The Postcolonial Question

Common Skies, Divided Horizons

Iain Chambers, Lidia Curti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134839476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

Brings together renowed and emerging critical voices to respond to the questions raised by the concept of the 'post-colonial'. The contributors explore the diverse cultures which are shaping our global future.

Part I

Critical Landscapes

1

The Undone Interval

Trinh T. Minh-ha in conversation with Annamaria Morelli

Annamaria Morelli: When I read your writings, or watch your films, what often comes to my mind is the image you evoked at the very beginning of Woman, Native, Other, that of the people of a remote village meeting to speak in the market place at nightfall. You say, ‘Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter… to allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes.’ Do you find that this image of the way people discuss in that remote village might describe the way you proceed in the composition of your texts?

Trinh T. Minh-ha: Yes, I would very much say so. Not only such a practice is reflected all along in the approach, but also in the writing of the book. The second chapter (‘The Language of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific Conversation of Man with Man’) begins, furthermore, with a specific suggestion of how I proceed in theorising and exposing the West’s approach to its ‘others’. The work constantly reflects back on itself, and everything written in the book can be said to be equally critical of my own activities as writer and thinker. It is important to remember that if one goes directly to an object, if one tries to seize it, one would always somehow lose it, and this is for me one way towards understanding truth. As I have stated elsewhere, ‘a creative event does not grasp, it does not take possession, it is an excursion’.

With the expansion of a market-intensive economy of movement, there is a tendency in the mainstream media to emphasise speed as a goal of inventive people or, rather, of smart consumers. To save time and energy, one is told to ‘go at it’ and devise short-cuts so as to take hold of the desired object as quickly as possible. So, anyone who makes a detour, opts for indirectness, and takes time to move on his or her own can neither gratify the reader or viewer right away nor expect any immediate gratification in return. But for me, to be able to maintain a certain independence, and to pace one’s movement accordingly, is always a necessity if one is to meet cultures other than one’s own, and to embark in any artistic or creative venture – theory, for example, is also a form of creativity. One can only approach things indirectly. Because, in doing so, one not only goes toward the subject of one’s focus without killing it, but one also allows oneself to get acquainted with the envelope, that is, all the elements which surround, situate or simply relate to it.

To start a story, for example, not in a linear fashion ‘from the beginning’, or to come into a story without a preconceived beginning and ending, but rather with anything that emerges at a specific moment in one’s thinking process, that relates back to one’s intimate experience, and then, to proceed slowly from there – just like the way the village meeting that you have just quoted unfolds – means letting things come to you rather than seizing or grasping them. Such an attitude is necessary for any creative venture; otherwise all that one has to offer the reader or the viewer is the empty skin of a fruit. There is, in other words, no reverberation, no resonance. With this also comes the much-debated notion of subjectivity which has regained all its complexities in contemporary theories. If one merely proceeds by opposing, one is likely to remain reductive and simplistic in one’s critical endeavour. Whereas in an approach where things are allowed to come forth, to grow wildly as ‘controlled accidents’ and to proceed in an unpredictable manner, one is compelled to look into the many facets of things and is unable to point safely at them as if they were only outside oneself. It is in indirection and indirectness that I constantly find myself reflecting back on my own positions.

Annamaria: You say that your films are not materialisations of ideas or visions that precede them, and that the way they take shape depends entirely on what happens during and in between the processes of producing them. I wonder if the way your written texts take shape is similar to the practice you describe in the making of a film. If so, to what extent and what are the differences, since what happens in the producing of a film has also a lot to do with the fact that one lives and creates with other people, while in the writing process one is unavoidably alone in the reassemblage of voices, tales, thoughts, memories.

Minh-ha: I guess I will start with the last statement, which is that one is alone in writing, whereas, in film-making one is with other people. I think the difference is very small, actually. It is just a question of physically working with other people, confronting them on a daily, one-to-one basis, whereas in writing, one may be immediately isolated and yet, with every word or every sentence one writes, I think one is always endlessly conversing with a huge number of people, reading and hearing from as many ears and eyes as possible, whether they are immediately present or absent. Yes, I would say that although images and words are two different worlds, there are many similarities in the way my films are made and my books are written. I am thinking here of Woman, Native, Other and When The Moon Waxes Red. With Framer Framed, it is a slightly different situation since interviews (which form part of that book) are encounters between two individuals and the discussions generated usually deal with the more generalised concerns of a certain audience and readership.

