Confluence/Reconstruction

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Commonwealth Essays and Studies

40.2 | 2018 Confluence/Reconstruction

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/275 DOI: 10.4000/ces.275 ISSN: 2534-6695

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

Printed version Date of publication: 1 April 2018 ISSN: 2270-0633

Electronic reference Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 40.2 | 2018, “Confluence/Reconstruction” [Online], Online since 05 November 2019, connection on 02 April 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/275; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.275

Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. Confluence/Reconstruction

Vol. 40, N°2, Spring 2018

Confluence / Reconstruction

Confluence

Claire Omhovère • Confluence. Introduction...... 5 Marie Herbillon • Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks...... 9 Adrian Grafe • Type, Personalisation and Depersonalisation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians...... 23 Alice Michel • Convergence and Divergence in Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship...... 33 Sara Arami • Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’sThe Girl in the Tangerine Scarf...... 43 Cédric Courtois • “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics”: Helon Habila and the Flowing Together of Politics and Poetics...... 55 Sandrine Soukaï • The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English: Reshaping National Identities in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows...... 69

Reconstruction

Salhia Ben Messahel and Kathie Birat • Reconstruction. Introduction...... 81 Pascal Zinck • In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country...... 85 Jaine Chemmachery • “Bricks Are Undoubtedly an Essential Ingredient of Civilisation”: Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)...... 97 Anne-Sophie Letessier • “Isn’t the Place Only Ruins and Vacancies Now”: Reconstructions in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass (2005)...... 109 Cédric Courtois • “Thou Shalt not Lie with Mankind as with Womankind: It Is Abomination!”: Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015)...... 119 Myriam Moïse • ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body...... 135

Reviews

Reviewed by Charlotte Sturgess • Ten Canadian Writers in Context. Edited by Marie Carrière, Curtis Gillespie and Jason Purcell...... 149 Reviewed by Christine Lorre-Johnston • Thinking Literature Across Continents. By Ranjan Gosh and J. Hillis Miller...... 151 Reviewed by Fiona McCann • Decolonizing Sexualities. Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions. Edited by Sandeep Bakshi, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Silvia Posocco...... 153 Reviewed by Claire Omhovère • Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place. By John Thieme...... 155

Contributors...... 157

Confluence Introduction

It is a tradition for the organizers of the annual conference of the Société des Angli- cistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SAES) to choose a topic that will be found doubly relevant, first as conducive to exchanges across the disciplines constitutive of English studies, and second as emblematic of the region where the event is hosted. The 2016 SAES conference took place in Lyon, the city where the mighty Rhône and sedate Saône rivers flow together, at the very tip of the peninsula or “Presqu’île” nestled between the two hills of Fourvière and La Croix Rousse. “Confluence” was therefore the theme proposed to the delegates who met there between June 2 and June 5, 2016. The site’s geography played an essential role in the development of the Roman military camp that became the capital of the Gauls as Lugdunum flourished between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, and is now the most important educational centre in France after Paris, at least if we are to believe the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It also happens that Lyon is my hometown, the city where I grew up and went to university to study English. It is a rather apt and, to me at least, moving coincidence that my 2011-2017 mandate as general editor of Commonwealth Essays and Studies and president of the Société d’Etude des Pays du Commonwealth (SEPC) should come to an end with the publication of this joint issue for which I have edited six essays. Four of them were presented during the 2016 Confluence conference, but all of them engage with its federating topic on several, complementary levels as shall now be seen. There is something profoundly irenical in the idea of confluence, the dynamics that bring different purposes and (fluvial) temperaments to converge, former divergences diluting into a common course, giving birth to new currents and fresh realities. Viewed through this conciliatory prism, the geographical trope may not be the most adequate to apprehend the synergies that have shaped postcolonial literatures, fraught as they have always been with the antagonisms imperial rule encouraged or sometimes introduced among the populations and territories it sought to control. Another factor of disturbance and current transformation lies in the effects of globalization and the emergence of diasporic, transnational and increasingly transcultural literatures in which the postcolonial is just one possible affiliation among others. Postcolonialism is a shifting and increasingly contested field. It is then perhaps not fortuitous that the terms postcolonial scholars have diverted from their literal usage to serve critical purposes should tolerate a high degree of heterogeneity in the very forms of contact and subsequent alterations they make intelligible. Mimicry, hybridity and creolization are prominent examples of this, while reconciliation, as in the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have been taking place in Britain’s former colonies in recent decades, remains a collective horizon difficult to reach in spite of the efforts displayed on all sides. A case in point is the public controversy sparked in 2017 by Canada 150, the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation that many indigenous leaders 6 refused to celebrate on account of the “one hundred and fifty years of ongoing colonialism” which the year 1867 inaugurated for Canada’s First Nations.1 Proposing to observe the operations of confluence in postcolonial literatures certainly involves paying attention to the fluidity and permeability the geographical analogy helps identify in terms of thematisation, representation, and critical conceptualization. But confluence, it must be pointed out, is also a zone of turbulence where currents coming from different sources rush to impose a direction to the flow. Here, I believe, lies the productive tension that informs the essays to follow, insofar as the latter do not give pride of place to conciliation over the eddies of resilience or resistance, but carefully work out the modalities of their uneasy coexistence in literatures that keep challenging critical reception with their inventiveness. Marie Herbillon’s chronotopic approach emphasizes the confluence of time and space in the essay she devotes to Murray Bail’s Notebooks. Once she has shown how the relationships between self and place undergo a redefinition in Murray’s “geotobio- graphy,” Herbillon works from the neologism she borrowed from Frédéric Regard to elaborate on the effects of “extrospection” in a hybrid genre that allows “a plural and dynamic approach to selfhood, whereby a contemporary sense of Australianness is evolved through the dispersion of unified, static and potentially hegemonic identities.” Adrian Grafe’s essay follows a circuitous course in its approach to J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. If confluence first seems to prevail in the entwining of the Magistrate’s and the Barbarians’ fates, Grafe however chooses to concentrate on the conflict the Magistrate’s conscience has internalized between his aspirations for justice and the authority he embodies as a representative of the law. The essay finally ponders over the value of waiting, the receptiveness through which the Magistrate resists the role the regime forced upon him, and reclaims an ethical sense of self grounded in a shared humanity. In her own contribution, Alice Michel engages in a reappraisal of Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship. First published in Australia in the 1880s, this serial novel has frequently been dismissed as “too romantic, too domestic, or even too conservative.” The essay, however, identifies in its ambivalence the seeds of a radicalism that has long passed unnoticed. A pioneer concern for social issues converges in Cambridge’s writing with a questioning of gender norms and a sly feminist positioning that allows the author to steer around the rules of Victorian propriety while avoiding a direct confrontation with the conservative expectations of a colonial audience. Sara Arami chose to discuss The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, a coming-of-age novel by Mahja Kahf, a Syrian-American writer. The essay focuses on the dilemma faced by female Muslim writers who grew up in the West and constantly run the risk of re-orientalizing their culture of origin, the object of great emotional investment on their part. Arami pays close attention to the novel’s turning point where the heroine realizes that her ideal of an authentic Islam immune to the global reach of Westernization does not exist, except perhaps in her imagination. The ending of the novel, a happy confluence

1. In a feature article for The Guardian, Ashifa Kassam presents a documented overview of the controversy that includes a link to the travelling exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience by Kent Monkman, a prominent artist of Cree origin. The exhibition is a fine example of the counter-celebration organised by the vanguard of Canada’s Indigenous artists, and a great antidote against the complacency that occasionally surfaces with retrospective views on Canada’s history of interracial relations. 7 Confluence. Introduction if there is one, nevertheless requires a careful assemblage of objects, rituals, and texts for the novel’s heroine to succeed in bringing her culture home to the US. In “The Flowing Together of Politics and Poetics,” Cédric Courtois proposes an in- depth analysis of three novels by Nigerian writer Helon Habila. Courtois first replaces Habila’s oeuvre in the historical context of the building of the Nigerian project, a political process in which literature has been put to task to foster national reconciliation after one civil war and many years of brutal dictatorship. He then moves on to analyse how politics and poetics strikingly converge in Habila’s critique of Nigeria’s current petroculture, before enlarging on his experimentation with the hybrid genre of “faction.” Finally, hybridity is also central to the essay Sandrine Soukai devotes to Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Her analysis throws light upon the transformations the Anglo-Indian novel underwent following the 1947 Par- tition, in reaction to the rise of competing nationalist discourses in India and Pakistan. Although Ghosh and Shamsie now stand on separate sides of the boundary dividing the two countries, their novels reinstate a sense of commonality, beyond the shared trauma of Partition, by relying upon the cross-cultural memory deposited in the various Indian literatures they draw upon, “thus creating hybrid narratives whose texture reflects their plural definitions of concepts such as the nation, identity and culture.”

Claire Omhovère Paul-Valéry University – Montpellier / EMMA

W orks Cited Kassam, Ashifa. “Canada celebrates 150 but indigenous groups say history is being ‘skated over’.” The Guardian 27 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ jun/27/canada-150th- anniversary-celebration-indigenous-groups. Consulted 15 March 2018.

Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks

The Australian writer Murray Bail’s Notebooks feature a change of stance that interrogates the self-place relationship: initially dominated by an ideal of placelessness, they then seek to forge new bonds with a reimagined homeland. This essay examines the political implications of this paradigmatic shift. Arguably, the sense of identity that finds expression in this unconventional autobiography depends, in part, on a radical reconceptualisation of the Aus- tralian space.

In the past few decades, a number of critics – among whom the authors of The Empire Writes Back – have maintained that “a major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place” (Ashcroft et al. 8). From its inception Australian literature in particular has been largely dominated by the idea of place. The contemporary Aus- tralian writer Murray Bail is no exception to this rule: throughout his fiction, he has regularly interrogated the relationship between national landscape and cultural identity. In his introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories (1988), Bail himself recognised that the landscape had long been (and still was in the 1980s) “the dominating force” (xv) in Australian literature and art in general. Yet, it is worth noting that Bail’s Notebooks (first published in 1989 under the title Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook and reissued sixteen years later in an augmented version soberly entitled Notebooks 1970-2003) engage with the issue in a more oblique manner. This border-crossing text, which collates first- and third-person entries, also features a crucial change of stance. While the first part (started in London in the early 1970s) seems dominated by an ideal of placelessness and a general sense of unbelonging, the second half (chiefly written in Sydney from the late 1980s onwards) arguably displays a wish to create new bonds with a home country now perceived as essentially heterogeneous.1 Taking its cue from Bakhtinian theory, this essay will rely on a chronotopic analysis so as to examine the potentially political implications of this paradigmatic shift. Ulti- mately, I aim to show that Bail, as he breaks with traditional – i.e., historical – definitions of autobiography (notably in terms of self and genre), not only suggests that a genuine sense of Australianness necessarily depends on a large-scale reconceptualisation of the Australian space, but also that a modern, i.e., plural, conception of identity, such as it finds expression in the hybrid genre invented with the Notebooks, inevitably rests on much more than a mere sense of place. In the mid-1970s, the French theorist Philippe Lejeune defined autobiography as a “retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence,

1. Although it was released in 1989, Longhand was written between 1970 and 1974, when the author was residing in London while travelling around Europe. I will use this edition every time I refer to those early years; all entries written between 1988 and 2003 will thus be taken from the most recent edition (Bail had, by then, returned to Australia, from where he undertook various journeys abroad). This will allow me to distinguish clearly between two distinct time-frames which I will also call Part I and Part II respectively. 10 focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality” (“The Autobiographical Contract” 193). In a couple of remarkable articles dedicated to what he names “geotobiographies,” Frédéric Regard exposes this definition as doubly restrictive, ignoring as it does the issue of the autobiographer’s spatial positioning. Firstly, this definition of autobiography lays the emphasis on “an essentially historical element” (“Topologies” 19), which largely overlooks the fact that the speaking subject is also geographically placed in the physical universe. Secondly, it fails to highlight that “discourse spatializes the subject in [an even] more decisive fashion than […] ‘natural’ geography” (17). If this definition could – in Lejeune’s own view – accommodate various exceptions, one single sine qua non condition had to be fulfilled if a text was to be classified as an autobiography: a relationship of identity had to exist “between theauthor , the narrator and the protagonist” (193). The main problem with this definition does not so much lie in the fact that it postulates authenticity, insofar as Lejeune himself is careful to differentiate between this ambiguous notion and those of absolute transparency and referentiality: since it is obviously vain to hope that “objective” truth can be reached through autobiographical writing (or, for that matter, through any kind of discourse), it is the “intention on the part of the author” (Anderson 2) to tell his/her truth, i.e., a form of sincerity, that guarantees autobiographical “authenticity.” In this context, the reader has no choice but to believe the author as to the fact that the latter is saying the truth about him-/herself. This is what Lejeune has called “the autobiographical contract” in his well-known Pacte autobiographique. Arguably, the weakness of Lejeune’s definition has more to do with the fact that it posits introspection as a natural process, whereas the introspective impulse, for the advent of which the “identity between observer and observed” (i.e., between narrator and author) is a problematic “precondition” (Marcus 69), was almost simultaneously called into question – and ultimately deemed impossible – by the poststructuralist and deconstructionist movements (see infra). Drawing on the theories developed by Émile Benveniste, in which the French linguist discriminates between the subject of the enunciation (the autobiographical “I” of the utterer) and the subject of the utterance (the “real” “I” of the author), Lejeune, for his part, appears to suggest that the self is composed of two identical entities, namely the narrating “I” of the autobiographer and the author as a real person, and yet that the former can take the latter as his/her object, as if these entities were also distinct, or separable. There is no reason to suppose that Bail is violating Lejeune’s pact in the Notebooks, namely that he is being insincere by not being the one he implicitly claims he is, even if only a small minority of entries are historically, or factually, verifiable in this respect. Strictly speaking, i.e., from what is commonly known of Murray Bail’s life as a writer, it can be ascertained that the couple of specific public events to which the text refers – firstly, the fact that he received a prize called “Premier’s Award” Notebooks( 202) on 16 September 1988 in Melbourne, for his novel Holden’s Performance, and secondly his meeting with the “Queen” of England at “B. Palace” (272) – occurred to the person whose name appears on the Notebooks’ cover. However, this does not amount to asserting that the textual “I” unambiguously designates the author of the book: it would be bold, even paradoxical to assume that the I-entries indeed have the ability to give us direct access to the author’s mind, life and feelings, as – somewhat deceptively – suggested by the classic conception of authorship on which the autobiographical contract is premised, and to 11 Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks which Lejeune himself could never entirely subscribe.2 As early as the 1970s, poststruc- turalism radically challenged this view of the author as a truthful and authoritative entity controlling the meaning of his/her works, as well as the related, romantic, notion of a unified and authentic selfhood. In fact, the poststructuralist critique of these concepts can be located in the broader context of a new paradigmatic shift taking place a century and a half after the previous one, which led to the emergence (around 1800) of autobiography and its development as a genre. In this sense, as Laura Marcus indicates, “the critical and theoretical interest in autobiography which has gathered pace since the 1950s,” and indeed “the growth of ‘autobiographical studies’” (180) themselves, “can […] be understood as a response to, or an aspect of, the intense debates over subjectivity in the latter part of the twentieth century” (147). In his experimental autobiography originally published in 1975 (and first translated into English in 1977), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the latter already pointed to the utterly discursive nature of “the subject,” declaring that it was “merely an effect of language” (79, original emphasis). Let us note in passing that Lejeune, who came to recognise the rhetorical dimension of subjectivity, remained convinced that the autobiographical contract could be “sealed by the name of its signer” (209), as if the latter, by virtue of his/her location at the “outer edge” (210) of a text, was not part and parcel of writing: the author’s personal name, onto which the “I” is displaced, is seen as being “at once textual and indubitably referential” (211), i.e., as “the only mark in the text of an indu- bitable “outside-of-the-text,” designating a real person” (199). In poststructuralist and deconstructionist accounts, this idea of an isomorphism between proper name and authorial authenticity is resolutely invalidated: the name(s) featured on the cover of a book is (are) clearly as immersed in language as the rest of the text, and thus emerge(s) as an “insufficient marker of authenticity” (Marcus 257). In this regard, Derrida points out that “the proper name” or signature, which is as texturised as the “I” featured in the body of the autobiography, “is not to be confused with the bearer […] of the name” (Ear 53), i.e., the “real” self. As for Paul de Man, he uses a different terminology to make a similar point. In his groundbreaking essay “Autobiography as De-facement” (1979), he argues that since the writer’s self is always mediated through language, the writing of autobiographies necessarily implies some sort of displacement and that a crucial distinction thus needs to be made between, on the one hand, the name on the title page or signature, which pertains to the author’s rhetorical “I,” and, on the other hand, the proper name referring to its bearer, i.e., the autobiographer’s real personality. As Marcus aptly remarks in her discussion of de Man’s work, “autobiography imports alterity into the self by the act of objectification which engenders it” (203). In the same essay, de Man explicitly attacks Lejeune because he “uses ‘proper name’ and ‘signature’ interchan- geably” and contends that, by contrast, “the name on the title page is not the proper name of a subject capable of self-knowledge and understanding, but the signature that gives the contract legal, though by no means epistemological, authority” (71). For de Man, the writer’s self is thus hopelessly divided and can only be textually, i.e., imperfect- ly, reconstructed. Just as most fiction encapsulates an autobiographical component, so do autobiographies – as Linda Anderson puts it – “produce fictions […] instead of the self-knowledge they seek” (13). The poststructuralist and deconstructionist critics then

2. In his later work, he refuted “some of the more absolute claims” (Marcus 193) he made in his famous essay. 12 not only foreground the subject’s fundamentally split character: next to this idea of a radical self-division, they also highlight – unlike Lejeune – the inextricable “coincidence” (Barthes 55) of the two entities constituting the self and, therefore, the impossibility of introspection. Since the “real” self cannot be dissociated from the autobiographical one, the “I” is condemned to being “im-pertinent”: having “no referent” (56, original emphasis) outside language, it cannot, in other words, take itself as an object. This is not to say, however, that the self does not pre-exist language. Indeed, the prelinguistic self is no more absent or non-existent than it is unitary, static or substantial. The myth of the self defined as a “rational concretion” (Barthes 119) and represented in English by a single and solid straight line should thus also be dispelled: there is no such thing as a primary, naked or pure “I” that would “simply lie beneath veils, awaiting the moment of revelation” (Marcus 122). Rather, as Barthes further suggests when he refers to the fundamental “inconsistency of the subject, his atopia” (86), the so-called “real” self is like a shapeless, insubstantial and inessential entity that must be written into existence. I will return below to the shape(s) possibly taken by non-introspective self-writing. In other words, discourse forever precludes the discursively spatialised subject from reaching his/her “ipseity” (see Regard, “Topologies” 18 and “Géotobiographies” 14), i.e., a sense of oneness with him-/herself. The so-called “metaphorists” (Roy Pascal, James Olney, Jean Starobinski, etc.) also advocated the subject’s “literarity” against the “literalness” (see Regard, “Géotobiographies” 17, 19) defended by Lejeune and his proponents (the “literalists”) but both traditions (with the exception of Derrida, who – in Margins of Philosophy (1982) – put forward the idea of the writing self ’s inner “spacing”) remain, as Regard notes, “attached to a single and unchanging paradigm, that of an individual subject cut off from the world” (“Topologies” 20). Regard further contends that the joint determiners of the life-writer’s spatial placement are, on the one hand, his/her objective location, which can be approached in chronotopic terms, and, on the other, a positioning vis-à-vis “hermeneutic models involving a conception of space” (“Géotobiographies” 13, my translation for all excerpts from this text). For Bakhtin, the concept of chronotope (literally time-space), which is borrowed from mathematics but can – as his examination of Western literature demonstrates – be productively transposed to literary studies, should be understood as expressing “the inseparability of space and time” (84). Although the term is said, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, to function as “the primary means for materializing time in space” (250; more specifically, it is applied to concrete places, like roads or rooms, fusing spatial and temporal indicators), I will use it more neutrally (more liberally, maybe), as a way of referring to the abstract, non-linguistic intersection of spatial and temporal parameters in Bail’s autobiographical account. In this respect, it can be upheld that the autobiographer’s chronotopic placement mirrors his positioning towards extratextual discourses on place (or, by extension, on national identity), which may – to some extent – have contributed to shaping his perception of these categories. Let me exemplify this: in the early 1970s, Australia was still characterised by a marked conservatism and nationalism. Conceivably, such a mind-set was tightly linked to archetypal representations of the local landscape as unified and monolithic – a type of connection Bail has relentlessly addressed and problematised in his fictional writings. It also resulted in cramped definitions of national identity. As Brian Castro puts it inLook - ing for Estrellita, a collection of essays in which he emerges as both a practitioner and a 13 Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks theorist of autobiography, identity became, at the time, “the pretext for the suppression of heterogeneity” (29). In Part I (the one written in Great Britain between 1970 and 1974), Bail seems to be contaminated, on a couple of occasions, by this stereotypical view of his native country as nothing but a hot and dry place. Witness the following entry: When I think of “Australia,” I first see its shape. It is quickly followed by scenes of slow-moving dryness, muted colours, and some of the great white trees. Of people in general, it is often young, flushed mothers in sleeveless cotton dresses yanking or carrying children on the hot city asphalt. (Longhand 30) Elsewhere, he states: “Sometimes, ‘Australia’ appears to me as all rocks (dry, hot)” (Long- hand 109). If these comments are rather explicit compared to many other entries, they still resist interpretation, which can be ascribed to Bail’s general refusal to go beyond the level of seemingly objective – but often deceptively transparent – description in the Notebooks. The fact that the word Australia is placed between quotation marks in the two above-mentioned cases nevertheless seems to indicate a willingness on the author’s part to distance himself from these stock depictions of his homeland. By the same token, brief descriptions obliquely castigate some Australians’ propensity for national pride. For instance, a presumed relative of his then wife Margaret Wordsworth (see Ackland 25) is portrayed in this way: “M.’s aunt from Queensland: long face, wrinkled vertically (unusual). Broad sensible dress. Firm disgust at foreignness; but loud about Austra- lia” (Longhand 25). Later on, he reports and laconically comments on a conversation between an Italian guide and an Australian tourist: “Guide: ‘Do you all speak English?’ / Australian, loudly: ‘Can you manage Australian?’ / A form of pride” (Longhand 117). However, this first section can be said to move towards what Castro has named “a conscious extinction of place” (9): on the whole, Australia is rarely mentioned and the pronoun “we” is never used as a referent for Bail’s fellow Australians. Furthermore, a sense of homelessness, concerning both his country of adoption (where he temporarily chose to live, for reasons which remain undisclosed, between mid-1970 and late 1974) and his birthplace, is asserted throughout. The impression of “not [being] part of all this” (Longhand 1) he had upon his arrival at Heathrow airport in June 1970 has not left him shortly before his return to the fold, as suggested by this entry: “Definite feeling of unbelonging – definitely” (139). As for the notion of home, which features in one single entry, it is immediately disavowed by the three words following it, namely: “Wherever that is” (134). It may not seem coincidental, by contrast, if Part II, which covers a fifteen-year time- span, starts in Sydney in 1988 (after an equally long gap in the writing). It is indeed in the late 1980s that some writers and critics locate “the advent of multiculturalism” (Castro 31) in Australia. This concept is, of course, a highly controversial one in the Australian context. A scholar like Ghassan Hage has criticised the limited scope of Australia’s multiculturalism and exposed what he termed “white cosmo-multiculturalism” (205) as a type of rhetoric which, in practice, has tended to contain and regulate racial and cultural difference. Although Bail’s novel acknowledgement of his country’s geographical variety (see infra) should obviously not be seen as a direct consequence of Australia’s multicultural politics, it may still have something to do with the author’s sensitivity to a new Zeitgeist rooted in more heterogeneous conceptions of space and identity, which progressive writers like himself – together with various other factors – may also have 14 contributed to shaping. It would thus come as no surprise that Bail should feel more in line with a country where cultural hybridity would no longer be “synonymous with inauthenticity” (Castro 10). His own perspective on the local place is, at least, deeply modified. In his distinctively terse way, he is now keen to insist on Australia’s inexhaus- tible geographical diversity, as attested by this entry: “Another and then another and yet another landscape” (Notebooks 206). Similarly, he takes to depicting atypical – i.e., non desert-like – landscapes, for instance this one which is covered in snow (near Oberon): “Snow all the way up the trunks of eucalypts: white and grey-white. Snow and cold are always a reminder of the harshness of this isolated planet, and how humans have softened it, to remain living” (215). He is also more inclined – if relatively so – to rely on first-person plural pronouns, which notably express a nascent identification with the Australian people. Having previously established his belief in topographical variety, he even attaches, on one occasion, such a pronoun to the delineation of a fairly traditional landscape, which then becomes one among many possible representations of Australia: “Around Wilpena, the colours are naturally ours: silver-greys, pale browns. The pink of galahs” (258). At some point, he even observes that “hot, foreign places seem to produce homesickness” (265). Insofar as this non-I-entry can be applied to himself, it might imply that his new awareness of Australia’s territorial multiplicity now allows him to experience this feeling, which he defined earlier on as the “habits of a landscape acquired over time” (Longhand 30). The very possibility of a change in personality and thus in viewpoint (including vis-à-vis his motherland) is actually alluded to in the Notebooks. Whereas Bail seemed convinced, in Part I, that “[he could] remain the same. Easily” (Longhand 11), he claims, in an entry dated 8 March 1999 in Part II, that “in the past ten years [he has] become more complex,” adding that “it has made [him] more interesting, and yet less attractive” (Notebooks 272). Significantly, this paradigmatic shift is echoed in the fiction. In Holden’s Performance (1987), many characters are subjected to the literal influence of a simplified environment (either urban or rural), with a view to parodying their allegiance to a nationalistic doctrine or simply their excessive identification with their archetypal motherland. The central protagonist is, for one, a grotesque allegory of his country: physically huge but ontologically empty, Holden Shadbolt comically problematises the seductiveness of place as a matrix of cultural identity. In the later novels, Bail’s approach to this classic theme in Australian literature nevertheless takes a more serious turn. The complex, hybrid spaces that serve as backgrounds to Eucalyptus (1998) and The Pages (2008) obviously parallel the author’s earnest, methodical attempts to debunk, like Pa- trick White before him, the myth of “the Great Australian Emptiness” (White 157). In Eucalyptus, for example, he forces us to remember that the singular genus of the title is a linguistic construct concealing myriad eucalypts: blinded as we are by the most common specimens, we just cannot see the wood for the trees. Turning as many trees as he can into metonyms for his country, Bail thus refutes the widespread accusations of unifor- mity that are regularly directed at the Australian landscape and celebrates a land that is actually as dazzlingly diverse as the “trees [which] compose [it]” (Eucalyptus 16). In The Pages, he similarly questions the idea that the vast, arid spaces of Australia must necessarily induce cultural – philosophical rather than literary, in this case – barrenness, inciting us to remember that the Australian space is a heterotopic palimpsest, the geographical 15 Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks variety and historical layering of which should be uncovered rather than obscured by enduring archetypal representations. In the Notebooks, the author’s new rapprochement with a reconceptualised landscape no more lapses into complacent national devotion than it does in the fiction. Bail is indeed careful to suggest that he is never entirely at one with Australia. Although he feels “welcomed […] back” (240) in Sydney, where he settles in the late 1980s, he keeps moving from one of the city’s neighbourhoods to the next. These frequent changes of address, as well as his realisation that his mobility amounts to “a form of evasion” (241), definitely resonate with the words of Henri Lefebvre, who, in The Production of Space, saw the notion of home as “an imaginary encoding that belongs to an extinct past” (see Regard, “Topologies” 22). More importantly, it should be stressed that, on the whole, the entries pertaining to other topics far outnumber those devoted to Australia. In this sense, the Notebooks break free – and doubly so – from the traditionally postcolonial theme of the relationship between self and home country, partly because of the narrative transpositions to various foreign settings, but also because the issue of place now emerges as one among many features of a text that engages more broadly – as we will see below – with the notion of identity. In the aforementioned introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories, Bail also argued that “transport[ing] themselves or their subjects overseas” was a way for Australian writers of “gaining […] an instant complexity” (xvi). Significantly, Bail followed his own advice in theNotebooks , so much so that these often read like a travel book in which he deterritorialises himself further and further away from either the old imperial centre or from Australia. If, in the London notebooks, the author is naturally led to focus on the urban landscape of the British capital rather than on his homeland, he also relates several trips to nearby countries (namely France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany), then to Northern Africa (Morocco) and Russia. Likewise, the second section recounts Bail’s various journeys to Europe (including, this time, “exotic” destinations like Ice- land), as well as to North America (Canada and the United States) and West Africa (Senegal, Mauritania or Mali), where he was obviously too engrossed in an often utterly defamiliarising environment to concentrate on the matter of his own national identity. Because it virtually obliterates locatedness and compels the traveller to direct his/her gaze towards the outer world, travel definitely contributes to shaping fluid, rather than stable, identities – and it does so in each part of the Notebooks. As a matter of fact, this outward-turning gaze can be regarded as the hallmark of the entire book, which seems to conceive of the autobiographical form as an ongoing dialogue with the outside world. Each section of the Notebooks indeed consists of an apparently transparent textual collage that conflates reported conversations, quotations, casual observations, brief comments on an array of topics ranging from art to language, as well as newspaper cuttings and obituaries. This Bakhtinian dialogism makes for a deeply heterogeneous text, which deviates (both in terms of self and genre) from the traditional definitions of autobiography as an introspective, retrospective, historical and essentially European genre. Focused on the main events of a great man’s existence and on the “evocation of [his] life as a totality” (Marcus 3), these formally and culturally dominant autobiographies tend to present selfhood and genre – inseparable categories in autobiographical criticism – as stable and coherent entities: they are not only gene- rically homogenous or unitary, but they also ascribe a central place to a self conceived 16 as monadic, static, centred, exemplary and sovereign. By contrast, Bail’s extrospective, non-retrospective and spatial Notebooks experiment with the conventions of the genre, allowing their author to develop what could be named a philosophy of the extimate, which turns, with time, into a genuine poetics. Although Bail hardly expresses reservations about introspective literature until the end of Part II (see infra), his repudiation of introspection is clearly textualised in the Notebooks since the latter bear less resemblance to a journal intime in which the author would withdraw into his shell than to a journal extime, in the phrase coined by the French writer Michel Tournier3 to define his own autobiographical writings. Autobiography, which has often been likened to the process of looking at oneself in a mirror, thus becomes synonymous with holding this mirror out to the world. If the self, as Tournier – like Barthes before him – seems to think, is “insubstantial” and therefore uninteres- ting as such, the autobiographer should, instead, attempt to detect in the external world (which is not limited to national space), the small yet significant events that deserve un- mitigated attention. Tacitly but firmly, Bail’s own hybrid collage asserts the superiority of the outside over the inside, so much so that he could probably have declared, with Tournier, that “reality is infinitely beyond the resources of my imagination and keeps filling me with surprise and admiration” Journal( extime 12, my translation). Like Frank Delage, the protagonist of his latest novel, who carries around notebooks “for jotting down things he had read or heard, the way some people pick up cigarette butts, they could be useful one day, not only maxims, although most of them were, unusual phrases, descriptions too, he liked the sound of single words” (The Voyage 10, emphasis added), Bail thus embarks on a quest for what he terms, in The Voyage, “the poetic unexpected.” This spiritual quest, which appears as a constant in the Notebooks as a whole, consists in the perpetual desire and attempt to encounter “new knowledge” (53) in the real, which then turns into an enchanted place where the “ordinary” can reveal itself. Adopting the posture of the philosopher (of the phenomenologist, in particular), Bail lets the world speak before subjecting all that catches his attention to description, as if the facts of life could be laid bare. This descriptive strategy, which refrains from indulging in emotion, explanation or analysis, is often – as Marcus observes – “accompanied […] by [a] process of estrangement” (114) which reproduces or even reinforces the sense of surprise the autobiographer experienced in the first place. This art of serendipity is not simply a matter of luck; the discovery of the unexpected is also the result of human agency insofar as it implies a great mental availability and a resolute opening to newness. In Part I, Bail repeatedly uses the term “alert(ness),” which clearly thematises the type of sagacity that is supposed to go hand in glove with his extrospective attitude. When he leaves the hospital where he was treated for a tropical disease, for example, he says he has been observing everything “with special alertness” (Longhand 43). Later on, he emphasises an “extreme alertness to almost all things” (Longhand 58). Elsewhere, he notes as a possible consequence of his increased receptiveness that some objects have the power of “asserting themselves” and “coming forward at [him], in their absolute es-

3. Although the Notebooks contain no reference to his Journal extime (published in 2002), Tournier’s novelistic work is cited with admiration in two of the few entries explicitly expressing Bail’s literary preferences. The first one reads as follows: “With little warning I read a novel of commanding force, intelligence: The Erl King. Through his thoughts the author himself (Tournier) almost becomes the most interesting character” (Longhand 91). The second one, which opposes introspective to mythical literature, will be discussed in more detail below. 17 Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks sence” (Longhand 97). With the following quotation, also featured in Part I, Bail invokes Goethe in order to address the way in which the latter evolved a connection with the outside world, which exerts a constant influence on him: “I sought to free my inner life of every alien influence, to look with love on all around me, and allow all beings, from man downwards to the lowest comprehensible creature, to act upon me, each after his own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity with the several objects of nature, and a heartfelt concord and harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place and country, of hour and season, or of any other part of the natural order, affected me profoundly.” – Goethe (Longhand 47-8) As he quotes Goethe, Bail presumably seeks to signal a filiation with the German writer, an autobiographer and eulogist of extrospection, thereby distancing himself from other autobiographical models notably provided by Augustine, the founding father of introspective autobiography. As early as that period (i.e., the beginning of the 1970s), Bail nevertheless seems aware of the fact that his desire for exteriority and the quest for defamiliarisation it entails tend to induce a propensity for “using the word ‘I’ too much,” which he then sees as “a sign of inexperience” (Longhand 13). In Part II, Bail’s persistent distrust of introspection leads him to ponder further on the most appropriate narrative treatment of the “I.” For instance, the next entry – although it ironically contains a first-person pronoun – explicitly testifies to his distaste for confessional (as well as “effect-oriented”) literature: It makes no difference whether literature is European, American, British, or Australian, as long as it allows me to enter and contemplate. Prefer inventions, those that more or less reach the area of myth (the broadest sense). Kadare, Tournier, Marguerite Yourcenar etc.; Madame Bovary – “myth.” The Illiad [sic]. Little interest in literature – or painting, music – produced merely for effect. The confessional, self-analysis in the first person which is now common: it’s difficult, though not impossible, for it to enter “myth.” (Notebooks 282, original emphasis) Other entries firmly denounce introspection, stigmatising any autobiography that would limit itself to a narrow kind of self-analysis (see 280). Next to this succinct theorisation, a real effacement of the “I” should be pointed out in this portion of the text. In this respect, it is worth noting that Part I contains, proportionally, twice as many entries in the first person as Part II. Like Barthes, Bail is careful to disperse the autobiographical self by multiplying the modes of self-reference, i.e., by using a range of pronouns other than the “I” to refer to himself. At times, he opts for the second-person pronoun “you”; elsewhere, he addresses himself in the imperative mode. In an entry like the following, which contains both an existential and a self-reflexive dimension, he tersely combines the two methods: “You’re here briefly – work, give shape” (260). In a semantically related entry, which is also the Notebooks’ concluding comment, he includes himself in a collective “we”: “No use saying: if only we could live longer, there is not enough time etc. The brevity of life is in the design; it applies to every one of us” (306). A few pages earlier, an uncommented quote by Montaigne aptly emphasised the inevitable multiplicity, indeed the permanent dissemination of the self: “Anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending on which side I lay down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look after myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me: timid, insolent, chaste, 18

lecherous: talkative, taciturn: tough, sickly: clever, dull, brooding, affable; lying, truthful: learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal – I can see something of all that in myself…” – Montaigne (280) In view of the pronominal strategies described above, it can legitimately be assumed that Bail shares this position. As (s)he turns outward in this way, the writing subject thus becomes what Barthes names “an echo chamber” (74), i.e., (s)he disperses him-/herself in reaction to the objects, people, situations, sights, words, discourses, systems, etc. which surround him/her. By reinforcing this dispersion in Part II, Bail strengthens the poetics of the extimate started in Part I. As indicated earlier, the notions of self and genre are closely interrela- ted in the field of autobiography, where the “dispersion” (Barthes 143) to which extrospection subjects the self converges with the idea of “writing as […] an unconditional dispersion” (136). As it writes itself into existence, the autobiographer’s “dispersed” self further disseminates itself and turns into a textual “patchwork of reactions” (143). More than any other narrative form, extrospective writing thus spatialises the self, even as it entails a generic impurity that has been criticised by the proponents of traditional, i.e., introspective, autobiography. As Marcus puts it, “the demand for generic purity runs through auto/biographical discourse” and is “often linked to a strong rejection of the idea that it is environment that determines character” (61). The “scattered” subject (Barthes 158) writes “by fragments” (92) and proceeds “by addition” (94): according to Barthes, “the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle” (92-3), the centre of which would be too vague and elusive to be grasped. As Barthes further explains, “each piece is self-sufficient” (94) and no new fragment is ever the last one: it “is nothing but a further text, the last of the series, not the ultimate in meaning” (120, original emphasis). However, all these fragments gradually compose something like a Chinese portrait. As the autobiographer writes “in brief bursts” (93) and attempts “to resist the last word” (94, original emphasis) on him-/herself, (s)he allows a figure, his/her own, to delineate itself between the lines. The rhetorical recession of the self described above may also be invested with a political significance. On the part of a white Australian writer like Bail, it might indeed partake of a wish to dissolve a specific European legacy, that of the solid and singular “I,” the centrality of which has, at the turn of the 19th century, not only given birth to autobiography, but also played a symbolic role in the rise of colonialism. This is a point raised, for instance, by Marcus, who views colonisation and autobiography as “a product of the same impulses” (157). Likewise, Regard sees “a coincidence between the emergence of the autobiographical tradition and the hegemonic practices of Western modernity” (“Géotobiographies” 20). More particularly, he maintains that “the ‘isola- tion’ of the Western subject has always gone hand in hand with a hegemonic centra- lization that extended into the constitution of the great European Empires” and into “a world-order in which the Other was perceived as a threat” (21). According to Regard, this dogma, “through which the [European] individual has construed himself as the absolute centre of the world” has long obscured the crucial issue of the “geography of the self ” (20). For a white writer like Bail, the dispersion, or partial dissolution, of the autobiographical “I” could therefore take on a political character, this decentralisation allowing him, on the one hand, to construct an identity that would not be the mere re- 19 Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks plica of a dominant subjectivity and, on the other, not to perpetuate the oppression – be it discursive – of Australia’s indigenous populations. However, the erasure of the “I” is – as previously pointed out – not total, which would be neither realistic nor desirable, first because, as Bail himself notes, “it is almost impossible to live without vanity” (Notebooks 304), and also because the “I” represents a symbolic but necessary form of agency in an Australian context where identities in construction might be even more tentative than anywhere else.4 Furthermore, this recession of the “I,” which – as attested by the many biographical fragments incorporated in Part II – is paired with a growing interest, on the autobiographer’s part, in lives other than his own,5 is above all grammatical: even if the gradual effacement of the pronoun strengthens the (deceptive) impression of transparency and objectivity emerging from the text, the writer’s autobiographical self (his “I”) subsists in the form of a point of view (i.e., an “eye”), the neutrality of which is obviously illusory. In other words, the recession of the “I” is intimately linked to the development of a genuine poetics, not only of the extimate but also of the unexpected, which seeks to discard both an invasive self and heavy stylistic effects in order to textually re-create a sense of amazement (or even of wonder) instead of merely witnessing it in the outside world and describing it phe- nomenologically. The following entries are particularly relevant in this connection: “As she watched a woman on the street holding a baby up to her face saliva filled her mouth” (Notebooks 209); or: “From train (near Woy Woy): old turquoise-coloured barge rotting in khaki water. Man opposite, asleep, smelling like a wet dog” (284). Insignificant though they may seem, these two excerpts show how the writer silently worms his way into apparent descriptions (in which I have italicized the most creative segments)6 to create surprise, not only by defamiliarising the real in order to make its strangeness palpable, but also by initiating, within the Notebooks, a movement towards textualisation based on a friction (not to say a fusion) between the categories of “fact” and “fiction.” Although they were systematically categorised as non-fiction by his publishers, Bail’s Notebooks thus function as a textual locus where both reality and self are creatively rendered. While Lejeune and de Man expressed their dissatisfaction with the impossibility to make a clear-cut distinction between autobiographical and fictional texts, Bail deliberately blurs the boundary between fact and fiction in his Notebooks. Not only does his autobiographical account offer several ideas that were subsequently exploited in his novels, but it also exemplifies the process – also thematised and textualised inEucalyptus – by which “experience” is inevitably, and should always be, transformed into “texture” (258). Envisioned as definitely multiple, identity as approached by Bail is also deeply dynamic, since the self does not exist as such, i.e., as a pure, naked and sovereign ontology, but can only be captured (though not contained) in the sustained interactive process of writing back to the world at large. For Bail, as much as for Barthes, this “zone of

4. It can, for instance, be argued that the exacerbated nationalism that has sometimes been observed in Australia and has tended to contaminate settler literature is but an extreme response among others to the sense of fragility, not to say the cultural inferiority complex, generated by colonisation. 5. The following entry exemplifies this tendency: “Man (in Provence) tells younger swimmer she cannot land on his property. Exhausted she falls back into water. He then allows her to land, giving his hand. They have an affair for two years; children. His wife, owner of the house where it all began, left him” (294). 6. It goes without saying that Bail could know neither if the woman’s mouth, in the first excerpt, was actually wate- ring, nor, in the second case, what the man he saw from the train was smelling. 20 diffraction” (Barthes 153) where the self reverberates the real is, therefore, the sole – albeit multi-dimensional – space where both reader and writer can catch a glimpse of the autobiographical “I.” As a “miniature reflector of the outer world” (Marcus 43), the self is bound to be as dispersed as it is multiple. Throughout the Notebooks, Bail thus endeavours to produce a space, or myriad narrative spaces, for the deployment of a plural, dynamic and dialogical self, which is, of course, more in keeping with the multicultural spirit prevailing – theo- retically, at least – in Australia from the late 1980s onwards than with the dominant nationalistic creed of the early 1970s (partly countered, as I said, in Part I). As demonstrated by the frequent geographical deterritorialisations and by the constant interplay with the outer world, Bail attempts less to preserve enshrined ideas of place than to open up spaces which could then be termed “topological” (instead of “topical”), in accordance with the typology elaborated by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. In a previously quoted critical article, Regard further contends that “topologies of the self rest on tropologies,” i.e., that “tropes spatialize the inscription of one’s presence in the world” (“Topologies” 26). In the Notebooks, the autobiographer’s spatial inscription seems to be produced by the articulation of two main rhetorical figures. On the one hand, each entry can be construed as a metonym of the self (which may account for Andrew Riemer’s portrayal of Bail as “a consummate miniaturist”). On the other, the potentially infinite juxtaposition of these individual parts, the sum of which will always be exceeded by the self as a whole (however utopian this notion may seem to be), culminates in an image featured in both Barthes and Bail, that of “the ship Argo, of which the Argonauts gradually changed each part, so that they finally had a new ship without having to change its name or form” (Longhand 96).7 The Argonauts’ mythical ship thus provides a convincing metaphor for the self as an irreducibly diverse and evolutional object despite unchanging appearances. This image also implies a belief that performativity prevails over permanence or sequence. Although the Notebooks, which contain a few dates, preserve a global sense of chronology, their discontinuous quality arguably undermines temporal linearity inasmuch as it has the potential to disrupt the sequential order. Indeed, like the philosophy produced by Wesley Antill (one of the protagonists in The Pages), they are composed of countless “self-sufficient entities” (Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing 105 and “A Concern” 103) which can be read in any order. Instead of favouring “any particular […] vantage point” or “the progressive development of a privileged Self, in relation to which events and other persons are arranged as ‘background’ […], narrative attention is ‘evenly distributed’” (Postcolonial Life-Writing 103). Because they are not retrospective, each of the autonomous autobiographical acts they consist of nevertheless contributes, with equal weight, to the performative constitution of the life-writer’s subjectivity; in the same way as Ian Fairweather’s “finest” work, Bail’s own text is “a mosaic reality, where everchanging parts make up a whole” (Ian Fairweather 155).8

7. Barthes’s version: “… the ship Argo […], each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship without having to alter its name or form” (46). 8. This comment by the author (acting as an art critic in this case) relates to a Futurist canvas entitled Buffalo Ride (1959) and painted by this Scottish-born Australian artist to whom Bail devoted a monograph (first published in 1981 and reissued in 2009). 21 Remapping Australia: Murray Bail’s New Topographies of the Self in the Notebooks

In all, with the Notebooks, Bail invents a hybrid genre that draws all at once on autobiography (the conventions of which the author takes some liberties with), biography, travel literature9 and even fiction. As I have shown, this fractured, manifold form goes hand in glove with a plural and dynamic approach to selfhood, whereby a contemporary sense of Australianness is evolved through the dispersion of unified, static and potentially hegemonic identities. As he constructs his complex mosaic of discursive fragments, Bail not only exposes the essentialised self as an illusion, but he also performs a political act, insofar as he reimagines his homeland as a heterogeneous space with which new bonds can be forged. As Gregory Day put it in his 2005 review of the Notebooks, Bail “thankfully expands the official representation of the Australian literary imagination” (2) and puts forward a conception of identity in terms of which a sense of self and a sense of place need not be equated.

Marie Herbillon University of Liège, Belgium

W orks Cited Ackland, Michael. “Murray Bail.” Dictionary of Literary Biography (vol. 325): Australian Writers 1975-2000. Ed. Selina Samuels. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006. 24-30. Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2001. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post- Colonial Literatures. 1989. London: Routledge, 2002. Bail, Murray. Ian Fairweather. Sydney: Bay, 1981. —. “Indian Notebooks 1969.” Quadrant Twenty-Five Years. Ed. Peter Coleman, Lee Shrubb and Vivian Smith. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1982. 13-24. —. Holden’s Performance. 1987. London: Harvill, 2000. —. Introduction. The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. xiii-vii. —. Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989. —. Eucalyptus. 1998. London: Harvill, 1999. —. Notebooks 1970-2003. London: Harvill, 2005. —. The Pages. London: Harvill Secker, 2008. —. Fairweather. Sydney: Murdoch, 2009. —. The Voyage. London: MacLehose, 2012. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. 1977. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989. Trans. of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Castro, Brian. Looking For Estrellita. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1999. Day, Gregory. Review of the Notebooks 1970-2003. The Age. 23 December 2005. 2. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. 1984. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Trans. of L’Invention du quotidien. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” 1979. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 67-81. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Trans. of Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. —. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans. Avita Ronell. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985. Trans. of L’Oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Montreal: V1b, 1982.

9. This is also the case of the so-called “Indian Notebooks 1969”: based on the author’s impressions of India (where he lived between 1968 and 1970), they take the shape of a travel narrative, the factuality of which is circumvented thanks to personal comments. However, the continuous and retrospective nature of this text (penned in 1971) only reinforces the idea that the heterogeneous form taken by the Notebooks is far from fortuitous or anecdotal. 22

Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale NSW: Pluto, 1998. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Trans. of La Production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos, 1974. Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Contract.” French Literary Theory Today. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. 192-222. Trans. of Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. London: Routledge, 2009. —. “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as a Genre.” Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form. Ed. Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. 91-108. Regard, Frédéric. “‘Géotobiographies’ : Introduction aux géographies du soi.” L’Autobiographie littéraire en Angleterre (17ème-20ème siècles). Ed. Frédéric Regard. Saint-Étienne: PU Saint-Étienne, 2000. 11-33. —. “Topologies of the Self: Space and Life-Writing.” Mapping the Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography. Ed. Frédéric Regard. Saint-Étienne: PU Saint-Étienne, 2003. 15-30. Riemer, Andrew. Review of the Notebooks 1970-2003. Sydney Morning Herald. 19 January 2006. Tournier, Michel. Journal extime. 2002. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. White, Patrick. “The Prodigal Son.” The Vital Decade: Ten Years of Australian Art and Letters. Ed. Geoffrey Dutton. 1958. Melbourne: Sun, 1968. 156-8.

Type, Personalisation and Depersonalisation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) recounts the rebellion of the Magistrate of an Empire frontier outpost against the torture inflicted on those the Imperial administration which employs him considers as “barbarians.” The first-person narration is a strategy enabling the author to personalize the Magistrate whose name he never reveals, above all because through it we are allowed to witness the workings of conscience. The novel is a drama of the opposition between justice and law, and of what happens when men who are supposed to uphold the law in fact neglect justice and abuse their power, themselves becoming worse than “barbarians.” Within this complex moral and ethical framework the essay at hand proposes to explore the modalities of personhood as established by Coetzee, and its limits.

