternatively, this serves as a tool of self-assertion for the female inmate Yevette who uses her body to have consensual sex with a white employee in order to obtain freedom from the camp. It is important to note here that even if the reified, dominant and superior gaze of the white man is different from that of the racialized black man, both have negative psychological consequences on Little Bee and result in constant fear. However, she tries to overcome this by choosing to appear genderless. Hence, the female body emerges as a site of vulnerability and paradoxically as a space of “strategic struggles” (Marquez, quoting Foucault, 2015, 23) that allows resistance, self-assertion and individuality.

12 One of the characteristics of postcolonial refugee writings is that they deal not only with the place of arrival or transit, but also with the place of departure. As Little Bee’s first-person narrative alternates between present and past, the detention centre is not seen differently from the violent spaces of her homeland. Although the novel seeks to break away from the stereotypical discourses on female refugees, it at times seems to

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reinforce the same stereotypes. Little Bee recounts these in the following manner: “the- men-came-and-they-burned... tied… raped-my-girls… cut-my-breast… I-ran-away… and-then- they-put-me-in-here” (Cleave 2008, 15). “Rape” and “cut” are used as transitive verbs to depict the atrocities to which the female bodies are subjected. Moreover, the interwoven, fragmented and incomplete traumatic stories, which include hyphens, ellipses and italics, show that there are gaps and voids within them. In addition, the spectacular and aesthetic exposition of the terror and cruelty of the past depicted in these lines emphasizes the “intertwined histories and overlapping territories” (Said 1994, 15), implying that traumatic stories involving women are not separate but connected to one another. Just like any other refugee story, the shocking past life of Little Bee is marked by trauma and death: the murder of her parents, as well as the gang rape and murder of her elder sister, as the family was caught in the Oil Wars in Nigeria.

13 The disruption of filial bonds is one of the main features of this refugee novel. Little Bee recalls: “in the detention centre, I screamed every night and in the morning I imagined a thousand ways to kill myself… The detention officers sent the bodies away in the night, because it was not good for the local people to see the slow ambulances leaving that place” (Cleave 2008, 68–69). Little Bee is seen as amputated, not only from her original culture and identity through the murder of her family, but also from any potential future due to the appalling conditions both in the detention camp and in her home country. The life of Little Bee seems to illustrate the idea of Homo Sacer, the “sacred man” or “accursed man,” as she appears to the readers as a doomed person that is susceptible to being killed anywhere, including in her homeland and in the hostland. Moreover, the trauma of forced displacement along with Little Bee’s current situation in the detention camp complicates her situation as a refugee and puts her in a “discourse of vulnerability” (Ager 1999, 18). By drawing a parallel between the death threats looming large in the past and the present circumstances – “In my world death will come chasing” (Cleave 2008, 169) – the novel also critiques the host nation’s failure to provide a safe haven for the needy, in contrast to what is mentioned in the novel’s epigraph.

14 As the novel shifts its focus to the other female inmates of the camp who are equally relegated to the anonymous margins, the unsettling and hostile conditions of the detention camp are reiterated. The designation of the inmates as “The girl with no name,” “The girl in the yellow saree,” and “The girl with scars on her legs” (Cleave 2008, 14) shows how the detention camp turns most of the refugees into anonymous beings, with the exception of Little Bee and Yevette. The absence of proper names denies the characters the kind of personal information that names convey. Besides, the exposed body of the refugee girl, “the girl with scars on her legs,” reminds us of the various meanings of what Agamben calls “bare life” (1998, 8). Identity markers, in the form of reference to physical attributes, also suggest the complex value of the scarred body as a visible reminder of the staggering violence of the past and an “unspeakable” trauma for the refugee (Lloyd, 214).

15 Wounds and scars also parallel the working of the refugee novel as they pursue the impossible task of narrating trauma in its totality, disorienting and decentering its very form. In a literal sense, the novel seems to channel the readers’ attention to these visual markers so as to appropriate the “othered” refugee voices. In other words, these “other” refugee characters serve as a foil to Little Bee who then emerges as their

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spokesperson, as she simultaneously orients the reader’s gaze towards the refugee trauma as well as her own visibility: “I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly… We must see all scars as beauty… Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived” (Cleave 2008, 13–14). A scar is seen as inscribed text in the flesh and as an identifying marker of suffering which could be both alien and alienating, but Little Bee invites the reader to re-appropriate it by showing her resistance to the aesthetics of human beauty.5 Through this dialogical narrative, Little Bee also attempts to cope with her past as she controls the way in which her refugee story is conveyed to others.

Coping mechanisms in the state of exception

16 The detention camp may impose a sense of non-belonging, undesirability and immobility and it may subject Little Bee to self-effacement and self-denial, but ironically, this “space of exception” also enables her to resist the state of non-being as she tries to negotiate a space for herself within it. As the story proceeds further, one finds that this space also provides her with enough time and space, enabling her to detach herself from her trauma. She claims: I was born – no, I was reborn – in captivity… They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon… So, I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. (Cleave 2008, 11–12) These lines foreground her refugee experience as she identifies it as a site of empowerment and “re-birth.” This interior monologue and her deliberate addition of the diminutive “Little” to her name call attention to the need of re-asserting her voice and identity in her own limited way against the processes of silencing and ostracizing found in this invisible and isolated place. Invisibility is used as an instrument of control and power by the authorities to legitimize the use of violence. In the words of the philosopher Axel Honneth, this imposed invisibility reveals a lack of recognition. Ironically, the same detention camp creates the condition for “scriptural mobility,” a term Hayette Lakraa coins in her article “Im/Mobility, Power, and In/Visible Refugees” to refer to the process through which the words and voice of refugees are allowed to be expressed. The moment that freezes refugees in space and time due to external forces trying to stop their mobility at border crossings unleashes their imagination and artistic creation. As unbearable as those long hours are in confinement cells or on the other side of the fence, those moments of absolute uncertainty and deep anxiety become the special occasion… to speak out. (2017, 9) 17 Little Bee is able to subvert her invisibility through “scriptural mobility” by transferring it to speech; it then becomes a means to speak out her emotions in moments of “deep anxiety” and physical immobility. She thus begins to learn and speak the Queen’s English: “I am only alive at all because I learned the Queen’s English… I spent two years learning the Queen’s English, so that you and I could speak like this without an interruption.” (Cleave 2008, 8). Giving vent to her pain and suffering becomes a way of coping with her precarious and vulnerable situation that ironically aims to silence and negate her. Unlike other refugee girls who are condemned to oblivion and turned to ahistorical and “othered” figures, Little Bee claims recognition for her story of victimhood as a black, female, refugee child. Laura Savu points out that “speaking the Queen’s English is, to a certain extent, empowering and liberating, in

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that it enables Little Bee to stake a claim in the cultural conversation, and thus to assert herself as subject of and for history” (2014, 94). Unlike the other detainees who speak broken English and are reduced to stereotypes, Little Bee’s fluent language not only empowers her, but also serves the authorial purpose of diverting the reader’s attention away from stereotypes towards her experience of being othered. It also underlines the potential of language as a way of coping with trauma and as a powerful tool to flee harsh realities. Moreover, readers learn about Little Bee’s refugee life, marked by constant fear, isolation and profound spatial incarceration, as her voice occupies most of the textual space in the first part of the novel. But the irony of the situation is that in a postcolonial context, language becomes a double-edged sword: it functions as a form of domination for Little Bee and yet she continues to feel like an alien and an outsider. Little Bee is, therefore, both liberated and limited by language.

18 The detention camp is a space where extremely diverse refugees from the global South are involuntarily put together away from normal, everyday life to exhibit what Bhabha calls “gathering at the frontiers; […] gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language” (1994, 139). The detention camp as gathering space, hence, emerges as the site of the uncanny, instability and liminality. As an alternative, Little Bee tries to overcome her isolation by confiding her fears and her intercultural experiences to an imaginary, heterogenous group of Nigerian girls whom she considers her companions, listeners and equals: “[What] I would have to explain to the girls from back home, if I was telling them this story, is the simple little word ‘horror’”(Cleave 2008, 65). These girls symbolize the trustworthy and understanding friends of her age missing from her life in the camp. According to Cleave, they serve as a “Greek Chorus” to whom Little Bee divulges her knowledge “from a position of superior knowledge” (Little Bee author Q &A 2008). As Little Bee tries to replace her amputated filial bonds with affiliative connections with these girls, a new relational system appears. This sort of relationship also resonates with Said’s “pressure to produce new and different ways of conceiving human relationships” (1983, 17). This imagined association serves as her extended family and as a survival mechanism amidst the lack of any constructive bonding. Moreover, the spectral absence/presence of these girls from back home transforms the protagonist Little Bee from a mere tragic character to one holding a superior epistemic position.6

19 Little Bee’s dialogical communication with these imaginary friends also echoes Anne Frank’s diary, posthumously published as The Diary of a Young Girl, in which the adolescent Jewish girl Anne talks to her imaginary friend Kitty, her constant companion and her primary confidante. As Anne confides her loneliness and despair to her only friend Kitty, so does Little Bee convey her emotions to the girls back home through the literary device of the apostrophe. Just as Anne Frank’s friendship with this imagined addressee serves as a coping mechanism, so does Little Bee’s conversation with the girls enable her to escape from her actual entrapment in this utterly hopeless situation. In both cases, the dialogical narration results in an engaged friendship between the protagonist and her imaginary friends as well as in the re-assertion of their culture and value systems.

20 Apart from the girls back home, Little Bee tries to establish other connections with the outside world as well. She directly addresses the reader of the novel and involves her/ him in her storytelling process so as to make herself heard. In spite of a binary divide between the reader and herself, “me” and “you” as former colonized and colonizer, she

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attempts to subvert national and linguistic boundaries between these two opposing poles through the use of the technique of breaking the fourth wall.7 She directly addresses the reader in the second person, “Let me tell you” (Cleave 2008, 12), and includes her/him as witness to her testimony and storytelling. Her address to the reader also becomes a marker of her agency and subjectivity, of which she is deprived in the detention center. Moreover, the presentness and the immediacy of the address invite the reader to access some private aspects of her life: “I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come to talk to you about the bright African colours. I am a born-again citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the colour of my life is grey … I implore you to tell no one. Okay?” (12). As a mixture of white and black, the colour grey symbolises Little Bee’s unsettling feelings as a refugee girl. In addition, she deliberately highlights the distance between herself and the reader in order to reclaim her individual voice and identity, while simultaneously establishing a connection, leading to the creation of new transnational bonds. The paradox between distance and intimacy depicted in these lines also paves the way for the reader’s empathetic unsettlement as s/he is prompted to reflect upon her/his own limited perception of the refugee in the face of death, violence and trauma. The gaps and fissures in this address also blur the boundaries of the diegesis.

21 This relationship established between the reader and the protagonist also reminds one of affiliative connections between Edward (white American) and Nash (ex-slave) in Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips. A similar type of affective bonding is established through epistolary communication between the two. However, unlike Nash, who finally frees himself by rejecting this affiliative bond, Little Bee maintains her affiliation with the reader until the end to survive her ordeal. She in turn appears to be the mouthpiece of the author Chris Cleave who exposes the hypocrisy of the global North towards the refugee crisis issue. In the words of Hayette Lakraa, Little Bee could be seen as the one who “underlines the limits of democracy and the confusion of the juridical and political institutions to the point where the borderline separating democracy from totalitarianism becomes, as asserted by Agamben, almost invisible” (2017, 11).

22 Moreover, by divulging her story to the reader, Little Bee tries to come to terms with her trauma. For every testimony, there has to be a listener; as Dori Laub states, “testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude” (1992, 70). The reader, hence, bears witness to her testimony and so becomes an agent in her recovery from the trauma as she articulates it in a dialogical form. In the words of Laub, the reader becomes a “witness to witnessing itself” (75). This form of witnessing then also confirms the reader’s involvement at multiple levels in Little Bee’s narrative. In addition, language emerges as a means of integrating traumatic experience in the realm of representability, thereby challenging the idea that traumatic memory8 is inaccessible.

23 To conclude, The Other Hand draws on the refugee novel genre of the twenty-first century to propose an alternative way of conceptualizing the female refugee as well as postcolonial migration. It ascribes the protagonist Little Bee with an agency and individual voice in a counter-space of the detention camp which imposes limits on “relational freedom” and affiliative bonding. Even if the detention camp is perceived as a space of death, self-denial and anonymity, Little Bee tries to overcome these through her self-assertion, artistic creativity and the power of language in a limited fashion.

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The novel hence tries to re-position the figure of this female refugee in the “discourse of resilience” (Ager 1999, 18) by focusing on her agency and subjectivity. Besides, the fictional space of the detention camp could be seen as an “interstitial” and “in- between” space to use Bhabha’s terminology (1994, 4), where the traumatic and vulnerable subject could undergo a transformation by gaining power to resist oppression and violence. Thus, the novel challenges the dialectics of invisibility/ visibility and mobility/immobility that seem to encapsulate this refugee protagonist’s life. Through the depiction of Little Bee, her traumatic story and her wounded body, the novel moves beyond the “aesthetic of indifference” (Ghosh 1995, 35) by forging new forms of reciprocity and relationality, across the boundaries of race, gender and class. By doing so, the novel also questions the hegemonic and moral authority of the global North and revisits the notion of frontier and migration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published as Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Rome: Giulio Einaudi, 1995).

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by K. Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Stato di eccezione (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

AGER, Alastair. 1999. Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration. London: Cassell.

APPADURAI, Arjun. 2003. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In Theorizing Diaspora, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, 25–48. Oxford: Blackwell.

BHABHA, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

BROGAN, Kathleen. 1998. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

BRONTE, Charlotte. 1999. Jane Eyre. 1847. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

CARUTH, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

CLEAVE, Chris. 2008. The Other Hand. London: Sceptre.

FANON, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Originally published as Peaux noires, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952).

FARRIER, David. 2011. Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary before the Law. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

FRANK, Anne. 1952. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Originally published as Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (Amsterdam: Contact Publishing, 1947).

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GALLIEN, Claire. 2018. “‘Refugee Literature’: What Postcolonial Theory Has to Say.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 6: 721–26.

GHOSH, Amitav. 1995. “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi.” The New Yorker. July 17: 35–41.

GROSFOGUEL, Ramon. 2016. “What is Racism?” Journal of World-Systems Research 22, no. 1: 9–15.

HONNETH, Axel. 2001. “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75, no. 1: 111–26.

KAPLAN, Anne E. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

KAPLAN, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

LAKRAA, Hayette. 2017. “Im/Mobility, Power, and In/Visible Refugees.” Postcolonial Text 12, no. 3–4: 1–17.

LAUB, Dori, and Shoshana FELMAN, eds. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge: New York.

Little Bee author Q &A. 2008. https://chriscleave.com/little-bee/the-true-story-behind-my-new- novel/.

LLOYD, David. “Colonial Trauma / Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 212–28.

MARQUES, Xavier. 2015. “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance.” Polity 44, no. 1: 6–31.

MORRISON, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Knopf.

NAIL, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

PHILLIPS, Caryl. 2006. Crossing the River. 1993. Vintage Books: London.

SAID, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

SAID, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

SAID, Edward. 2002. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

SAVU, E. Laura. “Bearing Wit(h)ness: Just Emotions and Ethical Choice in Chris Cleave’s Little Bee.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 1 (2014): 90–102.

The Home Office – Life in the UK Advisory Group. 2005. Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship, UK Home Office.

UNHCR. 1979. Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. Reedited January 1992. Geneva: UNHCR. See also the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for other handbooks and guidelines: http://www.unhcr.org.

WILSON, Janet Mary. 2017. “Narratives of Flight and Arrival: Abu Bakr Khaal’s African Titanics (2014 [2008]) and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015).” Postcolonial Text 12, no. 3–4: 1–13.

NOTES

1. Known in the US as Little Bee (2008). I will use the British title throughout the article.

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2. The conflict in the Niger Delta first arose in the early 1990s between foreign oil corporations and Niger Delta’s minority ethnic groups, which felt exploited. This also fuelled violence between ethnic groups, causing the militarization of most of the region. From 2004 onwards, violence took the form of kidnappings, mass murders, rape, etc. See for instance: https:// www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/nigeria-2.htm. 3. The word “refoulement,” from the French word “refouler,” means forcibly sending a person back to her/her home country when s/he faces a danger to his/her life or freedom. 4. To Farrier, the refugee is “a scandal for postcolonial studies” […] “[a]s the interstices available to and inhabited by the asylum seeker differ from that described by postcolonial studies as a ‘smooth space’ of productivity and difference – rather, it is a space of detention and exclusion through inclusion, striated by razor wire and legislated segregation” (2011, 7–8). 5. Little Bee’s depiction of the scar echoes Sethe’s scars shaped as chokecherry tree in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which become a poignant and beautiful symbol of a traumatic experience of the past. In both these novels, the readers are prompted to make connections between beauty and human suffering. 6. These ghostly figures symbolize Little Bee’s private as well as collective past. Similarly, Sethe’s conversation with the ghost of her daughter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved illustrates ghosts’ cultural role of healing the traumas of the past. This notion is described by Kathleen Brogan in Cultural Haunting in the following terms: “Cultural ghost stories, which feature the haunting of a people by the ghosts of its own past, represent one way a group actively revises its relationship to the past. Not surprisingly, these stories tend to emerge in the aftermath of times of swift and often traumatic change, when old social bonds have been unhinged and new group identities must be formulated” (1998, 174). 7. A performance convention in which the character/actor talks directly to the readers or spectators. This trope not only attracts the reader’s attention, but also makes her/him feel as if s/he are part of the story. It also serves as a link between the real world and the fictional world. See for instance, the famous statement in Jane Eyre, “Readers, I married him” (Bronte 1999, 498). 8. Some critics assert that traumatic memories are “unrepresentable” (Kaplan 2005, 37) and “incomprehensible” (Caruth 1995, 154). This also emphasizes the limits of representation of trauma and its inaccessibility through language.

ABSTRACTS

In Chris Cleave’s novel The Other Hand (2008), the detention camp is depicted as a space of exception where refugees are reduced to invisible and voiceless beings. This article analyzes how this fictional setting produces a sense of alterity in the refugee protagonist, Little Bee. It particularly focuses on how the novel balances narratives of exclusion and violence embedded in this counter-space with the refugee girl’s agency, resistance and self-assertion. The article also explores the power of language in attributing voice and visibility to this triply marginalized African female, while revisiting the notions of migration and frontiers in the twenty-first century.

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INDEX

Keywords: refugee, postcolonial, alterity, invisibility, exception

AUTHOR

BHAWANA JAIN

Université d’Angers Bhawana Jain obtained her PhD in English from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. Her research focuses on contemporary migration and postcolonial literature. She has a particular interest in issues pertaining to diaspora, trauma narratives and cross-cultural encounters. Her papers on diasporic representations and trauma have been published in several books and journals. She has previously taught at the University of Delhi and at University Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne. She is currently working at the University of Angers.

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“You’re Just a Housewife. What on Earth Could You Possibly Do?”: The History of the Bangladesh War of Independence Told by Women in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

Sabine Lauret-Taft

1 On March 25, 1971, with Operation Searchlight led by Tikka Khan under the command of President Yahya Khan, East Pakistan was swept into a bloody genocide that US consul general, Archer Blood, reported to Washington, but that remained on the margins of history, a footnote in the Cold War. A few months before, East Pakistan had won significant political representation at the National Assembly of Pakistan with the Awami League and the leadership of Sheikh Mujib. But as the results of the elections were canceled, the country found itself in an exceptional situation, governed by martial law, the Pakistani army at war with its own people. Tahmima Anam is not of the generation of writers who experienced the nine months of conflict that followed Operation Searchlight and led to the proclamation of Bangladesh. In A Golden Age (2007), the first installment of a trilogy that encompasses the Bangladesh War of Independence and its aftermath, Anam pays homage to her maternal grandmother’s involvement in the war. The narrative draws inspiration from the story of the rifles she let soldiers hide in her garden and from survivors’ stories. A Golden Age is a novel that brings women to the fore, exploring what it means for them to be in a country at war, without reducing them to victims, but focusing on “the unexpected ways that women are heroic” (Anam 2011b). Going against the grain of a nationalist narrative that has made rape survivors birangona (a coined feminine version of bir, meaning hero), A Golden Age sheds light on the other ways women participated in the war effort, as well as on the violence they encountered. As Anam gives voice to ordinary women, to invisible heroes of the war, to the women who were told after the war was over “to

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forgive and forget” (Anam 2011a, 90), the narrative embodies how “women are the bearers of national culture.” (Boehmer 2005, 4; original emphasis).

2 The novel opens with a prologue in which the reader encounters Rehana, a young widow who lives in Dhaka. In the wake of her husband’s death, she finds herself overcome by grief and unable to provide for her family. As a result, she loses custody of her two children, Sohail and Maya, who go to live with her brother in-law and his wife in Lahore. In chapter one, Rehana has gotten her children back. They are now students at Dhaka University where political turmoil is increasing. Against the backdrop of macropolitics, Anam’s narrative unravels minor stories. Political historical events such as Operation Searchlight, the election of Sheikh Mujib and the Indo-Soviet treaty make their way into the narrative. They act as titles for chapters and are mentioned in conversations, but the reader always sees politics and the war from an intimate perspective. Inviting her readers into the lives of women, Anam filters exceptional political conditions – cancelled elections; religious, ethnic and gendered violence – through the mundane, retrieving people’s memories of a time when history and politics disappeared in the haze of collective frenzy.

3 With Rehana at its center, the narrative relies on what Louise Harrington has called a “gendered perspective which gives a voice to the plight of women in this war” (2011, 241). Drawing on this, A Golden Age may be read as a mother’s tale, told from a domestic space, from the sidelines. In this article, I will study how weaving violence and resistance into the fabric of ordinary lives, Anam sheds light on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide through the voice of a mother and through the particular bond she develops with her daughter. Although at times the novel seems to revolve on a mother-son axis, it is balanced out by Maya’s perspective, by the predicament of a daughter. I will focus particularly on how women help redefine domestic spaces and roles, and how the female body is reclaimed, both using and challenging national narrative images. As war invades homes, the novel will be approached from a feminist angle, as a way to recover history as herstory.

Telling the war from the margins: domestic spaces and roles

4 In Anam’s narrative, although the main issue is war, most of the plot unravels in domestic settings, such as Rehana’s house, Mrs Chowdhury’s house, and Maya’s room in Calcutta. The violence of the Pakistani army forces its way into neighborhoods and homes as illustrated here: “mounted on their jeeps they had fired through shutters and doorways and shirts and hearts” (Anam 2008a, 65). The enumeration conjures up the trajectory of a bullet and underlines the intimate nature of this war, in which two parts of the same country fight one another. A Golden Age is not about epic battles but sheds light instead on how the Liberation war affected people. As Amy Finnerty underlines it, “Anam places her readers in her characters’ parlours and kitchens, bedrooms and residential enclaves – and inside their heads” (2015, 43). The first words of the prologue, “Dear husband, I lost our children today” (Anam 2008a, 3), echo throughout the text, reverberating like a Greek chorus. They invite the reader into an intimate setting, and break away from the main narrative; Rehana’s voice comes from the fringes of society, from the cemetery where her husband is buried. Domestic spaces in

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the novel are thus not always connected to a house, but mainly defined by intimacy and by family interactions.

5 The title of the first chapter, “March 1971, Shona with her back against the sun” (Anam 2008a, 13), immediately signals the importance of domestic spaces. Shona is the house Rehana built to get her children back. It stands for her efforts, her sacrifices as a mother. But more importantly, Shona, which means gold, can be read as a synecdoche for the golden Bangladesh celebrated in “Amar Shonar Bangla,” the Bangladesh anthem written by Rabindranath Tagore that Maya sings to herself on the night of Operation Searchlight (55). So, even before events start unraveling, domestic and national spaces are juxtaposed: “Proud, vacant Shona of the many dreams” (102). The pathetic fallacy not only underlines motherly pride, it also indicates the spirit of the freedom fighters. When Rehana gives Shona to Sohail so that he can have a base for his guerilla operations, she becomes one with the house and the country. Rehana watching her son leave for the war conjures up the image of Mother Bengal watching her sons go into battle.

6 Additionally, Shona seems to project a utopian promise of reconciliation; it appears at first as neutral ground. It is characterized by amicable relationships between Hindu and Muslim neighbors. Rehana rents Shona to the Senguptas, a Hindu couple with whom she becomes friends. But other characters like Rehana’s sister and her sister-in- law voice a feeling of spite and disgust for Bengalis. Rehana’s sister tells her: “Your Urdu is not as good as it used to be; must be all that Bengali you’re speaking” (Anam 2008a, 18). East Pakistan fought back when West Pakistan tried to impose Urdu as the national language. The sister’s remark points out a lingering sense of contamination, a feeling further expressed by Faiz, Rehanna’s brother-in-law, as he claims: “national integrity, religious integrity, this is what we are fighting for” (179). Faiz lives in Lahore and works for the Pakistani army. He represents the official voice of Pakistan, a voice that sustains that they are freedom fighters not invaders. The focus on Shona thus sharply contrasts with the divisions that come with occupied Dhaka. But Rehana is a complex character, straddling cultures and languages, with “ambiguous feelings about the country she had adopted” (47). When the land is ablaze with communal violence, she turns Shona’s garden into a shelter for the Hindu families of the neighborhood (62).

7 Political stakes are exposed in chapter one, but the narrative then moves to ordinary lives. As Anam explained it herself in an interview, she likes to “ask people the little details, about what they wore, what brand of cigarettes they smoked, what music they listened to, maybe the car they drove” (2011b). For instance, Anam’s prose invites the reader into the Gymkhana club, where the women gather to play cards. Rehana and her gin-rummy friends have tea, gossip, and occasionally look for a bit of mischief, as when they put whisky in their tea (Anam 2008a, 22). But these women are not just housewives. Anam brings them to the fore as ordinary, everyday members of the resistance against the Pakistani army, highlighting the supporting role of women to the cause. Their weapon of choice is the needle as they sew blankets for the refugees: “Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram took the sewing with the same enthusiasm they’d displayed for cards. They gathered at the bungalow every week, ready with their sewing kits” (97). The regularity with which they meet, combined with Mrs Rahman’s endeavor to enlist everyone she knows, evokes a military operation. Their war effort contribution invests their domestic talents with nationalism. They become “Project Rooftop,” activists at home. When Shona is turned into a guerrilla headquarters, Rehana starts making

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mango pickles to make sure her sewing friends do not find out about the guerrillas. Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram are so indisposed by the stench from the pickle jars that they are happy to find a new location for their sewing operation. Anam’s female characters turn their domestic skills into war strategies. They express their political and religious ideas using their domestic role as an advantage to assert themselves as individuals. Silvi, Mrs Chowdhuri’s daughter, dutifully accepts the match her mother has chosen for her. But as the narrative unfolds, she becomes more self-assertive. Turning progressively to the scriptures and to her faith, she starts covering her head with a scarf with complete disregard for what her mother thinks. Her choice to be in purdah – covering her head and not appearing before men outside the family circle – is her own, separating her from men but also from the influence of her mother. As she embraces a more fundamental Islam, she is able to confront Maya and support her idea that “Pakistan should stay together” (248).

8 The women in the novel depict the many reactions to the war; they are brought forth not as silent victims, but as vocal supporters of either cause. Anam dwells on how their sense of home is redefined by the war. Rehana spearheaded “Project Rooftop” as a response to her daughter who questioned her loyalty to Bangladesh. Born in Calcutta, with her sisters in Karachi, Rehana does not consider herself a nationalist. Her diasporic position, speaking “with fluency, the Urdu of the enemy” (Anam 2008a, 47), is reminiscent of the Bose’s house in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988). Increasing quarrels among the joint family lead to an absurd division of their house. The Bose brothers erect a wooden wall inside the house blocking doorways, cutting furniture, including their father’s nameplate, in half. The house reads as a foreshadowing symbol of the Partition of India and draws attention to the chaos that civil wars wreak on families. For the children in the Bose family, the house becomes an “upside-down house” (Ghosh 2005, 123), where meals start with sweets and books go backwards; the carnivalesque trope emphasizes the daze the country is in. Partition draws new lines on the map of people’s lives. Rehana does not live in an upside-down house, but she has an upside-down family. Her sisters in Karachi look down on her and her life in Dhaka. As the war is waging, Rehana fears that they may consider her a “traitor” (Anam 2008a, 125). Faiz, her brother-in-law, works for the Pakistani army, while her children have embraced the cause of freedom. Although she does not feel “entirely severed” (19) from her sisters, her home is not with them. Her relationship with her brother-in-law is based on pretense, with her lying about supporting Pakistan. Family and nation overlap, and in this context, the enemy is not just an anonymous collective, it is someone close.

9 The narrative zooms in on Faiz, Rehana’s brother-in-law. He is the enemy. Everywhere else, the army is presented as a dehumanized collective. It is made of “green jeeps with green men waving the green Pakistan flag” (Anam 2008a, 55), of “young men in green uniforms spill[ing] out of their trucks, dozens of them at once, each with identical savage eyes and boots that moved like hammers” (258). The soldiers seem dehumanized, reduced to their boots. The repetition of green as a metonymic reference to the enemy also paves the way for the scene in which Sabeer looks at his uniform as he realizes what the army is doing: “The green was dark, almost invisible, but the sickle, the grin, shone whitely against his chest, the crimson sky, the blinking horizon” (56). He has become one with the rest of the army, his uniform blending in with the dark of the night; he no longer seems to be an individual but has merged with the collective force, representing only the nation he is supposed to serve. Violence is

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seldom depicted in gory detail, however the strength of it is conveyed by the absence of reference to individuals. Violence is perpetrated by an anonymous mass, suggesting mass violence throughout the text: The boots stomped heavily through the bungalow; they tore books out of shelves, smashed dinner plates, knocked over the brass lamp, ravaged the cupboards. They ripped the posters from Sohail’s bedroom, Mao against a red background, Che with a cap and jaunty smile. A pillow was bayoneted. Yellow cotton scattered like dandelion. (258) 10 The recurring synecdoche is reminiscent of war propaganda posters in which the soldiers are often represented by their boots, suggesting here that the political identity of East Pakistan, hinted at by the posters in Sohail’s room, is trampled by West Pakistan as they canceled the elections. The soldiers are grammatically erased in the use of the passive form: “A pillow was bayoneted,” reinforcing the idea that they are the invisible agents of the West Pakistani government. This episode echoes the opening of chapter five: “They looted homes and burned roofs. They raped. They murdered” (129). The proliferation of collective pronouns suggests that the identities of the soldiers coalesce in acts committed as a group. It seems that the collective supersedes the individual; yet, it is Faiz who, for Rehana, crystallizes the enemy in action. He compromises her domestic peace when he obtains custody of her children. The court episode paves the way for the escalation of the conflict, as he becomes a leader of the Pakistani army, threatening the lives of Sohail and Maya.

