Alienation and Fiction: Double Colonisation, Search for a Unified Self, and Lack of

Fiction, whether it be a game in cyberspace, as in the case of Beryl Fletcher’s The Silicon Tongue, or a literary work, as in the case of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip and Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer, is a medium through which postcolonial characters will find their identities or recognise their true natures either to cover their alienation or to alienate themselves from the people around them. Sigmund Freud describes the function of literature in his analysis of Jensen’s Gradiva:

psycho-analytic research has summoned up the courage to approach the creations of imaginative writers with yet another purpose in view. It no longer merely seeks in them for confirmations of the findings it has made from unpoetic, neurotic human beings; it also demands to know the material of impressions and memories from which the author has built the work, and the methods and processes by

8 The quotation that belongs to Ufuk Ege is translated by the author of this dissertation.

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which he has converted this material into a work of art. It has turned out that these questions can be most easily answered in the case of writers who (like our Wilhelm Jensen, who died in 1911) were in the habit of giving themselves over to their imagination in a simple-minded joy in creating. (Freud, 1976: 1885)

For Freud, literature, as fiction, is the medium in which authors reflect their own neurotic minds, memories, or their wishes in the subconscious; therefore, literature is the medium through which authors recognise their true identities through characters.

Considering the similarities between Frame’s own life and her character Grace Cleave’s life, one can conclude by Freud’s psychoanalytic analysis of Jensen’s Gradiva that Frame depicts her own sense of alienation and search for identity through her character, which can also be understood in Frame’s autobiography. Let alone Frame herself, her character, Grace Cleave, as a novelist, also tries to express herself through literature.

Literature, like her haptic hallucination of her envisioning herself as a bird⁹, unravels the need for self-recognition as a postcolonial character.

As a female postcolonial character, Grace needs to express herself and make her voice heard in the Western discourse; only when she manages to express herself, she will free herself from the constraints of that discourse. Having lived in New Zealand, which is considered to be a third world country in the Western worldview, and immigrated to Britain, Grace criticises the Western discourse and endeavours to unfold

9 Haptic hallucination refers to the “[sensation] of being touched, tickled and pricked”

(McKenna, 2007: 10). As explained in the part entitled “Alienation and Other: Search for Recognition and Other as the Constitutive of Self” in this chapter, Grace envisions herself as a bird; she assumes that she turns into a bird and has feathers on her body (Frame, 2009: 7).

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the “concealed […] oppression of blacks, working-class people, [and] women”, which is what the postcolonial literature intends to do (Habib, 2005: 740):

([…] I have told no one, I’m never going to tell anyone, but when I grow up I am going to be a poet.)

It seemed that she was not grown up yet, nor was she a poet, and if she ever became a poet it was likely that she would never have the name poet – it would be

‘poetess’, the word which is sprayed like a weedkiller about the person and work of a woman who writes poetry – many have thus been ‘put to sleep’; we are assured it is painless, there is no cause to worry then – is there? (Frame, 2009:

195-196)

As the quotation suggests, Grace criticises the Western discourse and how it contributes to colonization by referring to her childhood dream of becoming a poet: naming a person a poetess and foregrounding the difference between the male and female sex are the illustrations of sex discrimination, condescending and pacifying attitudes that put a woman to sleep and make her believe that there is no harm in being called a poetess. As a black postcolonial character, Grace is cognizant of the concealed oppression of her race and sex; she is twice oppressed by the Western discourse: first as a black and second as a female character. Just like Ufuk Ege Uygur, who foregrounds that “[b]lack women are the victims of both racism and sexism” (2016: 245), Meryem Ayan scrutinizes the oppression of the female sex by touching upon ethnic female writing in her Diversities in Ethnic Female Narratology (2011): she points out

ethnic female [writing] generally attempt[s] to define the condition of the ethnic woman who is oppressed not only because of being female, but also because of being ethnic (2011: 7).

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Like Janet Frame or Grace Cleave, therefore, “the ethnic female writers […] [center]

their subjects on the issues of “otherness” […], identity, gender, sense of belonging”

(51), by “analyz[ing] ethnic women’s oppression in terms of race” as well (109). That is to say, ethnic female writing, or black female writing as in the case of Janet Frame or her character Grace Cleave, deals with the issues of race and sex in their relation to the function of Other in identity formation, and the feeling of alienation or lack/loss of belonging. As Barbara Smith points out in “Toward A Black Feminist Criticism”

(1978),

[a] Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers is an absolute necessity. Until a Black feminist criticism exists we will not even know what these writers mean.

(1978: 21)

Thus, the ethnic female writing, or the black female writing, criticises the patriarchal Western discourse either by means of the reflection of “the conventional story telling mode to show how it recalls male oppression in literary tradition” (Ayan, 2011: 7) or by means of the “subver[sion]” (6) of the “already established modes of narrations […] to come up with models for the best articulation of [women’s] own experiences” (6).

