A Post-Colonial Feminist Reading
by
Alexandra Olivotto
Borderline
1.
Canadian vs. Canadian vs. American
Just like the
Australian culture, the Canadian one contains in its
core the settler – invader pattern ; its complexity is
due to the layering of colonial relations : the
natives were dispossessed of their land by the French
and English, but the French-speakers were subordinated
to the English-speakers and confined to the geographical
area of Quebec in the nineteenth century. Canada has
also been the subject of economic and cultural
imperialism by the United States (1). With regard to
these psychological effects of a colonial past
(2), Janette Turner Hospital focuses on the
establishment of indigeneity, a desideratum which is
also expressed by Kroetsch : I now suspect that, on
the contrary, it is his [sic ! i.e. the Canadian
writer’s] task to un-name… there is in the Canadian
word a concealed other experience, sometimes British,
sometimes American (3). If a major concern of
post-colonial literatures is to write place, Janette
Turner Hospital transforms it into a temporal mirror
that reflects all the layers of the Canadian colonial
history : ‘ Out of the eighteenth-century enclave. Past
the three-tiered nineteenth-century brick (dripping with
a lace of pigeon leavings ; eaves trough jostling eaves
trough, wooden porches slumping softly with rot). Past
the shopping center where the long strip of upper-case
energy began : Hamburgers to Go ![…]. To where the edges
of the town turned fuzzy on the map or ribboned out
along highways[…].To where three centuries of
settlers’events, brief flecks of commentary, were barely
noticeable in the expansive statement of prehistory ’(page
73). The end of this excerpt reminds one of Atwood’s
Surfacing : if the American influence is represented
as the cause of pollution and contagion, then the remedy
is a return to the savage and untamed nature that
moulded the Canadian imaginary. Nonetheless, the
salvation with which Janette Turner Hospital provides
her Canadian protagonist (Augustine Kelly) comes from
within the Canadian culture (it is actually one of its
pillars) : it is a Catholic one. And it is precisely the
nature of this salvation that transforms Gus into the
type of Canadian hero that Margaret Atwood analysed in
Survival.
The
traditional hero is defined by the purpose and quality
of his death
[…]. The
Canadian way of death is death by accident[…].
Canadian history and Canadian imagination, then,
conspire to make a plausible heroic death – a death that
accomplishes something in terms of its society – almost
impossible (4). Although Atwood’s statements seem to
fit Gus’s death literally, the last one remains
controversial.
On the one
hand, Gus dies while trying to smuggle an illegal
immigrant over the border; this can be read as a
rebellion against the Canadian psyche that regards
lawful authority as the social form of divine order
(5). Conversely, Gus dies for a cause that is endowed
with a humanitarian aspect and with a Catholic one (Gus
considers La Magdalena the cause of his conversion); the
Catholic element is portrayed in the book as the only
element that binds the French and the English Canadians
together (Gus and Therese, Jean-Marc’s using his and his
mother’s religion in order to make Felicity feel like an
outsider). From this perspective, the death of Gus is
not only heroic (in terms of martyrdom), but also
significant in terms of his society.
In granting Gus the protagonist
status, Janette Turner Hospital conforms to another
pattern of Canadian literature : constructing a hero
that belongs to ordinary people […], men not different
in kind from the society they stand for, they are
engaged in occupations defined as normal by that
society, and they are not particularly outstanding
(6). Thus she recovers the heroic material submerged in
every-day life, threatened by mediocrity at all times
and, in the mean time, she stresses the way in which
this particular background is linked to national
specificity : ‘His pathology had been defined in amazing
detail only yesterday, in the conference room of Grand
Hyatt in New York : negative thinking […]. Gus knew he
was addicted to it. This came from being Catholic and
Canadian’ ; no one could say it didn’t make a difference’
(pages 28-29). The insurance agent caught in a religious
frenzy that drives him into chasing his salvation has no
longer the pure tragical flavour of the American hero,
but attains the pathetic-comic double-edge which is
symptomatic for the Canadian psyche as ‘His suffering is
appalling. It is unique and also banal […]. The stuff of
kitsch and great art and religion’ (page 219).