J.M. Coetzee summed up Waiting for the Barbarians, six years after the publication of the novel, by saying that it was “about the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience” (Doubling the Point 363).1 The first part of the statement stresses state oppression; the second part, conscience and human being. The unnamed Magistrate, the novel’s main character, is then a “man of conscience.” He is, as a man of conscience, a type, and that seems to be enough for Coetzee. His character’s conscience, in the author’s eyes, defines him sufficiently for him to be denied a name. He is at the same time a man of justice, a man of the law. He describes himself as just “another grey-haired servant of Empire” (Waiting for the Barbarians 16). He does not see himself as anyone special: “I am a country magistrate […], serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire […]. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times” (Waiting 8). Ironically, the arrival at the Magistrate’s Imperial frontier town of state police officer Colonel Joll, and later Warrant Officer Mandel, brings to an end the Magistrate’s “quiet life in quiet times” and the rule of law it is his – and, supposedly, their – very function to ensure. In order to contextualize the present perspective, it is worth pointing out that although there are no direct references to the notions of type and person in Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee does refer to type in two later novels. In The Master of Petersburg, the main character, Dostoyevsky, has an affair with Anna, the landlady of the writer’s deceased son, Pavel: “He imagines her as she lies […] beside her daughter, her eyes open and glistening. She belongs, he realizes for the first time, to a type he has never written into his books” (The Master of Petersburg 133). One type of woman, the one Dostoyevsky is used to, has sensations which are intense but “of the surface,” whereas Anna’s “type” has sensations “deep within their bodies” (Master 133). From then on, he desires this quality as found in this “type” of woman. Teaching The Prelude, the English professor David Lurie, narrator and protagonist of Disgrace, tries to explain to his class why Wordsworth’s discovery of Mont Blanc is disappointing to the poet. It is due to

1. An early version of this article was delivered as a seminar paper at Michael F. Zimmermann’s Aesthesis conference on “Type and Person” at Eichstadt Catholic University, in Germany, in July 2014. The author wishes to thank Professor Zimmermann for his inspiration and hospitality on that occasion. Thanks, too, to the editor, Claire Omhovère, and to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their suggestions for improvement. 24 the discrepancy between the idea the poet has formed of the mountain and its reality. Lurie tries to explain this discrepancy by drawing an analogy based on the experience of being in love: “Do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form” (Disgrace 22). Lurie goes on to use the phrase “the great archetypes of the imagination” and, just before, in connection with the Wordsworth poem, “the great archetypes of the mind, pure ideas” (Disgrace 22-3). The word “idea” alludes to the Platonic forms which were a staple of English Roman- tic poetry. Coetzee said of Waiting for the Barbarians: “Why does one choose the side of justice when it is not in one’s material interest to do so? The Magistrate gives the rather Platonic answer: because we are born with the idea of justice” (Doubling 394).2 While wrestling with the problem of evil in various forms in his writing, Coetzee seems to be displaying here a strong bias in favour of the humanist idea that all human beings are basically good, all the more notable in a writer coming from a country whose history has been so fraught with injustice. The notion of human beings being born with the idea of justice calls to mind Rous- seau’s definition of conscience: conscience is an innate principle of justice and virtue, which enables us to judge our own actions and those of others as good or evil (cf. Blay’s entry on conscience). The Magistrate is a type, to the extent that he is a man whose function it is in the plot of the novel to embody and to represent the idea of justice. The Magistrate as person is not merely, or rather not primarily, the sum of the different elements which make up his personality – his passionate attempt to discover or reach the essence of the barbarian girl, his interest in archaeology. Rather he manifests the necessity for justice, if it is to have any reality or density at all, to be incarnated in the fallible warp and weft of human being. At this point one might apply a religious perspective. Among other possible references to this domain, the language with which the Magistrate describes the treatment the Empire’s officers inflict on him inevitably recalls the Passion: “I have already died one death, on that tree” (Waiting 125). In its statement of charges against the Magistrate, the Empire accuses him of consorting with a “streetwoman” (83), a term suggestive of prostitution. The Magistrate “anoint[s] [the girl] with exotic oils” (56; also 135, “my perfumes and oils”), starting with her feet, in what he repeatedly calls a “ritual” (for example 41). Such a cluster of Biblical allusions or even pattern of Biblical motifs hints at the possibility of our seeing the Magistrate as a Christ figure, and the barbarian girl, mutatis mutandis, as an avatar of Mary Magdalene (John 12:3: Mary “anoint[s] Jesus’ feet” with “expensive perfume”). Conversely the Magistrate is a Magdalene anointing the feet of the barbarian girl as Christ figure. They are both Christ figures crucified by the Empire: the barbarian girl is an innocent, tortured without trial, the magistrate is hung on the tree for his defence of justice.

Mask and Identity In the first pages of the novel, the Imperial army has taken some “barbarians” prisoner. As Colonel Joll’s first conversation with the Magistrate reveals, the Colonel has already

2. One might compare this statement with one made by Dostoyevsky to another character, Nechaev, in The Master of Petersburg: “You were born with the spirit of justice in you” (Master 183). 25 Type, Personalisation and Depersonalisation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians judged the prisoners – an old man and his nephew, a young boy – as guilty of belonging to a larger raiding party, though the Colonel lacks evidence of this and the army have captured the prisoners on their own. The Empire, then, refuses to acknowledge the personhood of the barbarians, if Hegel’s idea that personhood involves giving the individual a legal dimension, according to abstract law; Hegel’s idea of the person cor- responds to that to be found in ancient and medieval philosophy, wherein the person is a subject of right and obligation in the moral and legal order (cf. Blay on “person”). The question of conscience intervenes when the first-person narrator, the Magistrate, uses the legal verb to plead: “I grow conscious that I am pleading for [the prisoners]” (4). The Magistrate is distinctly conscious of his conscience, and his “growing conscious” is part of the process of his becoming a person. He uses the legal verb though his professional role is not to plead for, or against, the accused, but to mete out justice. He tells the Colonel that the prisoners have no reason to be lying when they protest their innocence. Again, when the Magistrate tries to persuade himself he has not heard the screams of pain coming from the room where the Colonel interrogates the prisoners, he tries to justify to himself his hearing nothing, his moral deafness: “I begin to plead my own cause” (5); again the Magistrate expresses himself in specifically legal language (through the use of the verb to plead, and through one meaning of the noun “cause,” meaning an individual’s case offered at law), as though he were almost wholly identifiable with his professional function. The narrative has now established the existence of two “causes,” the barbarians’ and the Magistrate’s, as though their causes, if not they themselves, were somehow interdependent. The Magistrate’s and the barbarians’ fate, along with, possibly, their very respective identities, have become lexically entwined, and perhaps existentially so. At the same time, the Magistrate tries to turn a deaf ear to his own moral deafness. It is an attempt to stifle his conscience, but that attempt is useless – he pleads his own cause because he knows he has behaved unethically by letting the Colonel take the prisoners away for questioning so easily. This weighs on his conscience. It is as though his personhood, dependent on his conscience, were at once affirmed and denied. Moreover, since Coetzee intended the Magistrate – who has no name to individua- lize him, despite being an individualized character in many other respects – to be “a man of conscience,” he is more of a type than a person. The Magistrate is the type, or at least a type, of the conscientious objector. But every conscientious objector is different: it is his very conscientious objection that makes him most truly a person, that singularizes him. In specific relation to conscience, Geoffrey Hill reflected on the concept of “intrinsic value” (cf. Collected Critical Writings 465-77). Hill lays down an integrated vision of intrinsic value in which opposites are somehow complementary and not only antagonis- tic: “the intrinsic value of our self-realization in and through conscience [stems] directly from the implicated nature of our strength and frailty.” Hill takes the verbal adjective “implicated” from a phrase of John Henry Newman’s quoted a few lines before: “the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity” (Collected Critical Writings 475). This is Newman’s “phrase for the inheritance of Original Sin,” as Hill calls it (Col- lected Critical Writings 475). Although Coetzee does not use the term “sin” in Waiting for the Barbarians, he does go out of his way to suggest that it underpins the Magistrate’s own worldview: “we are fallen creatures” (Waiting 139). 26

Hill’s anthropology, while theologically contextualized, is founded upon the primacy of conscience, as a means to what he calls “self-realization.” So if we apply this line of reasoning to the Magistrate, we can assert that, because of his conscience, and in spite or because of his moral frailty, the Magistrate is a person, a “self.” “Ironically, the na- meless Magistrate remains an absence throughout the novel,” Hania Nashef has argued, going on to say, “The jargon which has […] ruled his life, the language through which he has spoken, has left him empty” (Politics of Humiliation 10). Yet this is an incomplete reading of the Magistrate rather than an untrue one. Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of a man whose conscience comes into conflict with the régime which governs him (and of which he is a part). The régime’s many disputes with the Magistrate and the various punishments that it metes out to him go to show that the Magistrate is to Joll, Mandel and the other officers an awkward presence, a thorn in the Empire’s side, despite his age and apparent ineffectuality. The Magistrate’s narrative shows him to have a powerful reflexivity, an indestruc- tible self-awareness. This is arguably and precisely what the other “servants of Empire” in the novel – Joll, Mandel, the warrant officer – do not have. The Magistrate, then, is not exactly an absence in himself but rather a person who happens to be without self-importance, an ageing civil servant who wants only a quiet life and the freedom to devote himself to his sensual pleasures and few harmless hobbies. He has not spent his professional life waiting for the barbarians, or waiting for anyone or anything – until the barbarians arrive in the shape of the state police who represent his employer, the Empire, and wield authority over him. Coetzee has made the point that the Magistrate’s thinking cannot be ascribed to him alone, since his thoughts represent “voices of authority speaking through him” (White Writing 133). Even if for this reason his personhood is incomplete (on condition that one accepts Coetzee’s own interpretation of his character), it is the coming of the barbarians – both Colonel Joll and the barbarian prisoners – which makes him a person, or more fully a person. The more he resists the state police by defending the barbarians, the more they acknowledge him, the more he follows the dictates of his conscience, the more he becomes a person. He has his own personal authority deriving not from his Magistrature or his “smooth patrician talk” (77), as he knows full well, showing no surprise at Mandel’s scornful attitude towards him, but from his ethical and moral standpoint that in turn springs from his conscience. To the Magistrate, Colonel Joll’s shades are his main defining feature. They make him a source of fascination for the Magistrate and the others at the outpost. They function as a mask, and the Colonel seems to be nothing but his persona: no wonder the Magistrate associates both him and warrant officer Mandel spontaneously with the theatre. The question of identity becomes complex once the word “mask” itself enters the Magistrate’s narrative. He approaches the boy whom the old man, now dead – presumably at the Colonel’s hands – brought with him for medical treatment. The boy pulls back from the Magistrate whose one desire is to comfort and reassure him: doubling his point, Coetzee writes: “It has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive” (7). The boy does not then see the Ma- gistrate and the Colonel as two different persons, or even as persons at all. He sees them as two faces of a single type: the interrogator. Hence identity remains undifferentiated, and in a sense dependent on the observer as opposed to the subject himself. There are other unsettling parallels between the Magistrate and Joll. Joll’s face is “masked by two 27 Type, Personalisation and Depersonalisation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze” (44). When the Magistrate tries to look Joll in the eye, he only sees himself reflected back. If there is nevertheless a certain diffuseness attaching to the identity of the Magis- trate, it is perhaps because he feels “locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things” (38). Referentiality and signification become unstable, blurred – something that no totalitarian state will tolerate – including human identity itself. Moreover, as the Magistrate becomes more and more ostracized by the state police, and following that by the broader society of townspeople, a certain interchangeability enters the course of events. We may consider such interchangeability from the point of view of identity: “A man sits at my desk in the office behind the cour- troom” (76), and later, “Colonel Joll sits behind the desk in my office” (110). Although the idea here is that of replaceability rather than identity, the Magistrate’s replacement by servants of the state depicted as evil confirms the Magistrate’s intuition when he approaches the boy: that to be a servant of the state is to be evil, whoever you are. To serve the state means to be evil, or to wear the mask of evil, which seems to be the same thing. The Magistrate is “invisible behind the glass” of his window (90), just as Joll is invisible behind his shades. This might suggest that the Magistrate’s moral standpoint is thus not quite clear, and indeed he often questions his own motives. When Colonel Joll appears for the last time in the novel, his party defeated by the barbarians, he is no longer wearing his sunglasses, his mask. This cannot simply be because it is night-time when he and his party pull into the frontier town, since when he tortures the barbarian girl and the other prisoners at the start of the plot, it is at night. But paradoxically, without his sunglasses he is more insubstantial than ever. To the Magistrate looking at Joll through his carriage window, he is just a “faint blur against the blackness” (146). The full sentence reads: “I stare through the window at the faint blur against the blackness that is Colonel Joll.” The sentence structure is such that one might almost read the end of the sentence as “the blackness that is Colonel Joll”: Joll is reduced to the blackness of the sunglasses he has for once taken off (or lost in the struggle against the barbarians). This “blackness” can perhaps stand as the obverse of the “whiteness” (9) of the snow always associated with the barbarian girl in the Magis- trate’s dream. Empire has somehow stripped both Joll and the barbarian girl of their own identities. The word “mask” recurs in the Magistrate’s depiction of the first man he finds sitting at his desk: “When he looks at me, as he will in a moment, he will look from behind that handsome immobile face and through those clear eyes as an actor looks from behind a mask” (77). He is a perfect type “with regular teeth and lovely blue eyes,” the perfect Aryan male. He is not merely or even primarily a pure racial type: he is a pure product of Empire. Bereft of personality, he is all mask, all surface.

The Intolerable Other The Magistrate assumes the barbarian girl whom the Magistrate takes in thinks of Joll as “your friend with the black eyes” (135). The girl herself has “black eyes” (26). The Colonel’s black eyes are, in fact, his sunglasses, which act as his mask. Since Joll tortured her around the face and eyes, the girl cannot look another person in the eye. Whenever the Magistrate tries to look her in the eye, she gazes blankly beyond him. Joll has reproduced in the girl his own inability to return another person’s gaze. By torturing 28 her around the eyes, he has transformed her into a version of himself – in her case, a kind of shadow version of himself. Either he has tortured her in this way because he has seen in her a kind of barbarianism which he knows only too well is within himself; or, conversely, because totalitarianism cannot tolerate the Other, and must somehow replicate itself mimetically. To the girl, Joll’s mask is his face, since his dark glasses seem to her to be his eyes. It is as though his mask were his reality. He has no personal identity. As for the girl’s blank gaze, it may stand for the side of her that is unknowable both to Joll and to the Magistrate, however much each of them in his own way may probe her. In the Magistrate’s recurrent dream of the children playing in the snow, he always pictures the girl – if her it is – as blank-faced, faceless even: “The face I see is blank, fea- tureless […] it is not a face at all” (Waiting 37). Because she has no face, she has no mask. In this respect the girl is all reality. The Empire is all pretence, all theatre; the barbarian girl is all reality, she has no depth because she has no surface (no mask), she is all one. The Empire cannot stand her reality, nor that of the Other as a group, the barbarians. Who exactly is the barbarian girl? What makes this question hard for the reader to answer is the fact that because of the first-person narrative technique, the reader can only encounter her through the narrator’s testimony. The latter is not entirely subjective, and conditioned by the fact that, when all is said and done, the relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl is a power relationship in which one of the two part- ners to that relationship holds all the power, and the other one none. The problem is confounded not only by the sympathy which draws the Magistrate to the girl in the first place, but also by his habit of speculation and sympathetic identification.3 He constantly tries to understand her feelings and to see himself as he thinks she might see him.4 That said, the girl is an enigma to the Magistrate not inherently because she is a barbarian or because they do not speak each other’s language – they manage to communicate rudimentarily in the same language – but because she has been tortured behind closed doors, and has seen her father tortured and killed. The impact on her is to damage if not alter her identity: “Is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears?” (64). Throughout the text, the Magistrate’s terms, especially for people, are constantly synonymous, this multinominal approach reflecting shifting perceptions on the Magistrate’s part. Thus the unnamed girl is a “barbarian prisoner” (47), “a beggar, a fatherless child” (56), “a stranger, a visitor from strange parts”;5 and the Magistrate records – indeed insists on – his “freedom to make of the girl whatever I felt like, wife or concubine or daughter or slave or all at once or none” (78). The relationship the Magistrate has with her also colours her identity as outsiders perceive it: to them, she is “the old man’s slut” (63). At the heart of the Magistrate’s relationship with the girl is the massage ritual by which the girl, in Grant Hamilton’s words, “ceases to be a simple determined function in the territorial assemblage of the Magistrate and becomes the constitutive element of the social assemblage of courtship” (On Representation 67). The idea of the “determined

3. The novelist went on to develop an approach to the ethics of sympathy in “The Lives of the Animals,” chapters 3 and 4 of Elizabeth Costello. 4. The Magistrate is struck by the girl’s “ordinariness,” while acknowledging that “she may have ways of finding me ordinary too” (56). 5. An echo of the Biblical “stranger in a strange land” theme (Ex. 2: 22, and elsewhere). As belonging to a nomadic people, the girl could even be a type of the wandering Jew, confronted with a totalitarian state of which the Magistrate himself is willy-nilly a representative. The Magistrate says to Colonel Joll, preparing to ride out against the barbarians: “You and I are strangers – you even more than I” (11). As the Magistrate quite sees, strangers are by definition strangers to each other. The girl is a stranger to him just as he, as the coloniser, is a stranger to her (in her land). 29 Type, Personalisation and Depersonalisation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians function in the territorial assemblage” is interpretable as that of a type, while the second half of Hamilton’s sentence provides an analogy of person, although the language used is rather cold and tends to reification of the person in both cases. Courtship would seem to turn the girl into a person. When she gets the chance to speak “the pidgin of the frontier” with other people she becomes “a witty, attractive young woman” (64) – a person, in fact, no longer the barbarian girl the Magistrate knows, or rather tries to get to know on his own terms. The Magistrate tries to break down the girl’s distance from him. Hamilton quotes Deleuze: “What is mine is first of all my distance” (On Representation 65). The massage ritual is an attempt on the Magistrate’s part both at healing the girl from the wounds the Empire has inflicted on her, and at breaking down the distance he feels lies between them. But this proves impossible. The Magistrate does not allow the girl any distance, so that she has nothing that is fully hers. She is most fully herself away from him, away from someone who reduces her identity to that of a maimed victim of state terror. The Magistrate only discovers this – apparently – “witty” side of her shortly before parting from her forever. At the moment of leave-taking he tries, as he already has done, “to understand who she really is” (73). But all he can see before him is “a stranger,” and there is nothing to suggest that that is all she sees before her: a stranger, too.

Personal Identity as Linked to Relationship: “I-Thou” as “primary word” Yet we might examine the relationship between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl – a relationship which does, after all, form the heart of the novel – from another standpoint. This would involve setting aside the question of masks as well as that of the Magistrate’s preventing the girl from being herself. This would rest on a philosophical consideration of personhood as linked to relationship. In an essay, the novelist explores Martin Buber’s idea that the “primary word” is not I but “I-Thou”: “This primal relation is, however, lost […]. Intimations of the lost relation, [the] moments of the Thou […], strange lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical […] tearing us away to dangerous extremes […] shattering security,” inspire our efforts to reconstitute again and again the being-with of the primal I-Thou. The I searches for You: in Buber’s words, “If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it” (in Doubling 72). Ac- cording to Hubbeling, “the I-Thou relationship is very often numbered among the essential relations of a person. […] [I]t is plausible to say that a man cannot exist without at least some essential relations (to God and/or his fellow men) and that these relations belong to his essence. This ‘Thou’ can be interpreted in a threefold way: an individual Thou; a collective Thou of a group (a political party, tribe, people, etc.); God” (Hub- beling 9). With regard to the Magistrate, the barbarian girl is the “individual Thou”; his relationship to a “group” – the Empire for which he works – is broken off by his guilt, in the eyes of the Empire, in having consorted with a barbarian girl; and his relationship to God, if he has one, cannot be discerned.6 The notion that the Magistrate and the barbarian girl share identity, up to a point, may be highlighted by the etymology of the word “type” as deriving from the Latin

6. Occasional Biblical references – “Truly, man was not made to live alone!” (80, clearly pointing to Gen. 2:18) – do not suffice to make of the Magistrate a religious man. There are also some inconclusive allusions to prayer. 30 typus, itself related to the Greek tupos, meaning imprint. The state police torture both characters around the face and leave the same mark. The Magistrate examines the girl’s face: “I notice in the corner of one eye a grayish puckering as though a caterpillar lay there with its head under her eyelid […]. The caterpillar comes to an end, decapitated, at the pink inner rim of the eyelid. There is no other mark” (31). Later, the Magistrate has returned the girl to her people and has undergone torture: “The wound on my cheek […] is swollen and inflamed. A crust like a fat caterpillar has formed on it. My left eye is a mere slit […]” (115). The Magistrate and the girl thus share the caterpillar as the residual trace of their torture, and as a sign of their irreducible otherness in relation to the Empire. The mark – the imprint – they share, confirms the link between them, but also the fact that in the eyes of the Empire they are merely types. We close the novel after witnessing the man of conscience as multiple above all: one might say, able to be multiple because of his oneness, literally, his singularity, which is generated precisely by his being a man of conscience. In fact, his own narrative attributes to him a carnivalesque variety of identities. This alone would, on one level, make him a threat to the established order, even if it is the established order which thrusts some of these identities upon him. He is Magistrate, judge, One Just Man, old man, old woman (the police dress him in women’s clothing), a beast, a simple machine, a monkey forced to climb a tree, old clown, barbarian-lover, beggar, archaeologist. Personhood in the case of the Magistrate is linked to marginalization: the Magistrate’s being marginalized (stripped of his status and function, punished, tortured, imprisoned, publicly mocked) only serves to deprive him of everything except what truly makes him a person – his conscience. However, this argument itself depends on one’s definition of personhood: for Catherine McCall, “Persons are social beings, created and constituted, and found only in society […]. The individual can exist only as a person […]. The person is a public construction.” (Concepts of Person 13-4). One approves the firmness of this definition, but it leaves out the question discussed above, that of interiority. In order to overcome this objection, with regard to Coetzee’s Magistrate at least, one might argue that the Magistrate is never a passive onlooker of the barbarians’ plight: his conscience always prompts him to act. McCall’s definition can also be set against the attitude of the men, other than the Magistrate, who accompany the barbarian girl back to her people: to the men, the Magistrate asserts, the barbarian girl is “a person of no account” (80). This means she has no social identity, no place in society. She is no one. Despite her anonymity, she is not a person of no account to the Magistrate. He identifies her in a world – the outpost – where she has no identity; or, if he does not identify her, he tries to do so, in his own way. His own identity comes under pressure from his torture and imprisonment at the hands of Empire: “I daily become more like a beast or a simple machine, a child’s spinning wheel, for example, with eight little figures presenting themselves on the rim: father, lover, horseman, thief…” (84-5). The Magistrate does not give “eight figures,” however, and somewhat changes the children’s rhyme which is usually, “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief…” The four terms chosen by the Magistrate apply to him (hence his careful and inventive choice). He is childless. But his relationship to the barbarian girl is, problematically, both that of father – he acts as her protector – and lover. We witness him as rider, both when he hunts and when he takes the girl back to her people on horseback. Once stripped of his dignity as Magistrate, he clearly resembles a beggar. Though he is not literally a thief, his rela- 31 Type, Personalisation and Depersonalisation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians tionship with the barbarian girl is complex, and one might perceive him as trying to steal something from her – the secret, perhaps, of her very identity.

To be Human is to… Wait. The multiplicity of identities which the Magistrate attributes to himself leads us, in conclusion, to explore the possibilities inherent in the verb in the novel’s title. The verb “to wait” (including the variant form “to await”) occurs in the novel about two dozen times. The title allows us to take the verb as ontological, definitional: it is the act of waiting that arguably defines identity. In the first chapter, we witness the Magistrate depicting his situation in metaphysical terms: on one of his excursions two miles from his outpost where the Magistrate, as a hobby, excavates ruins he has found there, he says he was “opening [his] senses to the night, waiting for a sign that what lay around [him], what lay beneath [his] feet, was not only sand, the dust of bones, flakes of rust, shards, ash. The sign did not come” (16). Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is, as for him, “waiting for a sign,” when he hears a dog barking and takes it as somehow linked to his dead son Pavel: “He is waiting for a sign, and he is betting (there is no grander word he dare use) that the dog is not the sign, is not a sign at all, is just a dog among many dogs howling in the night. But he knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things that are things from things that are signs he will not be saved” (Master 83). This dimension alone brings together the Magistrate and Coetzee’s later recreation of Dostoevsky (along with the shared etymology of magistrate and master). Beyond anonymity, person and type, the act of waiting defines the Magistrate as a human being, since waiting is itself a sign – a sign of the incompleteness of the human being. The “sign” is the equivalent of the Magistrate’s “something”: “There is something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it” (155). The “sign” for which he is waiting, the “something” staring him in the face, may not be something, but rather – however tendentious it may seem – someone, an Other. And the Magistrate’s self-awareness may enable us to conclude that waiting in itself is not a criterion of humanness, since animals wait, too. It is the combination of waiting and knowing one is waiting which makes for humanness. Perhaps what ultimately defines the Magistrate is his writerly identity in tandem with his waiting: he stares “at his empty white paper, waiting for words to come” (58). The text of the novel, then, is proof that his writerly identity and his waiting have been vindicated.

Adrian Grafe Artois University

W orks Cited Blay, Michel, ed. Grand dictionnaire de la philosophie. Paris: Larousse, 2003. Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Penguin, 1982. —. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven / London: Yale UP, 1988. —. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA / London, UK: Harvard UP, 1992. —. The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994. —. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 2000. —. Elizabeth Costello. London: Vintage, 2004. 32

Hamilton, Grant. On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi. 2011. Hill, Geoffrey. “Rhetorics of Value and Intrinsic Value.” Collected Critical Writings. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 465-77. Hubbeling, Hubertus G. “Some Remarks on the Concept of Person in Western Philosophy.” Concepts of Person in Religion and Thought. Ed. Hans G. Kippenberg, Yme B. Kuiper, and Andy F. Sanders. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990. 9-33. Mccall, Catherine. Concepts of Person: An Analysis of Concepts of Person, Self and Human Being. Aldershot: Avebury, 1990. Nashef, Hania A.M. The Politics of Humiliation in the Novels of J. M. Coetzee. New York / London: Routledge, 2009.

Convergence and Divergence in Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship

Although Ada Cambridge is a major writer of the colonial period, she has long been neglected in Australian literary history. Her serial novel A Woman’s Friendship, published in the Melbourne paper The Age (August-October 1889), was widely read and circulated and, as such, offered a way in the social and gender debates of the time. This paper aims to reflect on Cambridge’s ambivalent representation of female characters and gender issues in the 1880s Australian society, oscillating between convergence and divergence with conventions, and between conformism and radicalism.

Geographically and culturally, Ada Cambridge found herself at the crossroads between two antipodean parts of the world, England and colonial Australia, when she undertook her seventy-nine-day voyage to Victoria in 1870. A poet and a novelist, born in 1844 in England, Cambridge married the Anglican clergyman George Cross in 1870 before settling in Australia, where she died in 1926. First feeling as an exile, “homesick practically all the time” (Thirty Years 1), she nonetheless later claimed that Australia was her “true home” (Letter n.p.). Throughout her writing career, she used the vantage point offered by her position at the confluence of two geographical and cultural experiences to reflect in her work on the settler society that surrounded her in Australia, as well as the place women occupied in it. She published regularly in the local press, at first using only her initials, “A.C.,” to sign her serial novels, probably in order to avoid trouble for her missionary husband, as what she wrote was anti-conformist enough. Some of her favourite themes were indeed marriage, women’s rights, social equality, class norms and institutional religion. Cambridge was a prolific writer and was praised by her contemporaries, notably by literary critics, such as Henry Gyles Turner and Alexander Sutherland: “Ada Cambridge is entitled to the first place amongst the novelists of her sex in Australia, […] by reason of the quality of her work, and the varied distinctiveness of her several stories” (Turner and Sutherland 87). In the 1880s-90s, she was a major literary figure in Australia, writing in the Australian press as well as for the English and American book markets. How- ever, at the turn of the century, interest in Australian colonial women writers waned as their novels were often disregarded as tackling feminine, domestic concerns, away from the nationalist, masculinist tradition that began to assert itself in the 1890s. Romance tended to be dismissed while the emphasis was placed on realism as promoted by the Bulletin writers – a predominant view until the 1980s. For instance, Ken Goodwin, in his 1986 History of Australian Literature, reflects the enduring view that Cambridge was “unable to break from the confines of the standard romance plot” (34). Nowadays, it can be difficult to procure Cambridge’s serial novels and stories, a lot of them unpublished in book form. Nonetheless, since the end of the 1980s, critical works have paved the way for a re-evaluation of Australian colonial women writers, among whom Ada Cambridge takes a prominent place. There have been attempts at reconstructing Aus- tralia’s literary history with the inclusion of these writers, notably by Dale Spender, who defines them as a “‘submerged’ heritage,” whose study is necessary to “redress 34 the balance, to reclaim those lost women writers who will then enable us to construct a comprehensive world-view and a coverage of the full range of human experience,” notably in the colonial period (xiv, 296). Debra Adelaide also invites us to “re-read the history of Australian literature” from the point of view of women writers (1), and Susan Sheridan has argued that women writers of nineteenth-century Australia “were never the silenced outsiders that later historians and critics rendered them,” demons- trating that the emphasis on realism has had a marginalising effect on women’s fiction, and calling for a reappraisal of romance as a form used by women to address social and gender issues (viii). Two biographies of Ada Cambridge were published in 1991, one by Margaret Bradstock and Louise Wakeling and another authored by Audrey Tate. Other prominent studies on Cambridge include Susan Lever’s and Elizabeth Morrison’s works, including the latter’s edition of the serial novel A Woman’s Friendship in book form in 1988. The novel was originally serialised in the Melbourne paper The Age from August to October 1889 and unpublished in book form at the time. In this paper, we will also refer to Ada Cambridge’s preceding serial novel, A Marked Man – published in The Age just a few months before A Woman’s Friendship, under the title “A Black Sheep” – as it echoes certain aspects developed in A Woman’s Friendship, notably the ambivalent representation of women characters and the oscillation between conformism and radicalism. A Woman’s Friendship portrays the everyday life of two Anglo-Australian couples living in colonial Victoria. The men are used to going to the club and their wives, Margaret Clive and Patty Kinnaird, wishing to turn their ideals into reality, create their own club to discuss social justice and women’s rights. Their club is mixed, informal and extremely select: the two married women have accepted only one more member, a widower, Seaton Macdonald. Nevertheless, ideals begin to be cast aside by the two women, for the private meetings turn into a pretence for another cherished activity: talking about and meeting up with Mr. Macdonald, who becomes the unavowed object of their desires. While the reader witnesses the difficulty the married women experience in coming to terms with their repressed desires, the narrator’s sardonic wit, a frequent feature of Cambridge’s writing, keeps flashing in the background – but what does it really debunk? Despite the re-evaluation of some of Cambridge’s works, the extent of her feminist stance remains open to debate. As Susan Lever remarks, “in Cambridge, the critic faces a writer overtly concerned with feminist issues but dealing with them within existing conventions, in a manner palatable to an educated general public” (21). The ambiguity between conventionalism and radicalism prevails in Ada Cambridge’s fiction, notably in the late-1880s serial novel considered in this article. This paper aims to reflect on Cam- bridge’s ambivalent representation of female characters and gender issues in the 1880s society that the author had come to discover, oscillating between convergence and divergence with conventions, between conformism and radicalism. The serial novel, used as a point of entry into the social and feminist debates of the time, develops female characters whose views deviate from social and gender norms. The club gradually turns into a shelter for their diverging, unavowed desires, while the divergent voice of the narrator, wittingly sardonic, keeps flashing in the background, leaving the reader unsure of who or what the target of her irony may be. 35 Convergence and Divergence in Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship

Diverging from Class and Social Conventions “All the great reforms begin with a few people” says Margaret Clive in A Woman’s Friend- ship (13). Her proverbial assertion initiates what is to become the “Reform club” and expresses the great ambitions that the character places in the experiment, that is to say, redefining the status of women in colonial Australia and fighting class restrictions – “we shall be pioneers in the proper sense,” Margaret emphatically adds (21). In the Victorian period, clubs offered a distinct sphere or an intermediate space between the private and the public realms, for they were “quintessentially private institutions” which “bordered the public worlds of politics and urban pleasure” (Gunn 101). Originally, clubs were intrinsically male spaces, where British gentlemen were sheltered from the worries of life (see Milne-Smith; Gunn), which is what Margaret’s and Patty’s husbands were seeking. By founding their own club, Margaret and Patty claim women’s right to have access to the same privileges that men had, namely leaving the private sphere to get involved in politics. By foregrounding the whole process of the development of the club by the two women, from its creation to its disintegration, Ada Cambridge therefore questions the restriction of women to the private sphere in the Australian colonial context. The two female characters, in their rebellion against class distinctions, want to change the existing order, using its own tools in the form of the club. For instance, the two women want the wealthy to stop wasting their money, therefore they decide to stop buying first-class train tickets and travel instead on second-class carriages, while Marga- ret tries to explain the importance of such a choice to Patty’s husband: [T]o systematically defy the laws of caste on the railway will mean a great deal […]. You know as well as I do that a lady would be simply insulted – not in words or deeds, but in the general regard of her class and the authorities – if, because she was strong enough not to mind a hard seat, and had no money to waste, she chose to travel for a pound instead of thirty shillings […]. And yet you tell me that such an act of courage – true courage, I call it – is too small and paltry to deserve mention! […] Don’t discourage her with conventional platitudes about ladies being out of place when they are here or there where ladies don’t usually go. (22) Breaking class barriers is shown as less socially acceptable for a woman than for a man, so that by breaking class norms, Margaret attempts to go beyond gender conventions as well. Class norms is a recurring theme in Cambridge’s fiction, notably in her preceding novel, A Marked Man. This novel focuses on Richard Delavel, the younger son of an aristocrat English family, who, against his father’s will, refuses to take holy orders. He marries a farmer’s daughter, thereby breaking class barriers, and is consequently driven to exile in Sydney. There, he becomes a successful businessman, yet remains unhappy in his marital life, because of his unfulfilled passion for Constance, a young woman who took care of him while he was sick, and secondly because his wife Annie turns out to be a class snob who insists on a strict respect of class and gender conventions. The novel then portrays the growing love between their daughter Sue and Noel Rutledge, a former churchman who questioned the limitations of his religion, and the short affair between Richard and Constance. The portrayal of these two love stories leads to thoughts on social ethics, marriage, sexual passion, and agnosticism. Margaret’s views in A Woman’s Friendship in fact recall Sue’s radicalism in A Marked Man, as both women refuse to conform to the norm: 36

We believe that the time is coming when people will be ashamed to be rich – I mean rich for merely their own purposes. It will be vulgar, it will be selfish, it will be mean; people will look down on the rich person instead of up, as they do now. (A Marked Man 238; original emphasis) Sue speaks for herself and her father, Richard Delavel, who is openly against “class snobbery” (16), as Margaret and Patty also try to be in A Woman’s Friendship. Yet even if A Marked Man may seem less ambivalent and less problematic – maybe because having a male protagonist enabled Cambridge to depict experiences and views that would have been deemed too improper for a female character – A Woman’s Friendship foregrounds specific instances of divergence from social norms. For instance, another club rule is that when Patty and Margaret go to concerts, they are to buy tickets for the cheap seats in the stalls, because “it is both vulgar and cowardly to spend more than is necessary or than we ought to afford, merely because we are afraid of losing caste with Mrs. Grundy” (20).1 The association of wealth with vulgar selfishness closely echoes Sue’s words in A Marked Man, but the future form “will be” has been replaced by the present form “is,” as if the time of social ethics that Sue hoped for in A Marked Man had finally come in A Woman’s Friendship. It is interesting to note that this move away from snobbery and class conventions is associated to the move from England to Australia: in A Marked Man, the first half of the novel takes place in England, associated to aristocracy, strict social norms and conventionalism. Richard is there a “rebel ma[king] no parade of his rebelliousness,” “a ‘marked’ man, at a disadvantage with the world” (7). Cast away as a black sheep, he decides to go to Australia where he expects to make his fortune. While England is represented as the land of established values, the Australian colonies are portrayed as a land of opportunities. Once in Australia, being a “black sheep” is defined positively as being “just the one person in the world who never pretends to be what he isn’t” (159). In A Woman’s Friendship, the story takes place in Melbourne, and England is only mentioned at the end, when Seaton Macdonald, having turned out to be a sham of a feminist and having contributed to the destruction of the club, goes back to England: Mr. Macdonald, having married Miss Joyce within a month of his engagement to her, with the readiest permission of her friends, vanished into outer darkness – that is, went off to England to present his bride at court while the wedding dress was fresh […]. (120) Sarcasm is patent, and again, Cambridge creates a sharp contrast between Australia and England, two countries she herself lived in. She described both as home, but eventually decided to settle back in Australia, for good, making it her chosen home, after a few years back in England with her husband. The introduction of the club at the heart of the plot of A Woman’s Friendship enables Cambridge to tackle social and gender issues in colonial Victoria. The two protagonists’ political claims, under the cover of the club, which they call the “Reform Club,” diverge from the social norms of the colonial society. Yet the club turns out to be a shelter for the two women’s desires, rather than a political experiment, thereby also questioning gender norms.

1. Mrs. Grundy, or the proverbial guardian of respectability, implies the importance that one’s opinion has on someone else’s everyday behaviour. The name comes from Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798). 37 Convergence and Divergence in Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship

Divergent Desires As Susan Lever points out, in colonial Australia, “while women were denied access to public office and even to public platforms, the novel became an accepted way for women to enter the debate about social change and women’s rights” (18). Ada Cambridge’s novels assume this role, A Woman’s Friendship being an example of how she used fiction to engage in the social debates taking place in the urban Melbourne where she lived. The novel’s concern with the Woman Question echoed the Australian social debate taking place at the time about marriage and franchise. In the 1880s, the first societies in favour of women’s franchise appeared, and in 1888, the year of the publication of A Woman’s Friendship, the first woman’s suffrage bill went into the Australian Parliament in Victoria. Women were to obtain the franchise in South Australia a few years later, in 1894, so that the social changes occurring in Australia constitute the background of Cambridge’s novel and are echoed in her fiction. During the club meetings, Margaret and Patty indeed discuss their future once women obtain the franchise and have “a hand in the making of the laws” (36). The club as such embodies a shelter where women are able to voice their progressive, feminist ideas: Let us say what we think, dear, and do what we know, and not be afraid of being laughed at. Let us feel ourselves that we are not miserable sheep-like imitators […] but individuals with souls and with responsibilities of our own. […] If we shake ourselves free, we may encourage others – at least we shall have a right to our own self-respect. (15) This is a demonstration of persuasion: women must turn their thoughts into actions. Margaret wishes to speak for all women, uniting them behind an inclusive “we,” univer- salising the purpose of the club. Dealing with women’s dissatisfaction with their social position, the novel foregrounds these women’s desire for fulfilment outside marriage. This echoes A Marked Man, in which Sue, whose mother tries to turn into a “lady,” declares to her nurse Hannah that she will never marry, in order to maintain her independence: “I will never have a husband,” said Sue. “Oh, won’t you? We shall see about that. You are not cut out for an old maid, whoever else may be.” “Not one who will order me about – most certainly. […] No man or woman either shall ever make a slave of me.” (150) In both novels, marriage is associated to constraints that are to be avoided if women are to maintain their free will. Ada Cambridge often promoted a love marriage as opposed to one for money, a view reflected in her writing, with for instance Sue raising the idea that women’s financial independence should not be linked to marriage: “I hope I shall be an old maid to the end of my life before I sell myself for money” (A Marked Man 179). This appears in a chapter originally published in October 1888, and strongly resembles the rejection of what Mona Caird had called a “mercenary” marriage a few months earlier, in August 1888, in an essay exploring the question of the domestic and conjugal subjection of women. In this essay, she makes a claim for the “ideal marriage”: The ideal marriage then, despite all dangers and difficulties, should be free. […] The economical [sic.] independence of woman is the first condition of free marriage. She ought not to be tempted to marry, or to remain married, for the sake of bread and butter. (197-8) 38

This claim for women’s financial independence is supported by and reinforced in A Woman’s Friendship, in which Margaret and Patty read Mona Caird’s “Marriage” article, which is explicitly mentioned. This reading gives the opportunity for the author to praise Mona Caird as “a courageous woman, not […] afraid to stand up alone, in her own proper person, against the solid army of prejudices arrayed against her” (44). Furthermore, women’s financial independence and paid work was a concern of Ada Cambridge’s, who wrote in her memoirs that she financially contributed to the family resources by her writing, at a time when it was believed in the colonies that reading and writing would make women unfit for the domestic duties that were considered theirs: “I remember the time-honoured theory that a writing person is no good for anything else […]. I began to write for The Australasian […] to add something to the family resources when they threatened to give out” (Thirty Years in Australia, 38, 69). A Woman’s Friendship thus reflects the feminist claims of the time, but also tackles the question of female desire in less explicit terms through the love triangle comprising the three members of the club. The club is indeed both a place where women could exchange on topics not so appropriate in public, and a pretence for unconventional meetings. The club, neither a public, nor a completely private sphere, is a rather secret sphere where the two women can play with fire and attempt to acknowledge their sexual desires. The club is shown as offering a realm of possibilities to them, reinforcing its role as a shelter for socially unacceptable sexual desires. As such, the club embodies a “neutral territory” (Levy 533), serving as an in-between space where private encounters are allowed to happen because for the outside world, club events are socially accepted, while the Reform Club in fact offers a front for a partly illicit activity. The very first chapter, entitled “The Reform Club,” is devoted to preparing the love triangle that will be developed in the rest of the story. The setting of the scene – the 1888 Melbourne Centennial Exhibition – is described in terms replete with the lexical field of secrecy: “nooks and corners,” “retirement from observation,” “out of everybody’s way,” “only twittering little birds to spy upon you,” “darkness” (9). The reader may picture a couple of lovers wandering through the Exhibition premises, until the end of the chapter unveils a love triangle: “three people had withdrawn themselves instead of two. It was the Reform Club holding its little meetings” (10). Instead of depicting “a purely intellectual friendship” (57) – as Patty defines their relationship – the narrator foreshadows a love triangle and binds the two notions of the club and of seduction together. The exclusiveness of the club shelters its members from the public eye and from the Victorian conventions of propriety, allowing the club meetings to gradually turn into private encounters, when the members choose to meet in twos instead of threes, “sub rosa” (80). For instance, when Patty is in Seaton’s company, she does not hesitate to leave social issues aside, stating that she “came here to be free and happy, not to drive at things” (88). The climactic episode takes place when Patty and Margaret go to Seaton’s station, unchaperoned and without their husbands. Desire, revealed by innuendoes, has taken over politics for the three members: Seaton is “delighted to have secured a club meeting under his own roof ” (65); when he addresses Margaret, she feels “the subtle something that is like wine in women’s veins [which] quickened her pulse for the moment” (70-1); and Patty, when alone with Seaton in the early morning, feels “a pleasant sense of youthful liberty” (76). Another example of this rhetoric is 39 Convergence and Divergence in Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship found in Chapter XV, which, quoting Patty’s words again, is ironically entitled “A Purely Intellectual Friendship” (96), while it focuses on flirtation between Patty and Seaton: “It certainly is the most delicious morning to be out in.” / “And to be out in it with you – up in this quiet spot, far from the madding crowd – that is enchanting” (98). The reference to Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) in Seaton’s statement reminds us that the escape from the public eye that the club offers may hide more passionate relationships, while forbidden desires show through Patty’s understatement. The challenge to conventions is reinforced by the fact that the women are shown to be aware of the impropriety of their actions, as Patty’s letter to her husband ironically reveals – “Certainly there is no mistress at Yarrock, but then as there will be two of us, that doesn’t matter” (57). She is also aware of the meaning of Seaton’s look upon her – “She knew the look too well to make any mistake about it” (74). The fact that the two women protagonists’ sensual and sexual desires are alluded to through innuendoes and understatements, rather than fully expressed in plain terms, enabled Cambridge to remain in keeping with the conventions of propriety that, as a woman, she was altogether expected to conform to, while her novel was dealing with a socially unacceptable topic. A Woman’s Friendship presents the club as a liberating possibility used to challenge the Victorian strict social and sexual constraints weighing on women, notably the expression of their desires. The experiment of the club, created out of the women’s will to diverge from the social conventions of the colonial society, ends up diverging from this original purpose, thus highlighting the parodic aspect of the experiment.

Ambiguity and Ambivalence The club itself may be a parody, which could therefore partly undermine the reading of the women’s experiment as radical. First, far from the realities of clublife in colonial Australia, this club is not granted any dedicated building. The first full meeting takes place “at Mrs. Clive’s house” (9), the second one “at the Imperial Coffee Palace” (9), and after that “the members assembled wherever and whenever they could do so conveniently. […] Thrice they met in the Public Library; once in the Botanic Gardens; twice in the University Museum; four times they went down to Brighton and sat on the beach” (9). The incredible number of different places is ironically counterweighted by the extremely restricted number of members: “three was the full number. […] [It was] the most exclusive club that ever called itself by that name” (5, 8-9). Cambridge’s fictional “Reform Club” thus diverts the name of the famous 1836 London club, hers having but the name of a club. Despite its declared social reform program, Margaret and Patty’s “Reform Club” is a formal parody, leaving us to ponder over the target of parody: is Cambridge mocking the rigid institution of the club, the habits of colonial society, or even the women themselves? The dissolution of the club at the end of the novel, partly due to the two women’s jealousy, increases the reader’s doubts: the collapse could be read as a failure, and, a common view at the time, as evidence of the impossibility for women to seriously enter political matters, consequently casting a shadow on the anti-conformist reading of the club. In this perspective, we are led to wonder if Cambridge really wrote with a feminist intent, or if she did not rather write so-called “ladies’ literature,” which was a guarantee of making good copy at the time. Moreover, the narrator’s omnipresent sardonic wit further increases the tension between conventionalism and radicalism in the novel. The narrator’s stance constantly 40 oscillates between foregrounding the women as strong-willed and progressive, and de- flating their militant assertions. For instance, the narrator notes that, despite their grand political declarations, they put an end to the club’s discussions because they cannot conceive being late for the evening with their husbands, “for, with all their modern notions, they were still quite conventionally punctilious in their regard for the conve- nience of their husbands” (23). In fact, the narrator’s comments, mocking the women’s inconsistencies, suggest their partial complicity with social conventions. For example, when Patty rejects her husband’s offer to buy her lace and jewelry because “he must find a better way of spending [his money] than that,” her refusal is immediately followed by the narrator pointing her contradictions through the fact that she is going to the theatre “in all her best clothes” (37). Later, the narrator underlines their role as caring housewives who feel absolutely necessary at home, and who finally go back to their husbands for emotional support, seeking the security of marriage as a force against the challenge to propriety: Patty gave herself wholly to him [i.e., her husband] and the domestic concerns – the bees and flowers, the poultry and dairy, the fruit preserving, the tomato sauce making, the rearing of puppies […]. She gave her lord something besides mutton chops for breakfast every morning, and the best of puddings for his dinner, as a sacred duty. (120) Sarcasm is perceptible in the enumeration of domestic tasks, as well as in the religious, sacred tone used in the hyperbolic labelling of Patty’s husband as a “lord” and domesticity as a “sacred duty.” In the light of this, A Woman’s Friendship could be read as a satire of women’s supposed inconsistencies, which would appear to confirm what Beilby and Hadgraft wrote about Cambridge’s women characters: “the tenor of her views is unmis- takable – she did not think very highly of them” (10). Susan Lever has also argued that in “A Woman’s Friendship, women are the central victims of her wit” (21). Yet, criticism may not so much be directed at Patty as at the Victorian, colonial conventions that attributed the “pudding making” to women rather than letting them get involved in politics. In this light, the narrator’s sarcasm is not directed solely at the two women. As Susan Lever has rightly pointed out, “this shifting of ground and multiplicity of viewpoints are the source of much reading pleasure” in Cambridge’s novels (32). In A Woman’s Friendship, sarcasm and criticism also target the socially-accepted inequalities between men and women and the lack of possibilities offered to women, as the following dialogue between two passing-by men about Seaton’s new fiancée, Miss Joyce, at the end of the novel, shows: “Miss Joyce plays the violin and writes poetry.” […] “Great Scott! You don’t say so. Then now I begin dimly to see why he puts his neck under the yoke” […]. “Well, if it were my case, I’d rather leave the poetry out. […] I’d like to have my wife attend to her children and the pudding making. […] Every wife and mother should do it, whatever her class of life. If I were as rich as the Rothschilds, I’d make my wife look after the nursery herself – aye, and the puddings too – because that’s her proper sphere and business.” (114-5) The repetition of “pudding making” as a woman’s proper activity in the last two chapters of the novel draws the reader’s attention to the phrase’s resonance with Jane’s thoughts on women’s duties in Jane Eyre, published more than 40 years before and that Ada Cambridge, known to have been an avid reader, would most likely have known: 41 Convergence and Divergence in Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; […] it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (Brontë 93) The recurrence of this domestic chore in Cambridge’s novel makes it stereotypical and thus ironical, and the insistence on a woman’s “proper sphere and business,” coming at the end of a novel devoted to two women blurring this very idea of a division between public and private spheres through their club, is highly ironical. The criticism rather weighs here on the two men’s restricted view of what a woman’s place in society should be. Moreover, when one knows the importance of poetry in Cambridge’s life – she started her writing career with poetry, of which she wrote four volumes – the description of Miss Joyce in the following paragraph as “this pretty creature, who writes poetry” is also ironical (115) and highlights the men’s condescension. Cambridge knew too well the criticism that could weigh on a woman should she be writing instead of fulfilling the domestic tasks that were imposed on her. It was a prime concern of hers, as her memoirs reveal, when she emphasises that despite her writing activity, she still attended to the domestic tasks, and writes, almost apologetically, that “in fact, housework has all along been the business of life; novels have been squeezed into the odd times” (Thirty Years in Australia 45). Yet, the huge amount of fiction that Cambridge wrote raises doubts about this statement, which reflects her own conflicting position, as the wife of a clergyman writing unconventional fiction, and publishing her serial novels under her initials so as to hide her married name, because her interests and her husband’s ones were divergent.

Ada Cambridge’s writing has long been neglected in Australian literary history, despite its popularity when it was published. Considered too romantic, too domestic, or even too conservative, her novels in fact resist any definite categorisation. A Woman’s Friendship presents female characters whose views diverge from class and gender conventions, and the “Reform Club” they create is gradually used as a shelter for the two women’s unavowed desires, inappropriate as they were for married women in Victorian society. Their club, consisting of only three members, is rather a parody of a club, and the narrator’s sardonic wit further blurs the frontier between radicalism and conventionalism, and between convergence and divergence with social and gender norms, as it highlights the two women’s inconsistencies. Yet, irony rather targets the socially-accepted inequalities between men and women, often reproduced by each alike. The serial form of the novel, which has contributed over the past decades to the neglect Ada Cambridge’s novels have suffered from, has nonetheless enabled her to be widely read in the nineteenth century. As such, this form could be used as an accepted way for women to enter the social and gender debates of the time. As far as A Woman’s Friendship is concerned, the newspaper in which it was published, The Age, was circulated up to the enormous number of 80,000 copies a week in 1888 (Smith n.p.), when Cam- bridge’s novel was serialised, confirming that Cambridge could thus reach a very wide readership thanks to this specific publication format.The Age was an inexpensive newspaper, costing only a penny, thereby increasing the readership’s access to Cambridge’s serial. The paper was also very influential, as its editor David Syme confirmed it in 1888: 42

“So far everything is going well. The paper maintains its influence with the public as well as it ever did” (Letter, n.p.). Writing serial novels thus constituted an effective way for Cambridge to take part in the political and social debate on the Woman Question on quite a large scale, while A Woman’s Friendship also demonstrates her brilliant use of irony, wit and ambivalence. As such, Ada Cambridge’s A Woman’s Friendship exemplifies the wealth that serial novels written by colonial women writers represent nowadays in Australian literary history.