11 Right from the prologue, a binary structure emerges that mirrors the geographical contradiction of a country split into two separate territories, a “country in two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns” (Anam 2008a, 33). A strong sense of dichotomy pervades the narrative, laying emphasis on divisions such as West/East, Lahore/Dhaka, Us vs. Them, daughter/son and father/mother. In fact, the first chapters pave the way for the opposition between the paternalistic description of Sheik Mujib, “a tiny white figure in the distance” (49), and motherhood, embodied by Rehana and Mother Bengal: “[she] watched as he waved his arms to quiet and reassure his people. His. They belonged to him now; they were his charge, his children. They called him father” (49). There is a domopolitical stance in Sheik Mujib’s address, in which the house/the country turns into a “fortress to be defended” (49). In Selina Hossain and Pascal Zinck’s River of my Blood (2016), the main character, Boori, a simple woman, a mother, when hearing the same address, feels transported, electrified, as she feels that he cares for her village. Sheikh Mujib’s charisma and words bring to mind the notion of “state fatherhood,” the promise of a solid safe government (Ivekovic and Mostov 2002, 11). After the war, Mujib’s paternalistic approach addressed the issue of rape victims as he urged people to look at birangona as his own daughters. But Anam’s narrative, even as it acknowledges Mujib’s stance, presents the reader with a counterpoint.

12 While the allegorical substitute father calls for barricades to secure the motherland, Rehana, the symbolical mother, feels it is her duty to feed her children, a trope that runs through Hossain’s River of My Blood as well, and which emphasizes the supporting role of women during the war. She is often described assessing her food supplies, cooking, and feeding people; the refugees who gathered around her home in the wake of Operation Searchlight as well as her neighbors. She feels it is her duty to send “[her] son to war with a full stomach” (Anam 2008a, 84). The military undertones of the word duty make the domestic role of mothers intersect with the the idea of supporting the cause. Mothers throughout the novel want to feed their sons, and food also becomes a

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pretext for them to stay involved. For example, Joy’s mother, Mrs Bashir, brings morag polao, her son’s favorite dish to Rehana, whom she suspects is in touch with her sons. The way the food is presented throughout their exchange, carried on a silver tray, makes it seem like an offering to obtain information about her son. (139–41). However, this nurturing image of mothers is nuanced by the episode of the dinner at Mrs Chowdhuri’s house. War makes its way into the narrative in the crudest way as the hostess “plunges her knife into the” (one could say sacrificial) “lamb” (54). The juxtaposition of the meal with Operation Searchlight evokes a vampire-like West Pakistan exhausting the resources of East Pakistan, an image that resonates with the argument made by Sohail at the beginning of the novel: “We grow the rice, we make the jute, and yet we get nothing – no schools, no hospitals, no army” (29; emphasis added). The anaphoric structure underlines the lack of public services, and at the same time foregrounds the overwhelming presence of the Pakistani army after March 1971. The dinner scene, in which the characters “devour[ed] the roast lamb, smacking their lips and sucking on the bones” (55), conjures up the Christmas turkey dinner in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1994).

13 Against the backdrop of political turmoil in Sri Lanka, Triton, the main character, is asked to cook a turkey for Christmas. In spite of his fear of the meat rotting in the heat, the turkey turns out to be a success, and after the dinner, Triton bones the bird, thinking of himself as “an animal devouring its prey” (Anam 2008a, 94). Both of these scenes involving meat can be seen as allusions to an imperial mode of governance and to the fight for power. The dinner at Mrs Chowdhuri’s house creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that heightens the tensions and underlines the intersection of the collective and the individual, of nation and family. The sense of huis-clos is first conveyed by the silence that surrounds the attack and then heightened by Mrs Sengputa’s demand, “I want to go home” (55–56). The dinner table where “Mrs Chowdhuri’s lamb was a half-eaten corpse with naked ribs and picked-over leg” (56) becomes a synecdoche for Dhaka. A similar trope is used in River of My Blood, with the juxtaposition of a gutted fish and the looming presence of the Pakistani army: “Boori felt as if the blood from Ramija’s hands and knife would flow out to the river, which would eventually run red into the sea” (Hossain and Zinck 2016, 135). The unease caused by the sight of blood, as when Rehana buys meat from the butcher, makes it clear that “this isn’t war. It’s genocide” (Anam 2008a, 79). Only then, as she is interacting with the Urdu-speaking butcher, surrounded by “cuts of meat hanging […] like wet jewels,” does Rehana identify her own native Urdu as the “language of her enemy” (119). Domestic spaces, domestic roles and tasks, like preparing a meal and buying food supplies, map out the political conflict and make it possible for the reader to look at war from a different angle. As Amy Finnerty puts it, Anam “places us in a time and place that, for most readers outside of Bangladesh, is grippingly foreign yet, somehow, familiarly human” (2015, 43).

Reclaiming the female body: from nation to woman

14 The image of a nurturing mother, with Rehana’s cooking and Bangladesh’s lush landscapes, is also supported throughout the novel by the recurring motif of fertility. West Pakistan, where Faiz’s “barren” (Anam 2008a, 6) wife takes Rehana’s children, is

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described as “parched” (19), and contrasts strongly with the vegetation in East Pakistan. The country is depicted in a sensuous tableau: She dipped her fingers into the rosebush, heavy with dew and plucked a flower. She held it in her hand as she wandered through the rest of the garden, ducking between the wall-hugging jasmine and the hibiscus, crossing the tiny vegetable patch that was giving them the last of the season’s cauliflower, zigzagging past the mango tree, the lemon tree, the shouting-green banana tree. (15–16) In this description, Rehana’s body seems intertwined with the land. Basking in her fertile garden, she seems to already be the mother of the nation in the making. The mother figure that catalyzes filial love may also represent a desired woman. Rehana is in fact both. In From Gender to Nation, Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov evoke the traditional idea of the female body becoming a “national collective” (2002, 11). Anam seems to rely on this, as she weaves images of fertility and motherhood into the political struggle for independence. Yet, what could serve a nationalist narrative, where “mothers, wives, and daughters [designate] the space of the nation and are, at the same time, the property of the nation” (11), turns out to actually destabilize such a positioning. In fact, women are not portrayed as a national collective; they are represented individually, with their own challenges and desires. The need to protect women as a symbol of virtue for the nation, which is a tenet of patriarchal politics, is alluded to in Mrs Chowdhuri’s urge to marry off her daughter. But as she fears for her daughter’s safety, the scene also emphasizes how absurd it is for her to believe that marriage will keep her safe. To a certain extent, her character, like her house filled with relics of the past, represents the traditional narrative of partition wars. But her voice fades in a narrative that revolves around Rehana, Maya, and other women whose agency challenges the commodification of women in war novels.

15 Rehana never remarried and appears as a single mother archetype (Biswas and Tripathi 2017, 524) – and even in her marriage, she seemed to be independent. She did not give in to the advances of the bank employee when she went to ask for a loan. She claims her body as her own. It is interesting to underline that one of the reasons she was deemed an unfit mother by the judge was that she let her children watch Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963). This reference, although anachronistic given that the children are sent to Lahore in 1959 (Gorra 2008), actually reinforces Rehana’s agency and her independence. Elizabeth Taylor’s breasts foreshadow Rehana’s control over her sexuality. While the war is waging, Rehana falls in love with a wounded soldier, the Major, as she nurses him back to health. This romance leads them to share precious moments, listening to Nina Simone’s “I loves you, Porgy” and watching Asif’s film Mughal-e-Azam (Anam 2008a, 146). The fateful love story between Prince Salim and Anarkali, the servant girl, foreshadows the fateful outcome of the Major and Rehana’s romance, but more importantly, it reclassifies transgression as pleasure. The main narrative seems to pause at times, evoking Nina Simone’s holding her breath (143). The chapter entitled “I loves you, Porgy” introduces a new tempo in the storytelling; it starts with the unstoppable violence of the Pakistani army, moves to the swelling of discontent, mirrored in the text by the enumeration, “Lenin and Castro and Mujib and Anwar Sadaat” (130), and then pauses as Rehana rediscovers herself, alone in her house, without her children. The Major’s presence at Shona is a double transgression: not only is Rehana alone with a man, she is also hiding a freedom fighter, a deserter from the Pakistani Army. With him, she discovers Nina Simone: “Nina. Sounded like a Bengali name. Rehana had a melting feeling in her mouth, as though she had bitten

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down on a pink overripe guava” (144). The erotic undertone, which echoes the lush description of Rehana’s garden, paves the way for Rehana’s “hungry love” (215). She feels defined as a mother but rediscovers herself a woman in the arms of the Major.

16 Reclaiming women’s bodies also means reclaiming certain emblems of femininity. One striking instance of this is women’s use of their saris as signs of protest. To make blankets for the refugees, Rehana wants to donate her saris and use their fabric. Kept in a steel almirah, gathering dust, they are literally relics of a former life. However, they are described in a very empowering, sensual way: the tight revolutions of material around her hips and legs limiting movement, the empty space between blouse and petticoat permitting unexpected sensations – the thrill of a breeze that has strayed low, through an open window, the knowledge of heat in strange places, the back, the exposed belly. (Anam 2008a, 91) 17 Giving them a new purpose, Rehana not only reaffirms control of her own body, she is also able to take action. The saris become an emblem of resistance, of fighting back, and may evoke the way they became tools of agency for abducted women who chose to commit suicide. In many accounts given by survivors, in camps or in bunkers, women were stripped naked, their hair cut short, as a way to prevent them from hanging themselves (Saika, 115). Similarly, Maya’s white saris are a means to show her sense of justice and her political indignation. After the 1970 cyclone, Maya “joined the student Communist Party […] and began to wear only white saris” (Anam 2008a, 33–34). This sartorial political statement invites the reader to consider the different ways in which women participated in the nation making. As Naila Kabeer explains it, white saris, as well as colorful saris and bindis, became signs of political dissent for women (2011, 142).

18 Rehana, who is from an older generation and a diasporic subject, does not understand her daughter Maya’s choices at first. In her eyes, the struggle has changed her. Her face has “sharpened” (Anam 2008a, 76), her body shouts determination as when she is at war practice, “raising her knees higher than all the others” (87). She is desperate to fight. Her character destabilizes the national discourse that focuses on male war heroes and on birangona. The hope inspired by the uprising is seen mostly through her eyes, although it is Sohail who joins the freedom fighters. She is the one shouting “Joy Bangla” at the stadium, the one who encourages her mother to embrace the cause “in solidarity” (50) and who challenges her allegiance. But it is neither the struggle nor the ideas that has changed her. It is the frustration she feels from being left aside. She behaved as though no one had told her that once the war began there would be nothing for her to do but wait. No one had told her that she would only be allowed to imagine it from a distance. No one had told her how lonely, how hot, how tiresome, the days would be. And no one had told her that her friend would be the first to go. (85; emphasis added) The anaphora seems to heighten her feeling of injustice. Yet, the use of the conditional points to her inability to accept what is prescribed, what she has been “told” by society. This desire to fight for her country was shared by many, but as Azra Rashid explains it, women were “pushed out of the battlefield and encouraged to offer support in secondary roles as care providers and nurses” (2019, 95). So, Maya finds a way to assert her agency in the war by writing articles and helping at a refugee camp in Calcutta. The reader gets more insight into her experience than into Sohail’s, while Anam focuses on women, on refugees, on silenced and forgotten voices.

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Telling the war from the margins: recovering herstory

19 In her article “The War that Time Forgot,” Anam underlines that “many young women were given informal military training; in the villages, especially among the Adivasi hill people, women smuggled arms to the front lines of the resistance” (2008b). Considering the way war is told through Maya’s and Rehana’s perspectives, I argue that the novel is a privileged writing form to address what in the text is called “wilful forgetting” (Anam 2008a, 225), and to bring to the fore the women Anam salutes in her article and who are left out of the prevalent patriarchal accounts.

20 Seeing the story from the perspective of Rehana, whom Anam calls an “unintentional hero” (2011b), the reader is confronted with the reality of war for ordinary people. Rehana is a mother – but her story can easily be read as an allegory. The tone is set in the prologue. The war will be seen from within a family, from a mother’s perspective. The first words of the novel are haunting: “Dear husband, I lost our children today” (Anam 2008a, 3), and they reverberate throughout the rest of the narrative. The only fear Rehana has is to lose her children again, this time to the cause. In the intersection of the collective and the individual, many things are played out. Nationalism and activism are intertwined with a mother’s love. But the feeling that prevails in the first pages and throughout the text is loss. When Rehana says: “I lost our children,” her grief announces the loss of innocence experienced by an entire generation; this feeling is epitomized by Joy, Sohail’s friend, whose face shows “no trace of childhood” (133). Distraught after he hears of his brother’s death, Joy tells Rehana: “we are all dead” (133). Although they are surrounded by actual death, Joy’s statement also reads as a symbolic death, the end of youth, the end of the country as they know it. This idea of a sacrificed generation is reinforced by the fact that Joy, his brother and Sohail all wear each other’s shirts. They appear as one and the same, and as Rehana remembers “the blessing she had blown on Joy’s forehead […] and the tender way in which he had thanked her and touched her feet” (141), she embodies all the war-mothers. In fact, by the end of the novel, Rehana is portrayed as a different kind of mother, she is the mother of all the young Bengalis who fought in the war, and whose lives were broken. Through her, all of them can be remembered.

21 But as Maya insists, these stories – Sabeer’s torture, Sharmeen’s death – need to be told, and Anam’s novel is an attempt at filling the gap, mirroring Rehana’s ritual that commemorates the return of her children, described as “a recounting of the past, an attempt at reckoning” (Anam 2008a, 35). Maya Scheherazade is her storyteller. With her typewriter as her weapon, which “sounds like a machine-gun” (103), she writes about the war. She presses her mother to tell her how Sabeer was tortured. And then, she confronts Silvi about not wanting to know what happened to her husband when he was detained. She represents the relentless need to tackle the “unspeakable things” (247) of the war. When she finds out the truth about Sharmeen – that she was raped and killed by Pakistani soldiers – she presses for more details: “I want to know their names […]. The ones who raped her. I want to know” (123), she demands. As she is asking for names, she is also the one to name the crime, and throughout the novel, and in this scene in particular, Maya voices the feeling of an entire generation of women who want the truth to be known. After this, Rehana sends her away telling her to “write some good stories” (126), and Maya starts writing for a newspaper. Her article “Chronicles of a Young Woman in Wartime” (189) makes her uncle furious. In The Good

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Muslim (2011), the second installment of the trilogy, Maya finds one of her old articles, “The World Looks on as Bangladesh Bleeds: A Cry for Help” (Anam 2011, 85), that was never published. She is the voice of a generation, telling the story of resistance from the sidelines, from the refugee camp, a voice that wants justice. She embodies the necessity to give voice to the victims of the war and to acknowledge war crimes. In the same way as Rehana can’t forgive Faiz (“I cannot forgive you, brother. For my daughter I cannot forgive you,” 273), the narrative seems to invite the reader not to forget.

22 In “Gender and Nation: Some Reflections from India,” Urvashi Butalia points out that when women narrate the nation they do so rather differently than men. In men’s narratives of the nation, women are often seen as symbols of national and family honor. In women’s narratives, the concerns are often different: the need to keep the family together, to contain grief, to put closures on unexplained deaths, to try and somehow contain the violence that such a situation inevitably unleashes. (2000, 111) Anam’s narrative illustrates this approach perfectly. There is a syncopation in the story – a pause with the chapter “Operation Searchlight” (that is signaled by “later she would say,” 64); this pause not only embodies the trauma of war, it is also a way to contain violence, to keep it at a distance. In fact, violence mostly happens offstage. The “collective deafness” (Anam 2008a, 53) that strikes the characters seems to mirror the silence in the creative responses to the war, as there are few accounts of it. As Louise Harrington underlines it, the “thirdspaces of 1971 are revealed in the side storylines” (2011, 242). Sabeer is captured and tortured. The sight of his broken body and the screams of his broken mind haunt Rehana. She reveals the details of his captivity: ‘They beat him, broke his ribs. ‘They made him stare at the sun for hours, days. ‘They burned cigarette holes on his back. ‘They hung him upside down. ‘They made him drink salt water until his lips cracked. ‘And they tore out his fingernails.’ (Anam 2008a, 215) In this list, Sabeer has disappeared, as if Rehana were acknowledging the damage done to his pulverized body. The way Rehana pauses, which translates on the page by a blank space, echoes the syncopation previously mentioned, a way to contain the violence. Moreover Anam chooses to address violence against women in an oblique way by creating gaps in the narrative. Both Mrs Sengupta and Sharmeen disappear, and although Mrs Sengupta survives, she becomes only the ghost of herself. In the first chapters, she is described as a determined woman. But in the commotion triggered by the news of the canceled elections, Mrs Sengupta loses her teep, her bindi (44). This minor accident in which her blouse and stomach are exposed hints at the religious aspect of the conflict. Her fallen sari (46) is a metonymic reference to violence against Hindu women, and at the same time it foreshadows the atrocities she will witness and endure. When Rehana finds her at the refugee camp, she can’t speak. Mrs Sengupta embodies the discursive silence of women evoked by Kajalie Shehreen Islam when she underlines that “women were neither the audience nor the subject of the news of 1971 and were largely absent from the entire discourse, except for Muslim ‘mothers and sisters’ as victims” (2018).

23 In the narrative, violence against women lurks in the chapter entitled “Tikka Khan, the Butcher of Bengal!,” and it is contained in short paragraphs: “Throughout June, Tikka Khan’s soldiers made their way across the summer plains of Bangladesh. They looted homes and burned roofs. They raped. They murdered. They lined up the men and shot

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them into ponds. They practiced old and new forms of cruelty” (Anam 2008a, 129). Women are erased. The words rape and murder are used as intransitive verbs. Genocidal rape is only hinted at, framed with other forms of atrocities (which are more thoroughly documented in historical accounts). There is a parallel between the grammatical erasure of women and the way Sharmeen’s disappearance is dealt with. Maya’s best friend is first introduced as “famous on campus for her political posters” and practically living at Rehana’s (44). The night of Operation Searchlight she goes missing: “But Sharmeen. Sharmeen could not be found” (71). The nominal sentence suggests the difficulty of finding words. The elision of the verb juxtaposed with the passive form encapsulates the violence women had to face. Her name slowly disappears from the narrative too. She is only mentioned three times after that, before the reader becomes acquainted with her story: “And then (Sohail) told (Maya) everything” (123). Yet, as mentioned earlier, the truth of Sharmeen’s abduction comes from Maya. Unlike other works on the Bangladesh War of Independence, such as Nilima Ibrahim’s Ami Birangona Bolchi (A War Heroine, I Speak), first published in Bengali in 1994, which sheds light on the atrocities that came with the commodification of the bodies of women, A Golden Age does not dwell on the nature of the crime; but like these same works, the narrative expresses a need for accountability. When Faiz tries to dismiss Rehana’s accusation, she insists: “You listen to me. Her name was Sharmeen. They took her and they kept her at the cantonment – not a mile from your house. And the girl was tortured until she died. They did things – unspeakable things – to her. She was the same age as Maya. How do you explain that?” (191). Sharmeen’s disappearance mirrors the discursive erasure of women in the national narrative. But Rehana’s insistence that her name be known underlines that it is not enough to acknowledge that they were victims of war crimes; their names should be remembered too and they should obtain justice.

24 Anam draws attention to the forgotten, overlooked archives that would balance the narrative of nation-making. The novel itself is turned into a platform to showcase such archives as it alludes to and thus pays homage to Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a fierce advocate for women’s education, and Jahanara Imam, the mother of martyrs, who campaigned to bring war criminals to justice. Early on, Mrs Sengupta has a dream of becoming a writer and mentions Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, a short story that celebrates a utopian matriarchal society. In her introduction to Gender, Nationalism and Genocide in Bangladesh, Azra Rashid underlines the necessity to examine the sites where history is memorialized. Focusing on the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh, she discusses the role of Sultana’s Dream as a feminist text and argues that it was one of the first to be embraced by the nationalist agenda (2019, 3–4). Mrs Sengupta is inspired by Hossain’s literary career. In fact, the first time she meets Rehana, she points out that she is writing a novel (Anam 2008a, 37). And when she is found by Rehana at the refugee camp, unable to speak, Rehana, remembering her mentioning the book, gives her a pen and paper. Only then is she able to start expressing what happened to her. One other very interesting intertext at work here is Jahanara Imam’s Of Blood and Fire. This diary first published in 1986, in Bengali, chronicles the war from the perspective of a mother whose son is a guerrilla. Like Imam, Anam captures the fear felt by war- mothers and the grief that surrounds them. Rehana and Imam are also allegorical mothers, embracing political change (Khan 2020, 90). Through the parallel between the two women, and the homage paid to Imam in The Good Muslim as the “Mother of

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Martyrs” (Anam 2011a, 95), it is the political force of women and mothers that is asserted.

25 At the end of the novel, Rehana has become a collector of stories, someone who inspires others to share their stories. Anam’s novel stands for a repository for these stories to exist as an attempt to not forget. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin explain in their study of women at the time of India’s Partition, that traditional historical archives are not enough; there is a need to turn to oral history – as Anam did, using some of her grandmother’s experience – to letters and memoirs, but also to Partition fiction, for they provide “women’s voices, speaking for themselves” (1998, 12). In this regard, in the same way as Maya becomes the voice of her generation, a secondary character like Silvi is an invitation to look back on the rise of radical Islam in a young secular Bangladesh and to reassess the role of women in the making of nation and identity.

26 Anam brings the focus back onto the family units, onto ordinary lives. The narrative tells the story of an “exceptional” generation for whom struggle was the only lifeline. Like the grandmother in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, who explains that she grew up with police raids, Maya and Sohail come of age in a context of political exception. And like Boori in River of My Blood, Rehana finds her cause not in a country, but first of all in her children. Partition is a state affair, but it is also a family affair. As Butalia explains, women’s narratives and testimonies are empowering when it comes to acknowledging history, but they have their shortcomings (2000, 16). There is not a single voice, but many voices for women; each has her own background, social status, etc. (Butalia 2000, 280). In her novel, and thanks to the flexibility of fiction, Anam brings together different types of women. Mrs Rahman, Mrs Akram, Maya, Silvi, Sharmeen, all create a polyphony of women’s voices that almost blocks out the soldiers in the narrative. The epigraph of the novel is the last stanza from Shamsur Rahman’s poem entitled, “Freedom, You are,” an homage to the freedom fighters (“muktijhoddhas”). With it, Anam also pays homage to the women who fought for freedom and to the necessity to “scribble” and tell their stories.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANAM, Tahmima. 2008a. A Golden Age. 2007. New York: Harper.

ANAM, Tahmima. 2008b. “The War that Time Forgot.” The Guardian, 10 April. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/10/bangladesh.photography.

ANAM, Tahmima. 2011a. The Good Muslim. New York: Harper.

ANAM, Tahmima. 2011b. Interview by Terry Hong. Bookslut. July. http://www.bookslut.com/ features/2011_07_017958.php.

ANAM, Tahmima. 2015. “An Interview with Tahmima Anam.” By Amy Finnerty. “A Voice in the World.” A Special Issue on Bangladesh, Wasafiri 30: 43–46.

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BISWAS, Sanjib Kr, and Priyanka TRIPATHI. 2017. “Relocating Women’s Role in War: Rereading Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English 8, no. 1 (February): 522–28. www.the-criterion.com.

BOEHMER, Elleke. 2005. Stories of Women, Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

BUTALIA, Urvashi. 2000. The Other Side of Silence, Voices from the Partition of India. 1998. Durham: Duke University Press.

BUTALIA, Urvashi. 2002. “Gender and Nation: Some Reflections from India.” In Ivekovic and Mostov, 99–112.

GHOSH, Amitav. 2005. The Shadow Lines. 1988. Boston: Mariner.

GORRA, Michael. 2008. “Birth of a Nation.” The New York Times, 27 January. https:// www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/books/review/Gorra-t.html.

GUNESEKERA, Romesh. 1998. Reef. 1994. London: Granta.

HARRINGTON, Louise. 2011. “An-Other Space: Diasporic Responses to Partition in Bengal.” In India and the Diasporic Imagination, edited by Rita Christian and Judith Misrahi-Barak, 237–50. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.

HOSSAIN, Selina, and Pascal ZINCK. 2016. River of My Blood. New Delhi: Rupa.

ISLAM, Kajalie Shehreen. 2018. “The Discursive Silence of Women in 1971.” The Daily Star, 16 December. https://www.thedailystar.net/1971-the-battles-women-fought/news/the-discursive- silence-women-1971-1674070.

IVEKOVIC, Rada, and Julie MOSTOV, eds. 2002. From Gender to Nation. Ravenna: Longo Editore.

KABEER, Naila. 2011. “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh.” In Perspectives on Modern South Asia, A Reader in Culture, History and Representation, edited by Kamala Viswewaran, 139–53. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

KHAN, Mosarrap Hossain. 2020. “Motherhood and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971).” In The Concept of Motherhood in India: Myths, Theories and Realities, edited by Zinia Mitra, 85–95. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

MENON, Ritu, and Kamla BHASIN. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

RASHID, Azra. 2019. Gender, Nationalism and Genocide in Bangladesh. Milton Park: Routledge.

SAIKA, Yasmin. 2011. Women, War and The Making of Bangladesh, Remembering 1971. Durham: Duke University Press.

ABSTRACTS

British-Bangladeshi Tahmima Anam’s debut novel A Golden Age (2007) is a mother-daughter tale of the Bangladesh War of Independence, and is set during an exceptional period of martial law. It is a story of resistance told from the margins, from a domestic space known as “Shona.” This paper explores how the struggle for independence is embodied by the actions of women, and analyzes how weaving violence and resistance into the fabric of mundane lives enables Anam to shed light on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.

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INDEX

Keywords: Tahmima Anam, Bangladesh, independence, gender

AUTHOR

SABINE LAURET-TAFT

Université de Franche Comté Sabine Lauret-Taft is an Associate Professor at the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté. She completed a joint PhD at University Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle and the University of Madras in 2010. Her dissertation analyzed the notions of voices, language and discourse in Amitav Ghosh’s novels. Her major research interests are Southeast-Asian fiction, conflicted spaces and territories, diasporic cultures, and the use of archival material in fiction. She has published articles on Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monica Ali. Her most recent work focused on “Postcolonial Anxiety in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef” (Colonial Extensions, Postcolonial Decentrings, 2018). She is currently working on Tahmima Anam’s trilogy.

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Unconventional Memoirs: Mary Fortune’s Account of Life on the Diggings

Alice Michel

1 “Who would write pages at fifteen shillings when one paid nine shillings per day for milk, and for a ‘woman’s’ magazine, too! Nay, there was nothing of the namby-pamby elegance of ladies’ literature in our stirring, hardy, and eventful life on the early goldfields.” This claim is made by Waif Wander – real name Mary Fortune (1833–1909) – in the narrative of her exceptional life on the Australian goldfields (Fortune 1882–83, 33). In “Twenty-Six Years Ago: or, the Diggings from ’55,” published in The Australian Journal (1882–83), Fortune provides an autobiographical account of an unconventional woman’s life on the Australian goldfields, in the first years of the gold rush in the colony of Victoria (1851 to late 1960s). This period is characterised by major changes at different social levels: greater parliamentary democracy following diggers’ protests, in the wake of the Eureka Rebellion (1854), extraordinary population growth due to massive immigration to Victoria and booming economic development of Melbourne thanks to the discovery of gold in the surrounding areas. Melbourne was the main access point to the gold mines; therefore, at the beginning of the gold rush, two to three ships a day landed at Melbourne from Europe, whereas it was common to see up to three hundred ships mooring in Port Phillip Bay, south of Melbourne (Davison 2011, 53–54). In just one year, Melbourne went from 23,000 inhabitants (1851) to 80,000 (1852) (Howitt 2010, 283). As gold aroused covetousness, Melbourne, and more generally the colony of Victoria, became the main destination of British emigrants. Between 1851 and 1861, the population was multiplied by four, turning a small pioneer colony into a metropolis. The very name of “Melbourne” was synonymous with luck and wealth in many parts of the world, from London to Guangzhou by way of Hamburg and Boston (Davison 2011, 52). Fortune’s text gives us a glimpse at this vibrant period, remembering her first stay in Melbourne: “I carried up to the diggings a few prominent memories of the city at that day, and it is strange to note with what pertinacity first

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and new impressions will cling to the brain upon which they have been photographed” (Fortune 1882–83, 35).

2 But her text also emphasises her rejection of colonial norms, representing nineteenth- century Australia not merely as a space onto which British cultural, gender and literary conventions could be projected, but as a place where women could assert and narrate their individual experience. Away from the domestic representation of women that could be found in feminine colonial romances (such as Ada Cambridge’s), Fortune places her female characters out of the home and into the public life. She narrates the ongoing social changes and the inclusion of women in them, by offering the reader an insider’s view into these key moments of the history of colonial Australia. She does so in the form of journalism as well as short stories and serial novels. Generally speaking, Fortune’s journalism is a precious source of information about Victoria’s colonial society. Nevertheless, what makes her writings particularly interesting is the fact that they are situated at the crossroads between fiction, autobiography and journalism, as we will see in what follows.

3 Fortune’s narrative belongs to the important number of texts written by women in the Australian colonies that have been dismissed in the course of the twentieth century despite their considerable popularity when they were published. Too few of them have been paid scholarly attention, even if since the 1980s, critical works have paved the way for the recognition of Australian colonial women writers. Among them, Dale Spender defines these writers as a “‘submerged’ heritage” which “produced a very different view of the world from that encoded by men” (1988, XIV–XV), while Debra Adelaide invites us “to re-read the history of Australian literature” from the point of view of women writers (1988, 1). Susan Sheridan also reconsiders neglected women’s fiction and journalism, arguing that women writers of nineteenth-century Australia “were never the silenced outsiders that later historians and critics rendered them” (1995, VIII). According to Debra Adelaide, one ought not to dismiss early colonial authors, despite the focus usually put upon the 1890s as a period “reflect[ing] strongly the development of nationalist thinking” (1988, 7). Finally, the reassessment of colonial Australia’s serial publication has been undertaken by Elizabeth Morrison (1995), as well as Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver (2010).