About ethnic writing, Ufuk Ege Uygur argues that the black or the colonized use the language of the white or the coloniser, and when the black or the colonized know the morphology of the language of the white or the coloniser, they can observe the culture of the white or the coloniser (2018: 11). Knowing and understanding the culture of the coloniser leads the colonized to criticise the coloniser, which, in turn, brings forth

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colonialism and postcolonialism¹⁰. In this sense, ethnic female writing or ethnic writing in general is similar to the postcolonial writing as they both serve the vocalization of the ideas of the marginalised and the otherized by the patriarchal Western discourse. To relate the ideas to the novel, Grace’s criticism towards the patriarchal Western discourse unravels how the female sex is pacified by the patriarchal Western discourse. The passivity of the female sex is not a harmless case for Grace: a pacified woman cannot express and identify herself on her own, and she cannot make her voice heard either in the colonial or in the postcolonial discourse. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak talks about this pacified woman by referring to a subaltern woman in her article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1994): “If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (Spivak, 1994: 82-83) By repeating what Spivak says, John McLeod, in Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), points out the ‘double colonisation’¹¹ of the colonized woman by means of both colonialism and patriarchy, and by touching upon the relation between the postcolonial and feminist discourses, he argues that this twice colonized woman questions, by postcolonial and feminist criticisms, her double colonisation (McLeod, 2000: 175). In this sense, Janet Frame, as the author of Towards Another Summer, questions the colonial discourse by means of her character: “Some of the most radical

10 Catherine Lynette Innes argues that post-colonialism and postcolonialism refer to two different concepts: that is, the hyphenated word is different from the other in the sense that it refers to the historical period after the decolonization of a country whereas the word without hyphen refers to the cultural consequences of the decolonized country:

these cultural consequences may be observed in the social and economic life of the decolonized country and in its language and literature too (2007: 1-2).

11 McLeod, as he states in his study, clarifies Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford’s ‘double colonisation’ terminology.

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criticism […] today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject.” (Spivak, 1994: 66) For Frame and Grace then, Western people may consider themselves superior and the Eastern or the Southern as the other to be colonized because they may consider themselves as the Subjects having a defining function¹²: defining the Eastern or the Southern as the other by turning them into Objects, as in the examples of Grace herself or Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (2017) or even Safiye Zeynep Şakil in Salman Rushdie’s (Shame) Utanç (2013).¹³ However, what is clear in Frame’s quotation above is that both Frame and her character are aware of their pacified positions and that they challenge that passivity, either by writing or pointing out and asking a question about it as a postcolonial writer and as a postcolonial character. Namely, Grace’s attempt to challenge her passivity is, in fact, her attempt to challenge the Western colonial and patriarchal discourse that

“constitute[s] the colonial subject as Other.” (qtd. in Habib, 2005: 748) Although she does not totally free herself from that discourse, she does not cease to search for means and forms to make herself heard. On the one hand, it is this constant effort to express

12 The concepts of the Western superiority over the Eastern or the Southern and the Eastern or the Southern as the others of the West have been engendered by the West so as to “conceptualise” or “classify[…] together things of a certain kind, and in some way think[…] or reason[…] about” these concepts so as to make them attain “universal”

meanings (Lacey, 1996: 56). It is through universalizing these concepts that the West actualized colonialism before the decolonization of the countries.

13 All the characters in the novels concerned turn into Objects through their likening to animals: Grace Cleave in Towards Another Summer turns into a bird (Frame, 2009: 7), Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is likened to a wild animal walking on her four legs (Brontë, 2017: 408) just like Safiye Zeynep Şakil, who is no more a human being but an animal walking on four legs in Salman Rushdie’s novel (Rushdie, 2013: 318).

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herself that leads to her constant alienation from the people either in New Zealand or in Britain. On the other hand, it is the same effort that foregrounds her postcolonial nature that challenges the “‘epistemic violence,’ the imposition of a given set of beliefs over another” and the attempt to “[establish] ‘one explanation and narrative of reality … as the normative one’” (748). For Grace, a way to challenge that epistemic violence is writing. That is, fiction serves her endeavour to overcome the sense of alienation. As a novelist, Grace attempts to have the fulfilment of the restoration of a unified self that is not fragmented with the coming of the coloniser: “belonging to more than one world can be both challenging and liberating and that writing itself can be a kind of home; a creative nest” (Nandan, 2012: 274), and

“[w]riting allows us to give some structure or recuperate some degrees of wholeness. However, this process does not become stagnant or complacent; rather the fluid space of writing retains a necessary sense of incompleteness in order to acknowledge the loss” (274).

