“The Empire Writes Back to and from the Centre”
An Introductory Lecture
Chantal Zabus
Université Catholique de Louvain
"The Empire Writes Back to the
Centre" — is a phrase originally used by Salman Rushdie, as he was
punning on "The Empire Strikes Back", the famous American T.V. show.
Here, the Empire is the sum total of the colonies of the British
Empire, which Britain lost with the coming to independence in the
1960s of nation–states from Africa to Sri Lanka. "The Centre" is here
Britain and the notion of "writing back" is crucial in understanding
the various strategies of decolonization that Britain's former
colonies have used to set the record straight. At the same time,
since various members of the erstwhile British colonies are now
living and writing in Britain, one could argue that they are also
writing back to the Centre but, also more accurately, from within the
belly of the beast, as it were, the Centre of the Centre.
As a cautionary tale, I should say
that the notion of "centre" does not mean the same thing to everyone.
For instance, when W.B. Yeats, the Irish writer who was to become the
Senator of the Irish Free State, wrote in The Second Coming (1919) — "Things Fall Apart; the centre
cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world", he had in mind,
Man losing touch with the Judeo–Christian God but also its corollary
: the advent of a strange, savage God; the death of God announced by
Nietzsche but also, since we are in 1919, the end of Czarism in
Russia and the aftermath of the October Revolution. As if to
complicate matters a bit further, the Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe,
took from Yeats's poem the title for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) but what was falling apart was the
pre–colonial coherence of Eastern Nigerian or Igbo society under the
impact of Christianity which was a cause of disruption.
The notion of "centre" as applied to
Britain goes back to the sixteenth century, an age of colonial
expansion but the crystallization of England as the centre harks back
to the nineteenth century, when English began to be studied as an
academic subject and became linked to the spread of colonial
education for the "natives". The study of English as an academic
discipline (before it was the Classics) and the growth of the British
Empire therefore stem from the same ideological climate (1884 had
just witnessed the "scramble for Africa" by the European powers).
With the teaching of English came other concepts such as "humanity",
"civilization" which, conversely, established "savagery", "native"
"primitive"; a dichotomy reinforced by racial theories à la
Gobineau on the "inequality of the human races." Hence the
crystallization of the notions of "centre" vs. "periphery" or
"margins" teeming with "others." (The iconic "other" is now in
current critical parlance that which is non–Western).
The result of the experience of
colonialism is that three quarters of the world population today have
had their lives shaped by it. As of the 60s then Britain stepped into
the post–imperial phase, as it ceased to be an Empire or rather
became an Empire in decline. Britain is indeed at present the last
colony of the British Empire. It stepped into the post–colonial era
but also at the same time in the post–modern era and the
post–feminist era. It is this three–tiered development that I would
briefly like to look at today, with special reference to the last
decade but occasional excursions into earlier fiction.
Postcoloniality
"Post–colonial" as it is used by the
authors of The Empire Writes
back (1989) largely refers to
the period after independence but it also covers all the cultures
affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to
the present day. So the literatures of African countries, Australia,
Bengladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New
Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, the South Pacific Islands and Sri Lanka
(so both settler cultures and colonies) are all post–colonial
literatures writing back to the centre. Note that the U.S. have been
left out because of its neo–colonial, hegemonic power). This involves
the appropriation of the English language and writing for new and
distinctive uses and the techniques of abrogation.
A common and early example of
"writing back" from the 1960s is Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1968) in which Jean Rhys from Dominica in
the Caribbean "re–writes" the story of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. In the
Victorian novel, Bertha is the "mad woman in the attic" (which is
going to be the title of a feminist analysis of Victorian writing by
Gilbert and Gubar, 1984). Bertha is kept under lock and key by Mr.
Rochester who married her, a rich Creole heiress from the Caribbean,
in a "transatlantic marriage" as was common in Victorian times for
dispossessed young British men. Jean Rhys, by telling Bertha's story,
provided the supplement, the apocryphal or alternative
("alter–native") supplement, that which is unsaid or repressed in the
Victorian text, Jane Eyre; the purloined letter, as it were, of
British history, in its colonial dealings with the Caribbean.