4 In this light, Australia’s fictional archive contains exceptional yet forgotten narratives written by women in nineteenth-century journals, which could be re-evaluated and potentially validated as having a place in Australian literary history. Among them can be found Mary Fortune’s narrative of life on the diggings, “Twenty-Six Years Ago,” never published in book form. The then-famous author writing under the pen-name “Waif Wander” is now barely remembered, although she was a keen observer of the colonial society in Victoria and of women’s place therein. Tackling issues ranging from women’s status as journalists and writers to financial and marital independence, her series draws on the genre of autobiographical journalism to assert the marginality of her life and writing.

5 This article seeks to stress the unconventionality of Mary Fortune’s memoirs, in order to contribute to their re-evaluation. It considers her exclusion from the Australian literary histories, takes her eccentric and marginal way of life into account, and re- reads, in light of this, her exceptional memoirs written beyond the norms of genre and gender.

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Between exception and exclusion

6 The series of articles entitled “Twenty-Six Years Ago: Or, the Diggings from ’55” was published in The Australian Journal in five instalments, from September 1882 to May 1883. The first of them is entitled “Arrival in Melbourne,” but the other four have no specific titles. “Twenty-Six Years Ago” is an autobiographical text in which Mary Fortune narrates her arrival in Victoria, when the colony was starting to rapidly grow, as well as her experience on the goldfields during her first two Australian years, “[her] recollection of [her] earliest colonial days” (Fortune 1882–83, 33), chronologically narrated in the form of anecdotes. The notes used by Fortune to write these articles were taken when she arrived in Melbourne in October 1855. Her original aim was to write articles for the London paper Ladies’ Companion, but she decided not to go through with this publication. This shows her desire for independence and her refusal to abide by the conventions of what was considered feminine literature, even if she could have made good copy, as narratives about the goldrush were very popular in England. John Elphinstone Erskine’s A Short Account of the Late Discoveries of Gold in Australia: With Notes of a Visit to the Gold District (1851), and Ellen Clacy’s A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1851–53 are good examples. The adventures that Clacy narrates raise a striking contrast with the usual representation of a young woman of the time, something that Clacy acknowledges in a preliminary note: “It may be deemed presumptuous that one of my age and sex should venture to give to the public an account of personal adventures in a land which has so often been descanted upon by other and abler pens […]” (1853, 114). Fortune, despite her initial refusal, can be inscribed in the line of rare women who narrated their experience on the goldfields, a place generally considered as male. A major difference between Clacy’s and Fortune’s narratives is that Fortune keeps hiding her identity and never mentions her marital status, either in her narratives, or in her penname, which was quite noteworthy in the Victorian era known for valuing female virtue.1

7 Despite the autobiographical references, Fortune takes care not to completely disclose her identity. The presence of her initials (“M.H.F”) in this story was the most important clue ever given to her readers and it would never be followed by others, confirming her intention not to disclose her identity, since her exceptional way of life could have led to criticism on the part of her contemporaries at a time when she needed to write to earn a living on her own. In spite of this anonymity and marginality, she was one of the most popular writers of nineteenth-century Australia and wrote serial novels, poetry and journalism, most of her texts being published in The Australian Journal. She was also very prolific, writing more than five hundred stories. However, even though her texts were popular during her lifetime, Fortune fell into oblivion after her death, so that her professional and personal lives have long remained mysteries, until her identity was rediscovered by the book collector John Kinmont Moir. In the 1950s, he found manuscripts of her poems signed with her initials, as well as a letter dating from 1909, signed “M.H. Fortune,” enabling him to establish a link between them. Later, in the 1980s, the journalist and researcher Lucy Sussex cast light on Waif Wander’s main biographical information, which point to an eccentric, nonconformist way of life.

8 Born in 1833 in Belfast as Mary Wilson, Fortune left Ireland with her father to go to Canada when she was a child. She married twice, the first time in Canada to Joseph Fortune, before leaving with their son for Australia in 1855 to join her father on the

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goldfields of Victoria. She crossed the world alone with her young boy, and then continued her lonely journey across Victoria, from Melbourne to the goldfields, in an unknown land. After her arrival in Victoria, she had a second son a year later and claimed that Joseph Fortune was the father. Yet evidence has shown since that Joseph had never been to Australia, raising doubts about the child’s legitimacy. In 1858, Mary Fortune remarried, stating she was a widow. Further biographical research was to reveal that Joseph Fortune died in 1861 in Canada, without being divorced from Mary Fortune (Sussex 1988, 121). This bigamous situation and the illegitimacy of her second child are part of the “secrets that could threaten her reputation and her livelihood as a female author” and partly explain why she wrote anonymously (Sussex 2009). However, despite the success of her stories, Fortune lived in poverty and ended up homeless and alcoholic. As she aged, her eyesight also deteriorated, preventing her from maintaining her writing, and consequently forcing her to ask The Australian Journal for an annuity. It is now known that she died in 1909 (Sussex 2009). Yet until 2015, the exact date and place remained unknown (Sussex 2016). With hindsight, her pseudonym “Waif Wander” can therefore be interpreted as hinting at several aspects of both her life and work: her geographical mobility, her non-conformism, and her writing experience. If mysteries surrounding this exceptional writer are starting to be slowly uncovered, they are far from being all unravelled.

9 Fortune was an exceptional writer who gave a voice to the voiceless, women and marginals. The journalist Henry W. Mitchell described her as “beyond all doubt one of the most talented, versatile and interesting writers of fiction that we have, or ever had, in the Australian colonies” (1880, 487). Some of her peers may have been cognizant of her identity, but they kept it secret, only at times dropping hints in their reviews, as did Henry W. Mitchell who “congratulate[d] the proprietors of The Australian Journal on their good fortune in having so gifted a writer on their staff” (487). The Melbourne magazine Table Talk also promoted the author as “probably the only truly Bohemian lady writer who has ever earned a living by her pen in Australia” (1898, 3), which again hints at the peculiarity of her non-conformist but self-supporting way of life. Fortune was also the first Australian writer to publish a collection of detective stories, The Detective Album: Tales of the Australian Police (1871). However, her achievement is not acknowledged in most literary analyses of the period. For instance, she is not mentioned by her contemporaries Henry Gyles Turner and Alexander Sutherland in their 1898 overview of Australian literature, otherwise a detailed nineteenth-century account of the period. Her name does not appear either in Henry Mackenzie Green’s 1961 work of reference A History of Australian Literature, except for a passing allusion to her story “Dare-Devil Bob; or, the Australian Hunters” (293). But even there, Green does not acknowledge the author properly, suggesting that the story might have been the work of a better-known Australian writer, Marcus Clarke. Mary Fortune’s exclusion from the more recent literary surveys may be explained by her work’s specific form of publication in newspapers. Nevertheless, as this was a common feature among nineteenth-century writers, especially in Australia, where the majority of novels appeared in serial form in local papers, it is only a partial explanation. Indeed, as Katherine Bode explains, “half of all Australian novels published in these decades [1860s to 1880s] were serialised” (2012, 57). As some feminist studies have emphasised, the texts of colonial women writers often present “alternative ‘truths’” (Bradstock and Wakeling 1991, VII) which contradict the dominant male perspective and perhaps this is a further reason for the relative lack of interest this writer has suffered from.

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Consequently, most of her texts are difficult to access nowadays. Yet, Fortune’s narratives, notably her journalism, present alternate views on the construction of both the colonial Australian culture and the inclusion of women in it.

Writing Australia beyond conventions of gender

10 Fortune’s retrospective tale opens on her pride in having lived an experience that was so remote from what could be expected of a lady at the time. A newspaper offered her a job as a reporter, thinking that her initials M.H.F were those of a man. But when her identity was disclosed, the newspaper withdrew their offer. Fortune includes this incident in her narrative, making fun of it, but revealing how, for a woman, being outside the norms often led to exclusion: I was interviewed by a man who stared in open-eyed wonder at me and my youngster, whom I led by the hand. “Are you ‘M.H.F’?” he questioned with evident disbelief. “Yes.” “I can hardly credit it. You had better see Mr. Saint; but as for the request that M.H.F would call, we want a reporter and sub-editor, and thought he might suit.” (Fortune 1882–83, 338) In the context of the gold rush, women journalists were rare, and Fortune kept hiding her identity. Yet for the first time, in this text, her three pseudonyms and initials (“M.H.F,” “W.W.” and “Waif Wander”) appear together, enabling the reader to make a connection between them. The articles in the series “Twenty-Six Years Ago” are signed by two pseudonyms together: “Waif Wander (W.W.)”. W.W. were the initials that Fortune used to sign her detective stories, in the series “The Detective Album” that was published in The Australian Journal. The pseudonym “Waif Wander” was used for the rest of her texts, including her serial novels, short stories, articles and poems. Finally, her genuine initials, “M.H.F,” standing for “Mary Helena Fortune,” appear in the third serial of “Twenty-Six Years Ago,” as seen in the above-mentioned quotation. Her initials “M.H.F” were never used to sign other stories. In “Twenty-Six Years Ago,” the revelation of the link between the three pen names shows a certain amount of trust on the part of Fortune in the way her readership would receive her story, as well as in her own status as a woman writer that now enabled her to disclose this link. It also implies that the historical plot in “Twenty-Six Years Ago” cannot be dissociated from the autobiographical aspect of the narrative. Thus, when Fortune writes about her arrival in the colonies, she contributes to narrating the beginning of the colony itself, from the point of view of a woman travelling alone.

11 In her narrative, Fortune puts forward her unconventional way of life and always attempts to leave behind conventions of gender. When she arrives in Australia, setting foot in Melbourne, the fact that she is not accompanied is a source of astonishment for those she meets, such as the hotel manager: “I was conscious that the landlord was looking at me doubtfully, yet sympathisingly, as he told me he could put me ‘with the girls,’ as it would hardly be safe for me to occupy a room alone” (Fortune 1882–83, 33). When she leaves Melbourne three weeks later, alone with her young son on board a stagecoach, the men she travels with are surprised to see her unchaperoned: “an’ it’s wonderin’ I’ve been all the road if it’s going to the diggings by yerself ye are?” (33). Despite her courage, she admits the difficulty of such a journey for a lone woman: “A woman, especially with little ones in charge, can scarcely be expected to feel safe or

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comfortable in a strange land, and among a class of people she has been told were as rough and knobby as the stones from among which they were rooting out their gold” (36). The journey through the bush had nothing of a poetic experience for the narrator: “our experience of travelling in ’55 did not include any time to bestow on the beauties of Nature in any shape or form” (35). Material difficulties were numerous, the first of them being the cost of life in Australia.

12 When Fortune and her son get to Castlemain tavern, on the way to the mine called Kangaroo Flat, a woman bursts into tears, regretting even having come to Australia. This anecdote is followed by a comment from the narrator, reminding the reader that such regrets were shared by many immigrants, herself included: “‘What ever came over me at all to come to such an outlandish place!’ she sobbed. […] ‘Ah! Many of us have come to the same conclusion many a hundred times since our voluntary expatriation’” (Fortune 1882–83, 36). Expatriation, combined with estrangement from one’s cultural and familial landmarks, leads to a feeling of exclusion. Similarly, in the second stagecoach that takes them to the goldfield of Kangaroo Flat, Fortune realises that her former life belongs to a past gone for good: What fate was to be for me and mine in this land of gold over which the shadows of night were slowly dropping? […] human nature is a strange thing, and the unknown and untried has always attractions for the sanguine and the young (36). Despite the dangers and uncertainties, the taste for adventure can be perceived in this declaration, a feature related to her nomadic way of life.

13 In her memoirs, Fortune emphasises her nomadic life, as her first years were characterised by a succession of trips following the discoveries of gold deposits. This voluntary wandering calls into question the feminine domestic realm of Victorian fiction, as throughout those years, Fortune never lived in a house, and her different homes were in turn a hotel, a caravan, and a tent. In addition to the various precarious homes that she lived in, intimacy and the private sphere did not exist in the camps near the goldmines: “There were some odd scenes exposed to the public in those days, and even refined women got accustomed to perform wholly domestic duties without even a screen between them and the moving, talking, laughing, eating, or working population around them” (Fortune 1882–83, 340). The accumulation of –ING forms, juxtaposed in a (seemingly) never-ending list, echoes the number of activities practiced in the camp in public, enabling the reader to hear and read the restlessness that characterised camp life. The distinction between the private and the public spheres was not established in the camp, maybe because it was mostly a male domain, in which women were rare, thereby enabling Fortune to cross gender boundaries. Judith Brett, the great-grand daughter of Percy Brett, Fortune’s second husband, considered that Fortune’s main interest lay in the public sphere: From the street, from the camping grounds she shares with the swearing drivers in “Fourteen Days on the Road” [another of Fortune’s narratives of wandering] as she journeys unaccompanied in a carrier’s dray, from the door of her tent as she surveys the chaotic life of the diggings, she always writes from the midst of a public space. (1989, IX)

14 On the goldfields, the absence of private space is reinforced by the fact that the narrator becomes herself a voyeur, when she observes her camp neighbours through a hole in the fabric of her tent, serving as an air vent: “From this point of observation I saw a loaded dray”; “The observation made me more closely observe the female”; “I watched the woman with interest”; “I was sitting by my ventilated slit, that I may call

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my window” (280–81). Fortune plays the role of a spectator as well as an interpreter for the reader of the colonial life on the goldfields, blurring boundaries between the public and the private, the individual and the collective, but also between literary genres.

Blurring genre boundaries

15 The narrative contains reflections by Mary Fortune on her new situation in Australia and the personal pronoun “I” is used regularly, referring to the narrator who is also the protagonist. However, the identity of the narrator is presented as plural. Her feelings, when she first awakes on the goldfields, are described as such: “To fall asleep and dream dreams that change as quickly as the forms in an unsteady kaleidoscope, and to awaken with a bewildered feeling that you are not yourself but have changed places with some other identity” (Fortune 1882–83, 280). As she wakes up in a new cultural environment, her identity landmarks are disrupted, so that the definition of identity is intimately linked to the place where the character evolves. In the colonial context, this place is linked to the notion of nation, and the different sides of identity which Fortune refers to are fragmented, separated by boundaries which are at the same time cultural, geographical and emotional: “As the twilight deepened, […] I began to realise I was on the borders of a new life. All the perils of the sea were over, and it lay an impassable barrier between me and the old happy Canadian life” (36). The frontier is both literal and metaphorical, representing the distance between Fortune’s previous place of belonging, Canada, and Australia where she has just settled. The ocean separates the two cultural sides of Fortune’s identity, but the frontier is also symbolic. This moment of epiphany takes place when the sun sets, during the trip from Castlemain to Kangaroo Flat: it is therefore a moment of transition, doubly symbolised by nightfall and the trip. Yet the different aspects of the narrator’s identity cannot be reunited: throughout the publication of the different narratives composing the memoirs, the pronoun “I” slowly disappears and the tone grows darker, until it becomes tragic. In the first three parts, there is an omnipresent first-person narration (“to me,” “I think,” “I also remember,” “I remember, too,” “I, myself,” “I asked”), but in the last two serials, the pronoun “I” becomes more and more discreet, leaving room for elaborate descriptions of anecdotes of life on the diggings.

16 The anecdotes become increasingly gloomy and the number of murders keeps increasing as the narrative progresses: “A moment of throbbing and terrified suspense, and then the crushed and clay-stained body of a man was laid upon the fresh grass” (Fortune 1882–83, 381). The anecdotes that deal with life on the diggings thus start with a betrayed husband (September 1882), a bag of gold that is lost and the flooding of a tent after a storm (January 1883), a reunion between husband and wife (February 1883), before becoming even more tragic in the last two serials (March and May 1883), in which the murders are numerous. No fewer than five deaths occur, including four murders, and they are narrated in just a few pages, without any convolution this time: “As he said the words he had buried the knife deep in Lygon’s breast” (508). The last of the five articles ends on the murder of a baby by his mother who becomes mad, with an abrupt conclusion: “It was a sad story, but, after the usual inquiry, poor little Possy was buried, and the wretched mother went home to her friends in town” (510).

17 Fortune’s memoirs end on this tragic note and in this neutral tone. This conclusion is all the more surprising as the first three narratives out of the five were written with a

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more personal tone. The last two, enumerating murders, rather remind us of the detective stories that Fortune regularly wrote for The Australian Journal. Indeed, when she published “Twenty-Six Years Ago,” Fortune had been writing detective stories for almost twenty years, which may explain the influence of the genre on her own memoirs, notably concerning the structure of the narrative, based on the gradual revelation of information related to a crime or a mystery, and centered on the main protagonist’s quest through internal focalisation.2 With more than five hundred detective stories, Fortune was an exceptionally prolific writer in this genre, and published more than any other woman in the nineteenth century, and earlier than the American writer Anna Katherine Green, usually considered as “The Mother of Detective Fiction.”3 Fortune’s collection of detective stories, entitled The Detective’s Album: Tales of the Australian Police (1871), was the first book of the kind to be published in Australia. Composed of seven stories taken from the series “The Detective’s Album,” which had initially been published in The Australian Journal in 1870 and 1871, it was unfortunately not republished and one single copy has survived to this day.4 The series “The Detective’s Album” started in 1868 and went on until 1908, with an average of twelve short stories a year. The tales are narrated in the first person by Detective Mark Sinclair, an innovative narrative strategy at the time. The voice of Sinclair is quite close to that used by Fortune in her journalism, for instance addressing the reader in a familiar way. As Lucy Sussex has underlined in “A Woman of Mystery,” Fortune’s journalism and her detective stories are often similar.

18 Fortune, while being an outsider to the male world of police, had enough knowledge on this issue to write plausible detective stories. Her second husband, Percy Brett, whom she met on the diggings, was a member of the mounted police, and her experience on the goldfields had enabled her to become familiar with an often dangerous environment, herself having been the witness of a murder. Thus, her autobiographical narrative “Twenty-Six Years Ago,” in between the genres of journalism and detective stories, testifies to her experience as a writer of detective stories and the reality of the violent life on the diggings. As the historian Charles M. Clark recalls, “[the mining towns] were frontier situations where frequently the normal civilized standards were forgotten. In many of the digging sites it was a journey back into primal behaviour with barbarism on the march” (1960, 133).

19 The papers of the time also report the high rate of criminality on the diggings, as The Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser, which was circulated on the goldfields of Avoca in Victoria, where Fortune lived for some time. Crimes and offences were commonplace, including theft, smuggling, murder, sexual abuse, deadly accidents, as well as suicides. Fortune drew inspiration from these incidents for her journalism as well as her detective stories. But if her journalism is inspired by detective stories, the detective tales can also be considered as a written trace of the colonial experience. For example, the series “Adventures of a Mounted Trooper,” which Fortune regularly contributed to, was explicitly promoted by The Australian Journal as the narration of extraordinary events that were part of the history of the colonies: “These narratives will be of the most spirited description, and embrace the most extraordinary adventures and perils that have characterised the history of the colonies” (“Notices” 1865, 156). Detective stories and crimes are presented here as being part of the colonial Australian identity and Fortune’s narratives, published in newspapers, can be seen as examples of a blurring of genres.

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20 In “Twenty-Six Years Ago: or, the Diggings from ’55,” Mary Fortune provides an autobiographical account of an unconventional woman’s life on the Australian goldfields. Fallen into oblivion in the course of the twentieth century, like the rest of Fortune’s production, this narrative however expresses a woman writer’s desire for independence as well as a refusal to conform to a conventional, “womanly” way of life. Fortune is thus characterised by various forms of exception, both on the historical and literary levels: her exclusion from the Australian literary histories despite having been one of the most prolific and popular writers in nineteenth-century Australia; her eccentric and marginal way of life; and her exceptional texts showing a desire to write beyond norms of genre or gender. “Twenty-Six Years Ago” is indeed situated at the crossroads between autobiography, journalism and fiction, notably detective fiction. Yet the last episode from the series, the most tragic one, also marks the end of Fortune’s autobiographical narratives and journalism, in May 1883. From this date onwards, she would never write journalism again and would carefully remain hidden behind her pseudonym, refusing to unveil her identity in her tales and writing fiction that could easily make good copy in order to earn a living, only living her marginal life out of sight. However, she left a huge body of work, most of it still waiting to be rediscovered and read.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES

1. Ellen Clacy’s narrative was published under the name of “Mrs. Charles Clacy,” stating her matrimonial status on the cover page, as was regularly the case for many women at the time. 2. For more information on women’s crime fiction, see Sussex 2005. 3. The detective genre has particularly been associated with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but several earlier examples can be found, such as Inspector Bucket in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852–53), but also John Lang’s The Forger’s Wife (1855), Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of Hansom Cab (1886), two of the early Australian detective stories. Anna Katherine Green obtained international recognition after her novel The Leavenworth Case (1878). According to Ellery Queen (the collective pseudonym of the two American writers Manfred Bennington Lee and Frederic Dannay), Green was the first woman to write detective stories: “[she was] the first woman to write ‘pure’ detective stories in any land or language” (Queen 1951, 64). 4. The collection contains the following tales: “The Evidence of the Grave,” “The Hart Murder;” “The Last Scene,” “The Twenty-Ninth of November,” “To Be Left Till Called For,” “A Woman’s Revenge: or, Almost Lost,” “The Diamond Robbery.”

ABSTRACTS

In “Twenty-Six Years Ago: or, the Diggings from ’55,” published in The Australian Journal (1882-83), Waif Wander (Mary Fortune’s pen name) provides an autobiographical account of an unconventional woman’s life on the Australian goldfields. This article seeks to stress the unconventionality of Mary Fortune’s memoirs, written beyond norms of genre and gender, in order to contribute to their re-evaluation. It addresses Fortune’s exclusion from the Australian literary histories as well as her eccentric and marginal way of life.

INDEX

Keywords: Mary Fortune, Waif Wander, memoirs, colonial Australia, exclusion, exception

AUTHOR

ALICE MICHEL

Université d’Orléans Alice Michel completed her thesis in 2017 and holds a teaching position as professeur agrégé at the University of Orléans. Her main research interests are neglected women’s journalism and serial fiction, Australian literature and culture, and the sociology of literature. Her articles include “Hidden Fortunes of Colonial Australian Popular Fiction: Women in Mary Fortune’s ‘Dora Carleton’,” published in The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (2016).

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An Exception to European Epistemological Rule: The Representation of Indigeneity in the Works of Mudrooroo and Alan Duff

Laura Singeot

1 Both Mudrooroo (the author of Master of the Ghost Dreaming series) and Alan Duff (who wrote Once Were Warriors) have been at the centre of controversies concerning their indigenous identity or their depiction of their own community: while in 1996, a journalist1 revealed that Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal ancestry could not be confirmed, Duff was considered by part of his community as a traitor for exposing their darkest side, feeding on poverty, alcohol and violence. Those two examples show the difficulties native populations may encounter when trying to redefine their identity, since they have to fight against pre-existing Western assumptions about identity and belonging. As a consequence, Duff’s and Mudrooroo’s novels may be considered as counter- discourses, but their epistemological strategy does not merely rely on a blunt opposition to Western discourses, which they acknowledge yet do not advocate. It is only by rendering visible those first hegemonic representations that they can question them, in order to renegotiate representations of Indigeneity.

2 Taking as its starting point Edward Said’s The World, the Text and the Critic, in which he theorizes the cultural dynamics of filiation and affiliation, this article questions the epistemological links Mudrooroo’s and Duff’s works weave with European constructs of the Indigene. First, they appear to reject discursive filiation, or what can be called “epistemological localisms”: as postcolonial literary works, they rewrite historically repressive colonial discourse, which is more often than not linked to the idea of filiation ‒ either paternalistic, missionary or biological. Since this discourse is usually rooted in a specific environment or place, it stems from local systems of representation used by the power in place in colonized territories, relying on those very epistemological localisms to reassert its hegemony. This article will begin by examining the specific treatment of the father figure and colonial as well as racial discourses,

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leading to a questioning of assimilation and going against any notion of “discursive filiation”: if these works rewrite such discourses, revolving around a father figure in the broad sense of the term, they do so in order to subvert it. Then, turning to the notion of affiliation will allow us to question the globalization of the epistemological systems at work in these novels, especially through the redefinition of the Indigenous cultural community. Finally, the reflection will consider the idea of “double consciousness” as it is displayed in the novels: they do acknowledge biased representations of the Indigenous figure, but, instead of taking part in the homogenisation and assimilation of culture, they examine and subvert those epistemological colonial traces while calling for self-definition.

A case against filiation: rejecting epistemological localisms

3 According to Edward Said, “the loss of the subject, as it has commonly been referred to, is in various ways the loss as well of the procreative, generational urge authorizing filiative relationships” (1983, 20). In other words, far from being considered an autonomous entity, the subject has to be considered according to its relation to others. As a matter of fact, the novels under scrutiny rely heavily on family ties, most specifically on filial ones, but it also seems as if their loss of subjectivity ‒ or of subjects ‒ goes hand in hand with the destruction of these links.

4 Father figures are the first ones to undergo the destruction of filial links; filial relationships are always perverted, sterile or even incestuous. The first example that comes to mind is the transitional moment in Once Were Warriors when Māori teenage girl Grace commits suicide because she thinks she has been raped multiple times by Jake, her father, as she writes in the letter her mother reads afterwards. However, if the second book of the trilogy (What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?) starts with Jake’s exculpation, on a metaphorical level, the harm has already been done: the father figure is repeatedly held guilty of having transmitted bad genes to his offspring, as well as the enduring perceived status of slave. This doomed legacy is inherited from Jake’s ancestors who were shunned and had to live on the margins of their Pā:2 in the story, it partly explains the family’s present wretched situation, leading Jake’s children to constantly hold him responsible for it. In one most disturbing image, the genealogical tree, instead of being a conventional tree of life, becomes the tree of death for Grace: the metaphorical family tree finds its physical counterpart in the tree overlooking the Tramberts’ property, the one from which she jumps to hang herself. While the genealogical tree encapsulates the notion of continuity, transmitting life from one branch to the next, upwards, the Heke family tree loses one of them. Jake, considered as a monster, is exiled from his family, rejected by Beth and their children, typically embodying what David Punter wrote: “What is the secret of the family tree? Incest, says Freud” (1998, 201). Punter also argues that “the monster and the terrorist have no family; they have no family history, no family tree, and thus they are exiled” (205), just as Jake is exiled and becomes homeless and family-less, while his children claim that they are “fatherless.”

5 In Once Were Warriors, the second consequence of the rejection of the father-figure is the children’s hereditary anxiety, since they in no way want to repeat their father’s mistakes. The notion of “stain”3 is prevalent in those passages and is strongly

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associated to the ethnic and social context in which the Māori characters are evolving while at the same time harking back to racist ideology. None of the Māori youngsters can escape from it, as shown in the following passage which focuses on the young members of a gang: Truth was (any kid could see) they wanted to hide in the volume of music like they were always hidin behind their shades or in the dope and the booze and the fags; they juss wanna drown out the, you know, the upbringing. The stain of growing up a Pine Blocker. Of growin up havin to fit a role, a race role […]. (Duff 2004a, 141; emphasis added)

6 Contamination is directly linked to “race” and to what it implies in contemporary society, on the social level, for example having to rent a car because you could never dream of owning one, or living in state-owned houses for exactly the same reason. During the 1990s debate over the issues of tradition and authenticity in Pacific cultures, 4 one of the Western constructions of the idea of ethnicity also relied on heredity, as Margaret Jolly explains: “Western constructs of ethnicity on the other hand create mutually bounded, stable entities based on ideas of innate shared substance – blood or seed” (1992, 59–60). As a consequence, Indigenous characters share that colonial and Western perception of Indigenous legacy as a flaw from which no one can be cured. That genetic determinism thus becomes an infernal epanorthotic cycle in Jake’s Long Shadow: “It might be genes, could be genes, must be genes. No one can be nurtured to become that evil” (Duff 2002, 165).

7 On a cultural and historical level, these questions of heredity are often linked to that of assimilation. As a matter of fact, if Indigenous populations cannot fight against hereditary traits, it might mean that no matter how hard colonizers try to “civilize” them, they will always go back to their former savage selves, or “revert to type.” In Duff, it seems that even the Māori characters share that way of thinking since they have come to conform to the racial construction imposed on them by society, mistaking it for scientific knowledge and thus confusing the question of race with that of genetic makeup. To them, being Māori explains their violent behaviour: “Must be something in the Maori make-up makes us wilder, more inclined to breaking the law” (Duff 2004a, 43). Māori are thus condemned to being influenced by their “racial” traits: You could just see why these young warriors’d joined up with the Browns: it was love. Being loveless. As well as something else missing... but what was it...? Sumpthin to do with race, with being a Maori and so being on the wild side when you compared with the other race, the ones running the show. It was sumpthin closely linked with that but damned if you could figure it. (74; emphasis added) This excerpt is not the only one to mark a clear paradigm shift from the individual to the collective. For instance, Jake’s son, Abe, reflects on the ideas of transmission and legacy in some of the passages in parentheses which express his inner thoughts in the midst of an otherwise third-person narration: “(Violence claimed me. This is Jake’s legacy.) ” (Duff 2002, 170). However, two paragraphs later, the repetition of this statement introduces a change of scale from the individual to the collective: “([…] The collective, it always claims you. […])” (171). So questions of individuality and subjectivity intermingle with questions of racial depictions of Māori and traits attributed to the whole community. Nevertheless, the collective is not entirely negative in these novels, and it may well be a solution to escape from essentialization and genetic determinism: in fact the links between individuals and their community are reasserted throughout the stories as a way of reclaiming one’s forgotten or lost identity, while creating other cultural relations.

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Affiliation: towards the globalization of epistemological systems?

8 Filiation and hereditary traits are rejected and feared as some kind of “epistemological localism,” which denotes here a system of representation defining the characters according to the specific community or environment to which they belong. In Duff’s books, it becomes clear that the characters have to break free from this very system of representation in which they are trapped. Their unwanted blood legacy is often associated with a gloomy fate, and experienced on a social level with the relegation of the Māori population to the margins of society and of the city. However, a new kind of relationship appears and takes over filial ties; it corresponds to the second process theorized by Edward Said, that of “affiliation,” which is not a vertical relationship anymore but a horizontal one.

