Relations between Postcolonialism, Fiction, and Posthumanism in The Silicon

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identification process is, then, attaining the wholeness with the mother and the motherland.

4. Relations between Postcolonialism, Fiction, and Posthumanism in The Silicon

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economics, science, language, music, art, literature - in a word, civilization.

(Young, 2003: 2-3)

However, with the encounter of the two groups, the coloniser and the colonized, the dichotomal positioning cannot always remain as it argues to be; either dichotomal or not, the encounter with the Other paves the way for interrelations and cultural interactions that engender mutual affectability; it is not only the colonized that is affected from the colonization process but also the settler in a colony. One cannot talk of pure cultural entity with the existence of the Other; instead, there is transcultural intermingling, a hybrid interactionism, and excessed cultural, social, and individual boundaries. Paradoxically, colonialism is the constitutive of alternatives to individuation due to its strict emphasis on uniqueness, oneness, and certainty: the postcolonial emphasis on alterity, change, and optionality, then, is based on a reactionary attitude towards colonialism. Postcolonial literature, therefore, attacks the boundaries brought forth by colonialism:

postcolonial literature focuses on differences, different themes and contexts rather than universality so that they can challenge the Western understanding of excellence in literature which is identified as universality. (McLeod, 2000: 15)

In this regard, postcolonial literature is the manifestation of challenge towards Western-oriented literature that situates the Western man at the centre as the measure of all living beings. It welcomes the suppressed, the unvoiced, the silenced, the colonized, the female as “authentic expression, empowerment, and agency” (Kurtiş and Adams, 2015:

398). In this way, it aims at achieving the alterity and optionality, and the challenge of postcolonialism to patriarchal Western-oriented literature, therefore, is the medium for the achievement of that optionality.

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In patriarchal Western culture, […] the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984: 6)

In postcolonial literature, however, he loses that supreme position; the voice of the colonized and that of the female are welcomed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Hazel Vivian Carby, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, for instance, are some prominent figures in postcolonial feminism.

Besides the emphasis on the suppressed, the unvoiced, the silenced, and the colonized, postcolonial literature depicts the settler in a colony also as the one affected from colonization process. Therefore, it offers a criticism towards the prevalent colonial assumption that the settler has a unique entity that cannot merge with the one of the colonized. It, therefore, reflects colonialism as a traumatic event not only for the colonized but also for the settler, as The Silicon Tongue exemplifies through Alice.

[T]he articulation of postcolonial trauma theory may be seen as functioning under the dynamics of transculturation, a dialogic process where each participant depends on and is transformed by the other [.] (Martinez-Falquina, 2016: 133)

Alice as a Pākehā woman, a British settler in New Zealand, suffers from the traumatic consequences of colonization: she yearns for Britain, as her motherland, and for her mother in Britain; she is silenced and made to remember her past experiences in her memories in a verbal communication with the people around her; she feels lonely as she expresses: “I had been having nightmares about being sent to a country family far from the city, isolated, lonely, trapped.” (Fletcher, 1996: 67) In this sense, what she experiences conforms to Gavin Rae’s definition of alienation: “‘alienation’ is typically associated with feelings of isolation, hopelessness, powerlessness, loss, anxiety, frustration, despair, and/or loneliness.” (Rae, 2011: 1). Considering the novel, Alice

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feels alienation caused by the loss of her mother and motherland. Therefore, unlike the colonial viewpoint that alienates the coloniser from the colonized based on dichotomal relations, The Silicon Tongue depicts a postcolonial viewpoint that focuses on how a migrant, a British woman, feels in a colony, in New Zealand. Her alienation in New Zealand and in Britain even before her immigration to New Zealand resembles to the one of the colonized in the postcolonial framework in the sense that both Alice and a colonized suffer from alienation from the motherland and from the national and cultural peculiarities that are changed or lost. However, this alienation is not an unfavourable sense at all; it brings forth the chance of self-identification and self-expression in a new context and domain. That is, it enables postcolonial characters to open up themselves to optionality.

Within different historical and cultural settings, people learn to deal with their emotions in particular ways and they embody ways of feeling and relating that they very much take for granted. It is only if they learn to engage critically with these emotional inheritances that they can begin to discern ways of changing their habitual ways of relating. Sometimes this is a learning process that is not consciously formulated, but people find their ways towards relating differently and possibly sharing more of their experience that they traditionally would have kept hidden or concealed. They learn to be more emotionally open with themselves and also with others.⁵⁸ (Seidler, 2013: 101-102)

The common point between postcolonialism and posthumanism lies in this emphasis on the potential alterity, potentials, and options of individuation and self-expression. Posthumanism, as the field challenging to Western humanism that is anthropocentric and solipsistic, foregrounds the blurred boundaries between human and