Alice Michel University of Orléans

W orks Cited Adelaide, Debra, ed. A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988. Beilby, Raymond, and Cecil Hadgraft. Ada Cambridge, Tasma, and Rosa Praed. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1979. Bradstock, Margaret, and Louise Katherine Wakeling. Rattling the Orthodoxies: A Life of Ada Cambridge. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin / assisted by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, 1991. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. New York: Norton, 2001. Caird, Mona. “Marriage.” Westminster Review 130. August 1888. 186-201. Repr. in A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s. Ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson. Peterborough, ON / Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2001. 197-198. Cambridge, Ada. A Marked Man: Some Episodes in His Life. 1888 (“A Black Sheep”). London: Pandora, 1987. —. A Woman’s Friendship. 1889. Ed. Elizabeth Morrison. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 1995. —. Letter to H.G. Turner. Manuscript. State Library of Victoria. 12 January 1911. —. Thirty Years in Australia. London: Methuen & Co, 1903. Goodwin, Ken. A History of Australian Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. Gunn, Simon. The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840-1914. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Hardy, Thomas. Far From the Madding Crowd. 1874. New York: Norton, 1994. Lever, Susan. Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction. Rushcutters Bay, NSW: Halstead / with the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2000. Levy, Amy. The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861-1889. Ed. Melvyn New. Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1993. Milne-Smith, Amy. London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Sheridan, Susan. Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s-1930s. St Leonard, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995. Smith, Charles Patrick. Men who Made “The Argus” and “The Australasian,” 1846-1923: Historical Records of “The Argus” and “The Australasian,” 1846-1923. Manuscript. n.p. State Library of Victoria. 1926. Spender, Dale, ed. Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers. London: Pandora, 1988. Syme, David. Letter to Joseph Syme. 20 July 1888. Quoted in Elizabeth Morrison, “Introduction.” A Black Sheep. By Ada Cambridge. Ed. Elizabeth Morrison. Canberra: Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, 2004. xi-lxvii. Tate, Audrey. Ada Cambridge: Her Life and Work, 1844-1926. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne UP, 1991. Turner, Henry Gyles, and Alexander Sutherland. The Development of Australian Literature. London: Longmans, Green & C°, 1898.

Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

In her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Syrian-American Mohja Kahf engages in the representation of an experience similar to hers, the coming-of-age narrative of a young girl in a Muslim community in the heart of Indiana. A coming of age that is strongly marked by recurring cycles of encounter, clash and confluence on various levels. By making use of such a recurring pattern, Kahf questions the view which holds identity to be fixed and ossified, and problematizes the prevalent stereotypes of gender and nationality.

Syrian-American Mohaj Kahf, a poet and novelist, was born in Damascus and moved to the United States with her parents at the age of four. In her only novel to date, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, she draws on her own experience of growing up in the American Midwest in order to represent the coming-of-age narrative of a young Mus- lim girl, Khadra Shamy, who is brought to the United States by her parents at an early age. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf belongs to the tradition of Arab-American women’s immigration fiction. Contemporary Arab-American women, who have always been spoken for either by their patriarchal home culture or the patronizing colonial host, make it their mission to contest and challenge the abounding stereotypical representations of their lives and identities in their writings. These representations, when produced by their patriarchal home culture, focus upon them as a repository of national culture or, when coming from the patronizing colonial host, fix them in the position of the passive victim of oriental patriarchy and religious practices. In a similar manner to what Marlene Goldman argues about Canadian women’s writing in her Paths of Desire, “This subversive project is by no means straightforward” (Goldman 4), since in order to achieve their goal, Arab-American women writers have no other choice but to draw upon the existing traditional discourses. Thus, as Gold- man observes about Canadian women’s writing, these fictions “posit a link between a subversive engagement with established discourses and attempts to disrupt the configuration of gender within society at large” (4). The difference being that Arab-Ameri- can women writers such as Kahf add the question of race to the equation, to create a more complex system of subversion, and a more elaborate disruption of established discourses. Kahf, however, takes a further step and distinguishes herself from the lot, since she finds a way to relate contemporary Arab-American women’s writing to the American tradition of the novel by drawing upon another set of traditions, that is the founding myths of America, such as the myth of the prairie, and on various real and imagined geographical places, in order to treat questions of immigrant identity and to redefine Muslim-American women’s subjectivity – in other words, to address both gender and national identities. In addition, she sets the story of her protagonist within the context of a Muslim community in Indiana, presenting to her readers not only one version, but various versions of Islam and the diversity that exists within the community. In this way, she fights the essentialized clichés that have haunted Muslims and been reinforced since 9/11. This article will focus on the latter aspect of her writing. 44

Before moving on to the main argument, a point needs to be made. One should be aware that writing from the position of Arab-American women is by nature problematic, as by engaging with the established discourses with the aim of subverting them, authors risk being accused of “re-Orientalism.” The term was coined by Lisa Lau in relation to South Asian literature in order to account for the kind of stereotyping that leads her to refer to some South Asian authors as “diasporic Orientals.” For Lau, these are authors who write “as much to the West as for the East” (4), and whose self-representation “continues to be filtered through Western lenses (in a very similar style to Orientalism) and to reference the West as ‘Centre’ in framing the representations and anticipating the audiences” (5). Lau’s analysis of re-Orientalism is part of a larger discussion in which many critics before her, such as Samir Amin, G. Arrighi, Wallerstein, and others have referred to the same concept with different terms such as ethno-orientalism, self-orientalism, internal orientalism, reverse orientalism, neo-orientalism, etc. To avoid such pitfalls would mean not to risk writing from the position of Arab- American women at all and thus not to make an attempt at shifting the terms of female Muslim American identity from the passive object of patriarchal discourses to the active, self-defining subject who contests and reshapes those discourses. Kahf does take the risk to rewrite and thus rebuild the Muslim American female identity from an insider’s stance. To do so, she devises both thematic and structural strategies. On a thematic level, she presents us with a coming-of-age story that is marked by recurring cycles of encounter and clash on various levels, all of which play an important role in shaping the identity of her protagonist. The first series of encounter and conflict to be discussed are those that occur between Khadra and her homeland. In this respect, Kahf discusses the relationship between Khadra and the state of Indiana, and her relationship to the United States, both of which change drastically throughout the narrative as the protagonist is represented in a constant attempt to modify her relationship to various places in order to create a space where she feels at home. As Charles J. Stivale explains, “Home is […] not a pre-existing space. […] It is the continual attempt to create a space of comfort for oneself, through the arrangement of objects, practices, feelings and affects” (79). The novel opens with adult Khadra driving back to Indiana, where she has passed most of her youth. From the very incipit Khadra’s re-encounter with Indiana reveals a hostility one would not imagine existing between a person and his or her home town: “‘Liar,’ she says to the highway sign that claims ‘The People of Indiana Welcome You’” (1). The author continues with the description of what Khadra comes across on her way back to her home town, namely images that contribute to and extend this hostility: There are silver silos and pole barns, tufts of goldthread on the meridian, and the blue day beginning to pour into the dark sky. But it is not mine, she thinks, this blue and gold Indiana morning. None of it is for me. Between the flat land and the broad sky, she feels ground down to the grain, erased. She feels as if, were she to scream in this place, some Indiana mute button would be on, and no one would hear. (2) This passage introduces Khadra as a displaced subject, one who does not feel a sense of belonging to or ownership of the place where she has grown up. The flatness of Indiana, mentioned here for the first time, is insisted upon throughout the novel, sym- bolizing the inflexibility of its inhabitants, and their unwillingness to accept diversity. The history of this hostility is then represented to the readers with a flashback when 45 Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’sThe Girl in the Tangerine Scarf the seemingly calm and heavenly world of childhood innocence of little Khadra playing between freshly-washed bed linens and laundry is quickly disrupted by: a boy with heavy pink flushed cheeks on a dirt bike, tearing through the hung laundry, pulling down rope, soiling sheets with his tire tread. Khadra ran. Screamed and ran. Fell, scraped her cheekbone on the cracked asphalt. He wheeled and turned. Gunning for her. […] “Fuck you raghead!” Brian shouted back. “We’re gonna get all you fuckers!” He wheelied on “fuckers.” (4-5) As a result of these hostilities, young Khadra does not think of herself as American. In fact, Americans are represented throughout the book as the ultimate other, against whom Khadra is judged during her growing-up years. An instance of this othering could be seen when Khadra’s mother gives the children chores to make sure they “didn’t turn into lazy American children” (21). When Khadra’s parents decide to go before a judge and take citizenship (and this only because their Syrian passports have expired, and as political activists working against the government in Syria they have no way of renewing them, and are thus paperless), the whole family goes into mourning: “To her [Khadra], taking citizenship felt like giving up, giving in. After all she’d been through at school, defending her identity against the jeering kids who vaunted America’s superiority as the clincher put-down to everything she said, everything she was” (141). Thus, America is set in opposition to Khadra’s whole being. Being a displaced subject, one without a home, leads Khadra to an identity crisis. In order to overcome it, she embarks on several quests in search of the place where she belongs. The search for a place of origin is the result of a view of identity that considers it an essential entity, and which in diaspora literature is best demonstrated in the “narratives of return.” Having grown up in a Muslim community, among Muslims from different countries and ethnicities, Khadra sees herself first and foremost as Muslim: “Wasn’t she supposed to be an Islamic warrior woman, a Nusayba, a Samaya, an Um Salamah in exile, by the waters dark, of Babylon?” (141) So when she travels to Mecca with her family in order to do Haj, the pilgrimage every Muslim has to do during his or her life, the deterritorialized Khadra expects to finally feel in Mecca, the sense of belonging lacking in her relation to Indiana or America. Before visiting Mecca, Khadra identifies as a member of the “imagined community” (Anderson 6) of Muslims. On this account, in her first moment of encounter with Mecca, when their plane lands, she thinks to herself: “At last [...] someplace where we really belong. It’s the land of the Pro- phet. The land of all Muslims” (159). Ironically though, throughout her stay in Mecca, Khadra comes to realize that she who believes herself to be an Arab Muslim woman, is in total conflict with this place. In Mecca Khadra is an outsider, the other, both in relation to the official religious and national discourses, and in relation to the unofficial discourse of her generation. The first clash happens when one early morning, upon hearing the call to prayer coming from the mosque right next to her mother’s friend’s house, she decides to go to the mosque to pray fajr: Thirty minutes later, with a tear streaked face, Khadra was back, escorted by two burly matawwa policemen […]. “Is this one of your womenfolk?” they asked Uncle Zaid, Saweem’s husband, his face freshly washed. “We found her trying to get into the mosque.” They said it as if she was a vagrant or something. (166) It’s only after this incident that her parents explain to her that women are not permitted to pray in mosques in “most Muslim countries” (168). This contradicts Khadra’s dee- 46 pest beliefs about the teachings of Islam: “What about the Prophet saying ‘You must never prevent the female servants of God from attending the houses of God?’” (168). What is more disturbing to Khadra is the way the policemen have treated her for her so-called transgression: “[H]e said ‘this woman’ – it was like the police thought she was some kind of a bad woman, out in the street at that dark hour, alone, face uncovered. […] And then the expression on Uncle Zaid’s face when he wouldn’t look at her at first and then when he recognized her: it was that look again. For a minute, she actually felt like a bad woman” (168-9). On the one hand, here Kahf represents the workings of the discourse of patriarchy that plays upon women’s sexual identities, and judges them according to the angel/ whore binary, in order to control them. She demonstrates how Khadra is thus fixed in a position of subordination and silenced, immediately treated like a “bad woman” when trespassing social conventions. On the other hand, by presenting Khadra’s parents’ reaction, who do not reprehend her for having broken the social codes, but instead explain them to her, she demonstrates that not every Muslim who has grown up in the so-called oriental countries accepts and approves of these social codes. This is one of the ways Kahf tries to avoid the trap of re-Orientalism. As explained before, she is writing from a difficult position, one between two cultures. Such representations of “oriental cultures” in the novel are nodal points that could be read as re-orientalizing. However, one should consider that the other option would be to grant a blanket approval, roman- ticizing and not criticizing the home cultures at all; a practice that would be in conflict with the purpose of Kahf ’s writing. The problematic position of the author is thus crystalized in such examples, where the challenges of so-called cultural representation are best illustrated. Following Khadra’s disillusionment with Mecca, another incident is narrated. It happens when their host’s daughter, Afaaf, proposes to Khadra to go to her aunt’s house with her where, once left alone, she makes a phone call, puts some makeup on and asks her aunt’s driver to drop them off at the mall. There, another car picks them up, “full of young Saudis – two clean-shaven guys in white caftans and a girl whose black abaya was crumpled under her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans” (174), and takes them to the desert. It seems Afaaf had wanted to show off her American cousin who, to everyone’s disap- pointment, speaks Arabic, insists on being an Arab and refuses to take her hijab off or drink alcohol. Ironically, Khadra is more “Arab” than the Arab girls. At one moment, when Afaaf disappears in another of the few cars full of young Saudis drinking and doing drugs that are accompanying them on their excursion in the desert, the young man who is left in the car with Khadra: caught her hand by the wrist. Half playfully he wrested it down to her side. In the middle of Mecca, this was the last thing she expected. “Let go,” she said. “Why? No one can see us,” he said. Without warning, he was pulling her veil down the back of her head and pushing his other hand up against her breasts and his mouth was grazing her now exposed neck. She was squeezed up against the car door, and then he was pushing himself on top of her, his jeaned thighs taut. (177) This incident reminds Khadra of another case of harassment, when she had been unveiled at school in the US. Only, this time, what is happening to her takes a double significance, since she is being molested, ironically, by a Saudi Muslim boy in Mecca, 47 Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’sThe Girl in the Tangerine Scarf which makes it more disturbing to her. It makes her doubt if her pilgrimage would be accepted in the eyes of God. Both in the US and in Saudi Arabia, the veil acts as an operating signifier for inclusion/exclusion. Khadra is shaken and disappointed. After these experiences in Mecca, America does not seem to be the ultimate other anymore, as the binary opposition established from the beginning of the novel has now been overtur- ned. Incidents of such sort can and do happen in both places (America and the land of the Prophet), and in some ways, Islam seems to be closer to America as Khadra’s father, Wadji, had announced in one Friday sermon: [L]et’s face it: here inside America, there are many good qualities. Law and order, cleanliness, democracy, freedom to work and honestly seek the provision of the Lord […], freedom to practice religion. These are Islamic qualities. America […] is like Islam without Muslims. And our sick and corrupt Muslim home countries – they are Muslims without Islam. (144) Thus, Khadra’s attempt at feeling a sense of belonging, at finding a home in Mecca and reappropriating her identity in relation to it fails drastically. In a scene parallel to her arrival in Mecca on the plane, and for the first time from the beginning of the novel, she thinks to herself that she is going home. Indianapolis is then reterritorialized on Khadra’s return, but her relationship to her supposed “home” is still far from simple as “territories are not fixed for all time, but are always being made and unmade, reterri- torializing and deterritorializing” (Stival 79). Thus, the precarious ties formed after this first voyage in search of a home are unmade as a result of events that will follow. As mentioned before, one of the principal grounds on which Khadra’s identity seems to lie is religion. Throughout the book, Kahf represents various and most of the time conflicting versions of Islam confronted by Khadra in her Muslim community, and elsewhere. Other religions, like Christianity or Judaism, are represented as Islam’s others, their followers referred to as “kuffar” (the unbelievers), for instance by Khadra’s mother, Ebtehaj. But more importantly, different versions of Islam, such as Shiism, or what is referred to as the African American version of Islam, are also represented: “all that Elijah Mohammad business was nonsense. […] [I]t was a good thing Black Muslims like Aunt Khadija and Uncle Jamal converted to real Islam or they would be wandering astray” (24). Subsequently, one important factor that continuously reshapes Khadra’s identity is her encounter and conflict with different religions and different versions of Islam. On another level, in having the narrator explore all these different versions of Islam, the author is representing something that Western readers most probably don’t know much about. In this respect, the novel inevitably fulfils a didactic function. As she is exposed to different versions of Islam, Khadra goes through various stages of religious transformation represented in the narrative by the color of her scarf and the way she wears it. Every time, she moves on from her previous religious convictions because they come into conflict with various aspects of her ever-changing identity. Such internal clashes can best be observed in Khadra’s marriage to Juma, a young Kuwaiti man whom she meets at the university. The problems in their marriage start when Juma objects to Khadra’s riding a bike. First, he kindly asks her not to, then he tries to cajole her by promising to make her stay worthwhile if she doesn’t leave with her bike, then he mocks her, telling her she looks ridiculous on the bike with her hijab and finally he forbids her: “‘I forbid you,’ he said, laying his hand on the bike seat. ‘As your husband, I forbid you.’ Khadra recoiled. She couldn’t believe he would out and say that, even if 48 it was Islamically valid. Her father never said things like that to her mother. It was alien to everything she felt and knew” (230). Khadra, who believes herself before all to be a Muslim woman, finds it very difficult to accept her husband’s request. Two aspects of her identity clash and although she eventually gives in, “[s]omething inside her rusted a little too” (230). Incidents such as this come up in her marriage, making her admit: “I can’t go on in this marriage without killing off the ‘me’ that I am” (242). Khadra’s real problem is not with Juma, as a person, but with the demands he makes of her as an Arab Muslim woman, what is, for him, supposed to be part and parcel of who she is: “She was an Arab girl, familiar with Arab customs. He hadn’t expected her to be doing things that would embarrass him. If he’d wanted to have to explain every limit of proper be- havior, he’d have married an American” (227-8). Their different understandings of who an Arab Muslim woman should be clash. The ultimate conflict is caused by Khadra’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion. Her husband, but also her family and all her friends are against her decision to abort her child, not because her life is in danger, but because she feels she does not want to have a baby at this moment in her life. To them, Khadra rejects her traditional and religious role as mother, “her most important work: making more Muslims” (21). Thus, her identity as a Muslim woman comes under question, and her transgressive act is viewed as a threat to the whole community, because “[b]oth in the original culture […] and in the diaspora, the female body, especially the body of the middle-class woman, functions as the repository of cultural tradition” (Kimak 13). In a final attempt to stop her from going on with the abortion, her father tells her that his mother died giving birth to him, and so she is considered a martyr and will go straight to heaven: “Well, I don’t want to die in childbirth,” Khadra said sarcastically. “I’m not suggesting you do so,” he said quietly. “I’m saying, my mother sacrificed everything for a child. Sacrificed her own self.” “Well, I am not your mother,” Khadra shot back. “I don’t want to be your mother.” “I didn’t raise you to speak to me in that tone,” he snapped, as he rarely ever did. Yeah, you did, Khadra thought sullenly. You raised me to go out and learn, but deep down you still want me to be just like your mother. So where did you think all these contradictions would lead me if not to this frustration, this tone of voice? But I am not going to kill myself to fit into the life you have all mapped out for me. (245-6) Khadra’s abortion leads to her divorce, but more importantly, to her alienation from her family – who stop speaking to her – and her community in Indiana. Her relationship to her religion, her family, her community, and her home, the pillars of her identity, is shaken. After her abortion and subsequent divorce, Khadra goes through a period of depres- sion. She stays at home, sleeps, cries and does nothing, as her identity and everything she had tried to base her whole life upon fall apart. She mourns the breakdown of her self and when she is done mourning she embarks on another quest in search of another self, one that could hold up in order to be able to continue living because, as Françoise Kral points out in her Critical identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature, “the more identity is under threat, the more it resurfaces” (2). Khadra asks herself: “And then what? Where do you go when the first part of your life is coming to an end, and you don’t know what is yet unborn inside you? Where do you go when you’re in a free fall, unmoored, safety net gone, and nothing to anchor you?” (265) 49 Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’sThe Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

At this point in the narrative, Khadra’s view on identity as an essential entity is still at work. The same logic that had led her to look for a sense of belonging in Mecca, when she identified most with the religious aspect of her self, leads her this time to go to the original homeland, “[b]ack where she came from: Syria” (266). She goes there despite the dangers that might await her, especially since her parents were political activists in their homeland. “The Baathists, the mukhabarat, the Asad, the army-police-border-pa- trol-visa-authorities” (266), Khadra accepts all these dangers because, for her, there is no other way to go on living than to go back to Syria: “She would risk it. Maybe she had a death wish. She was in a reckless state of mind” (267). The perspective of not making the trip and living without a sense of identity seems worse to Khadra than all the risks she may be taking by going back. In the same way as with the trip to Mecca, a series of events happen on the voyage back to Syria that change Khadra’s worldview. During her trip Khadra stays with Téta, her father’s aunt who had raised him since his mother died in childbirth, a mother to Khadra’s father and a grandmother to Khadra. During her stay, she listens to stories about Téta and her youth. She learns that Téta had married for love, and her husband was a Circassian, a minority group looked down upon by Syrians, and so they had to run away to get married. Téta’s husband was eventually killed in Haifa in 1948 when they were running away from the Zionist militias, and because of the crowd and the circumstances she had not even been able to stop or to bury him. To Khadra’s surprise, she also learns that one of Téta’s best friends from her youth was Jewish. In a way, Khadra learns about her origins, realizing that Téta’s generation was and is much more open to otherness than she ever imagined or was herself. In the country of origin, she also learns her mother’s secret from her aunt, one that her mother had never told her. Contrary to what Khadra believed, her mother had not been religious in her youth, did not pray or wear hijab until she went on a trip to Paris with school, where she was raped by one of her teachers. It is only after this incident that she became religious and wore her hijab very strictly. To Khadra, this is an explanation for her mother’s strictness, not only in her religious views, but also in her attitude towards Khadra and her life. Therefore, once again, stories Khadra hears on her trip to Syria change her understanding of her past, altering her life narrative. This part of the novel re-establishes its connection to the tradition of the return narrative, which formed as a subgenre of travel writing. Return narratives recount the adventures embarked upon by diasporic subjects in an attempt to approach and comprehend their origins, most of the time in the hope of resolving the conflicts and contradictions they encounter in their sense of self. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that in comparison to travel writing and its effects on national identity and the nation, “return narratives [eventually] formulate identities beyond singular national affiliations; they write the diaspora and establish a transnational, diaspora consciousness” (Kindinger 85). To this end, and ensuing the adventures of the trip to Syria, Kahf also introduces the readers to the figure of the poet, whom Khadra meets at the top of Mount Qay- soon. It is impossible to determine whether the poet, who serves to help Khadra in overcoming the either/or, right/wrong, black or white logic she has been brought up with, is a real character or a figure of Khadra’s imagination. In this sense, he is a liminal figure, standing between reality and imagination. His liminal position is essential to his role in the novel, helping Khadra question her dearest beliefs: 50

“Why do you spend so much time worrying about what God thinks of you?” […] [H]is low voice seemed to come right out of her own gut. She didn’t think she’d shared that much of her state of confusion. “It’s the other way around, you know. God is what you think of God, you know.” (301) Khadra, Téta, Téta’s friend and the poet visit a synagogue together, where Khadra meets the rabbi, in an incident that makes her break down once again. She realizes how arbitrary all the lines were that she had drawn between people and religions, right and wrong, and these are the lines that caused all the conflicts and contradictions in her life: [The Rabbi] spoke with the deepest Damascene accent Khadra had ever heard, drawling out the last “m” on every word. […] His voice in those chords was like family to her. Something vibrated in her chest. […] It’s just that, all this time, she’d thought of them as Them, these people over There, not all the same of course, she knew that, but, still not part of Us. Never. […] [S]he could suddenly imagine being his granddaughter. Blood and soil and home, boiling coffee in the kitchen, puttering about in faded house slippers to find him dozing in his chair, his finger on a word in the holy book in his lap. And then this whole other life opened up in her mind. It sent her whirling in mad agony. This incidental skin, this name she wore like a badge-glance down, check it – what was it again? Had it changed? Was it always changing? Who was she? What was she, what cells of matter, sewn up into this Khadra shape, this instar? Imagine! It was suddenly too much. She began to gasp. Great gasping sobs poured out and wouldn’t stop. (305-6) Khadra then is taken back to Teta’s house, where she goes through a painful transformation. She sleeps and wakes and cries and dreams and blesses everyone and everything. She thinks of all the people she had once held at bay, people she had judged and turned away: “Now the barrier was removed, and they all rushed into her heart” (306-7). She feels connected to all of them. In a state somewhere between dream and reality, a liminal state, Khadra opens up to otherness, and so all the conflicts resolve themselves and confluence takes their place. When she starts praying after this incident, she feels as if she is praying for the first time: “All that had been lost was returning. All that had been disconnected was connected again” (307). Throughout the novel, Kahf makes use of an extended metaphor to reflect on Khadra’s transformations, that of the instar, which is “what entomologists call the body of the bug in its different stages of life” (250) – “a phase between two periods of molting in the development of an insect larva or other invertebrate animal” (OED). This in-betweenness reflects Khadra’s diasporic identity and extends the trope of liminality used in diverse manners in the novel. As Khadra explains to her friend Joy, the adult instar, the mature bug, is called “imagine.” It is after this incident that Khadra emerges from her metaphoric molting metamorphosed into an “imagine,” as her new self is formed around the idea of acceptance, and an ability to imagine herself as one with her others. It is on this trip to Syria that Khadra buys the tangerine silk out of which she makes two identical scarves for herself and for Téta. Thus, her tangerine scarf, that of the novel’s title, takes a symbolic significance connecting her to this trip, the development of her self, her mother and her country of origin. On the first day after her difficult transformation Khadra lets her slipping scarf drop off to her shoulders on a picnic with Téta and the poet. “She saw Téta looking at her. Téta got it […], maybe she knew about kashf, the unveiling of light. How veiling and unveiling are part of the same process, the same cycle, how both are necessary; how both light and dark are connected moments 51 Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’sThe Girl in the Tangerine Scarf in the development of the soul in its darkroom” (309). In this way, Kahf overturns the binary opposition between veiled and unveiled. During the days after the unveiling, Khadra’s body has to relearn how to go about unveiled. Thus, she also goes through a physical phase of transformation (like an instar) as, at the beginning, her body feels off-balance. When upon her return to the United States, Khadra decides to put the tangerine scarf on, she wears it differently than she did before. “Not tightly, the way Ebtehaj wore it. Loosely, so it moved and slipped about her face and touched her cheek, like the hand of a lover” (313). The looseness of her hijab symbolizes the philosophy of acceptance she has come to learn with her heart, the consequence of the overturning of the binary. The hijab itself stands for her heritage and she wants to show it off as she now feels at peace with her own hybrid personal history and celebrates it. On her return from Syria, Khadra is certain that if there is a home for her, it is America. She embraces her Americanness and reconfigures her own concept of home, a territorial assemblage, which precisely because of being an assemblage survives and contains contradictions. However, Khadra does not want to go back to Indiana, because she does not see a place for her new self, a self open to the whole world, in her Muslim community “[w]here everyone who knows you knows exactly what you are supposed to become. […] And then Indiana itself, the flat land that felt like a trap” (315). She then decides to move to Philadelphia, where ironically, she feels like a Hoosier. It takes a last voyage back to Indiana seven years later, when Khadra gets to mourn the death of Zuhura, a young African American Muslim girl who had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan years before, for Khadra to be able to resolve her conflicts with her homes- tate Indiana. To Khadra, Zuhura becomes the symbol of the contradictory hopes that their Muslim community had for their young girls and at the same time “the infuria- ting, confining assumptions the Americans put on” them, when all she had been was just a regular Muslim “girl looking for a way to be, just be” (358). In a way, the whole novel – by engaging with the terms of the debate, and by representing the seemingly unresolvable contradictions of not only writing from, but being in the position of the Arab-American woman – could be seen as an attempt to open a space in American society where these women could “just be.” The author thus draws upon the terms of the discourse, engages with them and shifts them so that they could contain such identities. It is only after mourning the death of Zuhura that Khadra comes to the realization: She looks around at the white people, too – the Americans – no wait, she’s American now – the other Americans. […] Midwesterners – Hoosiers – set in their ways, hardworking, steady, valuing God and family. Suspicious of change. In a funny way, Khadra realizes suddenly, as she surveys the crowd: they’re us, and we’re them. Hah! My folks are the perfect Hoosiers! (438) The novel follows a circular pattern as Kahf ends it where she had started: with Khadra in Indiana, only she is not the same. Throughout the novel, she goes through various stages of change and transformation, some minimal, some drastic. Her identity shatters and is reformed several times to a point that at the end of the novel the readers are sure she will still go on to transform. She is Kristeva’s “subject in process” (22), a subject continually reforming himself/herself, never wholly representable and never complete. By the end of the novel, Khadra has stopped searching for “the place” where she belongs, and has understood with her heart, has come to the state of “yaqin,” that she has to surrender and accept the different and sometimes conflicting aspects not only of 52 her identity, but also those of others. In her novel, Kahf thus questions the view which holds identity to be fixed and ossified, and problematizes the prevalent stereotypes of gender, nationality, and religion. She portrays the self as threshold, a zone in between two multiplicities, but also a zone of proximity where the elements of multiplicities come into contact, and pass through and between each other (Deleuze and Guattari 249). Furthermore, the author reflects this view on a structural level. The sixty-six chapters of the novel are neither numbered, nor do they have a title, but each and every one of them begins with an epigraph which relates in some way to the content of that chapter. Kahf has chosen the epigraphs from extremely diverse sources: from religious sources such as the Quran, the Bible or the Prophet’s sayings, to scientific ones such as Sue Hubbell’s Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs, to books on history and philosophy such as James H. Madison’s The Indiana Way and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, to mythological books like Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Kramer’s Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, to English and American, Russian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Persian, etc. literature, poetry and prose, to song lyrics, to books on Sufism or by famous figures of Sufism such as Rumi or Attar. This polyphonic intertextuality is the manner in which she enacts her view on identity as hybrid, made up of various multiplicities coming into contact with and passing through one another.1 In this way, not only does she incorporate hybridity into the soul of her novel, but she also knits a web that connects all of these texts together and puts them on the same level, subverting hierarchies and undermining the superiority, verisimilitude or claim to truth of scientific, historical or even religious texts. Her use of intertextuality problematizes the nature of fact and by “problematizing the nature of ‘fact,’ [it] strategically call[s] into question the supposedly historical and factual discourses that have defined what it means to be female” (Gold- man 7), but also what it means to be Muslim American. She reinforces her authority to rewrite herself back into history, and to make new maps of gender and national identities. Her novel demonstrates the possible difficulties of coming to terms with hybridity in the world we are living in, but could also be regarded as a celebration of hybridity, itself an attempt at confluence.

Sara Arami University of Strasbourg / SEARCH 2325

W orks Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 1983. London: Verso, 2006. Cuddon, J.A., et al. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: UP of Minnesota, 1987.

1. For Mikhail Bakhtin hybridity is when “one single speaker could speak with a hybrid voice containing more than one language, culture or belief system” (Ryan 636). In other words, “hybridity […] resides in […] heteroglossia, or po- lyphony; similarly, he contends, polyphonic narratives have the potential to call into question authoritative discourse” (Cuddon 334), which makes the use of a polyphonic narrative very apt in the case of Kahf ’s novel. In addition, for Homi Bhabha, “cultural identities are constantly shifting, incorporating a multiplicity of influences” (Ryan 636). That is what leads me to interpret Kahf ’s polyphonic use of intertextuality as her way of enacting hybridity on a structural level. 53 Encounter, Clash, and Confluence: Mohja Kahf ’sThe Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Goldman, Marlene. Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women’s Writing. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 1997. Kahf, Mohja. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006. Kimak, Izabella. Bicultural Bodies: A Study of South Asian American Women’s Literature. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. Kindinger, Evangelia. Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives. Dissertation. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2015. Král, Françoise. Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Trans. of La Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Lau, Lisa. Re-orientalism and Indian Writing in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ryan, Michael, et al. The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Stivale, Charles J., ed. Gilles Deleuze, Key Concepts. Chesham: Acumen, 2005. The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, n.d. Web . Consulted 31 August 2016.

“In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics”: Helon Habila and the Flowing Together of Politics and Poetics

Helon Habila’s literary output has until now been characterised by a great focus on politics and history. Inheriting from a number of great Nigerian writers, he falls into the scope of these literary predecessors who have considered that literature is commitment, but he also tends to move away from this tradition. Politics and poetics flow together in his work to denounce military rule, but also the paradox of a country, extremely wealthy as regards oil, yet incapable of making its population benefit from it fully, thus pointing to the false promises that oil offers.

In A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (1995), environmental activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa stated that [l]iterature in a critical situation such as Nigeria’s cannot be divorced from politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role. (81) Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the military government of Sani Abacha in 1995, could not be any clearer: he did not believe in the idea of art for art’s sake, but considered literature as a means to emancipate those who are voiceless.1 Nigerian writers have long been preoccupied with their country’s political development and history.2 According to Ali Erritouni, while first- and second-generation writers, such as Chinua Achebe, Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, and Ngũgĩ, […] are “massively overdetermined by [the colonial event]” [and] have championed nationalist causes, third-generation writers, such as Maik Nwosu, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Habila, are shaped by an increasingly globalized world […]. (145) Erritouni explains that the generational criterion used in order to come up with differences between generations of writers is not satisfying. Indeed, a divide based on generations could overshadow the existing bridges between the fathers of Nigerian literature and the “children of the postcolony,” to use Abdourahman Waberi’s words

1. It bears noting that, among many others, Odia Ofeimun is also famous for thinking of the writer as a citizen. In a 1990 interview, Ofeimun states that “[i]t is possible to tell the truth and on the basis of the positions you take, try to change public policies […]. I think a writer will be deceiving himself, if he believes he can draw a line between himself as an artist and himself as a citizen of society who has positions that he considered right and deserving expression” (Wilkinson 66). Therefore, according to quite a few voices in the Nigerian literary landscape, a writer has the duty to interfere in politics. 2. Helon Habila falls within the scope of the Nigerian literary tradition in his collection of short stories entitled Prison Stories published in 2000. One of the short stories, “Love Poems,” received the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001. It constitutes the basis of his first novel Waiting for an Angel (2002). While describing the type of fiction that was given birth to under the Sani Abacha regime (1993-1998), Oyeníyì Okùnoye explains that one of the trends was “inspired” by the hardships during the Abacha years. These hardships “inspired more prison memoirs and diaries in various forms. [They] serve as enduring records of personal agony under a lawless regime […]. Those who survived the ordeals always had tales of torture and dehumanizing restriction to tell” (76, emphasis added). Waiting for an Angel describes this “torture,” and the “dehumanizing” measures taken by the authorities. 56

(1998).3 Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and their contemporaries have often addressed the legacies of military rule, among which abuse of power but also the dearth of economic management.4 In 2007, when asked about his inspiration for the writing of his first novel, Helon Habila stated that in a way, the dictatorship was good for literature because it supplied some of us with our subject matter, and also while it lasted, gave us an education in politics that we couldn’t have acquired in school or anywhere else. We saw pro-democracy activists being killed or arrested or exiled – unfortunate for the victims but great stuff for writing. (Qtd. in Okùnoye 65) The appalling conditions under which people lived during the approximately thirty years of military rule5 gave rise to events that became a source of inspiration for Nige- rian writers, moulding not only their writing but also the function of Nigerian literature. Poetics and politics thus converge in a country where, to quote Lomba in Waiting for an Angel, “the very air we breathe is politics” (108). Each of Helon Habila’s three novels to date is set in a different part of Nigeria, which allows one to grasp the specificities of each region more fully by laying the stress on the multi-ethnicity and the fragmentation that characterise the Nigerian nation.6 Waiting for an Angel takes place in the urban environment of Lagos while Measuring Time (2007) and The Chibok Girls (2017) – the latter is a non-fictional work – are set in Nor- thern Nigeria. Oil on Water (2011) takes place in the Southern Delta state.7 The similari- ties between these regions seem to be scarce: whether it be religiously, traditionally, or culturally, they display divergent identities. However, politics can be considered a point of confluence in this fragmented country. Oil on Water deals with political issues through the two liquid motifs mentioned in its title. Nigeria is undoubtedly one of the world’s wealthiest countries as regards oil resources and greatly depends on them economically. The novel may be about “a political ecology of oil” (Wenzel, “Petro” 452). Rivers are locales whose significance is worth noting since the motifs of water and oil, almost always related to the topographic phenomenon of confluence, form the crux of the novel.8 The novel may be considered a response to the dearth of novel-writing dealing with oil as highlighted as early as

3. Waberi considers that third-generation writers were born after the independence of the former colonies, i.e. 1960 for Nigeria. In his 2005 article, Harry Garuba was already pointing to the problem Erritouni highlights in his article. 4. To give but only a few examples, a military coup d’état terminates the politicians’ corruption in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People (1967), a novel where the military is perceived rather positively, as a symbol of change to end corruption. However, later, in Anthills of the Savannah (1988), Achebe criticizes the military for interfering in civil administration. In his play Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope (1995), Wole Soyinka similarly exposes the hopes that the transition toward the military might have represented for the population; yet, this hope was ruined because the very soldiers that were believed to be saviors became oppressors, all this of course, mirroring the situation in Nigeria back then. 5. The military ruled Nigeria from 1966 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1999. The Babangida and Abacha years, from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s, regulated both public life and private life and turned out to be totalitarian regimes. 6. In his latest work, The Chibok Girls (2017), Habila attests to this lack of homogeneity in the country when he writes, for instance, that the northern “region, often seen by outsiders, erroneously, as part of a homogeneous ‘north’ – meaning any part of the country above the River Niger-River Benue line and commonly viewed as all Muslim and all Hausa Fulani – still has its many fault lines. And because these divisions predate the birth of the nation, most people here – and this is true to a large extent in other parts of the country – are always Muslim or Christian first, ethnic affiliation second, and Nigerian third” (68, emphasis added). 7. The three novels will from now on be respectively referred to as Waiting, Measuring, and Oil. 8. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “confluence” as “a flowing together or union of rivers etc./The place where two or more rivers etc. unite/A combined flow or flood” (Brown 476-7). 57 “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics”

1992 by Amitav Ghosh in his essay “Petrofiction,”9 but also, more recently, by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and the “After Oil” school embodied by the Petrocultures Re- search Group.10 Thematically this time, Habila explores and engages in a field that has until now hardly been tackled in the Nigerian novel.11 He elaborates a reflection on what Fernando Coronil (1997) has called “petro-magic” whereby petroleum cannot but be a lie when it promises people to strike it rich with no work involved. I would like to argue that one of the specificities of Habila’s writing lies in his literal use of toponymy, in order to chart a poetics and politics of confluence. His works convey a political message through the motifs of oil and water, both related to the phenomenon of confluence. This particular interest in toponymy and in the notion of confluence parallels the generic hybridity at the heart of his oeuvre: facts – historical and/or political – and fiction converge. The generic confluence at issue – a hybrid genre called faction – craftily merges real historical events and fictional situations. Finally, this emphasis on history and politics raises the question of the role of the contemporary Nigerian writer. As was seen before, this question has often been debated in Nigeria with various responses. As a representative of the third generation of Nigerian writers, is Helon Habila saying that Nigerian writers should, as Ofeimun and Saro-Wiwa argued, be eminently political, in order to depict and/or denounce pervasive corruption, dire poverty, and the disastrous environmental situation of the country?

Poetics and Politics of Confluence and the Confluence of Poetics and Politics Habila’s three novels and his latest non-fictional work stage political atmospheres which constitute the undercurrents of life in Nigerian society. The regular use of the motifs of oil and water, and the phenomenon of confluence begs for investigation. After a short summary of the works under study, in which I analyse how central political instability is in the plots, I will concentrate on toponymy as well as its inter-connectedness with the two liquid motifs that serve as prisms through which the political stance of these works is observed. Politics is central in Waiting, in which the protagonist, Lomba, a journalist, is locked up in jail after what was initially intended to be a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration. From then on, he is considered a political prisoner. The novel is set in the 1990s, mostly under General Sani Abacha’s dictatorial regime. The first chapter eponymously entitled “Lomba” 12 stages the protagonist in his cell, awaiting trial, most likely in vain. In this novel Habila puts forth the pervasive corruption which gangrenes postcolonial Nigeria, and which affects not only all the layers of society, but also, in a symptomatic way, the

9. Although Ghosh was mainly alluding to Indian literature, his reflection can be considered true in the Nigerian context. Indeed, some short stories and plays, as well as numerous poems tackle the issue of oil and its consequences on the population: the question of the suitability of a shorter form, such as the short story or the poem, in order to narrate the impact of oil on the population, is interesting but will not be broached here for want of space. 10. See Margaret Atwood’s “It’s Not Climate Change – It’s Everything Change,” written online in 2015. Available at . The Petrocultures Re- search Group, based in Canada, wrote a short book entitled After Oil (2016), to which I will be referring later. 11. Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow (2006) is another novel dealing with the consequences of oil exploitation in the Niger Delta, but it focuses more on the feminine experience of it. 12. I see a distant echo with Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985), in which the word “number” at the head of the chapters, is actually written and pronounced “Lomber” in Saro-Wiwa’s “rotten English.” It is one of the many subtle correspondences between the late author and Habila that are perceptible in the latter’s oeuvre. 58 layers of the text. Despite the highly-monitored prison environment, Lomba still finds a “pencil and paper and he start[s] a diary” (3), which enables the reader to have access to his most inner thoughts.13 Habila clearly debunks a political system – Abacha’s military rule – which, at the time of Waiting’s publication, had come to an end only four years earlier: indeed, Abacha died in 1998 and with his death came the end of military rule and the return to democracy the following year. The 1990s were an intense decade characterized by a tremendous political and social turmoil, marked by arrests, murders, etc. Measuring is partly set in the 1980s-early1990s, in the north of Nigeria. This region is the setting of many tensions. Mamo, the protagonist, is appointed as the would-be- biographer of the local ruler, and works very much as a journalist would in order to find information about his research. Political corruption is a central element in the novel; so is water, a vital resource and a tipping point in the winning of local elections and, as an outcome, an eminently political element. Water is ubiquitous in Oil, where rivers are the sites of extremely violent confrontations between government forces and rebels triggered by the monstrous and deadly presence of oil. Liquidity saturates the novel which deals with the abduction of a British woman, Isabel Floode, the wife of a British oil engineer.14 Zaq, “no doubt one of the best [journalists Nigeria] ever produced” (5) and young Rufus – the protagonist, also a journalist – launch an enquiry so as to find the abducted woman, hoping to issue “almost a perfect story […] [a] good story for any paper” (135). The kidnapping is a way for Habila to delve into the thorny power struggles between the different factions at play – the representatives of Shell for example, but also the inhabitants of the region, not to mention people who “steal” oil – in the geo- political context of the Delta region, where abductions and murders are rampant. Habila falls into the scope of his literary predecessors when he shows that politics is so significant in his works. His references to settings, oil and water, are nearly always connected to a (geo-)political agenda. The following quotation, from Kela in Waiting, synechdochically refers to Lagos, the place of corruption par excellence: [Poverty] street consisted of a single tarred road that ran through its centre – Egunje Road – and a tributary of narrow, dirt roads that led off Egunje Road to the dark interior of the street […]. Behind the Women Centre was Olokun Road, the shabbiest and poorest of all the quarters on Poverty Street. Olokun Road terminated in the less squalid, but more notorious University Road. The latter was the flux point for all vices on the street: there were hotels for sex and alcohol, and there were doorways and alley-mouths for marijuana and cocaine. (120-1, emphasis added) In this passage, confluence is political and this is conveyed not only through the lexical field (in italics) which saturates the excerpt, but also through two stylistic devices, the synecdoche and the hypallage, thanks to which Habila elaborates a rhetoric of confluence. Amidst figures of speech related to the metonymy, the synecdoche is a figure in which “a part of something is used to signify the whole” (Abrams 66). It requires that two concepts be near, contiguous i.e., sharing a boundary or a point: the initial interest in toponymic confluence present in Habila’s novels parallels a stylistic convergence which surreptitiously conveys political messages.

13. Lomba starts a “detention diary” as Ken Saro-Wiwa did in A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (1995) or as Wole Soyinka did in The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972). 14. The name Floode clearly gives clues as to what is going on in the Niger Delta region. Metonymically, the Floodes represent Western expats coming to Nigeria because they are interested in the money they could make out of oil extraction. 59 “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics”

The focal point, Morgan Street – ironically renamed “Poverty Street” – seems to be born out of the “alley-mouths,” crippled with “dark[ness],” “squal[or],” and “vices”: this rather dystopian description synecdochically points to the derelict state of Nigeria as a whole. Even “University Road” – allegedly Nigeria’s brightest future? – has become a notorious place because of sex and drug trafficking: it attests to the corrupt quality of the neighbourhood in an obvious, visible way. Moreover, with the Yoruba word “Egunje,” meaning “bribe,” corruption is displayed as more insidious, giving its name to official places. The use of more specific toponymic vocabulary with the words “tributary,” “flux point,” and “alley-mouths,” is noteworthy as it is more commonly found in descriptions of rivers and more precisely when it comes to describing the phenomenon of confluence. This liquid quality is given more prominence thanks to the use of the word “Olokun” which in Edo language15 refers to the River Goddess. Therefore, the idea of confluence is addressed and used here in order to expose and denounce the impact of the various inter-connected political and social problems mentioned – prostitution, drug-trafficking, poverty – on Nigerian society. Political criticism is rendered even more prominent thanks to two details present in the description above, which describes the daily reality of the inhabitants. The common denominator between the “tarred road” and the “plastic containers” (emphasis added) is oil, which is metonymically designated by the two adjectives, tar and plastic being made of this substance. According to Imre Szeman and the Petrocultures Research Group, “petroculture” “is shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to plastics that permeate our food supply and built environments” (9). Kela indicates that on warm days like the one he describes, people “[g]asp[ed] for breath, they would stare through glazed eyes at the long tarred road that dissected the street in two […]. [T]he tar would start melting, making tearing noises beneath car tyres, holding grimly on to shoe holes” (119). The use of the hypallage (“the tar […] holding grimly”) gives indirect indications about the feelings of the inhabitants, and the state of the country. Linguistically, the relation between “tar […] holding” and “grimly” is a divergent one creating a disjunction, which could metaphorically be interpreted as political. It could be inferred that the situation described by Kela is discouraging, de- pressing, dismal even. According to Hélène Collins, both convergence and divergence form the essence of the hypallage. This double contradictory movement – between divergence and convergence – that this figure of speech seems to operate takes another path: it follows a pattern of “bivergence” (see Collins).16 This could help better understand the political situation of Nigeria as described by Habila: it is a country that neither converges nor diverges, but is stuck in-between, in a “bivergent” movement, incapable of moving forward. The reasons for this are multiple: mismanagement of oil revenues in the context of Oil, or military rule in Waiting. They prevent the country from deve- loping smoothly and make the most of its assets. The society depicted is a stagnating

15. Edo language is mainly spoken in the midwestern state of Edo, bordered in the south by the Delta state. Habila’s use of various native languages in the novel’s toponyms points to the possibility of making divergences between ethnic groups appear less prevalent in fiction. 16. These reflections have been inspired by Hélène Collins’s article entitled “La relative transparence de l’hypallage : l’hypallage est-elle un trope?” Collins comes up with the term “bivergence” to express the simultaneous movement of convergence and divergence that is, according to her, at issue when dealing with the figure of the hypallage. It can also mimic Habila’s situation as regards his literary predecessors, between convergence – i.e., writing like – and divergence – i.e., getting away from. 60 one.17 Not only is the heat responsible for the oppressive and deadly atmosphere but so are the police forces, brought to the fore through a simile, and the use of hypallages. The heat is personified with verbs expressing violence, a violence that isotopically applies to the police and their drastic measures: “tear,” “strangle,” “wring out.” The stagnating impression is expressed by Lomba in a metafictional passage that can be read as part of Habila’s literary manifesto, where life in this environment, and in Nigeria as a whole, does seem to be harsh: I use my street, Morgan Street, as a paradigmatic locale, the fuel scarcity as the main theme. The long lines of cars waiting for fuel at petrol stations and obstructing traffic I use as a thread to weave together the various aspect of the article; in front of the petrol pumps I place the ubiquitous gun- and whip-toting soldiers, collecting money from drivers to expedite their progress towards the pumps. (113)18 The tense, oppressive atmosphere prevailing in Waiting is the consequence of the paradoxical situation of Nigeria in the 1990s. David Cockley argues that “Waiting […] subtly positions oil as the undercurrent of every aspect of life in contemporary Nigeria” (147). Although the country is one of the wealthiest as regards oil resources – which are eminently political not only on a national but also on a global scale19 – very few people benefit from them. When Lomba is offered a job as a journalist,20 the editor suggests that should Lomba write something, he’d better stop trying to write fiction and concentrate on a bottomless source of inspiration: Nigerian politics.21 In order to hammer his point, the editor indicates a situation which again synecdochically represents the paradoxical plight of the country where there are “long queue[s] of cars waiting for fuel. Some of them have been there for days. […] And we are major producers of oil. […] [P]eople remain stuck in the same vicious groove. […] The general disillusionment, the lethargy’” (108-9).22 The use of the adjective “vicious” to refer to the groove – a possible meaning is “noxious” or “morbid” – prefigures what Habila tackles in Oil where the black gold is a major political issue. While talking to James Floode, Rufus delivers a heartrending (geo-)political speech in which he alludes to his native village, “Junction.”23 According to Rufus, “Junction” has been devastated by the pollution in the region, and he alludes to the vandalism of “the pipelines that have brought nothing but suffering to their lives, leaking into the rivers and wells, killing the fish and poisoning the farmlands” (108). The region has

17. Okùnoye writes: “Dele Giwa, Kudirat Abiola and Alfred Rewane were murdered in very bizarre circumstances by those believed to be agents of the state, while the killing of Moshood Abiola and Ken Saro-Wiwa, in no less ques- tionable circumstances, remain reminders of the damage that the military and their supporters did to stagnate Nigeria” (83, emphasis added). 18. It bears noting that the ubiquitous presence of soldiers is equally striking in The Chibok Girls. Habila writes that “[c]heckpoints weren’t only for regulating traffic – they also controlled the flow of the narrative surrounding the kidnapping” (22). 19. Ghosh writes: “But the experiences associated with oil are lived out within a space that is no place at all, a world that is intrinsically displaced, heterogeneous, and international” (79). 20. The editor of The Dial had been impressed by the young man after reading an essay entitled “The Military in Nigerian Politics” (106) that he had written for his university assessments. This attests to the interest in politics the young student was showing then and proves once again Habila’s emphasis on the Nigerian political situation of the 1990s. 21. Habila himself seems to take this advice at face value in his latest work, a non-fiction essay about the 276 Chibok schoolgirls who were abducted by the Boko Haram terrorist group in 2014, triggering a wave of international support with the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. His short essay enables the reader to understand both what happened in Chibok and the subsequent reactions from the Jonathan and Buhari administrations. 22. One cannot but think of the post-independence disillusionment and the literary output of the 1960s. 23. Used as a toponym “Junction” is another word that evokes the idea of confluence. 61 “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics” become explosive because of oil. The land is supposed to provide the villagers with the basic means of survival but crude makes it barren. As an outcome, the villagers are forced to flee. The victims of this ecological catastrophe find a spokesman in Henshaw, an environmental activist: “We are the people, we are the Delta, we represent the very earth on which we stand” (149). Henshaw proudly identifies with his territory as the hamme- ring anaphora in “we” indicates.24 The novel is anchored in the daily reality and politics of the Niger Delta and focuses a great deal on the landscape. The other liquid motif, water, is put forth in a variety of colours and shapes – “clear and mobile,” “brackish and still” (4), “oil-polluted” (5), “restless” (152), “dangerous” (172). Together with oil, it forms the crux of the novel: it is shape-shifting – and as such, unstable, like Nigeria as a whole. In this novel, water is poisonous while it usually symbolizes life. Toponymy is exploited by Habila in order to express political criticisms targeting the dictatorial regimes of Babangida and Abacha, but also corruption, and the ecological and social impacts of oil on the inhabitants of the Niger Delta. More surprisingly, water is also depicted as life-threatening. In Oil, the two liquids meet, but their combined presence is paradoxical since the two resources are not miscible. This chemical (im) miscibility metaphorically affects Habila’s writing, particularly his literary choices, as oil can also be related to ink. He aims to elaborate a generic hybridity, inspired by his own experience as a writer at the junction between two literary modes.