9 As Said linked the loss of the subject to the loss of filiative relationships, affiliation becomes the privileged way to reintegrate the individual into the community, to redirect the epistemological drive from the local and the personal to the global and general, and focus on the communities and their relationships: “The only other alternatives seemed to be provided by institutions, associations and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology, but by affiliation” (1983, 17). He further argues: What I am describing is the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship, which I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system. (19; emphasis added)

10 While in Duff’s story, Jake is accepted in the Douglas clan as part of another whanau (which is already an extended family, going beyond the nuclear family as Westerners know it), in Mudrooroo’s novel, that new relational system rests heavily on an extended sense of community and on a definition of culture as being transferable via experience. Consequently, culture itself is not as stable and hermetic as some of the Western essentialist definitions of culture would have it: as formulated by Margaret Jolly, in the article quoted above, following the “Western model,” culture was “objectified and substantivized as a unitary essence” (1992, 59–60). One of the protagonists of Mudrooroo’s tetralogy, Wadawaka, is from Africa but, as the scars on his body show, he has been adopted by the Aboriginal tribe,5 even though he keeps some of his own cultural specificities (for example his Dreaming Companion takes the shape of a leopard). He also is a former slave and he shares this experience of Western hegemony and domination with the tribe, which follows what Jolly says about how Pacific communities define cultural identity: “Indigenous Pacific constructs of cultural identity are permeable, situational, and shifting; shared identity derives from the shared experience of the environment, or shared behavior rather than shared substance” (59). That redefinition of cultural identity relies on two different, complementary movements since it becomes not only trans-tribal but also transnational.

11 Aboriginal communities are well-known for being diverse, hundreds of them are scattered on the Australian territory. In Writing from the Fringe, Mudrooroo underlines

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this diversity of Aboriginal communities, mistakenly understood as just one people or one cultural group by Europeans, when he writes about “the different communities ‒ the Nangas, Nyoongahs, Djamadjis, Murris, Kooris, Yolngus and the other regional groups making up the unity of people placed under the white term, Aboriginal […]” (1990, 3–4). This first misunderstanding of Aboriginal cultural diversity gives Mudrooroo ground for advocating and reclaiming it under the term “Pan- Aboriginality.” This redefinition of Aboriginality is also linked to a similar redefinition of Indigeneity itself, whose epistemological diversity has also come to be acknowledged. Yin C. Paradies says: I am suggesting that we […] recognize that although the poor and the rich Indigene, the cultural reviver and the quintessential cosmopolitan, the fair, dark, good, bad and disinterested may have little in common, they are nonetheless all equally but variously Indigenous. (2006, 363) This expansion from pan-Aboriginality to pan-Indigeneity makes it possible to find common ground with other communities from other continents ‒ Africa as far as Mudrooroo’s novels are concerned. These crossings and points of convergence between different black communities ‒ Aboriginal, Māori and African ‒ create a new zone of similar experience which could be called the “Black Pacific,” to echo Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic.” According to Gilroy, while “transcend[ing] both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (1993, 17), the Black Atlantic is a new way of “forging a new means to build alliances above and beyond petty issues like language, religion, skin colour, and to a lesser extent gender” (28). Affiliation deploys itself beyond national and ethnic borders and allows communities to expand their reach and empower themselves, by sharing the same struggles and political claims for example.6

12 Thus, one way of shifting epistemological paradigms is to focus again on the collective and the depiction of community even though, according to Said in his introduction to The World, the Text and the Critic, one of the dangers of affiliation is to repeat the filiative order: Affiliation then becomes in effect a literal form of re-presentation, by which what is ours is good, and therefore deserves incorporation and inclusion in our programs of humanistic study, and what is not ours in this ultimately provincial sense is simply left out. […] [T]his new affiliative structure and its systems of thought more or less directly reproduce the skeleton of family authority […]. (1983, 21–22; second emphasis added) Duff’s and Mudrooroo’s novels go further than this: to avoid the repetition of filiative authority through affiliation, they tend to raise and advocate collective awareness, the emergence of which derives from the redefinition of cultural community and contains a self-emancipatory dimension.

Transcending affiliation: double-consciousness as emancipation

13 In the essay quoted above, Said details the dependency of affiliation on filiation, while also introducing the role of criticism that he will come to develop later: [W]hat I have been trying to show is that, as it has developed through the art and critical theories produced in complex ways by modernism, filiation gives birth to affiliation. Affiliation becomes a form of representing the filiative processes to be found in nature, although affiliation takes validated nonbiological social and cultural forms. (1983, 23)

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Said then focuses on the role of the contemporary critic, who can thus choose to follow two options: he calls the first alternative “organic complicity with the patterns [he has] described” (23), since the critic’s work only helps legitimize those, whereas the second alternative leads the contemporary critic to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms. Immediately, then, most of the political and social world becomes available for critical and secular scrutiny. (24) 14 The novels studied in this article seem to follow the second path devised by Said since they all offer direct examples of this “critical scrutiny”: one of the consequences of the colonial subject being fragmented is paradoxically that it becomes self-reflexive, in so far as it starts pondering over its own existence, as well as the positioning of its community in the common space shared with white characters. From the very beginning of Duff’s Once Were Warriors, even though she is but a young teenager, Grace shows an acute perception of New Zealand society’s racial division and its imbalance in favour of the Pākehā, the white New Zealanders. As she is the one to accompany her brother Boogie to his trial, she reflects on the courtroom as one of the privileged places displaying white power, setting the tone for her relentless questioning of the partition of society: “Funny that, how one side of the double doors are one race, and the other this race: Maori. Made Grace want to crawl into a hole with shame. Or had her wanting to disassociate herself from them, jump up and explain…” (Duff 2004a, 24). Racial and social division is translated on a spatial and visual level by the doors of the courtroom, which set clear boundaries between those who judge, and those who are sentenced to jail.7 Division is thus not only about one’s awareness of one’s position in society, but it is about one’s awareness of others’ perception of oneself. This goes under the name of “double-consciousness” as defined by W.E.B. Du Bois: […] a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, ‒ an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois 2007, 8; emphasis added) 15 In the novels some characters seem to embody this concept and give allegorical or archetypal expression to it, since they too “look at themselves through the eyes of others.” Duff often presents such episodes or even characters whose inner essence seems to be split into two “warring ideals,” though not those of the “American” and the “Negro” as in Du Bois’s theory, but rather those of the “New Zealander” and the “Māori,” “two souls” which may not be that easily reconciled either. This leads to reflexions on the issue of self-definition that best finds its literary embodiment in split characters like the anonymous inmate in Jake’s Long Shadow, the last volume of Duff’s trilogy. This character, presented as “a voice” without a name since it “doesn’t matter who [he is]” (2002, 163) first functions as an archetype of all inmates, representing the collective, but he also paradoxically comes to “voice” that “double-consciousness,” which is finally the only thing that defines him for the reader.8 His words for his lot are rather harsh since he describes the inmates as being a “symptom,” the “bogey hanging from the nose of society no one’s prepared to point out. A wound that everyone closes eyes to” (163). As a consequence, one side of this two-sidedness is based on oblivion or erasure: society does not want to acknowledge such a level of debasement, and, since the inmates are murderers and rapists, such a level of ethical and moral failure, “most of [them] one race [Maori]” (164). In contrast to the situation described by Du Bois, this very refusal to define the prisoners and to acknowledge them “tears them asunder”:

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“we’re not only outcasts […], we’re cast aside in the too-hard-to-define tray. We’re never going to be fixed” (164). The anonymous inmate however still feels this two-ness, except that society refuses to accept him as part of it, relegating him and his lot to a place where they could be disposed of and easily forgotten, the prison. Nevertheless, this prisoner feels this inner fragmentation and acknowledges it: I am a definition of another type, I am. If you don’t count the middle-aged dudes who go for ritual and symbolism, we’re the crim types, who’ve seen the light of God. Only with me, I’ve seen my light, not God’s. It’s one day waking up from a dream of seeing me. You! Screaming without the hot coal of truth on my skin. Screaming with the truth of Self bellowing it had never belonged to me, had Self, it had always been claimed by someone and something else. (167) 16 In this passage, the reader cannot but notice the confusing use of pronouns (“I,” “we”), before that “I” strikingly becomes “You!,” marking that transitional point where his awareness becomes a double-consciousness. For him, “Self ha[s] always been claimed by someone and something else,” most likely by violence whereas the “light” he has seen is another side of himself, one that society will probably never be able to recognize or accept. This passage ends with that instance of self-awareness being translated into a literal self-awakening: I woke up […] and saw for the first time what and who I was surrounded by and that it had been me, we were one and the same, separated not by degrees, but here for the same reason and therefore existed as the same mindless creature. The creature that does not and cannot change. (167) This character can be considered as an archetype of the idea of double-consciousness since he functions as an autonomous and separated element in most of the novel,9 while being acutely aware of the tension between this commonplace image of the violent Māori and the different person he finally comes to realize he could be.

17 While the inmate seems to fight against this definition imposed on his Self by society, another character, Jake “the Muss” (Duff 2004a, 23) is also constantly aware of the gaze of others: conversely, he tries to conform to those expectations in the hopes of gaining some kind of recognition. His nickname (“the Muss,” for “muscle”) emphasizes his pride in his physical strength, which he also voluntarily displays and uses for his own purposes. For example, he plays with the gaze of others: he greatly enjoys working on the road half naked, so that he can show off to the white people driving past him. If this passage first shows the extent of his ego, it nevertheless also implies that Jake is aware of the fact that he is but a “body”10 to the whites, being “aware of people’s awareness of him” (65), which could be understood as a translation in Duff’s novel of Du Bois’s expression “to look at themselves through the eyes of others.” It seems that only by deliberately showing off this body will he ever be able to gain respect and admiration: he could hear them, all day he could, in his mind saying to each other, Hey! Take a look at that dude’s build will you? So his head lifted in sweet prideful anticipation of working all day shirtless and admired. It kinda felt like being loved. (13) Jake positions himself as a consenting victim of this sort of ethnographic gaze, which may also recall the over-sexualized representation of Indigenous masculinity dating back to the nineteenth century and the racist fear of miscegenation. In Fear and Temptation, Terry Goldie dedicates a whole chapter to what he terms the “commodity of sexuality in the semiotic field of the indigene” (1993, 64) and he explains that complex intermingling of attraction and repulsion at the core of relations between Indigenous and white characters. However, the complexity of this event is revealed later in the

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narration since the reader is also given access to the other side’s perception, that of Isobel and her friends who are slowed by the roadworks and get a good look at Jake: One of the other girls commented that he was a handsome specimen and likened him to a thoroughbred horse, which I didn’t quite go along with despite his body. A thoroughbred has a certain class. […] I was reminded of white southern American women assessing a Negro slave. I felt somewhat disgusting for being one of them. (Duff 2004a, 160) 18 The encounter between the white women and Jake goes beyond that play on sexual attraction and repulsion since a historical layer is added to Isobel Trambert’s interpretation of the scene, which has to be read in terms of racial tension. Racial difference is insisted upon when Isobel’s friends liken Jake to a horse, in a comment that reaches back in time since Isobel also refers to the American slave trade, comparing Jake to an object with more monetary than human value. Racial difference and reification form a central node around which that fear of the over-sexualized Other evolves in the Western imagination according to Goldie: “It is as though the element of ‘difference’ provides a necessary catalyst for the process of individuation but, like other catalysts, it forms no part of the final product” (1993, 80). This is what happens: while Jake does everything he can to physically stand out, his difference sinks into generalization and even worse, into dehumanization. Instead of merely being part of a sexual balance of power, it is transferred onto a racial plane. One of Goldie’s remarks concerning that fear of miscegenation ‒ which was but the starting point of the analysis of this striking passage ‒ could well be evoked here as well: when it comes to domination, race always prevails over sexual identity. As Goldie concludes, “The female white invader may become an invadee in terms of the sexual metaphor, but the balance of power remains a racial one” (81).

19 Moreover, while the Indigenous character is perceived as a commodity making the history of domination resurface in this episode, Isobel reaches another level of awareness for she seems to experience some kind of uncomfortable realization that those comments do not ‒ and should not ‒ really belong to the present situation but rather to another space and time – that of the slave trade. However, Isobel does not go as far as fully rejecting her friend’s remark since she still forms part of that hierarchical system: not only does she comment on her own perception of a “thoroughbred” but she feels “disgusting for being one of them.” Here, the use of the - ing form instead of the -ed ending (“disgusted”) insists even more on the inclusion of the white female character in that very system of domination which underpins the representation of the indigenous male character in the narration. As the choice of the word “disgusting” shows, Isobel comments on her own behaviour as if seeing herself from the outside and experiencing double-consciousness as well. Yet, even though she may become self-conscious in this episode, she does not really question her belonging to that group nor debunk its hierarchical system, which still defines her. On the narrative level, this passage is all the more striking as those colliding perceptions expose many different strata of consciousness, overlapping in the narration which finally becomes a layering of perceptions, interpretations and points of view.

20 Jake’s image relying on pure physicality – his conscious and in a way compliant display of his half-naked body – eludes him when the perceptions of the Pākehā women come to the fore. Indeed, Jake unconsciously plays by the Western epistemological system, as he finally acts according to the Pākehā women’s expectations. He thus embodies what Bernard Perley describes in Performing Indigeneity, “the readily identifiable imagined

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mythic super Indigene […] [the] charismatic Indigene” (2014, 52). Jake has come to accept and share this perception of his own self, reduced to his body, in order to exist ‒ gloriously, he thinks ‒ in the white psyche. This is clearly explained in The Portrait of the Colonized, in which Albert Memmi severely condemns this type of scientific and racist discourse, warning against the vicious circle that he calls “the colonialist delusion” (2003, 175): Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed on all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It cannot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer which, like an insult, blows with the wind. He ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname which has become a familiar description. […] Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. It thus acquires a certain amount of reality and contributes to the true portrait of the colonized. (131–32) 21 Double-consciousness comes in Mudrooroo’s novels together with barely hidden criticism on the part of the Aboriginal characters themselves, who are well aware of the white characters’ representations, interpretations and aspirations, and this is what leads them to turn this double-consciousness into a self-defining practice. In The Promised Land, during Aboriginal ceremonies or corroborees, Aborigines wear body paintings representing European clothing, with as many details as possible, such as buttons on the jackets and even hats, made out of twigs. While secretly watching the dances, the missionary Sir George Augustus, also called Fada, relates what could be a good example of affiliation to mere mimicry and filiation, which, for him, becomes synonymous with assimilation, in this context: it reproduces colonial authority, since Aborigines wear European attire, and Fada can only read this as a tribute to Europeans and the recognition of the colonial order. It even leads him to say that assimilation has been successful with them and that they have become civilized: Sir George Augustus, the well-known expert on the natives of the Great South Land, had always enjoyed their simple dances, especially those which employed mimicry. […] [W]hat performances they did do would show the civilising process. (Mudrooroo 2000, 210) 22 The fact that the Aboriginal characters wear body paintings recalling European attire may first be interpreted as an instance of carnivalization with that reversal of roles, the fools becoming kings, the colonized becoming the colonizers. Travestying first appears in the outfits, in the distribution of ranks or identities that are not originally the characters’, but while it definitely shows a wish for subversion, it also reasserts colonial power by acknowledging it. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos explains: The carnivalization of emancipatory social practice has an important self-reflective dimension; it makes the decanonization and subversion of such practices possible. […] In the feast, subversion is codified, in that it transgresses order while knowing the place of order and not questioning it. (Santos 2016, 61–62) Even if it is not about a feast here but a corroboree, those outfits do not directly debunk white hegemony, but rather reassert it in acknowledging the colonial order that they have to follow and respect. However, Santos already mentions “the feast” as an “emancipatory social practice,” implying that this practice also leads to something else. Indeed, the Aboriginal chief and shaman, Jangamuttuk, eventually repositions that European model as a cultural marker that they need to get rid of.

23 This transitional dimension is encapsulated in the ambiguity of the word “mimicry,” which, in this passage, is the key to cultural misunderstanding. As the narration focuses

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on Fada’s perception, “mimicry” becomes synonymous with mimesis, in the Aristotelian sense of the term ‒ the unmediated and objective representation of reality. To him, the Aborigines, while imitating the Europeans, are merely copying reality, and this imitation is what leads him to believe that “the civilizing process,” or assimilation, is well under way. However, this “mimicry” takes on another meaning for Jangamuttuk, who is not merely imitating or copying but performing, creating something else, with a specific purpose in mind. This kind of “mimicry” has a specific aim and, because of this intentional dimension, it becomes radically different from an instance of mimesis. As a consequence, the narration calls for a redefinition of the term “mimicry” insomuch as it points at the “parodic travestying” quality of Jangamuttuk’s performance (Bakhtin 1981, 55). In fact, this instance of “mimicry” recalls what Bakhtin describes in The Dialogic Imagination as an “intentional dialogized hybrid” (76), which literally relies on the “appropriation, reworking and imitation of someone else’s property, that is, of someone else’s word” (77). If this performance is “dialogized,” it is because it rests on heteroglossia since, during the corroboree, Jangamuttuk imitates Fada’s way of talking as well as his accent and intonation: “[Fada and his wife, Mada] listened as on the wind came the voice of Jangamuttuk miming out perfectly words in the very voice of [Fada]. […] Fada had rather enjoyed the mimicry. He took great pleasure in the natives and their simple, but effective ways.” (Mudrooro 1991, 10).

24 Consequently, there is definitely something more to this corroboree that Fada fails to understand, which is Jangamuttuk’s parodic intention behind that performance, turning it into an “intentional dialogized hybrid” to borrow Bakhtin’s words. In such performances, discourse and reflexivity seem to prevail, according to Barbara Bolt: To parody, ironise, or perform in a distorted way, suggests a model or category against which to perform. Through such strategies, the work of art becomes concerned with the manipulation of existing signs. Here matter, as material substance, seems to have disappeared into discourse. (2004, 153; emphasis added) Those practices become discourses and testify to a degree of reflexivity on the part of the Aboriginal protagonists, which is linked to the emancipatory drive that was mentioned earlier since their body paintings become signs: “The men’s head ornamentation also signified the European. […] Their body painting had been designed to signify European fashion” (Mudrooroo 1991, 2–3; emphasis added). “Signify” implies the need for interpretation, also because those signs are to be read as “painted symbols” (13) ‒ “thus replacing the reality for the symbolic.” (2) Signs are associated with signification, and interpretation has to take place to create meaning, a process which in the novel could not be achieved by any Western character: [F]or the moment there were [no Europeans eyes], and even if there had been, it was highly doubtful that the signifiers could have been read. What was the ultimate in a sign system, might still be read as primitive. (3) 25 The term “mimicry” may take on a postcolonial meaning, as it allows for a second reading and interpretation of the scene. As presented later on by Jangamuttuk himself, those ceremonies differ from mere mimicry since they are considered as real creations. As their “creator and choregrapher” (3; emphasis added), [Jangamuttuk] was not after a realist copy, after all he had no intention of aping the European, but sought for an adaptation of these alien cultural forms appropriate to his own cultural matrix. […] There was a ritual need for it to be done. The need for an inclusion of these elements into a ceremony with a far different purpose than mere art. […] Not only was he to attempt the act of possession but he hoped to bring all of his people into contact with the ghost realm so that they could capture the essence of

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health and well-being, and then break back safely into their own culture and society. (3–4, emphases added) The goal in fact is a regeneration of Aboriginal people and culture: contamination can actually be seen as the first step to becoming immunized, and Jangamuttuk really aims at protecting his own tribe against the negative effects of colonization. This redefinition of mimicry may also recall what Homi Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture: he defines it as “almost the same but not quite” (2004, 123) while stressing the difference between mimesis and reality, which has definitely gone lost on Fada in Mudrooroo’s novel: “What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable” (Bhabha 2004, 125; original emphasis). That idea of “writing” is what inscribes purpose or intention behind such an act, that “double vision” which finally often manages to debunk colonial power: “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (126). “Mimicry” eventually calls for the emancipation and redefinition of the identity of the colonized, and it is demonstrated on a cultural level: European elements are integrated into the Aboriginal cultural matrix and are finally used according to the effect that is sought for, more political than just merely artistic or aesthetic ‒ as a self-defining and self- emancipatory practice.

26 In conclusion, the way indigenous subjectivity is depicted in these novels engages with and confronts the white characters’ epistemological constructions of the Aboriginal and Māori communities: they show another way of understanding and knowing, which definitely inscribes them as postcolonial works, while integrating the issues they address in contemporary society and debates. Finally, Mudrooroo’s and Duff’s novels should be considered as reflexive as well: their capacity to rewrite the past while offering a reflexion on its very construction in the narration corresponds to one of the main attributes of what Linda Hutcheon calls “metafictional consciousness.” She says: “to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological” (2004, 110; emphasis added). Similarly, affiliation has to be understood as a synchronic as well as a diachronic process: it implies a return to the historical past while rooting reflexion in contemporary social and historical contexts ‒ whether it be that of reading, writing or diegesis.

27 In the novels different layers overlap: histories intermingle, whether they be fictitious or alternative versions of Western history, without imposing one as more believable, or closer to reality than the others. The stories are not really about the different versions that are presented but rather about the way they are associated, coexist and made available in fiction. That epistemological dimension is always linked to an ontological questioning as in Mudrooroo’s and Duff’s novels, since it finally leads to the construction of the Indigenous subject thanks to the redefinition of their relation to a sense of community. This subjectivation process is not only a part of diegesis, it also feeds on the historical past of those communities that determined their position in a mostly white society, as well as their relation with Western characters for example. As a consequence, history, fiction and politics coalesce through the treatment of historical discourse but also through the reflexion on epistemological systems that underpin the novels: the combination of these two processes is the first step toward collective awareness, subjectivation and agency.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BAKHTIN, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

BHABHA, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: New York, Routledge.

BOLT, Barbara. 2004. Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. London: I.B. Tauris.

DU BOIS, William E. B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Oxford University Press.

DUFF, Alan. 2002. Jake’s Long Shadow. Auckland: Vintage Books.

DUFF, Alan. 2004a. Once Were Warriors. 1990. Auckland: Vintage.

DUFF, Alan. 2004b. What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? 1996. Milsons Point, NSW: Vintage.

GILROY, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. London: Verso.

GOLDIE, Terry. 1993. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

GRAHAM, Laura, and H. Glenn PENNY, eds. 2014. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

HUTCHEON, Linda. 2004. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. 1988. Taylor and Francis. e-Library.

JOLLY, Margaret. 1992. “Specters of Inauthenticity.” The Contemporary Pacific 4, no.1: 49–72.

LAURIE, Victoria. 1996. “Identity Crisis.” Australian Magazine (20–21 July): 28–32.

MEMMI, Albert. 2003. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld. London: Earthscan. Originally published as Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (Paris : Buchet/Chastel, Corrêa, 1973).

MUDROOROO. 1990. Writing from the Fringe: a Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature. South Yarra, Melbourne: Hyland House.

MUDROOROO. 1991. Master of the Ghost Dreaming: A Novel. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson.

MUDROOROO. 1998. The Undying. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson.

MUDROOROO. 1999. Underground. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson.

MUDROOROO. 2000. The Promised Land. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson.

PARADIES, Yin C. 2006. “Beyond Black and White: Essentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity.” Journal of Sociology 42, no. 4: 355–67.

PERLEY, Bernard. 2014. “Living Traditions: A manifesto for critical indigeneity.” In Graham and Penny, 32–54.

PUNTER, David. 1998. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law. Basingstoke, London: Macmillan Press.

SAID, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa. 2016. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. 2014. London: Routledge.

SHOEMAKER, Adam. 2003. “Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity.” In Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, edited by Annalisa Oboe, 1–23. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

SINGEOT, Laura. 2014. “An Odyssey into the ‘Black Pacific’: A Reassessment of Mudrooroo’s The Undying.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37, no. 1: 89–99.

NOTES

1. For more details, see the first article in which this uncertainty was revealed: Victoria Laurie, “Identity Crisis,” Australian Magazine, 20-21 July 1996, p. 28-32. For the detailed chronology of events and inquiry about Mudrooroo’s identity, see Adam Shoemaker, “Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity”, in Annalisa Oboe (ed.), Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, p.1-23. 2. A Pā is a Māori village. 3. In Mudrooroo’s third book in the tetralogy, entitled Underground, the Aboriginal protagonist, George, understands that his father is Fada, the white missionary, and also feels contaminated or “stained” because of this “reversed” point of view on miscegenation (1999, 174). 4. In the 1990s a virulent debate took place amongst anthropologists about their different conceptions of Pacific cultures, and Pacific peoples’ relation to culture. The specific conception of ethnicity mentioned here is to be opposed to the way others claimed Pacific peoples come to construct their identity as something that can be shared through experience. For more details, see Margaret Jolly’s article, which retraces the history of this debate and gives a detailed account of the opposing sides and theories, as well as their evolution. 5. This term is used in the tetralogy. 6. For a detailed study of that shared trans-continental experience, see Singeot 2014. 7. The image of the trial has become a trope in postcolonial literature, relying on this spatial transfer of social and racial disparities, which also proves to be a recurrent theme throughout Duff’s trilogy. Still in the first opus, for instance, Grace is used to spying on a Pākehā family at night from a tree: looking through the windows, she compares herself with the white girl, who is supposedly as old as her, observing in a way what she knows she could never be herself. Here the windows function like the double doors in the courtroom: a clear separation allowing the character to reflect upon its meaning in New Zealand society, and on her own position on the other side, the “deprived” side (Duff 2004a, 86). Those few passages take on a specific significance in Grace’s tragedy ‒ and in the whole novel ‒ as she finally commits suicide, hanging herself from that very tree. 8. This character remains quite enigmatic and seems to give allegorical expression to such questions of identity and self-definition, even though the reader progressively understands that he is Jake’s brother, Matti, serving time for murder. 9. This transitional moment will lead him to do something good in his life and he will finally save Abe’s life in prison. 10. The stress put on the Indigenous body here is not without recalling the racist ideology that relegated Indigenous people to their very physicality.

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ABSTRACTS

Starting from Edward Said’s The World, the Text and the Critic, in which he theorizes the cultural movements of filiation and affiliation, this article questions the epistemological links Alan Duff’s and Mudrooroo’s novels weave with European constructs of the Indigenous subject. This theoretical framework can be helpful in understanding the relations between the individual and the collective, mostly concerning their drive toward self-definition and emancipation.

INDEX

Keywords: filiation, affiliation, self-definition, collective awareness, metafiction

AUTHOR

LAURA SINGEOT

Institut Universitaire de Technologie de Cachan / CREA, Université Paris Nanterre Laura Singeot defended her PhD at the University of Paris Nanterre. Her dissertation deals with the representations of Indigeneity in Australia and New Zealand, focusing on Mudrooroo’s tetralogy Master of the Ghost Dreaming and Alan Duff’s trilogy Once Were Warriors, as well as artworks by Michael Cook and Tracey Tawhiao. She has published articles on Indigenous literatures, the representation of Australian history in contemporary Australian fiction, the anthropological gaze and its representation of Pacific communities in the nineteenth century, the integration of contemporary Indigenous art pieces in primarily “ethnographic” exhibitions, and the decolonization of writing in South Pacific Literature.

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Fairy Tale, Tragedy, Fantastic: Three Generic Exceptions in the Short Stories of Anita Desai

Elsa Lorphelin

1 As a writer, Anita Desai is mainly known for her novels. Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), among others, are set in India, yet constantly explore the cultural and social hybridity of a modern, postcolonial, sometimes Westernized India, in which characters find themselves trapped between tradition and modernity, and between marginality and society. The same goes for her short stories, published in Games at Twilight (1978), Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000) and The Artist of Disappearance (2011). Despite their realism, Desai’s novels and stories occasionally rub shoulders with other genres, such as the fairy tale or tragedy. Borrowing from the latter can be interpreted as a general aesthetic choice, since most of her work shares a sense of innocence and tragedy that results precisely from the inescapable state of entrapment experienced by naive or inexperienced characters, who are often female. In her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), the young and innocent heroine’s psyche slowly dissolves into madness after her marriage, prompting her to kill her husband and commit suicide. In Fire on the Mountain (1977) also, a young girl, Raka, sets fire to the mountains in a highly symbolic gesture, trying to escape her feeling of alienation and suppressed hatred for the world.

2 Progressively though, and especially in Desai’s later novels, tragedy ceases to be a feminine prerogative, and distantiates itself from the fairytale-like quality of the heroines’ inner worlds, to become a more universal burden, shared by all individuals. For instance, Baumgartner, the main character of Baumgartner’s Bombay, after a life spent trying to escape his personal experience of the Holocaust, ironically dies in India at the hands of a German misfit he was trying to help. Deven, in In Custody, cannot seem to escape the announced catastrophe of his meeting with a great Urdu poet, for whose so-called human greatness the hero will be driven to social and material destitution.

3 But if tragedy often colours Desai’s novels and stories, it is made manifest in the title of one of her short stories, “Diamond Dust: A Tragedy”. There, tragedy appears through

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its distinctive characteristics: hubris, hamartia, forebodings and omens, even though they are diluted in the modernist unimpressiveness of both settings and characters, which do not possess the social and personal grandeur of classic tragic heroes and places. Present yet subverted, tragedy in Desai’s story deserts the city-state of Greek Antiquity and is reinvested in the banality of India’s daily life. Thus, still retaining its universalizing and didactic dimension, it is concealed by the normality of its heroes and locations. Two other short stories, “The Rooftop Dwellers” and “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” stand out for similar reasons: their realism is either mixed with elements from the fairy tale, or even undermined altogether by the addition of fantastic elements.

4 I would like to focus on these stories, to the extent that they constitute notable exceptions in the overall production of Anita Desai. Their deviation from strict realism entails a questioning about genre: why are those stories so keen on blurring generic boundaries, and what kind of interpretation does this suggest? For as we shall see, these particular stories – whether they tackle gender issues or display an interest in the question of Otherness – use and relocate these very Western genres in an Indian environment. Relying, in their elaboration, on generic and diegetic hybridity, I contend that these rewritings of Western genres serve a wider reflection on literary authority in a postcolonial context.