Since we are concerned with the last
decade, I will take an example closer to us, and "from the Centre" :
Marina Warner's Indigo
(1992). This is also a re–writing of Caribbean colonial history and
of a major canonical text such as Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) which, you may remember, deals with
Prospero, the duke of Milan who was dethroned by his own brother
(Antonio) while engrossed in the study of magic and is subsequently
marooned in an island somewhere in the Caribbean with his daughter,
Miranda. Interestingly, Prospero is a powerful figure, the
heliocentric arch–magician of the Renaissance; he is the magus who
master–minds everything, enslaves both Caliban, "the deformed slave"
and Ariel, the "airy spirit" and conjures up his own tempest to bring
his enemies to the island and plan his revenge (although he will
forgive them all). In Prospero's Books by Peter Greenaway, who is at
the forefront of British post–modern auteur cinema, that Prospero
masterminds everything is clearly seen in the fact that he voices all
the lines of the other characters. So here in Warner and Greenaway,
you have the two possible re–visions of the same Prospero–figure that
are going to determine the ideological shape of the twentieth century
: Prospero as a tired actor, Western man faced with the loss of his
white magic, reluctant to drown his magic books or Prospero the
Eurocentric God–like Magus who effortlessly controls the rest of the
planet. On the other hand, it is also easy to imagine this fin de
siècle as a huge chessboard with Warner's Black Queen
rivalling Peter Greenaway's White King for the ownership of
meaning.
What is missing in Shakespeare's play
and which Warner provides is the story of Miranda, so not history
("his–story") but her–story; so not the Bardscript but the Daughter's
plot by foregrounding a most unholy matriarchy between Sycorax, the
witch (also Caliban's mother), Ariel who is no longer a spirit but an
Arawak (Indian) girl and Miranda who has "a touch of the tar brush."
Warner thereby provides that which was missing in Shakespeare's play
but also in the whole of the Shakespeare corpus, i.e. the
mother–daughter relationship (indeed women are conspicuously absent
from the play and one can even argue that it is a misogynistic play),
what Adrienne Rich, the American radicalesbian feminist, called "the
great unwritten story" in Of
Woman Born (1977). Warner
also by the same token provides a history of miscegenation and
exogamy which is often laundered off colonial accounts (we just have
to imagine Bertha Mason and Rochester having a child of mixed blood)
and debunks myths of racial and ethnic purity. So that the future to
Warner, herself the great–grand–grand–daughter of Thomas Warner of St
Kitts and thus of creole ancestry, is one of inevitable hybridity — a
blurred chessboard, if you will, with no clearly delineated
black–and–white squares. All in all, this is a typical contemporary
writing back to the centre but also from the centre since Marina
Warner is alive and well and living in London. Along the major
writers writing in England today (some of them are only in their
thirties) are people who are "exiled in English" like, to name but a
few, David Dabydeen (Guyana), Linton Kwesi Johnson (Jamaica), Timothy
Mo (China), Kashuo Ishiguro (Japan) and Ben Okri (Nigeria). Ben Okri,
for instance, has got his name, along with Chaucer's, on the cover of
the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English republished last year
(note that we no longer say "English Literature"). So that the
concept of Englishness has been dealt a severe blow, not to mention
the "English language" which has been the butt through
phoneticization of Nobel Prize winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka
who does not hesitate to mock RP (Received pronunciation).
As a post–scriptum, I might add that
myths of linguistic purity are also being debunked. What
post–colonial linguistics is trying to promote is that English is no
longer the monopoly of the "Englishman" (also a mythical creature on
the verge of extinction, along with the Times and the bowler hat on a
rainy, foggy day in London) since post–colonial people are now the
co–owners of the language. You may remember that Saussure in his Course in General
Linguistics (1916) had
distinguished between langue and parole, the idealized grammatical
form and what goes on in real language interactions. Post–colonial
linguists have argued that Saussurian linguistics has marginalized
the social by bracketing the message or parole to concentrate on the
langue. They (Ashcroft, for instance) propose to redress this
imbalance by reinstating the parole. As the contest is between
margins or the periphery and the centre, it is by the same token
between language variants or "the new englishes" and a standard code;
the post–colonial discourse in English has thus been labelled a
"counter–discourse" which entails writing back with an accent.
