7. Otherness within
‘One becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within’ (Кристева 2005, 251) Bryan is the one who stirs otherness in Shadia and challenges the borderline she has set to separate herself from others. Separation does not only imply expelling others but expelling a part of ourselves as well. When he dares to walk across her borderline he leaves her with the feeling of in-betweenness, with awareness that she must either extend her borders or expel even more.
To accept a part of what she has abjected12F her whole life, she must admit, among other things, that she is not in love with Fareed, that her mother is oppressing her, that her father left them because he had a good reason and that Sudan is not large enough for her.
A part of what she has to expel is her similarity with Bryan. Both of them are quiet, timid and not quite talkative. They share their interest in mathematics, and they could share one in religion too. Bryan is willing to accept Muslim religion and to become deeply religious. Fareed, on the other hand, is not very religious. Alone in the company of Bryan she feels comfortable, with Fareed, even in the rare cases they are unaccompanied, she imagines she is with her mother or her sisters.
Furthermore, both do not fit the identities in which the museum photographs fix them. Bryan has no purpose and strength in his look, whereas Shadia is ‘too modern, too full of mathematics.’ (116) To a certain extent, they are unrepresentative of their cultural ideologies.
Fetishisation of otherness
There is a need to root otherness, to position it, to confine it and isolate it from oneself. It should not inspire excessive intrinsic fear, but allow us to feel threatened and relish this secret experience at the same time. Pleasure, fear and power all in one. Much as we believe we can control it, otherness is stronger than us. It negates our comfort. With it or without it, we cannot be at peace.
There is an easy escape from this situation. Elizabeta Šeleva says derisively, ‘I shall die or I shall consider repulsive all those who do not belong to my (privatised) experience of my self-difference difference.’ (2005, 124-125)
1. Constructing ‘the West’
Lazarus speaks of the constructedness of the concept ‘the West’. It ‘has no coherent or credible referent [and] is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one,’ serving ‘to specify a social power’ yet also ‘to mystify’ it as it ‘references neither a polity nor a state … but a “civilization”.’ (2002, 44) He suggests particularising that “West’ as capitalism or Eurocentrism. Indeed, ‘the West’ serves as a useful shorthand on which we can spill all the frustrations of being underprivileged, but with this generalisation we often forget at whom we should direct our anger: at capitalism, Eurocentrism, and also at neocolonialism, patriarchy, racism, religious fanaticism, homophobia and the like. The choice depends on the situation and on the fact who is being marginalised.
Colonialism ‘always works alongside other structures’ and should be referred to ‘with caution and qualifications,’ ‘it is not [in Hulme’s words] simply a ‘merit badge’ that can be worn at will,’ (Loomba 1998, 18-19) and it ‘is not just something that happens from outside’ but ‘can be duplicated from within.’ (12) For instance, in the relation man-woman or higher-lower class.
Shadia, as well, is entangled in these discursive traps, whether consciously or not. Experience has instilled in her anger towards ‘the West’ and she identifies it with the geography of the same term. What she others as ‘the West’ is probably the closest to capitalism and postcolonialism. She recognises capitalism from her experience in Sudan as something coming from outside: Burda and other expensive foreign magazines, 7 Up, Listerine mouthwash, computers, cars and furniture from abroad. About colonialism, she has heard from others: in the stories about British rule in Sudan13F. Postcolonialism is something she really experiences. It is her mistake to contribute her marginalisation to every western citizen. Even to such a ‘non-player’ as Bryan.14F
At the museum she is faced with a canonical image of Africa, its reduction to its past and images of wild animals. The conquerors are also shown, but in their canonical image the dead Scottish fighters for freedom from English rule are not included. One could argue that this is a museum of Africa and in it there are no Scots but, generally speaking, British conquerors. Then, Britain is reduced to a stereotype too – the museum does not show poor workers such as Bryan’s parents. The museum’s representations, nevertheless, are a means by which Britain represents itself, whereas Africa is there only to be seen through the eyes of Britain.
In this short story Britain is also being watched. When they hear about the Malaysian’s broken window, Shadia asks, more naturally, whether it was the thieves who did it; however, the Turkish girl comments, ‘Racists.” Shadia discriminates too. Instead of realising Bryan is confused when she approaches because he is shy, or in love, or caught unprepared, or simply surprised, she sarcastically imagines he thought she was an insect.
