A Silken Tongue and The Silicon Tongue

148

deep currents of doubt, represents the transcultural qualities of modern life far better than narrative patterns claiming absolute authority about truth and identity.

(Helff, 2009: 87)

As argued by Helff, a transcultural piece of fiction offers its readers alternatives to only one truth; its narration also illustrates different options and variations of the truth by focusing on different sides of only one event. It is for this reason that there are multiple narrators in this novel to depict especially Alice’s and Joy’s understandings of an event.

Therefore, the word unreliability in the quotation above can be explained in a way that there are different narrators reflecting their own versions of events with their own understandings.

149

understanding of the events and why and how they happen or happened in the past.

“The recounting of [her] life story is helping [her] to make sense of [her] past.”

(Fletcher, 1996: 116-117) As Irene Visser argues, orally narrating past memories

“enables a healing process, which allows insight, acceptance, and access to various modes of redress” (2016: 16). When one becomes aware of the real meanings of and the reasons for the events, s/he can understand others, their way of understanding the events, and the implicit reasons of the events. For Alice, understanding the underlying reasons of the events and other people’s conceptions happens, besides her old age, through her narrating her own past memories in her kaleidoscope to Wendy. The idea can be exemplified with her own utterances as follows:

The first fifteen years of my life in England is my true ground. I understand now that it is not the spending of time that is important, it is the constant rearrangement of experiences within that time. Without my memory beads, much would be lost.

There are long stretches of my life in this country that would have blurred and faded away. (Fletcher, 1996: 201)

In this sense, kaleidoscope is the medium for self-recognition, and narrating the stories in the kaleidoscope refers to the process of self-recognition and self-expression. That is to say, while revealing how she feels as an alienated person both in London where she is left alone by her mother and in New Zealand where she finds herself in a different country without any relatives of her own through her narration, Alice recognises the ways to express herself, her feelings, and her concerns. Besides the kaleidoscope, fiction and cyberspace⁵³ are instruments of self-expression and identity formation for Alice.

53 The self-expression process through cyberspace will be elaborated in “Alienation and Posthumanism: Cyberspace as a Medium to Lessen the Sense of Longing for the Mother/Motherland” part of this chapter.

150

To turn back to the title and how it reflects the process of recognition, self-expression, and self-identification, the metaphorical meaning of the title should be clarified in its relation to the ending of the novel. The novel ends with a published book entitled The Silicon Tongue, which displays the past memories and the life of Alice.

Found by the great-granddaughter, Pixel, the title suggests the relationship between the real and the fiction. If one considers that the events happening in the novel refer to realities for Alice, the book published refers to the fiction. In a way, the book is the bond between the real and the fiction; yet, one should also consider that the title has a relation to cyberspace. As Alice is a character in Pixel’s virtual game in the cyberspace, her tongue, just like the other tongues in the game, turns out to be an artificial but silicon one that resembles a natural one. As cyberspace is an artificial domain that is very close to the real and so it is virtual, the silken tongue becomes a silicon one either in cyberspace or in the book published. The idea is given in the novel in Alice’s narration as follows:

Pixel chose the title. You speak with a tongue of silk Alice. The past is reconstructed through the visualisation of your voice. When I bring your memory into my virtual world, we are irrevocably joined together; orality translates into video, the silken tongue into silicon. (224)

Here one can see the connection between cyberspace and a book: they both offer the reader or the gamer a fictional world: they are both virtual and artificial with refences to the real. Hence, they are alternatives to the real. In these alternative domains for the real, the reason why a tongue as an organ is chosen as a medium to reflect the real events experienced is given by Beryl Fletcher in her “Cyberfiction: A Fictional Journey into Cyberspace (or How I Became a CyberFeminist)” (1999):

151

The tongue is the physical site of human speech and also another word for language in English (that is, the mother tongue). A poetic and loquacious person is sometimes said to have a silken tongue. The metaphor of a silicon chip implanted in the tongue broadens the possibility of speech beyond bodily contact […]. (1999: 341)

Metaphorically then, a silken tongue refers to a person who is talkative and chatty. Here one can see the relationship between this metaphorical title and Alice: the title represents for Alice although it is ironical. The novel does not give a detail of Alice’s being a very talkative person, but it implies that she is not silent when she vocalizes her memories to a tape recorder to be published later. Hence, her memories are heard by means of a tongue, by means of her own tongue explaining her experiences throughout her life to Wendy; it is the same tongue that enables her memories and stories to be read in a book and to be played in a game, and when this tongue becomes the part of a fictional and a virtual world, it becomes a silicon one. It is for this reason that the title of the book published refers to Alice’s whole life. It not only gives references from the past, but also reflects the present day of the character. In this sense, the book describing Alice’s life is atemporal since it deals with Alice’s past and present concerns which are intertwined. These past and present references in the book make it a means for self-expression because Alice expresses her past and recognises the events, their reasons, and herself by means of this book as well as the cyber game.