All in all, the post–colonial
linguistic programme is certainly more humane than M.I.T. linguist
Noam Chomsky's act of universalization in his Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (1965), where he
posits an ideal speaker–listener, in a completely homogeneous speech
community. Post–colonial theory thus views language as a human
behaviour and the ethnography of speaking as a new area of critical
inquiry.
Postmodernism
What postcoloniality and
postmodernism (and postfeminism) may have in common is the
reconstruction of history or rather the demonstration that history is
a human construct, just like fiction. Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) wrote : "History is natural selection.
Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of
fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and
smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive.
The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks. ... History
loves only those who dominate her. It is a relationship of mutual
enslavement." And who writes history ? Those who have the power to
write it down, to shape it.
Instead of defining postmodernism
(Lyotard, Baudrillard, Calinescu, Jameson, McHale, Hassan, Hutcheon),
I will digress briefly on what it actually does in fiction, for in
both postcoloniality and postmodernism (PoMo in Dutch) there is
revisionism : apocryphal history contradicts the official version by
supplementing the historical record, claiming to restore what has
been lost or suppressed, or it displaces official history altogether
(McHale). What is official history the history of ? Reply : of the
winners, says Stanley Elkin; of the male sex, says Günter Grass
who, in The Flounder, writes the history of cooks, the women who fed
and cared for history's "great men" and were left in historical
anonymity for their pains. Official history is often opposed to
"stories", as in French, l'Histoire vs. des histoires, la petite
histoire often female and where plurality takes away from male,
official truth. Although American literature counts many revisionists
of history such as in the paranoiac conspiracy–theorists like Thomas
Pynchon and Ishmael Reed (in Mumbo Jumbo), the most grandiose
postmodernist revision of official history is Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975) which provides an alternative history
of Spain and Spanish America by having Felipe II of Spain marry
Elizabeth Tudor of England and bringing her to live with him at
Escorial.
The term "post–modernism" indeed
first appeared in Latin America in the 1930s but it is generally
agreed that, in its present–day connotation, it grew out of the
collapse of the Western system of values, the denial of metaphysics
but also the exclusion of "others" in Western thought like women,
madmen or slaves. It is therefore no wonder that postmodernist
fiction in Britain as anywhere else aims at revising the past (often
the Victorian past) and correcting the future or "premembering the
future" by engaging with the pleasures of anachronism. To take an
early example, John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1967) revisits 1867, which happens to be the
date of publication of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and signals John
Stuart Mill's attempt to pass women's suffrage during the second
reform bill. The author at some point takes the train with his own
character, sits across from him and asks himself : "What am I going
to do with you ?", a clear illustration of a step beyond what Barthes
called "the death of the author" in that it here illustrates the
return of the author with a vengeance and the conflict of wills
between creator and created. The questioning of authority has been
described by William Gass as a decline in "theological power, as if
Zeus were stripped of his thunderbolts and swans, perhaps residing on
Olympus still, but now living in a camper and coo-king with propane.
He is, but he is no longer a God" (Qtd by Hutcheon, p. 190).
To take an example from this decade
now, Antonia S. Byatt in Possession (1990) retrieves voices of nineteenth–century
originals by their twentieth–century counterparts, including the
obscure wife to some famous husband (the reverse of the relationship
between Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning when Robert was only
known as Mrs. Browning's husband). This retrieval by the critic Maud
Bailey of the nineteenth–century plot becomes a disturbing
reconstruction of her own past and thus of her own self. Byatt's
nineteenth–century pastiche makes use of painstakingly uncompromising
reconstructions of voices recognizable as those of Robert Browning,
Emily Dickinson, and possibly Christina Rossetti.