Writing Faction: Toward a Generic Hybridity Habila has declared that his journalistic experience has contributed to shaping his method, style and understanding of day-to-day realities as a novelist. He has also dis- tanced himself from politics, stating that resorting to journalists as protagonists is “a conscious and committed way to put a distance between the artist and political commentary” (my translation).25 He does not mean, however, that in his work no political commentary is made at all. Indeed, according to Lai Oso, [t]he Nigerian press has from its infancy been a participant in the country’s political processes. From its beginnings, the press has not been a mere chronicler of political events and politicians. Quite often, the press has either wittingly or unwittingly been a major actor in all events. (Qtd. in Okùnoye 69). In Oil, it is Rufus, a fictitious character, who denounces the situation in the Niger Delta, not Habila the citizen/writer. History and politics are central in Habila’s works: it is an aspect the writer is fully aware of as proved by the “Afterword” he included at the end of Waiting, and in which he accounts for generic decisions he made while writing his novel. This “Afterword” is meant to emphasize the fictional character of his work and could also apply to his second and third novels. It indicates that Waiting is a story [written] like most works of historical fiction are achieved: by making recognizable historical facts and incidents the fibres with which the larger fictional fabric is woven: Ken Saro-Wiwa, June 12, Dele Giwa, Kudirat Abiola, the riots, the student demonstrations, and of course the arrests. […] My concern was for the story, that above everything else. (228, emphasis added)

24. This episode cannot but remind the reader of Ken Saro-Wiwa whom Habila must have had in mind when he created this fictitious character. 25. “C’est une manière consciente et assumée de distancier l’artiste du commentaire politique.” . Consulted 16 March 2016. 62

The reason for the presence of the afterword is twofold: it circumvents possible criticisms as to a lack of originality because Habila anchors his novel in Nigerian history and politics. Moreover, by laying the stress on the fictional side of his production, Habila may attempt to sidestep problems with the authorities since, surprisingly, as Jennifer Wenzel writes, “[i]n addition to the Caine Prize, Habila won a Commonwealth Writers Prize for Waiting […] in 2003, a feat that he repeated in 2011 with Oil […] – without even getting arrested” (13). To the writer, recent Nigerian history is strewn with historical landmarks he names and which he thinks deserve a place in his fiction. Among those landmarks are references to well-known activists, politicians, and writers, who at some point entered Nigerian history. The period Habila mentions in his Afterword, the 1990s, were years of dictatorship embodied by two men, General Ibrahim Babangida, who ruled Nigeria from 1985 to 1993, the year he had to give up power because of the people’s pressure since he had annulled the June 12th democratic elections. As to Ge- neral Sani Abacha’s regime (1993-1998), it was infamous for wide-spread human rights abuse, among which the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, triggering international anger and causing the suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth. Saro-Wiwa himself put forth the plight of the Ogoni people who were – and still are – considered the main victims of oil extraction and exploitation. The late writer clearly had an ecological and judicial agenda in mind and was in favour of financial compensations for the material losses of the Ogoni: this is addressed in Oil. Habila anchors his novels in history and politics and this constitutes a form of faction as defined by David Lodge (202-3).Faction – a portmanteau, hybrid word composed of “fact” and “fiction” and at the point of convergence between the two – enables Habila to instil generic hybridity in the very “fictional fabric” of his work.26 His writing is certainly not the equivalent of Truman Capote’s, but Habila aims to convey the raw reality of life in Nigeria without hiding anything. The choice of faction is part of his literary agenda in order to convey political messages. The boundary between fact and fiction in his novels proves to be all but clear-cut. Rather, it is fluctuating, blurry. Faction is a way for him to narrate the failed Bildung of the nation relying on clear and identifiable historical references.27 Yet the Bildungsroman – the three novels can be read as such – goes in line with faction since “[it is] a genre where the boundaries between fact and fiction are often unclear and not necessarily very significant” (Austen 2). Both Lomba and Mamo’s specific situations can be applied allegorically to the nation itself: people, like Lomba, lack freedom (of speech) and the country, like Mamo, suffers from anaemia, a sickness that wears the country out.28 In After Oil, Szeman writes that “energy plays a critical role in determining the shape, form, and character of our daily existence” and “[a]s authors Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman have recently argued, now that we have the facts about oil and climate change, we need fictions to act on them” (9, 42). The writer is therefore also a militant.

26. This resonates with Wole Soyinka’s Foreword in his autobiographical Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, a Memoir 1946- 1965 where he writes that “Ibadan does not pretend to be anything but faction, that much abused genre which attempts to fictionalise facts and events, the proportion of fact to fiction being totally at the discretion of the author” (ix). 27. Historical references are not as precisely marked in Measuring and Oil as they are in Waiting. Oil, for example, elaborates a rhetoric of indirectness reflecting the impression of disorientation affecting the characters in the novel. 28. The plants in an excerpt from Waiting also suffer from anaemia: “on the anaemic plants that drooped in old plastic containers” (119). In Nigeria, life as a whole seems to be affected with this (blood) disease. A parallel between oil and blood can also be made. Andrew Apter argues that oil can be compared to blood running in the national body (The Pan-African 249-55). 63 “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics”

Habila’s novels are examples of faction since they are presented as works of fiction but find their inspiration in real facts. The generic confluence – with a more or less fluid flow – combines the factual and the fictional. However, is Habila contemplating the role of the contemporary Nigerian writer as political? Does this emphasis on history and politics make the novelist a political spokesperson? It has long been what was expected from the Nigerian novelist, but where does Habila stand on this question?

Helon Habila and the Figure/Function of the Writer Habila’s choice of the socialist realist vein could limit the interpretation of his oeuvre as solely political. Lomba, his literary avatar, does admit that he is “not very political” (Waiting 108). Habila, however, acknowledges having a political agenda when he states that he aims at “captur[ing] the mood of the 1990s” in words, but he also weaves an aesthetic approach into his fiction which reaches a point of confluence between politics and poetics, both eventually flowing together. As we have seen, it has often been argued that the African writer is a political spokesperson. Habila seems to take a slightly different path. Indeed, for instance, the reader does not have access to the article Rufus aims at writing about the situation in the Niger Delta and the abduction of Isabel Floode. The story terminates before the reader even has the opportunity to read it. In a similar way, we only have access to some excerpts from Mamo’s biographies and, once more, we do not know whether these biographies will eventually be published. The writer clearly has a political agenda, but it is aborted before publication. Yet, Rufus and Mamo want to write for people to be aware of what is going on in Nigeria. Regarding the didactic role of the writer, Habila clearly follows on from Achebe in “The Novelist as Teacher.” Quite early in Measuring, Mamo teaches history, and the exchange he has with his students is noteworthy: “What is history? Immediately hands went up. ‘It’s the story of the past.’ / ‘Not entirely true, it is also about the future,’ he replied” (95-6). The writing/teaching of History also has much to do with the future because it enables one to learn from the past. History is also about the consequences of past events upon the future of people, and the construction of the country. When challenged by a student to give his own definition of what history is, Mamo brushes the question away by saying he expects more intelligent answers from his students. Yet, this is telling of the fact that he himself has no clear definition of what history is. The reflection which could have been extremely fruitful is aborted. One of the few things Mamo is certain about is that he aims at writing a revisionist version of the history of Keti in order to right the wrongs he read about in the book Reverend Drinkwater devoted to “History of the Peoples of Keti.” Here, the writer is clearly a righter, in the vein of Achebe or Saro-Wiwa. Indeed, s/he cannot but be a witness of his age, a recorder of events. When he submits a review of the missionary’s book, the answer he receives from a London Magazine epitomizes the Western vision of African writers and intellectuals in general: [W]e regret that the subject does not suit our particular demand at the moment. However, if you have other pieces that address such issues as the AIDS scourge, or genital circumcision, or other typical African experiences in a challenging and progressive way, we’d like to take a look at them. (179) 64

This is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “The Danger of a Single Story” whenever the West expects African writers to focus on the negative aspects of Africa. The journalists in Habila’s novels – avatars for writers – are expected to keep records of what is going on. Mamo considers that as far as he was concerned a true history is one that looks at the individuals, ordinary people who toil and dream and suffer, who bear the brunt of whatever vicissitude time inflicts on the nation. He said if a historian could capture these ordinary lives, including their recollections of their own family’s past, then he might come close to writing a true “biographical history” of a nation; for when we refer to a nation, are we not really referring to the people that inhabit that nation, and so isn’t the story of a nation then really the story of the people who make up that nation? (180) He concentrates on individual stories and the role of the writer is to “writ[e] about our history” (175) according to his girlfriend, Zara. As an outcome, he decides to write “a true history of the Keti people” (186, emphasis added) and the use of the indefinite article is very powerful: other histories could be written through this bottom-up approach. According to Habila, multiplicity is a strength, and the writer is the very embodiment of this multiplicity of voices, the medium through whom they can be heard. He embodies a point of confluence that is aware of the divergences from which it was born, a confluence which does not erase the peculiarities of each voice. In the same way, Rufus wants to hear and narrate the stories of individuals in the Niger Delta, in order to “write back” to the “Big Oil” narrative. Individual voices are sublimated and Habila conjures up a web of literary voices in order to highlight the fact that social, geographical, historical, etc. divergences of (literary) sources can actually be used together in order to criticize specific aspects in society. He aims at writing back to “Shellspeak” as Saro-Wiwa said. The didacticism of Mamo the teacher, who relies on facts, is qualified with a magical trend present in the novel, particularly in the chapter where the two brothers plan to kill their neighbour’s dog. They intend to discover a new way of seeing the world by rubbing the rheum of the dead dog in their own eyes since dogs “can see spirits and ghosts” (27). Mamo wants to explore “distant places, underwater people and spirits, all these beings Auntie Marina talks of in her stories” (27). This experience brings the two brothers the expected results in the form of nightmares, but they are affected with a temporary blindness since they develop an eye infection that seems to weaken the already fragile Mamo even more. Although this is a particularly unstable classification, we could say that this passage falls within the framework of magical realism, which has a “subversive, anti-hegemonic, or decolonizing thrust” according to Wenzel (“Petro” 457). Mamo – and by extension Habila – seems to be “a crossroads person […] a child of intersection” as expressed by Ben Okri. Mamo’s political agenda – writing a “true history” of Keti – aborts before it is it completed. Therefore, despite a very political stance, Habila’s novels diverge toward a poetic agenda, with flights of magical realism, but also with poetic passages. Poetry can be considered a rite of passage for Habila and his avatar, Lomba. Early in his career, Habila wrote poems – among which “After the Obsession” and “Birds of the Graveyard” (2000) – which caught the critics’ attention. Poetry is at times intrinsically woven into his prose. This genre has been used as a political tool by Nigerian writers. We have already mentioned Odia Ofeimun, whose aim has been to use poetry as a po- 65 “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics” litical weapon, especially when he wrote The Poet Lied in 1980. Poetry is used to target new leaders who amount to the same as before, as exemplified in Ofeimun’s poem “The New Broom.” Waiting refers to the succession of leaders and the impression that they amount to the same thing through the image of the palimpsest: Everybody started using the shorter name Women Centre, when the full name changed twice in the two years of existence, from Mariam Babangida Women Centre to Mariam Abacha Women Centre. The first name was still faintly visible, in white ink, beneath the hastily painted new name in blue. (120-1) Habila’s prose is at times eminently poetic, particularly when dealing with the motif of water, which appears in Lomba’s poems written in jail and which are stereotypically connected to “love.” This interest in love poems is most prominent in Lomba’s transformation of Sappho’s poem, “Ode to a Loved One.” What is most relevant in his “bowdlerization” of Sappho’s poem is that the poet’s persona is “no longer master of [his] voice / And [his] tongue lies useless” (21). In another poem in which he describes his living conditions, Lomba writes: Lord, I’ve had days black as pitch / And nights crimson as blood // But they have passed over me, like water. / Let this one pass over me, lightly, / Like a smooth rock rolling down the hill, / Down my back, my skin, like soothing water. (6) The liquid quality is conveyed with the alliteration in /l/ which saturates the poem. It is unstable as the varying number of feet in each line indicates. The harmonious iam- bic pattern is nearly absent. Unlike the water that has hitherto been referred to, water is here reassuring, alleviating, a property that is regularly attributed to the liquid motif but which contrasts strikingly with the conditions in which Lomba evolves, rendered through the erratic poetic rhythm. The reference to blood – which parallels water here – allows the reader to see that water is highly ambivalent. These poems are not really “love poems” anymore since Lomba is manipulating the format, but also the words to ask for help from the superintendent’s girlfriend. Lomba the poet is lying and has political goals which aim at showing that poetry has the power to inspire action. This resonates with Oil, where water is most of the time ominous and poisonous as exemplified in the following passage in which Naman, a worshipper, tells the story of the shrine he leads. There, people have decided to live on an island, away from the pollution of the Niger Delta, in a traditional, “pre-oil” utopian manner: The shrine was started a long time ago after a terrible war – no one remembers what caused the war – when the blood of the dead ran in the rivers, and the water was so saturated with blood that the fishes died, and the dead bodies of warriors floated for miles on water, until they were snagged on mangrove branches on the banks, or got stuck in the muddy swamps, half in and half out of water. The land was so polluted that even the water in the wells turned red. That was when priests from different shrines got together and decided to build this shrine by the sea. The land needed to be cleansed of blood and pollution. (129-30) The accumulation of punctuation signs (dashes, commas) and the repeated use of the conjunction “and” indicate a reluctant flow of the sentence which metaphorically parallels the quasi impossible flow of the rivers: corpses of both human beings and animals choke the rivers. The dashes themselves insert the rivers physically on the page. This description reminds the reader of the River Styx which formed a boundary between Earth and the Underworld. These passages are eminently poetic and the poetic motif 66 par excellence, water, is typically used and injected with political aspects. Poetics and politics thus flow together: the Nigerian writer has to navigate troubled waters and, as the Petrocultures Research Group asks us to do in After Oil, imagine a world that has tran- sitioned away from the black gold. In this context, Habila can be said to have written a “climate change novel,” also known as “cli-fi.”29 However, he seems to bring a unique voice in the sense that his “narrative […] [is] focused on the environmental and social impact of particular extractive industries [and] Habila introduces some visions of spiritual cleansing and healing for human bodies, if not for the land, in his novel” (Irr 16). Contrasting with the poetic stance adopted by Lomba, the writer is metonymically reduced to his “asshole for shitting and farting, and a penis that in the morning grows turgid in vain. This leftover self ” (24). This scatology is clearly a symbol of political disillusionment in postcolonial Nigeria where the writer is aware of his own uselessness and powerlessness. When Mikhail Bakhtin refers to the grotesque realism in Rabelais’s writings in Rabelais and his World (1941), he calls attention to the “downward movement” of carnivalesque humour and the emphasis it places upon “the level of the material bodily stratum” (370), triggering a cathartic laughter whose aim is to produce social criticism and satire to eventually bring along regeneration. However here, the scatological motifs point to the hardships the prisoner and the writer had to go through, and they do not produce the expected laughter. The political seems to prevail; yet, this points to a form of commodification of suffering in order to gain literary profit,30 something Habila paradoxically criticised in an article published in The Guardian when reviewing NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names (2013). In Waiting “Habila […] recognizes that life without the prospect of a better future is meaningless” (Erritouni 154), and this is the reason why he envisions utopian worlds to try and find solutions to political and social ills. For indeed, as Imre Szeman writes, “[t] elling stories from the past is not just an exercise in uncovering lost causes, traumas, and oppression. It can also point to alternative ways of thinking and being that may have been forgotten or suppressed in the mad rush to cover the world with oil” (43). Ac- cording to Fredric Jameson, who refers to Ernst Bloch’s utopias, utopian impulses are future-oriented (2) and it is now up to “[t]he arts and humanities [as] uniquely equipped to help us engage in a full, successful energy transition” (Szeman 41), inventing utopian alternatives to the dystopian stories told by Helon Habila.

Cédric Courtois École Normale Supérieure de Lyon / Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne

29. Caren Irr writes that “cli-fi” is “[c]haracterized most frequently by efforts to imagine the impacts of drastic cli- matological change on human life and perceptions […]. The styles and voices used in cli‑fi range widely, but these works often pay marked attention to the perspectives of scientists, especially where these deviate from popular ideas about the environment. […] Together, these motifs cohere in an apocalyptic sensibility” (2). 30. In Waiting’s last chapter, where some Nigerian writers among whom Toni Kan, but also Maik Nwosu and even Helon Habila himself are given a platform, Lomba has a conversation with a female painter who says: “You really must try and get arrested – that’s the quickest way to make it as a poet. You’ll have no problem with visas after that, you might even get an international award” (215). 67 “In this Country, the Very Air We Breathe Is Politics”

W orks Cited Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 1957. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1981. Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” July 2009 . Consulted 10 June 2017. Agary, Kaine. Yellow-Yellow. Lagos: Dtalkshop, 2006. Alli, M. Chris. The Federal Republic of Nigerian Army: The Siege of a Nation. Lagos: Malthouse, 2001. Apter, Andrew. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005. Atwood, Margaret. “It’s Not Climate Change – It’s Everything Change.” 2015 . Consulted on 10 June 2017. Austen, Ralph. “From a Colonial to a Postcolonial African Voice: ‘Amkoullel, l’enfant peul’.” Research in African Literatures 31.3 (Autumn 2000): 1-17. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. 1968. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Trans. of Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса, Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable I narodnaja kul’tura srednevekov’ja I Renessansa. 1965. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Trans. Stephen Plaice, Neville Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge: The MIT P, 1986. Trans. of Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 1954. Brown, Lesley, ed. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993. Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. London: Vintage, 2013. Cockley, David. “Helon Habila’s Neoliberal Nigeria: Free Markets and Subordinate Cultures in Waiting for an Angel.” Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature. Ed. Walter P. Collins, III. Amherst: Cambria UP, 2010. 147-76. Collins, Hélène. “La relative transparence de l’hypallage : l’hypallage est-elle un trope ?” Études de Stylistique Anglaise 5 (2012): 43-60. Collins, Walter P., III. Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature. Amherst: Cambria P, 2010. Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997. Erritouni, Ali. “Postcolonial Despotism from a Postmodern Standpoint: Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel.” Research in African Literatures 41.4 (Winter 2010): 144-61. Garuba, Harry. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-Figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry.” English in Africa 32.1 (May 2005): 51-72. Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.”The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2002. 75-89. Habila, Helon. Prison Stories. Lagos: Epik, 2000. —. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2002. —. Measuring Time. 2007. New York: Penguin, 2008. —. Oil on Water. London: Penguin, 2011. —. “We Need New Name by NoViolet Bulawayo – A Review.” 2013 . Consulted 10 June 2017. —. The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria. London: Penguin, 2017. Irr, Caren. “Climate Fiction in English.” February 2017 . Consulted 10 June 2017. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction. New York: Verso, 2005. Kapstein, Helen. “Crude Fictions: How New Nigerian Short Stories Sabotage Big Oil’s Master Narrative?” Postcolonial Text 11.1 (2016): 1-18. Le Gros, Julien. “Helon Habila, écrivain : ‘L’art doit être le reflet des réalités politiques.” 17 December 2014 . Consulted 10 June 2017. Ofeimun, Odia. The Poet Lied: and Other Poems. Lagos: Longman, 1980. Okùnoye, Oyeníyì. “Writing Resistance: Dissidence and Visions of Healing in Nigerian Poetry in the Military Era.” Tydskrif vir letterkunde 48.1 (Autumn 2011): 64-85. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. London: Penguin, 1995. —. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Port Harcourt: Saros, 1985. Soyinka, Wole. The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946-1965. London: Methuen, 1994. Szeman, Imre, and the Petrocultures Research Group. After Oil. Edmonton: Petrocultures Research Group, 2016. 68

Waberi, Abdourahman A. “Les enfants de la postcolonie : esquisse d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains francophones d’Afrique noire.” Notre Librairie 135 (September/December 1998): 8-15. Wenzel, Jennifer. Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies 9.4 (2006): 449-64. —. “Behind the Headlines.” American Book Review 33.3 (March/April 2012): 13-4. Wilkinson, Jane, ed. Talking with African Writers: Interviews. London: James Curry, 1990. The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English: Reshaping National Identities in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows

The 1947 Partition led to the division of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines and the creation of seemingly homogeneous Indian and Pakistani national identities. Yet such clear-cut national imaginings have long been questioned, notably in the Indian novel in English. By incorporating tropes and forms from traditional Indian literatures into their novels, Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie give the genre a hybrid texture that shapes their multicultural understanding of national identity.

In the introduction to his monograph on Indian Partition movies, Mourning the Na- tion: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, Bhaskar Sarkar states: [S]cholars have sought to wean us off the mythopoesis of the nation as primordial, essential, natural. As a result, we now know that the nation is a cultural artifact: an “imagined community” […]. Nationhood leads to the inevitable erasure of difference, of alternative and equally salient poles of affiliation, in the service of a monolithic, and at times oppressive, identity. (6) Sarkar’s words immediately evoke Benedict Anderson’s analysis in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) of the nation and nationalism as fast evolving cultural artifacts and social constructs that are willed into being. Such a comment resonates even more powerfully in the context of the subcontinent since the modern Indian nation was shaped both by national politics and cultural imaginings, and notably by the Anglo-Indian novel. I offer to examine two Partition novels published from across the Indo-Pakistani divide created on 15 August 1947 when the British left the subcontinent after hastily drawing the new borders that were to split the region into two independent states: The Shadow Lines (1988) by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh and Burnt Shadows (2009) by Pakis- tani-British novelist Kamila Shamsie.1 I focus specifically on the Anglo-Indian novel whose development is “handcuffed to [the] history” of the subcontinent insofar as, both in form and content, this literature was transformed by history (Kabir, “Handcuf- fed” 119-32). The first Anglo-Indian novel was published in India during the colonial era – Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1864). The novel in English then quickly became the vehicle of Hindu nationalist aspirations. In the 1930s, this mode of representation gained larger recognition through the pioneering works of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and N.K. Narayan, especially the latter’s Chronicles of Maguldi (1936-

1. The two Radcliffe Commissions – named after their President, the London lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe – pressured by the increasing amount of communitarian riots opposing the Hindus and Sikhs to the Muslim minority, divided in haste the two Indian provinces which gathered the largest concentration of Muslim population: the Eastern province of Bengal and the Western province of Punjab. The Partition of India led to some of the largest displacements of population of the twentieth century. Within a few months, around 12 million were displaced. According to Butalia, “estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) […] there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own […]. Thousands of families were divided, homes destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned” (Other Side 3). 70

1983; Raghavacharyulu 21-48).2 However, the sudden social, cultural and political rup- tures brought about by the 1947 Partition questioned the very “idea” of the nation3 that Indian nationalists had fought for, and radically reshaped the Anglo-Indian novel. Anglo-Indian novels do not necessarily portray the history of the nation – let alone Par- tition – yet Partition has been hovering over the subcontinent like a “long shadow” for the last seventy years. Several fictional and non-fictional works make use of the trope of the “shadows” to refer to this epochal event. For instance, the collection edited by Urvashi Butalia, Partition: The Long Shadow (2015), demonstrates how Partition has been revisited through various modes of representation such as literature, the visual arts, music, film, etc. The volume gathers essays written by scholars from across the national borders inherited after 1947 and the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. Some of them are either working or living outside the subcontinent, mainly in the United States or Canada. As I examine here two novels written by Indian and Pakistani diasporic writers, I wish to contribute to the cross-cultural memory work advocated by Butalia and her fellow researchers. Despite the two decades that separate their publication, The Shadow Lines and Burnt Shadows share a similar interest in grasping the “idea” of the nation. Ghosh and Shamsie transform and adapt the novel in English to subvert the hegemonic nationalist discourse that has shaped the official history of the subcontinent since Partition and has led to several Indo-Pakistani wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999, to the militarization of the frontier zones, and to the arms race and missile tests via which both states seek to consolidate their home power by threatening their neighbour and turning it into the archenemy (see Kaul’s introduction). In my comparative analysis, I argue that Ghosh and Shamsie refashion the cartography traced at Partition by interrogating the ideologies that underlie geographical constructs. I study the literary techniques both novelists borrow from South Asian literatures and cultures to invent “maps of memory” that are transcultural, transnational and international (for this coinage, see Mallot). First, I will show that the nation imagined into being during the colonial period was reinvented in the Indian novel in English in the 1980s. Then, I will discuss the way The Shadow Lines and Burnt Shadows produce imaginary maps of the subcontinent that replace the concept of a holistic and time- and space-bound nation by that of ever-changing homes. Lastly, I will demonstrate that although both novelists create imaginary homelands, Ghosh revisits the Bildungsroman by drawing inspiration from Bengali literature, while Shamsie reaches back to older literary sources by peppering her work with Sufi tropes and Persian lyricism.

Imagining a Holistic Nation in the Anglo-Indian Novel during the Colonial Period During the anticolonial struggle, the Indian nationalists fought to shape a unitary vision of the nation that all Indians, regardless of their social and communal backgrounds, could rally to. Amartya Sen asserts that though the “Indian identity” forged then did not have a unique definition, most nationalists still promoted an inclusive and secular

2. The Chronicles of Maguldi are a series of novels published by Narayan on the fictional semi-urban town of Maguldi in southern India, from Swami and Friends (1935) to A Tiger for Maguldi (1983). 3. I borrow the term “idea” of a nation from the title of Sunil Khilnani’s book, The Idea of India, which refers to the historic, economic and socio-political circumstances that participated in the national conception of India. 71 The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English image of the nation that would encompass the cultural, religious and social diversity of the different Indian communities: [T]hese varying interpretations all share an inclusionary reading of Indian identity that tolerates, protects and indeed celebrates diversity within a pluralist India. […] [T]hey shared a general refusal to privilege any narrowly circumscribed perspective (such as an exclusively religious approach, or more specifically, a Hindu view). (A. Sen 348) Yet the fracture of the subcontinent destroyed this ideal of unity since it endangered the “idea” of the nation. According to Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, this “idea” could only be maintained provided the nation was inclusive of the Other: “‘the idea of India’ itself militates ‘against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’” (qtd. in A. Sen 349). Paradoxically enough, this ideal seems to have been a nostalgic dream even before Independence since the Other – in the present case the opposite religious community – was already rejected within the country, as illustrated during the many riots which paved the way to Partition. Moreover, Perry Anderson observes that the nationalism advocated by the Indian Congress Party was dominated early on by a Hindu ideology despite the secular aspirations it openly claimed. Statis- tics made in the mid-1930s reveal that 97% of the Congress members were Hindus, and during that time Gandhi himself invoked Hindu imagery in his public speeches to gather new followers (P. Anderson 94). By using this religious iconography, the seemingly secular leaders were actually walking in the footsteps of the late nineteenth-century Bengali nationalists who had developed a political and cultural ethos based on Hindu myths and on Bankim Chatterji’s (anti-Muslim) poem, “Vande Mataram,” which inspired the anthem of the Congress Party (P. Anderson 99). The “idea” of the nation was undermined from its very inception as the cohesi- veness of the nation was put in jeopardy by the nationalist discourses that shaped it. In the four decades that followed Independence, the official Indian historiography worked at erasing the violence of Partition from collective memory, and the event was considered an “anomaly” (Sarkar 15). Admittedly, the Indian government tried to marginalize the tragedy to consolidate its secular ideal. Yet, by denying this legacy of communitarian violence to smooth out cultural and religious differences, the government-fueled “collective amnesia” prevented the nation from confronting its collective trauma and working through it (Pandey 33). The traces of the Partition violence took on biased and displaced forms which permeated cultural productions and eventually resurfaced on the socio-political stage. To guarantee its national integrity, India focused on the neighbouring enemy, Pakistan – and Pakistan retaliated – all the while downplaying the plight of religious minorities on both sides. After the 1971 partition of Bengal, such contradictions could no longer be contained and, as the subcontinent became more open to the globalized world in the 1980s, the image of the nation that Indian and Pakistani novelists in English would offer to the world changed drastically.

The 1980s: Reshaping the Fractured Nation in Indian and Pakistani Novels in English Though the Indian official historiography marginalized the violence of Partition during the four decades that followed Independence, several Indian novels in English published during that time evoked Partition. These novels mainly focused on the im- 72 mediate experience of violence, sometimes described with harsh realism. This is true of the first Indian novel in English dealing with Partition, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), which uses the image of the “trainload of corpses” that later became a recurring trope in Partition literature (Rituparna Roy 33-46, 135-7). From the 1950s to the early 1980s, Partition novels mostly described the traumatic experience of victims confronted with the horrors of Partition, faced with forced migration or burdened with psychological wounds. All three aspects are illustrated by Indian novelist Attia Ho- sain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961). Starting in the early 1920s and ending in 1952, the novel examines the repercussions of Partition for the Indian Muslim minority by adopting the perspective of Laila, a young girl brought up in the landowning class of the Taluqdars,4 who opposes the patriarchal values imposed on women. Given the time- frame in which these novels were written, it is no surprise that they would mainly focus on the experience of the generation who lived through Partition. While they depicted Partition as a rupture in the Indian socio-cultural fabric – often by using tropes of mutilation, dislocation, dismemberment – none of these novels went so far as to rethink the concept of the nation in the way some Anglo-Indian novels would from the 1980s on. The 1980s became a landmark in the history of the Indian novel in English when Salman Rushdie published his much acclaimed and debated Midnight’s Children (1981) that propelled the genre on the international scene while simultaneously disclosing to the world a sensitive and intimate history of Partition (Coussy 60-8). The publication of Midnight’s Children initiated a new vision of the nation that was to guide most Indian and Pakistani novelists. While fiction devoted to the nation had been forging so far a holistic image supporting the nationalist agenda of both India and Pakistan, Rushdie rewrote the collective past through magical realism and personal memories and trajectories. In “Interrogating the Nation, Growing Global in The Shadow Lines,” Someshwar Sati demonstrates how Rushdie’s polymorphous imaginary nation inspired many other Indian writers: Rushdie offers a history of the nation not through a unilinear narrative, but in terms of disruption and discontinuity […]. Rushdie’s novel has been diagnosed as a plural narrative that explodes the notion of the nation having a stable identity. It however does so without discarding the nation; it merely attempts to draw attention to the glorious multiplicity of this entity. (51) Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines similarly reinvents the history of the subcontinent from the memory fragments of an anonymous middle-class Bengali narrator, who also introduces himself as the author of the novel. He retraces his family history to make sense of a private drama which still haunts him after two decades: the murder of his uncle and mentor Tridib, assassinated by a mob of angry Muslims during the 1964 Dhaka riots. The narrator’s family migrated from Dhaka (which became Pakistani in 1947 and then the Bangladeshi capital city in 1971) to Calcutta (which remained Indian) before Partition. He appears to be Ghosh’s spokesperson on the sensitive issues of nationalism and national history which are central to the novel. In several essays and interviews, Ghosh stated he had decided to write The Shadow Lines following the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs of Delhi – perpetrated to avenge the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards – because these more recent events had triggered his

4. During the Mughal domination, the Taluqdars were in charge of tax collection in the Indian provinces. Under British rule, they kept their status of feudal landlords until the abolition of their privileges in 1947. 73 The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English childhood memories of the 1964 Calcutta riots (see Aldama 84-90 and Ghosh, “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi” 60-1). Like Ghosh, the narrator was born in the 1950s, after Partition. Yet, in his narrative, individual and family memories relating to Partition and other tragedies which shook the subcontinent converge to reshape the past of India, and produce a fragmentary and plural vision of national history and of the nation. Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows also revisits the history of the subcontinent through private memories as the lives of three generations of families from different parts of the world intersect in the narrative. The national tragedies that bring the characters together are transformed by their personal trajectories. The novel opens up in Japan just before the bombing of Nagasaki; the plot then follows the journey of a hibakusha, an irradiated survivor, Hiroko Tanaka, as she reaches Delhi just before Partition. In 1948, Hiroko and her Indian husband are forced to settle down in Karachi refugee camps as muhadjirs (a derogatory name given to Muslim refugees from India), and eventually she moves to New York where she witnesses the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Though the novel predominantly adopts Hiroko’s perspective, the plot also explores the life of second-generation immigrants – such as Hiroko and Sajjad’s son, Raza, who was born in Pakistan and became de facto a Pakistani citizen, but never fit either in his country or in the mu- hadjir community because he remained burdened by the traumatic memories inherited from his parents, the survivors of Nagasaki and Partition. Ghosh and Shamsie are second- and third-generation novelists who did not confront Partition directly but remain deeply affected by its tragic legacy since their national identities and cultures are still being defined by this event today. They participate in what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory,” the process whereby traumatic pasts are being transmitted from one older generation to a younger one who did not experience them personally but appropriates and transforms them. Both authors use narrative techniques and tropes to fashion memory maps that enable them to re-create the subcontinent they live far from. I would argue that the place they reinvent is not so much a “nation,” either territorial or imaginary, as it is a “home” wrought through affective ties and human relations, a subjective “home” which encompasses multicultural identities.

Memory Maps of Affects: From “Nation” to “Home” Though the term “memory maps” can undoubtedly qualify other Partition novels in English that question and imagine the national borders of the subcontinent – a good illustration is offered by Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002) – I use the concept of “memory maps” here to demonstrate how The Shadow Lines and Burnt Shadows redefine the “idea” of the nation by both turning to the private and domestic sphere of “home” and by placing the South Asian experience of Partition on a world map of international traumas. Through the narrator’s experience, The Shadow Lines offers a precise method to rewrite the past. The first step requires using one’s “imagination” to picture places and times one has never travelled to. Thus the narrator repeatedly claims his uncle Tridib taught him to use his “imagination with precision” (24) so as to devise the world in which he would live since everyone lived in a story and “the alternative wasn’t blankness – it only meant if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions” (31). Personal imagination, and more generally fiction, could enable individuals to emancipate themselves from the ideological constructs shaping official histo- 74 ries and cartographies. The second step consists in examining archival documents such as contemporary press articles. Using both the imaginative power of fiction and his knowledge as a scholar – Ghosh completed a PhD in history and anthropology – the novelist elaborates a narrative that reads as an imaginary memory map crossing over time and space, connecting past private memories to more recent collective histories, and also linking different world traumas together – namely the 1947 Partition and the Second World War Blitz in London. This memory map is woven through several tropes that point to the instability and artificiality of national borders – be they geographical, ideological, cultural or religious. Among these motives, the trope of the “shadows” is undoubtedly the most important in the novel. The shadows evoke the porosity and the arbitrariness of the demarcations traced in 1947, they are both a visual metaphor and an ungraspable linguistic sign which denotes presence and absence. The trope of the shadows is often associated with the image of the “mirror” or the “looking-glass,” which frequently expresses a reduction of the distance between the individual and their reflection, but also, more generally, between the Self and the Other, and ultimately between India and Pakistan. For instance, the narrator’s discovery that similar riots occurred in Calcutta and Dhaka in 1964 is transcribed via an allusion to the “mirror” which blurs the distance between past and present, here and there: “It was thus, sitting in the air-conditioned calm of an exclusive library, that I began my strangest journey: a voyage into a land outside space, an expanse without distances; a land of looking-glass events” (219). Through the specular image, the enclosed, isolated space of the public library is transformed into a heterotopic space, to use a term coined by Michel Foucault (360-1). Heterotopia qualifies a space within society that does not abide by society’s rules; it is a marginal space that can house one’s imagination. The mirror metaphor abolishes the border between the real and the imaginary so that the library becomes a site where official state cartography can be contested and rewritten. Elsewhere in the novel, the specular reflection weaves cross- cultural affiliations: for instance, the Indian narrator’s image in the mirror is that of a blue-eyed, fair-haired English boy, Nick Price, a family friend he has not met in person but envies: “[…] Nick Price, whom I had never seen, […], became a spectral presence beside me in my looking glass; growing with me, but always bigger and better, and in some ways more desirable” (49). The image brings closer places, people, even abstract ideas, which would ordinarily be opposed to one another, and thus it subverts various types of borders and dichotomies. A similar erasure surfaces in language itself as the verbs of movement “come” and “go” end up meaning the same thing for people who lose their spatial bearings, and can no longer match their national identity with the place they consider home, once the borders arbitrarily drawn to separate India from Pakistan cut them off from their birthplace. For instance, in 1964, as Tha’mma, the narrator’s grandmother, goes through complex airport controls on her way to Dhaka, she struggles to understand how she can be an Indian citizen when her native town has become Pakistani. In Tha’mma’s language, Dhaka will always be the home to come to and should, consequently, remain where she experiences the warmth of homecoming.5 And yet, she is now treated as a foreigner and is required to produce a visa:

5. From the 1980s on, the shift from “nation” to “home” that we discuss here became a prevalent theme in Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi novels in English that challenge the hegemonic imaginaries produced in India, Pakistan and 75 The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English

You see, in our family we don’t know whether we’re coming or going […;] the fault […] lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. (150) The inability of language to properly locate the subject on a mindscape, which symbolizes the physical map of the subcontinent, emphasizes the impossibility of ever fulfilling an identity quest relying on transient national bearings that uproot the individual. The Shadow Lines focuses on the post-Independence history of Bengal. Strengthened by its cultural and linguistic unity, the province of Bengal was the birthplace of the first nationalists in the nineteenth century. Yet, after being partitioned in 1905, then reunified in 1911, Bengal was eventually split along religious lines in 1947 as cultural nationalism was supplanted by religious discord (Ludden). However, The Shadow Lines challenges the seemingly uniform nationalities created at Partition by subtly incorporating Bengali language into the English prose. In fact, Nivedita Sen observes that the interchangeable meanings of “come” and “go” in the novel can be attributed to Bengali customs: In traditional Bengali households, there is something inauspicious about saying, “I take your leave” or “I will go now,” when one actually means to depart for any destination […]. When one is going away, therefore, one is expected to say Aashi, which literally means its opposite, that is “I am just coming,” its nearest English equivalent as a farewell statement would be “See you soon” or “Until we meet again.” (132) Here the superimposition of English and Bengali creates a linguistic pluralism that participates in what Homi Bhabha defines as cultural hybridity: “a difference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality” (19). Bhabha’s analysis sheds light on the subversive power of hybridity, its capacity to challenge traditionally accepted monolithic national dichotomies. The novel Burnt Shadows also reconciles opposites by using the polysemous trope of the “shadows.” The trope connects different national histories and places, which are apparently far and unrelated, as it is repeated and redefined throughout the novel. For instance, the “shadows” first refer to the quasi-imperceptible traces of the bodies decimated by the Nagasaki explosion. Then, they allude to the bird-shaped scars Hiroko carries on her back after the blast, and, towards the end of the novel, these wounds take on the appearance of real birds as they cast dark shadows between Hiroko and her close American friend, Kim Burton, when the latter, overcome by her prejudices towards Arabs after the 9/11 attacks, unknowingly helps the police arrest Hiroko’s son who looks suspicious merely because he is a Pakistani and his mixed origins make him resemble an Afghan. Both Ghosh and Shamsie use poetic tropes to structure their imaginary homelands, articulated via maps of memory which transcend national time and space constraints. However, they draw inspiration from different Indian literary traditions.

Bangladesh since the 1947 and 1971 partitions. By turning to everyday, domestic and private experiences of Partition, such novels question the “totalizing logic of bourgeois nationalism and point to a more contingent and polyphonic reading of national identity” (Dildur 6). These novels include notably narratives that, by privileging the perspective of marginalized and silenced women, demonstrate that the telling and writing of Partition is a gendered experience. One could think for instance of Indian Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980), Pakistani Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988) and Bangladeshi Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007). 76

Going Back to Pre-Traumatic Cultural Roots Burnt Shadows’s poetic description of Delhi as the “beating heart” of Muslim culture roots the novel’s prose in classic Urdu literature (Shamsie 33). In the same passage, Shamsie directly quotes Ahmed Ali’s novel Twilight in Delhi (1940), which is written in a lyrical prose partly composed of ghazals, religious hymns and popular songs. Moreover, Shamsie discreetly uses the Persian qissa of Laila and Majnun (King 149-50, 157), a popular myth in the Islamic world which tells of an impossible, excessive and passionate love bound to end up in disaster. This qissa is inspired from Sufism and reworks the image of the moth dangerously flirting with the flame, which often refers to forbidden love in poetry. The novel also discusses the decline of Urdu literature in 1947 by staging the Urdu lessons taught by Sajjad to the Japanese heroine, Hiroko, while denouncing the “Indian Oxbridge set” that denigrates Urdu and chooses to learn Latin: “Why are you wasting your time with Urdu?” Kamran Ali, one of the Indian Oxbridge set, lowered his bulky frame on to the picnic blanket beside Hiroko. “Language of mercenaries and marauders. Do you know the word “Urdu” has the same root as “horde”? Now, Latin. That’s a language worth learning. (65) Though Kamran Ali claims his admiration for Latin, his broken Urdu – “there was Kamran Ali speaking to a waiter in his broken, English-accented Urdu” (69) – and his drunken mockery of the Caesarean maxim, “‘Vini, vidi, vino’” (65), transform his so- called mastery of Latin into pure mimicry of the British. Paradoxically, through this character, the Western-educated Indian elite seems to encourage the colonial discourse that maintains the colonized subjects in a submissive position (on mimicry and the ambivalence of colonial discourse, see Bhabha 121-31). Furthermore, Burnt Shadows rehabilitates Urdu language and literature by using several Urdu terms, such as ghum- khaur/“grief eaters” (77) and uljhan (332) whose closest equivalent in English is “me- lancholy,” and simultaneously commenting on the specific nuanced meanings of these words that make them almost untranslatable into English. At other times, the narrative turns to Muslim historical legends of heroic queens and kings: “Sajjad had no political allegiances, but many narrative preferences – in the stories of history two of his favourite characters were the Rani of Jhansi and Razia of the Mamluk Dynasty: powerful women who led troops and sat in council with men” (52). It also alludes repeatedly to an episode from the Koran relating the Prophet’s escape from his pursuers on his way to Medina thanks to the providential help of a spider, a story that explains why the insect is sacred for Islam (59, 318, 357). The Shadow Lines draws inspiration from Bengali children’s travel stories, especially in its characterization of Tridib. A learned but marginal uncle whose life is shrouded in mystery, Tridib’s character is reminiscent of the typical mentor figure in Bengali literature: “Bengali children’s fiction is replete with instances of the child protagonist’s undiluted adulation for such eccentric and unconventional uncles or cousins who […] do not follow the dictates of genteel decorum, discretion and discipline” (N. Sen 133). Ghosh’s novel follows a pattern similar to these Bengali tales insofar as both narratives are close to the Bildungsroman: a child protagonist who resists abiding by family or social rules is temporarily tempted away from home by a male adult who becomes his guide and role model. Nonetheless, in children’s fiction, the mentor usually offers an illusory 77 The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English and dangerous escape world. Eventually both child and marginal uncle/cousin are expected to return to their daily reality and adapt to social codes. Such literature can serve educational purposes in middle-class families. Ghosh makes use of Bengali travel literature, but he enriches the genre by enabling his young narrator to wander the world through imagination under the guidance of his uncle: “Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with” (20). At first, the novel seems to be written as a Bildungsroman which follows the narrator’s physical and mental growth from innocence to experience, from childhood to adulthood. However, the “lines” that should neatly separate these two stages are blurred like all the other “shadow lines” mentioned in the novel. Ghosh adapts the Bildungsroman and traditional Bengali stories to suit his narrative purposes. The narrator never forsakes his belief in imagination. Memories of Tridib and his teachings survive his death and haunt the adult narrator, and this intellectual legacy allows the protagonist to question the legitimacy of national borders. Till the end of the novel, imagination appears as a source of empowerment that can produce spaces which are not limited by political ideologies but do not look less real than territorially-bound nations. For instance, the narrator firmly sticks to his belief in the imaginary maps without borders he has devised as a child, yet his is not a naive disillusion, but rather an attempt at self-authorization and self-fashioning via fiction. The plot reverses the usual dichotomy associated to the Bildungsroman between fantasy/imagination on the one hand, and reality on the other. In The Shadow Lines, the official cartography that would objectively be considered as “real” is actually reinterpreted as an ideological construct and a deceptive illusion. Ghosh and Shamsie incorporate in their novels tropes and vocabulary from various Indian literatures, thus creating hybrid narratives whose texture reflects their plural definitions of concepts such as the nation, identity and culture. Novels by Indian and Pakistani authors that fictionalize the postcolonial nation often entail a recreation of the traumatic history of Partition. Nevertheless, for those who have long been away from home, either out of necessity or out of choice, writing about the subcontinent can never be a simple return to historical, cultural or geographic pasts. As Rushdie argues, it may be that those living far from the subcontinent can only ever grasp their home countries as productions of the mind. Yet, despite the fractured and partial nature of the memory fragments shaping these imaginary homelands, the distance between diasporic writers and their native countries provides the former with a critical gaze and creates new sensorial and emotional resonances that physical closeness sometimes obs- cures. When discussing the chaotic structure of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie thus compares the memories of his protagonist, Saleem Sinai, to the shards of a broken mirror: It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. But there is a paradox here. The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed. (“Imaginary Homelands” 10-1) Saleem’s memory shards allow him to weave a self-reflexive and personal history of the subcontinent which subverts monolithic and hegemonic national representations of the past. Similarly, many contemporary Indian and Pakistani diasporic novelists redefine the notions of exile, migration and displacement. As Joshi observes, for several postcolonial Indian writers fictionalizing the history of the subcontinent, among whom Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and Ghosh: 78

Being at-home is always and only provisional; a homeland, then, becomes the imaginary place of symbolic meanings and associations that are woven together to render place to displacement, and meaning to memories. (226) Joshi’s statement could apply to both The Shadow Lines and Burnt Shadows. Indeed, the two novels conceive India and Pakistan as transcultural poetic spaces which can only be grasped as narrative memory-traces without borders. Such traces emerge through a fiction in English that incorporates selected Indian languages and literary tropes harking back to pre-traumatic South Asian cultures and performing the lasting impacts of the 1947 psychological and physical dislocations on the inhabitants of the subcontinent living in South Asia and abroad.

Sandrine Soukaï Paris-Sorbonne University

W orks Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. “An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” World Literature Today 76.2 (2002): 84-90. Anam, Tahmima. A Golden Age. 2007. London: John Murray, 2008. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 2003. Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. 2012. London: Verso, 2013. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: Routledge, 2012. Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. 1998. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. —. Partition: The Long Shadow. Delhi: Zubaan, 2015. Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra. Rajhmohan’s Wife. Calcutta: Indian Field, 1864. Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day. 1980. Uttar Pradesh: Random India, 2013. Dildur, Jill. Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Foucault, Michel. “Des espaces autres.” Dits et écrits IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. 752-62. Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. 1988. Boston: Mariner, 2005. —. “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi.” The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2002. 60-1. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column. 1961. New York: Penguin, 1989. Joshi, Priya. “The Exile at Home: Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi.” In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in India. 1995. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. 205-27. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 2014. 63-76. —. “Handcuffed to History: Partition and the Indian Novel in English.” A History of the Indian Novel in English. Ed. Anjaria Ulka. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. 119-32. Kaul, Suvir, ed. The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India. 2001. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. 1997. New Delhi: Penguin, 2012. King, Bruce. “Kamila Shamsie’s Novels of History, Exile and Desire.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (April 2011): 147-58. Ludden, David. “Spatial Inequity and National Territory: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam.” Modern Asian Studies 46.3 (May 2012): 483-525. Mallot, J. Edward. “‘A Land Outside Space, and Expanse Without Distances’: Amitav Ghosh, Kamila Shamsie, and the Maps of Memory.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 18.3 (2007): 261-84. Pandey, Gyanendra. “In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.” Economic and Political Weekly 26.11/12 (March 1991): 559-72. Raghavacharyulu, D.V.K. “Small-Scale Reflection on a Great House of Fiction: R.K. Narayan’s Chronicles of Maguldi.” Perpsectives on Indian Fiction in English. Ed. M.K. Naik. New Delhi: Abhinav, 1985. 21-48. 79 The Hybridity of Partition Novels in English

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Vintage, 1995. —. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. 1982. London: Penguin, 1992. 9-21. Sarkar, Bhaskar. Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Sati, someshwar. “Interrogating the Nation, Growing Global in The Shadow Lines.” Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: Critical Essays. Ed. Arvind Chowdhary. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2002. 49-58. Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006. Sen, Nivedita. “‘Going Away’ and ‘Coming Home’: The Shadow Lines and the Travel Motif in Children’s Fiction.” Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: Critical Essays. Ed. Arvind Chowdhary. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008. 128-44. Shamsie, Kamila. Kartography. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. —. Burnt Shadows. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. 1956. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988.