In moments such as these ‘the projector of difference perceives and places themselves mostly in the role of an innocent victim’ ‘transformed into a sort of a fetish of suffering’ (Шелева 2005,115) Are we forcing ‘the West’ to conform to our expectations and are we relieved when it does so, and thwarted when it doesn’t? It is appealing and convenient to have a typical West.
Bryan is not what he is, but what she constructs him to be. Is he to blame for this? Perhaps he too readily makes compromises regarding his position, yet his identity is more nomadic. He is in search of himself and receptive to change, considerably more receptive than Shadia. Perhaps he does not discern the hidden intent of the colonialists hanging on the museum walls. Nevertheless, this is due to the fact that he is trained to have a positive opinion about his countrymen. He identifies with their unrootedness, strength and ‘heroism’, not with their violence.
2. Othering as defence
In the beginning several types of defence from otherness (and from oneself) are offered for the diasporic intellectuals. Shadia cries; the Ethiopian Asafa drinks. There is a more sinister escape. A Nigerian student committed suicide and this fact pervades the whole story like a leitmotif. It is etched in the subconscious of the whole ‘collection from the Third World’ and they keep returning to it although we are told they are ‘ashamed of that brother they had never seen.’ (2001, 101) His mentioning is a form of secret pleasure and desire.
When she wishes to defend herself from the emotions that destabilise her self-perception the first thing she reaches for is impoliteness, in order to become repulsive to Bryan. She admits she has been trained in pleasing people since she was little. Those rules, she feels, need not be applied to Bryan now. She misleadingly believes the reason is the fact that he is not worthy of such attention and does not represent a threat to her. She acts like this precisely because he is a threat to her and he reveals the hypocrisy beneath her politeness.
She is hypocritical because she likes to mock him and to humiliate him, because she does not keep company with Bryan and the others from the ‘Third World’ at the same time (later she even completely forgets them), because she is ironic when he does not know where Sudan is, she boasts, she believes in stereotypes, and is a 25-year-old whose mother washes everything for her, even the underwear.
A second means by which she defends herself is through attack on his social status. ‘One cannot hope to displace or overturn Eurocentric reason by inversion … such a strategy merely replicates, rather than challenges the thoroughgoing essentialism of the dominant optic,’ says Lazarus. (2002, 54)
In the need to make a class difference, Shadia emphasises her status. She boasts that her father is a doctor. Naturally, she forgets to mention that her father is a gynaecologist, a profession which left childhood traumas because of her friends’ teasing. Moreover, she hyperbolises the beauty of her homeland in a description so abundant with pathos that she recognises its own fictitiousness.
Once she alters it, his appearance no longer scares her; once she equates her mathematical knowledge with his (owing to his help), she can afford to mock him. His difference is, obviously, what attracts her. When it disappears, what is left is the fear of sameness. Some people live all their lives believing in the myth of a soul mate. Yet, what happens when that soul mate begins negating our identity or threatening our uniqueness?
In the masterly wrought dialogue of this short story, the more Bryan approaches Shadia and tests the limits of otherness she has set, the more meagre her discourse becomes, to end, finally, in complete silence at the museum. Invited to speak about her country, Shadia uses minute, literary, and at moments consciously pathetic descriptions. In the beginning, when she needs to defend herself from the powerful feelings towards him she makes a fool of herself: she says that she does not like his earring, that her mother would have been a princess had not the British colonised Sudan (an absolutely pretentious overstatement) or that The Nile is superior in relation to Bryan’s river The Dee. However, truly threatened, she does not use language in defence.
‘[T]he foreigner is a baroque person’: in order to blend in the new atmosphere they rely on rhetorical sophistication so as to assert themselves to those who do not accept them and try to adopt the new language as soon as they can. Still, their ‘kingdom is silence’. The memory of their mother tongue fades and the new one can never be mastered. (Кристева 2005, 251,252,158) Shadia decides to be silent. This silence is an escape from otherness and oneself, a non-acceptance and a refusal to challenge ones self-sufficiency.
In the last scene, inside the museum, we do not have a dialogue between two cultures. At a more private level, we do not have a dialogue between two individuals. ‘[W]ithout interculturality (about which Bakhtin and Lotman spoke so prophetically) multiculturality will probably remain solely a vacant – even though, politically correct slogan.’ (Шелева 2005, 128)
Is there a hope of understanding?