The Canadian attitude toward the U.S.A. is not often
dwelled upon ; one has access to it only from Gus’s
point of view : ‘Confident at the hub of the world, they
would marvel at Canadians, affectionately increduluous,
mocking : Do you insure against death by snow-job, then
[…].You
couldn’t help
liking Americans , they were so guilessly predictable’
(page 71). The ironic and patronising attitude is
grounded on the devalorisation of Americans just as much
as the aggressivity depicted by Atwood in Surfacing,
but it is considerably more tolerant. Nonetheless,
Janette Turner Hospital gives a subtler illustration of
the American influence when juxtaposing the images of
two families (Jean-Marc’s and Kathleen’s). As Atwood
formulates it, […]
if, in America
it
[i.e the family] is a skin you shed , then in Canada
it’s a trap in which you are caught
[…],
crowded and
miserable, but unwilling to leave because the
alternative is seen as cold empty space (7). The
feeling of entrapment discussed by Atwood is
particularly conspicuous with Gus : ‘ He was groping
through anxieties : overdrafts, mortgage renewal, the
stink of adultery on his underclothes, the dread of
Therese’s sharp nose, a rainbow of guilts – and all in
pitched battle with a valiant little guerilla flank of
self-confidence, a novelty this, his fix from the sales
conference’ (page 28). Entrapment and suffering (because
of her husband’s infidelities) are Therese’s due as well,
and she endures them stoically, as a consequence of an
original sin (Gus’s deflowering her, which led to their
marriage) : ‘Resignation suited her. She wore it well,
like a dress that had become threadbare but is still
comfortable and attractive. She had the air of someone
who carries on by instinct in the face of exhaustion and
predictable humiliations’ (page 106). Even when this
family falls apart, Kathleen still needs it as a basic
imaginary unit, she clings on to it while refusing to
acknowledge the entrapment it entailed. Contrary to that,
Jean-Marc epitomizes the American pattern of the family :
sons must by definition transcend their fathers, in
the process rejecting them. The family, then, is
something you come from and get rid of […]
(8).
However, there is a sharp irony embedded in this
typically American father-son combat mirrored in a
Canadian family (Jean-Marc and his mother are, just like
Therese, French Canadians) : the son reproduces and
overdoes the demiurgical megalomania of the father and
repeats the pattern of his relationship with Felicity (
‘January falling in love with May’) : ‘He [i.e
Jean-Marc] heard the Old Volcano laughing. The glands
are banal , he thought, and without subtlety. And life
is such a stale joke – it’s all managed with circles and
mirrors, it’s all been done before’ (page 242).
Nonetheless, this reproduction of the American family
pattern in the basic social cell of the Canadian society
asserts the amplitude of the American influence, an
amplitude that goes beyond economic imperialism.
Even though
she emphasizes the specificity of the Canadian culture
(to an extent that determins Gina Wisker to assimilate
her as a Canadian writer) Janette Turner Hospital denies
it a return to post-coloniality that would allow
Canadians to ignore their complicities in imperialism
(9). For this reason, she sometimes ‘writes Canada’ as
it is rather than as it is postulated to be. For
instance, she focuses only on the animosity between
French and English speakers, when it is generally
claimed that Canada is ‘multicultural’. Although most
political leaders in English-speaking Canada have
accepted and proclaimed the desirability of Canada’s
ethnic diversity, the Canadian public has not given
unanimous support to pluralism (10). Consequently,
Janette Turner Hospital prefers to display the actual
biculturalism instead of the multicultural image, which
remains more a desideratum than a real aspect of the
Canadian society. Insofar as Third-World immigrants are
concerned, Canada has the reputation of being more
tolerant than the U.S.A. (for example, Canadians granted
asylum to women fearing ritual circumcision two years
before the U.S.A. did). In Borderline this
distinction is inexistent : both ‘Montreal Gazette’ and
‘New York Times’ use – in their discussion of the border
incident – the most colonial language ever (in which the
depersonalisation of the immigrants is performed at all
levels) and the supposedly tolerant Canadians simply
extradite the ‘aliens’ back to the U.S.A.. In this case,
Jean-Marc’s comment (‘Today’s illegal alien is
tomorrow’s Resistance hero. This fashion or that fashion,
what difference does it make ?’- page138) suggests that
the accomodation practices (in which the Canadians take
so much pride) are a matter of political trends which do
not depend on the actual status of the ‘outsider’ but on
his/her current representation within the culture in
which he/she is to be accomodated. Once more, this
radical political statement contained in the novel is in
striking contradiction with Canadian academic
reflections on this subject : the habit of
acomodation as a conflict-avoiding strategy appears
deeply embedded in Canadian political culture, and has
increasingly become a habit of generosity from which
other cultural minorities benefit (11).
2.
