Postcolonial Life-Writing

Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation

Bart Moore-Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415442992
• eBook ISBN: 9781134106929
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Postcolonial Life-Writing is the first attempt to offer a sustained critique of this increasingly visible and influential field of cultural production.

Bart Moore-Gilbert considers the relationship between postcolonial life-writing and its western analogues, identifying the key characteristics that differentiate the genre in the postcolonial context. Focusing particularly on writing styles and narrative conceptions of the Self, this book uncovers a distinctive parallel tradition of auto/biographical writing and analyses its cultural and political significance.

Original and provocative, this book brings together the two distinct fields of Postcolonial Studies and Auto/biography Studies in a fruitful and much needed dialogue.

1
Centred and decentred Selves

Turning to the first thematic of subjectivity identified in the Introduction, feminist critics within Auto/biography Studies have persistently complained that male colleagues have traditionally promoted a normative view of autobiographical Selfhood as centred and unified (as well as ‘sovereign’). Sidonie Smith, for example, claims of canonical autobiography that it is presumed historically that ‘the teleological drift of selfhood concedes nothing to indeterminacy, to ambiguity, or to heterogeneity’.¹ There is ample evidence to support such arguments across the history of the critical field. Thus, more than a century ago, Misch argued that: ‘In this single whole all [elements of the personality] have their definite place, thanks to their significance in relation to the whole.’² At mid-century, Gusdorf insisted that the task of the autobiographer was ‘to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time’ in order to express the ‘mysterious essence of his being’.³ Such perspectives persist into the most recent phase of the critical field, despite the advent of post-structuralism.⁴ For example, Spengemann asserts that the genre provides the ‘ground upon which conflicting aspects of the writer’s own nature might be reconciled in complete being’.⁵

For many women critics, such a model of Selfhood is clearly gendered. Mary Evans, for instance, argues that the ‘project of masculinity emphasizes … the completed self’.⁶ Indeed, its privileged status is often invoked to explain why women’s life-writing has traditionally been marginalised within the male-dominated formation of Auto/biography Studies. In turn, feminist critics have claimed that women life-writers tend to construct more dispersed and decentred models of auto/biographical subjectivity ‘as the means to counter the centrifugal power of the old unitary self of western rationalism’.⁷ Further, Brodzki and Schenck claim that the postmodernist decentring of the subject in Roland Barthes’s autobiography ‘can be said to have something in common with the strategies of some women autobiographers dating as far back as the fifteenth century’.⁸ Comparable arguments have been extended to minoritarian women’s writing in the West. For instance, Lee Quinby suggests that such work tends to construct ‘a subjectivity that is multiple and discontinuous’ in order to resist the ‘modern’s era’s dominant construction of individualized selfhood’.⁹ Equally, Françoise Lionnet argues that postcolonial women’s life-writing generally promotes ‘the creation of a plural self, one that thrives on ambiguity and multiplicity, on affirmation of differences, not on polarized and polarizing notions of identity’.¹⁰

While such positions represent the prevailing pattern of claims about this aspect of Selfhood in women’s auto/biographical writing, some feminists have nonetheless cautioned against premature celebration of the ‘death of the Subject’ in relation to female experience. Thus, Linda Hutcheon warns that ‘those radical postmodern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses’.¹¹ Such doubts have fed into feminist revisions of Auto/biography Studies. For example, Gilmore argues that ‘[M]any women autobiographers tend to attribute to speech, presence, political enfranchisement, and cultural authority the same tonic effects contemporary critics associate with the (more or less) free play of signifiers.’¹² This suggests that to appropriate the speaking positions, narrative modes and paradigms of Selfhood associated with the hegemonic regime of social power advances claims to equality for those traditionally denied full subjectivity (and therefore humanity) by the established institutions of cultural authority – which include both autobiography as a genre and the critical field associated with it. This stance is echoed by bell hooks with respect to minoritarian constituencies in the West. While by no means wholly unsympathetic to postmodernism, she asks: ‘Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the “subject” when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time?’ [sic].¹³ A similar suspicion of the over-valorisation of fragmented subjectivity in relation to some postcolonial women’s life-writing is expressed by Kateryna Longley who sees it as a wholly negative consequence of colonialism in relation to Aboriginal women.¹⁴

