Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

Donna McCormack

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441113788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critical study of the relationship between bodies, memories and communal witnessing. With a focus on the aesthetics and politics of queer postcolonial narratives, this book examines how unspeakable traumas of colonial and familial violence are communicated through the body. Exploring multisensory epistemologies as queer and anti-colonial acts of resistance, McCormack offers an original engagement with collective and public forms of bearing witness that may emerge in response to institutionalized violence. Intergenerational, communal and fragmented narratives are central to this analysis of ethics, witnessing, and embodied memories. Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is the first text to offer a sustained analysis of Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's intersecting theories of performativity, and to draw out the centrality of witnessing to the performative structure of power. It moves through queer, postcolonial, disability and trauma studies to explore how the repetition of familial violence – throughout multiple generations –may be lessened through an embodied witnessing that is simultaneously painful, disturbing and filled with pleasure. Its focus is selected literary texts by Shani Mootoo, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Ann-Marie MacDonald, and it situates this literary analysis in the colonial histories of Trinidad, Morocco and Canada.

1

Intergenerational Witnessing in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Unknowing pain

As we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally or definitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it. If letting the other live is part of any ethical definition of recognition, then this version of recognition will be based less on knowledge than on an apprehension of epistemic limits.¹

Physical pain [. . .] is language-destroying.²

At first glance, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night confirms Elaine Scarry’s assertion that ‘Physical pain [. . .] is language-destroying’.³ After years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Mala Ramchandin ceases to use language. On the one hand, such traumatic events appear to lead to Mala’s inability to speak and, more specifically, to her incapacity to articulate a sense of her past (and her self) in narrative form. Indeed, when speaking of Mala, her carer confirms this view, saying, ‘I detected what I think are symptoms of trauma’.⁴ On the other hand, her refusal to use the colonial language of English testifies to her defiance: she refuses to speak the language used to teach her father to hate both himself and his family because of their purported racial inferiority. This is the language of the British, who implemented the indentured labour system through which Mala’s grandparents migrated from India to the Caribbean. Mala therefore refuses to live by the rules set down by the British system of trading in people and the Canadian missionaries who seek to convert the Indians on the island in order to raise them out of supposed destitution and backwardness.⁵ Thus, although redolent of much feminist and postcolonial work, where the articulation or reconfiguration of the colonial language is a form of resistance, Cereus does not so much reimagine linguistic communication (in the way we see many of Mootoo’s other characters doing so when using Creole) as affirm silence as a powerful political tool.⁶ Mala’s resistance manifests itself through her refusal to engage with others within the existing frame of reference. In other words, her abandonment of language is a wilful turn to her surroundings in a search for alternative and less violent ways of being with others. She cultivates a wild (i.e. uncontrolled) garden space, where she coexists with the beauty and ugliness of a decaying house and a flourishing out-of-control garden-home. She actively refuses to harm the bugs, animals and plants around her. She gives into the chaos of not controlling life, self and other, and the ecosystem. In so doing, Mala lives with a sensorial alertness to the simultaneity of putrid stenches and delightful odours, beautiful fauna and rotting bodies, and life and death. Thus, although Scarry may be right to assert that physical pain is ‘language-destroying’, I would argue that the destruction of linguistic communication can be a politically motivated act and an ethical turn towards non-violent modes of being with others.

In this chapter I examine the embodied potentiality and potency of silence. My analysis is attentive to how silence is ‘too common, too institutionalized, and too destructive’, especially for those who cannot speak or who are forced into silence as a result of the interrelated violence of colonial rule and family life.⁷ Like Wendy Brown I understand that silence may have its limits. It may restrict entry into the public domain where it becomes possible – or even essential – to exercise selfhood and relational needs and desires. However, I also agree with Brown that ‘refusing to speak is a method of refusing colonization, of refusing complicity in injurious interpellations or in subjection through regulation’.⁸ Indeed, I am focusing on the political and ethical valency of silence in order to interrogate the current critical attention given to speech as the main (and often sole) means through which political subjectivity is gained. In this chapter I explore how silence is not a refusal of the public or the political, but a demand for change in institutional structures so that the unspoken may be heard. I therefore argue that silence, as Foucault suggests, is not the opposite of discourse but ‘an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses’.⁹ More specifically, I argue that Mala speaks with and through her body. To hear her embodied communication we must listen with more than our ears. Indeed, our eyes must be aware of movements, our nose sensitive to smells, our tongues willing to taste and our bodies open to tactility. I explore both the difficult task of translating such embodied engagement into words and the ethical potentiality of repeatedly failing to know Mala’s complete history. An ethics of unknowingness is integral to reimagining knowledge production, how knowledge is authorized, and the meanings of silence and multisensory communication.

With a focus on how the stories of Mala Ramchandin are narrated, I explore the collective and multisensory narrative structure of the novel. That the narrator only hears Mala’s stories by being with, close to and attentive to Mala portrays narration as an embodied, intimate and multisensorial endeavour. I further suggest that the queering of both the narrative form – insofar as it cannot quite stay straight, or follow a heteronormative trajectory – and the content – with Tyler desiring to express his feminine gender and Otoh having transitioned from a girl to a boy – is constitutive of the decolonization of knowledge, embodiment and modes of belonging in the novel. Furthermore, I argue that queer is not simply a mode of categorization, whereby we identify queer characters (although the fact that the characters explore multiple and non-normative embodiments, genders, sexualities and desires is important), queer is also a wilful defiance of the normative and violent structures of a religious family life under colonial duress.