La Desconocida
With regard to minority groups Janette
Turner Hospital devotes her attention not to the
dominant indigenous group (Sister Gabriel Vergara) but
to the subaltern (Dolores Marquez). Her evanescent
presence in the novel is a case-study meant to prove
that the subaltern cannot speak. In opposition with the
academia’s subaltern, in Dolores’s case, the priority is
her being rescued, as she lives in perpetual peril :
half-frozen in the meat-van, raped, unable to utter
words because of the trauma, scarred by the permanent
fear for the fate of her children . Her salvation – if
one assumes that the accidents of Gus and Felicity have
been set up – is accomplished only because the
protagonists transform it in a quest of their own, whose
purpose is to rehabilitate and to recover their past.
This can also be read as Janette Turner Hospital’s
positive retort to Spivak’s assertion : the problem
is that the subject’s itinerary has not been traced so
as to offer an object of seduction to the representing
intellectual (12).
In this particular case, it is by sheer
chance that the representing intellectual (i.e.
Felicity) has had a long-lasting relationship with the
colonial periphery and that she fully understands the
epistemic violence inflicted on it by the colonial
discourse. A sample of this epistemic violence is
exposed in the newspaper clippings that Felicity
collects ; an analysis of their language unveils
colonial stereotypes still at work : dehumanisation (‘illegal
aliens’ – page 137), homogeneisation, denigration of
indigeneous people whose identity is their difference
(13) ; these aliens – all look-alikes – instead of being
characterised by age, gender, race, religion, etc. are
only categorised as such and, hence, their traits are
not even taken into consideration. No wonder that
Felicity finds these categorisations ‘unreal’ and ‘absurd’.
Conversely, her decisive devotion to the cause of
Dolores corresponds to the feminist demand for political
solidarity.
Although the practical side of the
rescue is accounted for, the ideological aspect of it
backlashes. The representation of the subaltern is, from
its very beginning, a misrepresentation. Felicity names
her (and this naming has a history which is intertwined
with that of colonialism) La Magdalena, thus connecting
her to canonical culture, making out of her a mere
object whose function is to comply with its being
represented. Her naming of Dolores erases her history
and positions her as a figure of desire, reminding one
of Robert Young’s comment on the colonial discourse
which is redolent of a sexualised eroticism (14).
Gus’s images of her border with religious visions. Her
voice is impossible to hear while the novel is brimming
with hypothesises, assumptions and mirages that the
other characters construct with regard to her. If one
confronts this observation with Firdous Azim’s argument
that the concentration on a liberal humanist notion
of full subjectivity for the Western individualised
subject has often been at the expense of the claims to
subjectivity or even representation of the native
(15), what does one infer about the political position
of the novel ? Perhaps the novel epitomizes the
situation depicted in the quotation above, as Dolores is
a pretext for Gus’s and Felicity’s quest for the self
and for recovering it by locating it in the service of a
cause.
The main aspect which is emphasized
about Dolores is her motherhood (‘ «These are her
children », he said. « And her mother. This was her
talisman. We all need a piece of magic to keep going »’
– page 212), and it is a quite stereotypical feature in
the representation of women with hispanic background. In
her case though, it is a family composed of women and
children, a family which does not seem to reproduce
patriarchal structures of power. Is this feminine
Third-World space responsible for engendering Dolores’s
resistance ?
Angelo’s description is the only one
that comes close to a realist one ; there is a
sensational quality to it in the images of extreme
cruelty that it conveys. The solidarity between the two
women, and Felicity’s devotion to their cause are the
outcome of coincidence : the similarity between the
humanitarian purposes of Felicity’s father and of La
Salvadora and the fact that her memories of children
dying in the street, just like Angelo’s ‘vanish in
American air. They’re invisible here’(page 210).
Through the movement of location, any part of the world
can be recreated or made to stand in for another
(16). This statement explains Felicity’s assimilating La
Magdalena’s experiences to her own ; therefore her
action perpetuates the muteness of the subaltern.
This imagining of Dolores in
stereotypical terms is taken further by Jean-Marc : ‘She
spoke, he supposed, in Spanish, a low monologue, exotic
like the sound of an Andean flute. He saw red dust and
volcanoes, village churches, candles, an icon, an old
woman’s face’ (page 270). In spite of Angelo’s
description, the same colonial items associated with
Central and South America (exoticism, religiousness,
motherhood) remain attached to her image. Moreover,
Jean-Marc’s ventriloquizing Dolores’s voice is
reminiscent of Morris’s glosses on Baudrillard : in
the world of the third-order simulacra, the encroaching
pseudo-places finally merge to eliminate places entirely.
This merger is a founding event : once it has taken
place, the true (like the real) begins to be reproduced
in the image of the pseudo, which begins to become true
(17). Jean-Marc’s description is more a construction of
a neatly-homogeneised simulacra than a post-colonial
accurate writing of the place. The subaltern is
doubly-muted and more unknowable than ever and the place
for which she stands is – in Elspeth Probyn’s terms –
a postcard without any real people.