The short story and the question of genre

5 As far as the short story is concerned, the genre already carries an undecidedness that inherently seems to imply hybridity. As Liliane Louvel and Claudine Verley argue in their Introduction à l’étude de la nouvelle (1995), one of the characteristics of the genre is that “it escapes all attempts at a definition” (Louvel and Verley 1995, 18; my translation).1 therefore marking its generic versatility and elusiveness as an essential marker of the form. Its uniqueness, at the very least, seems to reside mainly in its brevity and in its treatment of time. This is all the more interesting when we consider Desai’s thematic sympathy for tragedy, a genre that generally implies long periods of time and a nearly mythical slowness of events that grants tragedy its immutable character. A similar conception of time applies to fairy tales, which might happen to be brief but always convey a sense of out-of-timeness. On the other hand, the short story’s “fragmentary” dimension would suggest a total incompatibility with the demanding genre of the tragedy, in which the most minute elements participate in the lengthy and intricate weaving of a fateful plot that will tighten its snare around the tragic hero’s neck. The same goes, to some extent, for fairy tales. Although the supernatural is more inclined towards fragmentation, through the use of ellipses for instance, this genre generally rejects the anecdote (which is so dear to the genre of the short story) in favour of a conception of time that borders on eternity and grants it the same immutability as tragedy or myths. Even though Nicole Belmont, in her book Poétique du conte : essai sur le conte de tradition orale, recalls that nineteenth-century scholars, during the heydays of the genre of the tale, considered it as a “product of the degeneration of myths” (Belmont 1999, 34; my translation),2 we can yet point out apparent generic incompatibilities between the genres that are combined in Desai’s stories : myths, tragedies and tales all work toward a sense of eternity, of permanence, while the short story focuses on instantaneity, as shown in Nadine Gordimer’s expression “the flash of

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fireflies” (Gordimer 1968, 178–80), which illustrates the elusive and ephemeral quality of the moments that the short story aims at capturing.

Tragedy in prose

6 It is therefore all the more intriguing to find, in the collection of short stories entitled Diamond Dust, an eponymous story whose full title is “Diamond Dust: A Tragedy,” for this adjoining of the word “tragedy” rejects the idea of the tragic as a mere “colouring” of the short story, and entails a generic questioning. The plot itself humouristically subverts the nobility of tragedies, by narrating the symbiotic and unreasonable relationship between the main character, Mr Das, and his dog Diamond, a mixed-breed mongrel whose unpredictable behaviour terrifies the neighbourhood, and whose incessant habit of running away will cause Mr Das to be hit by a car. More grotesque and farcical in appearance, the plot of the story immediately debunks tragic expectations. Mr Das’s honourable position as a state official offers no protection against his embarrassing affection for the dog, causing the community to severely disapprove: They had caught him, as portly and stiff as any of them, romping ridiculously in a rose garden enclosed by crumbling, half-ruined walls that he imagined hid him from view, chasing or letting himself be chased around the rose beds by a wild- with-excitement dog whose barks rent the peace of the morning park. They hardly knew how to tell him he was making a fool of himself. (Desai 2000, 52) Not only does this description of Mr Das’s fooling around with his dog insist on the notion of taboo (“they had caught him”), it also mixes farce with a simulacrum of sexual intercourse. The unflattering description of the character (“portly and stiff”) is reinforced by the adverb “ridiculously” and by the verb “to romp” which recalls a filiation with the genre of the farce, of comedy. Mr Das is turned into a clownish figure (“he was making a fool of himself”) and yet, this scene is depicted as a love – or physical – encounter. The “rose beds” suggest a conjugal bed and the “crumbling, half-ruined walls,” a secret location where lovers might meet (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to mind here, and more particularly the wall scene from Pyramus and Thisbe, also fraught with bawdy references). In this light, the word “romping” becomes a euphemism for sexual intercourse, which is emphasized by the depiction of the “wild- with-excitement dog.” The tragic fault therefore seems to build up right there, and to derive from an unnatural relation between the man and his dog that endangers order inside the community.

7 The latter, often referred to as an anonymous yet omnipresent “they,” comments on Mr Das’s capricious and, in this description, nearly romantic behaviour, and can be seen as a true Senate of the Antiquity, discussing and debating the attitude of a citizen whose embarrassing carelessness is a shame for the city: It was – had been – a friendly, peaceful neighbourhood, after all, built for government officials of a certain cadre: all the men had their work in common, many were colleagues in the same ministries, and it would not do to have any enmity or public airing of personal quarrels. It was quite bad enough when their wives quarrelled or children or servants carried gossip from one household to another, but such things could not be allowed to get out of control. Propriety, decorum, standards of behaviour: these had to be maintained. If they failed, what would become of Bharti Nagar, of society? (Desai 2000, 59)

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Propriety, decorum, standards; those words recall the strict rules of Ancient Greek society that work as a safeguard against any form of deviance that might endanger the stability and order of the community. As such, Mr Das, who seems to be reverting to a natural state in the presence of his dog, threatens the harmony and pastoral quality of the city and therefore becomes expendable in the eyes of his peers. As in a classic tragedy, Mr Das’s fate seems to be sealed by his own marginality, his disregard for propriety, his improper love for an untamed beast, which justifies in itself his being cast out of society.

8 The voice of the community, which reminds one of the chorus in Attic drama, is further emphasized by the character of Mr Das’s wife, whose isolated yet recurrent interventions and constant disapproval of her husband turn her into a Greek coryphaeus. Her warnings concentrate the sense of doom and inevitability that pervades the short story, as if she were channeling the tragic strength of the genre: He felt he was coming down with the flu, but he would not give up, he would not leave Diamond to the dire fate Mrs Das had prophesied for him. A kind of mist enveloped the city streets – whether it was due to the dust, the exhaust of tired, snarled traffic or the cold, one could not tell, but the trees and hedges loomed like phantoms, the streetlamps were hazy, he imagined he saw Diamond when there was no dog there, and he was filled with a foreboding he would not confess to Mrs Das who waited for him at home with cough mixture, hot water and another muffler. “Give him up,” she counselled grimly. “Give him up before this search kills you.” (Desai 2000, 62) In this short passage, Mrs Das appears both as a dutiful wife and as a dreadful oracle sharing her visions with the tragic hero. The solemnity of the premonition, conveyed by the repetition of “give him up” and the abrupt conclusion “before this search kills you,” along with the disquieting presence of “phantoms,” of “haze,” of “mist,” and of the hallucinatory visions of the man, further reinforce the feeling of a tragic destiny awaiting Mr Das. When tragedy strikes, before the main character is hit by the pound van, it is subverted by the prosaic depiction of the catastrophe, that again borders on the grotesque, for the witnesses are said to see “the small man in his tight brown coat, his woollen cap and muffler, dash down his market bag into the dust, and chase the van with a speed no one would have thought possible” (Desai 2000, 63). Far from the stature and exceptionalism of the classic tragic hero, Mr Das’s tragedy is all the more poignant as it is highly plausible and therefore relatable.

9 In this rewriting of a tragedy, first, dialogue is replaced by narration, thus removing one major element of tragedy: its theatricality. Yet, the latter is to be found in the theatricality of the characters’ personalities, a transformation that nevertheless subsequently shifts the tone of the plot from pure tragedy to comedy, as seen in the many ironic descriptions that are made of Mr Das and his wife. Somehow turned into the traditional duo of the unfaithful husband and the shrew, the characters of this so- called tragedy challenge the typology of the traditional genre.

10 Thematically, both tragedy and the short story seem to hold qualities that make sense of this mixing of the two genres. First of all, the question of marginality is central in both: whether it is the marginality of the tragic hero whose destiny sets him aside from the rest of humanity, or that of the short story characters, the “submerged population” as Irish writer Frank O’Connor called them to refer to the necessary exile undergone by those characters. He added, “Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes

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on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo – Christ, Socrates, Moses” (1962, 19). Therefore, myths, tragedies and short stories encompass a number of characteristics that seem to bring them closer than initially imagined, at least in terms of the characters they portray.

11 Another one of those characteristics is the notion of “catastrophe.” The etymology of the word, which means “turning point,” or “overturning,” recalls one of the specificities of the genre of the short story, about which Daniel Grojnowski explains that it “relates in a limited number of pages something that happens” (quoted in Louvel and Verley 1995, 17), a particularity confirmed by Marie-Louise Pratt’s assertion: “The short story deals with a single thing ” (1981, 184). In “Diamond Dust,” the depiction of the catastrophe in the tragic sense of the term appears as very similar to the short story’s modernist epiphany, if only through the lexical field of illumination that is used by Desai: “But when tragedy struck, it did so in broad daylight, in the bright sunshine of a winter Sunday” (2000, 63). The last sentences of the story, which depict the pound van carrying the dog away, borrows from the same imagery, albeit slightly differently: “Behind the bars of the window receding into the distance, Diamond glittered like a dead coal, or a black star, in daylight’s blaze” (63). The predominance of light that announced the dénouement/revelation of the story is again present yet invalidated by oxymoronic associations such as the “glittering of dead coal” or that of “a black star,” thereby reuniting at the same time the illuminating quality of the tragedy’s catastrophe, and the opaque epiphany of modernist short fiction.

12 But mostly, what this convergence does to tragedy is that it trivializes it and undermines its authority as a noble and codified genre. Set in India, the Western tragedy is here exoticized, while at the same time legitimizing mundane incidents as worthy of being labelled “tragedies.” Tragedy is therefore no longer the privilege of European royals, nobles or aristocrats, but a genre that applies to third-world reality as well.

Fairy tale

13 Tragedy is not the only genre that Desai associates with her stories in the collection Diamond Dust. For in this particular collection, two other short stories stand out. Not carrying any subtitle this time, as if to mingle, unnoticed, among the more traditional realistic short stories of the collection, they nevertheless question the plasticity and “polysyntheticism” of short fiction (Louvel and Verley 1995, 25) by borrowing from other traditions. It is the case of the story entitled “The Rooftop Dwellers,” which narrates the life of Moyna, a young Indian woman who starts working and settles down in her own place, a “barsati,” that is to say, in this case, a cheap makeshift apartment built on the roof of her owners’ house. While working at her own independence she discovers the existence of a whole community of people living on the roofs of Delhi and whose lives on the rooftops seem to obey a parallel code of conduct, completely disconnected from that of the people living below. Artificially recreating a caste of destitute citizens, these barsatis shelter marginals, social outcasts, and contribute to form an unacknowledged and at times rejected bond between them, which is mainly the result of these people’s subjection to the inquisitive rules of house owners and to the voyeuristic urge of male rooftop tenants. Despite the sordidness of this reality, “The Rooftop Dwellers” summons many aspects of the fairy tale, starting with its

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lexical field: “a weeping heroin,” “trapped in a cell,” “atrocities committed by a matron,” a “pumpkin,” an “empress with crowning glory,” a “palace,” adoptive parents, thieves, murderers, Russian folk tales, a “dragon lady,” a mother-in-law, a “young gallant,” “books on medieval trade,” but also an insistence on growing up, an omnipresence of dreams, and the final liberation of the heroine. The main character, who first appeared as no more than a young woman on a quest for empowerment, actually turns out to be similar to a fairytale heroine, locked up in a tower whose entrance is guarded by a dragon (her owner), and longing for freedom.

14 Generic hybridity is further developed by the juxtaposition of this modern fairy tale with references to the mythological sagas and epic narratives of Indian folklore. Indeed, the family who rents the barsati to Moyna spends most of its time watching TV: You have come just at Mahabharata time, the woman crosslegged on the bed reproached her. […] The two children stared at her for a bit, impassively, then went back to picking their noses and following the episode of the Mahabharata that the whole city of Delhi watched, along with the rest of the country, on Sunday evenings – everyone, except for her. (Desai 2000, 159) And further: Although she did not bring it up directly, after that whenever Moyna encountered them, on her way to work or back, they never failed to refer obliquely to that evening. “You are having more guests tonight?” they would ask when they saw her returning with the shopping she had done along the way. “No? Then why not come and watch TV tonight? Ramayana is showing at seven p.m. Very fine film, Ramayana. You should join us,” they commanded, as if testing her true colours. (183) The reference to these sagas, which modernity has turned into mass entertainment and whose traditional storyteller is now a TV set, marks their uprooting from their initial context, that of orality and cultural transmission of a shared heritage. Ironically, the tales that once brought the Indian community together, narrated as they now are by an appliance, isolate even the members of the family nucleus in this simulacrum of family time. Worse, the communitarianism that derives from watching them (“that the whole city of Delhi watched, along with the rest of the country – everyone except for her”) borders on segregation, as Moyna, who does not watch TV, becomes the outsider, the troubling figure of the “Other.”

15 Therefore, the elements borrowed from the tale, even as they thrive in the short story, are either empty signifiers for objects that are nowhere to be found in Moyna’s life (the prince, for instance, is nowhere to be found), or a liminal space where the so-called fairy tale becomes subverted into an acerbic depiction of what life holds for ambitious young women in India, when they decide not to abide by the rules of family and society. For after all, the short story ends on a letter from Moyna’s mother begging her daughter to accept an arranged marriage, and on the memory of a female acquaintance’s acceptance into a convent. The relief felt by the girl’s father echoes the request of Moyna’s parents. In this story as in India as a whole, not much seems to be expected from girls except that they should be provided for.

16 It is worth noting that, of all genres, the fairy tale should be the one that is subverted in a text dealing with female emancipation, inasmuch as it has been known for its traditionally stereotypical depiction of female characters, along with a compliance with a patriarchal system of values. Genre and gender are intertwined, and, even though the tale here loses its didactic and pedagogical aspects, its inclusion into a specific time and geographical location makes it more relevant to a particular era and culture. If the tale

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is more inclined to deal with political considerations, it might be because “it is not tales that stage political stakes as much as political powers that take on the appearance of fairytales” (Méchoulan 2006, §1; my translation).3 Thus, the arbitrariness of some social codifications (men/women relationships, male domination or taboos, for instance) are generically transposable into the absurdity of the tale. Auxiliaries and opponents cease to be archaic stereotypes to become realistic individuals that contemporary characters come across daily. As Eric Méchoulan explains, “regularly, tales stage kings, princesses, inherited powers, conquered provinces or deserved sovereignties. Power games crowd fabulous tales” (Méchoulan 2006, §1).4 It is therefore not surprising that in a postcolonial context and under the pen of female writers, the genre of the tale should be so popular. Emptied out of a purely magic dimension that is sometimes replaced by magic realism, the tale sheds light on matters of power, domination, and on the rejection of those.

Fantastic

17 The last short story that I would like to discuss, entitled “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” is to some extent even more confusing than the other two. Its affiliation to the fantastic genre, which distinguishes it from the usual preferences of Anita Desai, makes it significantly disconcerting. In his Introduction to Fantastic Literature, Tzvetan Todorov reminds us that: In a world that is indeed ours, the world that we know, empty of devils, sylphs and vampires, an event takes place that cannot be explained by the laws of that very familiar world. The witness of the event has to choose between two possible solutions: either it is an illusion of the senses, a product of imagination and natural laws apply; or the event actually took place, it is part of reality, but then this reality is ruled by laws unknown to us. […] The fantastic is the hesitation felt by a being who knows nothing but natural laws, faced with an event that is, in appearance, supernatural. (Todorov 1976, 29; my translation)5 This is indeed what “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown” depicts, since it tells the story of a man who, literally, witnesses his own drowning and finds himself compelled to disappear from his own life. As such, it falls into the fantastic category, even though the mysterious death of the character is the only element that links the story to the genre: Every detail, in every detail, he was myself: I was looking at myself – after having spent half an hour, or an hour, underwater, sodden with river and mud – but it was I, in every detail, I. It was as though I was lying full-length, suspended in mid-air, and gazing down at my own reflection below, soaked and muddy, but myself, I, after an accident in the river. (Desai 2000, 88) 18 We nevertheless quickly notice that even though death is the main disruptive element in the text, the one that defies Todorov’s laws of nature and transforms our world into one where a man may concurrently die and survive death, it is not death itself but the splitting into two that results from it that plunges the character – and the reader – into horror. From analyzing this quote, we can notice an almost frenetic and chaotic multiplication of the pronouns. In four lines, “myself” is repeated four times while “I” is repeated five times; and the third-person “he” only appears once, as if grammatically marking the impossible identification, or coincidence, between the narrator and the corpse. The repetitions emphasize the incredulity of the character and his obsession with details (“every detail” appears three times) illustrates his inability to make sense

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of this extraordinary situation. The play with the pronouns insists on, and semantically materializes, the generic split at play inside the diegesis. In this extract, the assertion according to which “he was myself” is so hard to comprehend that it forces the narrator to try and justify it. The colon shows a desire to explain, and in a first attempt, the rephrasing into “I was looking at myself” re-categorizes the text into the realm of the bizarre, more rationally acceptable than the fantastic. If it happened to be a mere resemblance between the narrator and the corpse, then the laws of nature would still apply and the situation could be explained. But the interpolated clause, that desperately aims at establishing a reassuring alterity between the narrator and the dead man by listing the latter’s singularities, is quickly invalidated by the conclusion “it was I.” Here, the pronoun “it” concentrates the horror of the identification process, not only between the self and an “Other” that is so similar, but – as also implied by the use of the past tense – between the self and a dead “Other.” The passage constantly hesitates between distantiation (as exemplified by the theme of reflection – “gazing down at my own reflection” – that circumvents and delays the fusion between the “I” and the “it”), and a denied identification. The latter nevertheless manages to force itself onto the text, by progressively removing the “he” and “it” pronouns, replacing them with a final “myself, I,” that binds the two entities, the narrator and the drowned body, in a tacit recognition that this “Other” is also and irremediably an “I.”

19 The initial amusement felt by the character at what, to him, is most certainly a misidentification, soon gives way not only to the horror of beholding his own dead self, but to the impossibility of making sense of an existence that has legally, and officially, declared him dead. Denied a civil existence whereas he is alive, he is condemned to a life of aimless wandering. The whole narrative also carries a mark of this identity break, if only through the abrupt shift – in the middle of the story – from a third- person narration to a first-person one, as if external focalization, or the possibility of being “seen,” “accounted for” by a third party, suddenly became impossible in the very core of the story. Being denied an existence in the eyes of the Other (even if this “Other” is the narrative persona), the main character’s life becomes pointless and tragically non-desirable. From that point on, the character’s only obsession becomes “to drown this self that had remained, to drown the double of the self that had already died” (Desai 2000, 98). The confusion between the notions of “self,” “other” and “double” brings about a feeling of defamiliarization and fragmentation that culminates in the oddity of the mere presence of such a story in the production of Anita Desai. While pondering on the meaning of his “non-existence,” the protagonist observes: I began to see that all of life was divided in two or into an infinite number of fragments, that nothing was whole, not even the strongest or purest feeling. As for the way before me, it multiplied before my eyes, the simplest question leading to a hundred possible answers. (92) This could be, in a way, a valid definition of the genre of the short story, exposing its open-endedness together with its hermetic nature and resistance to easy interpretation. The story performs one last trick on us, when nearing its ending. Another sudden break in the diegesis and return to a third-person narrative gives us to see, in a very distantiated way, with a visual effect that borders on the cinematographic, the drowned and dead body of the protagonist, who one line before was rejecting the idea of killing himself: At daybreak the child with the pot returned to the river for water. What he saw made him stop and stare, first from the slope of the bank, then from closer up, the stones in the shallows. When he made out it was a man’s body that lay in that

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trickle, face down, he dropped the pot on the stones in fright. Its clattering rang out so loud and clear, a flock of crows settling on the sands in curiosity took off in noisy flight. (99) 20 Taking the reader completely by surprise, the short story once again debunks our expectations, by making up for its brevity and multi-layered opacity through the unlimited and “fantastic” possibilities it opens up in terms of interpretation. In the context of postcolonial literature, one might indeed wonder about the aesthetic and political significance of defamiliarizing traditional genres such as the tragedy, the fairy tale or the fantastic story. Their inclusion in short stories, which already point toward hybridity and undecidedness, further complexifies the question. An answer can be found in the use of magic realism by postcolonial writers, since “the magic realist texts tend to display a preoccupation with images of both borders and centers and to work toward destabilizing their fixity” (Slemon 1995, 412). It is not images but genres whose fixity is here destabilized, as they find themselves rewritten and modernized. They nevertheless all retain a magical dimension. In the case of “Diamond Dust,” it lies in the mythical presence of fatum, of a mysterious masterplan that directs the fate of Mr Das. In “The Rooftop Dwellers,” as we said, intertextuality constantly relocates Moyna’s story in the realm of a subverted fairy tale. As for “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” the narrative keeps on hesitating between realism and the supernatural. Further elaborating on magic realism, Stephen Slemon contends that: The term ‘magic realism’ is an oxymoron, one that suggests a binary opposition between the representational code of realism and that, roughly, of fantasy. In the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the creation of a different kind of fictional world from the other. Since the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the ‘other,’ a situation which creates disjunction within each of the separate discursive systems, rending them with gaps, absences, and silences. (1995, 409) 21 We might thus argue that the generic instability that is to be noticed in the three selected short stories stages issues that are eminently postcolonial. They articulate Western genres with a strictly Indian rewriting of those, and thereby unsettle traditional expectations and open up new interpretative horizons. For the dialectic mentioned by Slemon, the “separate discursive systems,” is precisely what structures these stories: Mr Das’s awful death is constantly challenged by comedic elements that make it grotesque rather than tragic, Moyna’s life is anything but a fairy tale, and death in “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown” is what dissociates reality and fantastic, thus triggering the character’s epiphany about the relativity of perception that is so reminiscent of magic realism (“I began to see that all of life was divided in two or into an infinite number of fragments, that nothing was whole,” 93).

22 These three stories therefore, though they may strike the reader as exceptions in Anita Desai’s overall production, rather epitomize what many of her other stories address, thematically speaking. They displace and relocate postcolonial questionings inside their own structures – by degrading and trivializing the tragedy, subverting the fairytale or making Otherness a central and unifying concept. They offer an example of “writing back” that does not aim at undermining imperial or metropolitan discourses so much as deconstructing the literary forms that constitute them, thus also reclaiming these genres as postcolonial ones, able to encompass Indian reality.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BELMONT, Nicole. 1999. Poétique du conte : essai sur le conte de tradition orale. Paris: Gallimard.

DESAI, Anita. 2000. Diamond Dust and Other Stories. London: Chatto & Windus.

GORDIMER, Nadine. 1968. “The Flash of Fireflies.” Kenyon Review 30: 178–80.

LOUVEL, Liliane, and Claudine VERLEY. 1995. Introduction à l’étude de la nouvelle. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail.

MECHOULAN, Eric. 2006. “Le Pouvoir féérique.” Fééries 3. Posted online 5 February 2007. http:// journals.openedition.org/feeries/138.

O’CONNOR, Frank. 1962. The Lonely Voice. London: Macmillan.

PRATT, Marie-Louise. 1981. “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It.” Poetics 10: 175–94.

SLEMON, Stephen. 1995. “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 407–26. Durham: Duke University Press.

TODOROV, Tzvetan. 1976. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.

NOTES

1. “Un genre dont la caractéristique principale semble bien être qu’il échappe à toute tentative de définition.” 2. “La position nuancée des frères Grimm concernant les rapports du mythe et du conte sera durcie par les savants du XIXe siècle, qui ne verront dans le second qu’un produit de la dégénérescence du premier.” 3. “[C]e ne sont pas tant les contes qui représentent des enjeux politiques, ce sont les pouvoirs en place qui prennent l’allure de contes de fées.” 4. “Les contes, régulièrement, mettent en scène rois, princesses, pouvoir hérités, provinces conquises ou souverainetés méritées. Les jeux du pouvoir occupent beaucoup les récits fabuleux.” 5. “Dans un monde qui est bien le nôtre, celui que nous connaissons, sans diables, sylphides, ni vampires, se produit un événement qui ne peut s’expliquer par les lois de ce même monde familier. Celui qui perçoit l’événement doit opter pour l’une des deux solutions possibles : ou bien il s’agit d’une illusion des sens, d’un produit de l’imagination et les lois du monde restent alors ce qu’elles sont ; ou bien l’événement a véritablement eu lieu, il est partie intégrante de la réalité, mais alors cette réalité est régie par des lois inconnues de nous. […] Le fantastique, c’est l’hésitation éprouvée par un être qui ne connaît que les lois naturelles, face à un événement en apparence surnaturel.”

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ABSTRACTS

Focusing on Anita Desai’s collection Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), this article examines three short stories: “Diamond Dust – A Tragedy,” “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown” and “The Rooftop Dwellers.” Respectively borrowing from tragedy, the fantastic and the fairy tale, they use the generic malleability of the short story and entail a questioning of the hybrid nature of this literary genre. The notion of hybridity also resonates as a political strategy of ideological and formal subversion, and this article examines the possible link between the hybrid generic nature of those three texts, and the themes they explore – gender, otherness and Indian identity.

INDEX

Keywords: Anita Desai, short stories, postcolonial, hybridity, genre, otherness, gender

AUTHOR

ELSA LORPHELIN

Lycée militaire de Saint-Cyr / VALE, Sorbonne Université Elsa Lorphelin is a teacher in preparatory class at the Military School of St Cyr l’Ecole. She is completing a PhD at the Sorbonne (Paris), entitled “Intertextuality, Interdiscursivity and Authority in the Short Stories of Jean Rhys, Janet Frame and Anita Desai.” Her research interests include postcolonial literature, gender studies, authority, intertextuality and discourse analysis. She has published “Ending(s), Seriality and Interdiscursivity: The Paradox of the Collection of Short Stories in the Works of Jean Rhys and Janet Frame” in Sillages Critiques (24, 2018) and “The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction” in Women: A Cultural Review (31, 2020).

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“With the Exception of [Ali] Banana:” Second World War Bildung in the Burmese Jungle in Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy (2007)

Cédric Courtois

1 In her debut novel entitled Dust (2014), set in 2007, Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor stages a character called Nyipir, whose father and brother enlisted in the British army and went to Burma – present‑day Myanmar – to fight against the Japanese during the Second World War. All his life, Nyipir has been particularly obsessed with Burma and has always wanted to go there because his father and brother have never returned; however, he has never found the opportunity to do so, and this represents a wound that has never healed. After his daughter asks him: “‘What’s in Burma?’,” he answers: “‘Our people. Went for King George’s war. Didn’t come back’” (Owuor 2014a, 69). The fragmented syntax reflects his own sorrow, pain and possibly trauma related to the loss of those who have never returned from this far‑away land during this sombre period for the Kenyan people. In an interview with Michael Halmshaw, Owuor mentions the Burmese conflict and explains that “[d]ying away from home, away from the soil of your birth – and to do so unseen and unmourned – is a profound horror. As is the fact that we don’t necessarily talk about this absence, even if the feeling of […] loss looms large in different homes” (Owuor 2014b).1 The secondary place granted to this conflict in conversations, not only inside family circles and nation‑wide, but also in African fiction, mirrors its marginal position in both Western and African historiography. The pages historians devote to the Second World War in history books seldom or never evoke the Burmese conflict; when it is dealt with, it appears in mere footnotes. Instead, the emphasis is laid on the war zones in the USSR, the Pacific and Western Europe. The conflict in Burma has therefore been called “the forgotten war” (Latimer), the “forgotten conflict” (Thompson) or, more recently, an “unknown conflict […] of the Second World War” (Murray).

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2 In the Author’s Note at the end of Burma Boy, Yorùbá/Nigerian writer Biyi Bandele explains that his father – a former “Burma boy” himself – “immersed” him in “stories of carnage, shell‑shock and hard‑won compassion […] when [he] was little more than an infant” (2007, 216). The first‑hand account of life in the Burmese war zone by Bandele’s father, along with specific works which he mentions in the Author’s Note,2 have enabled Bandele to frontally address this issue in his fourth novel, Burma Boy (2007). The novel is itself a fictional account of the Burma Campaign which tells the story of Ali Banana, a 13‑year-old Hausa boy who enlists in the British army in the name of “kingi Jogi” (Bandele 2007, 39). It is exceptional since, to our knowledge, it is the first African novel to fully and directly deal with this part of the history of the Second World War.3 This appears unsurprising coming from a writer who is well‑known for subverting both Western and African literary orthodoxies, as exemplified in two of his earlier novels, The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (1999), which evidence crafty narrative manipulations and use of language. Private Ali Banana himself is a figure of exception, as shown in the following quotation – part of which is used in the title of this article: “With the exception of Banana whose face seemed to grow more baby‑like by the day, a moon‑like face that didn’t need a shave because there was nothing on it to shave, the men’s faces hadn’t seen a shave in months” (175–76). The young Ali Banana is quite unlike the other soldiers as his physical appearance seems to prove; we will see that his character also sets him apart from the rest of the group to which he belongs. In Burma Boy, Bandele’s literary – and, to some extent, historiographical – project seems to be dual. Firstly, he writes against the orthodoxies of canonical Western and African works and genres, among which and above all the Bildungsroman. Secondly, he introduces a representative account of the Burmese conflict in a fictional biographical narrative about a young Hausa private, thereby enabling the “[f]orgotten voices of Burma,” to quote Julian Thompson’s title, to be heard (again).

From Bildung to War Bildung: From the “Art of Living” to the Art of Surviving

3 In her review of Burma Boy, Emma Hagestadt argues that it is a “classic coming‑of-age tale” (2008). Bandele’s novel can indeed be considered as a Bildungsroman if one focuses on the genre’s emphasis on the development of a specific character, on his “passage from innocence to experience” (Suleiman 1983, 65).4 Moreover, the Bildungsroman “examines a regular course of development in the life of the individual […]. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary transit points of the individual on his way to maturity and harmony” (Dilthey 1985, 136).5 The concepts of “regular[ity],” “maturity” and “harmony” are central to the Bildungsroman’s project, as they represent the result of the Bildungsprozess. The protagonist learns from his experiences and, by the end of the novel, is ready to become a worthy member of society, whose values he had initially partly rejected. The journeys undertaken by the protagonist, a great many of which are articulated on a tripartite narrative structure involving departure, a journey – characterised by trials – and a return, also define the genre. The hero leaves his familiar environment and faces various situations that represent fruitful contexts for the construction of his identity, but they lead to personal conflicts. The encounter with such new environments shapes the

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protagonist’s character and influences him in his “process of becoming” an individual.6 As a teleological genre, the Bildungsroman insists on the importance of the social reintegration of the hero, thereby ensuring a form of stability for him. At the end of the novel, the protagonist has come to terms with his identity.

4 However, classic Bildungsromane have mainly featured Western, white, bourgeois, male protagonists, who had an easier access to these transformational steps.7 The Bildungsroman has indeed often been perceived as an androcentric genre, as the use of the masculine personal pronoun indicates in Wilhelm Dilthey’s study (in Labovitz 1986, 2), for example. Pin‑chia Feng also notes that “[t]he term Bildung […] implies an endorsement of patrilineage” (1999, 3). However, half a century after the publication of Goethe’s novel, women began to reconfigure the generic tradition of the Bildungsroman, which led to a broadening of the paradigmatic axis of the genre, a process furthered by post‑colonial writers.8 Although Ogaga Okuyade’s reference to the African post‑colonial context is too general and simplistic, his argument is still useful when he explains that “African writers […] adopt and reword the tradition of the bildungsroman form” and “that most third-generation African novels fall within the latitude of the [Bildungsroman] tradition” (2009, 1). Burma Boy is no exception to Okuyade’s argument, yet it does not resemble a classic coming‑of‑age novel, as Hagestadt argues.