Reconstruction Introduction

The theme of the 2017 SAES conference “(Re)construction(s)” is particularly pertinent in the area of colonial and postcolonial studies, for it captures one of its underlying preoccupations. It suggests that the ultimate purpose of postcolonial deconstruction – which represents a first step toward a transformation of critical thought that aims at overcoming Eurocentric approaches to space, place, people, and nations – is reconstruction. By incorporating other voices, postcolonial deconstruction challenges Eurocentric practices, but in giving voice to those subaltern and colonised subjects it functions as a form of postcolonial reconstruction. In an article entitled “The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies,” Bahkti Shringarpure notes that recent conflicts in former colonies have triggered a renewed interest in the work of Frantz Fanon, especially his book The Wretched of the Earth, and says: More than half a century after his death, the specter of Frantz Fanon haunts the field of postcolonial studies, and his reflections on decolonization, nationalism and violence seem more poignant than ever. Part of the reason is that, instead of a successful transition into nation-states, several of the ex-colonies have become sites for terrible conflicts in the name of ethnicity, race, power, religion and territory. (113) Thus, in the light of postcolonial contexts, re-reading Fanon’s work most certainly reminds us that the dream of decolonization has not been completely fulfilled, and that we need to reflect again on Fanon’s claims concerning violence and the negation of otherness. The articles presented in the workshop devoted to New Literatures approach the idea of reconstruction from a variety of perspectives, involving both thematic concerns and the aesthetics involved in reconstructing an artistic vision of subaltern populations. They remind us that reconstruction involves a rereading of the past, of both time and space, as a necessary preparation for the construction of a more promising future. Three of the articles published here (Zinck, Chemmachery, Letessier) link the most literal meaning of reconstruction, in its embodiment of the colonial enterprise as a bricks-and-mortar form of empire-building, with the social and human ramifications of colonialism in the present. In the two other articles (Courtois, Moïse), the reconstruction involved is primarily human and concerns the body as the site of a necessary reconstruction of human relations. Pascal Zinck examines the difficulty of reconstruction in the context of the long- term conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil separatist guerilla (LTTE) as it is reflected in Romesh Gunesekera’s story collection Noontide Toll (2014). In a collection of fourteen interlinked stories divided into two sections, “South” and “North,” reflecting the division of the country between the Tamil-dominated North and the Sinhalese South, Gunesekera explores, through the words of his narrator Va- santha, the difficulty of reconciling the two populations through a “one-size-fits-all government-controlled solution to reconstruction” (90). Zinck argues that the stories’ peripatetic narrator, who has set up a minibus transport business taxiing foreign visitors 82 around the country, becomes himself a vehicle for expressing the difficulty of overcoming the trauma of the past. His travels allow him to reveal the hypocritical nature of the island’s rehabilitation projects, like the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport or the A9 expressway, which are simply “a travesty of reconstruction” (87) since they are not based on a genuine acknowledgement of the past and a desire to transcend it. In her article devoted to J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, Jaine Chemmachery studies the possible meanings of the idea of reconstruction with respect to the historical novel. Farrell’s novel revisits the colonial past with what would appear to be a postmodern and/or postcolonial desire for reinterpretation. By examining the novel’s historical dimension, but also its recreation of Victorian culture through the representation, for instance, of relations between men and women, or the mania for collecting, Chemmachery shows how Farrell engages in a reconstruction which reveals the social and intellectual underpinnings of the period in a way that goes well beyond a simple interest in the past. The treatment of the characters through humour and satire suggests a postcolonial desire to adopt a critical stance toward the colonial period. However, the question can be raised as to whether Farrell’s real desire is to engage with the ethical concerns that one associates with postcolonial criticism, or whether he is mainly interested in adapting the story of India’s colonial past to the tastes of contemporary readers. Anne-Sophie Letessier, in her study of Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass, uses reconstruction as a prism through which to explore the complex relation of Urquhart’s characters to the land, a relation which, in the novel, “disrupts the logic of binary oppositions – displacement/ emplacement, place/placelessness, rootedness/rootlessness” (110). She shows how the narrators’ discursive reconstruction of the past reveals the complexity of their relation to their personal and family roots in the land, undercutting any simple idea of what it means to inhabit a place or to try to preserve it. Sylvia’s narrative scrutinizes the possibility of possessing the land and questions the legitimacy of entitlement, while the land artist’s Fence Lines project underlines the paradoxical nature of any attempt to represent one’s relation to a place, the entire novel inviting the reader to “re-examine what it means to be in place” (117). Cédric Courtois and Myriam Moïse approach the question of reconstruction from an overtly social point of view, observing the ways in which the gendered body becomes the site of a desire for reconstruction. Cédric Courtois studies the treatment of lesbianism in Africa in Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees. He revisits the Bildung- sroman, one of the best-known constructs of the western novel, to examine the ways in which Okparanta questions not only the masculine and heterosexual underpinnings of African society, but also the narrative frame that has produced an aesthetic bias which leaves little place for the experience of women. The Bildungsroman, with its emphasis on the crucial process of growing up, proves to be a form which can itself undergo reconstruction in order to accommodate the experience of a young woman growing up in a society, here Nigeria, torn by civil war and divided by ethnic and religious conflicts. The protagonist’s search for personal affirmation in a society which does not accept homosexual desire reveals the need for a broader form of reconstruction as a preliminary step in seeking a redefinition of the very idea of “becoming.” Myriam Moïse’s concern, in her article devoted to the poetry of NourbeSe Philip and Grace Nichols, is with “the bodily and discursive reclamation and self-reconstruction” (137) undertaken by women writers belonging to the African diaspora. Using the theoretical framework suggested 83 Reconstruction. Introduction by the writings of feminist critics such as Gayatari Spivak and Luce Irigaray, who have emphasized the role of the body in the construction of female subjectivity, Moïse looks at the ways in which Philip and Nichols have attempted to recover and reaffirm the black female body. While Philip uses the tongue as a synecdoche for the body, showing how language can participate in the reconstruction of the black female body, Nichols emphasizes the need to deconstruct stereotypical images of the fat black mammy by evoking and convoking them explicitly in order to achieve a genuine authority as a black female speaking subject. By engaging with the idea of reconstruction, the authors of these articles show that if, on the one hand, reconstruction means, in a postcolonial context, re-examining the constructedness of the past, it also implies an ability to approach the present by taking the past into account in constructive and positive ways, by establishing a dialogue with the past in which the subaltern can actually speak.

Salhia Ben Messahel University of Lille

Kathie Birat University of Lorraine

W orks Cited Shringarpure, Bahkti. “The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23.1 (2015): 113-128.

In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country

The French term “reconstruction” has two different meanings, both of which are in common usage. Its older meaning refers to the physical act of rebuilding what has been damaged or destroyed, as a like-for-like replacement. A more modern meaning suggests a more structural and systematic process. The present paper posits that understanding the differences between the two is helpful in post-conflict resolution and reconciliation. To provide a long-term approach to fractures and vulnerabilities, a nation must not only open a Pandora’s box of legal accountability. Reconstruction ultimately poses the challenge of redefining national identity. Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll explores such issues in the context of the three decade- long civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). Gunesekera’s choice of the short fiction form over the novel reflects the precariousness of the survivors’ disjointed experiences. As the ubiquitous driver demonstrates by looking at the road ahead while forever looking in the rear-view mirror, reconstruction is a trial and error, non-linear route that tries to steer clear of both amnesia and the trauma of nostalgia. This paper highlights the State’s rebuilding strategy which marginalizes the evacuees and antagonizes the Tamil minority with its one-dimensional war museography.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost, “The Road not Taken” We have all gone away; There is no one to tell our story. Now there is only left great land, wounded. No bird may fly above it until our return. Cheran, “Apocalypse” Unlike rebuilding which merely designates the act of restoring or replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, reconstruction is a more comprehensive and complex transformative process combining contradictory aspirations of reverting to the status quo ante as well as expectations of economic advancement (Gerharz). Despite being more satisfactory, the terms reconstruction, recovery or rehabilitation are far from ambiguous, as they may equally imply the restoration of pre-war institutions, or paradigms when it is often the pre-war failures that contributed to the conflict in the first place (Kumar 2; Barakat 572-3). The precedents in Belfast, Soweto, Sarajevo, Kigali, Kabul or Baghdad show that there can be no lasting surface reconstruction. There is no short cut or simple prescription for healing the wounds and divisions of a society in the aftermath of sustained violence (Bloomfield). As such, reconstruction raises a multitude of ethical issues, whether the term is used in architecture, regenerative surgery, post- conflict resolution and reconciliation or post-tsunami recovery. Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll (2014) explores the scars of war and the proble- matics of reconstruction in the context of the three decade-long civil war between the 86

Government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil separatist guerrilla or LTTE. This article will highlight the political expediency of amnesia and official memorialization as well as the State’s cosmetic or diversionary rebuilding strategies, in stark contrast with piecemeal individual initiatives. I shall argue that Gunesekera’s diptych reflects the difficulties of “turning the page,” as long as the binaries that triggered and entrenched the civil war have not been transcended or exorcised. Before attending to the difficulties of reconstruction, it is worth addressing Gune- sekera’s choice of fictional mode. There have been a significant number of novels focusing on the conflict, although the overwhelming majority have been penned by diasporic writers for censorship reasons. Apart from When Memory Dies (Sivanadan, 1997), most diasporic novels tend to eschew the fuller historical spectrum for a narrower focus. Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje, 2000) and A Little Dust on the Eyes (Salgado, 2014) both focus on the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), or People’s Liberation Front, Maoist insurrec- tion, and the State’s brutal repression in the South. Funny Boy (Selvadurai, 1994) and Island of a Thousand Mirrors (Munaweera, 2013), which resonates with the novella, An Enemy Within (Wijenaike, 1997), focus on the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms. Using a similar technique, The Story of a Brief Marriage (Arudpragasam, 2016) restricts its focus to the narrow canvas of a makeshift camp in the jungle where Tamil evacuees were lured and shelled in the closing stages of the war. Gunesekera had previously written a diasporic novel about a civil war on a tropical island. However, Heaven’s Edge (2002) has rather loose affiliations with Sri Lanka, despite the topography and Uva’s name. It is a dystopia which nonetheless addresses issues of biopower, annihilation and post-apocalyptic regeneration. Furthermore, the genre of the novel is associated with dialogic interactions and polyphonic voices. Thus, Gune- sekera’s switch to the short form is disconcerting, given the nature as well as the complexity of the subject matter. Yet, interpreting a festering civil war between two forces competing for ethnic and political hegemony may be, per se, incompatible with a fictional mode characterized both by closure and an overarching controlling narrative voice. Short fiction seems a more relevant medium to challenge the victor’s war narrative with testimonies of the voiceless or the silenced, in the Spivakian sense, while reflecting the precariousness of the survivors’ disjointed experiences and their struggle to deal with trauma. Although Gunesekera’s work is different in context, form and scope, it bears some close affinity with Country of my Skull (Krog, 1998), the aim of which was to record the stories of people traumatised by apartheid and ensure that they were heard. The short format is also consonant with Sri Lankan writers’ preferred creative fictional medium, from Jean Aranasayagam to Pradeep Jeganathan, or in recent anthologies of Sri Lankan short fiction celebrating hybridity in the country’s three official languages, Sinhala, Tamil and English (Kanaganayakam, 2002; Wijesinha, 2007; Selvadurai, 2014). Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll is emblematic of Sri Lanka’s fractures.1 It is presented as a double-hinged collection of fourteen interlinked stories, with the first section entitled “North” and the corresponding second section, entitled “South.” Each part of the diptych follows the narrator’s tribulations in six self-contained stories. The “North” section is introduced by a prologue, “Full Tank,” while its mirror image, “Running on an Empty Tank,” provides a coda to the “South” section. Gunesekera has crafted his narratives

1. In his earlier collection, entitled Monkfish Moon (1992), Gunesekera explores the threats lurking behind the hibis- cus and frangipani which harbinger the island’s self-immolation. 87 In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country so that his Northern tales have to be read against the grain of his six Southern tales, and conversely “Ramparts,” “Fluke,” “Shoot,” “Turtle,” “Janus,” and “Humbug” echo respectively “Folly,” “Deadhouse,” “Scrap,” “Roadkill,” “Mess,” and “Renewals.” Inci- dentally, the title “Janus” is symbolic, as it captures the Island’s fractured identities and problematic reconstruction. The peripatetic narrator of Noontide Toll epitomizes the country’s reconstruction and its inhabitants’ resilience. Indeed, at fifty-five, Vasantha takes early retirement from the Coconut Plantation and cashes in his pension to set up a minibus transport business (NT 2, 148). As he plies his trade North and South, taxiing his guests – mostly foreign visitors – of all colours and shapes, “Mister Van Man” (NT 235, also 102) learns to realize that riding in his second-hand Toyota and reading his country’s turmoil are mutually complementary and explanatory. The minibus is indeed a microcosm of the Island’s faltering peace process: In my van, I maintain a sense of serenity, whatever goes on inside or out. People like that. A place of safety. An island of peace. A smooth, safe ride is what I deliver, however long the journey. Not easy on the A9 to Jaffna. Especially after all the rain, never mind the war. (NT 12-3, emphasis mine) The van provides a protective cocoon (note the double entendre on the “island of peace”) or camouflage, as it enables Vasantha to maintain a safe distance from his passengers and their turbulent past. Being a quiet, unobtrusive, yet alert and perceptive student of individuals and situations, he easily slips under the radar. Seeing, while po- litely pretending not to look; he is the insider/outsider or the lens through which we glimpse and read the characters. Vasantha is literally and metaphorically a vehicle for the narrative as he “stay[s] in control behind the wheel,” keeps checking his rear-view mirror and stops in his tracks or refrains from interacting (NT 193, 24-5). However, the canny middle-aged “free agent” highlights the dangers of personal or political nostalgia (NT 24, 25). While proving useful from a narrative standpoint, his insularity can also be construed as a form of denial, synchronized with national amnesia (Seioghe). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following a war comprises complex symptoms such as traumatic flashbacks, fear, avoidance/numbing, amnesia and self-withdrawal, to name but a few. Denial has been well documented in relation to Shoah survivors, the hibakusha and genocide victims. The act of blotting out/blocking out atrocities is often associated with a sense of guilt. In Noontide Toll, Tamil witnesses provide one or the other responses to queries about the civil war: either they cut the conversation short and change the subject or they see their future outside the country. In the story ironically entitled “Renewals,” the young Tamil encountered at the Jaffna Library is an avid reader of Dante’s Inferno, which he considers as his passport to a more promising life in Italy, but also a grim reminder of his country’s self-destruction (NT 118). Fol- lowing his pronouncement on neutrality, Vasantha is forever on the move, to the point of sometimes driving for its own sake, without any guests or purpose. “The future is in pleasure,” a short-hand for coral beach packages with a smattering of sex and spa thrown in. Accordingly, the narrator seems to share the ebullience of the new generation, oblivious to the war and “open to the filthy winds of change,” in his friend Ismail’s words, with everything and everyone geared towards the tourism bonanza (NT 140, also 98). The Island seems to be teeming with rehabilitation schemes of every size and nature. Most such programmes are a travesty of reconstruction. They do not only tend to 88 marginalize or alienate local fishing or rural communities to meet the needs and greed of foreign investors. They also highlight the Tamils’ “precarity” as second-class citizens (Butler 25-6). In “Folly,” the fledgling Heritage Foundation organizes a two-day trip to Jaffna for potential tour operators. The Dutchmen seem unimpressed by the crumbling fort and the rubble that was once Kruys Kerk. Unfazed, Mrs Cooray tries to sell them the British colonial period as part of the heritage package. Hordes of Indian or Chinese tourists may be expected to chill out on the new Eldorado’s palm-fringed white sandy beaches. However, the discerning European tourist, they suggest, is after a more challenging as well as personal experience – they even contemplate incorporating war stories to provide authenticity and local colour (NT 23). By and large, reconstruction does not operate on the same scale and may not cover the same reality for Tamils and Sinhalese. In “Scrap,” Sepala, a low-ranking government official is extolling the virtue of recycling and sustainability, as he conducts a Chinese delegation to the Mullaitivu battleground (NT 83-9). However, the tour is brought to an abrupt end, as the guide registers his di- sapproval of one such battlefield being turned into a film set. The young director has no qualms about using a wrecked warship for a promotional video: “‘Don’t you know what happened here?’ / ‘Happened? Are you talking history? We are the future, machang. The fuckin’ A future, no?’” (NT 91) The closing scene of “Scrap” echoes the story entitled “Shoot.” Sanji, a Milan-based Tamil Tiger refugee, takes an arsenal of camera equipment out of Vasantha’s van. His assignment is a lingerie photo shoot of tanned belles running with bat and pads on a cricket pitch. The titillating theme is “ebony and ivory,” to tap into the Asian market (NT 162). However, as in the earlier Northern story, nothing goes according to plan. The gazelle-like models balk at the heat, the light is too white, and a posse of school- boys invade the Galle Cricket Stadium, spelling chaos. In the “South” section, “Fluke” and “Humbug” stand out with their exploration of the country’s hypnosis with “liquid modernity,” to borrow a phrase from the sphere of cultural theory (Bauman) and reflect the Island’s pursuit of US or Hong Kong dollars. In “Fluke,” Mr Weerakoon seems to be ex-service personnel, reborn or rather rebranded in civvies, as he regurgitates a crash course in marketing. Pitched at neophytes, the PowerPoint presentation holds everyone in thrall with its “bullet points,” “exploding pie charts,” “bell curves” and “www dot shots” (NT 144, 148). One ex-navy officer rubs his hands at the prospect of a wind- fall as he contemplates converting decommissioned navy vessels into whale-watching cruises and floating casinos NT( 151-2). The publicity guru and his flock resemble the stork perched by the pool, outside the conference room. The more the narrator looks at it, the less certain he is that the bird is real: “These days it is so hard to spot a fake” (NT 147). Furthermore, for all his talk about success and export, the marketeer is literally out of his depth without Vasantha’s assistance (NT 154). Since the end of the civil war, the term fake has gained a lot of publicity. The idea of fraud or a confidence trick keeps recurring in the South section, particularly in “Hum- bug.” The name is another double entendre, referring to both the traditional British stri- py peppermint-flavoured sweetmeat distributed at the beginning and end of the story, a kind of crowd pleaser, so to speak, and hypocritical sham. The latter meaning relates to the “Theatre of Reconstruction” (Unnithan), the “baronifying” turning the whole Southern and Eastern coastlines into a great, big amusement park (NT 169, 213). In the aftermath of the war, Sri Lanka becomes a brave new world of infinite possibilities. 89 In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country

With its mantra echoing The Tempest and Huxley’s dystopian novel, the country reinvented itself. Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s former President, embarked on a slew of Pharaonic schemes to court rival Indian and Chinese investors to rebuild the economy (NT 210, 218). One such white elephant is Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport. Billed as a state-of-the-art facility with a one-million passenger capacity per year, the airport is virtually defunct (Shepard). Another megaproject featuring in “Humbug” is the Ham- bantota hub. Combining hubris and paradigms of neopatrimonialism (Bayart), the late President slated his backwater home fishing village to become a major deep-sea port and “hub of the Southern hemisphere” (NT 213). Vasantha is scheduled to ferry Colin and Miss Susila down memory lane, to revisit Leonard Woolf’s Hambantota Rest House. The entrepreneur humours the oddly assorted couple – another meta-commentary on the country’s Janus figure or the alliance of opposites. While they are caught in a time warp, expecting to hear the surf crash on the beach, just as Woolf described it, the narrator makes wry observations about the hype over the Hambantota developments (NT 210). As a professional driver, Vasantha appears to countenance the country’s changes – particularly the “first-class” new road to Hambantota, or the new A9 highway connecting Jaffna and Colombo, which implies more business, shorter journey times and fewer traffic hazards with wild animals. Symbolically, the new artery is in stark contrast with the Northern dirt tracks or the pot-holed roads which almost lead to a hospital or a government-sanctioned war memorial (NT 3). However, his social background – his modest upbringing in a shack by a cemetery, his family’s dislocation due to the tsunami and, more significantly, his genetic scepticism, influenced by his father’s Marxist views – appears incompatible with the kind of prebendary politics displayed by the Rajapaksa regime. Such confusion between State apparatus and ethnic patronage networks has been denounced as “the politics of the belly” (Bayart). Ironically, the same clique that profited from the war economy and contributed to the destruction lined its pockets with the industrial and real estate spin-offs of the post-war reconstruction. Far from actually bringing the island’s Tamil North and Sinhalese South closer – the opposite seems nearer to the truth – the A9 is presented as a dictator’s caprice to stamp his ego on the country’s map (NT 170, 190). The toll expressway is not only evidence of biopolitical control, as well as pseudo-reconstruction; it significantly changes the configuration of the Island, so much so that “it turns the whole of the south squarer. […] [T]he idea of an island will disappear” (NT 169).2 The spectacle of the Hambantota Rest House where Colin and Miss Susila are boo- ked for lunch leaves the mixed Anglo-Sri Lankan couple aghast. The establishment is closed down for refurbishment. The only employee on attendance obliges with the regular sales pitch for “Hot buffet, à la carte, acupuncture, clinic, WIFI. Everything [,]” provided they defer their visit till the following month. The promise appears all the more surreal as the 3-phase restructuring programme, modelled on the Hambantota port, has yet to be finalized, and demolition phase one to begin NT( 215-6). When it comes to reconstruction, the caretaker receptionist and Miss Susila propound radically irreconcilable paradigms. For the Sri Lankan expatriate, the past is hallowed ground, and Leonard Woolf’s heritage should be preserved, not tampered with, modernized or marketed for the sake of modernity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the receptio-

2. The narrator’s neutrality also provides a space for a dissenting voice, in the face of censorship. 90 nist considers the past as an encumbrance which can be dismantled and reconstructed at will (NT 217-8). Thus, in his eyes, the Hambantota Rest House is no more “real,” as depicted in Woolf’s Village in the Jungle, than its simulacrum recreated in a “real” village in the jungle.3 Noontide Toll has a loose affiliation with the Bildungsroman genre, with driving as a metaphor for Vasantha’s journey of self-discovery.4 Although, he has reservations about being cooped up for long spells in his van and not being able to interact with “real” people outside, what was a “foreign country,” at the outset of his Jaffna trips, becomes increasingly familiar. The narrator sees himself as an ant reaching the edge or underside of a floating leaf NT( 119) – hence the mirror stories in both the “North” and “South” sections. Vasantha’s learning curve also alerts us to the country’s fatal attraction to collective amnesia/“narcolepsy” (NT 180). Driving is not only reflexive, it is also an act of reconnoitring the land, an act of political resistance, as Vasantha considers his role as “the only insomniac in the land of nod” (NT 214): They say this island of ours is the crossroads of the world. […] But the more I see of it in this business, and the more I meet, the more I understand the real truth of the matter. We live at one of those crazy junctions where everyone gets stranded not knowing which way to look, never mind go. All nodding like sleepyheads unable to ever completely wake up. (NT 176) What “Humbug” suggests is that (re)development and reconstruction do not cover the same realities. Gunesekera’s kaleidoscope indicates that there cannot be a one-size- fits-all government-controlled solution to reconstruction. As in reconstructive surgery, there is a high risk of immune rejection from transplanted tissues. The roadmap to reconstruction, Archbishop Tutu highlights, cannot be a quick fix or a single approach modelled on a national or international paradigm imposed from outside or above (Bloomfield 4). Reconnecting a fragmented country is, Vasantha concludes, what roads are all about (NT 208). However, the success or failure of his mission, according to Tutu’s prognosis, is contingent on “examining the painful past, acknowledging it and understanding it, and above all transcending it together” (Bloomfield 4). In the course of his peregrinations, Vasantha never departs from his protective camouflage. It provides the narrator with a sense of security, a modus vivendi even after the cessation of hostilities.5 Vasantha is repeatedly vetted at army checkpoints by bored, machine gun-flanked sentries. Despite being Sinhalese, he is only motioned forward because he is escorted by army interpreters or guards. In the South, Mister Van Man is even flagged down by a brigadier’s driver for a private assignment. NT( 191-2) Vasantha’s professional camouflage operates at another level. The narrator prides himself on his unobtrusiveness and his near-invisibility, two qualities which allow him to blend in and out of the traumatised landscape. As a starting point, Vasantha has cordoned off the cabin of his Toyota, screening the windows with curtains, to insulate his guests. Further on, he attunes the drone of his engine to coincide with the moods of his passengers and lull them into a “couch-state” (NT 194, also 155). The more Va-

3. “Shoot” examines the country’s need for and dependence on the simulacrum, in much similar fashion (NT 163). 4. Traditionally, the hero is a young rebellious orphan who searches for his origins and returns home as the prodigal son. Vasantha’s late journey can be compared to Stevens’s in The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro, 2009), as he mulls over missed opportunities. 5. He had to repaint his Toyota, as white vans were associated with extrajudicial disappearances. 91 In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country santha reconnoitres the Island, the more his van doubles up as a psychoanalyst’s couch or a confessional booth. He becomes aware that his scarred interlocutors perceive him as a secular “confessor” (NT 130), a term and mode of disclosure he makes his own, after his encounter with Father Perera.6 Indeed, he identifies “[r]edeeming the sinner, rectifying our faults. Drawing confessions” as a pre-condition for the process of “abso- lution” or healing (NT 52). The use of the collective personal pronoun clearly indicates that far from imposing his own paradigm, Vasantha empathizes with the victims. He claims to be non-judgmental, as his service, like a barber’s or a dentist’s, is only meant to “help them unburden” their consciences (NT 203). Time and again, the peripatetic narrator becomes a repository for tales of atrocities about the civil war. Retrieval of such stories is a significant act for both victims and perpetrators, even though the trauma can be too raw, the stigma too overwhelming (NT 135). “Roadkill” reveals the limitations of Vasantha’s type of maieutics. Kilinochchi, Ta- mil Eelam’s ex-capital and a “dumping ground of bombs,” has been bypassed by the Southern boom in the hospitality industry. Vasantha, who has chauffeured in the rare clients, only spares a thought for the martyred town after tasting the undercooked food. Despite assistant-manager Miss Saraswati’s efforts, despite the flags, and exotic flowers, the Spice Garden Inn is unprepossessing, smells of disinfectant, and the rice tastes of rubble (NT 96). The term “rubble” is significant as it suggests the reversal of reconstruction and it locks the story in the war. Chasing a rat across the cafeteria, Miss Saraswati intimates that they have infested the whole town – another double entendre about the heavy-handed military presence. The assistant manager’s military past resurfaces as she grasps the narrator’s beer bottle and kills the rodent with one deft movement. The detente between Vasantha and his Tamil interlocutor seems shattered, as though the two of them realize that each needs his/her own safety valve, hidden “areas cordoned off ” that cannot be trespassed upon (NT 104). The driver is mystified by the Janus-like hotelier whose displays of blissful ignorance and amnesia belie her controlled demeanour as well as her name, a reference to the Hindu goddess of knowledge. Ho- vering in between her professional role and her private self as a Tamil victim or former conscripted LTTE fighter, as evidenced by the scar at the base of her neck, or her callused trigger finger, Miss Saraswati needs her own time and space to negotiate what Vasantha terms “a safe passage” between hallucination and political amnesia (NT 105). When it comes to reinventing himself, Brigadier Bling transitions smoothly into civilian life. His military exploits were matched by his ballroom prowess, particularly his killer foxtrot, the talk of Colombo’s dancefloors NT( 191, 193). In addition to the hijacking of his van, Vasantha is not so taken in by such versatility, as the walrus-looking bigshot eyes him as though “[he] might make a good target for rifle practice, or even a bayonet run for one of his young machine heads” (NT 196). “Janus” replicates a similar mock execution of the driver in “Mess.” Whether or not Brigadier Bling’s ambition to provide disaffected soldiers with routine activity is a form of atonement for his costly strategic mistakes, his message of getting a grip on one’s life again rings particularly hollow on PTSD men on crutches (NT 201-3). A couple from Czechoslovakia – another fractured country – evokes the Commu- nist regime as the land of equivocation, in the face of censorship: “Our theatres used

6. The term secular is all the more symbolic, as the root-causes of the civil war between the Sinhalese and Tamils were ethnic as well as religious (Buddhism versus the island’s three minority religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam). 92 silence, our artists used darkness, our writers used the surreal, symbols, double entendres. That was the way to speak about things” (NT 172). Vasantha draws parallels between censorship operating behind the Iron Curtain and in post-war Sri Lanka, and the need for escapism. Eva and Pavel have fled communism and end up in Croatia where, they say, “the history is not so nice,” with hints at traumatic events. The couple views Sri Lanka as a land of amnesia, mesmerised by the death of the sun god and oblivious of the plight of the tsunami survivors (NT 177-9). Equivocation informs the characters’ relationships in “Mess.” Father Perera and his English friend, Patrick, construe the appointment to Jaffna’s Samala Camp as part of their investigation into an officer’s human rights abuse. Vasantha interprets the trip as a reconciliation initiative, whereas the major under scrutiny sees it as a publicity stunt to boost the army’s image. The story is replete with double entendres. “Our little mess” refers to the area where service personnel socialize or eat; here a lavish banquet has been prepared (NT 37). The phrase cannot be dissociated from the bloody civil war. The interpretation is supported by the major himself, in his riposte to the priest’s inquisitiveness (NT 36). This admission of requiring a free hand to finish off the LTTE and their human shield flies in the face of normalization and contradicts the civilian rhetoric. The same conclusion applies with other double entendres like “operation” and “occupation” (NT 34, 37). The term occupation is highly significant and controversial for the Tamil population in the North and the major’s intimation that “the people are with us now” is read in totally opposite ways by the two sides. As part of its image makeover and to retrain military personnel for reintegration into civilian society, the Sri Lankan army deploys “Tender Loving Care” programmes. The major describes one such euphemistic scheme intended to solve “the housing crisis.” Emphasizing that “this is not army policy,” his men have dedicated their own time and money to build a dozen homes for the people (NT 43-4). What the major almost suppresses is that the new accommodation may be for the likes of Captain Vijay, who has a Tamil sweetheart, or for personnel working for the armed forces. Furthermore, a dozen or so new satellite homes within range of a permanent garrison are hardly going to solve the housing shortage, as Vasantha notes ironically when he confronts Kilinochchi’s cripples and flattened buildings NT( 50). The gift of humbug at the end of the eponymous story is replicated with the major’s offer of mangoes in “Mess.” The “island of luxury” which the officer claims as “our home” is premised on a fraud. Dozens of high security zones dot the North, with about 200,000 troops stationed in the Jaffna peninsula – a density of around one soldier for every 10 residents, figures which are unwarranted by any insurgency threats. Contrary to the major’s propaganda, human rights agencies denounce the confiscation as a political act of permanent occupation (Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice 84). Despite the fact that the conflict has ended, the military continues to rule the North repressively, controlling the peninsula as its fiefdom, apart from the rest of the island. Over 100,000 people have been evicted from their lands or homes with no compen- sation and Internally Displaced People (IDPs) have yet to be relocated – only about 10% of the land had been returned by 2015, out of the 10,000 acres of private land still in military control (Gowen). The government has tried to normalize the presence of its troops as a benevolent force for rebuilding and development. It is customary to share the spoils of war among the victors. Thus, the Sri Lankan military’s hospitality portfolio, ranging from luxury hotels and restaurants to golf and spa resorts, whale-wat- 93 In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country ching tours and airlines has been distributed amongst the members and scions of the Sinhalese ruling class. These acts of political and economic domination are perceived critically since the late government of the Rajapaksa brothers did not only seek to mi- litarize the North, but, also and more profoundly, sought to change the North’s demo- graphics, for instance, by removing farmers or fishermen from their ancestral villages and replacing them with soldiers and their families forming the first wave of Sinhalese settlers, to be followed, through land grants and the lure of jobs in the hospitality sector, by Sinhalese from other parts of the country, thus eroding Tamil culture. Creating trust and understanding is an ongoing challenge between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, it is a stepping stone along the road to reconstruction that brave individuals like Vasantha have embarked upon. Examining the traumatic past, and acknowledging it, is a tortuous process that some of the characters are struggling with, even though they have found their own ways of sharing their stories with the narrator – others like Miss Saraswati have just stopped short of such disclosures as the pain is too raw. Ac- cording to peace builders, other crucial stages to bring together estranged communities include mechanisms to seek truth, provide redress, and pursue justice (Bloomfield 4; Bala 2). The tense encounter between Father Perera and the major highlights the grey area of war crime accountability. More open to transitional justice than his predeces- sor Rajapaksa, President Sirisena has nonetheless repeatedly stated that he would “take fullest responsibility for war crimes, thus preserving the immunity of war heroes” (Ra- singam). The construction of collective memories can be a more easily attainable objective, without compromising on the truth. However, the victors seem to lack the will to reach out to the other side. One example is provided by the Lagoon’s Edge, a luxury resort located on Mullaitivu’s killing fields and touted as a once-in-a-lifetime experience to spend the night where Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tiger leader, died (Harrison; Arudpra- gasam). Such crass triumphalism is reflected in the erection of a statue commemorating the victory of the Sinhalese king Dutugamunu over Elara, the Tamil prince who had invaded the Kingdom of Rajarata, a strange “reconciliation route,” in Vasantha’s eyes (NT 28). Thus, a number of battlefields are packaged for war tourism as (Sinhalese) victories over (Tamil) Evil and Terror (Amarasingham, Bastin, Unnithan). Even though tourist pleasure and pilgrim piety may be difficult to reconcile (Figal 83-4) or represent conflicting agendas, especially in a post-civil war context, the process of only commemorating the victors’ gallant sacrifices is a major obstacle to reconstruction (NT 76, Perera 81). In the North, most roads lead either to hospitals or to victory shrines with their flags and commemorative plaques. One further objective of these plinths – a small monolith or the rectangular slab or block that forms the lowest part of the base of a column, statue, pedestal – is to inscribe the Rajapaksa dynasty into the war mythology (Perera 87). Anchoring memory as a Sinhala-only identity complete with national and lotus symbols creates a counterfeit official national narrative NT( 81). As the double entendres emphasize, Noontide Toll highlights the dangers of a monolithic post- war polity framed in a negative reconstruction or revisionist discourse. As Vasantha becomes a trusted confidant in Jaffna and Kilinochchi, he invokes the need for a plurality of truths (NT 51-2, 117). This dawns on the narrator as he drives Mr. Desmond and his assistants to the Jaffna library. The government of Sri Lanka depicts the vandalizing of the renowned temple of Tamil culture as an after-myth, the new resplendent building providing both continuity with the pre-war past and closure. As Vasantha contemplates 94

“the empty shell,” an empty signifier or simulacrum endorsed by the Me Rata Sinhala Rata ideologues,7 he becomes acutely aware of the differences between rebuilding and reconstruction. It is also significant that the young reader who imparts the need for critical truths that challenge the national script and link the ola-leaf libricide to the Sinhalese police should only imagine his future as an exile. Incidentally, Western donor agencies are complicit with this form of revisionism or simulacrum as Mr Desmond ignores Mrs Kumaraswamy’s requests for classics and poetry volumes. Practical manuals and self-help handbooks on agricultural management and microfinance are far more suitable prescriptions for the future generation (NT 122-3). More than any other stories, “Scrap” sheds light on the need to challenge the national script of the war. The narrator’s critique is incremental and is facilitated by Chen, an enthusiastic young Chinese interpreter who has a knack for interrupting the official guide’s spiel with barbed questions about the translation of “security” and “minefield.” Although aware that “it was not his place to ask [questions,]” Vasantha exploits the visit of the Chinese delegation to speak his mind freely and thereby challenge the country’s orthodoxy (NT 82). The Chinese businessmen are conducted on a tour of the Mullai- tivu battlefields, to assess the feasibility of recycling the wreckage of war littering the landscape. Vasantha’s first act of resistance comes in the form of an innocuous question about whether the British or the Tigers built the access road. Sepala, the Sinhalese guide, is shocked at the mere suggestion that the government’s arch-enemies could have made a positive contribution. Before long, Vasantha registers his horror and disbelief as Sepala takes them to various scrapyards. He does not buy the official version that the neat piles of bicycles, buses, lorries and vans are “LTTE stock,” or “confiscated property,” combed from all battlegrounds by a curator-minded or eco-friendly army (NT 86). To the driver, the macabre spectacle appears like a war or Frankenstein movie or, worse, the “catalogue collection of a mad museum” (NT 88). Sepala tries to ward off embarrassing questions by highlighting the fact that the LTTE used the armoured lorries as battering rams against government defences. These crude weapons had “metal sheets for windscreens like rusted eyelids with only a slit for the driver to look through”; the “narrow view” in question (NT 84) is also related to the position of the teller/reci- pient, as well as the overall Sinhala/Tamil debate. Sepala’s long-winded explanations fail to convince the narrator, who perceives his whinnying laugh as a tell-tale sign: “Eco policy? What had happened here? We all know something happened, but what?” (NT 86) These unanswered interrogations resonate as Vasantha drives his guests to the ultimate scrapyard. The landscape is ominous with a bombed-out Hindu temple and the charred stumps of coconut trees like pointed fingers “accusing the sky.” Even Sepala is reduced to silence at the spectacle of “frozen pandemonium” (NT 88). The official narrative of the war is at once demystified, as the empty and random mass of vehicles petrified in the past signals genocide or ethnic cleansing.8 As he pieces together the Chinese guests’ bits of conversation in English and weighs the guide’s defensive explanations, the narrator tentatively accedes to scraps of truth.

7. For these ideologues, “There is only one Land, the Sinhalese Land.” 8. The term “shepherding,” used in “Mess” and “Scrap,” similarly punctures the myth of the LTTE protecting the civilian population. Most of the Tamil civilians who were killed in the No-Fire zone in the last stage of the war were used as a human shield, hence the references to the proverbial sacrificial lambs NT( 39, 81). 95 In Romesh Gunesekera’s Ghost Country

At the end of his odyssey, Vasantha is no longer only an islanded persona. He has learnt to overcome his insecurities and doubts “about the purpose of roads.” His com- posite journeys have helped his fellow-countrymen, whether residents or expatriates, recover their stories and, as he pens it, fill the gaps in their memories and join the dots of their dislocated lives (NT 76). Thus, in his humble position, the driver proves ins- trumental in reconnecting the North and South and re-mapping the country, in an inclusive way that defies the narrow confines of orthodoxy and essentialism.9 In its unas- suming way, Gunesekera’s collection echoes and prolongs Sivanadan’s memorial novel, When Memory Dies. Vasantha is fully aware of his country’s “culture of impunity” (NT 52, 229) and the difficulty of prosecuting war crimes (Bala 45). Nonetheless, his acts of resistance, however modest, in the shape of pointed questions, double entendres and wisecracking, while puncturing the revisionist or institutional enterprise, are tentative steps on the road to healing and reconstruction. Noontide Toll, the title of the collection, can be read in several ways. If morning is the beginning of the day and night, the end, then noon is the zenith, the highest point, in the life of an individual, or of a country. But if the tide comes in at noon, it is at a critical juncture. In Julius Caesar, as Brutus and Cassius discuss the final phase of the civil war, the former advises that there is a crux, so they should act now, while the ratio of forces is in their favour. Sri Lanka has chosen the easier fast track to global capitalism, which belies reconstruction as it benefits neither the war victims nor the IDPs. So far, the Government of Sri Lanka has been dragging its feet over its United Nations commitments, eschewing the less-travelled road of judicial transparency and the prosecu- tion of war crimes. If they keep vacillating, or rewriting history, consigning minorities to limbo, there is a price to pay – as the alliterative “Toll” suggests, and reconstruction may be compromised: There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. (Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–24)

Pascal Zinck University Paris 13

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9. Gunesekera’s repository of voices and stories of the wounded echoes “The Monument and other works,” a monumental sculpture by Chandragupta Thenuwara featuring four women fused together to represent the island’s four Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher communities. 96

Barakat, Sultan. “Post-Saddam Iraq: Deconstructing a Regime, Reconstructing a Nation.” Third World Quarterly 26.4-5 (2005): 571-91. Bastin, Rohan, and Premakumara De Silva. “Military Tourism as a State-Effect in the Sri Lankan Civil War.” Eds. John Eade and Mario Katić. Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism, 2018. 101-24. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. London: Polity, 2000. Bayart, Jean-François. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. 1989. London: Longman, 1993. Bloomfield, David, Teresa Barnes, and Luc Huyse, eds. Reconciliation After Violent Conflict: A Handbook. Stockholm: IDEA, 2013. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Cheran, (Rudramoorthy). “Apocalypse” (1999). In a Time of Burning. Todmorden, UK: Arc, 2013. 87. Figal, Gerald. “Between War and Tropics: Heritage Tourism in Postwar Okinawa.” Public Historian 30.2 (May 2008): 83-107. Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken” (1916). Collected Poems. New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1930. 131. Gerharz, Eva. The Politics of Reconstruction and Development in Sri Lanka: Transnational Commitments to Social Change. London: Routledge, 2014. Gowen, Annie. “Can reconciliation heal Sri Lankan war wounds?” Washington Post, 13 June 2015. . Last consulted on 20 January 2017. Gunesekera, Romesh. MonkfishM oon. London: Granta, 1992. —. Heaven’s Edge. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. —. Noontide Toll. London: Granta, 2014. Harrison, Frances. “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields Tourism.” Colombo Telegraph, 26 December 2012. . Last consulted on 20 January 2017. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber, 1989. Jeganathan, Pradeep. At the Water’s Edge. New York: South Focus, 2004. Kanaganayakam, Chelva. Lutesong and Lament. Toronto: Tsar, 2002 Krog, Antje. Country of my Skull. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998. Kumar, Krishna, ed. Rebuilding Societies After War. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997. Munaweera, Nayomi. Island of a Thousand Mirrors. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013. Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Picador, 2000. Perera, Sasanka. Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise. London: Sage, 2016. Rasingam, Kumarathasan. “Sri Lanka’s Crumbling Credibility.” Colombo Telegraph, 29 April 2017. Last consulted on 10 May 2017. Salgado, Minoli. A Little Dust on the Eyes. Leeds: Peepal, 2014. Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. London: Vintage, 1994. —, ed. Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature. London: Penguin, 2014. Seoighe, Rachel. War Denial and Nation-Building in Sri Lanka: After the End. London: Palgrave, 2017. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. 1623. London: Methuen, 1970. Shepard, Wade. “The Story Behind the World’s Emptiest International Airport.” Forbes 28 May 2016. Sivanadan, Ambalavaner. When Memory Dies. London: Arcadia, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Spivak Reader. Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Eds. Donna Landry and Gerald McLean. London: Routledge, 1996. Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice. “Crimes against Humanity in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province: a Legal Analysis of Post-War Human Violations.” March 2014. Last consulted on 10 May 2017. Unnithan, Sandeep. “Tiger tourism thrives in Sri Lanka.” India Today 29 March 2013. Consulted on 20 January 2017. —. “The great game: India and China fight it out to rebuild Sri Lanka’s economy which was torn apart by a war that lasted nearly three decades.” India Today, March 31, 2013. Last consulted on 8 May 2017. Wijenaike, Punyakante. An Enemy Within. Colombo: Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha, 1997. Wijesinha, Rajiva. Bridging Connections: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Short Stories. Colombo: National Book Trust, 2007. “Bricks Are Undoubtedly an Essential Ingredient of Civilisation”: Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)

This article aims at considering the various levels of reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), from the rewriting of a colonial event and of Victorian culture to critical appreciation of the latter. Yet, my contention is that the main re-construction at stake in the novel is the revival of the literary myth of the Raj, that is to say how the Raj is made into a commodified item to be consumed by modern-day readers.

J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1973, parodically revisits the Indian Mutiny which occurred in 1857 and is, to some, “the first Indian war of Independence.”1 The work is part of a trilogy including Troubles (1970), that focused on the 1916 Easter Rising, and The Singapore Grip (1978), which dealt with the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese during World War Two. After writing Troubles, Farrell specialised in historical fiction, explaining: “the reason why I preferred to use the past is that, as a rule, people have already made up their minds what they think about the present. About the past they are more susceptible to clarity of vision” (Rovit 632). Despite Tony E. Jackson’s claim that “the turn to history as a theme may be the definitive element in British fiction in the last three decades” (170), Farrell’s historical fiction has been overlooked by critics2 until the 1990s and postcolonial studies’ renewed interest in fiction about Empire which contributed to situating him among post-colonial writers.3 In 2008, The Siege of Krishnapur was one of the six books selected to compete for the Best of Booker competition and in 2010, Troubles was rewarded the “Lost Boo- ker” Prize, which are signs of retrospective recognition. The Siege of Krishnapur has been alternately referred to as a Neo-Victorian novel, a reinvention of imperial adventure and romance, a postcolonial novel, a historical novel, among other designations. One may understand “reconstruction” as “identical reproduction” but also “re-creation” or “re-invention.” The aim of this article is to reflect on the various levels of reconstruction involved in this novel: is it “reconstructing” Victorian discourse with a postmodern touch which could account for the “Neo-Victo- rian” label? “Neo-Victorian” is indeed used in the sense intended by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, i.e. a work “self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4). Is The Siege called a “historical novel” because it re-writes or reconstructs the history of the Indian Mutiny? In fact, one may wonder about the “postcolonial” label as well. Can the novel be considered as “postcolonial” because it was written by an Anglo-Irish man in the 1970s and is about

1. The Hindu nationalist V.D. Sarvakar termed the event “The Indian War of Independence” in 1909, as Clare Anderson notes in The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion. Marx and Engels also referred to it as “the first Indian war of independence” in their news summaries for theNew York Daily Tribune in 1857 and 1858. 2. Martin Green, in The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: The Doom of Empire (1984), does not mention Farrell, nor does Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). Authors like Julian Barnes or Martin Amis are more visibly considered in anthologies as British authors of historical fiction of the 1970s and 1980s. 3. I am using the word “post-colonial” (with a hyphen) when the adjective has a historical meaning and literally means “after colonisation.” But the word “postcolonial” will be used whenever I am referring to the critical concept as it is used in Postcolonial Studies. 98 colonial India? Or does it have a critical and ethical dimension which would explain why it can be considered as postcolonial from a critical – even theoretical – point of view?4

Revisiting History The action in the novel takes place in the historical context of the Mutiny. In 1857, during the Raj, Indian soldiers of the British army started rebelling against the British in Northern and Central India. The reason that is generally acknowledged is that new cartridges containing pork and beef grease had been introduced in the Army. The main issue was that to use them, soldiers had to bite them which would have meant making themselves, as Hindus and Muslims, impure. Yet, other reasons are also given to account for the uprising as Nicola Flaminia recalls: Of course, the 1857 Rebellion is a much more complex event than the folkloric tale of the Enfield rifles and the cartridges greased with animal fat [...] that threatened the religious integrity of the Indian soldiers. The causes of the insurgency are grounded in the economic and cultural impact of the colonial policy of the Company, more and more aggressive as time went on. (20) Indrani Sen is slightly more specific, explaining: Several theories about the Revolt abounded in the nineteenth-century colonial mind. It was variously held to have been caused by religious fears of conversion, by sepoy unrest, disaffection among the peasants and talukdars – and not least of all, by a yearning for lost power among the ‘native’ princes. (1754) Not only does the Mutiny stand as a background for the Siege of Krishnapur, but Farrell acknowledges in the afterword the many sources he used to document the novel: “those familiar with the history of the time will recognise countless details in this novel of actual events taken from the mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses, in some cases with the words of the witness only slightly modified” (375). The siege depicted in the novel does actually recall the siege and relief of Lucknow immortalised by Thomas Jones Barker in his 1859 painting, The Relief of Lucknow.5 D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke yet argued that Farrell chose to name the city in his novel Krishnapur so as to move away from historical veracity: The “Mutiny” is remembered for events that have become legendary: the massacre at Cawnpore (alluded to in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet), the Kashmir Gate at Delhi and the relief of Lucknow. The Siege of Krishnapur is based on the last and, therefore, on a major and memorable event. Farrell’s city is not named Lucknow but Krishnapur, the city of Krishna. The name appears a genuinely Indian, generic one. Farrell has chosen it in preference to a precise and real Indian city for two cogent reasons: firstly, it gave him freedom in the use of history and, secondly, it permitted him to give play to the farcical aspect of his art whereas, if he used the name Lucknow, he would have set up expectations. (408-9)

4. Bill Ashcroft evokes a blurring between postmodernism and post-colonialism which needs to be addressed: “This confusion is caused partly by the fact that the major project of postmodernism – the deconstruction of the cen- tralized, logocentric master narratives of European culture – is very similar to the post-colonial project of dismantling the Centre/Margin binarism of imperial discourse. These concerns – the decentring of discourse, the focus of the significance of language and writing in the construction of experience, the use of the subversive strategies of mimicry, parody and irony – all overlap prominent features of postmodernism and so a conflation of the two has often occurred” (Ashcroft 18). 5. See https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw08481/The-Relief-of-Lucknow-1857 99 Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)

Still, in his afterword, Farrell explains how some of his characters were inspired by real people, such as Mark Thornhill who was the Collector at Muttra in 1857. Words, known to have been written, reappear in the mouths of some of his characters, “only slightly modified” (375). It is noteworthy that Farrell should also speak of his sources in terms of “writers whom I have cannibalised” (375), suggesting that his act of re-writing history has to do with digesting previous works, possibly with a level of violence, and not just experimenting with them. Other events such as the circulation of chapatis or the fact that English people may have chosen to blow themselves up rather than surrender are some of the myths surrounding the Mutiny. As the historian Kim Wagner writes in his study about 1857: During the early months of 1857, a strange phenomenon occurred through the districts of Northern India. From village to village, the chaukidars, or watchmen, passed from one to the other a strange sign in the form of chapatis […]. The chaukidars themselves did not know what the chapatis signified or from whence they came; they knew only that it was incumbent upon them to continue the transmission. […] The circulation of chapatis was, like a rumour, a transient phenomenon that passed swiftly through the districts of Northern India […]. [B]y the time the authorities were informed of its transmission within a district, it had already moved on – an understandably disturbing sign of the efficiency of indigenous modes of communication that lay outside colonial control. (62-3) The way the chapatis are noticed by some of the heroes and interpreted by the Collec- tor as a sign of future trouble is an interesting fictional development of this historical event: “The first sign of trouble at Krishnapur came with a mysterious distribution of chapatis, made of coarse flour and about the size and thickness of a biscuit; towards the end of February 1857, they swept the countryside like an epidemic” (Farrell 5). This shows that history is, of course, a natural source of documentation for historical fiction but that fiction may in turn offer its own discourse on history by precisely taking liberties with the latter. Not only is history revisited but Victorian intellectual debates, literary history and colonial fiction as well. References to Victorian trends of thought can be found in an evocation of the Victorian discussion opposing religion and progress, inspired by M.A. Crowther’s Religious Controversy of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, and embodied here in the many debates between the Collector and the Padre. While the former is a strong defender of progress, the latter only sees it as evidence of intelligent design in divine power. The paradoxically comical and lethal debate opposing Dr McNab and Dr Dunstaple as regards the cause of cholera – one thinking that cholera was caused by contaminated water, the other by foul air – also echoes medical discussions which did take place in Victorian England and provides interesting plot developments, as Dunstaple’s being wrong leads to his premature death. The well-known Victorian interest in taxonomy is particularly hinted at by the Col- lector whose very name is telling, as he is both the one who collects taxes and the one who collects objects. His mania for collecting is visible in the way he has accumula- ted objects from the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Victorian incentive to collection can also be found in the poetics of the text, for instance in Fleury’s exclamation: “I think that to dedicate is not enough. We calculate, we make deductions, we observe, we construct when we should feel!” (57). The verbs chosen in this enumeration all refer to rational thinking and are generally contrasted with sensitivity. They are reminiscent of 100

a short story by Kipling, “Wressley of the Foreign Office” (1888) in which the hero is working on “a really comprehensive survey.” His actions are described as such: “He dated and cross-dated, pedigreed and triple-pedigreed, compared, noted, connoted, wove, strung, sorted, selected, inferred, calendared and counter-calendared for ten hours a day” (227). While Kipling’s irony is more obviously perceptible, the mere principle of linguistic accumulation and concatenation mimics the Victorian impulse to collect. Such hints at recording and classifying could also be seen in other Victorian works of fiction such as the very title of one of Kipling’s short stories, “To Be Filed For Reference” (1888), or in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), where Kurtz was asked to write a report by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. The Victorian ideology of separation between races and sexes, inseparable from the construction of England as an imperial nation, as opposed to the colony, is reflected in The Siege of Krishnapur. The Victorian era was one specific moment in European modern history when the separation between men and women was conceptualised, as in John Ruskin’s “Of Sesame and Lilies” (1856) where men and women were depicted as follows: “The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest” (107), whereas the woman is the “Angel in the House,” to quote Coventry Patmore. In Ruskin’s words: “The woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision” (107). The necessity of a separation between men and women was expressed even more strongly in the colonies and constructed at the very same time as that between Euro- peans and Indians. In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Ann L. Stoler recalls colonial life in which “Women [were positioned as] bearers of redefined colonial morality” (57), in the face of the colonizers’ pseudo immorality. Anne McClintock has also written extensively on the interdependence of the European bourgeoisie and colonialism/imperialism, as the former rested on the gender ideology of the separation of spheres and the latter on the cult of domesticity. Such theories are paraphrased in the Collector’s words: “Women are weak, we shall always have to take care of them, just as we shall always have to take care of natives” (Farrell 186). More generally, in the novel, men and women are given clearly delineated roles to perform. Men are basically expected to display chivalric behaviour while women express frailty of nature and character, as the following sentence epitomises: “Harry Dunstaple, attended by Fleury […], had gone to rescue the ‘fallen woman’ […]. [T]his was exactly the sort of daring and noble enterprise that appealed to the two young men’s imaginations” (121). Not only are references to Victorian trends of thought or intellectual debates perceptible but the novel displays strong intertextuality with Victorian works or works dealing with the Victorians. Kipling is one intertext and Forster is another. The very first lines of the novel are: “Anyone who has never before visited Krishnapur, and who approaches from the East, is likely to think he has reached the end of his journey a few miles sooner than he expected” (3). As several critics noted, the plain landscape described in the incipit recalls Forster’s depiction of the unappealing Marabar Caves at the beginning of A Passage to India (1924): “Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary” (Forster 31). Forster’s lacklustre India is also referred to in the narrative comment: “To Fleury 101 Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)

India was a mixture of the exotic and the intensely boring” (27), while Anglo-Indian texts are known to often construct India’s exceptional character by resorting to plural forms of accumulation. In Forster’s novel, the moment when the Anglo-Indians all stand up, religiously, to the sound of the British anthem foreshadows the rigidity with which Anglo-Indian characters6 in The Siege of Krishnapur are shown to stick to their positions despite the events, as a way less to preserve than to build Englishness, as if it were precisely besieged by the threat of Indian contamination. When the Residency is besieged, the gravity of the situation does not deter lady characters from wanting to be placed in the hall according to their husbands’ ranks or from being wary of Lucy who is considered as the “Fallen Woman” because an officer took advantage of her. As Allen Greenberger humorously said about Farrell’s novel, “constantly we are given pictures of British under attack being concerned only with the making or drinking of a cup of tea” (12). Yet, the novel does not simply echo previous works or Victorian zeitgeist. What makes it more than a reconstruction which would be identical to what existed before is the omnipresence of humour through irony and satire. Through humour, this palimpsestic work, adding more layers to previously sedimented works, considers the situation depicted in the plot from a critical distance.

