Voice of the Oppressed in the Language of the Oppressor

A Discussion of Selected Postcolonial Literature from Ireland, Africa and America

Patsy J. Daniels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415936910
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136710858
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines works from twelve authors from colonized cultures who write in English: William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Maxine Hong Kinston, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Alic Walker, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko. The book fins connection among these writers and their respective works. Patsy Daniels argues that the thinkers and writers of colonized culture must learn the language of the colonizer and take it back to their own community thus making themselves translators who occupy a manufactured, hybdid space between two cultures.

CHAPTER I

Introduction: Making Connections

THE LITERATURE THAT WE HAND DOWN TO FUTURE GENERATIONS IS THE LITERATURE that we value, usually because it has something important to tell us, some universal truth. While they started from marginalized positions, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad have now long been considered authors whose works say something that is important for us to understand, remember, and pass on to our offspring. With the recent opening up of the literary canon, other postcolonial works, such as Chinua Achebe's novels, have become literature that is deemed important. Even though Conrad and Yeats wrote a hundred years ago, Joyce eighty years ago, and Achebe fifty years ago, academics still consider what they had to say valuable enough to teach to the next generation. But what is the connection between their writings and contemporary American literature? The connection is similar to a postcolonial genealogy: Yeats looked into the past and prophesied the future and, with Joyce and other Irish writers, invented a unified Irish society that could then resist English oppression; Conrad, even as he was also implicated in it, revealed the brutality of European colonization of Africa; and Achebe revised the history that he read in Conrad's work. Contemporary American literature, especially that written by women and especially that written by female members of a minority ethnic group, follows the examples that these earlier writers provided. Writing also in English, contemporary American minority women writers stand—like Yeats, Joyce, Conrad, and Achebe—on the edges of two cultures, belonging fully to neither. They have recovered the past and revised it to suit their purposes of inventing a cultural space from which to speak, as did Yeats and Joyce; they have revealed the oppression they have experienced at the hands of both the dominant culture and male members of their own culture, as did Conrad; and they have spoken to the world to revise their own history, as did Achebe. But Yeats, Joyce, and Conrad have been appropriated by English literature as “British” modernists, a literary movement that was dominated by white males, leaving many other types of people out of the picture. When Achebe attempted to correct this situation by speaking up for Africans, he left out African women. Contemporary American minority women writers have followed their examples, but with one difference: since they are in the lowest category of existing power structures in the United States, there is no one left to exclude. These women suggest a harmony among ethnicities that was lacking in the work of the earlier males. Even as they reveal their double oppression of race and gender, these women writers anticipate a blending of cultures that the men did not foresee.

Further, each oppressed group represented by the writers examined here has been forced to use the language and ideology of the dominant culture. In each case, the language is English, but the Irish writers had to speak from the patriarchal and imperialist ideology that they lived in and by which they were appropriated. Conrad invented himself as a member of the white male elite of England and criticized the colonization of Africa with the language and through the ideology of imperialism. In addition, Achebe had to use the platform of imperialist literature in order to revise the history of Africans as written in literature in English. And contemporary American minority women writers have had to speak from the milieu of patriarchy and dominance in order to have their postmodern voices heard.

About a hundred years ago, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce were Irish writers who deeply felt their marginalization by the colonizing English; Joseph Conrad, a contemporary of Yeats and Joyce, was a Polish writer who was similarly oppressed by the Russians; Chinua Achebe, a twentieth-century Nigerian writer, is from another culture oppressed by English imperialism, the Igbo culture, or a “Third-World” culture, as former colonies are sometimes called. Yeats, Joyce, and Conrad are considered “modernist” writers; it was in reading these modernists that Achebe found that he was further marginalized, even though Nigeria had gained its independence from England, and “wrote back” to “the empire.” Further, in the United States today, we have what some call an “internal Third World,” citizens who have won civil rights, but who are nonetheless marginalized by the dominant culture. This internal Third World comprises four major groups: Asian Americans, African Americans, Americans from a Spanish-speaking culture designated by the United States as Hispanics, and the American Natives, who occupied this continent before the Europeans invaded. In this study these groups are represented respectively by writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo, and Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko. What do these writers, from such widely varied backgrounds, covering a hundred years, have in common? Each of these writers has used a public voice to critique the hegemonic culture, to “invent” a culture that straddles or blurs boundaries in order to find a space from which to speak. Each has used a public voice issuing from that space to “write back” to the “empire” which has kept them marginalized.