5 Burma Boy belongs to a series of child‑soldier narratives, a particularly popular African literary phenomenon between 2000 and 2010. Warfare is at the core of these (auto)biographical narratives.9 It is all the more striking in Burma Boy, which, therefore, can be considered as an exceptional Bildungsroman.10 Franco Moretti describes the destructive impact of the war on the development of soldiers, proving that war and the Bildungsroman are, to a certain extent, antithetical: “faced with an increasing probability of being wounded, it is quite reasonable for the subject to try and make himself […] smaller and smaller. Under artillery fire, the favourite position of World War I infantrymen was the fetal one” (2000, 234). The foetal position is the symptom of a regression to the mother’s womb, as if development for the soldiers were completely impossible after the horrors they have been through. The Bildung of the individual therefore becomes impossible in a context of war, since the individual has become disintegrated, fragmented and incapable of growing up. However, Ericka Hoagland introduces the concept of “war Bildung,” which is essential for studying Burma Boy. Hoagland explains: ‘[W]ar Bildung’ uses elements common to the Bildungsroman, including an emphasis on self-reflection, the role of mentors in the protagonist’s development, and […] the protagonist’s relationship to the society from which s/he is separated and to which s/he may or may not be able to (or want to) return. Yet ‘war Bildung’ […] also incorporates anti-war rhetoric as a part of the ‘education’ the protagonist […] receives. Like the ‘traditional’ Bildungsroman protagonist, the ‘war Bildung’ protagonist is an ‘everyman/woman,’ hardly extraordinary but enmeshed in extraordinary circumstances. Mene [in Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten in English by Ken Saro‑Wiwa] serve[s] as [a] medium […] through which the readers’ own perceptions of war are challenged, extending the process of Bildung beyond the novel itself. (2006, 193–94)11 6 “War Bildung” – growing up in a time of war – means putting in place strategies of survival in front of (sometimes great) forms of violence, and developing/learning an art of surviving.12 Hoagland adds: “war Bildung [...] represent[s] a second, but not secondary, process of ‘Bildung’ necessary to the protagonist’s development” (12). To her, a form of development takes place even in wartime. This is partly what makes

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Burma Boy an exceptional Bildungsroman in the sense that the conditions for the Bildungsprozess that are depicted are far from what the Bildungsroman classically stages. War has a considerable impact on the development of the subjectivity of Ali Banana. The following passage focuses on the training every soldier follows in India before he is sent to Burma to fight the Japanese enemy: He [Ali Banana] learnt not so simple things such as covering tracks, the art of evasion, watermanship, river crossing, the open-eyed science of appreciating your terrain, night operations, defensive operations, stealth operations, initiating action on contact with the enemy; squad, platoon and column tactics, navigating the jungle, patrolling, scouting and map-reading, and preparing landing zones for airdrops. Together with every member of his unit, including the muleteers, he learnt to use every weapon in his section. […] He learnt things he thought he already knew, such as the proper way to clean a rifle. (Bandele 2007, 58) The learning process – or “war Bildung[sprozess]” – is emphasised through the listing of the countless skills the soldiers must learn, perform, and master on the battlefield. This is shown through the anaphora “He learnt,” which indicates that even in tragically difficult times, individuals/soldiers do learn something that contributes to their development. The use of the term “science” points to a perception of war as a complex “artform” and, as such, it needs to be learnt and practised. This training is part of the soldiers’ “war Bildung,” and the training conditions seem to be as difficult as the battles they will have to fight against the Japanese: The next seven days went in something of a blur – the exercises were gruelling and all‑consuming; by the end of each day Banana passed out as soon as he returned to the tent and staggered to his mat. Stand-to seemed to come increasingly earlier each day and the exercises seemed to go on for much longer. By the end of that week there had not been a night when he got more than three hours of sleep. (55) 7 The soldier who follows this training is no longer himself, and he even seems to lose the notion of time. The verbs “passed out” and “staggered,” as well as the adjectives “gruelling” and “all-consuming” emphasise the hardships faced by the young Ali in order to keep pace with the other men. Here, “war Bildung” consists in learning to control one’s body in order to survive in the Burmese jungle. “War Bildung” also comprises the remoulding of the soldiers’ identities, a sort of unlearning of previously acquired skills or intrinsic traits. They must not be exceptional in any way but have to conform to and obey a precise code of conduct. Burma Boy not only sabotages the individualist telos the Bildungsroman classically presents as one of its cornerstones, but also favours the development of collective ties. A sense of community increases progressively throughout the narrative. From a selfish and self-centred boy, Ali Banana becomes interested in his fellow-soldiers. The humility he acquires has been made possible by the context of the war. Soldiers, and child-soldiers in particular, do manage to learn in a context of conflict; yet it seems that the content of this “education” is linked to the practicality of the war. The fact that most of the narrative is set in the Burmese jungle is also an exceptional element that deserves a more thorough analysis because it affects the Bildung of Burma boys.

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A Reversed Bildung? Going Down / Growing Down in the Burmese Jungle

8 The Burmese jungle that Ali Banana and his section cross in order to wage war represents an unusual setting in the context of the (war) Bildungsroman, whether it be Western or African.13 The narrator mentions this difficult “journey” across the jungle (Bandele 2007, 204, 210). A similar environment, the Indian jungle – Burma/Myanmar shares a border with India, and Ali Banana and the other West African soldiers first receive a training in India (32) before heading to the war front in Burma – lies at the heart of Rudyard Kipling’s own Bildungsroman, The Jungle Book (1894), which seems to be intertextually alluded to by Bandele.14 Christie Harner explains that in The Jungle Book, “Mowgli progresses from a half‑wild child into an appropriate servant of the British, utilizing his unique skill set for the benefit of the Empire” (2019, 144). Ali Banana is also making use of his “unique skill,” in the eyes of the British authorities, i.e. becoming cannon fodder for the Empire, in order to wage King George’s war. While Mowgli is developing a voice – supposedly thanks to the “civilisation” brought by the British – Ali Banana already had a voice before he went to Burma, a voice he is losing little by little in this hostile new environment.

9 This journey is both geographical and metaphorical, and is strewn with hurdles. Ali Banana goes down the Burmese jungle, to the “heart of darkness,” in a descent into Hell, a katabasis that simultaneously evokes a downward movement and a military retreat.15 The jungle is presented as an uncivilised space that is at first frightening for Ali Banana. The other (downward) movement consists in a growing down process of the protagonist. The journey through the Burmese jungle therefore first seems to lead to a reversed Bildungsprozess, since Ali Banana’s geographical mobility is not teleological – as would be expected in the Bildungsroman genre – but circular. This possibly indicates an incapacity to reintegrate society because of the psychological impact caused by the horrors of the war, and the experiences undergone in the jungle.16 This terrain is a space that affects the protagonist’s subjectivity. The very first description of the jungle is given through the eyes of Ali Banana, in an omniscient third‑person narrative. The passage seems to develop a poetics of the sublime with its essential elements detailed by Edmund Burke. In Burma Boy, the jungle is at first an extremely antagonistic environment, as shown in the first jungle scene: A swirling inferno appeared in the distance, a blue pillar of fire roaring towards them. Farabiti Banana, near the back of the slow‑moving column marching in single file, froze briefly then shuffled along, nudged forward by the man behind him. The fire cut through the pitch-dark night and lit up the dense thicket of moss‑covered trees and the rocks wrapped in lichen that rose into great hills and fell into steep valleys along their path filled with strange plants and nameless wild beasts, and snipers real and imagined whose imminent appearance had kept them moving since they left their last bivouac just before dawn, trailed by pi‑dogs, and up till now, long after dusk, when their shoulders had sagged, crushed under the unbearable weight of the kit that each man carried on his back. As the mast of flames whooshed towards them, Farabiti Banana decided to run for his life. He felt […] these flames [had] come to devour them […]. He couldn’t understand why they were all ignoring it, trudging on and ignoring it, consumed it seemed only by the sheer effort of will required to raise one foot in front of the other. (Bandele 2007, 25–26)

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10 Several elements recall aspects addressed in Burke’s essay, among which the use of hypotyposis. The most striking image appears at the very beginning of this jungle scene, with a reference to a hellish place – an “inferno,” the word itself recalling Dante’s Divine Comedy – whose threatening presence is echoed in the term “fire” later on. The alliteration in [f] insists on the threat the jungle embodies. According to Burke, “[g]reatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime” (1823, 97). The dangerous flames Ali Banana sees at a distance, flames that can “devour” the soldiers, therefore giving the jungle a metaphoric capacity to digest, become an obsession for him and are once again a characteristic of the sublime: “the mind is so entirely filled with its objects, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Burke 1823, 73).17 Among the elements that lead to sublimity, according to Burke, are “Terror,” “Obscurity,” “Privation,” “Vastness,” “Infinity,” “Power,” “Suddenness,” all of them being present here. The fact that the jungle “rose into great hills and fell into steep valleys” offers a feeling of vastness, of infinity even, reinforced by the “precipice,” the “fast‑flowing stream,” and the “shaggy hill,” leading to the protagonist feeling overwhelmed.

11 Obscurity is also a defining characteristic of the Burmese jungle, the soldiers marching in a “pitch‑dark night.” The “dens[ity]” of the jungle metaphorically indicates the undecipherability of this unknown landscape for the young Ali. The jungle even triggers a confusion between reality and imagination. This gives a phantasmagoric quality to it – “snipers real and imagined.” Moreover, Ali’s main feeling is fear – “run for his life”; “impulse to flee.” Time dilation also seems to be at stake in this jungle: “That was two nights ago. Two nights only and yet it seemed to Ali Banana […] that it was such a long time ago” (Bandele 2007, 79). Ali Banana and the other soldiers are almost petrified: “froze briefly”; “had kept them moving.” In the context of Bildung, this fear is debilitating as it inhibits any attempt at mobility – hence, development. This recalls Burke’s essay according to which “all […] motions [of the soul] are suspended” in front of “the great and sublime in nature” (1823, 73; original emphasis).

12 However, there seems to have been a change in Ali Banana in this narrative which can also be read as a novel of “human emergence,” to quote Bakhtin (1986, 21–22): “Banana’s journey back to White City was painfully slow. It wasn’t simply because he was totally exhausted, or just because the trek back was uphill all the way” (Bandele 2007, 204). Here, the narrator describes an upward movement, which symbolises Ali’s emergence. Despite his initial fear, Ali seems to become accustomed to some of the elements which initially constituted a threat to his life in the Burmese jungle. They no longer have an impact on his psyche: “It rained all through the night but he didn’t once wake up” (208). An osmosis between Ali and nature even reaches a climax when, one morning, he wakes up covered with leeches, for which he feels empathy: He started pulling them out, but then he saw that once they’d had their fill, once their famished little bodies had swollen up with his blood, the leeches simply retracted their muscular, needle-sharp, flesh-puncturing snouts from his body and fell to the ground in a happy swoon. He could tell they were happy […]. (208) These leeches are given human attributes. Ali does not consider them as a nuisance, but as “friends” (208), to which he offers a meal (his own blood). The young soldier is affected by hallucinations since, according to him, the movements of the leeches while they are feeding on his own body are akin to a “dance” (208). He even apologizes for hurting them.

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13 There has been a change in Ali at the end of the novel, as explained in the following passage when he finally arrives in the camp where his platoon is based: The sentries took one look at the naked African singing loudly as he approached the wire and rushed to help him inside. They couldn’t make out who he was but they knew that any black man in Burma had to be one of them. All they could tell was that the man looked to be about fifty years old. (Bandele 2007, 211) However, if there is indeed a literal emergence of Ali in White City, he emerges as a madman after wandering in the jungle. When they see him back at the camp, the other soldiers acknowledge his madness: “Bloken’s jaw fell wide open. He stared groggily at the mad man talking to him” (212). It is a physical change that has occurred in just a few days. The loss of his mentor (Damisa) is described as a major change in his relation to death and this completely derails Bildung.18 While Ali was considered as a naive and annoying young boy at the beginning, he is now compared to a fifty-year‑old man whom nobody seems to recognise. His identity has been lost in the jungle in the process of the war: he is just an “African man.” The use of “man,” which contrasts with the titular “boy,” indicates a physical change but also a psychological one. There has been a war Bildung and Ali has grown (old); he has also gone back to a state of innocence, as shown by his madness. Finally, what has become of the voice of this lively, talkative chap the reader met at the beginning of the novel?

Decolonising History: Giving a Voice to the West African Subaltern

14 First- and second‑generation African writers have often linked poetics and politics, as literature is not produced in a void, and Bandele, a third‑generation writer, seems to be no exception.19 In Burma Boy, the voices of West African subalterns are put to the fore, partly enabling Bandele to decolonise history.20 In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises the question of the possibility and the capacity for marginal figures to become speaking subjects: she famously argues that Indian women in a subaltern position cannot speak.21 For Spivak, US and European intellectuals who aim to talk about marginalised subaltern subjects end up speaking for these subjects (82–83). One could therefore question the role of intellectuals in the representation of the deceased like the Nigerians who fought as Chindits – “long‑range penetration groups trained to operate deep behind Japanese lines” (Bandele 2007, 21) – and who have left little to no trace in history books.22 Fiction cannot speak for real soldiers, nor can it genuinely represent their experiences, but Burma Boy features a didactic component aimed at educating the reader.

15 In his Guardian article on Burma Boy, Giles Foden writes: There have been some great memoirs of Chindit life, but the thousands of Africans who fought with the force – including Bandele’s own father – have not been properly memorialised. Though credited with great courage and resourcefulness, they have existed only in the margins of the official record, as cameos and asides. (2007) West African soldiers have never been granted the place they deserve in the history of the Second World War. Despite the heterodiegetic narration used, Ali Banana, the subaltern of the Second World War, acquires a voice both through indirect and direct speech. Bandele’s project seems to be in line with Subaltern Studies, as introduced by

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Ranajit Guha (see Guha 1996), whose aim is to integrate history-less figures into history. In “Chandra’s death,” Guha himself explains one of the objectives of subaltern studies: How is one to reclaim this document for history? The ordinary apparatus of historiography has little help to offer us here. Designed for big events and institutions, it is most at ease when made to operate on those larger phenomena that visibly stick out of the debris of the past. As a result, historical scholarship has developed, through recursive practice, a tradition that tends to ignore the small drama and fine detail of social existence, especially at its lower depths. A critical historiography can make up for this lacuna by bending closer to the ground in order to pick up the traces of subaltern life in its passage through time. (1997, 36)23 16 By diversifying the voices in the history of the Second World War, by offering a larger picture of this period, Bandele also decolonises History. To quote Sophie Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, “the histories of extra‑western worlds are […] almost never taken into consideration in global historiographical panoramas, for which they remain blind spots” (2003, 1; my translation).24 The fact that we hear various Hausa voices in the novel – Damisa’s, Danja’s, Ali Banana’s, Zololo’s – is also part of Bandele’s decolonial project since, according to Claire Gallien, decolonialism emphasises “a suspicion towards […] any homogeneous understanding of identity” (2020, 31). Although, as we have seen earlier, Bildung is not satisfying in Burma Boy, this novel enables Bandele to shed light on subaltern soldiers who have long been ignored. By tackling this issue in a direct way, Bandele also writes back to African history as it has been written until very recently, and engages in a historiographical project. He is in line with his “writing back” predecessors of the 1950s and 1960s, like Chinua Achebe, who offered what he would have described as the lion’s version of the hunt, something that made him write Things Fall Apart in 1958. The Nigerian writer famously declared: There is a great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be that writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions. (qtd. in Brooks 1994) It is possible to draw a parallel between the “agony,” “the travail,” and “the bravery […] of the lions” that Achebe refers to and the plight of the soldiers who are the heroes of Bandele’s novel.

17 At first sight, early in the novel, the young Ali Banana shows great enthusiasm at the idea of waging war against the Japanese enemy.25 His ardour is probably linked to the fact that he has not fought in the Burmese jungle yet. An analepsis also allows the narrator to underline the enthusiasm of the soldiers for the army uniform and the status attached to it: Indeed when Ali and his friends marched, proudly, through the streets of Kaduna in these boots, they looked as if they were wearing a flotilla of shoe-sized boats and could set sail if they stepped into the River Kaduna and the wind was strong enough. Ali, whose tiny feet had known no shoes before, wore them with great pride. (Bandele 2007, 43) The use of the polyptoton “proud/pride” reveals a lot about these young men’s impression regarding their enlistment and enables Bandele to emphasise Ali Banana’s tragic disillusion-to-come. The young man shows impatience while he finds himself in a military hospital in Bombay, because he has caught chickenpox:

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Banana […] paid a visit to Staff Office every day without fail, begging, pestering and haranguing the non-commissioned officers there. He haughtily informed the NCOs that he hadn’t travelled all the way from Kaduna to Laagos, from Laagos to Preetown, from Preetown to Darban and all the way to India just so he could go back to Nigeria with tales of chickenpox conquered. ‘I here to fight na Boma,’ Banana declared. ‘I here for to killi di Janpani.’ (33) 18 The narrator sometimes relinquishes his prerogative of omniscience. For example, when the narrative deals with Ali Banana’s personal matters, such as his origins and the portrayal of his parents, the narrator vanishes in order to let him express himself in direct speech. He does so for conversations between the soldiers that can cover several consecutive pages, thus allowing the reader to hear subaltern voices. In the afore‑mentioned quotation (Bandele 2007, 33), Ali Banana alters the names of the cities which are located on his sea trip to India. This transformation/deformation of topological names can be perceived as the mark of their pronunciation by the young Hausa speaking protagonist: for instance, the capital of Sierra Leone, “Freetown,” is pronounced “Preetown.”26 Standard English is affected by a form of syntax which is influenced by the Hausa language. Moreover, although they are expressed in English, the cultural references are Nigerian or, to be more precise, Hausa. This is the case with the expression “‘Roast me a cassava and you can have the skin’” (39) which is used by Ali Banana when he addresses a Sergeant.27

19 The novel’s use of dialogue provides opportunities to hear the singularity of Ali Banana’s voice, and his recourse to quasi-neologisms which deviate from standard English. The use of “english” words (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2002, 8) such as “Janpani” instead of “Japanese,” “killi,” instead of “kill,” “Boma” instead of “Burma,” or, elsewhere in the text, “Samanja” instead of “Sergeant,” “kingi Jogi” instead of “King George,” imposes a “sense of difference,” a distinction “between the ‘standard’ British English inherited from the empire and the english which the language has become in post-colonial countries” (8). This english destabilises both “standard British English” and the narrative of the Second World War. Another passage also reveals this subversive aspect. In an exchange between a Hausa-speaking Japanese – an occurrence which the West African soldiers find surprising, as shown in the accumulation of adjectives before the word “Hausa” – and the Nigerian soldiers themselves, the Hausa language momentarily interrupts the narrative written in English. This destabilisation process is all the more visible as it is emphasised by italics: ‘Black man!’ rang the voice. ‘The white man is no friend of yours. The white man is your oppressor. Why are you dying for him? Leave him now. Let him fight his own war by himself.’ […] What startled D‑Section that night was that the Japs were speaking to them not in English but in perfectly accentless, unhesitant, impeccable Hausa. Once they got over their initial shock, Danja was the first to respond. ‘Uwar ka!’ he yelled. Your mother. […] Seconds later, the same Jap voice responded. ‘Uban ka!’ said the Jap. Your father. […] ‘Buran uban ka!’ yelled Guntu. Your father’s penis. […] ‘Durin uwar ka!’ shouted Banana. Your mother’s vagina. […] ‘Blaady facker,’ Bloken muttered. ‘Blaady madafacker.’ (165–66) The use of stichomythia makes this exchange highly comical. The soldiers hurl grenades, in the same way as they insult each other. Contact is nevertheless established between the enemies. This is made possible through language, and the echo “mother”/“father,” which draws attention to an exchange, albeit not a nice one. The

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surprise also comes from the fact that a Japanese soldier speaks perfect Hausa; this perfection is conveyed through the impeccable English syntax in the first sentence in this passage, while it is the phonetic transcription of an insult launched by Bloken that is offered in order to conclude this dialogue. This hybridization of language points to a linguistic subversion that amounts to a political statement against history written by the victors, a strategy that is at the very core of the historiographical postcolonial strategy. The “classic” Second World War narrative has been momentarily interrupted. Moreover, in the epigraph to Burma Boy, Bandele quotes a passage from another novel entitled The March Out written by British writer James Shaw, in 1953, and he chooses to use a specific cue pronounced by a soldier called Ali Banana: The gun arrived, and I checked it, wondering how much the men knew about the thing. ‘Who’s number one?’ ‘Me be,’ exclaimed Private Ali Banana. James Shaw, The March Out. (Bandele 2007, n.p.) Ali Banana’s answer seems to be a way to affirm his identity and his existence, but to confirm the great implication of the Nigerians during the Second World War, after the question asked by the other character (who is unknown in the epigraph): “Who’s number one?”, to which the answer is “Me be,” which is grammatically incorrect but very powerful because of its concision. The use of the infinitive “be” emphasises the soldier’s desire to impose his voice in the Eurocentric narrative of the Second World War.

20 Yet another paratextual element leads to the disruption of the historical and literary discourses of the Second World War. Indeed, Bandele ends his Bildungsroman with a sentence in Hausa, followed by its translation into English: “Kurunkus kan dan bera. / Off with the rat’s head” (2007, 215). Although this could surprise a Western reader, it is not new to a North Nigerian one. In popular Hausa tales, it is usual to hear two sentences which constitute their framing. At the beginning, the sentence “A story, a story. Let it go, let it come,” is usually uttered. The sentence “Off with the rat’s head” is heard at the end of such tales. Furthermore, Ali becomes the griot of Hausa history as he also tells stories, in the manner of Hausa tales, as indicated in a sentence at the end of one of his stories: “‘That is all,’ I said ‘Off with the rat’s head’” (42). The pedagogical value of these tales echoes that of the Bildungsroman as a genre. As explained by Karl Morgenstern: “[the Bildungsroman] was to portray the hero’s Bildung (formation) in all its steps and final goal as well as to foster the Bildung of the reader” (in Summerfield and Downward 2010, 1). Burma Boy highlights the importance of rewriting the history of the Second World War by focusing on the subaltern and it offers the possibility to correct the “single [hi]story” of Africa, to quote Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In that sense, Bandele’s novel contributes to the Bildung of the (Western) reader.

21 By writing a historical novel about the Second World War and by choosing Ali Banana, a representative of subalternity, as his protagonist, Biyi Bandele has offered a novel in which poetics and politics converge. By opting for the genre of the Bildungsroman, which is ideologically charged, Bandele tells the story of a young boy who has to grow in terrible conditions in the Burmese jungle. What we have called “war Bildung” – as in “war training” – does take place. Yet, Bildung in the more traditional sense cannot occur: instead of shedding light on the emergence of a unified self, this Bildungsroman insists on the fragmentation and the madness of this young individual. Finally, even though Bildung might not be satisfying for Ali Banana, this novel nevertheless offers a

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great opportunity to endow West African soldiers with an existence, a memory and possibly a voice.

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NOTES

1. Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1975) is an earlier example of an African novel dealing with the Burmese conflict through the memories of Second World War veterans.

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2. Bandele expresses his “gratitude” to a number of sources that helped him write his novel, among which three biographies of Orde Wingate, two historical studies about West African soldiers during WWII, as well as a collection of Hausa stories. 3. In the “Introduction” to a recent study he published as editor, Chris Murray explains that there are “distinct approaches” to the study of the Second World War. Among them, the “micro‑level” approach corresponds to what is presented in Burma Boy: “there is literature that fixates on the humanity of the war, the experiences of those who actually lived through the hell. Historians, such as the popular Max Hastings, retell individual experiences that are engrossing and incredibly important to furthering our understanding but in doing so can sometimes lose the forest for the sake of the trees – in some cases, so much so that we can almost be forgiven for forgetting exactly what war is being written about” (1–2). Although Bandele’s novel does deal with the Second World War, it is true that no bigger picture of the war is offered in his book. Yet, it seems to be exactly Bandele’s project, by solely focusing on the (in)humanity of these West African soldiers fighting in Burma. 4. The Bildungsroman – coined by scholar Karl Morgenstern (1819) – is originally a German genre, born at the end of the eighteenth century, with the publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels (1795–96), which is considered as the archetype of the genre, and which Morgenstern uses to define its main characteristics; see also Franco Moretti (2000, 3). 5. Other critics question whether Goethe’s novel itself is a Bildungsroman. This leads to a confusion regarding what some critics consider as the archetypal Bildungsroman (see Amrine). The genre is no longer solely German, it has become international. 6. Mikhaïl Bakhtin writes: “[a] type of novel that provides an image of man in the process of becoming. […] This type of novel can be designated in the most general sense as the novel of human emergence” (1986, 21–22; original emphasis). 7. Ericka Hoagland analyses the ideological significance and implication of the Bildungsroman which, for her, is linked to “imperialist patriarchal practice,” and used to tell “a story […] that was white, male, heterosexual, and middle‑class” (2006, 3–4). 8. Tobias Boes observes that “[t]he rise of feminist, postcolonial and minority studies during the 1980s and 90s led to an expansion of the traditional Bildungsroman definition; the genre was broadened to include coming‑of‑age narratives that bear only cursory resemblance to nineteenth century European models” (2010, 231). It is also an element mentioned by Ralph A. Austen (2015, 215). Jarad Heath Fennel argues that “[t]he Bildungsroman genre is the perfect form for expressing the struggles of the emerging postcolonial subject” (2016, 24). 9. Among these novels, one can name the following examples, some of which are autobiographies: Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) by Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma, Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life (2002) by Ugandan writer China Keitetsi, Beasts of No Nation (2005) by Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala, Song for Night (2007) by Nigerian writer Chris Abani, A Long Way Gone (2007) by Sierra Leonean writer Ishmael Beah, War Child: A Boy Soldier’s Story (2009) by South Sudanese writer Emmanuel Jal, etc. This African transnational literary phenomenon might have given the impression that child‑soldiers only exist in Africa. Biyi Bandele offers another story, through a new setting, as will be studied here. 10. Writing about the impact of the war on young soldiers is however neither new nor intrinsically African. German writer Erich Maria Remarque famously wrote an anti‑war Bildungsroman entitled All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The main character is a young German soldier during the Great War. Remarque’s novel depicts the spiritual crisis of this (anti-)hero and his disenchantment with war. David M. Rosen explains that by giving details about the physical and psychological consequences of the war, a literary “critique of war” was born (2015, 103). Rosen also notices a “humanitarian” shift in the fictional representation of the child, from “heroic child fighter” to “the battered victim” (102). Burma Boy also develops an anti‑war stance.

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11. In Burma Boy, the character named Damisa is a member of the group of soldiers to which Ali Banana belongs. Ali Banana admires Damisa because the latter is older and more mature, and he embodies the role of the mentor for the young boy, the mentor being central in the process of identity construction of the hero in the Bildungsroman (see Feng 1999, 3). The narrator reveals that “Samanja Damisa was Banana’s hero. He was twelve years older than Banana and had been to more places and done more things than anyone Banana had met” (Bandele 2007, 30). First, Damisa is described as a “tall, broad‑chested man” whose main characteristic is his missing “left ear” (29). The reader learns that he is a seasoned soldier, who has already fought on another war front, that of Abyssinia. 12. By using the expression “art of surviving,” I aim to echo Franco Moretti who alludes to the Bildungsroman genre and the “art of living” (2000, 32). In most works dealing with child‑soldiers, the focus is on survivalism and not on how these young protagonists live. 13. It is worth noting that in sub‑Saharan African societies, the Bildungsroman’s function can be related to African initiation ceremonies, most of which are accompanied – as is also the case for the Bildungsroman – by didactic tales. For example, Yorùbá writer D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga (1938) – translated into English from the Yorùbá by Wole Soyinka and central to Yorùbá (oral) literature and philosophy – together with Amos Tutuola’s The Palm‑Wine Drinkard (1952) or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), deeply inspired by Fagunwa’s work, are early Nigerian works adapted from initiatory tales. This might explain why the Bildungsroman genre has particularly caught on in Africa, a natural terrain, or so it seems, for these tales of initiation and maturation. Different episodes are described in Fagunwa and Tutuola’s works – monsters, descents into abysses, ascensions to the skies, harsh, if not impossible, tasks to achieve, symbolic death, rebirth, in the Bush – which represent trials for the hero. Similar episodes can be found in more recent novels, like in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), for example. In Burma Boy, Bandele comes within the scope of a whole tradition of Yorùbá writers who are particularly interested in initiatory tales. 14. Elliott L. Gilbert and Don Randall read The Jungle Book as a Bildungsroman. Other critics, like Jessica Straley, argue that it “never was [a] Bildungsroman” (2016, 121). 15. In its general sense “katabasis” refers to a descent of some sort, and to a retreat in a military context. 16. For example, Ali Banana’s mentor, Damisa, asks him to shoot him dead because he is wounded and does not want to be killed by the Japanese enemy (Bandele 2007, 203). Another soldier named Danja warns Ali: “‘[K]illing men does not make a man of you’” (190). This killing, and that of enemies, which, in the context of war Bildung alluded to earlier could be considered as an initiatory process, hampers – rather than contributes to – the development of the protagonist. 17. These flames are actually not fire, as Ali Banana explains later on: “The fire which earlier had frightened Banana and made him nearly flee had ceased to trouble him. That fire, which wasn’t a fire at all, but a million fireflies fused together into one giant piercing flame, had long ago disappeared. But the fear had not left him. He no longer remembered the excitement he’d felt only three days earlier. That feeling was gone, replaced by this numbing, if not disabling, anxiety” (Bandele 2007, 81; emphasis mine). Anxiety, or even fear, hamper mobility, as this quotation shows. 18. This could be compared to what happens to Damisa himself when Zololo dies: “He was only twenty‑six; in Banana’s eyes he’d always behaved like a man twice his age. But now as he rested his head against the teak tree, he looked like a little boy lost” (Bandele 2007, 126). 19. For example, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o deems that a writer should be politically committed: “Whether or not he is aware of it, [the writer’s] works reflect one or more aspects of the intense economic, political, cultural and ideological struggles of his society. […] Every writer is a writer in politics” (1997, 19).