In the quotation by Beryl Fletcher, there is also one more issue to be touched upon: the title of the book reflects a postcolonial representation of the character.

Fletcher argues that she deliberately chooses the tongue as an organ in the process of self-expression, yet the tongue has one more usage that is crucial for Alice: it collocates with the word mother, and people can talk about a mother tongue. In this sense, the title

152

of the book refers to Alice’s longing for her mother and motherland either in Britain or in New Zealand. She is separated from the mother for economic problems and alienated from the motherland for colonial reasons besides the economic and social ones. Alice explains her alienation from Britain and the colonial policy of her motherland by becoming a tool in the colonial mission of Britain in these lines:

We were sailing to New Zealand under a scheme that provided domestic servants for selected religious families. Mrs Bates told us we were going to a life of good honest work, and perhaps a chance of marriage in a new place where our lack of background and money would not count so heavily against us. We had been chosen for our diligence and good character. (Fletcher, 1996: 26)

The quotation above reveals Alice’s criticism towards colonialism in the sense that children without families are sent to the colonies under some schemes like providing a domestic service to the English people living in the colonies. It is only a scheme or a plot to tell the children that they will be a part of honest work in the colonies and that they are chosen for their diligent and good character as they will later understand that they are sent to the colonies since they are seen redundant in England.

As it turned out, children had been exported from Britain since the 1600s, though the practice only gained real pace in the late 1800s. Although many of those who sent them away seemed to have believed they were doing good, giving the children a new beginning, it is clear that they had no idea what this new beginning might be like. […] [I]t was these children’s “whiteness” that turned them into the tools/commodities that the metropolis used (and abused) […]. (Herrero, 2016: 98)

Herrero foregrounds the hypocritical attitude of Britain in exporting children from Britain in his “Oranges and Sunshine: The Story of a Traumatic Encounter” (2016). He argues that “they became “perpetually forgotten”, “irretrievably lost in the history of

153

society and the history of individuals”, while paradoxically becoming utterly

“unforgettable” […]” (98-99). In this sense, these children were ontically missed as they were not dead but the contact was lost, and their personality was lost as well (99). The novel depicts Alice’s alienation from her country by means of her criticism towards the hypocritical colonial attitude: Alice reveals her alienation via her tongue as a concrete vocaliser of her voice and as a symbol of ideas when she narrates her story to be sent to New Zealand to Wendy: “young children had been brought from institutions in England under false pretences to be used as workers on farms and as servants for the rich.”

(Fletcher, 1996: 117) The tongue then becomes a symbol for Alice’s criticism as well: it represents for the “trickery” of the British Empire that separated the children from their families and told both the parents and children that they died (117). Another example to the tongue’s being a medium for criticism towards colonialism and so Alice’s alienation from her country due to the hypocritical colonial policy Britain follows can be given in the expression below:

Some authorities claimed that we children had a better life through coming to this country. The unfortunate children of these working-class families were locked into poverty they said. We have broken this cycle, we should concentrate on the results not the methods. (118)

When Alice speaks of the discrepancy between the colonial methods and the consequences, she highlights the hypocritical discourse of colonialism. Despite some children of working-class families undergoing poverty, there are others who live with families and become “in-flu-ence” to others as they serve to their “betters” and the

“important” people having “important lives” (40). As the colonial discourse manifests the favourable sides of the colonial acts, it hides the hypocrisy in the attitudes and in the application of the colonial mission. Telling a lie that family members are dead when

154

they are not in fact is an example of hypocrisy: it is the hypocrisy of colonialism. In this sense, Alice’s tongue becomes a medium for a social criticism as her mother tongue, the language she speaks, that is, English, becomes a tool in the colonial mission⁵⁴: rulers manipulate the language. To sum up, her tongue reflects how she alienates herself from the British colonial policy: each criticism towards such a policy of her motherland is the expression of her alienation. It is a postcolonial tongue criticising colonialism, and this tongue is revealed in fiction by means of fiction, her biographical book and the cyber-game revealing her life, so fiction not only enables her to express hypocrisy in many institutions of her motherland and so her alienation but also makes her find ways of expressing her past stories.