Their connection has several strands: each writer uses the language of the oppressor to manufacture or invent a cultural space for himself or herself from which to speak. Each writer uses that space to find a voice with which to critique the oppressive culture. When Yeats, Joyce, and Conrad found such a space for themselves, it was swallowed up by the hegemonic culture, closing the door, so to speak, against persons of color. When Achebe found such a space for himself, it was not swallowed up by the dominant culture, but his work has been increasingly included in the canon of Anglophone literature; however, Achebe, in inventing his culture of overlapping or blurred boundaries, did not do justice to half of his people: the women. Contemporary women writers of color are now seeking such a speaking voice and space for themselves.

In the recent debate over the literary canon and reaction against the white, male view of New Criticism, several ideologies have arisen, predominantly poststructuralism. Under poststructuralism are subsumed other ideologies: postcolonialism, feminism, and postmodernism, to name a few. According to Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, if poststructuralist ideologies have “a summarising idea it is the theme of the absent centre” (178). These three ideologies in particular—postcolonialism, feminism, and postmodernism—overlap, and a major point of intersection among them is that each is complicitous in the hegemonic system that it critiques. For example, the modernism of Yeats, Joyce, and Conrad critiqued the imperial position even as it spoke from that system; postcolonialism springs from the literature of empire and speaks its language; feminism uses patriarchy as a platform from which to speak against the patriarchy; postmodernism is based on modernism, but takes its tenets a step further. To refer to Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of speech genres, it is easy to compare each successive ideology to an utterance in a chain of communication and to show that, basically, each ideology uses the “language” of the oppressing ideology to speak in the voice of the oppressed, just as each individual author has done in using English, the language of the oppressor.

Another connecting strand is the shift from the modernist “individual” to the postmodernist “subject.” This subject is doubled as subject-agent in the postmodernism of the women writers considered here, and their particular brand of postmodernism includes other doublings: of voice, of vision, of consciousness. Some of their texts resist interpretation of a reader from outside the culture of the text, but this can be useful in promoting community. These women take some of their cues from the earlier male writers. But contemporary women of color extend the groundwork laid by the earlier men, to an idea of community.

A further connection is the fact that there have been so many public quarrels among and about these writers. For instance, Joyce disagreed with Yeats's idea that art should be used in the service of politics; Achebe responded directly to Conrad's Heart of Darkness and titled his first novel self-consciously after a Yeats poem. Some Asian American men have questioned whether the Asian American women writers considered in this study were honest in their portrayals of Asian and Asian American culture. Likewise, some African American men feel that they have been impugned in the writings of African American women, and some Latinos feel that they have been castigated by the writings of Latinas. There are further quarrels between Third-World women writers and the women writers of the internal Third World of the United States. In addition, some women of color reject feminism as an ideology because, they say, it is a practice for white women only.

There seems to be a progression among these postcolonial authors, moving from modernism to postmodernism. In his early writing Yeats searched for the ancient legends and folktales of his people and wrote them into his literature, providing a body of literature that made the people into a community with a shared history in order to resist together the oppression of England. In his later years, Yeats became what is known as a “modern” writer, not abandoning his folklore, but striking out in new directions. James Joyce, too, is one of the “high modern” writers who looked for new forms of expression and rejected the traditional. Joseph Conrad is considered one of the great modernists, too, who seems to have anticipated many of the concerns of Yeats in Yeats's later, more prophetic writing. Chinua Achebe reacted vigorously to Conrad and connected his first novel self-consciously to a Yeats poem, although his postcolonial style of writing is more like nineteenth-century realism than like modernism. While Achebe's work has come to be included more and more in the literary canon, he would never be considered, as a man of color, a part of the elite group of “high” modernists. In addition, since Achebe is significantly later than Yeats, Joyce, and Conrad and can be seen as both postmodern and postcolonial, he may well provide a link between the modernist men and the contemporary minority women writers.