58 The words in italic are Seidler’s own emphasis.

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non-human entities; in posthumanism, one cannot talk of clear-cut boundaries between different species; as they are in contact within the nature-culture continuum, as stated previously in the analysis of Towards Another Summer, by Janet Frame, different embodiments of a conscious being can come out; a human being can transform himself/herself into a cybernetic organism or an animal. Alice, in The Silicon Tongue, is an example of a posthuman character, either in the cybernetic organism form or in the animal form, who undergoes many potentialities of her in her identification process. As a settler suffering from alienation and longing for her mother and motherland, she travels to the North, to Britain, through transforming herself into a cyber-character or into a horse. Cyberspace, therefore, offers the representation of her homeland to the character. The cyber-game which enables her to revisit her past when she is together with her mother in her homeland is the virtual medium making her find out and express who she is. The other of the human form, therefore, has a favourable function for postcolonial Alice, which calls for the paradoxical statement that the Other that otherizes its other has another function: thanks to the concept of otherness, one can come to terms with the other that is formerly otherized. To speak more explicitly by giving its example from the novel, the British settlers in New Zealand recognise the Māories there as their other, and they live in different places of Auckland; however, it is the hypocritical colonial policy of Britain that engenders Alice’s realization of feeling closer to Māories, the formerly accepted other of the British, and upon that realization, she detaches herself from Pākehās, the British settlers in New Zealand. In this way, therefore, she celebrates her hybrid nature.

I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement – that confounds any profound or ‘authentic’ sense of a ‘national’ culture or an ‘organic’

intellectual – and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective

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might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure. (Bhabha, 1994: 21)

As the quotation suggests, the encounter with another culture enables the questioning of authentic culture and authentic and unchanged self; the hybrid nature of Alice makes her departure from the imposed certainties available for her. In a way, her defamiliarized look at herself enables her to discover her voice and the significance of her stories, and so the significance of herself too. Hence, postcolonialism and posthumanism both engender a new understanding and representation of a self with a new identity having the capability of vocalizing who she is.

The defamiliarized look at a personality is also related to the use of fiction in the novel: Just like postcolonialism and posthumanism, fiction makes Alice discover her voice and the significance of her stories, as a consequence of which she finds the chance of expressing herself. Either in a printed or recorded form, fiction – the books Alice reads and the book about her life – is closely similar to cyberspace – a virtual domain where she experiences her life – since both fiction and cyberspace enable her to re-visit her past memories and help her lessen her longing for her mother in Britain as well as her alienation and the sense of homelessness, in New Zealand, as a settler who does not resemble other settlers that have a colonial viewpoint, like Mrs. Vetorix, Mrs. Pink, the neighbour that looks at Joy with “black stare” as she hangs out with Māories. It is also through fiction that Alice expresses another type of alienation that can be seen in her disapproval of colonialism when books about earlier colonial acts are found inappropriate for her, and throughout her narration, she underscores her criticism towards colonialism – namely, her alienation from the hypocritical policies of her motherland. The book describing her life stories is the medium for her to be heard by the people around her. In her biographical book, she reflects the sense of homelessness,

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longing for the mother, both yearning for the motherland and alienation from that motherland, and the criticism towards colonialism, as the representation of her alienation from her motherland. The cyber-game, reflecting such concepts as her sense of homelessness, longing for the mother and motherland, alienation from the motherland, and the criticism towards colonialism, has close relation to fiction, therefore. What gathers posthumanism, fiction, and postcolonialism is her life experiences in general. To dive more into the details, her social class, her being a child of a poor mother, her mother’s desertion, her immigration to New Zealand are some events that are influential in her search for ways of finding who she is. In this search for the self, fiction and posthumanism serve as a medium to delineate her postcolonial identity that criticizes colonialism and that reflects new alternatives to certainties about the self – who a person is – and about the perception of events.

To sum up, as argued by Ufuk Ege Uygur, “people’s leaving their hometowns and immigrating to another city, nation, and culture” enables them to have an

“awareness on the notion of identity” (2016: 201); a settler also suffers from colonization: s/he feels alienation, isolation, longing for the homeland, and lack and loss of the motherland and the mother. However, these unfavourable consequences of immigration turn out to be favourable in the end as they serve the immigrant’s attaining the capability and chance to know himself/herself and expressing that self. In this self-expression, fiction plays a crucial role since it is the medium and the domain through and in which the immigrant heals himself/herself, copes with traumatic events and their consequences, and vocalizes the suppressed feelings, wishes, and desires. Related to the novel and Alice, it should be noted that fiction is at the core of the relationship between posthumanism and postcolonialism since without fiction, her alienation from the British colonial policy – she feels both in Britain and in New Zealand – cannot be heard.

Therefore, her search for leaving her body behind – namely, her alienation from her

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body – and travelling to the North to see the mother and the motherland cannot come out, and she cannot discover that her life, in fact, matters, and that it is important. For further study of this novel, Isobel’s relation to fiction can also be handled. Finding herself on the receiving end of patriarchy, Isobel makes use of fiction to reveal herself;

through fiction, she reveals her identity, her desires, and her opinions; her relation to fiction exemplifies the relationship between fiction and feminism and how writing about the self becomes self-revelation and identity revelation, especially considering Hélène Cixous and her perceptions on the female body and feminine writing in “The Laugh of Medusa” (1976). That is, the novel can be analysed by means of feminist theory. For further study, the use of colour symbolism in the novel can also be elaborated because there are many references to colours, and especially the black and the white colour, symbolizing especially the Māories and Pākehās in New Zealand. Also, the posthuman nature of Joy and Pixel can also be studied in view of the attainment of who/what is lack in them or in their social lives.

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