In this sense, the sense of wholeness for Grace can be attained through fiction, through writing. It is for this reason she becomes a novelist. However, as Kavita Ivy Nandan argues, attaining that unified wholeness is not an easy task: it is paradoxical; that is, the fragmented person first appreciates her incomplete nature and her loss of wholeness; it is only after this appreciation, she can retain the sense of completeness or wholeness.

Fiction, then, is a medium to attain that completeness although it cannot, solely by itself, allow the fragmented person to overcome her in-between nature.

The novel reflects the in-between nature of Grace even in the beginning: her childhood and juvenile years were spent in New Zealand, and she, as a grown-up woman, lives in Britain:

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When she came to this country her body had stopped growing, her bones had accepted enough Antipodean deposit to last until her death, her hair that once flamed ginger in the southern sun was fading and dust-coloured in the new hemisphere [...] (Frame, 2009: 3)

Before commenting on the quotation above, the terms “culture” and “transculturalism”

should be elaborated first. For Jeff Lewis,

[c]ulture is an assemblage of imaginings and meanings that may be consonant, disjunctive, overlapping, contentious, continuous, or discontinuous. These assemblages may operate through a wide variety of human social groupings and social practices. In contemporary culture these experiences of imagining and meaning-making are intensified through the proliferation of mass media images and information. (2002: 23-24)¹⁴

That is, culture, as a consequence and/or a product of an imagination that gains its meaning and definition in time through the expectations of external forces, is not stable;

that is, its meaning is fluctuating and changeable, so it is discontinuous. It can gain its meaning through different determiners or social groupings like religions, technologies, work, families, nations, and ethnicities (23). Besides these, mass media images and information contribute to the meaning-making process and the discontinuity of the culture. Then it can be concluded that culture aims at attaining fixed and continuous values that are shared by one single community, nation, or people whereas it is also discontinuous as it is also shaped by the many divergent minor groups besides the dominant one (23), which, in fact, paves the way for transculturalism as transculturalism gives much importance to discontinuity and “instability” of meanings (24) besides “the ways in which social groups “create” and “distribute” their meanings” (24). To be more

14 The quotation is in italics in the original text.

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precise, transculturalism deals with the meaning-making process and the ways how concepts gain meanings. It is for this reason that it rejects a priori and fixed meanings and deals more with “transitory nature of culture” (24). The transitory nature of culture also highlights how knowledge is instable (26): language, as the medium of the expression of culture, is open to the differences between each divergent group in a community or a nation. As it is shaped by a large number of groups, both the dominant and the minor ones, it does not provide fixed meanings or knowledge that is true for every person in the same community or nation. Instead, it brings forth communication that is either enriched or disrupted by external determiners. That is, just like knowledge, communication does not come out of a single vision or imagining of a single meaning.

It comes out when a person is in interaction with other meanings and meaning-making processes; that is, when a person is in interaction with the meaning-making processes of other nations as well. For this reason, meaning-making, in general, does not happen in one single nation; it comes out of the interactions with different nations as well. Based on the idea that there are no more definite cultures peculiar to only one nation, transculturalism argues that different cultures of different nations are in contact with one another, and they are affected from each other. The influence of one culture on the other

“is rooted in the quest to define shared interests and common values across cultural and national borders” as defined by Richard Slimbach (2005: 206). This quest, however, does not always end up with the desired wish for finding common interests and values between different cultures a person is affected from, and this is generally true for the migrants whose integration into the culture of a different group or nation becomes generally problematic.

In the studies of migrant transculturalism, the issue of social change necessitates the review of social organisations, conditions, values, practices, and structures in more than one place. In other words, migrant transculturalism scrutinizes how two

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concepts, that is the homeland and the place lived in [after immigration], are gathered together, and how immigration changes both [the concept of homeland and the place lived in after immigration]. (Uygur, 2016: 357)

As understood from the quotation, transculturalism for the migrants gathers different cultures’ social values, structures, conditions, and practices. It does not, therefore, provide fixed meanings of home, homeland, belonging, nationhood, and so on. Instead, in migrant transculturalism, immigrants feel ties to both cultures they leave and they enter into, and they live with the sense of duality (368). That is, they feel belonging to two cultures (368) as they are part of the two cultures they leave and they enter into.

However, this belonging is a partial one, and it is not a feeling and an act of thorough belonging as they feel the sense of lack of belonging to any of the cultures they leave or immigrate to: they do not totally feel the embracement of the culture they leave and the culture they immigrate to; they feel that neither of the cultures provide them a feeling of completeness with/within a culture. To turn back to the quotation from the novel, it can be said that Grace, as a transcultural person, is a novelist knowing and becoming a part of both cultures; grown up in New Zealand, she prefers living in Britain although she cannot thoroughly express herself there. Besides, she cannot totally forget about the days she spent in New Zealand. In this sense, she is fragmented, torn between the two cultures. That is, she is tied to both cultures, and as Uygur points out, she lives with the duality of the feeling of belonging. This duality and the fragmentation cause her to be alienated from both cultures in the end. The narrator expresses this sense of alienation as follows:

In my own country.