What these writers and their works have in common is their underlying concern with changing the world. Yeats wanted to consolidate the Irish people; Joyce wanted to show the paralysis of the psyche, society, and politics of Ireland; Conrad wanted to expose imperialism as brutal; and Achebe wanted to rewrite the history of his people for the eyes and ears of the world. While of course not singlehandedly, I believe that each of these writers, at least to some extent, accomplished his goal. Each of these writers found a space in the hegemonic culture by using the language of the oppressor. But the “radical conservation” of “arch-modernist T. S. Eliot,” according to Selden and Widdowson, “hardened … into the hegemony of a self-incorporated modernism” (176). As each of these groups gradually attained a voice, other voices have begun to become heard, voices of women, “other” to half the world, and especially women of the so-called Third World. While Declan Kiberd shows that the Irish experience of resistance through literature and words has provided a model for Third World writers in decolonizing their own cultures, vis-à-vis Chinua Achebe, Fredric Jameson claims that there is an “internal Third World [with] … internal Third World voices” within the society of the United States; the examples he gives are “black women's literature or Chicano literature” (49). Other examples are Asian American and Native American literatures. Terry Dehay agrees that women of color have been marginalized by the dominant culture “in at least two important ways: as members of marginalized ‘minority’ groups and as women in a dominant white male culture” (27).

These two kinds of marginalization may be the lowest common denominators for these women writers of color. It is important to keep in mind that not all African Americans have the same cultural background or experience, but that they do have similar histories of enslavement and oppression within the dominant white culture of the United States. Similarly, Native Americans are not from identical cultural backgrounds or experiences; but they do have in common the experience of being shoved aside, their lands taken, their people decimated by disease, warfare, and other cruelties perpetrated by the European invaders. Asian Americans, too, are not all the same, being from cultures as diverse as Indian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and many others. But they, too, share the experience of being excluded by law and by practice from the hegemonic white culture of the United States. Latinas have the dubious distinction of being twice marginalized by the Europeans: first by the Spanish invaders, and later by the political interactions between Mexico and the United States.

What these groups have in common within their group and with other marginalized groups is the experience of being “other” to the dominant culture in some form and, in some cases, being “other” within their own traditions. What these contemporary minority American women writers have in common with the earlier male writers is the search for roots (Yeats), the demonstration of oppression (Joyce), the exposure of imperialism (Conrad), and the rewriting of their own history (Achebe). In their struggle to manufacture a space for themselves from which to speak, they straddle the boundary between modernism and postmodernism, between patriarchy and feminism, and provide a multiplicity of perspectives or voices within each work.

Even though Larry McCaffrey identifies it as November 22, 1963 (Ousby), most critics do not agree on an exact time and place for the ending of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, nor do they even agree that postmodernism is essentially different from modernism, some holding the opinion that postmodernism is a continuance of or an intensification of modernism. But W. Lawrence Hogue explains it this way:

Two of the most common features of literary modernism are the radical rejection of history and the hostility between high art and mass culture. A writer imbued with the modernist spirit will be predisposed toward experiment, if only because he or she needs to make visibly dramatic his or her break from tradition … wants emancipation from all traditional social roles and traditional modes of servitude because they keep the self stifled and imprisoned … aspires to save the dignity and autonomy of art and life from the culture of everyday life, from the vulgarities and contaminations of mass culture, and from the constraints of traditional culture, which denies individuality. (75)

Hogue writes, too, that the “individual” is an invention of modernity. One feature of postmodernity, according to Hogue, is a “conscious effort to show how historical truths are socially and ideologically conditioned” (145), an effort to be found in each of the works considered here. He goes on to define postmodern literature as

That literature which consciously exposes those narrative strategies, or the process, which would lead to totality, that would advocate an essence, a metaphysics, or a meta-narrative.… [T]hat literature which constructs the subject as decentered, as possessing various subjective positions, or as a network of desires.… [T]he postmodern subject is free from all metaphysical narratives.… The trickster, who exists as a marginal figure in Native American, African American, and Asian American histories and cultures is a postmodern subject, with his multiple identities existing without a conflict. (152)

While modernist writing frequently alludes to classical literature and other “high art,” providing within itself the sense of an ordered universe that it professes to reject, postmodernism attempts to close the gap between the elite culture and the mass culture. While the white male modernists closed ranks and incorporated the body of modernist writing into literature for the elite, making modernism culturally specific, they also invented the idea of the individual. The difference between the modernist “individual” and the postmodernist “subject” is simply the difference between dominator and dominated. As Paul Smith explains in his Discerning the Subject, “The ‘individual’ is that which is undivided and whole, and understood to be the source and agent of conscious action or meaning which is consistent with it” (xxxiii-xxxiv). This definition is completely consistent with the views of the modernists.