Humour and Satire: A Critical Reconstruction of Victorian and Imperial Times Many passages aim at ridiculing Anglo-Indian characters who stick, almost insanely, to codes of Victorian behaviour despite the context: “It was by the Collector’s order that these children continued to wear velvet, flannel and wool, while the other children in the cantonment were dressed in cotton or muslin for the hot weather. Even as children, it seemed, they had a position to keep up in the community” (Farrell 69). The irony of the narrative voice can also be felt in the narrative comment that the Collector’s daughters should bring him their diaries so that he “may exercise supervision over their lives” (69). One passage, both hilarious and horrific, depicts Lucy, the Fallen Woman, being taken over by thousands of cockroaches so that her white body is quickly covered with bugs. Two young men, imbued with ideas about their male chivalric attitude, wonder how they should behave as she has undressed in order to try to get rid of the cockroaches: “Any moment she would faint. But they could hardly dash forward and seize her with their bare hands. Or could they? Would it be considered permissible in the circumstances? But while they hesitated and debated, Lucy’s strength ebbed away and she fell in a swoon” (174). The use of free indirect speech reinforces the irony of the narrative voice as it gives us access to the men’s internal dilemmas while the lady’s health is at risk. As they finally decide to help her, they wonder how they could keep the bugs off her body: It was Fleury who, remembering how he had made a visor for his smoking cap, found the solution by whipping his Bible out of his shirt and tearing the boards off. He gave one of those sacred boards to Harry and took the other one himself. Then, using the boards as if they were giant razor blades, he and Harry began to shave the black foam of insects off Lucy’s skin. (275)

6. The term “Anglo-Indian” is used to refer to English people who, in colonial times, were traders, farmers, etc., who had come to live in India. Only in 1912 did it start being used to refer to “interracial” people (Baneth-Nouailhetas 13-4). 102

While this could be interpreted as a literal use of the Bible on the Fallen Woman to redeem her, this passage should rather be read as being both farcical and critical of dogmas. It parodically reactivates the theme of the Damsel in Distress, but danger is embodied by mere cockroaches while the rescuers’ heroism is undermined by the ludi- crous dimension of the scene. Another series of examples showing how humour may support a critical reflection on the Victorian ethos is the questioning of the status of objects in the novel. At the beginning of The Siege of Krishnapur, the narrative voice solemnly states that “bricks are undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilisation: one gets nowhere at all without them” (4). The bluntness of the statement, rich with terms suggesting firmness of opinion – “undoubtedly,” “essential” – arouses suspicion. The Collector’s change of mind concerning artefacts is worth mentioning in that respect. The man was initially shown to worship the inventions presented at the Great Exhibition and more generally progress and civilisation, once lecturing an English woman in such terms: “The foundations on which the new men will build their lives are Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation, and Rotation of Crops!” (92). The enumeration, though too long to be taken at face value as it puts many heterogeneous elements on the same level such as Geology and Ventilation, suggests that the terms may be empty shells – an idea that the spelling with capital letters specifically highlights. During the very siege, the Collector ends up using many objects for a very different purpose than their initial one, either to strengthen the mud walls around the Residency which would otherwise have collapsed under the heavy rains, or to serve as missiles when powder and cannon balls are running short. Little statuettes of famous literary figures thus end up as ammunition: Without a doubt the most effective missiles in this matter of improvised ammunition had been the heads of his electro-metal figures […]. And of all the heads, perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective of all had been Shakespeare’s; it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys advancing in single file through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness. The head of Keats, for example, wildly festooned with metal locks which it had proved impossible to file smooth had flown very erratically indeed, killing only a fat money-lender and a camel standing at some distance from the field of action. (362) The slight irreverence with which the narrative voice considers Shakespeare’s head as an efficient missile implies a questioning of European modernity whose eminent literary figures are turned into weapons to kill non-English people. The way the artefacts are dissociated from their use in a properly Victorian and “civilised” context suggests a form of relativism as regards Western progress. Mere daily objects, such as forks, may now be used as weapons, so what need is there for military strength, one may ask. In Goonetilleke’s words, “Even the trivia of Western civilization can be as fatal, lethal, as gun powder” (417): There appeared to be a carpet of dead bodies. But then he (the Collector) realized that many of these bodies were indeed moving but not very much. A sepoy here was trying to remove a silver fork from one of his lungs, another had received a piece of lightning conductor in his kidneys. A sepoy with a green turban had had his spine shattered by The Spirit of Science; others had been struck down by teaspoons, by fish-knives, by marbles; an unfortunate subadar had been plucked from this world by the silver sugar-tongs embedded in his brain. (Farrell 344) 103 Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)

Without even mentioning the Grand Guignol dimension of the scene, the fact that futile objects may become arms can be interpreted as a signal that barbarity lies at the core of English, and by extension Western civilisation, since it can be inflicted with daily utensils, even if readers ultimately learn that “a few other metal objects had been fired, such as clocks and hair brushes… but they had proved quite useless” (362). Not everything can prove as efficient and lethal as a metallic head of the Bard. In other words, English literature – the power of the English verb and the remains of centuries of culture – is more efficient in killing natives than clocks, a mere product of technology. The depiction of the Collector later in the novel, when he is back in London, confirms the evolution of the character, away from Victorian materialism: But one day, in the seventies, he and Fleury happened to come face to face in Pall Mall [a club in London]. […] Fleury asked the Collector about his collection of sculptures and paintings. The Collector said that he had sold them long ago. “Culture is a sham,” he said simply. “It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness.” 7 (373) Fleury had been depicted throughout the novel as a romantic figure who aspired to seeing humanity progress from the point of view of feelings and proximity with nature: “he was thinking of civilisation, of how it must be something more than the fashions and customs of one country imported into another, of how it must be a superior view of mankind” (42-3). But during the siege, he appears to grow gradually interested in mecha- nics and physics. At the end of the novel, he seems to have suddenly become convinced of the importance of ideas: Fleury was taken aback by this remark. He himself had a large collection of artistic objects of which he was very proud. “There, Mr Hopkins, I cannot agree with you,” he declared loudly. “No, culture gives us an idea of a higher life to which we aspire. And ideas, too, are a part of culture… No one can say that ideas are a sham. Our progress depends on them… Think of their power. Ideas make us what we are. Our society is based on ideas…” (373) In this passage, Fleury is defending a platonic vision of the Western world, according to which ideas rule the world. His speech is here characterised by a sort of vacuity as the suspension points fill the gaps in the reasoning. But he has no time to defend his point: he has to hurry because he has a tryst with a prostitute. One may wonder if these final reversals – the Collector’s loss of faith in Progress and ideas, Fleury’s admiration for romantic love turning into an appreciation of carnal love – are enough to question imperial ideology and critically engage with it. While Mutiny novels generally promoted masculine chivalry and feminine propriety, as well as English heroism and Indian effeminacy, is it sufficient for the narrative voice to ridicule English characters and their supposedly “Victorian idea(l)s” so that the novel should be perceived as adopting a critical, postcolonial, approach? Are racism and imperialism challenged as aggressively here as in works often considered as postcolonial, not just from a historical point of view? What seems at stake in The Siege of Krishnapur may be less to construct something anew than to construct again – to re-construct. The novel, in the end, is not necessarily about reconstructing Victorianism, but a certain vision of imperial history.

7. The statement directly echoes a sentence in Haggard’s Allan Quatermain which reads: “Civilisation is only savagery silver-gilt. A vain glory it is, and, like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark” (10). 104

Re-Constructing Empire in a Commodified Shape for Present-Day Readers In “De-Scribing the Centre,” Ralph Goodman suggests that postcolonial discourse dif- fers from satiric discourse in the specificity of its commitment to ethical issues, while satire’s stance is a “less well-defined one, more detached because of the ironic weight which satire carries” (62). He adds that “satire does not, in general, operate from a specific moral or political agenda, preferring instead to give itself the flexibility to criticise any party, group or class” (66). This statement is relevant in the case of The Siege of Krishnapur as everyone is ridiculed, whatever their class or origin. Yet, Indians remain relatively voiceless, reduced to types or representatives of social or religious groups. Except for the Maharajah’s son and Prime minister, Indians during the siege are merely referred to as “sepoys.” Even if the way Hari, the Maharajah’s son, says “frenla-ji” or “frenloudji” instead of “phrenology” could be seen as a form of disruption of Euro- pean science which dissociates it from its authoritarian signifier – just as the Indian Hari questions the authority of the English Harry in a process of Bhabhaean “sly mimicry” – the narrative voice uses hackneyed colonial clichés which are not questioned such as “sea of brown faces.” For Goodman, “postcolonial strategies are essentially ethi- cally and politically driven […]; they strive to challenge attitudes and structures which perpetuate inequality within societies” (69). Goodman also quotes Helen Tiffin who wrote in The Empire Writes Back that good postcolonial practice works by “refusing, realigning, deconstructing the ‘master narrative’ of western history [while] investigating that destructive binarism ‘itself ’” (Tiffin 179). The issue here is that race and gender binarism remains. The more open-minded characters admit at the end of the novel that the Indians remained inaccessible to them, finally establishing them as the ultimate other. At the same time, Anglo-Indian women are essentially there to support their male counterparts, while Indian women are simply doubly silenced, made even more minor than Indian men characters. As John McLeod argues, the novel “enables a space to be opened where the contradictions of colonial discourse are exposed,” but “it also remains constrained within the specific limits of Western hegemony” (117). While the author cannot be criticised for speaking on behalf of the Indians he depicts in his novel, he certainly writes within the borders of Western modes of thought and ideology. The novel’s overtly conspicuous, if not contrived, irony in the depiction of Anglo- Indian racism specifically needs to be addressed: Along the fourth wall […] ran primitive portraits of several past maharajahs. These faces stared down at the two young Englishmen […] though really it was just one face, Fleury noticed, as he passed along, repeated again and again with varying skill and in varying head-dresses. (80) The insistence, on the following page, on their host having the same face as that in the portraits, and a few pages later, on the maharajah having himself the same face as his son and people painted on the walls, sounds suspicious. While the persistence of such resemblances can be seen as a sign of the strength of the dynasty of the Maharajahs who have ruled the area for centuries, it seems to illustrate the inability of English characters to distinguish one Indian from another. Yet the very lack of subtlety which accompanies the potential criticism of colonial ideology and racism is worth analysing. Another similar example can in fact be found in the following passage: “Of the score 105 Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) of subalterns who had managed to escape, the majority had never seen a dead person before… a dead English person, anyway… one occasionally bumped into a dead native here and there but that was not quite the same” (110). Specifying the origin of the dead person, along with the remark “that was not quite the same,” is a way of ostensibly stressing the irony of the comment, making it deliberately stand out against the rest of the text. It is no surprise to the reader that Anglo- Indian culture and Victorian society were informed by cultural racism. But the way narrative comments are made explicitly ironic suggests a playful textual self-reflexivity which is integrally part of Farrell’s postmodern project. Theatricality is omnipresent in the novel as most characters in The Siege of Krishnapur are playing the roles that would be expected in Mutiny novels: General Hearsey is said to advocate a “display of confidence” (74), while many of the characters are spectators of what is going on outside the Residency, which is made obvious by the recurrent use of terms belonging to the lexical field of vision. The characters abide by a semiotic code which makes them recognisable by readers familiar with the Anglo-Indian intertext. The characters also perceive the world around them through an interpretation grid which is imposed on them by colonial doctrine, which enables them to make peremptory statements such as “the apathy of the native is well-known” (38). The male characters reconstruct themselves as colonial heroes, like Fleury who, after firing the cannon, pictures himself in a noble pose, while the smoke and haze of battle gives the whole scene “‘historical’ quality because everything appeared faintly blurred, as in a Crimean daguerreo- type” (139). When they are not imagining themselves as heroes, such characters become powerless puppets, as signalled by the many references to the Collector’s words being unheard by his fellow-countrymen. While colonial imagination plays an important role in the way characters picture themselves, the narrative voice and the many changes in foca- lisation use irony to reveal the constructed nature of Victorian masculine and feminine identities as in: “Miriam was tired of womanhood […]. She was tired of having to adjust to other people’s ideas of what a woman should be” (259) – as well as that of racial identities. At the end of the novel, Englishmen are indeed compared with the untouchables. Farrell is successful in showing the performative nature of culture through the exhibition of objects and in this respect his fiction echoes David Cannadine’s discussion in Ornamentalism of the spectacular dimension of Empire. The aim of the Great Exhi- bition was to collect a great variety of artefacts under the unifying and homogenizing project of imperialism and identity-construction. In Cannadine’s words: “The British Empire was about the familiar and the domestic, as well as the different and the exotic: indeed, it was in large part about the domestication of the exotic – the comprehending and the reordering of the foreign in parallel, analogous, equivalent, resemblant terms” (xix). But the heterogeneous aspect of the objects the Collector had gathered – “tiger- skins, bookcases full of elevating and instructional volumes, embroidered samplers, teasets of bone china” (Farrell 245) indicates the arbitrariness involved in the gathering of so many varied objects under one common banner. Referring to McLeod’s reading of the novel, Crane and Livett suggest: The gathering of objects in any collection or exhibition imposes a taxonomy which draws together under a new heading a group of disparate objects, but the new group is always threatening to disperse into its original individualities. Each single object is a startling reminder of the potential for separation and anarchy. (96) 106

The objects themselves can be seen as symbols of an English culture that needs protecting while they literally construct such a culture. So Farrell exposes parodically the strategies of colonial discourse which aims at strengthening itself by highlighting the very fragility of such a construct. This reminds us of Bhabha’s statement that colonial discourse had to reassert itself constantly to hide its insecurities: In the colonial discourse, that space of the other is always occupied by an idée fixe: despot, heathen, barbarian, chaos, violence. If these symbols are always the same, their ambivalent repetition makes them the signs of a much deeper crisis of authority that emerges in the lawless writing of the colonial sense. (143-4) In an article about the history of the Booker Prize, Graham Huggan recalls that more than half of prize-winning novels “investigate aspects of – primarily colonial – history or present a ‘counter-memory’ to the official historical record” (419), suggesting the centrality of England in a prize-system which can be otherwise seen to encourage postcolonial production. In Huggan’s terms: “Historical fictions such as Scott’s, while ostensibly debunking imperial glories, might still be seen as peddling commercially profitable imperial myths” (419). In a polemical essay entitled “Outside the Whale” (1984), Rushdie, more than thirty years ago, wrote even more clearly that Indians [in The Raj Quartet] get walk-ons, but remain, for the most part, bit-players in their own history. Once this form has been set, it scarcely matters that individual fictional Brits get unsympathetic treatment from their author. The form insists that they are the ones whose stories matter. (90, italics in the original) Thus, is The Siege about revision of history and/or revival of literary myths? It seems that the Raj is a commodity which travels and sells well around the world, as the TV show “Indian Summers” (2015-2016) or the recent release of the movie “Viceroy’s House” (2017) suggest. Resorting to historical phantasy of the Raj might be seen in Huggan’s terms as “a neo-colonial ‘othering’ process – the process by which history, transformed into an exotic cultural spectacle, becomes a packageable commodity for metropolitan consumption” (421). Even if the exoticization of (colonial) history is mostly achieved in epic film, literature participates, again in Huggan’s words, in the “spectacularization of a cultural ‘otherness’ that is projected out in mythicized space and back in imagined time” (421-2), in this case the mythified and mystified time and space of Mutiny in 1857 India. Huggan finally adds that “irony […] functions effectively as an alibi for the revival of a discredited-decadent-imperial imaginary” (422) which strongly resonates with the unease readers might feel as regards overly ironical passages. In conclusion, J.G. Farrell builds his work on the colonial intertext and resorts to strategies similar to those used in Mutiny novels, such as the binary construction of English heroism and Indian character, or the performance of English identity through the promotion of values such as progress, reason, civilisation, etc. Despite its use of satire to deconstruct the logic of imperialism by exhibiting the empire as a makeshift construct, which prevents Farrell from being seen as “Raj nostalgic,” the novel fails to refashion imperial history and remains moored in a reconstructive aesthetics that renders it more palatable to contemporary audiences and tastes. In that respect, if one refers to Ashcroft’s statement about postcolonialism and postmodernism which was quoted earlier in this article, The Siege adopts postmodern playfulness, irony, and preference for the fragmentary over the “coherence of the collection” (Boccardi 52) but 107 Layers of Reconstruction in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) does not really engage with postcolonial ethical concerns like granting subaltern voices a literary space or reflecting on power imbalances in a colonial context.

Jaine Chemmachery University Paris-Dauphine – PSL

W orks Cited Anderson, Clare. The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion. London: Anthem, 2007. Ashcroft, Bill. “Post-Colonial Transformation and Global Culture.” Postmodernism and Postcolonialism. Eds. Silvia Albertazzi and Donatella Possamai. Bologna: Il Poligrafo, 2002. 17-32. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post- Colonial Literatures. 1989. London: Routledge, 1995. Baneth-Nouailhetas, Emilienne. Le Roman anglo-indien : De Kipling à Paul Scott. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. Boccardi, Mariadele. The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism. How the British Saw Their Empire. 2001. London: Penguin, 2002. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, 1899. London: Everyman’s Library, 1974. Crane, Ralph J. and Jennifer livett. Troubled Pleasures: The Fiction of J.G. Farrell. Dublin: Four Courts, 1997. Farrell, J.G. The Siege of Krishnapur. 1973. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993. —. Troubles. 1970. London: Flamingo, 1984. —. The Singapore Grip. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978. Jackson, Tony E. “The Desires of History, Old and New.” CLIO: A Review of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 28.2 (Winter 1999): 169-87. Nicora, Flaminia. The Mutiny Novel, 1857–2007: Literary Responses to the Indian Sepoy Rebellion. New Delhi: Prestige, 2009. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. 1924. London: Penguin, 1989. Goodman, Ralph. “De-scribing the Centre: Satiric and Postcolonial Strategies in The Madonna of Excelsior.” JLS/TLW 20.1/2 (2004): 62-70. Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. “J.G. Farrell’s Indian Works: His Majesty’s Subjects?” Modern Asian Studies 37.2 (May 2003): 407-27. Greenberger, Allen. The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism 1880-1960. London: Oxford UP, 1969. Haggard, Rider. Allan Quatermain. 1887. Ed. Denis Butts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Huggan, Graham. “Prizing ‘Otherness’: A Short History of the Booker.” Studies in the Novel “Postcolonialism, History, and the Novel” 29.3 (fall 1997): 412-33. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century: 1999- 2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Kipling, Rudyard. “Wressley of the Foreign Office.” Plain Tales from the Hills. 1888. Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 224-8. —. “To Be Filed For Reference.” Plain Tales from the Hills. 1888. Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 234-41. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. McLeod, John. “Exhibiting Empire in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.2 (1994): 117-32. Rovit, Earl. “J.G. Farrell and the Imperial Theme.” The Sewanee Review 106.4 (Fall, 1998): 630-44. Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale.” 1984. Quoted in Huggan 419. Ruskin, John. “Of Queens’ Gardens.” Sesame and Lilies. 1865. London: George Allen, 1904. Sen, Indrani. “Inscribing the Rani of Jhansi in Colonial ‘Mutiny’ Fiction.” Economic and Political Weekly 42.19 (12-18 May 2007): 1754-61. Stoler, Ann L. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010. Wagner, Kim. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.

“Isn’t the Place Only Ruins and Vacancies Now”: Reconstructions in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass (2005)

Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass hinges on reconstructions which are informed by the characters’ sense of depredation and dereliction when faced with places which are but “ruins and vacancies.” This paper proposes to analyse such reconstructions as providing the groundwork for a reflection which attempts to puzzle out the intricate issues of place, land, inheritance, belonging and memory.

It has now become commonplace in criticism on Jane Urquhart to underscore the intimate relation between storytelling and landscape (Cuder-Dominguez 201). Yet, the indiscriminate use of the latter term seems to ignore the Canadian author’s exploration of its polysemy. Like her other novels, A Map of Glass (2005) is fraught with pictorial allusions, from sixteenth-century Flemish painter Joachim Patinir to American land artist Robert Smithson, whose 1969 outdoor installation A Map of Broken Glass inspired the title of the novel. Nevertheless, it introduces a decisive shift as Urquhart’s attention veers away from the probing of the visual and pictorial definition of landscape.1 By creating the character of “landscape geographer” Andrew Woodman (MG 96),2 she goes back to the etymological meaning of the word “landscape”: a composition of man-made spaces superimposed on the surface of the land (Jackson 7).3 Since landscape is perceived in the novel as an “embedded, physicalized memory” retaining the traces of previous occupations (Urquhart, “Confessions” 81), the focus is less on the adjustment of European cultural and aesthetic heritage to a new geography – as in The Whirlpool (1986) or Away (1993) – than on the legacy left by the colonial past. Structurally, A Map of Glass hinges on a reconstruction: the interpolated nineteenth- century Woodman family saga, which comprises the second section of the novel, and whose authorship is ascribed to Andrew. The character’s death in the prologue brings together Sylvia, his former lover, and Jerome, who found his body while on an artistic retreat on the abandoned Timber Island. In the long conversations which ensue from the encounter and which constitute the frame narrative, the middle-aged woman and the young land artist discuss Andrew’s life and work and reminisce about their past. Both express the same acute sense of loss when faced with Ontario’s vanishing rural landscape: the “heartbreaking neglect” of rotting fence lines along fields “destined to become the wilderness of asphalt” (MG 16), the “sad, neglected” farmhouses built by “the earliest settlers in the province” (MG 36), the “sad refuse” left by the wood industry on Timber Island (MG 97).

1. Historically, the term first designated the pictorial representation of a tract of land before it came to refer to its perception, namely “a portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a single view” (Webster’s). 2. The pagination for all subsequent quotations from A Map of Glass will be given directly between parentheses in the body of the text. 3. In the first essay of his seminalDiscovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinkerhoff Jackson underlines the need for a new definition of the word. The one he proposes relies on etymology: the combination of the noun “land,” which, “as far back as we can trace the word, […] meant a defined space,” and the suffix -scape which can both designate “a composition of similar objects” (as in the related word “sheaf ”) and land creation (as in modern German schaffen, “to make”) (Jackson 6-7). 110

These descriptions seem to echo the fate of Coomavoher, an abandoned nineteenth- century Irish village about which a peasant from a neighbouring community exclaims: “isn’t the place only ruins and vacancies now” (MG 256). The deliberate indeterminacy of the unusual plural “vacancies” suggests more than mere dereliction. Ruins testify to the precariousness of human efforts to inhabit the world and carve out places for themselves (Besse 40). The phrase, which yokes together the tangible and the intangible and amplifies the tension between presence and absence, is a reminder that a place is never merely a location in the world (Ashcroft 156, Cresswell 20). In its “most straightforward definition,” it is “a meaningful location” which human lives have invested with value and emotional attachment (Creswell 7). In sharp contrast with the pathos of the deserted village, however, the ruins in the Ontario rural landscape are the remnants and reminders of the transformation of uncolonized space into a colonized place. As such, they represent the “inherited memory of destruction” (MG 99) and their disappearance is construed as the symptom of “ecological forgetting” (MG 99) in a former settler-invader colony unwilling to remember that its “wealth [was] founded on the slaughtering of wild animals and the clear-cutting of forests” (MG 255). Be they literal in nature, as is the case of Jerome’s land art installations, or discursive, as with Andrew’s chronicle of his ancestors, reconstructions go beyond the simple indulgence in colonial nostalgia.4 As Sylvia insists at the end of the letter she gives Jerome before returning home, the attempt to recover, restore and revive the past is not just bound to fail,5 it is a perilous lure: “we cannot reconstruct. The dead don’t answer when we call them. The dead are not our friends” (MG 368, italics in the text). The prefix re- suggests a critical and creative response to a sense of dereliction and depredation. My contention is that Urquhart’s concern with “ruins and vacancies” should be read in the light of her on-going investigation into the relation of human lives to “the land as physical environment, aesthetic milieu and possible habitat” (Omhovère 17). Reconstruction thus provides the groundwork for a reflection on how individuals and communities conceive of, relate to, and bond with a place. In a novel which is an example of post-colonial revision of Canada’s settler past, such a reflection disrupts the logic of binary oppositions – displacement/emplacement, place/placelessness, rootedness/rootlessness – in an attempt to puzzle out the intricate issues of place, land, inheritance, belonging, and memory.

Emplacement, Genealogy, Accretion When Sylvia introduces herself by explaining that she has always lived in the house her ancestors built, Jerome exclaims: “Then you are settled, […] a settler” (MG 48), an appraisal that reads like a pun erasing the idea of displacement attached to the noun.6 The middle-aged woman’s intimate knowledge of the geography and history of her county is her defining characteristic in the novel: she has memorized the 1878 atlas of

4. Urquhart’s engagement with post-colonialism is something of a moot question among scholars. In an article about Away, a family saga which follows the lives of Irish immigrants in the historical context of the Canadian Confede- ration, Cynthia Sugars argues that the novel evidences “an indulgence in a nostalgia for a certain kind of settler nationalism,” more specifically “for a particular scripture of a foundational Canadian narrative” (4). 5. Nostalgic restoration produces a sanitized travesty as Sylvia notes: “A few houses in the County had been restored by city people seeking charm […] and always seemed to her to be unnaturally fresh and clean, as if the past had been scrubbed out of their interiors, then thrown carelessly out the door like a bucketful of soiled water” (MG 37). 6. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “settler” as “one who settles in a new country; a colonist.” 111 “Isn’t the Place Only Ruins and Vacancies Now”: Reconstructions in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass

Prince Edward county (MG 40, 88, 128),7 is able to “list from memory the entire genealogy of [her] father’s family” (MG 128), and knows “the histories of the old settlers as well as she kn[ows] her own body” (MG 37). When discussing this with Jerome, she insists on the immediacy and “physicality of the past” (MG 117), her sentiment that, like the family objects stored in the attic, the past is always “retrievable” (MG 108). The memorability of the settlers’ history, however, does not give rise to an epistemological questioning. It is addressed as the condition for the development of “emplacement,” a term coined by Urquhart which coalesces a sense of place and belonging to a place. As Sylvia explains to Jerome, “those who are emplaced are made that way by generations of their people remaining in the same location” (MG 325).8 The text repeatedly makes a point noting the character’s “geographical intimacy” born out of “the experience of a long, multi-generational relationship with place” (Ur- quhart, “Confessions” 20). Traveling through her county on the way to Toronto, Syl- via finds comfort in the familiarity and “reliability” of the “visual reminder[s] of the past” she sees through her car window: the cairns, boulders and hedges which form the “biography of stones” left behind by the old settlers (MG 37). The metaphor equates human industriousness transforming the terrain with the writing of a text on the earth’s surface, thereby bringing to the fore the readability of the inscriptions. What the character sees as “markers” endow “the surrounding environment with a measure of human containment” (Pogue Harrison 351), both temporally and spatially. Not only do they circumscribe, organize and ultimately contain indifferent space, but they function as relics binding Sylvia to the past and her ancestors. Their presence provides a historical sense of continuity which allows her to reconstruct and trace her lineage in one locality. The notion of “emplacement” could thus be read as a resolution of the post-colonial dialectic of place and displacement falling somewhat short of expectations. The novel seems to accommodate such a reading at times, especially when it sets up Sylvia’s rooted identity against the rootlessness of Jerome, the embodiment of the (post)modern man who knows nothing of his family’s past (MG 128, 362) and who is “so mobile that he has not the time to establish roots” (Tuan 183). And yet, the text relates Sylvia’s emplacement to geographical confinement (MG 110, 127) as continuity and stability transform into stasis and paralysis, which is evidenced in the character’s unnamed condition.9 Leaving aside clinical interpretations, construing Sylvia’s emplacement as a symptom entices the reader to ponder her identification with her ancestors’ place and un-settles the comforting “biography of stones.” While the character delights in the image of the land as palimpsest used by British historian York Powell in The Relations of History and Geography (MG 93), the colonial “accretions which become the dense text that constitutes place” come under scrutiny in the novel (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 190). The tactile maps Sylvia makes for a blind friend eventually lead her to reflect on the meaning she ascribes to place: “Each aspect of her County – her own territory – had been named, filled, emptied, ploughed

7. The atlas is but one example of the “omnipresent Victoriana” (Lorre 187) in a novel which gives pride of place to descriptions of Canadian nineteenth-century material culture. 8. Urquhart’s understanding of the term bears close resemblance to Yi-Fu Tuan’s definition of rootedness: “it means that a people have come to identify themselves with a particular locality, to feel that it is their home and the home of their ancestors” (194). 9. Even though scholars generally agree to see in Sylvia’s “disability” (MG 116) a form of autism, the text conspi- cuously refuses to spell out a diagnosis. 112

and planted long ago; all the harvests belong to the dead who insisted on their entitlement” (MG 147). From the rephrasing of the reference to an administrative unit into a claim on land, to the last word, which designates the legal right to possess it, Sylvia’s evocation of her relation to her county relies on the notion of property as a mode of inhabiting a place. The series of past participles draws attention to what has been done to the land: the “colonizing process [which] appropriates, defines, captures the place in language” through naming (Ashcroft 134),10 and the civilizing work of agriculture which, according to the political philosophy of John Locke, legitimizes the settlers’ appropriation of the New World (Ashcroft 163).11 Sylvia can therefore claim the land as emotionally hers because her ancestors made their claim to land through naming and labour. The text undermines what would amount to complacency by alluding to the eviction of indigenous people and the erasure of this eviction, in other words the very process of overwritings and rewritings participating in the palimpsestic construction of place. The dissonant note this introduces becomes more prominent when the ancestors’ voices become interwoven with fragments from the morbid nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin”: “I cut the trees, built the mills, sawed the boards, made the roads, fenced the fields, raised the barns,” they had told her in the dark of her childhood bedroom. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. “I drew up the deeds, made the laws, drafted the plans, invented the history, prescribed the curriculum,” the dead whispered. I, said the rook, with my little book. They beat out a telegraph in her blood, one that read, “I fought the wars, buried the dead, carved the tombstones.” I, said the fish, with my little dish, And I caught the blood. (MG 147, italics in the text) The settlers’ proud assertions are juxtaposed to the animals’ responses to questions the text does not quote, a bathetic collage which provides the postcolonial revision of land claim legitimacy. The three lists are thematically organized: the productive ordering of nature, the written word as a vehicle for legal and cultural authority, and the deadly outcome of military conflicts. Taken as a whole, they may be read as outlining Canadian history, from the agricultural development of the colony to the elaboration of cultural nationalism after the 1867 Confederation. Yet, in the absence of temporal markers, what gives the passage its cohesion is the nursery rhyme, more specifically, the first and second verses quoted earlier on in the text (MG 113), thus closely associating the ancestors’ litany with an unacknowledged, initial wrongdoing: the robin’s murder gruesomely illustrated in the book Sylvia discovers as a child in the family house attic (MG 56-7). Situated at the very end of the first section, the passage ushers the reader into the nineteenth-century interpolated narrative about the Woodmans while offering an interpretative template. “The Bog Commissioners” is a variant of the settlers’ stories so familiar to Sylvia, but one in which the hardy pioneers have given way to greedy entrepreneurs and the unfettered pursuit of profit. Andrew Woodman’s reconstruction of his family story is not a search for roots or cultural location; it deals with “the heritage

10. In the nineteenth-century interpolated narrative, Branwell Woodman ridicules the “singular lack of imagination” evinced by colonial toponyms, townships being named after the entrepreneurs who sold them off and “everything else […] after European towns and villages” (MG 218-19). 11. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. […] God gave the world to men in common. […] He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it) […].” (Locke n.p.) 113 “Isn’t the Place Only Ruins and Vacancies Now”: Reconstructions in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass of guilt” (Lorre 192) for a wrongdoing detrimental to the land and to the investment of human lives in a place.

Place, Foundation, Inheritance When the interpolated narrative opens onto the cartographic description of the Thou- sand Islands in the Saint Lawrence River (MG 153), the reader has already learned about the most significant events in the Woodman family story. In the course of her conversation with Jerome, Sylvia summarizes the bare facts about the patriarch Joseph Woodman’s work in Ireland as a bog commissioner, which gives its title to the second section (MG 98), the rise and fall of the Woodman empire on Timber Island (MG 99), and the family hotel buried in sand (MG 77, 131). As she wonders whether it was “An- drew’s reconstruction that […] filled in the gaps” in his record of the family narrative (MG 225), the mise en abyme engages the reader in a similar act of reflection. The extent to which “The Bog Commissioners” self-consciously relies on the generic “building blocks” of romance (Frye 4) is reminiscent of the narrative strategy Urquhart experi- ments with in Away and which brings readers “to question their adhesion to the fictions through which settler colonies negotiate their self-representation and, along with it, an endurable version of the past” (Omhovère 61).12 For all the romantic topoi – the star- crossed lovers, secret weddings, recognition scenes, vindicated orphans, and oracular prophecies (Frye 4) – the second section is not a New World romance nor are the Woodmans founding settlers: the family story is marked by a series of displacements, each associated with the vacating of a “raped landscape” (MG 99) once the natural resources have been depleted. While the “Bog Commissioners” retraces the story of the Woodmans starting from their arrival in Canada at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, its opening conspi- cuously manifests a double silence. Very little if anything is said about England as the place of origin13 and Urquhart refuses to depict the moment of the original encounter with the New World: there is a twenty-year-long ellipsis in the chronology between the mention of Joseph Woodman’s departure for the Canadian colonies (MG 155) and his son Branwell’s return to Timber Island after a stay in Paris. This narrative strategy throws into relief the first description of the island, which even at its peak is but ruins. Hoping to be reunited with a “pastoral and bucolic” landscape, Branwell is appalled at the evidence of his father’s flourishing industry: everything for a time probably appeared to him to be […] raw and unfinished and in what looked to be a state of complete destruction. Felled and ruined trees were being floated down the lake to his father’s docks. Raw and unfinished timber was being hastily assembled in order to construct the merchant ships that would litter the lake’s surface, ships that would eventually carry not only timber but also animals, barrels, china, furniture, food, bolts and nails, cast-iron cooking utensils, shotguns, salt, axes, hacksaws, looking glasses, bolts of cloth, cannons, cannonballs, and human beings. (MG 161, italics mine)

12. In A Map of Glass, Urquhart decides to fully exploit “the thrilling potential” of “romantic topoi such as the family house swallowed by sand or struck by lightning” which, in Away, “are cursorily mentioned” (Omhovère 62). 13. Joseph Woodman’s wife is the sole member of the family who is presented as “never [having] successfully managed to emigrate from England in her mind” (MG 183). Whereas her son Branwell, who aspires to become a painter, delights in her descriptions of “picturesque fields,” her practical daughter dismisses her “rhapsodizing about distant places” that she herself will never know (MG 183). 114

In sharp contrast with the description in the frame narrative of Jerome’s glorious visions of huge vessels being launched (MG 22), the narrator’s choice of qualifiers indicates some inner recoil. The chiasmic construction brings to the fore the unusual combination “ruined trees,” which signals a moral reprobation sharpened by the evocation of lucrative trafficking, the ships becoming the objective correlative of the greed of commerce. The seemingly never-ending list of merchandise, which equates goods and human-beings, precludes Branwell’s comforting belief that this spectacle is still “prefe- rable” to Louis XIV’s military plans-reliefs which he discovered while visiting the Invali- des (MG 161-2). The somewhat naïve opposition between commercial enterprise and military imperialism, as well as the benign image of Canada as a “peaceable kingdom” underlying it (Omhovère 57), is of course unsustainable, and Urquhart makes a point of reminding her readers of the role of the Canadian timber industry in the production of the “pugnacious vessels of the [British] Admiralty” (MG 199). The adjectives “pastoral” and “bucolic” evince a second set of remarks. Branwell the artist and his father the entrepreneur share the same ideal of agrarian landscape. In the latter’s dream of draining the unproductive Irish bogs to transform them into “fields of golden grain” MG( 155), agricultural exploitation trumps aesthetic consideration, thus drawing attention to the political, economic, and imaginative assumptions the pastoral landscape embodies as a colonial trope.14 Those assumptions are evidenced in the author’s exploration of the correlation between (bio)colonialism and environmental “vandalism” (Urquhart, “Confessions” 75) as the plot of the framed narrative proceeds through the unrelenting repetition of depredation. In the heyday of the timber industry, Canadian wood “re-emerge[s] in the shape of furniture in a multitude of Victorian parlours” (MG 199) until “not one serviceable tree remain[s] in the vicinity of the tri- butaries and rivers that flowed into the Great Lake” (MG 224-5). A generation later, orchards and poplar woods are cut down to make way for cash crop farming, barley having suddenly become “very profitable” on the American market MG( 238). By the time the central section draws to a close, the process of degradation that Jerome wishes he could film has taken place twice-over. The Woodman empire collapses in less than fifty years and Timber Island is abandoned after the second generation. Then it is the turn of the Ballagh Oisin, the hotel Branwell and his wife Mary bought on the mainland, to be buried in sand after intensive farming practices on their son’s estate have depleted the soil (MG 238). A helpless witness to the slow destruction of the place she carved out for herself, Mary wastes away and dies, having been “depleted along with the soil” (MG 238). While the character’s death from grief is another example of the way Urquhart draws upon the generic codes of romance, the image suggests a common vulnerability shared by human bodies and the places they inhabit. Surrounded by the decaying remains of her father’s timber empire, Annabelle decides to have her beloved sister-in-law buried on Timber Island and commissions a stone angel for her grave. Something more than the desire to make a memorial for Ma- ry’s death is at stake in this episode. The middle-aged woman strives to come to terms with both the irretrievability of the past – the impossibility of going back to the original

14. The tragic irony is that Irish bogs are the result of clear-cutting. “Ireland never looked the way we imagine Ire- land looks. […] It was in fact known as Derry, and ‘derry’ means ‘oak’ in Irish, and it was an entirely forested – hardwood forested – island. The first thing the British did when they got there was clear-cut, because they had already clear-cut England” (Urquhart, “Confessions” 75). 115 “Isn’t the Place Only Ruins and Vacancies Now”: Reconstructions in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass wilderness – and the indifference of a future “that would have nothing to do with her or her family” (MG 225). Burying Mary on Timber Island is a gesture of symbolic re- appropriation. As Robert Pogue Harrison underlines in his reflection on the conditions under which places come into being, “the surest way to take possession of a place and secure it as one’s own is to bury one’s dead in it” (354). The grave marker is indeed a sign which stands for what it stands in: the ground of burial. The deictic in phrases such as “here lies,” “ci-gît,” is “an indicator that appropriates the ground of indication” (Pogue Harrison 352) and thus contributes to the founding power of the marking. For Annabelle, the grave provides the “empty, changed world of the island” (MG 226) with a center, once again transforming space into place, albeit precariously. The forward- looking impetus of progress carries with it the promise of oblivion which gets fulfilled in the twentieth-century frame narrative. When Jerome discovers the tombstone during his retreat on Timber Island, its meaning is eclipsed by the aesthetic musings of the artist on his newest project (MG 21). There is, therefore, something slightly jarring in the young land-artist’s glib enthu- siasm (while reading the historical geographer’s notebooks about Timber Island) about “hav[ing] it all reconstructed, […] hav[ing] it come to life, or come back to life” (MG 326). Such a statement ignores that “any construction is shadowed by the oblivion it is erected against” (Callahan 154). It also fails to recognize what underpins such a reconstruction. Whether it be mapping the remains of the colonial past (MG 38) or reconstructing the history of Prince Edward County through the lens of his family’s story, Andrew’s involvement with memorial geography stems from what he deems a “dynastic necessity” (MG 77). The interpolated narrative, which re-constructs the story of the woman who was buried on Timber Island, might be read as an attempt to re- inscribe the deictic, both the repetition of Annabelle’s compensatory gesture and the recognition of a debt which cannot be redeemed. Andrew’s sense of place, therefore, cannot be dissociated from the inherited responsibility which besets him. Here lies the difference between the characters in the novel. For Andrew, just like for Sylvia, “in certain landscapes, […] all you can see are ruins, all you can feel is the past, your own ancestry or that of someone else” (MG 117). Place is always perceived as a “memorial of times past” (Tuan 179). Jerome’s aesthetic endeavours lead him, on the contrary, to think of place as “time made visible” (Tuan 179).

In Place, Memory, Dis-Placement The chapter introducing the young artist’s character traces the origin of his involvement with land art to a painful realization when revisiting the place where he built tree houses with his father as a child. The journey is prompted by images, the vividness of which demonstrates that memory is “place-supported” (Casey 187). Because of the materiality of the physical location, “the tree near a dirty stream” (MG 14), memories of the “loose board knocking against a branch,” of the large nails used in the tree house’s construction, and of his father’s smile are inscribed in the landscape; conversely, the remembered has “incorporate[ed] place into its own content” (Casey 184). Hence the character’s anguish at discovering that a housing development has replaced the vacant land, the tree, and the stream: “There was simply no way to place even the few scraps of memory he had retained” (MG 14). The alteration of the terrain causes a harrowing disorientation since the young man no longer recognizes the remembered place and 116

only sees a meaningless site “indifferent to what might occupy it” (Casey 185).15 The destruction of the physical locale seems to erode the preservative power of place, its ability to hold and contain the remembered. What is threatened is the very possibility of finding “points of attachment onto which to hang one’s memories, […] to retrieve them” (Casey 186). In the installation inspired by this experience, Jerome attempts to “rebuild” and give shape to his childhood memories of the tree-house (MG 14). Both the choice of using discarded material, such as torn plastic and broken objects, and the decision to construct “temporary and incomplete structures” (MG 14) testify to the artist’s desire to eschew memorialization to better comment on the precarious memorability of abandoned places. Jerome’s later projects seem to veer away from the reflection on the memory of place and towards the “idea of nature’s memory” (MG 19). The young man sees himself as a “chronicler” who “record[s]” and “document[s]” the evidence of natural degradation: “peeling paint, worn surfaces, sun bleaching, rust, rot, the effects of prolonged moisture, as well as […] the larger shifts of erosion and weather and season” (MG 11-2). While the choice of verbs used to describe the artist at work minimizes the difference between the historical geographer’s task and the land artist’s projects, there is a reversal of perspective. Andrew, who maps history, both literally and figuratively (Callahan 151), is interested in the spatialization of time. Jerome is intrigued by the way the metamor- phosing process of decay temporizes space. That he should be fascinated by Robert Smithson’s work is therefore unsurprising. Standing at the edge of Timber Island and looking at the shapes created by ice on the surface of the river, the young artist muses about Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass, a temporary installation composed of “pieces of glass […] heaped […] into a haphazard shape” (MG 18). Despite its title, the piece “counter[s] the symbolic contract provided by a map” by denying the viewer “perception of pattern over time or repeatability of perception” (Callahan 139). What matters is less some hypothetical referentiality – Smithson came to “believe the glass structure […] was shaped like the drowned continent of Atlantis” (MG 18) – than the play of transient light on and through glass when “the structure […] leap[s] into […] vitality” and becomes an event marked by mutability and instability (MG 18). Like Smithson’s, Jerome’s aesthetic exploration of the ideas of time in space, decay and renewal, is informed by his interest in “built things going back to nature,” in “ger- mination” (106-7). The inspiration for the work which establishes the young artist’s re- putation thus comes during a series of walks through Ontario’s derelict rural landscape: He began to think of fences as situations rather than structures. Like an act of God or a political uprising, they seemed to him to mark the boundaries of events rather than territories. And like events, he felt that these fences had come into being as a result of a great deal of energy, flourishing on the edges of labor for a few hard decades, then collapsing onto a ground whose only crop now was an acre of windblown weeds. (MG 17) The passage hinges on substitutions. The idea of structure – fences as constructed objects – gives way to that of situation, which insists on their relative position in space and time. In the same way, fences are no longer perceived as enclosures, “the very mark of

15. I borrow this understanding of the opposition between site and place from Edward Casey’s explanation of the Aristotelian definition of place as periechon, “literally ‘a having’ or ‘holding around’” (186). Casey further argues that “it is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (186). 117 “Isn’t the Place Only Ruins and Vacancies Now”: Reconstructions in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass property” (Ashcroft 163), but as manifestations of time taking place. It is telling that, whereas Sylvia and Andrew would see in them “the evidence of the behaviour of [their] forefathers” (MG 96), Jerome’s vision dissociates fences from human industriousness: they are no longer the product of labour but what delineates its location, which does not deny human intervention but questions the crisp distinction between imprinting culture and imprinted nature. “Ruined fences” (MG 47) therefore do not merely occupy abandoned waste lands; they are a liminal zone (“edges”) of adaptation and transition. Jerome’s Fence Lines is a multi-media work of art which combines black and white photographs and a three-dimensional installation: six lines made out of “boulders and fence wire, branches and decaying rails” which “reconstruct the frail, disappearing remnants of the fences” (MG 17). The relationship between the art object and the actual, physical location it stands for does not obey the logic of mimetic representation. It is reminiscent of the dialectic “site/nonsite” theorized by Smithson. The installation in the gallery, the “nonsite,” is an abstraction of the locale outside the gallery, the “site,” insofar as it transforms the artist’s experience of following decaying fence lines into a three-dimensional logical picture. Even though there is no hierarchical relation between the two, the “nonsite” always remains a “non-sight” (Tiberghien 116). The pictures and the organic materials collected on location refer the viewers back to the fence lines while serving as a reminder of their finite life span. The body of objects in the art gallery temporarily stalls the process of degradation and brings decay to a form of temporary stasis appropriate to an art exhibition, but nature continues to consume and disintegrate the locale. Time and weather decompose the work of art at the very moment when the artist offers it to the public’s gaze. Because “site” and “nonsite” are mutually dependent, it comes into being through this discrepancy, this dis-location (Tiberghien 236). Dislocation, therefore, is not synonymous with an absence of place. On the contrary, “[t]he work of art constructs its place by displacing a site” (Didi-Hu- berman 36, my translation), a paradoxical place, displaced and anachronistic, which the viewer is invited to invest and inhabit, however briefly. While Jerome refuses to give the viewers the comfort of “lyrical” explanations of his work (MG 17), the text warns the reader of the possibility of misinterpretation. Despite the success of the exhibit – the artist sells some of his pictures to private and public collections – “[t]he sense of loss that he felt in the face of decay, of disappearance [goes] unnoticed, uncommented upon by the critics” (MG 18). Urquhart’s novel is informed by the painful awareness that there are very few “enduring places,” and that “most monuments cannot survive the decay of their cultural matrix” (Tuan 164). Compounded with the author’s anxious fascination with ruins, this may explain the somewhat fin de siècle atmosphere of a novel where one of the protagonists considers herself “part of [a] vanishing species with [her] pioneer ancestors and a […] focus that drifted to the past” (MG 128). As harrowing as the question “is there no place left?” is (16, italics in the text), Urquhart’s characters never indulge in bemoaning regrets about the erosion of an authentic, rooted sense of place and modernity’s “creeping placelessness” (Cresswell 44). Underlying Sylvia and Jerome’s conversations, the latter’s land art projects, and Andrew’s family story, is the recognition that inhabiting is no longer synonymous with dwelling. Because such a “dis-location” upsets traditional definitions of place, Jean-Marc Besse argues, it calls for “new aesthetic and intellectual categories” to be apprehended (131, my translation). A Map of Glass does not purport to formulate 118

these categories, but may be read as an open-ended reflection on how “ruins and vacancies” entice us to re-examine what it means to be in place.