3.
More Alien than the Alien
As compared to La Salvadora’s mute
subalterness, Felicity’s otherness can be read as a
turning to the post-colonial as a kind of touristic
me-toooism (18). Her childhod days, spent in India
and Australia have made her acquire an acute sense of
the peripheral, with which she identifies. This
identification is double-edged, as Seymour and Jean-Marc
use it as a means to restrict her definition to
otherness : whereas the Other corresponds to the
focus of desire and power in relation to which the
subject is produced, the other is the excluded or « mastered»
subject created by the discourse of power (19). The
illustration for this theoretical argument is contained
in Seymour’s words : ‘ You’re an idea of mine, remember
that’(page 88). And, as Gayatri Spivak states, the
othering is a dialectal process : insofar as
painting and writing are concerned, the colonising Other
of Seymour and Jean-Marc is produced at the same time as
their colonised other is produced and represented as
such. Jean-Marc as Other is elaborated when Felicity is
absent, while Seymour attempts to constitute himself as
Other at the expense of her actual subjecthood. He is
the Lacanian grande autre, in whose eyes the subject
gains identity (20), and Felicity acknowledges it :
‘You’ve dictated the way I see things. Everything comes
filtered through you […]. You’ve stolen my eyes’ (page
237).
Their othering is similar to the
modalities through which the imperial discourse breeds
its subjects ; the strategies ressemble, for instance,
the definitions granted according of colonial
dichotomies (21). Among the ones noticed by Alastair
Pennycook, several are applied to Felicity. Her
cherished ‘quality of absence’ stands for a colonised
that must be very strange, if she/he remains so
mysterious and opaque after years of living with the
colonizer (22). This strangeness, fluidity,
unseizability (‘She’s not anchored to every day, she
floats away. Her days are baroque, they curl into each
other like acanthus leaves, she lives somewhere between
now and then’ – page 93) and its being either elucidated
or praised constitute the core of the novel. On the
other hand, Seymour’s and Jean-Marc’s invention of her
(‘Perhaps I’m better at her lines than she is’ – page
189 ) reflects the discovery motif which has
frequently emerged in the language of colonisation
enabling European traveller/writer to represent the
newly discovered lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa
on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural,
and later territorial claims (23). For elucidation
purposes, Seymour and Jean-Marc force her to contain the
geographical periphery whose presence has to be evident
in the appearance of her body :’Between her breasts and
her pubic hair, the viewer could see straight to the
tropics : mango trees, coconut palms, white sand. A
conch shell where her navel might have been. White wave
crests frothing like crabs up the sand, a little breeze
off the reef stirring her pubic hair. There was a
hibiscus behind her ear. Jasmine in flutted letters
across her thighs announced : This is not a real woman’
(page 19). Felicity’s nightmare also encompasses an
impressive number of colonial features : not only
Spurr’s trope of idealisation, but also her fact that in
the act of mirroring the periphery erases her being. In
conclusion, their othering transforms her into an ideal
signifier which offers itself to representation, is
alive only when represented. Moreover, if one considers
that colonisation implies a relation of structural
dominance and a supresssion of the […]
heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question (24),
then Felicity experiences a double colonisation
as well (performed by different authors, through
different media).
Another colonial topos is related to the
temporal dimenssion of the colonised : only the
colonisers have history. The former are either confined
to a stagnant timelessness or they exist in a stage of
development previous to the one of the colonists, a
stage which is the colonists’ prehistory. This
topos is frequently handled by Seymour : he uses the
recollections of Felicity (along with his own) about
her father in order to construct a prehistory of their
affair. To this Felicity opposes her own writing of
history into her-story : ‘She knew better than most
people how simple it was to rearrange the past, that
yesterday was an hypothesis existing purely by the grace
of today’ (page 131). Yet, Janette Turner Hospital does
not overlook the biased nature of this rewriting. For
Felicity, both this rewriting and her clipping file are
necessary tools in her patient resistance against the
colonial practices to which she is submitted. The
colonised past Seymour tries to inscribe on her finally
appears to her as ‘unreal’ as the colonised present
mapped out by the newspaper articles she collects.
