Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World

Rebecca Romdhani, Daria Tunca, Rebecca Romdhani, Daria Tunca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000433210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines representations of violence across the postcolonial world—from the Americas to Australia—in novels, short stories, plays, and films. The chapters move from what appear to be interpersonal instances of violence to communal conflicts such as civil war, showing how these acts of violence are specifically rooted in colonial forms of abuse and oppression but constantly move and morph. Taking its cue from theories in such fields as postcolonial, violence, gender, and trauma studies, the book thus shows that violence is slippery in form, but also fluid in nature, so that one must trace its movement across time and space to understand even a single instance of it. When analysing such forms and trajectories of violence in postcolonial creative writing and films, the contributors critically examine the ethical issues involved in narrating abuse, depicting violated bodies, and presenting romanticized resolutions that may conceal other forms of violence.

Section 1
Intimate and Gender Violence

1

Ethics, Representation, and the Spectacle of Violence in Marlon James’s Short Fiction and the August Town Fiction of Kei Miller

Suzanne Scafe

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110231-1

In 2016, the year in which Kei Miller’s novel Augustown was published, Jamaica recorded the world’s highest violent death rate for females, and for men and women in total, it recorded the sixth highest homicide rate. During that year, 1,615 people were killed, which is fifty-nine per 100,000 (O’Brien Chang). Hugh Graham in the Jamaica Observer reported a similar figure for 2017, while noting that two specific areas “colloquially referred to as ‘ghettos,’” Trench Town and August Town, had been transformed into “income-earning zones from the renting of rooms to people visiting Jamaica as well as tertiary students seeking accommodation in the case of August Town.” Despite the claim that specific areas had been transformed, a claim contested in Kei Miller’s short fiction discussed in this chapter, the murder rate remained the same for 2018. The editorials and opinion pages of the country’s two main newspapers, The Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer, posit causes, effects, and solutions with weary regularity.¹ There is also a large body of academic research focusing on crime and violence in Jamaica, as well as an established and consistent focus on these issues in popular cultural forms such as music and theatre. More recently, Jamaican-authored fiction has been making an intervention into these public debates, resulting in a wide-ranging national discourse that is constantly seeking to understand and come to terms with this phenomenon. Focusing on two works of short fiction from the collection Kingston Noir (ed. Channer, 2012), Marlon James’s “Immaculate” and Kei Miller’s “The White Gyal with the Camera,” as well as Miller’s novel Augustown (2016), I examine the ethical effect and effectiveness of literary representations of what Angela Harris has defined as “gender violence.” I argue that, while these stories occupy a complex position in relation to the spectacle of violence they represent, they simultaneously offer the potential to create an ethical distance between the narrative and its readers, a space for ethical thought, and for representations of history’s hauntings (Jolly 11–12).

Hyacinth Ellis argues that, “Violence is one of the crucial alphabets for reading and writing the Caribbean” (1). This is in part a consequence of the region’s earliest recorded history as a colonial state founded by “brutality, violent response and coercion through the use of excessive force” (4). First-hand accounts of Jamaica from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century draw attention to the ways in which violence has framed, foreshadowed, and even determined its contemporary identity. Diaries of slave-owners are replete with accounts of cruelties, unspeakable acts perpetrated against individuals, and an everyday culture of brutality.² Exaggerations and embellishments notwithstanding, early accounts of piracy in the territories around the Caribbean, including Jamaica, repeatedly describe the pillaging, sacking, and razing of communities, and the “debauchery and excess” of the colonizers (Exquemelin 100). In such accounts, as Richard Frohock notes, “Pirates finally are not just devilish rebels operating in the interstices between official colonialisms but are emblems of broader, systemic, imperial evils” (68). As the pirate Henry Morgan’s knighthood attests, their violent excesses were committed in the service of the colonial governors and the Crown (Howard 40). Forms of resistance to colonization are, therefore, as Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, necessarily violent, and it is this history of violence, heroic resistance, and failure that Miller’s novel Augustown revisits with its focus on Alexander Bedward, the messianic “flying preacherman” who promised not just religious salvation but full emancipation for the poor, disenfranchised black population of Jamaica in the last decade of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries.

Whereas Miller’s novel directly addresses issues of colonial violence, state violence, and resistance, the concern of the two short stories is to contextualize criminal acts of violence and murder, and, in particular, to expose what several critics have described as the business, political, and criminal intersections that shape political, social, and cultural institutions and relations in contemporary Jamaica (Edmonds; Harriott; Gibson and Grant; Morris and Maguire). Despite these interconnections, the society itself is, on the surface at least, rigidly stratified in terms of class, colour, and location. In the fiction analysed, hierarchies of colour and class are mapped onto Kingston’s urban spaces. The narratives describe a world of “compartments” where the affluent areas, like those of the settlers in the colonial world, are strongly built, “all made of stone and steel”: theirs is a “brightly lit town”; it is clean, well paved and “well-fed” (Fanon, Wretched 29). These affluent areas are kept separate from the areas demarcated for the oppressed, whose “crouching,” hungry towns are “wallowing in the mire” (30). “The colonized man,” Fanon writes, “is an envious man. And this the settler knows well … ‘They want to take our place’” (30). The separation between the world of the mostly black and poor and that of the settlers or the elite in the case of contemporary Jamaica is maintained both by armed security and by the social structures that reinforce difference. Specific areas of the city are used as the subtitles of the fiction in the anthology Kingston Noir and for residents and visitors familiar with Kingston, each area is filled with meaning. August Town, the location of Miller’s short fiction, is historically resonant but also, because of the area’s proximity to the University of the West Indies, familiar to the constituency most likely to engage with his work. Marlon James’s “Immaculate” is subtitled “Constant Spring,” a mixed and mostly affluent area in the hills of St Andrew, some five miles above “Downtown” Kingston, an area synonymous with ghettos, poverty, and violence. As this fiction demonstrates, however, although the borders separating urban areas are powerfully woven into the national imaginary, these boundaries are porous and the spaces themselves are more complex and less regulated than a first encounter with the city might suggest. In Kingston, worlds routinely touch each other and there are continual moments of voluntary and involuntary encounter. The poor are required to traverse the “mire” into the uplands of respectability, even while “crouching,” and those uplands, more often than not, border sites of degradation. The violence, but also the instances of care and recognition, produced by the encounter between two worlds is the subject of several recent works of fiction that seek not merely to display the violence they represent, but to assume responsibility to combat it.³