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20. Claire Gallien explains that “[d]ecolonial studies emerged as a university field [in the years 2000], largely under the impulse of predominantly male scholars from Latin and South America now working for US and European universities and research centers. […] Both postcolonial and decolonial studies engage with global structures, experiences, and discourses of colonial domination. […] Both fields focus on marginalized people, whose experiences, imaginations, and knowledge of the world count less, or simply do not count at all” (29–30). These scholars include Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, Argentinian semiotician Walter D. Mignolo, US researcher Catherine E. Walsh, among others. 21. The concept of “subaltern” refers to figures who are not represented historically. This conception was highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s definition of cultural hegemony, that of a structural domination of a governing class – including intellectuals – vis-à‑vis those deprived of any power of representation. 22. The memoirs of a former Nigerian Chindit named Isaac Fadoyebo, entitled A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck, were published in 1999 after they were found in the Imperial War Museum in London. 23. More recently, Gyanendra Pandey, one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies group, put to the fore his willingness and (political) commitment to (re)writing history through his “defense of the fragment” (2005, 16), thereby acting against grand narratives. Bandele seems to share this project in Burma Boy. 24. “[L]es histoires des mondes extra‑occidentaux ne sont […] presque jamais prises en considération dans les panoramas historiographiques globaux, dont elles demeurent les angles morts.” 25. The choice of an adolescent figure both depicts a historical reality – as Isaac Fadoyebo testified – and an interesting narrative choice, since adolescence represents an interstitial space between childhood and adulthood. However, Ali Banana and the other soldiers go back to a state of infancy, as explained earlier. The description of Damisa’s dead body attests to this aspect: “[Banana] knelt down and lifted [Damisa’s] body. Damisa, a towering giant of a man, was light as a suckling” (Bandele 2007, 202; emphasis mine). The passage from “man” to “suckling” – not even “toddler” – is striking in that respect. These two characters symbolically return to a state of infancy, the Latin word infans meaning the one who has no voice. 26. UCLA’s “Teaching and Research: African Languages” website explains that “[t]he Hausa sound written ‘f’ is not pronounced like the ‘f’ typical of European languages such as English or French. […] In Hausa, ‘f’ is a bilabial sound. The lips are brought near each other and air is blown between them. For some Hausa speakers, the constriction of the lips is so tight that ‘f’ sounds very much like English ‘p’” (see http://aflang.humanities.ucla.edu/language-materials/chadic-languages/ hausa/hausa-online-grammar/pronunciation-writing/consonant-sounds/). 27. No clear explanation of this expression has been found, but one can guess that in the context where it appears in the novel, it means that Ali Banana is not a person who takes advantage of a situation, he is “not mean” (Bandele 2007, 39), as he explains to the Captain. This use of a proverb once again reminds the reader of Chinua Achebe’s relationship with proverbs when he wrote that “[a]mong the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm‑oil with which words are eaten” (1986, 4). In the same way as his Igbo predecessor, Bandele adapts the English language as a means to provide access to a specific African culture. This grants more authenticity to this West African account of the Second World War, and imposes a vision of Ali Banana as a master of “the art of conversation.” It also partakes of a decolonial objective whereby Bandele unveils an alternative epistemology, a different cosmovision.

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ABSTRACTS

Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy (2007) is exceptional in various ways. The novel deals with the Burma campaign, a series of battles fought in the former British colony of Burma during the Second World War. Bandele’s novel is therefore exceptional in the context of the Nigerian war novel, which has mostly addressed the Nigerian Civil War (1967‑70). This exceptionality is also found in the fact that Bandele rewrites the Eurocentric narrative of WWII and gives a voice to those who have long been silenced in history books, i.e. West African soldiers involved in a deadly conflict far away from their homes, fighting for a country with which they had little in common. The ultimate exceptionality of the novel lies in the rewriting of the Bildungsroman genre in a novel in which the self is fragmented; this contradicts the unified self found in the traditional version of the genre.

INDEX

Keywords: Bildungsroman, war Bildung, Nigerian literature, Second World War, History, childhood, jungle, subaltern, voice

AUTHOR

CÉDRIC COURTOIS

University of Lille Cédric Courtois is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lille specialising in Nigerian literature, which was the focus of his PhD dissertation, entitled “Itineraries of a Genre. Variations on the Bildungsroman in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction” (2019). He has published various articles and book chapters on the rewritings of the Bildungsroman genre in contemporary Nigerian fiction, mobility studies, refugee literature, and LGBTQ studies. His research interests include postcolonial literatures, decoloniality, transnationalism, transculturalism, gender studies, ecopoetics, ecofeminism, gender studies, and the ethics and aesthetics of violence in African literatures written in English.

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Revisiting Canadian Modernism: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959)

André Dodeman

1 Robert Kroetsch once wrote in the 1970s that Canadian fiction evolved directly from Victorian fiction to postmodernism in the 1960s, and although such a statement was meant in jest, it nevertheless showed to what extent readers were more familiar with realist and postmodernist writers than with the modernist innovations of the 1950s. The fact that most modernist texts of the 1950s had been printed by small presses had the effect of relegating Canadian modernism to a short period of transition in Canadian literary history, not to mention the acclaimed rise of Canadian postmodernism in the 1960s and early 1970s with internationally famous writers like Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood. In the first half of the twentieth century, the realist tradition held a strong position in Canada thanks to writers like Frederick Philip Grove and Hugh MacLennan who familiarized readers worldwide with a specific local or regional Canadian time and space by resorting to the more well-known, classic modes of realism and romance. It was in the aftermath of World War Two, which destabilized notions of order and meaning, that writers began experimenting with narrative form and reshaping Canadian fiction. Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952) and Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel (1954) are only two examples of innovative experimentation with storytelling, but it is more importantly Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook – published in 1959, but completed in 1952 – that critics identify today with the emergence of Canadian modernism.

2 Watson’s novel played a role in challenging classic modes of storytelling and former realist conventions, and in contributing to a specifically Canadian modernist aesthetic. The result is a story that, to this day, remains exceptional in its inclination to resist clear-cut classification. In the United States and Europe, modernist novels were concerned with representing the fragmented nature of the world and the long-term effects of the First World War.1 There is no denying that Watson was inspired by these models, but rather than drawing a macrocosmic portrait of a fragmented world, her

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novel sought to represent a microcosmic dislocated community in the British Columbia interior in need of spiritual reconnection and social reconstruction.

3 This article will first examine Watson’s aesthetics of narrative and spatial fragmentation in the novel before focusing on the problematics of linguistic fragmentation, which has always been one of the major concerns of European and American modernist texts. Watson’s narrative technique and stylistic devices question the very ability of language to speak for a community that is unable to articulate their own concerns and find meaning to their existence. The result is a highly exceptional novel that is now associated with a specifically Canadian modernist aesthetic, which problematizes the relationship between a vast and ominous landscape and the language that is used to represent and appropriate it. Recent readings of The Double Hook in this light have allowed many readers and academics to develop a more profound understanding of Canadian modernism.

A fragmented narrative for fragmented spaces

4 In The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, published in the early 1960s, Frank Joseph wrote that one of the main differences between realist and modernist aesthetics is the presence or lack of “historical depth” within the narrative. In modernist novels, such “historical depth,” he writes, has been replaced by a “spatial fusion” (qtd. in Morriss 2015, 77) of past and present in which plot and character seem to evolve in a centripetal fictional world outside history. Time becomes purely mythical in the story as the characters go through a collective crisis in a nameless landscape without clear time indications. The Double Hook is set in a small, rural and extremely isolated community located at Dog Creek, in an area more commonly known as the Cariboo country, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The isolation of this small community from a vaster outside world is illustrated by the incipit, a form of dramatis personae that not only serves to introduce the readers to the characters, but also grounds the characters in a local space and prefigures the content of the entire chapter: In the folds of the hills under Coyote’s eye lived the old lady, mother of William of James and of Greta lived James and Greta lived William and Ara his wife lived the Widow Wagner the Widow’s girl Lenchen the Widow’s boy lived Felix Prosper and Angel lived Theophil and Kip

until one morning in July (Watson 1959, 19) This modern technique of disrupting the classic layout of narrative recalls earlier works by Lost Generation poets such as e.e.cummings and writers like John Dos Passos whose U.S.A. trilogy displayed the same features of break and fragmentation to challenge classic conventions, disrupt the readers’ expectations and awaken them to

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the political and cultural transformations of the modern world. In Watson’s incipit, the spaces between the opening lines foreground the break between the first two haunting figures of Coyote and the mother and the small community made up of James, Greta and William, the Widow’s family, Felix Prosper and his wife Angel and finally Kip. It also foregrounds Watson’s deliberate choice to downplay the classic function of the omniscient narrator by reducing it to an exterior, impersonal function dominated by the trickster figure of Coyote and his all-seeing eye/I. Even though Watson openly admitted in an interview that she “wanted to get rid of reportage” and “the condescension of omniscience” (Watson 2015, 165), this barely perceptible, yet all- encompassing narrator serves to expose the deeply fragmented nature of the community by dealing with each character separately in the opening chapters of the novel. The only action that brings the characters together is the haunting figure of the slain mother seen fishing on everyone’s property.

5 As mentioned above, the novel’s regional setting, the community’s isolated location and the absence of any clear time indication anchor the characters in a mythical time and space which foregrounds Watson’s intention to draw universal meaning from a rural, microcosmic community in the British Columbia interior. Many reviews and articles have been written about The Double Hook and its recreation of a mythical time of beginnings. The plethora of biblical references in the story has led Margot Northey, in “Symbolic Grotesque: The Double Hook,” to write that “the message of The Double Hook is religious” and that the story is “about redemption written from a Christian vantage point” (Northey 2015, 62). It is true that the story begins with the crime of matricide that will affect the entire community and act as a triggering moment in the narrative. James, the leader of the community, kills his own mother by throwing her down the stairs: James was at the top of the stairs. His hand half-raised. His voice in the rafters. James walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof. In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James’s will. By James’s hand. By James’s words: This is my day. You’ll not fish today. (Watson 1959, 19) This in medias res beginning, enhanced by its dominant ING forms, deprives the incipit of the causality so characteristic of realist fiction and gives the scene a mythical dimension. Killing his own mother, who is understood to have ruled over the community with an iron fist, becomes an original act of rebellion and a sin that disrupt the apparent tranquility and unity of the community. In his chapter entitled “Sheila Watson, Wyndham Lewis and Men Without Art,” Dean Irvine associates James’s clenched fist with “what the German expressionists called Aufbruch, an awakening from a repressed condition and a violent breaking free from the past” (2016, 185). This inaugural matricide constitutes an original sin that echoes the biblical myth of the fall, the main consequence of which was the isolation of humanity and man’s permanent separation from the divine. The crime itself is the triggering act that moves the plot forward to elicit a silent, fragmented, and postlapsarian world. It is only after James’s descent from the hill to the “town below” and his subsequent return that the community begins to rebuild itself on more solid grounds.

6 The community is a nameless microcosm in a nameless valley, the position of which can only be determined in relation to the nameless “town below” and the “Indian reservation” in between. Watson’s diegetic world plays on the metaphor of the axis mundi insofar as the monolithic, yet anthropomorphized hill (with its arms, lips and ribs) towers above the characters and the town below. The valley and the town both

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serve as the community’s upper and lower boundaries that foreground the fragmentation of the community in which each individual is a separate inarticulate entity. However, this metaphor of the axis mundi suggests possible upward or downward movements that, as Northrop Frye contends in Words with Power, are prone to moments of development and transformation.2 After blinding Kip – the First Nations character closest to Coyote – for seeing too much of the truth, and striking his sister Greta and Lenchen, the girl he has made pregnant, James saddles his horse and leaves to go to the town below: The world didn’t seem to care. James passed William’s house. He passed Theophil’s. He passed the Wagners’. Smoke was rising from the Wagners’ chimney; otherwise, there was no sign of life. James passed Felix Prosper’s. (Watson 1959, 91) The paratactic style of the paragraph marking the beginning of James’s descent from the community “up above” (96) to the “town below” (92) unveils a fragmented community that stands in sharp contrast with the paragraph relating his return after a transformative stay in the town: The horse had brought him on the brow of the hill. Below him he could see the road which ran up the creek past Felix Prosper’s, past Theophil’s, past the Widow Wagner’s, past William’s, round by the flat lake to his own gate. (127) 7 The preposition “past” serves, like all other prepositions, to link words together and convey a sense of syntactic unity. This unity expressing his renewal and return is in keeping with many earlier modernist works which aimed to portray the fragmented nature of the world after catastrophic cosmic events such as World War One and the Great Depression, all the while hinting at the possibility of a return to order and wholeness. In the same way, Watson’s novel ends with the return of the hero, his reconciliation with the rest of the community and the birth of his child. This well- rounded denouement is clearly a result of her own experience with geographical and psychological isolation in the midst of the ineffable British Columbian landscape she discovered when she was working as a schoolteacher from 1935 to 1937. In “Ethics, Spectres, and Formalism in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook,” Marlene Goldman underscores the writer’s view that such isolation could only be resolved through contact and communication: “Watson’s experience of loneliness and of the unendurable physical and, more importantly, psychological isolation directly inform her novel about the moral imperative to transcend isolation, to care for others, and to create a sense of community” (2007, 193). Drawing on her own experience, Watson leads readers to understand that the sense of community which is absent from the beginning of The Double Hook can only be restored through language and communication.

A broken language for a broken community

8 Watson’s own experience of reading and teaching along with her interaction with the Dog Creek community in the British Columbia interior led her to investigate the problematics of language and art that resulted in the very original and exceptional form of The Double Hook. The singular and yet all-seeing and unidentifiable narrator, the highly symbolic content of the novel which minimizes the importance of plot and history, the highly condensed syntax and the prevalence of prose poetry are only some of the main features of the book that mark a break with what was being written at the time. In fact, Watson’s work, like many other modernist novels written before hers,

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anticipated some of the later poststructuralist concerns with language and meaning. The various rhetorical devices in her novel point to the discrepancy between signifier and signified and the subsequent fluctuation of meaning it entails. These renderings of the discrepancies and fluctuations in meaning heralded the epistemological questions raised by later poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida who would introduce new ideas such as trace and différance and problematize the interplay between identity and otherness.

9 The enigmatic title of the novel already testifies to Watson’s argument that words cannot be limited to a single and easily identifiable meaning, and that they also contain the trace of otherness. It is the enigmatic oracular character Kip that gives the title its meaning: [James] doesn’t know you can’t catch the glory on a hook and hold on to it. That when you fish for the glory you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear. (Watson 1959, 61) The recurrent term “glory” was chosen for its polysemy and points to the inextricable nature of the connection between life and death. After James kills his mother, each of the characters sees her spectral figure fishing in a place where she does not belong, evoking the haunting presence of death in the very fabric and meaning of life.

10 In addition to polysemy, other rhetorical devices are used to arrest and draw the reader’s attention to the instability and ambiguity of meaning. The text is replete with anaphoras which aim at evincing the internal workings of a character’s thought processes. The widow’s son Heinrich chases Kip away because of his role as harbinger of death and the narrator invites the reader into the young character’s mind: Stood thinking how a horse can stand in sunlight and know nothing but the saddle and the sting of sweat on hide and the salt line forming under the saddle’s edge. Stood thinking of sweat and heat and the pain of living, the pain of fire in the middle of a haystack. Stood thinking of light burning free on the hills and flashing like the glory against the hides of things. (Watson 1959, 28) The anaphora and the /s/ alliteration in the first sentence formally illustrate how words and sounds naturally associate with others and how meaning tends to naturally disseminate. The polyptoton and tautology are also frequently used to hint at the precarious relationship between form and meaning. While the polyptoton (“People keep thinking thoughts into other people’s heads,” 75) suggests the morphing of meaning into other meanings, the tautological expressions in the text that are usually spoken by James’s brother William (“The thing about a dog lying in the sunlight is it just lies in the sunlight,” 130) hint at the reflexivity of language and, more importantly, its shortcomings. These devices show that language and meaning constantly elude the characters, some of whom feel the need to fall back on the reassuring, fixed languages of the past.

11 Yet fixed words and expressions are much too burdened by meanings related to the past to fit into a new environment and a new era. In her analysis of language in Watson’s The Double Hook, Barbara Godard argues that Watson tried to “free language from the burden of the past” (1978), a burden that is best illustrated by the many proverbs, aphorisms and Latin expressions that tend to disconnect language from experience. It is the character of Felix Prosper, the priest-like figure of the novel, who is associated with ossified Latin expressions that are gradually downplayed by the surrounding modern and experimental form of the text. In the first chapter of the

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second part of the novel, the readers discover that Felix’s mind is replete with ritual expressions and words: His mind sifted ritual phrases. Some half forgotten. You’re welcome. Put your horse in. Pull up. Ave Maria. Benedictus fructus ventris. Introibo. Introibo. The beginning. The whole thing to live again. Words said over and over here by the stove. His father knowing them by heart. God’s servants. The priest’s servants. The cup lifting. The bread breaking. Domine non sum dignus. Words coming. The last words. (Watson 1959, 51) Even though Linda M. Morra is right in asserting that Felix’s “memory of Catholic liturgy offers a specific mediating ritual” which will enable him to become a “necessary disruptive element in the existing media ecology” (2016, 224), words come to Felix’s mind in a chaotic fashion at the beginning of the novel. The liturgical Catholic expressions are set against the everyday language of ordinary existence, blurring the border between mythical time and the present. In his study of myths, Mircea Eliade defines Christian liturgical time as a means to return to the illud tempus of the beginning (1963, 208), a sacred time that also justifies the absence of verbs and the frequent use of ING forms in this particular passage. Such forms represent the past as a patchwork of ossified images and memories that hampers progress and stalls Felix’s development into a more empathetic, communicative character. The last two lines that follow a slightly chiastic pattern show to what extent Felix is trapped in the world of rituals and reified language that work against any effort to unite the dislocated community. Even though the novel focuses primarily on the inability to communicate, it concludes on an optimistic tone with Felix rising to the occasion and acting as Lenchen’s midwife. In addition, the plot comes full circle with James’s return to the village and the birth of his child, hinting at the possibility of a new beginning that has yet to be articulated. Morra shares a similar reading of The Double Hook and argues that it can be read as an exploration of communication, of its attendant failures, and of the repercussions for a group of people whose environment is no longer a source of mutual understanding and for whom the current “technology” – language, art, and mediating rituals, the vehicles for communication – does not function. (2016, 213) 12 The fact that Watson’s characters are unable to use language to communicate with one another also accounts for the narrator’s reluctance to mention their cultural identities explicitly. Watson’s elliptical style and narrative silences run the risk of turning the novel’s characters into mere stereotypes, which was what Watson was trying to avoid. As Watson once stated in one of her interviews, she wanted to do something about the West without turning the story into a Western; she wanted to do something “about Indians which wasn’t about… Indians” (2015, 164). More importantly, she wanted to discuss how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition, how if they have no ritual, they are driven in one of two ways, either towards violence or towards insensitivity—if they have no mediating rituals which manifest themselves in what I suppose we call art forms. (164) 13 The characters in her novel are defined negatively and the universality Watson aspired to in her narrative had the downside effect of relativizing cultural identity and origin. Margaret Morriss, in her research into the evolution of the book, explains that the novel had undergone two major revisions (that is to say three major versions overall, including the published one) which have dialed down what she calls the “identification tags of nationality and history” (2015, 74). The First Nations communities in the novel

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are located in an in-between space between the valley and the town below and the earlier versions of Watson’s text were much more explicit about ethnic origin and cultural identity. For instance, the characters of Kip and Angel are identified as First Nations in the earlier versions while James, William and Greta are identified as a mixed group. In the final version, however, it is Coyote who solely stands for First Nations cultural identity. If these identities are not explicitly defined in the final version of the text, it is to better show how these characters are cut off from their origins and their original language. Being severed from one’s origins provides yet another reason for this apparent want of identity and subsequent inability to communicate which are liable to trigger wanton violence. The antiquated languages of the past lose their meaning in this new space, which is why Watson insists on the importance of finding a new language for a new space, a space that Bhabha would later identify as a third space between the old and the new and which would enable “other positions to emerge” and new forms to appear (1990, 211).

A new form

14 Watson’s exceptionally modern experimentation with language in The Double Hook was also a way of standing out from the dominating realist tradition of the first half of the twentieth century in Canada. Stephen Scobie, who wrote a biocritical study entitled Sheila Watson and Her Works in 1984, did not hide his enthusiasm for her work and his judgement of previous male-dominated realist writing. He stated that her work was a reaction against the “clumsy intensities of Frederick Philip Grove; the dreary and derivative banalities of Morley Callaghan; the urbane and academic essay writing of Hugh MacLennan” (qtd. in Pivato 2015, 11). It is worth noting here that this quote does not do justice to the works of Grove, Callaghan and MacLennan that have shaped early twentieth-century Canadian literature. Not only has Callaghan’s work often been read as a gradual transition between realism and modernism, but MacLennan’s unpublished novels, So All Their Praises (1933) and A Man Should Rejoice (1937), are clear evidence that these writers were fully aware of the literary experimentation that characterized modernist novels. In fact, it was MacLennan’s publishers who wanted a local novel, which is why he returned to the more classic mode of realism.

15 As “a mode of writing embedded in history” and centered on “empirical and observable life” (O’Gorman 2012, 485), realism left little to no space for the problematics of language. Grove’s realist prairie fiction and Hugh MacLennan’s blends of realism and romance are set in fictional worlds where meaning is stable and where the silences and gaps that Watson artfully elicited in The Double Hook are filled in by an omniscient demiurgic narrator. In his study of early twentieth-century realist writing in Canada, Colin Hill prefers to use the term “modern realism” to refer to their work. In Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction, he explains that one of the major differences between modern realism and modernism in Canada lies less in the realists’ ability or inability to innovate than in their attachment to a “national-referential ideal” (2012, 20) that served as the groundwork for their representations of a contemporary Canada. It therefore comes as no surprise that, after decades of realist fiction, readers were ready to discover new forms of writing that clearly stood out from more traditional plotlines and discourses. Indeed, after participating in two world wars, Canadians were less in demand for the didacticism that was so central to Hugh MacLennan’s work, such as Two

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Solitudes (1945) or Return of the Sphinx (1967) that both tackle the duality – but not the diversity – of the Canadian nation. It is perhaps the rigidity of both modes of realism and romance that opened up a different space for other writers – namely women and minority writers – to explore. The absence of First Nations in the works of Hugh MacLennan for instance is just as telling in terms of inclusion in or exclusion from the discursive formation of nation.

16 It is no doubt the opening up of this space in Canadian fiction that makes Watson’s The Double Hook so exceptional. In fact, Watson was at a historical and literary crossroads between the traditional realist mode of early twentieth-century Canadian literature that promoted stability and the European and American modernist texts, many of which resulted from the writers’ sense of alienation from the contemporary world. This connection between Watson and the Lost Generation is made clear in Emily Ballantyne, Marta Dvorak and Dean Irvine’s Translocated Modernisms in which they argue that writers and artists such as Watson “have at once real and imagined affiliations with the Lost Generation that come from shared aesthetic engagements with cultural modernity as articulations of alterity and a common lived experience of social dislocation and alienation” (2016, 4). While The Double Hook manages to combine the modernist techniques of European and American writers (Watson not only read but also taught and wrote on Joyce’s Ulysses), the novel nevertheless centers on the particularities of a local Western landscape and the idiosyncrasies of its inhabitants in an attempt to draw universal meaning from a local environment. In her study of Sheila Watson, Marshall McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis, Elena Lamberti goes further and posits that these writers rather “transcend modernism” and “are better read as representatives of a universal search that transcends the local and temporal dimension, and reaches a more international scenario and broader spectrum of interpretive possibilities” (2016, 45). Overall, Watson’s work can be said to be inspired both by Lost Generation writers and by local Canadian landscapes, and it continues to owe its exceptionality to the exploration of these in-between geographical and literary spaces. In her interview “Sheila Watson in Her Own Words,” Watson explains that she wanted her characters to interact with the landscapes of British Columbia to show that “the people are intertwined in, […] interacting with the landscape, and the landscape is interacting with them … not the landscape, the things about them, the other things which exist” (2015, 165). In the first pages of the novel, William’s wife Ara observes the landscape from the rails of a fence: If a man lost the road in the land round William Potter’s, he couldn’t find his way by keeping to the creek bottom for the creek flowed this way and that at the earth’s whim. The earth fell away in hills and clefts as if it had been dropped carelessly wrinkled on the bare floor of the world. (Watson 1959, 22) Watson describes a landscape that isolates the community from the rest of the world. The misleading course of the creek, along with the clefts, wrinkles and other interstitial spaces of the landscape, testify to the slow geological transformations of the natural world that demonstrate that change is the rule, not the exception. While the ever- retreating landscape helps Ara, the main focalizer of this passage, realize how isolated and divided her community truly is, it takes on a new meaning for James during his return journey insofar as it helps him understand that the rifts that keep the members of his community separate are just as impermanent as the “folds and creases” of the earth (127). James’s interactions with and crossings of the various edges, borders and natural obstacles between the town below and his own community evince Watson’s

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non-essentialist views of identity, the investigation of which remains central to her modernist aesthetic.

17 Critical interest in Canadian modernism has grown over the past decade as a response to the seeming lack of attention paid to works that had been published in Canada over a relatively short period of time between the 1950s and early 1960s. In 2011, Richard J. Lane tackled this question of Canadian modernism in his Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature in which he wrote that “[Canadian modernism’s] distinctiveness [was] still being explored and discussed in Canada […], using new critical paradigms and newly edited and published texts” (2011, 95). The aforementioned academic work on Canadian modernism is a clear response to this need to complete the history of twentieth-century Canadian literature. Such work has also had the advantage of shedding light on other works of fiction that have more or less thoroughly explored the same linguistic and aesthetic questions. Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952), for instance, belongs to the tradition of the Künstlerroman and similarly focuses on the artist’s difficulty in finding the appropriate language to voice the concerns and worldviews of his native, inarticulate community in the Annapolis Valley. In Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment, Marta Dvorak shows how his work illustrates his adherence “to the modernist questioning of the status of language [and] of linguistic conventions” (2001, 4). Another contemporaneous example is Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel (1954), which recounts the journey of Maggie Vardoe, a female character who walks out of her marriage in order to start her life over in the British Columbia interior. Her new-found freedom enables her to exult “in each small sight and sound, in new time, in new space” (Wilson 1991, 21) and discover a new identity away from the social pressures of marital life. The various concerns with and questions about the silences meant to bring inarticulateness to the fore would also seep into realist and romantic fiction. Even though Charles Bruce’s The Channel Shore (1954) is not categorized as modernist fiction and does not attempt to draw the reader’s attention to the problematics of language, it nevertheless focuses on thought processes and anamnesis, both of which are associated with the idea of memory as a patchwork of images. Bruce’s representation of memory as an accumulation of images is artfully rendered by the various ocean and shore metaphors evoking the eroding power of time.

18 Revisiting Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and these other contemporaneous novels also offers the advantage of challenging the clear-cut distinctions that are usually made between the aesthetic trends making up literary history. In fact, this observation loosely echoes philosopher Paul Ricœur’s views on the novelty, originality and exceptionality of certain narratives. After studying the works of early modernists like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Ricœur explains that modern narratives, however new and schismatic they claim to be, can never be completely new and are always shaped by texts of the past (1984, 52). This is why many realist texts dating from the beginning of the twentieth century are never completely devoid of innovation and why the novelty and meaning of a modernist novel depends on the literature published by previous generations. Even though it can be said that The Double Hook is truly original and exceptional in terms of form as it subtly combines prose and poetry while drawing attention to the power of words and the dire consequences of the failure to communicate, the novel still owes a great deal to all the earlier novels that have also examined, albeit differently, the problematics of local identity and cultural transformation.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BALLANTYNE, Emily, Marta DVORAK, and Dean IRVINE eds. 2016. Translocated Modernisms: Paris and Other Lost Generations. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

BETTS, Gregory, Paul HJARTARSON, and Kristine SMITKA, eds. 2016. Counter-Blasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

BHABHA, Homi. 1990. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 207–21. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

DVORAK, Marta. 2001. Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

ELIADE, Mircea. 1963. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard.

FRYE, Northrop. 1990. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. Markham, ON: Viking.

GODARD, Barbara. 1978. “‘Between One Cliché and Another’: Language in The Double Hook.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 3, no. 2. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/ index.php/SCL/article/view/7889/8946.

GOLDMAN, Marlene. 2007. “Ethics, Spectres, and Formalism in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook.” ESC 33, no. 1–2 (March–June): 189–208.

HILL, Colin. 2012. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

IRVINE, Dean. 2016. “Sheila Watson, Wyndham Lewis and Men Without Art.” In Betts, Hjartarson, and Smitka, 168–209.

LAMBERTI, Elena. 2016. “Watson, McLuhan (& Lewis): Conscious (Modernist) Solitudes, Challenging Canadians.” In Betts, Hjartarson, and Smitka, 38–57.

LANE, Richard J. 2011. The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature. Coll. Routledge Concise Histories of Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

MORRA, Linda M. 2016. “‘His Name is Felix’: Artist as Catalytic Agent and the Counter-Environment in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook.” In Betts, Hjartarson, and Smitka, 210–29.

MORRISS, Margaret. 2015. “‘No Short Cuts’ The Evolution of The Double Hook.” In Pivato, 73–98.

NORTHEY, Margot. 2015. “Symbolic Grotesque: The Double Hook.” In Pivato, 61–72.

O’GORMAN, Francis. 2012. “Realism and Romance.” In The Cambridge History of the English Novel, edited by Robert L. Caserio and Clement Hawes, 485–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PIVATO, Joseph, ed. 2015. Sheila Watson: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica.

RICŒUR, Paul. 1984. Temps et récit 2 : La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris: Seuil.

WATSON, Sheila. 1959. The Double Hook. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

WATSON, Sheila. 2015. “Sheila Watson in Her Own Words.” In Pivato, 163–70.

WILSON, Ethel. 1991. Swamp Angel. 1954. The New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

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NOTES

1. Sheila Watson was very familiar with the works of European modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In the late 1970s, she was asked to write a study guide for a literature class at Athabasca University which gradually evolved into an essay entitled “How to Read Ulysses.” Sections of this essay can be read in Joseph Pivato’s Sheila Watson: Essays on Her Works (2015). 2. In Words With Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature, Frye defines the axis mundi as “a vertical line running from the top to the bottom of the cosmos,” which “is related only to a verbal universe, though naturally the images used to illustrate it suggest climbing into the sky or descending into the depths of the earth or sea” (1990, 151). Frye also argues that ascending or descending movements are often associated with the acquisition of new forms of consciousness and awareness.