This beautifully illustrates what is
meant by the "real" today (which McHale punningly construed as the
"reel" of film), as it is only accessible to us in textualized form :
documents, eye–witness accounts, archives. The past is indeed
"archeologized," as the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon would have
it.
The phrase used to describe these
novels of the last two decades or so is "historiographic metafiction"
(surfiction in French). In the words of Hutcheon again, it "refutes
the natural or commonsense methods of distinguishing between
historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history
has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in
historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are
discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive
their major claim to truth from that identity" (A Poetics of Postmodernism).
Postfeminism
Similarly, postfeminism is a
development from the feminisms of the 1960s which got too
intellectualized (especially in France) and lost their social edge
(for it was at least in the 60s associated with the Civil Rights
Movements). Whereas Western gynocriticism (coined by Elaine
Showalter) heralds the pen and the penis as responsible for the
fathering of texts and the female ink/milk as a possible lubricant
for the blank page, the search for a female language beyond the
organs of patriarchy remains problematic. Elaine Showalter's three
categories are called the "feminine" (from the 1840s to the 1880s
with the death of George Eliot); "the feminist" between the 1880s and
the 1920s which corresponds to women's suffrage and the war of the
sexes and "the female" from the 1920s up to now, away from "T.H.E.
tradition" (A Literature of their Own), which entered a new phase
around 1968 with the Women's Lib Movement. This is what may have
signalled the beginning of the post–feminist phase, when one stopped
apologizing for one's "femininity" — "What is the point of sexcusing
oneself ?" asked Cixous in Coming to Writing. Feminisms have now
split into womanism (Alice Walker, U.S.), afrofemcentrism (Awa Thiam,
Senegal) or misovirism (Calixthe Beyala, Cameroon). On a linguistic
level, the écriture féminine has given way to the
desire to erect the language of post–patriarchy, which is not
tangible as yet.
The feminization of language seems to
go hand in glove with its dehierarchization through the
representation of colloquial talk or the "vulgar body" of popular
culture, whose language, like that of woman and performance, has been
inferiorized. However, this effort at debunking patriarchy has given
rise to overt and confident accounts of lesbian relationships as in
Jeanette Winterson's Oranges
are Not the Only Fruit (1985;
gingerly recast as a B.B.C. drama) and Penguin has just come up with
a collection of Gay Short
Stories (1994), an anthology
which refuses to "ghettoize" gay men as the shadowy inhabitants of a
nocturnal subculture. So that all in all recent literature presents
allegories of marginality by shifting the periphery such as gay or
lesbian culture to the centre, so that the very notion of "gender"
(as the social construction of sex) is being questioned in literature
and the social arena.
The politics
of the post–
"Post–" acts as a temporal marker in
that it signals something that happened after a previous movement
such as modernism or it is a pointer to the challenge and subversion
of what precedes; for instance postmodernism subverts modernism.
Greenaway even talks about Westerners as having solved "our
post–Christian problems" of sex in the last couple of decades (Take
Ten). In the words of Ihab Hassan, whereas modernism was dominated by
epistemological issues, postmodernism has been thought to be
dominated by ontological issues, i.e. "Which world is this ? What is
to be done with it ? Which of my selves is to do it ?" Yet,
postmodernism is more a development from modernism than a break with
it in the sense in which modernist writers like James Joyce tried to
escape the "nightmare of history" (Stephen Daedalus did say that
"history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.")
We have indeed reached an aporia, a
dead-end, an impasse, unless we use the prefix "trans–". But what we
remember from this is that we are indeed faced with what Kermode
termed "the sense of an ending", the sense of embracing a fin de
siècle which is also the end of a millennium, and the sense of
a centre as infinitely shiftable and fragmented; possibly also the
sense of being on the "eve" of the twentieth–century. And I use the
word advisedly since post–patriarchy is around the corner and
authority may never again be completely white, blue–eyed male,
"heterosoc" (as the late homosexual British playwright put it), as it
is being de–centered and ousted by a hybridized poetics of
marginality.
Bulletin de l'Association des
Germanistes de l'Université Catholique de Louvain
No. 27, Juin 1997
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