When I write, I never know ahead of time where the writing is going to lead me. I never proceed by having a plan (with an introduction, a development and a conclusion, for example), by mapping out the terrain of the arguments I wish to sustain, or even by compiling ahead of time all the points I want to discuss; I never work that way. Perhaps I can start here with an anecdote and then see where I can go with it in articulating my own practice. It is a story which the African-American poet and activist June Jordan told us in her recent book, Technical Difficulties. June was having a conversation with her aunt whom she loved dearly, but who apparently could only explain June’s political stance by accusing her of being ‘a Communist’. Such a label came about when June expressed her desire to go to Nicaragua at a time when she was supposed to celebrate Thanksgiving at her aunt’s home. They argued heatedly about the way Nicaragua had been spoken of in the mainstream media via ‘his Highness, the American King’ – Ronald Reagan – and since they strongly disagreed with one another, the aunt simply deduced that June was ‘a dupe of their [the Communists’] propaganda’ and remarked: ‘It’s a matter of East and West, can’t you see that?’ To which June replied: ‘East and West! But if I got on a plane tomorrow, heading for Managua, I’d be flying south and west. West!’ And this just made her aunt even more angry (laughs), as she exclaimed: ‘That’s just geography!’

For me the story is extremely revealing because at the same time as it is hilarious, it also offers a marvellous example of how wars burning nations are fundamentally linked to the way meanings are produced and fixed. With the playful insertion of one single word – ‘south’ – June succeeded effortlessly in introducing a shift of meanings that remains remarkably plural in its scope. In other words, she not only disrupted the East-West axis by opening it up to a third terrain and by implying the connection between geography and ideology, or between politics and economics, but she also displaced the binarism of such an axis by juxtaposing ‘south’ and ‘west’. For me, the poet in June is always at work. In a rather banal fragment of a family argument, the potentials of politics and poetry are simultaneously woven and unfolded. Such a practice of speech and writing would appeal to anyone who does not use language as a mere instrument of thought and is aware of how the same word can acutely shift its meaning when put in a slightly different context, as in this example.

Word as idea and word as word. These two movements of language are interdependent and always at work in the space of writing. When the telling and the told remain inseparable, the dichotomy between form and content radically loses its pertinence. This is how I would try to describe the way I proceed in writing. The way a thought, a feeling, an argument, a theory, or a story takes shape on paper is at the same time ‘accidental’ and very precise, very situated, just like a throw of dice. The fact that, radically speaking, ‘language only communicates itself in itself’ (Walter Benjamin) has not only been much theorised among the so-called anti-humanist thinkers today, it is also nothing new to writers for whom writing, which refers to and is drawn from reality, constitutes a material reality of its own. How one renders this reality is another matter. For me, if one of the two movements mentioned is atrophied in writing, if language is subjected to being a vehicle for thought and feeling, or if the emphasis is only placed on the told, the message, or the object of analysis, then the work will never resonate. And without resonance, writing becomes primarily a form of information retrieval or of administrative inquisition. Its ability to constantly reflect on itself, hence to generate new meanings along the process, to surprise both the writer and the reader, and to lead them to unexpected places, remains atrophied.

It is not enough to master a language in order to serve a vision or an idea. There are many dimensions in language and it is by constantly playing with these dimensions that words keep on displacing themselves from their intended or given meanings. And as words communicate among themselves, the writer who is the first reader of her text-in-progress will have to remain actively receptive to their interactions, for displacement causes as well as intensifies and multiplies resonances. Because of the sharp balance maintained between these two movements external and internal to language, writing proceeds by scrutinising itself and by constantly undoing the previous contextual meanings arrived at. What I mean by ‘resonate’ is therefore not simply a question of aestheticising language or a formalistic concern. Working with resonance is to resist diverse forms of centralisation – the indulgence in a unitary self, in a locus of authority, or in words and concepts whose formulation comes to govern the textual (and extratextual) space.