Anne-Sophie Letessier Paul Valéry University – Montpellier 3

W orks Cited Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge, 2001. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2000. London: Routledge, 2013. Besse, Jean-Marc. Le Goût du monde : Exercices de paysage. Arles: Actes Sud, 2009. Callahan, David. “Entropy and the Totally Buried Home in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass.” Engaging with Literature of Commitment, Volume 2: The Worldly Scholar. Ed. Gordon Collier et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 139-56. Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. 1987. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Cuder-Dominguez, Pilar. “A Biography of Stones: Mourning and Mutability in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass and Michael Redhill’s Consolation.” Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre. Ed. Marta Dvorak and Héliane Daziron-Ventura. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010. 201-14. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Le Génie du non-lieu : Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise. Paris: Minuit, 2001. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. 1690. . Last consulted 4 May 2017. Lorre, Christine. “Reconstructing the Past through Objects in A Map of Glass.” Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre. Ed. Marta Dvorak and Héliane Daziron-Ventura. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010. 185-200. Omhovère, Claire. Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary Canadian Writing. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007. Pogue Harrison, Robert. “Hic Jacet.” Landscape and Power. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. 1994. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 349-64. Sugars, Cynthia. “Haunted by (a Lack Of) Postcolonial Ghosts: Settler Nationalism in Jane Urquhart’s Away.” Essays on Canadian Writing 79 (2003): 1-32. Tiberghien, Gilles. Land art. 1993. Paris: Dominique Carré, 2012. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. 1977. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Urquhart, Jane. “Jane Urquhart: Confessions of a Historical Geographer.” Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 58-83. —. “An Address.” Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre. Ed. Héliane Daziron-Ventura and Marta Dvorak. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010. —. A Map of Glass. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. “Thou Shalt not Lie with Mankind as with Womankind: It Is Abomination!”: Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015)

Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel is a lesbian Bildungsroman set against the backdrop of a patriarchal and homophobic society. The novel depicts the coming-of-age of Ijeoma, and her path towards self‑acceptance. Both in line with writers of former generations, but also quite representative of those of her own generation, also known as the third generation of writers born after 1960, Okparanta finds her own path to give a voice to the LGBTQ community, which has been silenced for too long. Written in the aftermath of the Nigerian “Same- Sex Marriage Prohibition Act,” a confluence of both poetics and politics is at stake in order to explore same-sex sexuality in Nigeria, in a novel deeply anchored in the country’s history.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story entitled “Jumping Monkey Hill,” published in the collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), an “African Writers Works- hop” is organised by an English scholar, Edward Campbell, in South Africa. When the Senegalese participant reads the story she has written – with hindsight the reader un- derstands the main character is a lesbian – Campbell “sa[ys] that homosexual stories of this sort weren’t reflective of Africa, really” (107-8). To which Ujunwa, the protagonist – undoubtedly Adichie’s avatar here – asks: “Which Africa?” (108)1 The remaining part of the scene indicates that the white scholar belittles both Ujunwa and the Senegalese participant, and looks down on them from his “Oxford-trained Africanist” status, despite his claiming that he speaks from the point of view of someone who knows Africa and who aims at preventing writers and intellectuals from using Western grids to analyse African texts: [Campbell] looked at Ujunwa in the way one would look at a child who refused to keep still in church and said that he wasn’t speaking as an Oxford-trained Africanist, but as one who was keen on real Africa and not the imposing of Western ideas on African venues. The Zimbabwean and Tanzanian and white South Africans began to shake their heads as Edward was speaking. “This may indeed be the year 2000, but how African is it for a person to tell her family that she is homosexual?” Edward asked. (108) Campbell does not explain why he believes these stories are not “reflective of Africa.” On the contrary, according to Marc Epprecht, anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s work on “boy-wifery” dating back to the 1930s – it was not published before the 1970s – attests to same-sex relationships. The posthumous publication of Evans-Pritchard’s work has led Epprecht to claim that this is “a revealing instance of homophobic self- censorship among the first generation of Africanist scholars” (“E. E. Evans” 206). Campbell seems to belong to this first generation of Africanist scholars who, in a way, refuse to face reality. Which Africa is Campbell thinking of? In Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Adichie ventriloquizes her concern through her character Olanna when the latter wonders “[h]ow

1. It will be relevant within the scope of this article to address the role of writers in raising awareness and in tackling new, nearly untouched subjects, sometimes in spite of the fact that they are considered taboo. The metafictional aspect at stake in Adichie’s short story points to the Bildung of the writer/intellectual. 120

much did one know of the true feelings of those who did not have a voice?” (250) How to give a voice to subalterns who have been denied a way to express themselves? The recovery of the silenced voice has been the main project at the heart of Subaltern Stu- dies, in order to “recover” the agency of subalterns. In his essay “Chandra’s Death,” the founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, aimed at “reclaiming […] document[s] for history” (36), in order to deliver the history of the people, therefore clearly emphasizing a new way of dealing with History: History as seen from below. Subalternist historians have been aiming to recover the history of subaltern resistance from the perspective of the people. These historians have not shown any willingness to validate the perspectives supported by the State, perspectives – or narratives for that matter – written by elite social groups. In light of these preliminary ideas, I would like to offer a reading of Nigerian‑Ame- rican writer Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel, published in 2015, and entitled Under the Udala Trees. The plot revolves around the coming-of-age/coming-out of the Igbo heroine, Ijeoma, who is eleven years old at the beginning of the novel which spans a period beginning in 1968, during the Nigerian civil war (1967-70),2 and ending with an epilogue dated 13 January 2014.3 Ijeoma’s father passes away during a raid launched by the Nigerian army against Biafran rebels. She therefore grows up in a period of intense political turmoil and discovers sexuality and love with a Hausa girl, Amina, who is her age, but also, once she is an adult, with Ndidi, an Igbo woman. The novel is therefore a Nigerian lesbian Bildungsroman, connected to one of the most, if not the most traumatic events in Nigerian history: the civil war.4 In his essay entitled “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman” (1819), Karl Morgenstern defines the genre whose name he coined: We may call a novel a Bildungsroman first and foremost on account of its content, because it represents the development of the hero in its beginning and progress to a certain stage of completion, but also, second, because this depiction promotes the development of the reader to a greater extent than any other kind of novel. The objective and work- encompassing goal of any poet who produces such a novel will be the pleasurable, beautiful, and entertaining depiction of the formative history of a protagonist who is especially suited to such a development […]. (654-5) Central to this definition of the genre are the focus on the masculine identity of the prototypical protagonist of the Bildungsroman, the emphasis on the progress made by him toward a “certain stage of completion,”5 and the importance of the development of

2. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote Half of a Yellow Sun in 2006, she too offered a new (feminine) voice in the Nigerian War Novel corpus. At the end of the book (437), she provides the reader with a list of references that she has read in order to write her novel. These references attest to the overwhelming number of works about the Nigerian civil war written by men. Chinelo Okparanta falls in with these writers but she offers yet another perspective which will be analysed in this article. 3. This date is worth mentioning as we will see later. 4. Before the Nigerian civil war started, in each region – broadly speaking, the Hausa-Fulani in the North, the Yo- ruba in the West, and the Igbo in the East – the major ethnic group dominated the region: each ethnic group wished to see one of their own reach the federal level. In each region, the ethnic minorities felt alienated from the political process, thus furthering divisions based on identity, and preventing the development of a pan-Nigerian identity. It was obvious then that Nigeria was a state but certainly not a nation. Fear of being dominated by another ethnic group overcame people. Many citizens considered that the federal system, as it was then, was dysfunctional. As an outcome, the civil democratic regime was overthrown by military officers in January 1966, and then the civil war began in 1967 and lasted until 1970. The Eastern region (mainly Igbo) attempted, in vain, to secede to establish the sovereign state of Biafra. It is estimated that more than 800,000 people were killed in two and a half years. 5. The adjective “certain” carries with it the importance of taking into account different types of development. Development is multifaceted and this will have to be taken into account when applied to female development compared to the prototypical male development in the traditional Bildungsroman. 121 Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees the reader while reading the novel. In light of this definition, Under the Udala Trees can be read as a Bildungsroman despite having a female protagonist; the androcentric view of the genre has been debunked since Morgenstern defined the genre, notably by feminist critics among whom Susan Fraiman in Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993). Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism,” I would like to argue that the heroine emerges along with the world and reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. [The hero] is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. (23-4) In The Way of the World, Franco Moretti also parallels the construction of the hero and the construction of the world around him. However, like countless other critics who see the Bildungsroman as a masculine genre, Moretti does not take into account its feminine avatar. The question I would like to tackle then has to do with the manner in which Chinelo Okparanta rewrites the Bildungsroman by not only being in line with the tradition of this genre and, as an outcome, by taking into account its generic memory, the law of the genre, as Jacques Derrida puts it (1986), but also by getting away from this very tradition. Can the subaltern lesbian speak, or at least be given a voice, through a renegotiation of the pattern of the Bildungsroman? How is Nigerian patriarchy disrupted and (possibly) debunked? To what extent can the lesbian Bildungsroman be considered didactic and political? How do poetics and politics converge in this lesbian Bildungsroman?

The Subaltern Can Speak: (Re)Writing the Bildungsroman The Bildungsroman has often been called a moribund genre. David H. Miles even considers that Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) constitutes “an absolute end to the genre” (990), while Franco Moretti regards the First World War as the period which “ma[d]e [the Bildungsroman] impossible” (“A Useless Longing” 44):6 Rather than fulfilling the archetype [of the bildungsroman] the war was to shatter it, because unlike rites of passage, the war killed […]. If one wonders about the disappearance of the novel of youth, then, the youth of 1919 – maimed, shocked, speechless, decimated – provide quite a clear answer. We tend to see social and political history as a creative influence on literary evolution, yet its destructive role may be just as relevant. If history can make cultural forms necessary, it can make them impossible as well, and this is what the war did to the bildungsroman. (“A Useless Longing” 43-4, emphasis added). According to the critic, the trauma – both physical and psychological – associated to the Great War seems to have put an end to the existence of the European Bildungsro- man. However, the genre is currently being revived by subaltern groups. According to Bonnie Hoover Braendlin, who refers to the Bildungsroman written by disenfranchised Americans, the genre “portrays the particular identity and adjustment to problems of people whose sex or color renders them unacceptable to the dominant society; it expresses their struggle for individuation” (75). I wish to argue that Okparanta’s novel stages a protagonist who is a subaltern according to three criteria that interact following

6. Both remarks have to be hedged because they do not take into account Bildungsromane written by “minority” groups. 122

the theory of intersectionality: she can indeed be considered a subaltern because she’s a woman, a lesbian, and an Igbo during the Nigerian civil war. As is common in the female Bildungsroman, Ijeoma becomes aware of the limitations to her self-construction that society imposes on her because she is a woman. If we were to follow the taxonomic definition of the Bildungsroman given by Jerome Buckley and Franco Moretti, among others, the feminine experience does not fit in the theoretical framework of the genre.7 Yet, while referring to the female Bildungsro- man, feminist critic Rita Felski refers to “the historical process of women coming to consciousness of female identity as a potentially oppositional force to existing social and cultural values” (131). This “historical process” goes hand in hand with Bakhtin’s above-mentioned idea, and it is interesting in the context of the publication of Ok- paranta’s novel as Nigeria can be considered not only a patriarchal country but also a homophobic one as will be demonstrated later in this article; the construction of the protagonist’s identity has to be achieved against this backdrop. According to Frai- man, the objective for a woman in the female Bildungsroman is to negotiate crossroads both concrete and metaphorical – “not a single path to a clear destination but […] the endless negotiation of crossroads” (x) – and this is what is occurring in the novel under scrutiny: the path toward self‑acceptance is not a smooth straight line, not teleological, unlike what the memory of the genre seems to postulate. The novel is a first-person narrative where the narrator is the teller of her own story; she constructs her story. Internal narration helps the reader identify and sympathize with the heroine as explained by Kathryn Simpson, who offers a reading of Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit:8 “[the use of internal narrators] is crucial in disarming any hostility or negative response to [the] lesbian identity” (63). This aspect is crucial as we will see further down. Through the character of Ijeoma, Okparanta ventriloquizes a message which targets Nigerian readers, and she gives a voice to those who have always been ostracized, relegated to the margins, in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, and in Nigeria in particular: a voice is therefore given to the LGTBQ community as mentioned in the “Author’s Note”: “This novel attempts to give Nigeria’s marginalized LGBTQ citizens a more powerful voice, and a place in our nation’s history” (325). Ijeoma’s voice represents “the small voice of history” (Guha 2010) during the civil war. According to Jerome Buckley (17) and Marianne Hirsch, in the male Bildungsroman, love affairs have a formative role for the protagonist. Hirsch writes: The novel’s other characters fulfill several fixed functions. […] [L]overs provide the opportunity for the education of sentiment. (In the novel of formation these figures are subordinated to the protagonist in contrast to the social novel where a number of characters provide equal centers of interest.) (298)

7. Indeed, all the novels Buckley addresses in his study were written by men, save for The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot that he reads as “a sort of contrapuntal Bildungsroman, comparing and contrasting hero and heroine as each moves into young adulthood” (97). Susan Fraiman accuses Buckley of androcentricity in the choice of novels he made for his study (2). The idea according to which the Bildungsroman is a masculine genre has not only been conveyed by primary texts but also by literary critics. 8. It bears noting that the coming-of-age of both heroines in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – a novel with countless autobiographical elements – and Under the Udala Trees, has to be achieved against a very religious backdrop. Both titles contain a reference to a fruit; it is beyond the scope of this article to address this issue, but intertextuality seems to be at stake, tending to prove that Okparanta falls in with a (Western) lesbian literary tradition. 123 Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

However, there is little doubt that in a patriarchal society it cannot be the case for women. Indeed, as Ellen Morgan argues, [t]he female protagonists who did grow as selves were generally halted and defeated before they reached transcendent selfhood. They committed suicide or died; they compromised by marrying and devoting themselves to sympathetic men; they went mad or into some kind of retreat and seclusion from the world. (184, emphasis added) The elements which have been highlighted in Morgan’s quotation do appear in the novel under scrutiny. For indeed, the grammar school teacher – who accepts to take care of Amina, a Hausa orphan, and of Ijeoma, who has temporarily been left by her mother in order for the latter to start building a new life elsewhere – interrupts the sexual intercourse between Ijeoma and Amina. When they are together in the shed that they have been allotted in order to sleep, Ijeoma the narrator remembers and describes the following sexual scene, which is perceived from the point of view of Ijeoma the character: Slowly she made her way to my chest. We’d never gone farther than the chest. But now she gently removed my nightgown, and then removed hers. She cupped her hands around my breasts, took turns with them, fondling and stroking and caressing with her tongue. I felt the soft tug of her teeth on the peaks of my chest. Euphoria washed over me. She continued along, leaving a trail of kisses on her way down to my belly. She traveled farther, beyond the belly, farther than we had ever gone. I moaned and surrendered myself to her. I did not until then know that a mouth could make me feel that way when placed in that part of the body where I had never imagined a mouth to belong. The knock snapped us back to reality. (123-4) The overwhelming presence of monosyllabic words points to the intensity of the pleasure felt by Ijeoma, furthered by the verb “moan.” More interestingly even, transgression is clearly inscribed in this passage with the repetition of the comparative form “farther,” indicating a geographical transgression, an idea backed by the transgression of a taboo (“I had never imagined a mouth to belong [there]”) with quite euphemistic terms since the genitals are not explicitly mentioned. Transgression is highly pleasurable for Ijeoma and Amina. However, the disruption of this highly intense moment is not only audible though the plosive /k/ in the next sentence but also visible thanks to the typographical blank on the page pointing to what has been called an “arrested development” by Jed Esty, i.e. their illicit sexual intercourse is interrupted by a patriarchal figure, a man who is also someone who represents authority and is the guardian of morality: a teacher. The latter shames them and this moment is reminiscent of the “Book of Gene- sis”: “We were naked, and we felt our nakedness as Adam and Eve must have felt in the garden […]. He lectured and he lectured, and he lectured. As God must have lectured Eve” (125). The two characters are described as the original couple: a rewriting of the Biblical text is therefore at stake. Under the Udala Trees explicitly stages several instances of lesbian sexual intercourse, unlike what Elleke Boehmer argues appears in some more timid fiction, something she calls “implicit queerness” (“Versions” 117) which may be found in Unoma Azuah’s Sky‑High Flames (2005) for instance. Homosexuality is not depicted as an ideal to reach but the queer approach opens up different – and perfectly acceptable – possibilities of being, as explained by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the consti- tuent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) 124

to signify monolithically” (8). Everyday activities, such as “chatting, or plaiting hair” (Okparanta, Under 124), may also carry erotic innuendos. In Stories of Women, Elleke Boehmer has argued that female chatter, small talk, allows “women [to] share their woes and confirm female bonds […]; they also translate their lives into a medium which they control.” She has also suggested that women’s discourse “can be interpreted not only as a way of life but as a mode of self-making” (98). Amina and Ijeoma are making themselves as they chat together, and they confirm female bonds by plaiting hair, a feminine activity from which men are most of the time excluded – at least so it was at the time when the story is set. These intimate moments – a poetics and politics of (black) hair is at stake here – can enable women to disrupt the patriarchal discourse. After the grammar school teacher has found out about the two teenagers, Ijeoma’s mother comes to pick up her daughter. The mother’s main aim is to make her daughter change by brandishing the Bible and making her study very specific passages from it because she “believed so much that there was a demon in [her daughter]” (59). Pages 90 and 91 are saturated with Biblical passages which interrupt the narration of Ijeoma and Amina’s story, putting a (temporary) end to the alternative her-story in order for “[t]he wonderful power of our glorious and Almighty God!” (92) to prevail. In the same manner, Jude Dibia in his debut novel, Walking with Shadows (2005), showcases the religious justification often put forth in order to discredit homosexuality. It is considered the first Nigerian novel to put forth a queer protagonist, called Adrian Njoko. Adrian’s brother, Chiedu, wields the authority of the holy text: “‘homosexuals […] God forbids it! The law says it’s a felony for a man to practice sodomy’” (50). Adrian’s wife will echo this by stating that “‘[e]ven God forbids the act’” (108). We can consider that Okparanta purpo- sely interacts with Dibia. She might be said to go further than him because unlike Dibia – or Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo in Our Sister Killjoy (1977) – she does not deal with the attraction felt by the protagonist for a white person (Antonio in Dibia’s novel), but with the attraction between two Nigerians, Ijeoma and Amina. The mother – but also the State – are not satisfied with a simple teaching of the holy Word: they brainwash the LGBTQ community as embodied by Ijeoma in order to better discipline and punish – to use Michel Foucault’s words in Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975) – these indocile individuals who yield to their sexual drives. The mother promotes patriarchal and heterosexual values among which lesbianism has no place whatsoever: “There’s nothing more important now than for us to begin working on cleansing your soul” (65). Because her husband died during a raid, Ijeoma’s mother symbolizes this patriarchal authority which she has interiorized; she aims at submitting Ijeoma to heteronormativity or to what Adrienne Rich famously called “compulsory heterosexuality.” The novel uses one Biblical passage several times, a passage that is often quoted by those who oppose homosexuality: “Leviticus 18: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination!” (75) However, Ijeoma does not take these commands at face value: Bible stories and thoughts of their potential as allegories were beginning to invade my mind. […] I wondered about the Bible as a whole. Maybe the entire thing was just a history of a certain culture, specific to that particular time and place, which made it hard for us now to understand, and which maybe even made it not applicable for us today. […] I was excited by my thoughts. (82-3). She contests the Word, refuses to read the Bible literally, and is thrilled at these transgressive ideas. In this novel, what is at stake is a willingness on the part of both the 125 Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees grammar-school teacher and Ijeoma’s mother to wipe out any trace of lesbianism in the two teenagers: “He and his wife would do their part in straightening her out, and Mama would do her part in straightening me out” (129, emphasis added). The presence of a parallel syntax and the use of the word “part” (could it mean “role” here?) may echo Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. The polysemy of the verb “straighten”9 is fruitful and repeated by the narrator because the “straightening” of the gay citizens is central for society: to straighten could not only mean putting someone on the right path here, but also making someone straight, meaning heterosexual, two ideas which actually go hand in hand in a patriarchal society. This aspect also appears earlier in the novel when Ijeoma writes that “[she] wanted to ask God to help [her] turn [her] thoughts away from Amina, to turn [her] instead onto the path of righteousness” (72, emphasis added), a passage that clearly indicates that she has interiorized a patriarchal world view whose shackles she will have to rid herself of.

Disrupting and Debunking Patriarchy Under the Udala Trees is a disruptive novel right from the title. The udala fruit is a symbol of female fertility: in fact, legend indicates that spirit children gather above udala trees when they have had enough of floating between the world of the dead and that of the living. In exchange, women who come and stay under the udala trees are bound to be exceptionally fertile. This Bildungsroman, most of the time perceived as a masculine genre as we have already posited, is subverted (“under”): the novel is clearly set in the feminine realm from the very beginning. Ijeoma “felt anger [and wanted] to retract [her]self from any longer being a pawn. [She] could seize back control of [her]self just by opening [her] mouth and speaking [her] mind” (213, emphasis added).10 Here, Ijeoma wishes to move from passivity to action, one of the criteria that determines whether or not a Bildungsprozess is successful (Suleiman 65). Women in the novel do not need men in order to reach orgasm. They define pleasure outside the masculine law. Masturbation is also presented as a satisfying alternative to compulsory heterosexuality, “debunking the widely accepted notion that penile coi- tus is solely responsible for women’s sexual pleasure” (Zabus, Out 104). Sex with men is depicted as an ordeal and certainly does not lead to any kind of pleasure whatsoever. A re-conquest of the female body – what Stella Bolaki has called “body Bildung” (30) – is put to the fore and the novel showcases female sexual autonomy. When she sees Amina for the first time, by simply looking at her, Ijeoma transgresses patriarchal rules whereby

9. We could possibly see an implicit reference to the straightening of (black) hair as well. Adichie’s Americanah addresses this issue in an interesting manner. The protagonist, Ifemelu, writes a blog about race in America but it is a minor character, Wambui, who comes up with the idea that “[r]elaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do” (208). Admittedly this is a different context both geographically and temporally, but this politics of hair is highly ambivalent, as it is a way to confirm bonds between women, but also to lock them up “in a cage.” Also worthy of interest is the polysemy allowed by the word “straight” regarding the perception of homosexuality as a form of mental disease: people “suffering from” it would need to be put in a straitjacket in order to be controlled. 10. However, she sometimes realises that this resistance is utopian: “That night, I saw the foolishness of my resistance in his [her husband’s] words. Just let me know when you feel ready. I knew in my mind that I might never feel ready. There was no sense prolonging my resistance. Anyway, better to have one person miserable rather than two” (238). The sense of sacrifice for Chibundu’s happiness is clear in this passage. 126

staring is a masculine prerogative: “The moment our eyes locked, I knew I would not be leaving without her” (105). Indeed, according to John Berger, men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. […] The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (40-1, original emphasis) Ijeoma also compares Amina to a water goddess, expressing here some form of same‑sex desire: “Her hair hung in long clumps around her face, like those images of Mami Wata, hair writhing like serpents” (105). The alliteration in /h/ could point to the sounds of pleasure, the moaning sounds, that will be produced during the sexual intercourse between the two teenagers; the mere sight of Amina makes Ijeoma feel short of breath. Homoerotic passages pervade the text and climax in a shared moment of daily life, particularly when the two teenagers prepare dinner: “That evening, Amina and I peeled the yams together, rinsed them together, our fingers brushing against each other’s in the bowl” (106). Peeling yams carries here an extremely sensual and/or sexual connotation, and the idea of a lesbian couple is undoubtedly conveyed. However, there are some compromises in this Bildungsroman, compromise being identified as a key factor of the genre by Moretti: “The myth of bourgeois opportunity has little place for the middle-class female protagonist, and to reinvent the genre around her is to recognize a set of stories in which compromise and even coercion are more strongly thematised than choice” (The Way 6). Towards the middle of the novel, Ijeoma accepts to marry a man, Chibundu, who used to be one of her friends when she was a child. She thus seems to yield to the afore-mentioned compulsory heterosexuality: “I looked at Chibundu, I nodded, and, wordlessly, I accepted his ring” (221). Marriage is often identified as the classic end in the traditionalBildungsroman , indicating the pact sealed with society. However here, this is the moment when silence and “claustrophobia” (222) start for Ijeoma: she feels “trapped in her own body,” (243) “like a coffin: [she] felt a hollowness in [her] and a rattling at [her] seams” (196). In another noteworthy passage (222-3), Ijeoma is about to marry Chibundu. To be more precise, she is married off to him by her mother. Despite the concerns she expresses as regards the institution of marriage – a moment that is often described as the most beautiful day in a woman’s life – she feels discomfort both physical – “Sweat formed on my forehead” (222) – and mental – “There was a bit of claustrophobia in its embrace” (222). The whole chapter, dealing with marriage, ends with a subversion of all the things that are usually perceived as the best parts in a wedding ceremony: “Soon I was going through the sermon, the prayers, the kiss, the handshakes, the smiles, the nods, and the tangential congratula- tions. Because that’s what you do when you find yourself married to a man who both logic and your mother insist is the right man for you” (223). This passage puts forth a depersonalization process, a sort of dissociative moment when Ijeoma and her other self (the part that she seems to be acting/performing) are no longer unified. This can be considered a rewriting of the Bildungsroman since the genre clearly lays the emphasis on the existence of a sovereign, unified self which is identified in the traditionalBildungsro - man by Pin-Chia Feng (41) for example. Once she gives birth to a baby girl, Chibundu is not satisfied because this daughter cannot pass his name onto future generations: he wants a boy, and again here is the reason why Ijeoma accepts to have sex with him: “I now felt Chibundu’s hostage […]. If he would only get his son, then maybe I would 127 Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees finally be excused from any more of those nighttime obligations. Maybe I could finally be released from this captivity of a marriage” (304). Ijeoma is ready to let her husband make love to her for one reason: “But I knew full well that he also held the key to my only imaginable escape. Perhaps by making me a mother, he would save me. Maybe mo- therhood would make me feel more invested in the marriage” (242). Here, giving birth to a boy is a way to obtain freedom. However, quite symptomatically and symbolically, her pregnancy ends up in a m[isc]arriage, sealing the inadequacy of the couple that Chibundu and herself form. However, the novel goes beyond a simplistic rejection of marriage. The institution is not presented as necessarily dysfunctional. There is another form of marriage that seems to be working, but it is not a heterosexual one, it is a homosexual one, with Ndidi (of course there is no marriage per se but it feels like one according to the narrator).11 Therefore, this lesbian Bildungsroman aims to rewrite the pattern of the genre which classically ends with a marriage, in order to question it. In this novel, female empowerment is mainly achieved through a lesbian sexuality. A declaration of sexual independence is at stake – in a society where it is believed that “‘a woman without a man is hardly a woman at all’” (181). The exploration of the body is clearly one of the core issues, and an aesthetic of lesbian pleasure is highlighted, showing to the readers that there is no point in denying the existence of homosexuality. Okparanta is very critical of the heteronormative discourse that lies at the very foundation of the Bildungsroman genre. Her novel normalizes homosexuality.

The Lesbian Bildungsroman: A Political and Didactic Form? Okparanta interrupts the patriarchal discourse since her novel is partly a (Biafra) war novel, most of them having been written by men – two notable exceptions being Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), among others – making this category a mainly male preserve. With Under the Udala Trees, a clear inscription of the female voice inside the national narrative takes place. The “National Question”12 is referred to in the novel: for Okparanta, a possibility

11. This type of marriage might point to what British anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross observed, that is to say a fluidity as regards sexual practices among the Igbo ethnic group, to which Ijeoma and Ndidi – and Okparanta – belong: “I could not get them to explain themselves fully. This is to be regretted as I had occasionally caught glimpses of some peculiar conception of sex or of a thread of bi-sexuality running through everything […] or of a lack of differentia- tion between the sexes – or of an acceptance of the possibility of the transposition of sex – which it could have been interesting to study” (101). As explained by Zabus, “Female husbands in the Igbo context, then and now, are generally widows without a male offspring, who take on ‘wives’ to produce heirs for their husbands’ lineages” (Out 45). What Zabus calls “female Igbo gender bending” (Out 46) seems to be at stake in Ijeoma and Ndidi’s union. Indeed, a specific form of same-sex marriage has been practiced among the Igbos – and other ethnic groups – since before the advent of colonialism. This type of “marriage” has nothing to do with a lesbian marriage, since no sexual relationship is at stake. These women are married for social and legal reasons. Woman marriage has served traditionally in order to exercise social influence in patriarchal societies in which, by definition, inheritance and succession is patrilineal. By marrying, it is possible for women to become the heads of their households and thus gain social status. One good example of female husbandry is when an older woman, who is beyond child-bearing age, who has never married, and is childless, decides to become a female husband because she might want a child to inherit her wealth and her property. In order for inheritance to be ensured, she can look for a younger woman and pay the bride price before the younger woman agrees to marry her and bear her children, who she will have with any man she wishes, or a man chosen by the female husband. The paying of the bride price enables the female husband to obtain the same rights over the children as a “classic” husband. Howe- ver, Okparanta seems to rewrite this practice by showing that sex, rather than lineage, can be at stake in such a union. 12. The “National Question” arises from the extreme diversity that Nigeria represents as regards ethnic groups, with more than 400 languages spoken. It has been a concern since the independence of the country in 1960. Indeed, how is it possible to build a national feeling when there are so many differences – whether they be religious, linguistic or 128

to live with, to love even, someone from another ethnic group, exists. Not only does Ijeoma’s mother refuse her daughter’s lesbianism but she also cannot understand her attraction to a Hausa and, as a result, she quotes the Bible once more in order to prove that the holy text does not accept the mingling of Igbos and Hausas: “Leviticus 19: Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment of linen and woolen come upon thee” (76, original emphasis). The Bildung of the individual parallels the national Bildung13 as exemplified in the following passage where General Yakubu Gowon, who was the head of State in Nigeria from 1966 to 1975, is attributed these words when the civil war ends: “[…] [T] he tragic chapter of violence is just ended. We are at the dawn of national reconciliation. Once again we have an opportunity to build a new nation […]” (116). This is part of a speech addressed to the citizens of Nigeria that Gowon delivered on 15 January 1970. Official history joins fiction, and I would argue that allegorically, the union that Ijeoma, as an Igbo, and Amina, as a Hausa, form, could allegorically represent the “One Nigeria! One Nigeria!” (116) that Hausa soldiers are calling for at the end of the war, but which seems to be extremely difficult to achieve, even in the twenty-first century. Indeed, according to Helon Habila in his latest non-fictional workThe Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (2017): “because these divisions predate the birth of the nation, most people here – and this is true to a large extent in other parts of the country – are always Muslim or Christian first, ethnic affiliation second, and Nigerian third” (68, emphasis added). Added to the disruption of the male discourse on the civil war, Okparanta’s novel can be read as a response to the representation of homosexuals in Nigerian fiction, as exemplified by Wole Soyinka’s African-American mulatto professor, Joe Golder, in The Interpreters (1965). Golder is depicted as a lecherous and predatory figure; homosexuality is in a way described as un-African since he is not an African character per se: he has been “sullied” by Western practices. Black homosexuality seems to be only imaginable in a diasporic context for Soyinka in this novel in particular.14 Ijeoma’s mother sees her daughter’s lesbianism as a disease, as indicated in the following passage: “‘You will be cured by the glory and power of God’” (89, emphasis added). Chantal Zabus explains that “[h]omosexuality is still thought to be not only ‘un-African’ but also a highly suspicious import from the deviant West” (“Out” 251). Okparanta’s text disrupts the patriarchal discourse on homosexuality and displaces the lesbian character from her initial place at the margins to the centre, thus destabilizing the male discourse.

cultural in general – among people? The divide between the North and the South of Nigeria is exemplified by the couple that Ijeoma and Amina form: indeed, while Ijeoma speaks English properly, Amina has difficulties to do so. This fact can be explained by the different ways the North and the South have been ruled by British colonial authorities: indirect rule was carried out differently in the two protectorates. Islam was kept in the North and so was Koranic education; the South was Christianized, with a heavy emphasis on a Western education with the teaching of English, while it was not the case in the North. 13. According to Marxist critic Fredric Jameson in his article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the post-colonial text has to be read allegorically: applied to the Bildungsroman, this theory points to the parallel evolution of the hero/heroine and the nation. This generalization is problematic and cannot be applied to all “third-world” texts but Under the Udala Trees lends itself to such a reading. 14. Mark Mathuray, among others, has sought to bring out the complexities of Soyinka’s novel and this protagonist in “Intimacies between men: modernism, African homosexualities and masculinist anxieties in Wole Soyinka’s The Inter- preters.” This study goes against a homophobic interpretation of Soyinka’s characterization of Joe Golder. I nevertheless argue that this gay character not being Nigerian – or African more generally – but African-American is significant. 129 Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

I would like to further argue that Okparanta elaborates a poetics and politics of queerness. Ijeoma, Amina, and Ndidi achieve subjecthood through same-sex relationships although at times the construction of their subjectivity is slowed down due to the environment in which they live. They may suffer from a form of trauma, resulting from their confrontation with their environment and pointing to a form of vulnerability which they may embrace – or not – in their “process of becoming” (Bakhtin 21): “At the moment when I had found a community that should have been a source of support and security, an unexpected source of self-loathing flared up. […] Self-purification was the goal” (196).15 The novel has to be read in light of the current political evolution of anti-gay rhetoric in Nigeria but also sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, an anti-gay rhetoric that is at the heart of the politicians’ concerns. Indeed, on 7 January 2014, the Same‑Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was implemented in Nigeria, expanding on deeply‑rooted colonial era sodomy laws, and whereby same-sex couples who live together can be sentenced to 14 years in prison. Okparanta’s use of a lesbian character can be perceived as a militant act judging from the overwhelming pressures that this community undergoes especially on the part of religious zealots.16 After the grammar school teacher discovers the two teenagers in the scene we mentioned before, the narrator writes: He had heard of such cases, in which the accused [homosexuals] were stoned all the way to the river. Stoned even as they drowned in the waters of the river. Of course, it was rare that such cases were spoken of. So taboo the whole thing was, anathema, unmentionable not even deserving a name. (125) This is reminiscent of Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem “Two Loves” written in 1892 and in which an indirect reference to homosexuality is made – “the love that dare not speak its name” (28) – linked to the case of Oscar Wilde. Later in the novel, during the party that the discreet lesbian community has organized, some people arrive and decide to purify the place: most of the women manage to hide in the cellar. When they come out, they have to face sheer horror: We had hardly walked two yards when we saw, in the backyard of the church, a flame of orange and blue. A stack of burning logs. Ndidi began to cry, and then all of us were crying too, because we had all seen what remained of the face, and we had all recognized her: Adanna in the midst of the logs, burning and burning and turning to ashes right before our eyes. (208-9) A link can be made between the burning of the Igbos during the civil war – to which the text also refers – and the burning of homosexuals: both have gone or are going through a genocide. As already alluded to, some African leaders use the holy books in order to address the “perversion” that homosexuality represents for them, and according to Mary Mo-

15. We could see an intertextual reference to Oscar Wilde here: the Irish writer referred to same-sex attractions as “forms of sexual madness,” “diseases to be cured by a physician rather than crimes to be punished by a judge” in his “Letter to the Home Secretary of Her Majesty Queen Victoria” (1896; qtd. in Zabus, Out 100). Ijeoma’s will to “purify” herself comes from the internalization of the link between heterosexuality and normality, homosexuality and abnor- mality. 16. It goes without saying that it is easier for Okparanta to write such a story when we know that she is based in the USA, where she arrived when she was 11 years old. The problematic question of Okparanta’s African readership also has to be asked. What validity do these attempts to give the subaltern a voice have when the initiative is launched from a location situated at the very heart of Western power? 130

dupa Kolawole, homosexuality is “completely strange to their world view” (15). Ac- cording to them, homosexuality is “un-African,” a sort of disease that was brought to Africa during colonization.17 Politicians invent scapegoats to displace social anxieties. Therefore, society needs to be purified. The condemnations of the West only reinforce the rejection of homosexuality: change has to come from the inside and this is precisely the goal of this didactic Bildungsroman. At the end of the novel, Ndidi and Ijeoma do form a couple who raise Ijeoma’s daughter, because Ijeoma has divorced Chibundu. Yet, they are not a couple in the open because of the risks this could represent for them. Being homosexual in a heterosexist society – not necessarily in sub-Saharan Africa, it goes without saying – carries with it great threats as explained by John Rechy: We [homosexuals] become strangers in a strange land, sinners in the eyes of religionists, criminals in the eyes of some lawmakers – that is, outlaws. That early separation forces the homosexual into roles and camouflage in order to survive a hostile environment. In later life that separation defines a prominent aspect of the gay sensibility. It includes a terrific sense of dramatic representation that veers at times toward extremity. We might even call it gay theater. (124) The members of the LGBTQ community have no choice but to pretend, to pass themselves off as people who they are not really, to act, in order to simply survive. The didactic aspect of the genre was identified by Karl Morgenstern as we have seen at the beginning of this article, but also by Marianne Hirsch (298), who argues that the Bildung- sroman participates in the Bildung of the reader. Several examples appear in the novel: Just because the Bible recorded one specific thread of events, one specific history [Ijeoma is referring to Adam and Eve], why did that have to invalidate or discredit all other threads, all other histories? Woman was created for man, yes. But why did that mean that woman could not also have been created for another woman? Or man for another man? Infinite possibilities, and each of them perfectly viable. (83) This passage puts to the fore an interior monologue in which Ijeoma shares her thoughts with the reader. The questions which are asked have a clear goal: triggering a reflection process in the reader in order for the latter to start questioning what is presented as unquestionable truth about homosexuality by both religious authorities and the State. Also part of this didactic aim, hope is found in the protagonist’s mother’s final acceptance of her daughter’s lesbianism, indicating a better future for the LGBTQ community.18 It seems that Okparanta attempts to take Jude Dibia up on his wish to imagine a new Nigeria where people “would be more receptive and less judgmental than they were now” (Dibia 253) as regards homosexuality, since Ijeoma and Ndidi remain in Nigeria while other African short stories or novels addressing LGBTQ issues – Walking with Shadows included – end in Europe or in America, seen as Eldorados for the community (whether this is true or false is not the point here). This novel also aims to reach an end

17. This is an idea that was already expressed by colonialist Sir Frederick Jackson (1930) when he wrote that homosexuality is absent in Africa because of the “‘good sense of the natives and their disgust toward the bestial vices practiced by Orientals’” (Qtd. in Epprecht, Heterosexual 771). One of the examples that can be provided comes from notorious Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe who, in 2002, described homosexuals as “mad person[s] […]; we don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country, we have our own culture, our own people” (qtd. in Zabus Out 3). 18. In Walking with Shadows, Jude Dibia uses an epigraph by Alfred North Whitehead: “What is morality in any given time and place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.” Chantal Zabus affirms that “[t]his pronouncement which the famous English mathematician-cum-philosopher made on 17 August 1941 is very much in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a recurrent text in filigree in […] various West African novels […]” (Out 96). 131 Lesbian (Body-)Bildung in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees to the “single story” – to use Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words in her 2009 TED Talk – of homophobia in Africa whereby the LGBTQ community would be particularly targeted on the African continent. Acceptance can be found, and hope certainly is part of Ndidi and Ijeoma’s world view: Some of those nights when we are together in bed, Ndidi wraps her arms around me. She molds her body around mine and whispers in my ear about a town where love is allowed to be love, between men and women, and men and men, and women and women, just as between Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa and Fulani. Ndidi describes the town, all its trees and all the colors of its sand. She tells me in great detail about the roads, the directions in which they run, from where and to where they lead. “What is the name of the town?” I ask. […] “[…] You see, this place will be all of Nigeria.” (321) The use of the present tense inscribes this moment in the immediate environment of the reader. The couple Ndidi and Ijeoma embody attests to the possibility of a coexistence and to the greatness that all sorts of couples could represent. The repetition of the conjunction “and” makes all kinds of possibilities intermingle, whether they be sexual possibilities, or ethnic ones. Desiring a better future, daydreaming as Ernst Bloch identifies inThe Principle of Hope, function as utopian forerunners and anticipations of a future society where oppression will have disappeared and happiness will have become prevalent. This iconoclastic Utopian impulse is also a militant act. In her debut novel, Chinelo Okparanta proposes a rewriting of the Bildungsroman whose androcentric leaning has long been pointed out by literary critics. By staging a lesbian protagonist, and by describing a very feminine world view, she manages to prove that the subaltern can indeed speak. Although the protagonist, as a female, but above all as a lesbian, has to face many hurdles in her “process of becoming,” she nevertheless succeeds in reaching a “certain stage of completion,” to go back to Karl Morgenstern’s definition of theBildungsroman genre, by questioning the patriarchal and religious values she is presented with. Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees and her short story “America” – published in the short story collection Happiness Like Water (2013) – both stage lesbian protagonists who, despite the threats against the LGBTQ community, finally remain in Nigeria to live their lives as freely as they can. This attests to one of the central objectives in the writing of a Bildungsroman, i.e. an emphasis on the reader’s development thanks to the possible identification he/she may feel with the protagonist. Written in the aftermath of a strengthening of an anti-gay law in Nigeria, Under the Udala Trees thus combines poetics and politics and explores the ethical role of literature.

Cédric Courtois École Normale Supérieure de Lyon/Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Works cited

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‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body

The black African body is a highly historicised space as it has been tortured and traumatised through the processes of enslavement and colonialism. As for the black female body, a raced and gendered space, it has been even more exploited, objectified and fragmented by hegemonic and patriarchal systems. In diasporic Caribbean women’s literature, the black female body is often depicted as a site of tension, and a complex entity struggling to make itself heard outside of historical spaces of oppression and mutilation. This body needs to transcend traumatic memory in order to renew and heal. Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems and M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and A Genealogy of Resistance allow the black female body to be heard beyond intersectional oppressions. This paper seeks to demonstrate how these women writers embody resistance as they assert corporeal visibility and allow transcultural bodies to speak and heal through creative discourse.