Rosemary Jolly’s recent work on post-apartheid South African fiction is helpful in thinking about how fiction might combat, or make an intervention into, a history of colonial violence and its hauntings in the present. Describing the effects of listening to the testimonies given during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, Jolly argues that witnessing on such a scale produces “deaf listening” (5), a genuine difficulty in hearing and believing the magnitude of what the witnesses and victims have to say. The effect is that the acts of violence described in these testimonies are, in the context of the hearings, “spectacularized,” displayed without the necessary distance required for ethical thought. Spectacular violence feeds a desire on the part of the viewer/listener or reader “to want to be constantly surprised by the actual occurrence of violence … [the] desire to be offended by it” (11). Such a spectacle, however, allows us to separate ourselves from it, “by judging those who perpetrate it according to our own scheme of values.” Thus we “often fail to imagine the systemic context in which violence occurs” (12). That failure is in part because the violence is “allowable” (11); it is a consequence of “how we may render some subjects allowable for violation; how, in fact we culture violence” (9). By enabling us to move closer to the subjects of violence, to see and recognize those subjects, literature simultaneously opens up a gap between our “initial perception of that event and our subsequent judgement of it” (11–12). It creates a space for an ethical response that takes into account history’s hauntings and its reach into the present. Jolly’s work, in conjunction with a reading of Frantz Fanon’s theorizing of colonial and postcolonial violence outlined below, provides an approach that can be used to interrogate James’s and Miller’s complex representations of gender violence and the effectiveness of their intervention into what might be described as a national tragedy.

Feminist critiques of the work of Frantz Fanon have pointed to the exclusion of women from his vision of decolonizing resistance, postcolonial liberation, and national culture.⁴ Although it is undeniable that the muscular, masculinist language of Fanon’s essay “Concerning Violence” (Wretched), in particular, and the earlier Black Skin, White Masks, intensify that exclusion, I would argue both that Fanon’s theories of colonial and decolonizing violence, his prescient analysis of the failures of postcolonial and post-independence nationalism, and his critique of class and culture in newly independent societies continue to be central to an understanding of state failures and the explosion of violence in the contemporary Caribbean. Further, I would suggest that his project of postcolonial liberation in fact implicitly and occasionally explicitly addresses women’s significance in that project. “Bourgeois leaders,” he writes, misrepresent national consciousness: he argues that “It is only when men and women are included on a vast scale in enlightened and fruitful work that form and body are given to that consciousness” (Wretched 165). “National consciousness” is defined as a product of liberation that develops in “contemporaneous connexion” with an international consciousness. It augurs a “new humanity [that] cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism for itself and others” (Wretched 198). Fanon’s work is interwoven with examples from fictional prose, and more frequently poetry and drama; indeed, a selection of his own dramatic work has recently been published (Alienation and Freedom), and throughout his essays and lectures, literature is used as a way of elaborating his theoretical position. In Fanon’s writing, literature does not simply reflect the nation back to itself; it is not just a “cry of protest” but “a literature of combat because it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours … it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in time and space” (Wretched 193). For the purposes of this chapter, I am interpreting Fanon’s references to “the whole people” (Wretched 193) to mean women and men. I am further arguing that Jolly’s theorizing of ethical reading can usefully be juxtaposed with a Fanonian schema: both emphasize literature’s responsibility to combat the legacies of colonialism, including its legacy of violence. Such a juxtaposition is used to analyse the potential these texts create for ethical reading, and the extent to which such a reading can suggest the possibility of a “new humanity.”

Set in Kingston, in October 1993, Marlon James’s short story “Immaculate” self-consciously echoes the murder in May 1983 of Dianne Smith, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from Immaculate Conception High School in Constant Spring, Kingston. Newspaper accounts of the murder, in among all the other accounts of other murders during this period, spectacularized her violent death by repeatedly exposing her violated body to the gaze of readers: she was stabbed several times by what was alleged to be an ice pick; she was raped, strangled by her school tie, and left naked, or half-naked, in a gully. Once the trial of the two accused men started, further details emerged that were repeated in even the briefest reference to the murder: among others, that there were samples of “human pubic hair found in the shoes of the deceased” and in her hand; that there were bloodstains on the white skirt of her Immaculate school uniform (“Pubic Hair Found on Deceased Similar to Shortie’s”). Inevitably, those charged with her murder, an ackee picker and his co-accused, a baggage handler, were judged according to a scheme of values in which culpability for violent acts such as these is easily assigned. They were already victims of the physical and discursive structures used to position such subjects on the margins of middle-class respectability. Living and trading, in the case of the fruit-picker, just on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Locating the Mutations of Colonial Violence in the Postcolonial World
• Section 1 Intimate and Gender Violence
• Section 2 Violence and War
• Section 3 Violence on the Move
• Contributors
• Index