Shadia is not prepared to accept otherness. She wishes to see Bryan as in a museum. An unchanging, fixed and discriminating Eurocentric subject who has tyrannised her people in the past and now subjects it to derision and cultural repression.
Nevertheless, Aboulela, with her subtle use of language challenges her unpreparedness and her fear. In an interview, asked about the Occidentalism of some of her characters, she states
As long as fiction is committed to reflecting real people and not only a sophisticated elite, then fiction will reflect people’s prejudices, and their small minds which are a result of their small limited lives. Some of my characters do perceive the West in a reductionist way but they are challenged as the story goes along and this challenge is what is interesting. (2007)
Hope should not be searched for in the individual only, it is a social responsibility. However, the individual is the locus where we may intervene first. Some advice regarding the solution of this problem is given by Spivak, ‘distancing oneself in third person and self-irony,’ ‘logical and esthetical distance,’ and ‘the return to third person, having undermined one’s roots’. (2003, 35-36)
Everyone is ‘other’ to a certain degree and there are acceptable and unacceptable degrees of otherness for everyone. The fact that some are more other than the others is because we are not completely prepared to make that distance of self-irony.
June 2009
Bibliography
Books
Кристева, Јулија. 2005 (1997) Токати и фуги за другоста. Превод од англиски Роберт Алаѓозовски, Искра Гешоска, Емилија Георгиевска, Илина Црвенковска и Мимоза Петреска Георгиевска Скопје: Темплум.
Шелева, Елизабета. 2005 Дом/идентитет Скопје: Магор.
Сонтаг, Сузан. 2006 (2003) За страдањето на другите Превод од англиски Владимир Јанковски Скопје: Темплум.
Спивак, Гајатри Чакраворти. 2003 Постколонијална критика. Превод од англиски Лавинија Шувака и Роберт Алаѓозовски Скопје: Темплум.
Aboulela, Leila. 2001. Coloured Lights Edinburgh: Polygon.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992 The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 1996 (2nd ed.) Literary Theory: an introduction Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Gandhi, Leela. 1998 Postcolonial Theory: a critical introduction St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Loomba, Ania. 1998 Colonialism/Postcolonialism London and New York: Routledge.
Pennycook, Alastair. 1998 English and the Discourses of Colonialism London and New York: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988 In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics New York and London: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty. 1990 The Postcolonial Critic, Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues ed. Sarah Harasym New York and London: Routledge.
Essays
Ahmad, Aijaz. 1997 Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Post-‘ Condition in The Socialist Register Vol. 33 еd. Leo Panitch London: Merlin Press 353-381.
Bishop, Alan J. 1995 Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism in The Post-colonial Studies Reader еd. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin London and New York: Routledge 71-76.
Lazarus, Neil. 2002. The fetish of “the West” in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies еd. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne, Madrid and Cape Town: Cambridge University Press 43-64.
Slemon, Stephen. 1995 The Scramble for Post-colonialism in The Post-colonial Studies Reader еd. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin London and New York: Routledge 45-52.
Whitlock, Gillian. 1995 Outlaws of the Text in The Post-colonial Studies Reader еd. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin London and New York: Routledge 349-352.
Internet texts
Aboulela, Leila. 2007 Interview with Leila Aboulela http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/complit/leila.shtml
Sethi, Anita. 2005 Keep the Faith The Observer June 5 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/05/fiction.features2
Cowley, Jason. 2000 Commentary – Glittering prize New Statesman September 11 http://www.newstatesman.com/200009110048
Smyth, Brendan. 2007 To Love the Orientalist: Masculinity in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator in Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality Vol. 1 No. 2 170-182 http://www.jmmsweb.org/issues/volume1/number2/pp170-182
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12. “Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject.” Julija Kristeva 1982 Powers of Horror An Essay on Abjection, trans: Leon S. Roudiez New York, Columbia University Press. (13)
13. Sudan became independent in 1956, Aboulela was born in 1967. She also cannot be a direct witness of colonialism.
14. Leela Gandhi describes Ashis Nandy’s term non-players as ‘the “other” West which refuses to participate in an imperial view’ of the world ‘and the non-West which is able to live with this alternative West.’ (Gandhi, 172)