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? (Truth 253) Black female abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s question “Ain’t I a woman?” in her well- known 1851 speech at the Ohio Women’s Suffrage convention emphasises the need for the woman of African descent to assert her womanhood through the reconstruction and liberation of her body and tongue. Truth urges her audience to look at her and attracts attention to the very characteristics of a black female body, which is marked by gender as well as race and class. She overtly challenges the construction of popular stereotypical representations of the black female as voiceless and passive and asserts her physical presence, thus reclaiming her female body and her humanity. It is indeed her in- corporeal body that Truth reasserts on stage as in traditional African cosmology, the human body is perceived as “a capsule, an integral whole, incorporating blood, water, fire, air, soil, and all other symbols of life” (Wainwright and Tucker 680). Contrastingly, in the Eurocentric Christian-based and Puritan-influenced systems of thought, the body is mostly perceived in physical terms, as it is seen as a purely biological object. According to Western philosophy, the body is a fixed entity and an object which is controlled by the power of the mind. Feeling restricted by this body/mind dichotomy and the imperfect bodily identity that patriarchal discourses granted them, numerous European feminist theorists contrived to resist the fixedness of these conceptual frameworks and rethink the female body. A number of European egalitarian feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft1 and Simone de Beauvoir have attempted to redefine womanhood taking into account the specificities of the female body through its capacities for reproduction. While de Beauvoir’s question “What is a woman?” is fundamentally linked to the restrictive vision of the

1. See Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1833. 136

female body as the exclusive marker of womanhood, in her 1949 pioneering work The Second Sex, she opens the debate on the cultural “constructedness” of femininity, claiming that the woman is not born, but made. De Beauvoir’s distinction between sex (as purely biological) and gender (as socially and discursively constructed) has actually paved the way for most contemporary feminists such as Nancy Chodorow, who have valued the notion of subjectivity as socially constructed.2 Constructionist feminists have indeed focussed on cultural values and meanings, and have not considered biological differences as central. In a sense however, these constructionist theories reiterate patriarchal binaries between body and mind, as Elizabeth Grosz argues that according to them, “the body itself, in the strongest version of this position, is irrelevant to political transformation, and in the weakest version is merely a vehicle for psychological change” (Volatile Bodies 17). Indeed, through their dismissal of the body as subjective, constructionists have failed to consider the female body within its lived experience and its incorporated specificities in terms of race, class and gender. In other words, Euro- pean feminists “have often assumed a universal body, an assumption that has usually left some women silenced, inhabiting the borderlands” (Conboy, Medina and Stanbury 3). It is clear however that the female body cannot be universalised nor can it be “understood as an ahistorical, biologically given, acultural object” (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 18). The concern of this study being the African Caribbean female body, the theories of feminists such as Gayatri Spivak or Luce Irigaray, who consider the raced, gendered and classed bodies through the notion of the “lived body” appear as the most relevant. As Spivak puts it, “if one thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought” (“In a Word” 127). The body is therefore a product of the tensions between women’s lived experiences and the cultural meanings which have marked women’s bodily experiences. As a matter of fact, the black female body must be analysed within its very specificities, as a marked historicised space of conflicts, a site of trauma and dehumanization through the processes of enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism. The bodies of enslaved African women have been cruelly exploited, sexually abused, chained, pried open, flayed and discarded, and were exposed to the same severe working conditions as their male counterparts that they often outnumbered as field hands. As significantly pointed out in the introduction to Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Rep- resentations by African American Women, In slavery, the black female body served as one of the prime technologies of reproduction and commodification. […] In short, historically and socially, the black female body tends to be defined and viewed as the antithesis of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Demonized, debased, raped, dismissed – no other body in the United States has been so materially and discursively hobbled. (Bennett and Dickerson 13) Bennett and Dickerson’s scholarly volume is relevant to this study as it explores the extent to which African American women have developed discursive strategies to reclaim their own bodies; “how they have deployed and redeployed language and signs to revise and repossess the discursive body and how the material body has been recovered through performance and other transformative and transgressive acts” (13). Whether

2. See Nancy Chodorow’s influential bookThe Reproduction of Mothering, 1978. 137 Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body it took place in the cotton fields in the Southern United States or on the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean, the African woman’s experience of enslavement has been one of resistance against all forms of oppression and one of bodily and discursive reclamation and self-reconstruction. As theorised by feminists Gayatri Spivak, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous through their concept of “écriture feminine” or “writing the feminine body,” The only way to move from a position of objectified servitude to a position of full subjectivity is for women to write the truth of their bodies. Thus, the cry to produce embodied, personal, deeply felt “feminine” writing, in one’s true voice, serves as a call for independence. (Senft 276) The voice is essentially embodied: feminine writing embraces the liberation of body and voice, and in the case of women of African descent, memory and re-membering play a key part in this process. This paper examines a selection of poetic excerpts by Trinidadian Canadian writer NourbeSe Philip and Guyanese British poet Grace Ni- chols, so as to get an insight into their strategies for imposing a re-writing/righting of their bodies, for reclaiming their tongues and reconstructing their subjectivities. I wish to demonstrate the extent to which these two diasporic African Caribbean writers allow the body “to erupt” into their texts as Philip would put it. Philip and Nichols develop two rather unconventional approaches to the black female body: the first draws on the synecdoche of the tongue and the incrimination of English as the language of the op- pressor, while the second sublimes the fat black woman’s body, thus rejecting Western norms of beauty. The question is, to what degree do they manage to make the diasporic African Caribbean female body visible, audible and tangible, hence reconstructing and re-membering it beyond historical trauma? To NourbeSe Philip, the re-acquisition of power essentially resides in the capacity to recreate one’s own “I-mage,” a fundamental process to achieve self-assertion: The power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new I-mages, I-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these I-mages succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually its collective consciousness. (She Tries Her Tongue 78) As Curdella Forbes explains in her study “This Space/Dis/Place Between: The Poe- tics and Philosophy of Body, Voice and Silence,” “the act of I-maging incorporates the history of rapine and degradation into the being that comes to voice; equally, it does violence to English language in order to realize its own resistive, transformative power” (80). The notion of I-mage therefore entails a genuine process of self-definition and self- reconstruction through the discursive self. As voice and trauma are embodied, the black female body is a body-memory, one that expresses the interconnection between time, self and voice, a dialectic that may allow self-recovery. As Deleuze argues, “memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect of self by self ”: Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside and, as such, forces every present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory: forgetting is the impossibility of return and memory is the necessity of renewal. (89) Philip’s texts She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989) and A Genealogy of Resist- ance (1997), and Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poem offer comparable prospects of bodily re-membering and processes of healing and renewal. In her prose and poetry 138

work A Genealogy of Resistance, Philip denounces the dislocation of African Caribbean female bodies and depicts bodies in search of discursive recreation, provided that the black African women’s tongues be re-membered. In the New World, the African woman creating life and seeing the men – the white men – taking away her children and selling them. The man who walking, getting into his boat, his plane, his ship, taking the product of her body and the body’s wisdoms – her children – like he taking the crops she tending. Body and Place. Fertilized. Cultivated. Harvested. In the same way. Between parent. And child. Mother. And child. Father. And child. (93) This excerpt denounces the black female’s objectification in the process of enslavement, which took “the product of her body and the body’s wisdoms.” Body and place appear as intrinsically linked through the predominance of the semantic field of cultivation. The black female body is dehumanised and metaphoricised as land, as it is ploughed, fertilized and harvested for reproduction. Philip indeed appears to engage in a sort of “body-land-language association,” the body being “a metaphoric construct, still marked by the gender/power association, which can apply to architecture, the state, language, or any other structure – including land” (New 110). Echoing Ben Heller’s statement in “Landscape, Femininity and Caribbean Discourse” that Caribbean landscapes are often metaphoricised as feminine, the black female body is here depicted as colonised and abused in the same way as the land. In Philip’s Genealogy, the repeated use of passive structures and the ruptured structures evoke the dislocation and fragmentation of families, as enslaved mothers were deprived of their children. Through the ellipsis of the auxiliary verbs, which is typical of the Caribbean Creole demotic, criminal processes are condemned in a more straightforward manner and enslavers are openly accused of depriving African women of their bodies, and of their very being. Far from performing victimhood, the following verses brutally highlight some of the rebellious responses from African women to the dispossession of their bodies: Some African women nursing – Infanticide! Reproducing A-borting A warping and twisting of the filaments of silence between African and body – body & text body becoming text which she learning to read in a newlanguageandshecomingtounderstandhowtosurvivetextbecomingbody bodiesdeadbodiesmurderedbodiesimportedbredmutilatedbodiessold (Genealogy: 93-4) Recalling the horrible facts, Philip engages her reader in an exploration of the black female body as profoundly mutilated and fractured, but also as intrinsically associated with the text. From “body and place” in the earlier verses, this stanza now pictures “body & text,” “body becoming text,” thus the survival of the body resides in its very capacity to become tongue in order to voice its trauma and recreate itself discursively. The absence of punctuation and the opacity of the last section convey a suffocating feeling that may force the reader to imagine this dismembered body scarred by rejected maternities and striving for survival. While the African Caribbean female has long been depicted as a silent victim, Philip here underlines her silence as a tool for resistance and reparation through acts of rebellion such as abortions and infanticides, which were used as forms of bodily resistance against patriarchal oppressions. Resistance and self- reliance therefore allow the black female subject to assert her self-power and construct 139 Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body a new language which is translated in the final series of lines with connected words. The absence of spaces between the words further conveys the intimate connection between body and text. Despite the distortion and murder of physical/material bodies, new discursive bodies are created as the textual bodies transcend trauma and assert their unalterable presence on the page. In order to resist oppression, the enslaved woman vows to control her fertility and her children’s fate, thus repossessing her rights to her body and mind, a recurrent pattern in slave narratives. Bodily reconstruction through discourse is in fact a common pattern in slave narratives by women. In The History of Mary Prince, the only published narrative by a once enslaved woman in the Caribbean, Prince recounts her strategies to survive and overcome the hardships through acts of resistance. Among those were the numerous times when she took control over her body, her space and her speech by talking back to her owners and colonisers, thus deconstructing stereotypes about the silenced and passive enslaved woman. The story of Prince and the transformation of her bodily pains into voice and text are embodiments of resistance. Although the physical body has been traumatised and dis-membered, the textual/discursive body always remains and in that sense, the African Caribbean woman voices a bodily speech; one that is re-membered and re-connected inside as well as outside of the body, “a textual body that attempts to supplant the physical one” (Francis-Brockert 114), a body which actually becomes a “source of restorative abundance” (Bennett and Dickerson 10). Throughout Philip’s Genealogy of Resistance, the black African female’s utterances appear as reshaped so as to voice the continuous processes of renewal and survival through speech and self-assertion. In the same way, in her poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, the verses are intimately linked to the poem’s display on the page through a sort of umbilical connection; the poetic voice produces and reproduces the symbols of female discursive empowerment through the synecdoche of the tongue: When silence is Abdication of word tongue and lip Ashes of once in what was … Silence Song word speech Might I… like Philomela … sing continue over into … pure utterance. (Philip, She Tries Her Tongue 72)

The above passage suggests that the black female artist may find her own ways of expression through art as the reference to the Greek myth of Philomela implies. Philo- mela, who has endured a double rape (the rape of her body and the rape of her speech as her tongue was then cut and stolen), finds her only ways of expression in weaving and music. Despite this double mutilation, the female subaltern’s “pure utterance” does resist as she finds expression through silence; thus silence can speak. In Philip’s poetry, the act of silencing however symbolizes the rape of the expression of the self, a dual vision which is reminiscent of black feminist Hortense Spiller’s definition of rape as the violation of both body and mind (68). The black female body has been historically 140

mutilated on two important grounds, body and speech, and as a matter of fact, Philip’s poetry condemns this subjugation; her poem “Mother’s Recipes on How to Make a Language Yours or How Not to Get Raped” emphasises this association between physical body and discursive body. Memory thus allows speech and body to renew and heal. The smallest cell remembers a sound (sliding two semitones to return home) a secret order among syllables Leg/ba O/shun Shan/go heart races blood pounds remembers speech (37) The dislocation of the verses on the page epitomizes the dangers of dis-membering. This means on the one hand, the fragmentation of the physical body, thus a dispersal of its members, and on the other, the forgetting of the sacred word, “the secret order/ among syllables” which must be uttered to allow self-assertion and self-representation, and above all to resist the silencing of the body. In She Tries Her Tongue, the opening poem of her sequence entitled “Discourse on the Logic and Language,” which ironically is rather illogical and discordant, the poetic voice seems silenced and alienated by the use of English, as the link between (“mother”) and (“tongue”) is explored: I have no mother tongue no mother to tongue no tongue to mother to mother tongue me. (56) The multi-functionality of word categories and the absence of punctuation in this excerpt illustrate Philip’s wish to subvert and reconstruct language. While Philip’s poems offer multiple interpretations to literary critics, their apparent lack of conformity often creates discord and confusion for modern Canadian readers, a strategy that is still prompted by a wish to deconstruct and reconstruct language. Philip’s discourse is disorientating, as it is characterised by non-standard patterns, and the omnipresence of silences materialised by the gaps on the page, a style that attracts the reader’s attention through the form, hence highlighting the contents. She seeks to trouble the reader’s normative perceptions through a new disorientating language, a tongue of her own. This strategy is reminiscent of Indian Canadian writer Ashok Mathur’s non-standard paper entitled DisOrientation Chapbooks where unheard voices were published in a chapbook format in order to displace the reader’s perception through disturbing linguistic forms. Robert Budde draws a link in terms of objectives between NourbeSe Philip’s work and these chapbooks and acknowledges “the form of the book as a site of resistance and 141 Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body ideological contestation. This type of art puts tremendous pressure on the connection between form (the shape, rhythms of discourse, signs, representations, etc.) and ideology (the systems of meaning fortified by those forms). Form undoes race” (293) and specific discursive strategies have transformative powers. Philip’s synecdoche of the tongue, which is central to the whole collection, reveals the poet’s main preoccupation, as the tongue represents a vital part of the human body giving the power of speech and therefore the power of self-definition. The poem “Dis- course on the Logic and Language” conveys a certain confusion and drives the poetic voice to a definite conclusion, that English cannot be her mother tongue. Hence the tongue must be reconstructed and reshaped so that the body may be able to express the reality of its specific experience. As Gender Studies theorist Patricia Mohammed explains, in the Caribbean and its diasporas, the linguistic situation is a complex one, as modes of communication do not only depend on English but on Creole language, on popular culture as well as on what she terms “the Creole expression of the body in Caribbean society, the language of intimacy” (21). This Creole expression of the body can be defined as a cultural bodily language that crosses gender, race and class boundaries, as it is a language whose codes are created and recreated within Caribbean local communities. Bodily language and sounds such as the African Caribbean kiss teeth, that prolonged sound of disapprobation,3 epitomize the complexity of diasporic African tongues. Philip’s imagery of the tongue actually seeks to allow the African Caribbean woman to overcome her historical silencing by constructing her own coding. In Philip’s poetry and prose, the conception of English as pure is disturbed, as the diasporic Afri- can woman is endowed with a language of her own construction; this is a language that she re-discovers and re-members in order to voice her specificities and reclaim her historically distorted body. Throughout Philip’s texts, the reader is constantly confronted with a new language and silences are progressively transformed into bodies of speech, a language/silence dichotomy which is underlined throughout Pedro Carmona-Ro- driguez’s study Discourses of Dissent: Language, Silence and Transcultural Transit in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Writings. In fact, NourbeSe Philip’s poetic deconstruction of the English language occurs through “the crack of silence,” when the body speaks, when “the body becomes tongue”: That body should speak When silence is, Limbs dance The grief sealed in memory; That body might become tongue Tempered to speech And where the latter falters Paper with words The crack of silence. (72) Here the poet further transforms the silent wounded bodies into linguistic testimonies where “the grief [is] sealed in memory” (Philip, She Tries Her Tongue 72), and the scribal appears to allow the healing of “this body whose flesh carries the female and the male

3. “Kiss-teeth is an everyday Caribbean oral gesture; it is an inherently evaluative and inexplicit oral gesture with a sound-symbolic component, and a remarkably stable set of functions across the diaspora: an interactional resource with multiple possibilities for sequential organization, often used to negotiate moral positioning among speakers and referents, and closely linked to community norms and expectations of conduct and attitude” (Figueroa and Patrick 1). 142

to the frontiers of survival,” as Hortense Spillers would formulate it (67). In Abeer Re- fky Seddeek’s words, Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue is “a clear protest against the gendered, racist and sexist silencing practiced by the colonisers against the colonised. In it, Philip strives to break the silence and to re-obtain the language that has been inhibited inside the African female slave” (305). Through Philip’s poetry, the black female body claims its right to exist and survive as the poetic voice seeks to recreate the body beyond historical trauma and prejudice. Grace Nichols’s poetry collection The Fat Black Woman’s Poems depicts the reconstruction of the black woman’s I-mage through the deconstruction of historical stereotypes on the black woman in North America. Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins identifies four main representations of the black woman in North American societies: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, and the Jezebel (73). The most common myth is certainly the representation of the black woman as a docile and servile mammy, generally depicted as over-weight and dark-skinned. Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles extends the myth of the mammy to the Caribbean context and argues that black women were defeminised: The black woman was ideologically constructed as essentially “non-feminine” in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness. Pro-slavery writers presented her as devoid of the feminine tenderness and graciousness in which the white woman was tightly wrapped. (10) African Caribbean writers and theorists have struggled to deconstruct these racist representations of the black woman as anti-feminine, and as the passive and obedient fat dark-skinned mammy. Caribbean-American feminist Barbara Christian actually subverts the myth of the harmless domestic mammy in her analysis of slave narratives, as she describes a mammy who is a “cook, housekeeper, nurse-maid, seamstress, always nur- turing and caring for her folk. But, unlike the white southern image of the mammy, she is cunning, prone to poisoning her master, and not at all content with her lot” (5). In her poetry collection, Grace Nichols also brutally deconstructs the “mammification” process (Collins 74) and subverts historical racial stereotypes. In her poem entitled “Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while having a full bubble bath,” the fat black woman is depicted through her activist ideals which seem to intermingle with her body: O how I long to place my foot on the head of anthropology to swing my breasts in the face of history to scrub my back with the dogma of theology […] (Nichols 13) In this excerpt, the black female body seeks reconstruction through rebellion against canonical discourse and against major theoretical fields, whether it is anthropology, history, religion, medicine, aesthetics or linguistics. Nichols’s poetry inverts the historical process of objectification and fragmentation of black female bodies, as she chooses to depict those dominant theoretical discourses as tightly associated with the biological parts of the black female body itself. This discursive framework which historically degraded and fragmented the black female flesh and psyche is now challenged by the 143 Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body poetic voice which attempts to deconstruct and reshape it, hence illustrating French Feminist Hélène Cixous’s statement that Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement. (875) Defying the master codes, Nichols’s poetic voice imprints her body parts on the page and the imagery of the fat black female reflecting while soaking in a bubble bath is a mixture of femininity and resistance. The black female subject is made highly visible throughout this poetry collection, which allows her to perform within the spaces previously denied to her. Through the re-empowered figure of the fat black woman who performs her poems beyond stereotypical assumptions, Grace Nichols’s bodily poetics exemplifies diasporic African Caribbean women writers’ urge for spatial repossession and bodily self-reclamation. As Andrea Elisabeth Shaw explains in The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies, Superimposing fat onto the black female body doubles its representative status as the antithesis of white femininity, since the dominant perspective on fatness in Western culture replicates the view of what blackness is already understood as denoting: bodily indiscipline and rebellion. This assessment of fatness and blackness as highly sexualised concomitantly supports a Western patriarchal ideal of chastity and restraint as behavioral demonstrations of beauty. (50) In her poem “The fat black woman remembers,” Nichols’s poetic voice goes further in her deconstruction of historical stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima or the black mammy, through a series of phrases conveying contradictory representations: The fat black woman remembers her Mama and them days of playing the Jovial Jemima […] Starching and cleaning (5) The fat black woman remembers her imposed performance of the jovial domestic Je- mima, reminiscent of the Aunt Jemima pancake boxes, and an extension of the figure of the black matriarch, the evil black mother. […] pressing little white heads against her big-aproned breasts seeing down to the smallest fed feeding her own on Satanic bread But this fat black woman ain’t no Jemima Sure thing Honey/Yeah (5) The final stanza depicts a scene which re-exploits the racist construction of the servile black mammy feeding white children with her “big-aproned breasts” while “feeding her own [children] on satanic bread.” This image is reminiscent of Philip’s representation of infanticides, but it also recalls Beryl Gilroy’s analysis in “Swingers’ Past and Present” which mentions enslaved women on plantations as “colloquially named ‘Long Bubbies’” (11), and as associated with bestiality. Where Philip is obsessed with the sym- bolism of the tongue, Nichols insists on the imagery of the breasts. During slavery, fecundity and breastfeeding were fundamental to enslavers who saw African women as 144

“wombs of iron and gold” (Meillassoux 313). In her study, Andrea Shaw draws an analogy between Nichols’s fat black woman and Nanny of the Maroons, the one-breasted female warrior whose “use of her fleshy buttocks in an act of rebellion places her as a viable entity in the discussion of the fat black woman’s sexuality” (70-1). Nichols’s fat black woman is therefore a female warrior figure who swings her breasts and buttocks at misrepresentations, hence rejecting the historical continuum of oppressions against women of African descent. Grace Nichols’s poetry allows the fat black woman to reject discriminatory discourses and assert her identity in a colloquial language of her own. At the end of the poem, the discursive construct of the assertion “But this fat black woman ain’t no Jemima / Sure thing Honey / Yeah” appears to echo Sojourner Truth’s rhetorical question “Ain’t I a woman?” This last verse actually reminds the reader that this is performed poetry, and that the fat black woman’s voice is constantly resonating throughout the poems. Nichols’s poetry indeed grows more significant in performance, as the fat black woman’s voice can be heard beyond the physicality of the body. In a sense, the discursive and physical bodies intermingle, to replicate Butler’s theory of gender performativity (“Performative Acts” 155). Nichols’s “fat black woman’s body” is indeed in perpetual tension, it is “multiple” as opposed to “unitary”: The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory, refusing self-transformation. (Butler, Undoing Gender 28) Far from being “unitary,” Nichols’s bodies are embodiments of self-transformation and disturbance. Similarly to Philip’s poetry, Nichols’s poetic strategy implies a certain subversion of canonical English by disturbing accepted grammatical categories and given constructs, so as to create new alternative spaces for bodily assertion through speech. The two poems “The Fat Black Woman Composes a Black Poem” (14) and “…And a Fat Poem” (16) function together so that they deconstruct binaries and reject normative categorisation. While the first is an obvious satire on stereotypical perceptions of blackness as associated with exoticism and sexuality (black and bold, black and sweet, black and beautiful, black music…), the second uses fatness within an anaphoric pattern and makes it a central feature in the following poem: Fat is as fat is as fat is Fat does as fat thinks Fat feels as fat please Fat believes […] and fat speaks for itself. (17) Not limited to its primarily adjectival category, the word “fat” acts as a subject throughout the poem and is surely a personification of the fat black woman figure. Fatness is here positively associated with freedom of speech, belief, feeling and choice, hence allowing bodies to exist as such, without being restricted by Western norms of beauty. The fat black female body is not depicted as passive, it is not a commodification, it is now a libe- rated entity, one that can perform its own identity (triplication of “fat is”) and construct 145 Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body its own speech against the master discourse (“fat speaks for itself ”). “By creating a protagonist whose otherness is triply configured through her race, gender, and size, Nichols contests the marginalization of non-white and non-male individuals within a Caribbean postcolonial context” (Shaw 55). The poem entitled “Afterword,” which concludes the collection, depicts the fat black woman as transcending traumatic stereotypes and as eventually reconstructing her own subjectivity, one that embraces fatness, gender, race and class: Behold now the fat black woman who will come out of the forest when the last of her race is finally and utterly extinguished […] the fat black woman will emerge and tremblingly fearlessly stake her claim again. (16) The fat black woman is here a personification of survival against all odds; beyond the traumatic erasure of her counterparts, she still “come(s) out of the forest,” she still “emerge(s),” and her speech remains audible until the end of the poem. In the same way as Philip portrays a black female body which breaks the silence, Nichols allows the fat black woman to have the concluding words as she “fearlessly stakes her claim again” (16). Through the adverb “again” and the repetition of “last,” the fat black woman’s speech is depicted as forever recreating and renewing in a sort of discursive endlessness. In Nichols’s poems, the black female body is forever resurrecting and reconstructing itself through speech and bodily performance, as “one is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well” (Butler 524). Grace Nichols’s work is complex in its treatment of corporeality and her poetry is one of disturbance and deconstruction, in which body and voice are central and in constant tension with the outside hegemonic wor(l)d. In the same way as that of Philip, her poetry seems to work towards the ultimate goal of “decentring the language” which has contributed to fragmenting African bodies and selves (She Tries 88). Ultimately, both Nichols and Philip seek to represent the black female body/self against its historical misrepresentations as soundless and invisible, thus turning silence into productive utterance. Indeed, “women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impre- gnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse” (Cixous 886). Nichols’s fat black woman rejects submissiveness and becomes the epitome of self-assertion, as in her poem “Assertion” she actually decides to “sit down on the golden stool of authority and refuses to move” (8). Nichols’s fat black woman indeed chooses to empower herself through self-positioning and refusal to “censor her body,” to quote Hélène Cixous further: By writing her self, woman returns to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. (880) 146

Through the re-membering and repositioning of their African ancestors’ distorted bodies, Philip and Nichols actually negotiate new forms of subjectivity beyond bodily materiality; they subvert the master codes and deconstruct the master language in order to claim their own speech. For Philip, re-membering the body entails reclaiming and reshaping the tongue and voicing its trauma in order to heal. For Nichols, the body must be re-membered against its stereotypical representations and reconstructed through performance. Healing entails the re-assembling of the self through discursive performativity and through bodily re-envisioning. Both female poets truly engage in a similar process of “resistance that stretches beyond discursive realms” (Bennett and Dickerson 316), as they reclaim their flesh-and-blood bodies while re-membering their language. As a matter of fact, the task of the diasporic African Caribbean woman writer lies in the constant deconstruction of hegemonic and phallocentric discourses as her essential aim is to “revenge the self / broken / upon the word” (Philip, She Tries 56). Revenging the self thus supposes re-membering and reconnecting the fragmented selves through the power of discourse. Within this process of re-membering, recovery can be envisioned, and the diasporic Caribbean woman poet can engage in a genuine process of re-appropriation of her body and tongue. In a way, “this body – turned foreign, alien, and unfamiliar as the result of traumatic experience – becomes the vehicle through which trauma is told and, possibly, worked through” (Di Prete 4). The poetic texts of M. NourbeSe Philip and Grace Nichols function as writing, talking, and even performing cures, which allow self-healing and self-assertion through the creation of new therapeutic polyphonies that can be heard across borders.

Myriam Moïse The University of the French Antilles

W orks Cited Beauvoir (de), Simone. The Second Sex. 1953. Trans. H.M. Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Beckles, Hilary. Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999. Bennett, Michael, and Vanessa Dickerson, eds. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2001. Budde, Robert. “After Postcolonialism: Migrant Lines and the Politics of Form in Fred Wah, M. NourbeSe Philip and Roy Miki.” Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature. Ed. Laura Moss. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2003. 282-94. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (Dec. 1988): 519-31. —. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Carmona-Rodriguez, Pedro. Discourses of Dissent: Language, Silence and Transcultural Transit in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Writings. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism, Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875-93. Collins, Patricia H. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2002. Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. London: Continuum, 1988. 147 Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body

Di Prete, Laura. Trauma, Corporeality and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006. Figueroa, Esther, and Peter L. Patrick. “The Meaning of Kiss-Teeth.” Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 35 (2001): 1-36. Forbes, Curdella. “This Space/Dis/Place Between: The Poetics and Philosophy of Body, Voice and Silence.” The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Eds. M. Bucknor and A. Donnell. London: Routledge, 2011. 78-84. Francis-Brockert, Allison. “‘That body should speak’: How the Female Body Performs in The History of Mary Prince.” Swinging Her Breasts at History: Language, Body and the Caribbean Woman’s Text. Ed. Moira Inghilleri. London: Mango Publishing, 2006. 105-16. Gilroy, Beryl A. “Swingers’ Past and Present.” Swinging Her Breasts at History: Language, Body and Caribbean Women’s Texts. Ed. Moira Inghilleri. London: Mango Publishing, 2006. 2-15. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Heller, Ben. “Landscape, Femininity and Caribbean Discourse”. MLN 111.2 (1996): 391-416. Mathur, Ashok. “The Desisting Reader.” West Coast Line 27.1 (Spring 1993): 67-73. Meillassoux, Claude. The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. Trans. Alice Dasnois. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Mohammed, Patricia. “Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean.” Feminist Review: Rethinking Caribbean Difference 59 (Summer 1998): 6-33. New, W.H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Nichols, Grace. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago, 1984. Philip, M. NourbeSe. A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays. Toronto: Mercury, 1997. —. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. London: The Women’s P, 1989. prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. London: F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/prince/menu.html. Consulted 5 April 2012. Refky Seddeek, Abeer. “The African Female Body as a Form of Resistance in a Post-Colonialist Context: A Study of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 4.7 (May 2014): 291-307. Senft, Theresa M. “Writing and Independence: Gayatri Spivak and the Dark Continent of Ecriture Feminine.” Women and Performance 7.2.14-15 (Spring 1995): 275-86. Shaw, Andrew Elizabeth. The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Bodies. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64-81. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “In a Word. Interview with Eileen Roney.” Differences 1.2 (Summer 1989): 124-56. Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Eds. S.M. Gilbert and S. Gubar. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985. 252-3. Wainwright, Geoffrey, and Karen W. B. Tucker, eds. The Oxford History of Christian Worship. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New York: A.J. Matsell, 1833. http:// www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/wollstonecraft1792.pdf. Consulted 7 March 2017.

Reviews

Ten Canadian Writers in Context. Edited by Marie Carrière, Curtis Gillespie and Jason Purcell. Robert Kroetsch Series. Alberta: U of Alberta P, 2016. 202 p. ISBN (pb): 978-1-77212-141-4. CA$ 24.95.

Reviewed by Charlotte Sturgess

Ten Canadian Writers in Context is an anthology that has emerged from a series of “Brown Bag Lunches,” readings by authors at the Canadian Literature Centre of the University of Alberta over the last ten years. The title of the collection strangely reverberates through time and cultural change to that seminal work Eleven Canadian Novelists published in the 1970s which, albeit a set of interviews, was doubtless the first collection to bring to the wider reading public the idea that there existed a category of quality creative endeavour that could be classed loosely as Canadian writing. Since the 1970s Canadian writing has been widely acknowledged in all its cultural and racial diversity: through a plethora of novels, short stories, plays and poetry, and also through the many collections showcasing, for example, Italian-, Asian-, Indigenous- or Black-Canadian writing published in the last decades. All this inevitably begs the question: why yet another anthology on Canadian writing? What does Ten Canadian Writers in Context offer that is lacking in the landscape of critical perceptions and appreciations already out there on the reading market? It has to be said that, at first glance, this reader was fairly dubious as to the innovative value of an anniversary collection of readings that seemed to promise no particular cohesion in form or content. But, from the editor’s introduction on, the critical and creative project of the volume began to take shape, confirmed and complexified by the form and content of the collection, by the choices made and the ideas behind them. As the editors make clear in the introduction, the critical premise of the volume was to not “rely on nationalistic tropes” nor “contribute to the mythologies of a unified nation”(xi). Instead, their clearly stated objective was to represent the diversity of Canadian literary voices and Canadian languages – two of the excerpts are in French, one in Cree – as well as featuring the genres of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Each of the ten excerpts is preceded by a bio-note by the author, a short critical essay deliberately eschewing close readings and privileging, on the editors’ instructions, “a point of entry” into the author’s work (xiii), thus encouraging a politics of outreach to communities of readers inside and outside the academy. Obviously, as for any anthology, choices had to be made since the centre has hosted over fifty authors since its inception. Choice – and thus its corollary, exclusion – is justified by the project of diversity and difference under- pinning the volume: an overt critical focus on what distinguishes the individual writings rather than what unites them. The volume does indeed reflect this decentring impulsion while concomitantly tracing the fault lines of the Canadian imaginary in its richness of geographical breadth and cultural depths. The binding premise is that of privileging a writerly self-location rather than inserting the writings in any over-arching discourse of the nation. Thus, the volume encompasses “the caveats of familial ties (Ying Cheng); 150

the affects of shame (Lynn Coady); the anxiety of cultural loss (Michael Crummy); the tricks of memory (Caterina Edwards); late-life despair, surprise and comedy (Marina Endicott); the dynamics of race and language (Lawrence Hill); the biting humour of poetic allegory (Alice Major); the ethics of storytelling (Eden Robinson); the sacredness of love (Gregory Scofield); and the perils and gains of exile (Kim Thúy)”(xi). Ten Canadian Writers in Context is a volume that comes from, and further contributes to, a certain tradition of creative and critical praxis of transitivity that has, since the decentring lyrical materialism of Robert Kroetsch or the “geografictione” of Aritha van Herk, resolutely questioned, or actively dismantled, the border between the critical and the creative. The volume comes from conscious recognition that literature is a politics as well as a poetics, enmeshed in a specific cultural and ideological time and space. In this respect, the hegemonising tendency of any critical or creative enterprise is fully acknowledged by the editors who, themselves, come to writing and criticism from diverse professional perspectives: Marie Carrière, the director of the Canadian Literature Centre, teaches Canadian literature in both French and English – a fairly uncommon trans-lingual academic positioning reflected in her own critical writings; Curtis Gillespie is a writer and editor; Jason Purcell is a graduate student and Communications Officer for the Canadian centre. Openness, dialogue and a certain healthy scepticism towards the power of literary canon-making and meta-discourses are thus at the heart of the enterprise. What is more, the anthology is itself enmeshed in a larger, digital project entitled Inside the Bag: Can Lit Alive! which provides recordings of the readings as well as supplementary materials – part of the outreach strategy of the centre. In fact, Ten Canadian Writers in Context is an exercise in reading otherwise. Anthologies, despite their obvious and legitimate aim to bring writers and writings to the notice of the general public by providing tasty snippets in order to whet the appetite, generate a certain frustration: that of an appetite not immediately satiated since a snippet remains a snippet. Yet, doubtless because this particular anthology is moulded into, and springs from a coherent project – a project that refutes coherence as a hegemony – it produces its own reading pleasure. The reader experiences the fluid transition from notes about the authors to comprehensive essays on their work and finally to the excerpts from their own work while journeying across styles, themes, geographical and cultural sites. A reading pleasure which in no way diminishes that of discovering writings one then cannot wait to read in full. The only bone this reader would pick with Ten Canadian Writers in Context is the decision not to provide an English translation for the two Quebecois contributions, those of Ying Chen and Kim Thúy. Although fully understanding the (highly sensitive) politics of language that motivated the decision, one wonders if this kind of ideological bias is not counter-productive. Moreover, when the essay introducing the work is in English it seems rather nonsensical to prevent the non-bilingual reader (and there are many in the English-speaking world where French is not an official language, as well as in Canada itself) from appreciating those writers’ works. Bridges generally promote dialogue and outreach more productively than garrisons. That said, this is a very well thought out and carefully compiled volume, bringing ex- citing writings to a wide reading public. The editors are to be applauded for the difficult task accomplished and the extremely fruitful, innovative result obtained. 151 Reviews

Thinking Literature Across Continents. By Ranjan Gosh and J. Hillis Miller. Durham/ London: Duke UP, 2016. 316 p. ISBN (pb): 978-0-8223-6244-9. US$26.95.

Reviewed by Christine Lorre-Johnston

Thinking Literature Across Continents, Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s co-authored book, is based on a method implying a critical dialogue, with double chapters conceived both as a reflection and a response to the other author’s viewpoint on the same topic. The format leads to a lively conversational style (though often veering toward the abstract with Ghosh), for a discussion solidly framed by theory, and, notably with Miller, amply rooted in the close reading of a range of literary texts. Another characteristic is that the reflection has been conducted over a number of years; some of Miller’s chapters have been reworked from earlier published versions, as in an ongoing reflection subject to contemporary societal and political changes, one that is bound to further evolve. Ranjan Ghosh teaches at the University of North Bengal, while J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine; clearly the purpose is to confront through juxtaposition and dialogue two viewpoints that are anchored in singularly different cultures and traditions, making up an “international dialogue” (Miller xi). Yet a more complex process of circulation is also at play, as the authors’ locations are not strictly impermeable: to quote Ghosh, the book “speaks of no finite Asia or Europe or America – self-contained, harmonically hermetic” (3). “Across” is the key word here, alluding to various forms of circulation and exchange. Ghosh positions himself through what he has called the “(in)fusion approach,” which refers to the “cross-epistemic and transcultural entanglement” that is at work in literature (Ghosh 4), “the amalgamation of the elements that go into it” (Miller 8). As for Miller, he starts by distancing himself from the school of thought of deconstruction, which he has been influenced by, because of its erroneous understanding, and prefers to characterise his method as one that starts from specific literary works to evolve towards tentative generalisations. The five parts of the book successively examine essential topics that define what literature is about. In Part I, “The Matter and Mattering of Literature,” Ghosh thus explains the notion of sahitya, originally a Sanskrit term but now a word generally referring in Indian culture to the various genres of literature. Sahitya is understood as having a dialectical dimension of sacredness, conjoining a hermeneutical strength and an ability to generate a secret. Ghosh sheds light on the concept through an analysis of Robert Frost’s poem “Birches,” underlying the poetical (rather than political) dimension of sahitya. Miller, in contrast, emphasizes the function of literature as social critique, the way the text can be a source of pleasure, and how it generates images that give us access to the imaginary. Miller also observes how the shift from print culture to digital culture – which he calls “prestidigitalization” – marks a receding of literature in the traditional sense. In Part II, “Poem and Poetry,” Ghosh develops a theory of poetry based on the Sanskrit concept of rasa, which is about truth, goodness, and a dominant emotion linked to the poem. He also draws on Chinese and Arabic theories of poetry, as well as Western sources, to demonstrate that a poem is the common ground of the ordinary and extraordinary, an expression of life. Miller, in his chapter, proposes a reading of 152

Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive for Metaphor” to demonstrate that no theory can an- ticipate what reading will produce; reading a poem, between hermeneutic and stylistic analysis, is a process unique to each text. Part III, “Literature and the World,” focuses on the “new efflorescence” (Miller 151) of world literature and what it implies. To Ghosh, the fact that literature nowadays is said to be “at once global and local” (112) leads to a “more than global”: a form of transculturality that is more important than local or global affiliations, an “unexpected web of meaning” that grows from “multiple points of articulation” (113, 114). To Miller, world literature is undoubtedly a response to economic, financial and techno- logical globalisation, and might be seen as “a last-ditch effort to rescue the study of literature” (139). In this process, he notices three main challenges: translation, representation, and the very definition of literature. From this he concludes that world literature, and theoretical statements about it, need contextualising. In Part IV, “Teaching Literature,” Ghosh reflects on teaching Beckett’sEndgame to a class of Indian postgraduates. He argues that the play being about the human condition, it has a natural dialogical relation to other worldviews; in India, it can be connected with Hindu ethics and philosophy and the dharma of existence – the right action. Ghosh thus proposes a transcultural theory of literature – unlike Miller, who is convinced that poetry should be read in the context of its own tradition. Miller also argues that, even though literature is on the decline on American campuses, it remains a form of training, through the teaching of rhetoric, in spotting lies and distortions, at a time when many lies are told. Ghosh, in “Ethics and Literature” (Part V), envisions ethics in literature as a form of hunger, or desire for a relation to the other. He also considers a kind of postaesthe- tic hunger, which leads one to realise that the aesthetic experience may lead to nothing but salvaging experience and strangeness. To Miller, ethics means “the issue of how to act or choose rightly” (233); he thus proposes a reading of Trollope’s Framley Parsonage to illustrate the Victorian belief that realistic fiction could “teach ethical principles and conduct to its readers” (241). Thinking Literature Across Continents is a timely conversation about literature and some of the methodologies to read it, teach it, and write about it; the decentring effect of its dual approach opens up new possibilities of meaning and interpretation. The book examines the relevance of literature in our times, and raises important questions about academic practice in its relation to readers, in the context of the digital revolution. Even though it is not optimistic about the future of literature in view of the profound transformations it is currently undergoing, it nonetheless demonstrates the rich potential of literature and its enduring necessity as an art. 153 Reviews

Decolonizing Sexualities. Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions. Edited by Sandeep Bakshi, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Silvia Posocco. Oxford: Counterpress, 2016. xxii, 287 p. ISBN (hb): 978-1-910761-02-1. £14.

Reviewed by Fiona McCann

The front cover of this collection of articles, poems, and personal and collective experiences which deal with both the theory and praxis of decolonizing sexualities features a reproduction of a work of art discussed in one of the chapters by the artist-practitioner in question, Raju Rage. The collage portrait image foregrounds an ambiguously gendered body and the threat of racist violence, and undercuts the amalgamation of monstrosity, terrorism, and non-heteronormative sexuality that has such currency in Europe and North America. As such, this arresting cover is perfectly in keeping with the issues explored in this volume, with the multiple perspectives privileged, and with the refreshingly original theoretical and militant content. The book is divided into four parts but it is also framed at the beginning by a powerful foreword and prologue by Walter D. Mignolo and Nawo C. Crawford respectively, and at the end by an equally powerful afterword by Aniruddha Dutta. The two opening pieces emphasise the importance of understanding that colonial differences, far from being ontological, are constituted and sustained by people, institutions, and languages, and they point out the necessity of responding to imperial geopolitics and body-politics with decolonial geopolitics and body-politics. This collection of essays aims to stretch well beyond the academy, as the choice of publisher, Counterpress, a new, not-for-profit, open-access publisher, shows. One of the other strong points of this volume is its resolutely transnational approach. It also refuses to privilege one form of action or reflection over another, and so one finds poetry by Mia Nikasimo alongside an article on anti-LGBTI Legislation in several African countries by Sokari Ekine and a self-reflective piece by the artist-per- former Raju Rage. Placing these pieces in the sub part entitled “Challenge,” alongside others like “Notes from the Classroom” by Humaira Saeed, or “In Defence of a Radical Trans Perspective in the French Context” by João Gabriell, also indicates that art is not just about creation and aesthetics, but also about fundamentally challenging modes of thinking and of being, and that politics and aesthetics are inseparable. The second section, “Create,” proposes a similar dialogue between Sandeep Bakshi’s article on “Decoloniality, Queerness, and Giddha,” which deconstructs processes of “effective epistemological decolonization” (88) and analyses the re-emergence of queer as a decolonial praxis, a series of personal reflections by Diriye Osman, and Sirma Bilge’s research on social justice praxis and her call for “radical relationality coalitional resistance” (119). The third section, “All Power Activism,” proposes two collectively written articles, the first by Wala AlQaisiya, Ghaith Hilal, and Haneen Maikey on “Dismantling the Image of the Palestinian Homosexual” and the second by three members of the group Lesbiennes of Color (LOC) on “Decolonial Activism in White French Feminist Land.” The first of these articles hones in on the ways in which certain hierarchies deem some fetishized bodies worthy of saving (Palestinian homosexual bodies) and others easily maimed or killed, and challenges what the authors call the “hegemony of Western LGBT Organizing” (137). The second article explains the origins of the LOC, covers their campaign to remove the offensive and homonationalist official poster of the 2011 Paris Pride March, and asserts their opposition to the lucrative “manipulation of emotion by the state and capitalist media” (149) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015. Fatima El-Tayeb’s article pursues these issues by observing a refusal in European societies to accept that there is a deeply-embedded structural racism at work, pinpointing the ways in which queerness becomes acceptable only if it is understood to be “compatible with a neoliberal project that produces new forms of exclusion” (160), and ending with a re-affirmation of the necessity of a broadly intersectional approach to dismantling oppression. The final two articles in this section, by Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Suhraiya Jivraj, deal with sexuality and religion in Singapore and London, and both offer a deconstruction of stereotypes. The final section of the collection, entitled “Now,” proposes an interesting mix of case studies (Dervla Zaynad Shannahan and Tamsila Tauqir’s “Building an Inclusive Mosque” and Arturo Sánchez García’s “Reasons for Optimism: Same Sex Marriage in Mexico City”), an article written by three members of the group Against Equality on why the co-optation of LGBT people by the mainstream, although “enticing,” only reinforces other oppressive structures and should therefore be resisted, and two articles by Silvia Posocco and Paola Bacchetta. Posocco’s article, “(Decolonizing) The Ear of the Other: Subjectivity, Ethics and Politics in Question,” demonstrates how “wounded whiteness” works to re-centre whiteness, displacing in the process those who are affected by racist aggression. Paula Bacchetta’s article, “QTPOC Critiques of ‘Post-Raciality,’ Segregationality, Coloniality and Capitalism in France,” returns to many of the issues raised in the collection, and focuses on bringing to light radical practices and analyses that have been largely ignored. She historicises various different movements in France, and highlights the ways in which some groups have been founded and manipulated by political parties, and like her co-contributors, emphasises the necessity of resisting oppression not as an individual phenomenon (racism, capitalism, gender, sexuality among others), but as “co-constitutive of each other and of current conditions in France” (278). Aniruddha Dutta’s “Afterword” reiterates the immense importance of this volume of articles, highlighting the significance of including locations of knowledge production situated both inside and well outside of academia. This final contribution fittingly adopts a global approach and functions as a reminder that although POC and QTPOC solidarity is extremely important in putting pressure on institutions in the Global North, one should not forget for all that the existence of various forms of collusion and “complicity in neocolonialism and empire among ‘people of color’” (286). This is a highly stimulating collection of academic articles, case studies, reflections, art and poetry, and the editors have done a truly impressive job in weaving them together. There is no doubt that this is a very significant contribution to the fields of postcolonial or decolonial studies and queer studies. 155 Reviews

Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place. By John Thieme. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 237 p. ISBN: 978-1-137-45686-1. Hardcover: $95, e-book: $74,99.

Reviewed by Claire Omhovère

John Thieme’s latest monograph interrogates the hermeneutics of place that goes on to inform so much of postcolonial literature. The book analyses literary representations of place in a wide selection of postcolonial writings mainly, yet not exclusively, from Canada, India and the Caribbean, from the standpoint of cultural geography and the critique some of its leading theorists have given of Western conceptions of place as a fixed site of authenticity. Starting from Massey’s analysis of the transformations modern forms of mobility have wrought upon our understanding of place in a globalized world, John Thieme observes how postcolonial writers have taken issue with the spatial practices European empires and their neo-colonial successors have deployed to gain epistemological and discursive control over the territories and populations they brought under their sway. The volume’s introduction presents a theoretical framework which articulates Massey’s conception of place as dynamic and malleable with Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope.” The Russian formalist first used the term to identify a specific category of literary representations in which spatial and temporal coordinates are fused within a single artistic motif, thus making it possible to dynamise space through temporal accretions that transform it into place. The volume subsequently follows a chronotopic organization with six chapters, each of which is devoted to colonial and postcolonial spatial practises that inform the literary construction of place through cartography, botany, the collecting of spices, ecological transactions, zookeeping, and finally the growth of cosmopolitan, global cities in a dual literary portrait of Bombay/Mumbai and London. The chronotope that serves as the focal point for each chapter has its historical antecedents minutely identified, thereby injecting time into the tropologies through which literature textualizes place. The book then demonstrates how the atlas, the garden, but also the desert island or therianthropes evolved into topoi, common places shared throughout the postcolonial world by writers who have sought to transform those legacies of Empire into chronotopes that undermine the fixity of the allegorical significations the West once ascribed to such places. Replete with detailed information, the book never strays from its initial goal in the process of bringing to light the ramifications underlying the literary representations of place that have emerged in various periods and regions of the globe following the expansion of Western empires and the concomitant rise of postcolonial literature en- visaged in all its diversity. With the gentle yet firm manner that characterises his style, Thieme steers his reader through different epochs, time zones and literary works while never losing sight of his argument. All chapters share a similar structure, beginning with a robust introduction replete with historical knowledge (the same holds for the nuggets of information awaiting discovery in end-of-chapter notes that provide details on a wide range of subjects, from the history of the Greenwich meridian to the Persian invention of gardens or the sugar trade) before moving on to consider several inter-related case-studies. Thieme’s comparatist approach invites his readers to navigate between the literatures of Britain’s former empire, occasionally narrowing his scope to 156

reconsider well-known British classics, as in the chapter on spices and its subsection on British Romantic poets, or enlarging his focus to include works born out of a slightly different context. Such is the case with the incursion into French Caribbean writing in the chapter devoted to horticulture which also contains illuminating pages on how the botanical trope of hybridity became a heuristic tool in postcolonial theory. Close attention to the intersections between what Edward Said once called the “imaginative geographies” of Empire and the historical routes followed by Western material culture helps restore temporal depth and symbolic density to the places analysed in the literary case-studies complementing Thieme’s theoretical approach. Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Kroetsch and Eden Robinson, to cite but a handful of the writers who receive sustained consideration throughout the volume, write out of places that are never represented as stable givens, or the loci of reassuring forms of authenticity, because they are contested grounds, fraught with competing versions of history and land use, now reinvested with symbols that question the monolithic colonial allegories once vested in them. It is then no wonder that Thieme, in one of the book’s most insightful passages, should perceive a link between the fluid geographies that inspired those writers’ sense of place, the open reading practices their narratives encourage and the tropologies their writings never cease to reconfigure and expand. From beginning to end, Thieme’s meticulous approach is characterized by an awareness of the hazards any generalization is likely to meet in the mutable, deeply heterogeneous field of postcolonial literature. It is true that the emphasis it places on chronotopes encourages the delineation of commonalities between, for example, the sea adventures pictured by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe and those represented by Martel in Life of Pi, ultimately leading to the exposure of the materialism and of the colonial (even touristic) bias that endure in Martel’s take on the castaway novel. But Postcolonial Literary Geographies nevertheless remains extremely cautious in its analyses and never forsakes nuance in the process of establishing an underlying continuity, or defining a new paradigm. This is what John Thieme ultimately does when discussing the dynamics defining the postcolonial condition in the chapter devoted to the global city where cosmopolitan mobile elites are portrayed crossing the paths of crowds of refugees and asylum see- kers – “the migrant Anyman” Brian Chickwava depicted in Harare North in strategically shocking terms for a comfortably emplaced Western readership. “[T]he postcolonial condition,” Thieme explains in his concluding remarks on Chickwava’s novel, “generates a heightened sense of unbelonging, brought about by displacement, both at home, where land is appropriated, and in the diaspora, where new arrivals are often consig- ned to live on the margins” (189). I would therefore agree with John Thieme when he claims, with the whole of this fascinating study weighing in to back up his words, that “the postcolonial vision has become the dominant urban ethos of our times” (210). It is because of this specific aspect that postcolonial literature today has become of global relevance with respect to the challenges facing our modernity. This is particularly true concerning our attempts to understand the very local, embodied spatial practices that exclude and marginalize large sections of the globe’s population but that also contribute to altering and possibly destroying wide swaths of its environment. Such processes lead to further migrations and continued conflicts as to who possesses the right to exist in any particular place. Contributors

Sara Arami is a PhD student, and a member of the research group SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire) at the University of Strasbourg, where she teaches as a temporary lecturer. Her research interests revolve around the subjects of identity, diaspora, nationality, cartography, femininity, and the body. Her PhD thesis is entitled “The Body and Articulations of Nation in Middle Eastern American Women’s Diasporic Fiction.”

Salhia Ben-Messahel is Senior Lecturer at the University of Lille. Her research focuses on Australian literature and the Asia-pacific, postcolonial literature, ecocritical theory, and cultural studies. She has published numerous articles on Australian writers, is the author of Mind the Country, Tim Winton’s Fiction (U of Western Australia P, 2006), and editor of Des Frontières de l’interculturalité (Septentrion, 2009). Her most recent work includes Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction (Cambridge Scholars, 2017), Colonial Extensions, Postcolonial De- centrings, co-edited with Vanessa Castejon (Peter Lang, 2018), and a forthcoming chapter in Richard Dixon (ed.), Richard Flanagan: New Critical Essays (Sydney UP).

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. Her most recent publication on Caryl Phillips, “Literacy and Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River,” was published in Vanessa Guignery and Christian Gutle- ben (eds.), Traversée d’une oeuvre: Crossing the River de Caryl Phillips (L’Harmattan, 2016). She recently edited a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies devoted to Phillips (40.1, Autumn 2017). An article on Fred D’Aguiar, “Keeping my slave side well versed”: Fred D’Aguiar’s use of ottava rima in Bloodlines” has just been published in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing (54.1, 2018).

Jaine Chemmachery is currently a Senior Lecturer at University Paris-Dauphine – PSL. Her PhD dissertation (2013) was on R. Kipling and S. Maugham’s colonial short stories and the relation between colonialism, modernity and the genre of the short story. Her main research fields are colonial and postcolonial literature, Victorian and Neo-Victorian cultural productions, modernity and spectrality studies.

Cédric Courtois teaches English at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is a PhD student in Postcolonial Literature at ENS de Lyon where he works on third-generation Nigerian writers and the Bildungsroman under the supervision of Professor Vanessa Guignery. He recently published “Third-Generation Nigerian Female Writers and the Bildungsroman: Breaking Free from the Shackles of Patriarchy,” in Growing Up a Woman: The Private/Public Divide in Nar- ratives of Female Development, edited by Soňa Šnircová and Milena Kostic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

Adrian Grafe is currently English Professor at Artois University. He authored Gerald Manley Hopkins : la profusion ténébreuse (Septentrion, 2003) and Emily Dickinson: Poems (Atlande, 2009) as well as articles on the fiction of Alice Munro and Ron Hansen. He teaches a degree course on (so-called) postcolonial literature with particular reference to J.M. Coetzee and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Marie Herbillon lectures in the English Department of the University of Liège. A member of the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales (CEREP), she has completed a PhD entitled “Beyond the Line: Murray Bail’s Spatial Poetics” and published several articles focusing on the writings of this contemporary Australian author. Her current research project addresses the themes of history and migration in J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction. 158

Anne-Sophie Letessier is a Teaching Associate at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation (Paul Valéry University – Montpellier 3) focused on the politics and poetics of intermediality in Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart’s landscape writing. She has presented papers on the parody of landscape pictorial codes, the politics of looking, the theoretical foundation of the Western conception of landscape, and more generally on text/image relation in Urquhart’s fiction. She is the author of two articles published in Commonwealth Essays and Studies: “Circumscribing the Horizon in Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter” (Winter 2010) and “Intermedial Transpositions: The Visible and the Visual in Jane Urquhart’s Chang- ing Heaven” (Autumn 2014).

Christine Lorre-Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Her main research interests are in Canadian and New Zealand literature, postcolonial theory and cultural studies. Her recent publications include The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (co-authored with Ailsa Cox, Fahrenheit, 2015), and Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction: “A Book with Maps in It” (edited with Eleonora Rao, Camden House, 2018). She is editor of Commonwealth Essays and Studies and writes the entry on Canadian books for the Year’s Work in English Studies.

Fiona McCann is Professor of Postcolonial literature at the University of Lille and a junior fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. She has published widely on contemporary South African, Zimbabwean, and Irish writing, and has a particular interest in the overlap of politics and aesthetics. Her current research project focuses on writing by political prisoners in the postcolonial world. She is President of the French society of anglophone postcolonial studies (SEPC).

Alice Michel currently holds a teaching position at the University of Orléans. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2017, focuses on colonial experience and women writers in colonial Australia, more specifically Ada Cambridge and Mary Fortune. Her research interests include popular women’s fiction, Australian literature and culture, and the sociology of literature. She is the author of “Hidden Fortunes of Colonial Australian Popular Fiction: Women in Mary Fortune’s ‘Dora Carleton’” (Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, 2016).

Myriam Moïse is currently a Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) at the University of the French Antilles and is affiliated with the Caribbean Social Science Research Lab / LC2S – CNRS – UMR 8053. Her research field includes postcolonial studies, gender studies and discourse analysis, with a special focus on literary works by women of the African Caribbean diaspora in North America. She has published chapters in books for Routledge Atlantic Studies and Lexington and journal articles in Commonwealth Essays and Studies, PoCo Pages, and Vertigo.

Claire Omhovère teaches Commonwealth Literature at Paul Valéry University – Montpellier 3. Her research is broadly concerned with representations of space in postcolonial literatures with a specific interest in landscape writing in settler-invader colonies such as Canada, Aus- tralia and New Zealand. The author of several articles, her books include Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2007) and the edited collection L’Art du paysage (Michel Houdiard, 2014).

Sandrine Soukaï holds a PhD in Anglophone Studies entitled “The Shadows of Partition in Indian and Pakistani novels in English.” She is affiliated to the research group Vale (Voix Anglophones, Littérature et Esthétique) of Paris-Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on postcolonial literatures in English, especially on Partition literature. She is the author of “Shadows and Fugitive Selves in Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie’s Partition Novels” in Mapping The Self: Place, Identity, Nationality, edited by Nissa Parmar, Anna Hewitt, and Alex Goody (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). 159 Contributors

Charlotte Sturgess is Professor of North American Literature at the University of Strasbourg. She has authored a monograph, articles and chapters on Canadian women’s writers. She has also edited or co-edited several volumes on Canadian and Australian writing. Her research interests in recent years have focussed on the entanglement of politics and poetics in Cana- dian ethnic fictions.

Pascal Zinck is an Associate Professor of postcolonial literatures at University Paris 13. He has published extensively on postcolonial Sri Lankan fiction (Blacker, Gunesekera, De Silva, Ondaatje, Sivanandan), with a more recent focus on Pakistani anglophone literature (Hamid, Aslan Khan, Shamsie, Sahota and others). He has co-authored and edited River of my Blood with Selina Hossain (Rupa, 2016). He is currently researching for a book on Pakistani fiction and exploring representation of violence in film, provisionally titled “Screening Disobedient Bodies: Gendered Violence in South Asian and Desi Film.”