Postcolonial life-writing more broadly demonstrates the same mixed attitude about the centred Subject. This is illustrated, for example, in the contradictory accounts of Caribbean subjectivity provided by John Thieme and Sandra Paquet. In Thieme’s view, ‘[T]he fragmentary, heterogeneous nature of the society precludes the possibility of … a unitary Cartesian self.’¹⁵ For Paquet, by contrast, it is precisely such factors which under-write the ‘diaspora quest for wholeness’ in so many Caribbean life-writers.¹⁶ This ambivalence in fact extends back to the earliest theorisation of postcolonial subjectivity in Black Skin, White Masks. On the one hand, Fanon suggests that the appropriate response to the psychic disintegration inflicted on so many colonial subjects is to resist it through a strategy of Self-reconstitution as a whole being. Assaulted by racial discourses which fracture him into a ‘triple person’, Fanon claims: ‘I [must] put all the parts back together.’¹⁷ On the other hand, he denies that wholeness can be recovered by an appeal to essences, especially racial ones: ‘Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes.’¹⁸ Consequently, Fanon refuses to disavow the western influences in his formation; instead he celebrates ‘the zebra striping of my mind’.¹⁹

In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore some ways in which more recent postcolonial life-writing by both women and men engages with such debates. In doing so, I hope to determine whether the sub-genre can be differentiated from both its canonical and women’s equivalents in the West on the basis of this aspect of auto/biographical subjectivity.

The centred Self: Sally Morgan, My Place (1987)

There can be little doubt that the narrator of My Place aspires to the kind of unified, centred and ‘sovereign’ Self which many feminist critics have identified as characteristic of canonical male western autobiography. This aspiration begins in early life, during which Sally already feels ‘that a very vital part of me was missing’.²⁰ The text focuses primarily on her quest for that ‘missing part’, so that after journeying back to grandmother Daisy’s ancestral homelands, she at last understands the place of her Aboriginal ethnicity within the ‘jigsaw’ of her identity (MP: 232): ‘How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let things stay as they were. We would have survived, but not as whole people’ (MP: 233; my emphasis). This aspect of the text has elicited strong criticism. Eric Michaels has questioned whether such an apparently Eurocentric model of subjectivity is appropriate for the representation of Aboriginal personhood.²¹ Other commentary has claimed that it embodies the class ideology of bourgeois individualism in mainstream Australian mythography, which celebrates the continent as a land of opportunities available to anyone willing to conform to its supposedly ethnically neutral values of hard work and self-improvement. Morgan’s fellow-Aboriginal author Mudrooroo Narogin, for example, summarises the ‘plotline’ as follows: ‘Poor underprivileged person through the force of his or her own character makes it to the top through own efforts … the concerns of the Aboriginal community are of secondary importance.’²²

However, such interpretations of this model of auto/biographical Selfhood seem reductive in the light of Longley’s reading of the fractured experience of Aboriginality within which Morgan’s formation as a subject must be contextualised. As Carolyn Bliss argues,²³ My Place represents the predicament of those of mixed-race descent, more specifically, as one of psychic and cultural amputation. This is explained largely in terms of the policies of forced assimilation inaugurated with the grotesquely misnamed Aborigines Protection Act of 1905, extended and strengthened in 1936. Such legislation promoted the separation of mixed-race children from their mothers (whether ‘full-blood’ like Sally’s great-grandmother Annie, or, themselves of mixed descent like Daisy) in order to ‘redeem’ them through adoption by white families or incarceration in missions and children’s homes. (According to Russell West, between 10 and 30 per cent of all mixed-race children were removed from their mothers in the period 1905–65.²⁴) Daisy and Sally’s mother Gladys thus both belong to ‘the stolen generations’, the belated subject of a major government inquiry in the 1990s. Only after the findings were published in 1997 did mainstream Australian society begin to face up to issues which My Place had addressed ten years earlier, on the eve of the bicentennial celebrations of Britain’s invasion of the continent (and two decades after Aboriginals had so belatedly acquired citizenship rights in their own land). To this extent, as Anne Brewster argues, Morgan’s text, like much Aboriginal life-writing, constitutes ‘a counter-discourse to…white Australian nationalism’.²⁵