In my case, working with resonance is also, more specifically, to explore and develop the ability to speak to very different groups of people without having to name them all. For example, although Woman, Native, Other focuses mainly on the realities of women of colour in the US and Third World women, the critical tools it offers have been taken up by many other groups of resistance. These include, not surprisingly, marginalised groups across cultures and nations which I have not anticipated, but which can relate to the situations discussed, whether they are men or women, whites or non-whites. For me, if the book has inspired readers to use the tools offered to carry on their struggles on their own terms, their responses to the book have also been most inspiring to me as I move on in my work. It’s a reciprocal way of resonating. And it is exciting to write, as I said, with many ears and many eyes, even though you do not know exactly where all the possibilities lie.

Because of the multiple dimension of language, I often do not know how a sentence will end; I never know exactly where I will be in the next paragraph (laughs), not even to mention the next chapter, or the entirety of the book. This is something that applies on the most minute scale of the book as well as on the largest scale of the book. I have no idea how a book is going to begin and end when I start my writing journey. The story, as I wrote in the opening pages of Woman, Native, Other, is headless and bottomless but one has to enter somewhere, one has to go out somewhere, and even though there is a beginning and an end to every story, the readers can actually enter and exit on any page they wish without the feeling that they have missed ‘the intrigue’ or the ‘main point’. By turning yourself constantly into a reader while you write, you can see how your words can always be read differently, how language resonates differently from one context to the other and, according to the way it resonates, I’ll decide on the turns I’ll be making or the courses I’ll engage in. This being said, the book is certainly not chaotic (laughs), because you can take the last page of the book and the first page of the book and they do speak to each other in the contextual links created. The process constantly allows things to build on one another, and you as a receptor never lose sight of the many possibilities generated or of the continuous weaving of the many threads initiated. Ultimately one can talk about at least three movements, rather than the two movements I mentioned earlier. One movement is to go forward in an argument; another movement is to constantly come back to oneself; and the third, for example, is to create from, and with, the unintended reflexive communication among words themselves.

Annamaria: It seems exactly what is happening right now. I mean the way you have just answered seems to be articulated in the very movements you have just mentioned. These movements contribute to creating a rhythm that also comes out of different timbres and tones that modulate your voice. Different voices, in both the metaphorical and literal sense of the word, as well as silences, also constantly cross your voice, your work. As far as silence is concerned, while in your films, or while listening to you, the crossing and resonance of silences is clearly audible, it is apparently more problematic to listen to them in your written texts. Personally I find them in the way you put images in among the printed pages, sometimes in the way you play with the layout, or in the movement from prose to poetry, and vice versa, or in the overlapping of theorising and storytelling. For me, all these things create, in the otherwise overtly compact printed space, different rhythms and cadences which break the linearity of the composition and invite the reader to take a pause, to stop and listen to the soundless re-creation of his or her own associations, imagination, reflections. Here I’m talking of my experience as a reader, but I would very much like to hear from you about the possibility of creating silences in the written text.

Minh-ha: Well, your description is really great (laughs); it is a very acute way of describing how one can work with silences. Because for me, how should I say this… rhythm can only be created if one works on relationships, which means that you do not just focus, as I said earlier, on the object of observation or on advancing an argument, but musically as well as conceptually, on the reverberations and the links created in the process you have initiated. It is in drawing new relationships among old objects that changes can be effected on these very objects and that an unspoken space can be opened up. If I take music as an example, what is important for me in composing a piece of music is not just to select the sounds to be included, but also to select the silences. In other words, not merely to focus on the musical notes, but to have a feel for and to work with the intervals and the transitions between notes, phrases and movements, and how these take shape in relation to one another. Without an ear for the way tone, timbre, dynamics and duration (the latter includes both sound and silence) enter into relations with one another, your rhythm is bound to come out weak, flat or derivative. The piece would be just like a stream of notes and phrases put one after the other, whose relationship – you can hear this immediately – is not working out because they have not found a way of coming together and coming apart.

The same thing occurs, for example, when one reads aloud in deliverin...