To this extent, this chapter explores the spatialization of queer postcoloniality, whereby Mala imagines into being a non-violent mode of being with others. Mala’s sequestration in her garden-home is a resistance against and a reimagining of the colonial order that seeks to control and dominate the land and its peoples. Her intimate relation to her environment is the basis upon which an ethics of being non-violently with others emerges. Indeed, through the creation of a rather queer gathering – where stories are begun, flowers are smelled, and silence is heard as an embodied form of communication – it becomes possible both to share shards of narratives and to engage with the limits of what can be known. The repetitive and endless telling of the same stories differently, the openness to listening without hoping for endings, and the sensory openness to each other and the environment are central to the ethics of witnessing proposed in this novel. This performative narrative structure gives space to a theory of performativity where change becomes possible as epistemological certainties begin to crumble. Yet, I argue that the performative nature of identity is repeatedly related back to Fanon’s epidermal schema. Indeed, a significant aim of the chapter is to reinfuse Bhabha’s work on performativity with a phenomenologically informed Fanonian approach, while also bringing Fanon’s work on sexuality and gender into conversation with the queer gatherings, desires, genders and imaginaries forged through this queer postcolonial narrative. This chapter argues that multisensory epistemologies open up the meanings of performativity and its decolonizing and queer potentialities.

Cereus Blooms at Night tells the story of the now old Mala Ramchandin, who is brought to the Paradise Alms House after being acquitted of the murder of her father, Chandin Ramchandin. Tyler – an outsider in this community because he has studied abroad, is feminine and works in a profession dominated by women – willingly takes on the care of this socially ostracized woman. In addition to his role as carer, Tyler assumes responsibility for the acts of listening to and narrating Mala’s unarticulated history of physical and sexual violence at the hands of her father. He explains that, despite her unwillingness to speak, Mala is searching for someone to listen: ‘I was not sure what I was discovering beyond her voice but I felt it would not be long before I would have the privilege, and honour, of entering her world’ (77). Narrated retrospectively and non-chronologically, the novel tells of the events that lead up to and follow Chandin’s wife, Sarah, fleeing the fictionalized Caribbean island of Lantanacamara.

Chandin’s Indo-Caribbean parents want their son to have a life beyond the plantation, and the Reverend Thoroughly offers this to them in the form of adoption. The white missionaries raise Chandin in their home space, and through Presbyterian pedagogy teach him the racist hierarchical dogmas of religious conversion. Unable to attain the white wife he so desires – his ‘adoptive’ sister, Lavinia Thoroughly – Chandin marries the only Indian woman at the missionary school, Sarah. Much to Chandin’s distress, Sarah leaves him for the sister he has always loved. Where his ‘adoptive’ father, the Reverend Ernest Thoroughly, dismisses Chandin’s longings for Lavinia as incestuous, Sarah and Lavinia’s desires for each other queer the normative familial and religious structures to which both Chandin and the Reverend cling. Although Sarah and Lavinia had planned to take Mala and Asha with them, the daughters are accidentally left behind. Certain Sarah will return in the night, Chandin awaits her arrival by sleeping in the same bed as his daughters. However, this intimacy soon extends into a repeated violence towards and raping of his daughters. The novel weaves a connection between the racist tenets of colonial missionary pedagogy and Chandin’s subsequent abuse of his daughters. Indeed, Sarah’s queer migration with her white lover is linked to – without causing – Chandin’s horrific violence towards Mala. Queer desires, migrations, economic and social aspirations, and familial taboos are wrapped up in this colonial system, which not only maintains the order on the island but also perpetuates and silences violence.

However, other stories are being told: Mala’s lost love for Ambrose, her blossoming relationship with Tyler, and the latter’s growing love for Ambrose’s son, Otoh. We learn of Ambrose’s passive involvement in the perpetuation of violence towards Mala. Yet, we are also told of Otoh’s determination to reconcile Ambrose’s unarticulated past by getting close to Mala. This history of colonial and familial abuse is interwoven with Tyler’s urgent need to embody his feminine self. To speak of and listen to these imbricated and yet different histories is the collective decolonizing and queer task undertaken by these four characters. How to hear Mala and her family’s unspoken and silenced histories of intimate and public violence may appear to be an impossibility. If Mala refuses or is unable to speak of her experiences, then how can we hear what she has to share? Scarry describes how a listener may become the narrator of someone else’s pain:

Because the person in pain is ordinarily so bereft of the resources of speech, it is not surprising that the language for pain should sometimes be brought into being by those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are.¹⁰

However, in contradistinction to Scarry’s articulation, I would suggest that Mala’s move away from the use of language belies the idea that the one in pain is ‘bereft of the resources of speech’, where speech is understood as a solely linguistic means of communication. Where other nurses cannot hear Mala’s unspoken words, Tyler insists: ‘I watched her eyes, which I had come to believe were what she used for communicating’ (25). He is attentive to ‘her clinched fists, defiant stare [and] stubborn independence’ (21). Tyler makes a resolute decision to listen by trying ‘to decipher the words in her eyes’ (23). This is not an absence of communication – in contrast to dominant (and negative) interpretations of silence – it is a call for an intimate listening and thus for a different form of being with others. Tyler hears snippets of Mala’s incomplete stories. He connects her bodily narrative to Otoh’s stories and to his memories of his grandmother’s tales in order to weave a narrative that he then relates to the reader. The mediation of Mala’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: Embodied Memories
• 1 Intergenerational Witnessing in Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night
• 2 Monstrous Witnessing in Tahar Ben Jellouns LEnfant de sable
• Coda: Eyes at the Tips of the Fingers: Materializing the Self in Tahar Ben Jellouns La Nuit sacre
• 3 Fossil Witnessing in Ann-Marie MacDonalds Fall on Your Knees
• Conclusion: Embodying Other Stories
• Bibliography
• Index