She didn’t use that phrase as much now as when she had first arrived. Then it was At Home, Back Home, Where I come from ... It’s funny over here, you ... whereas

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we always ... you do this, we do that ... you ... we ... here ... there ... (Frame, 2009:

4)

Just like Frame herself, her character, who emigrated to another country, feels herself alienated from her own country. She does not compare the two countries as much as she did before, and she does not much use such phrases as “at home”, “back home”, and

“we”, the expressions that depict belonging to a country and a nation and the completeness Nandan argues. She states that she “[forgets] We, there, us, back home, where I come from, in my own country” (4), so she has lost the sense of belonging to New Zealand. Therefore, as a character emigrating to another country, she is alienated from her own country. “The alienated individual, in addition to experiencing estrangement, disconnection, isolation, and so on, suffers from a sense of loss, a definite sense that something [s/he] had before is missing [...]” (Ifergan and Banham, 2014: 6), and, as stated before, what is missing for Grace is the sense of belonging to New Zealand in this case.

The idea of fiction serving the representation of alienated and fragmented postcolonial people is also highlighted in Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia’s work centring on Edward Said. They point out the relation between texts and political ideologies in its relation to the concept of home and homeland. For them,

[t]he relationship between text and reader is something like the relationship of the coloniser and the colonized. This power relationship may be unequal but it is a relationship, and one which makes untenable the principle that texts are separate from the world, or that the text is opposed to speech. Too many exceptions, too many historical, ideological and formal circumstances, implicate the text in actuality, even if a text is considered to be a silent printed object with its own unheard melodies. The text is produced by the world, a concert of the material

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forces of power in that world, and the situatedness of which it specially speaks.

(Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 2001: 24-25)

Then the bond between texts and readers also highlights the bond between texts and their writers. Each text is an indication of social, economic, or political circumstances, let alone the psychology of the writer. The colonial and postcolonial texts, therefore, depict these circumstances and people experiencing alienation and fragmentation, as in the case of Grace Cleave in Frame’s novel. Her expressions “we”, “at home”, “back home”, or “I come from” are reactionary lexical usages to colonialism, the movement that eventuates in her alienation and fragmentation.

This has become a very familiar reaction in post-colonial societies to the dominance of a colonial language. The speech is a prototype of the reaction to the power relationship introduced by the ascendancy of European power throughout the nineteenth century, a recapitulation of the political and racial exclusions instituted by that dominance. (24)

This dominance of the colonial language, perpetuating also in the post-colonial period, results in reaction to the colonial power, and this reaction evinces the alienation of the colonized, either in the colonial or in the post-colonial period. Criticising the dominant power and its imposing language, the colonized reveal they are not the part of that dominant group, or the coloniser. That is, they alienate themselves from the coloniser, which is their Other as the external determiner in meaning-making process through a Western discourse, in fact. Vocalization of the longing for home or the homeland, which is also a familiar reaction in post-colonial societies (24), is another sign of that reaction.

What is repressed cannot, it is true, as a rule make its way into memory without more ado; but it retains a capacity for effective action, and, under the influence of

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some external event, it may one day bring about psychical consequences which can be regarded as products of a modification of the forgotten memory and as derivatives of it […]. (Freud, 1976: 1837)

It means that when postcolonial characters vocalize their longing for home and homeland, they expose the forgotten but to be remembered memory of this home and homeland in their subconscious. However, that vocalization does not mean that the colonized will attain the wholeness they lose with the coming of the coloniser. Instead, it unravels another alienation, alienation from the home or the homeland, due to that same loss of wholeness. The colonized are fragmented, torn between the two cultures;

therefore, they do not reattain the missed unity with the home no matter how they change their places or emigrate to another country. Changing places within the same country is like emigration in the sense that the already-colonized miss home and search for the wholeness they lose. They do not belong to any of the places they leave or move.

This feeling of not belonging to either of the places can also be explained through the relationship between nihilism and the lost feeling of homeland:

in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusion and of light, man feels a stranger. He is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. (qtd. in Ray, 2005: 102)

The “universe deprived of illusion” is a notion that has a relation to nihilism as nihilism focuses on the meaning-making process as a human intervention rather than a divine attribution; thus, for nihilists, values given to people, objects, animals, and even places are not determined by the divine God; instead, they are the human inventions in order to define the human being as the supreme creature that has a superior position when compared to other living and non-living beings (Nietzsche, 1968: 11):