However, this rewriting is perilous, its outcome can be
an autistic manipulation of the time, which is specific
to Felicity’s aunts : ‘As the spirals of peel went
slinking into bowls that might have held half the world,
so the stories uncoiled themselves and curled up again
into new shapes, and twisted and laced their way into
past and future and into each other’ (page 117). Beacon
Hill seems to exist outside time, a feminine isolated
space ; it is protected by the aunts’ belief in ‘the
proper channels’, managed by people ‘with the purest of
intentions’ (page 116). Paradoxically, it is situated
where the presence of witches was attested in the days
of the Founding Fathers and the connection is further
exploited :’And the aunts, who were now perhaps seventy,
or perhaps a hundred, or perhaps more, smiled back from
their youthful untroubled eyes’ (page 119). The price to
pay for this timeless shelter of ec-centricity within
the mainstream is a borderless egocentrism, which
engenders ignorance, blindness and deafness : the aunts,
even if they make donations to charitable institutions
in order to help the Third-World , disregard the
perphery : they even repproach to Felicity that she
gives it ‘undue importance. Now how could a place so
remote not do harm ?’(page 115). This is also underlined
by a symbolic scene : when Felicity begins to talk about
her ayah, Aunt Norwich accidentally cuts her
hand ; even discourse-type intrusion can shatter the
artificially-maintained harmony that owes its existence
to isolation. The aunts’ enclosed feminine and
non-political environment can be seen as an alternative
for Felicity, but is dismissed as she cannot afford an
autistic nonchalance. Another idea that is suggested by
this episode is that rewritings are never neutral and
sometimes dangerous if they are not sustained by – at
least - a quasi-political awareness. Can the feminine
gender be inexorably linked with politics ?
Bibliography :
1.
Keith (1985) quoted in Linda Hutcheon,
Circling the Downspout of Empire, in
Post-colonial Studies : A Reader, Bill Ashcroft,
Gareths Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.), Rouledge, 1995 ;
2.
Robert Kroestch, Unhiding the Unhidden,
Journal of Canadian Fiction, 3, 3, 1974 ;
3.
Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide
to Canadian Literature, McClelland & Stewart, 1972 ;
4.
Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide
to Canadian Literature, McClelland & Stewart, 1972 ;
5.
Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide
to Canadian Literature, McClelland & Stewart, 1972 ;
6.
Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide
to Canadian Literature, McClelland & Stewart, 1972 ;
7.
Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide
to Canadian Literature, McClelland & Stewart, 1972 ;
8.
Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide
to Canadian Literature, McClelland & Stewart, 1972,
9.
Diana Brydon, The White Inuit Speaks :
Contamination as Literary Strategy, Post-colonial
Studies : A Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareths Griffiths,
Helen Tiffin (eds.), Rouledge, 1995 ;
10.
Howard H. Palmer, Reluctant Hosts :
Anglo-Canadian Views of Multiculturalism in the
Twentieth Century, in John R. Malea & Jonathan C.
Young (eds.), Cultural diversity and Canadian
education, Carleton University Press, 1990 ;
11.
Melissa S. Williams, Toleration,
Canadian-Style : Reflections of a Yankee-Canadian,
in Ronald Beiner & Wayne Norman (eds.), Canadian
Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press,
2001 ;
12.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern
Speak ? in Post-colonial Studies : A Reader,
Bill Ashcroft, Gareths Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.),
Rouledge, 1995 ;
13.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern
Speak ? in Post-colonial Studies : A Reader,
Bill Ashcroft, Gareths Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.),
Rouledge, 1995 ;
14.
Robert Young, Colonial Desire : Hybridity in
Theory, Culture and Race, Routledge, 1995 ;
15.
Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel,
Routledge, 1993 ;
16.
Jean Baudrillard, Amérique, Bernard
Grasset, 1986 ;
17.
Meaghan Morris, At Henry Parkes Motel in
Cultural Studies, 2 (1), 1988 ;
18.
Diana Brydon, The White Inuit Speaks :
Contamination as Literary Strategy, Post-colonial
Studies : A Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareths Griffiths,
Helen Tiffin (eds.), Rouledge, 1995 ;
19.
Post-colonial Studies :
the Key Concepts, Bill
Ashcroft, Gareths Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.),
Rouledge, 2000 ;
20.
Post-colonial Studies :
the Key Concepts, Bill
Ashcroft, Gareths Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.),
Rouledge, 2000 ;
21.
Alastair Pennycook, English and the discourse
of colonialism, Routledge, 1999 ;
22.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized,
Beacon Press, 1967 ;
23.
Singh (1986) in Alastair Pennycook, English
and the discourse of colonialism, Routledge, 1999 ;
24.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes :
Feminist Scholarship & Colonial Discourse, in
Post-colonial Studies : A Reader, Bill Ashcroft,
Gareths Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.), Rouledge, 1995.
|