In polemically pursuing claims for restitution, both psychic and material, the genre has sometimes been criticised for its stylistic naivety,²⁶ a charge also laid against Morgan. Carolyn Bliss, for example, complains about her ‘artless primer prose’.²⁷ My Place is, however, a good deal more artful than such comments suggest, a fact recognised by Elvira Pulitano, who notes that Morgan’s narrative ‘operates on multiple levels’.²⁸ This is especially the case in its treatment of Sally’s aspiration to wholeness/unity of Selfhood. Thus, the issue of psychic amputation is broached with great delicacy in the opening chapter, in a manner which demonstrates the integration of a seemingly unself-conscious diaristic realism with allegory and symbolism which characterises Morgan’s whole narrative. Visiting her father in hospital, the 5-year-old is repelled by the disabled veterans of the Second World War. Nonetheless, Sally’s intuitive sense of her own lack of ‘wholeness’ is figured in both an unconscious identification with them (she wonders how she would cope without one of her own limbs) and her bodily ‘disease’ during the visit. As she arrives, she catches glimpses of her ‘distorted shape’ (MP: 11) in the chrome fittings of the hospital. The protagonist is self-conscious about her height, dislikes her ‘monkey’ limbs and feels ‘wrinkled inside’ (MP :16). Three particular aspects of such ‘dis-ease’ are flagged in this scene as obstacles which she must overcome if her quest for unified Selfhood is to succeed. First, again providing a link with the veterans, Sally feels physically immobilised during much of her visit. Second, her ‘colour’ is emphasised by the sterile whiteness of the ward: ‘I was a grubby five-year-old in an alien environment’ (MP: 11). Finally, Sally must overcome her fear of falling ‘in pieces on the floor’ if she dares to speak (MP: 12).

The crucial link between silence/concealment and trauma is further developed in this opening scene. It is initially adumbrated in relation to Morgan’s father, Bill Milroy, who is exceptional among the patients in being physically ‘in one piece’ (MP: 284). Yet Sally already senses that ‘the heart had gone out of him’, leaving only an empty ‘frame’ (MP: 12). Indeed, Morgan’s investment in traditional ideas of the whole/centred Self can be explained partly in terms of Sally’s developing awareness of the consequences of her father’s psychic fragmentation. His mind ‘broken’ by his experiences as a prisoner-of-war, Bill Milroy is prone to alcoholism, depression and violence against his family. While the explanation for these facts emerges later, his trauma is signalled at the outset by his inability to communicate during his daughter’s visit.

The silence of father and daughter suggests a comparable psychic abjection (later, Sally describes herself as ‘a crazy member of the family who didn’t know who she was’ [MP: 141]). However, whereas Bill’s trauma derives from an inability to escape his memories, Sally’s arises from being cut off from her past, so that her narrative becomes a process of ‘re-membering’ an amputated identity. The aetiology of her trauma is again revealed with discreet symbolism. Despite the temperate climate of Perth, she must sleep under a ‘mound of coats’ to supplement her bed-clothes (MP: 13). When her grandmother wakes her to listen to the ‘special bird’ which represents Daisy’s Aboriginal affiliations, it is a struggle to peel these ‘layers’ off. The clothing under which Sally is buried has traditionally signified the culture of the coloniser, in Australia as elsewhere. (One of the earliest examples of Aboriginal writing is Bennelong’s 1796 letter to Lord Sydney’s steward, requesting clothes from London.²⁹) Even in Arthur and Daisy’s youth, shirts remained prized objects of Aboriginal aspiration (MP: 182). Indeed, when the adult siblings argue, Daisy disparages her ‘blackfella’ brother by commenting that he does not ‘dress decent’ (MP: 147). This early incident in Sally’s life therefore foreshadows the process of ‘dis-covering’ which she must go through to reconnect with her Aboriginal heritage. The young girl has been assimilated to the dominant culture to such an extent that on this first encounter with the totemic bird, she seeks ocular verification of its existence. Conversely, the distance she travels towards integrating her different ethnic identities into a single new whole is measured by the fact that when the ‘special bird’ returns at the end of the text, Morgan no longer needs such material corroboration: ‘“Oh, Nan,” I cried with sudden certainty, “I heard it, too. In my heart, I heard it”’ (MP: 358).

Sally’s potentially tragic predicament of disinheritance ironically derives from the fact that the ‘cover-up’ of her cultural heritage is effected in the first instance by her mother and grandmother, owing to fear of being open about their mixed origins (MP: 163). Mother and grandmother, too, have suffered the psychic amputation which such self-repression entails. Thus, after their trip to the Pilbara, Gladys comments: ‘All my life, I’ve only been half a person. I don’t think I really realised how much of me was missing until I came North’ (MP: 233). Silence and disguise, crucial weapons in the battle for survival, can also, as Sally eventually persuades her mother, lead to extinction of cultural identity. In a sense Gladys’s silence hitherto is the very theme of the narrative she finally agrees to tell, which turns on her anxiety that the kind of separation which she and Daisy both endured was still possible in Sally’s childhood. Despite ...

Table of contents

• POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Centred and decentred Selves
• 2 Relational Selves
• 3 Embodied Selves
• 4 Located Selves
• 5 Working the borders of genre in postcolonial life-writing
• 6 Non-western narrative resources in postcolonial life-writing
• 7 Political Self-representation in postcolonial life-writing
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index