The postmodernism of the women considered here, however, moves from the modernist “individual” to “subject.” Smith goes on to define the subject, too; he believes that it “is not self-contained, as it were, but is immediately cast into a conflict with forces that dominate it in some way or another—social formations, language, political apparatuses, and so on. The ‘subject,’ then, is determined—the object of determinant forces; whereas the ‘individual’ is assumed to be determining” (xxxiv). The subject is the female in a patriarchal system, while the individual would be the male in the same system. So women have had to critique the patriarchy first in regard to the agency of the subject female. Feminist ideology has provided the means for this critique, and Josette Féral believes that the feminist demand for equality “is no doubt a necessary precondition for a profound transformation of structures” (qtd. in P. Smith 141).

In other words, women must first demand the right to be individuals before they are able to change the world. Smith believes that the feminist critique of the patriarchy has been effective; he writes, “Feminism … has been able to recognize the operations of subjectivity and ideology in a way at once more sophisticated and more appropriate to contemporary conditions than most of the other discourses or oppositional movements which have arisen” (152). Within the ideology of feminism, the “subject” is seen not just as dominated, but “also as an active and contestatory social agent” (152), providing a doubled aspect, “a view which counters the long and continuing history of (phallocratie) cerning of the ‘subject’“ (152). Smith goes on to explain that feminism comes from patriarchy and speaks the language of that oppressor:

What's important here is that this paired subject-and-agent in feminism derives from the “subject's obeying the logic of its own oppression. That is, the interpellation of the “subject” into oppressed positions is not complete and monolithic; rather, interpellation also produces contradiction and negativity. The necessary existence of various and different subject-positions in the interpellated “subject” produces resistance to the logic of domination while still being in a sense part of, or a by-product of, that logic. (152)

Negativity, according to Smith, carries heterogeneity. The feminist ideology has allowed the “subject” to become, in addition, agent, and has allowed that doubled subject-agent to resist the “individual” of the patriarchal hegemony from within the patriarchal framework. In his discussion of Julia Kristeva's work, Smith writes about her elaboration of “the relations between language, the ‘subject,’ and material process” and sums up, “The link of negativity which she establishes to carry, as it were, heterogeneity and to negotiate the finally ‘indissoluble relation’ between self and other, identity and difference, guarantees a simultaneous movement or negotiation between them” (160). In this simultaneous movement, we can find transformation. Feminism uses the patriarchal system as a vantage point or a “language” from which to critique and transform the system.

The language trope here is useful; it allows us to consider feminism as an utterance, a link in the chain of communication, in Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of “speech genres.” Bakhtin writes, “an utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication, and it cannot be broken off from the preceding links that determine it both from within and without, giving rise within it to unmediated responsive reactions and dialogic reverberations” (94). Modernism and postcolonialism, feminism and postmodernism can be seen as utterances in this chain of communications, with each mode of writing speaking the language of its previous oppressor.

Postmodern women of color write works that are inclusive of both high and ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Half Title
• Chapter I Introduction: Making Connections
• Chapter II Yeats: Recovering History
• Chapter III Joyce: Voicing Paralysis
• Chapter IV Conrad: Questioning The Empire
• Chapter V Achebe: Revising History
• Chapter VI Kingston And Tan: Inventing One’s Own Culture, Making One’s Own Luck
• Chapter VII Morrison And Walker: Imposing Silence, Writing A Voice
• Chapter VIII Cisneros And Castillo: Resisting The Oppressor, Writing A Liberation
• Chapter IX Erdrich And Silko: Joining Heaven And Earth, Changing The Ceremony
• Chapter X Conclusion: Slicing The Pie
• Works Cited