ABSTRACTS

This article proposes to revisit Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) and the role it played in the emergence of Canadian modernism in the 1950s. Watson’s experimentation with narrative and her examination of the traditional borders between prose and poetry account for her novel’s position in Canadian literature as a singular text. While this paper will consider Watson’s novel in light of the realist tradition that shaped early twentieth-century Canadian literature, it will also pay close attention to the writer’s desire to break free from such conventions by writing a story that remains exceptional in its inclination to elude clear-cut identification.

INDEX

Keywords: Sheila Watson, experimental writing, modernism

AUTHOR

ANDRÉ DODEMAN

Université Grenoble Alpes André Dodeman is currently working as an Associate Professor at the University of Grenoble Alpes. He wrote his PhD thesis on Hugh MacLennan’s work. He published several articles on English-Canadian writers such as Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod and Yann Martel and he co- edited four volumes on postcolonial literature and culture, the latest entitled Negotiating Waters: Seas, Oceans, and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World (Vernon Press, 2020) published in close collaboration with Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

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Reviews

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Marta Dvořák, Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear

Danielle Schaub

REFERENCES

Marta Dvořák. Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2019. 261 p. ISBN: 9 7814 8750 5301 (hb). $65

1 Mavis Gallant has puzzled numerous readers, owing to the multidimensional allusiveness and polyphonic quality of her works coupled with indirection, disjunctiveness, irony and shrewd vision. Marta Dvořák’s Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear sets out to remedy their bafflement by unfolding the multiple layers of the author’s work, applying her profound knowledge of stylistics and poetics as well as making the most of her intimate relationship to the writer, rich in informal conversations and more focused correspondence. Surveying the culture Gallant imbibed at various stages of her life, Dvořák throws light on what shaped the writer. Expanding on aspects addressed before by others and broaching on novel aspects, she superbly discusses Gallant’s overall craft and her writing’s infusion with techniques informed by her life- long and wide-ranging acquaintance with the cinematographic, literary, musical and painterly worlds.

2 Dvořák starts out with an acrostic for Gallant to capture the essence of the author’s world and work and to foreground her own argument astutely with its artistic, literary and philosophical incursions. Regarding ekphrastic and literary references, Dvořák points to their subtle, and often ironic, dynamics in Gallant, encompassing the spirit of the time. Reflecting on the osmotic connection between literature and the visual arts, she then considers the interaction between the visual and the auditory in cinema, ballet and opera. The clarification of the interactiveness between the verbal, the visual and the auditory aptly prepares for close-readings emphasising linguistic and rhythmic patterns that alternate with philosophical and artistic considerations as well as insights garnered from personal revelations.

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3 Through microanalysis of extracts from varied stories, Dvořák at first throws clear light on Gallant’s glowing, lively, precise use of words, dense and tight prose combining compression and expansion through metaphors, enumeration, polyphony, sound and rhythm. She then turns to Gallant’s mastery of rhetoric devoid of banality in spite of her not adhering to earlier modernists’ use of eccentric turns. She attributes such mastery to the oral quality of Gallant’s sentence structures and their alternation of increasing and decreasing complexity, parallelism and antithesis, chiasmus, coupled contraries – the source of her irony. Her subsequent discussion of meter, patterns reminiscent of film techniques and Cubist juxtaposition leads to novel understanding of Gallant’s craftsmanship as does her focus on dissonance and syncopation to avoid predictability, calling upon cinematographic, musical and literary characteristics.

4 In her chapter on “Text/Image Borderblur & Cubist Realism,” Dvořák skillfully grasps Gallant’s use of mixed perspectives – with examples from some of the most complex stories – comparing it to Picasso’s Cubist painting, or to Hockney’s photo-composites or collages. The analogies drawn between the visual and literary texts – Gallant’s or other master writers’ – point to the stunning width of Dvořák’s knowledge in different fields, from which her brilliant textual analyses of Gallant benefit. Her final comments on the author’s genre-crossing in her stories – between fiction and essay, “between portrait and self-portrait” – explain “the absence of plot” so characteristic of numerous Gallantian stories.

5 Carrying over the Cubist multiplicity of vantage points, Dvořák then concentrates on the disruptive presentation of time and space as well as on the changing voices and focal points so prevalent in Gallant’s writing. Ample analogies with visual artists, on the one hand, and Modernist and Romantic authors, on the other, serve to elucidate her talent at disjunctive simultaneity. Text explication of various passages from stories showcases the abundant ways in which Gallant introduces ruptures that dislocate and relocate at once, that signal diverse moments in time and different stages of perceptual consciousness particularly in first-person narrations. Dvořák then reflects on the riddles afforded by the shifting deictics that collide different enunciators, places and times, leading to the chapter’s title – “Who Is I & When Is Here?” Such distortions create slips from the personal to the plural or the universal, or from subjective to objective perspective, or even “fluctuating […] subjectivity” (183). Likewise, the examination of Gallantian similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech points to conjoining, compressing, crisscrossing views, ending in either doubling “short cut” or estranging “short circuit.” Continuing her analogy with the artistic, literary and musical frame, Dvořák rounds off her critique by inscribing her vision of Gallant’s oeuvre as engaged in forever drawing together contrary outward, or disjunctive, forces with inward, or unifying ones, transformation and stability in perpetual readjustment.

6 Dvořák adopts subsections throughout her chapters, demonstrating thereby the impossibility of giving a clear comprehensive view when it comes to the work of an author so accomplished at cumulating contrasting techniques, at engendering polyphonic perspectives and at breaking patterns; the variety of digressive prowess alone accounts for the need to subdivide the argument. With the numerous comparisons to other fields, Dvořák’s book may prove difficult for readers untrained in the critical terminology, but will no doubt delight trained readers. I therefore gladly second W.H. New’s succinct but powerful back-cover appreciation of her study as “a major accomplishment, nothing short of a new poetics of style,” indeed the true

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achievement of maturity. However, given Dvořák’s unquestionable expertise and scholarship, she surprisingly does not account for the genealogy of some ideas she develops. She disregards Janice Kulyk Keefer’s insightful Reading Mavis Gallant (1989) and its emphasis on style, irony and humour bordering on satire, narrative voice and structure together with some thematic chapters on children, women and history. Neither does she refer to the Twayne’s World Authors’ book on Gallant (1998) explicating texts through extensive close-reading with similar, though perhaps less overarching, findings, in chapters on multi-voiced narration, distance and disharmony, irony, space, text and image, style and painting. She also overlooks a few articles, amongst others those on the pictorial in Mavis Gallant published in a book including an article of her own, namely Image et récit : littérature et arts visuels du Canada (1993). Though such oversight raises questions as to basic acknowledgement of indebtedness to previous research paving the way for hers, it does not detract from Dvořák’s excellent argument and wide-ranging exploration of Gallant’s work grounded in overwhelming multifaceted artistic, literary and philosophical parallels.

AUTHORS

DANIELLE SCHAUB

Oranim College of Education, Israel Danielle Schaub has published numerous articles on Canadian literature, especially on Canadian and Québécois women writers. She has published and coedited books on Canadian authors, and (co)edited several collections of essays on cultural space, ethnicity and identities, community and nation, mixed heritage in Canadian literature. Her creative works include a prized collection of photographs and texts entitled Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors’ Reflections (University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Interior Views: Photopoetry (Rubicon Press, 2009). Her training as a bibliotherapist has led to both articles and three coedited collections on trauma, the current focus of her research on Canadian literature.

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Patricia Neville, Janet Frame’s World of Books

Claire Bazin

REFERENCES

Patricia Neville. Janet Frame’s World of Books. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2019. 234 p. ISBN: 9 7838 3831 2425 (pb). €34.90

1 Patricia Neville’s Janet Frame’s World of Books is a fascinating study of Frame’s world of words, born from a life-long interest in books and reading. It is a very well documented and illustrated study, based on thorough research and deep familiarity with Frame’s works. Neville follows Frame from her childhood as an avid reader and precocious writer (in Dot’s Little Folk) to her writing career, in a masterful demonstration that one can become a writer only by having read a lot. In the introduction (made up of three parts), she brings to the fore Frame’s abundant use of intertextuality (for the conceptualisation of which she borrows from Kristeva and Barthes), and polyphony (Bakhtin) which the ensuing development analyses and illustrates.

2 The book is divided into six chapters that range from Frame’s early readings (novels and poetry) to the varied influences which shaped her writing. Each chapter delves into one or several of Frame’s novels or autobiography.

3 The first chapter, entitled “Janet Frame’s Books,” composed of five sections, is concerned with Frame’s exile to Europe in 1956, after her release from the mental hospital of Seacliff the year before. The first section gives an overview of Frame’s publishing career both “at home” and abroad (in the US and England more specifically, but also Japan, China, Korea, Turkey, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Italy, and Germany) and of the translation of her books in different countries. Neville also draws attention to the other media that took their inspiration from Frame’s works, such as Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table – which contributed to making Frame known internationally – but also radio drama and even a chamber opera. In the second section, Neville insists on the role of Frame’s mother (she was a poet herself) in her daughter’s literary

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vocation. But what most developed Frame’s taste for writing was undoubtedly Dot’s Little Folk, a magazine that encouraged children to publish, often under pseudonyms. Later, in her school days, and during her stays in hospital, she became familiar with the Romantics, Shakespeare, the Brontës and George Eliot, but also Proust, Maupassant, Camus, Mallarmé, the French Nouveau Roman, and Rilke, all of which influenced her writing.

4 In chapter 2, Neville points to Frame’s love of music and sound, which accounts for her valuing poetry as the supreme form of art. Frame’s debt to the romantic poets (Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Rilke and Dylan Thomas) is huge, especially as regards their celebration of the natural world, birds in particular, at the expense of modern culture – such themes as Frame develops in her fiction (Living in the Maniototo). Special mention is made of New Zealand poets, in particular Allan Curnow, but also Charles Brasch and Ruth Dallas. The chapter ends on Walt Whitman, whose influence on Frame (in Daughter Buffalo) is of paramount importance, both in style and content.

5 In the following chapter (3), Neville shows the influence of poets and poetry on Frame’s fiction, which bears similarities with Baudelaire’s “prose-poems,” but also with modernist writers, like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and Faulkner, or poets like Dylan Thomas, G.M. Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Auden. Owls Do Cry is written in poetic prose, typographically rendered through the use of italics. Nature and childhood are given special attention in Intensive Care, Living in the Maniototo and The Edge of the Alphabet. In Towards Another Summer (her posthumous novel), Frame pays retrospective homage to Sylvia Plath (after the latter’s suicide) with whom she feels a shared experience of anxiety and despair (see Intensive Care).

6 Chapter 4 is dedicated to the (King James) Bible and its influence on Frame’s work, notably in its style, phrasing and syntax, as is particularly apparent in Living in the Maniototo, Faces in the Water, Intensive Care, Daughter Buffalo and The Adaptable Man. Frame’s work is influenced not only by the Bible but also by her mother’s Christaldelphian, non-conformist faith, and some interest in Buddhism. The Rainbirds combines for instance the story of Lazarus with echoes of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert.

7 The following chapter (5) deals with the influence of Shakespeare and of Macbeth in particular: in Faces in the Water, The Adaptable Man but also in Owls Do Cry, A State of Siege, Daughter Buffalo, Living in the Maniototo (which also draws on Thomas Hardy and the Brontës in its depiction of the moors), the Carpathians, The Rainbirds and Scented Gardens for the Blind. Quoting the same books (or even passages) makes repetitions unavoidable, even though the perspective is always different. Neville insists on the presence of water in Frame’s works and refers to the influence of Shakespeare’s The Tempest which is apparent in an epigraph to the second volume of her autobiography. Frame reveres Prospero’s magic of language, of which she makes abundant use in Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, A State of Siege and The Edge of the Alphabet. Dreams, too, are legion in the novels, as another sign of Shakespeare’s “presence.”

8 The last chapter (6) is concerned with myths, oral culture, folk tales, fairy tales, Māori myths and culture (Living in the Maniototo and The Carpathians), and legends (St Cuthbert in The Adaptable Man). Neville quotes Frame’s book for children Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, which, not unlike traditional fairy-tales, bears a dark side. Neville links myths and survival, stressing the inestimable value of memory (The Carpathians, Scented Gardens for the Blind), to conclude on the universality of Frame’s work.

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9 Not only is Neville very familiar with Frame’s writings, but she also displays impressive erudition in her knowledge of French, German, American writers, poets and critics as well. She has excavated a mine. This is a very complete, fascinating, innovative and timely work, written in excellent style by a critic who is also undeniably, and like Frame herself, a lover of words. Neville’s work contributes to renewing criticism on Frame which has tended up to now to neglect this crucial aspect of her work.

AUTHORS

CLAIRE BAZIN

Paris Nanterre University Claire Bazin is Professor of nineteenth-century British and twentieth-century Commonwealth Literatures. She has published two books on the Brontës, a book on Janet Frame, and a number of articles (on the Brontës, Dracula, Frankenstein, Janet Frame).

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Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana, and Nicole Thiara, eds., Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-Imagined

Cécile Girardin

REFERENCES

Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana, and Nicole Thiara, eds. Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-Imagined. New York: Routledge, 2020. 238 p. ISBN: 9 7803 6721 8416 (pb). £34.99

1 Seventy years ago, under the aegis of B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the leader who inspired the Dalit movement,1 caste discrimination and untouchability were abolished from the Indian constitution. Even though the rigid, ritual shunning of Dalits has indeed faded, a July 2020 article from The Economist still reported that “with dismal regularity news stories tell of higher-caste people maiming, raping or murdering Dalits for such slights as daring to sport a moustache, ride a horse or, worst of all, woo someone above their station.”2 The persistence of caste discrimination in contemporary Indian society lies at the heart of Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re- Imagined. Throughout this thought-provoking volume, the authors engage with the problems of a caste-ridden society which still fails to endow Dalits with mere humanity in many parts of the country. By the same token they shun the stereotype according to which castes belong to a pre-modern state and no longer prevail in a subcontinent seen as having fully embraced globalization.

2 After its birth in Maharashtra in the 1960s, Dalit literature spread in India and quickly became a political tool for their authors to dismiss their predestined and imposed identities. Its international academic assessment only emerged in the 2000s, and this book purports to further this pioneering field. Based on conferences and events

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organized by a research network created by the editors between 2014 and 2016, “Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature” (which received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council), the volume acknowledges the urgent need for “postcolonial studies to engage with this emerging field in order to remain relevant and avoid inadvertently contributing to the silencing of this important and radical literature” (1). The excitement of witnessing an emerging field by scholars not initially trained in Dalit literature fuels the book and gives it an urgency and an emotional dimension that never however diminishes its theoretical engagement.

3 The book is divided into four parts; the first one gives voice to four prominent Dalit authors, the second explores the relationship between Dalit literature and gender, the third examines translation issues, and the final part tentatively paves the way for Dalit studies in other artistic forms.

4 In an inspiring interview, Bengali writer and former rickshaw-puller Manoranjan Byapari claims that caste and class are near-synonymous, and he explains how he came to develop an aesthetics of anger out of a growing dissatisfaction with testimony. Similarly, Bengali writer Kalyani Thakur Charal cannot separate her work as a writer from that of an activist, in her quest to expose the everyday realities of deprivation prevalent in her tribe. Cho. Dharman, a Tamil writer, deplores the infighting between castes and subcastes in South India and takes a strong stand against the idea of a community literature, as does Punjabi prose writer Des Raj Kali, whose works focus on the processes of domination at work in the wars his characters wage against hegemonic Hindus and Sikhs.

5 The second part of the book relies on the notion that caste is perpetuated through the imposition of caste endogamy on the body of women. Santosh Dash focuses on Gujarati short stories that conjure up, through social realism, a feudal order where Dalit women, even though they are considered despicable by upper caste men, are still seen as sexually available. Carmel Christi K.J. shows how the form of the autobiography is radically challenged by Dalit women writing in Malayalam. Subjected to organized sexual violence and reduced to being doubly marginalized objects, they prefer using the collective “we” that points to the public nature of their project. The plight of Dalit women is largely taken up by male writers, as seen in the essays by Gopika Jadeja and Shivani Kapoor, who look at literary projects purporting to reclaim the body of Dalit women against the dominance of upper caste males. Perhaps the most interesting study is to be found in the essay of Kanak Yadav about Sivakami, a female Tamil writer who wrote an autobiographical novel, but rewrote it a few years later by focusing only on “objective experience” in an extreme exercise in self-criticism. This essay seizes the uniqueness of the Dalit literary project, always on the verge of being shattered because the agenda it is trying to establish is so sensitive.

6 The third part is devoted to translations from Marathi to English, a language that was at the forefront of the fight against untouchability. Arun Prabha Mukherjee makes a case for maintaining Marathi words when they have no equivalent in English, contending that finding loose equivalents in English sabotages the very Dalit project. Maya Pandit shows that translation, by bringing to light the voice of the subaltern, carries a politics of alterity. The final part of the volume develops an argument put forward in the previous essays: the film, art and publishing industries being dominated by upper castes, they impose constraints on all Dalit projects. Ruchika Bhatia and Devika Mehra focus on the potential of the graphic novel in terms of education and

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entertainment. Deeptha Achar shows that Dalit art is even more invisible than Dalit literature, and Chandra Sekhar subtly demonstrates how challenging it is to shoot a real Dalit film in a Telugu case study. These are less advanced contributions that would have benefited from stricter editing, yet they open up questions to be answered in future studies.

7 As a whole, the book is a formidable immersion into a field of study that is still at its outset. By showing that writers are fully aware of the forms they adopt to represent their plight, the volume proves that those texts, far from being mere anthropological material, can be assessed in accordance with aesthetic categories and not only in reference to the so-called authenticity of experience. Once this sterile debate is left aside, one can relate this literature to universal references and affiliations, to be seen in the solidarity those writers often express toward African-American literature or Aboriginal writing in Australia. It is no wonder that till recently the Dalit experience was nearly invisible outside India, so far removed is it from anything similar elsewhere, yet with sustainable effort, this wide-ranging, transnational inquiry will bring it to light and make sense of it. As stated in the moving preliminary statement by the editors, such a project required the fine work of emotionally-tuned, seasoned academics who deliberately chose to let Indian writers and scholars speak first-hand.

NOTES

1. The word Dalit, “broken people” in Marathi, is an umbrella term that refers to the former untouchable castes and Adivasis (tribal people). 2. “No Escape,” The Economist, 23 July 2020, https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/07/23/even- as-india-urbanises-caste-discrimination-remains-rife.

AUTHORS

CÉCILE GIRARDIN

Université Sorbonne Paris Nord Cécile Girardin is a Senior Lecturer at University Sorbonne Paris Nord. She specializes in postcolonial literatures and is the co-editor of Continuité, conservatisme, classicisme dans les littératures postcoloniales (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), as well as articles on the fiction and essays of Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Amitav Ghosh and Nirad Chaudhuri.

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Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds., Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Alexandra Poulain

REFERENCES

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds. Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2019. 223 p. ISBN: 9 7890 0439 5206 (hb)/ 9 7890 0440 7916 (e-book). €99 (hb & e-book)

1 Since the days of her infamous exhibition in early nineteenth-century London and Paris and her posthumous dissection at the hands of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, the story of Sarah Baartman returned to public attention in 1985 with the publication of two ground-breaking articles by Stephen Jay Gould and Sander L. Gilman, who both remarked that Baartman’s remains were still on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. In 1994, newly elected President Nelson Mandela visited President François Mitterand and requested that her remains be repatriated to South Africa, a request that initiated a protracted period of diplomatic squabbles between the two countries and contributed to further place the Baartman story in the public eye. By the time her remains were effectively brought back to South Africa in 2002, when she was at last given a funeral, her story had been revisited by many artists and writers, a lot of them black women, and had sparked much interdisciplinary new scholarship, often at the intersection of feminism, critical race studies and visual studies. Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt and Željka Švrljuga’s new edited collection Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices is one of several recent interventions which consider how the story of Sarah Baartman, and the related “figure” or “trope” of “Black Venus,” have been reinterpreted in various artistic and literary modes since Baartman’s death.

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2 The volume offers a general introduction followed by nine original case studies of such aesthetic revisitings of the Black Venus figure, organized in two sections, “Histories” and “Epistemologies.” One issue I found myself struggling with is that no effort is made in the introduction to define the historical and epistemological parameters of the Black Venus “figure,” or indeed to explain exactly what is meant by the ubiquitous terms “figure” and “trope.” While some of the contributions are concerned with works that return explicitly to the actual story of Sarah Baartman, others deal with stereotypical representations of hypersexualized black women and the ways in which these stereotypes are resisted, destabilized or resignified in modern and contemporary art and writing. The implication of the volume’s juxtaposition of both kinds of essays seems to be that the Baartman story is the cultural Ur-text of all later versions of the Black Venus stereotype, but this debatable assumption is not articulated clearly. Only Kjersti Aarstein, in her fine exploration of H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” which she reads as an early critique of Danish colonialism, building on Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s work on “the Black Venus narrative,” clarifies that she accepts “the general notion that ‘Black Venus’ is a metaphor for African women’s supposedly unrestrained sexuality and affinity with animals” – a notion which she sees as related to, though distinct from, “the life and legend of Sarah Baartman” (41). One useful starting-point for the collection might have been Janel Hobson’s claim in her landmark book Venus in the Dark, republished in 2018, that Baartman’s exhibition as the famed Hottentot Venus conjoined two existing tropes of black femininity in that era—the ‘Hottentot’ and the ‘Venus’ […]. Whereas the Black Venus is an enticing representation of sexualized, exotic black femininity, the Savage Hottentot is a repulsive icon of wildness and monstrosity. Yet both representations elicit fear and attraction, which are combined and reflected in grotesque images of the Hottentot Venus. (21) 3 Despite this conceptual ambiguity, the volume offers exciting new readings of a wide range of literary and artistic productions. The first section, “Histories,” focuses on textual figurations of the Baartman story and/or of the “Black Venus” paradigm, while the second section, “Epistemologies,” addresses the ways in which spatiality and visuality are implicated in the process of (racist) knowledge-production historically associated with the Western gaze when it focuses on black female bodies. Analysing the treatment of narrative voice in Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico, Željka Švrljuga shows how the novel subtly destabilizes the implicit hierarchies ingrained in the white male narrator’s story. Carmen Birkle examines the bold recycling and ironizing of stereotypes in Kara Walker’s 2014 ephemeral monumental sculpture A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, and reads it alongside Nicki Minaj’s wax figure at Madame Tussauds Las Vegas and her “Anaconda” rap video, showing how, as they elicit audience interactions, both work to make visible the latent racism in contemporary American culture, and reclaim the “Black Venus” figure while asserting full control over its modes of aesthetic figuration. Camilla Erichsen Skalle writes of fascist ideology’s investment in the Black Venus tropology and reads two Italian novels of the fascist era, Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (1947) and Mario Tobino’s Il deserto di Libya (1951), as questioning the Western male gaze on black women and thus engaging critically with fascist constructions of masculinity. Kari Jegerstedt offers a brilliant reading of Angela Carter’s “Black Venus,” in which the speaking voice is that of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s Caribbean lover. Rather than purporting to “give voice” to Duval, thus silencing her anew, Jegerstedt argues that the story makes apparent the act of

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imperialist silencing which is inevitable within the parameters of Western literature, but finds a way out of this impasse by gesturing towards traditional storytelling as an alternative discursive regime allowing transnational feminist solidarity. Ljubica Matek argues that the emancipatory potential of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus is grounded in its Brechtian aesthetics as epic theatre. Margery Vibe Skagen reads together Baudelaire’s prose poem “La femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse,” which stages a monstrous orangutan-woman at a fair, with a dream of a male monster displayed in a brothel/museum as related in a letter to his friend Charles Asselineau in 1856. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, she argues that the two monsters in their respective settings function as ironic distortions of the stereotypical poet, and that they “resist emerging discourses on the nature of the human” (153). Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen offers a fascinating, richly illustrated piece about contemporary engagements with the visual apparatus of the Western museums (specifically, the display case) and the construction of the Western gaze in the work of visual and performance artists Fariba Hajamadi, Tracey Rose, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez- Peña. Finally, Jorunn S. Gjerden examines the cinematic techniques at work in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Vénus noire (2010) and convincingly argues that Kechiche mobilizes similar strategies as those analyzed by Deleuze in Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) in order to inhibit the viewer’s cognitive mastery. The volume brings important new perspectives on well-known works and brings attention to lesser known ones, testifying that the story of Sarah Baartman and the Black Venus tropology are central to critical engagements with Western imperialist culture and epistemology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GILMAN, Sander L. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12, no 1 (Autumn): 204– 42.

GOULD, Stephen Jay. 1985. “The Hottentot Venus.” In The Flamingo Smile. New York: W.W. Norton, 291–305.

HOBSON, Janell. 2018. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. 2005. New York: Routledge.

SHARPLEY-WHITING, T. Denean. 1999. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham: Duke University Press.

AUTHORS

ALEXANDRA POULAIN

Sorbonne Nouvelle – EA 4398 (Prismes)

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Alexandra Poulain is Professor of postcolonial literature and theatre at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle. She has published widely on modern and contemporary Irish drama and performance, with a special focus on Yeats and Beckett. Her latest book, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (Palgrave, 2016), looks at rewritings of the Passion narrative as a modality of political resistance in Irish plays from Synge to the present day. Her current research focuses on decolonial projects in contemporary art.

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Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary

Kathie Birat

REFERENCES

Sarah Brouillette. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 175 p. ISBN: 9 7815 0361 0316 (pb). €21,50

1 At a time when the notions of world literature and the globalization of culture are being evoked with greater frequency, Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary serves as a timely reminder of the economic and political forces that affect the production and reception of literature. Brouillette’s examination of the role of UNESCO since its creation makes it possible to understand what she calls “the realities of production” (4) in their relation to UNESCO’s ideals and discredits any conception of literature as a level playing field. By giving an in-depth analysis of UNESCO’s role, the author allows the reader to observe the ways in which an organization more often associated in people’s minds with its support of World Heritage Sites was unable to achieve its initial goals with regard to literature. Beyond its value as a clear and well- documented study of a complex organization, Brouillette’s study serves as a reminder that creativity, writing, and publishing are governed by market forces.

2 Brouillette clearly states in her introduction that her work is motivated and informed by the cultural sociology of thinkers like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, whose approach to the cultural sphere was supported by UNESCO in the 1960s. It is on this basis that the author examines the “entanglements of power, culture and capitalism” (8) that can be observed in UNESCO’s changing role with regard to books. She designates three phases in the history of the organization, each of which she identifies with a representative program, illustrated through the discussion of a work that encapsulates the issues at stake in each period. This approach contributes to the clarity of the discussion, allowing one to grasp the concrete consequences of policies expressed in official statements, which form the basis of Brouillette’s documentation.

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3 The first two chapters discuss the organization’s “first major literary program” (21) which involved the establishing of a list of classics, chosen for their importance as landmarks of culture but also for their accessibility, some of which were translated into two or three major languages. Brouillette shows how, by linking the ideas of economic and cultural development, the program unwittingly reinforced the role of former colonial powers through an emphasis on modernization and progress. Chapter 2 uses the inclusion of Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Snow Country in the list of Representative Works as an example of the problems underlying the choice of works meant to encourage cross-cultural understanding through the values of “liberal humanist internationalism” (42). The author argues that the aestheticization involved in Kawabata’s narrative strategy makes the work compatible with the American desire to promote works expressing an “apolitical lyricism” (40).

4 In Chapters 3 and 4, Brouillette explains the source and development of the idea of “cultural policy,” discussions of which made possible the expression of people’s concern with the ways in which capitalism might threaten rather than preserve and encourage culture. It was during this period that UNESCO entered into what she calls “its most radical phase” (59), under the direction of Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow (1974– 1987) and that the preservation of “unique cultural identities” (60) through direct state intervention became a priority. Western opposition to any type of reform aimed at correcting “the inequalities in the flow of information to and from developing countries” (93) led to the withdrawal of the United States and Great Britain from UNESCO in the 1980s. Brouillette suggests that the financial power wielded by the United States, which returned to UNESCO in 2003, only to exit definitively in response to UNESCO’s acceptance of Palestinian membership, weighed heavily on the organization’s capacity to defend the interests of developing nations, which were threatened with being reduced to the status of “net consumers of culture” (97).

5 These chapters provide a clear perception of the difficulties faced by an organization dependent on the financing provided by Western nations, although it might be remarked that the media and particularly the publishing industries within the Western nations themselves were undergoing pressures of concentration and merger that made it increasingly difficult for independent publishers and booksellers to survive. Brouillette’s major contribution in these chapters is to an understanding of the hidden consequences of policies like book donation that hindered the development of local publishing in developing countries and perpetuated forms of “literary colonialism” (89).

6 Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the third period, in which culture has become a “resource” and in which UNESCO’s support is essentially given to private-sector activities. The City of Literature program as a mark of cultural success rather than as a tool for correcting imbalances and the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions are given as examples of UNESCO’s role as an “indirect support network” (109) in a cultural sector increasingly dominated by the logic of the marketplace. Chapter 6 looks at the crucial and controversial question of copyright through a discussion of the non-profit organization ZIMCOPY, which received a grant from UNESCO in 2013 in order to combat piracy and promote respect for copyright. Brouillette examines the failure of the project to encourage local creativity, using as an example NoViolet Bulawayo’s popular novel We Need New Names, in which Bulawayo reveals the dark side of humanitarian aid and suggests that piracy can be a form of

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cultural resistance. She concludes her book with an evocation of the increasing role of China within the structure of UNESCO.

7 Although Brouillette is frank about the ideological underpinnings of her study, the reader may find her approach heavy-handed. Her bias is particularly obvious in her analysis of specific works, such as Zake Mda’s The Heart of Redness, criticized for its failure to question “the value of integration into market-based commercial culture” (142). Sarah Brouillette’s study of UNESCO offers useful insight into the impact of cultural policy, communications, and the culture industry on literary production. Yet, the reader is also apt to remain wary of overly deterministic interpretations of literature, which end up setting aside the transgressive, transformative, discrepant nature of the literary.

AUTHORS

KATHIE BIRAT

Université de Lorraine Kathie Birat is Emeritus Professor of American, African American and Caribbean literature at the University of Lorraine. She has published numerous articles on writers from the English- speaking Caribbean, with particular emphasis on the work of Caryl Phillips. She edited a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies devoted to Phillips (40.1, Autumn 2017). Among her recent publications are “Making Sense of Memory in the Writings of the Caribbean Diaspora: Sam Selvon’s London Calypso,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.6 (2019) and “‘Taak prappa’: Voice, Orality and Absence in David Dabydeen’s Slave Song,” Sillages critiques 25 (2018).

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