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Negotiating the(post)colonial impasse: WoleSoyinka's the lion and thejewel and Derek Walcott'sTi‐Jean and his brothersHarry Garuba aa Senior Lecturer in English , University ofZululandPublished online: 22 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Harry Garuba (1999) Negotiating the (post)colonial impasse:Wole Soyinka's the lion and the jewel and Derek Walcott's Ti‐Jean and hisbrothers , English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies,16:1, 113-120, DOI: 10.1080/10131752.1999.10384462

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N E G O T I A T I N G THE (POS'O COLONIAL IMPASSE

Negotiating the (Post)Colonial Impasse: Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel and Derek Waleott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers

Harry Garuba

The power to narrate, or to block other narralives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism.

Not only in Said's Orientalist sense are we constructed as different and other within the categories of kno~qedge of the West b), those regimes. They had the pomw to make us see and experience ourselves as 'Other '. Ever), regime of representation "is a regime of power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet 'power knowledge"

Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora'

Text and Conquest

Colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial theory and criticism have madt. it increasingly obvious that, contrary to Arnold's conception of the critical enterpris e as a disinterested, objective field of knowledge, liter~iture, criticism and theory are products of particular discourses which are neither neutral nor universal. At a very basic le~,el, post-colonial theory suggests that colonialism and imperialism were not only about the physical subjugation of other Peoples but also involved a more insidious kind of oppression which was both textual and discursive. The violence associated with physical conquest and colonization for whatever purpose is fairly incontestable. But the violence associated with the textual/discursive conquest, which involved the overturning of an entire mode of social' cognition and collective self-apprehension, the process by which one narrative of the world is displaced and another written over, is not often as obvious as the former.

This is perhaps why the last paragraph of Chinua Achebe's Arrow o f God (1964), where the author informs us, for instance, that anyone who harvested yams after Ezeulu's refusal to name the date of the New Yam Festival did so in the name of the son, does not strike us with the same immediacy as Okonkwo's suicide in Thhlgs Fal l Apart (1958). The drama of physical violence is more immediately felt than the epistemic rupture involved in turning away from the authority of our fathers to the authority of sons, with all the biblical echoes it resonates with.

Post-colonial theory and criticism may not be clamorously concerned with the process by which one narrative of the world supersedes another, but they attempt to unmask the strategies, images, figures and tropes employed in the construction of other peoples and cultures as 'objects' of knowledge within the European 'archive'. This focus on texts in their alignment and collocation with conquest invariably evokes Foucault's 'fatal couplet' and the whole array of binary pairs which constitute the primary tropes of colonialist discourse. And, as Said informs us in the first epigraph, once the colonial/imperial power establishes this

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power to narrate the world on its own terms, it seeks 'to block other narratives from forming and emerging' (1994:xiii). The new regime of representation, as Stuart Hall affirms in the second epigraph, also 'had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as "Other" ...not only as a matter of imposed will and domination but also by the power of inner compulsion and subjective conformation to the norm' (Hall 1993: 94-95).

This brief paper, therefore, seeks to examine the power of the European 'archive' to prevent other narratives from emerging, or to rewrite them as part of the always already written archive of colonialist discourse, and the impasse which this discursive hegemony creates.

The strategies for overcoming this impasse are also examined with specific focus on Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel (1959) and Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1970); and, in ' the process of this examination, I propose a 'third text' as a transgressive, transformative discursive strategy for superseding the impasse created by the binarism of colonialist discourse and opening up the closure of the colonialist text. in short, the 'third text' represents possibilities for discursive 'action' within the post-colonial space for post-colonial writers of the Third World.

The Post-Colonial Impasse

In a doctoral dissertation entitled 'Motions of Critique: Modernity, (Post)coloniality, and the Africanist Agon', Olakunle George suggests that there is a post-colonial condition which he refers to as the 'Africanist Agon'. This condition is evidenced in the belief in the validity of traditional, African culture with its customs, world-view and belief systems, and a simultaneous acceptance of the idea of modernity as codified in the Enlightenment project, with its emphasis on instrumental reason, science, progress and so on. The Africanist Agon may therefore be read as the very consequence of Africanist discourse itself in its project of socio-politicai and epistemological decolonization. Inherent in the logic of the nationalist struggles for independence and the projects of the liberation movements were, on the one hand, the cultural rehabilitation and self-construction of Africa and the African subject away from the distortions and denigration of colonialism, and, on the other, an explicit acceptance of the ideology of modernity whereby, as Olakunle George puts it, 'the overarching impulse has been that of transcending colonial underdevelopment, that of "catching up" with modernity' (1993:170).

In accordance with this logic, the rhetoric of nationalism and decolonization--in its classical phase--thus reveals, at a th6oretical-discursive level, a profoundly disturbing contradiction: an impassioned rejection of the Eurocentric epistemology which underwrote and empowered colonialism, coupled with an unambiguously stated desire to embrace its historical, economic and technological logic as codified in the ideology of modernity.

This 'contradictory' positioning of anti-colonialist, nationalist discourse has become a subject of critical contestation in contemporary post-colonial politics of identity and ideology. This questioning--be it feminist, post-modernist, or post-colonialist--has ruptured our confidence in the deployment of the classical nationalist myths which had fuelled anti- colonialist resistance and led to the dismantling of the colonial State. For instance, reading the 114

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works of three African writers who derive a great deal of their material from traditional Iore-- Niyi Osundare, D.O. Fagunwa and Sol Plaatje--Olukanle George singles out this 'epistemic' contradiction in their writing, and concludes that their texts exhibit that 'double-discursivity' which is the hallmark of the 'Africanist Agon'.

An increasing number o f texts provide critiques, descriptions or theoretical elaborations o f the 'agonistic' spaces from which arose the nationalist resistance to colonialism and the discursive hegemony of the modernist project, and theideological imialications o f the various kinds of 'native' resistance. These critiques have been facilitated by the collapse or failure o f the nationalist ideologies which fuelled the struggles for' independence, and by feminist critiques of the roles played by women in these nationalist discourses.

We may include, among these, Homi Bhabha's critique of the forms of mimeticism which propelled and validated nationalist resistance at the level o f literary criticism and theory. In this regard, Bhabha's reading ofV.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1961) is particularly significant as a creative, literary approximation of the kind of mimeticism he criticizes. Mr Biswas' desperate wish for his own space, a place to call his own, and the ironic results o f his quest may be taken as symptomatic of what 1 refer to here as the (post)colonial impasse. As further elaborated in Naipaul's novels, essays and travelogues, one path leads to an unimaginative mimicry, while the other leads to the kind of uncreative violence exemplified in his Guerrillas (1975) (Bhabha 1984:93-112).

At the risk of appearing reductive and oversimplistic, we can say that post-colonial texts, in general, thematize this problem of discursive conquest and containment by attempting to negotiate a space for creative transformation between the two poles o f mimicry (of Eurocentric modernity) and resistance (or rejection of the colonialist episteme and its distortions), two options which are always already prescripted within the European archive. Elaborating on these options, Helen Tiffin affirms that

Post-colonial writers then on both sides of the 'fence' have addressed the problem of their colonialisation by text and adopted, as an ine~apable strategy, the re-entry into Europe's written archive with a view to destabilising those ontological and epistemological codes which underwrote and powered conquest, colonisation and continuing subjectification.

(Tiffin 1992: 430; my emphasis)

But then she adds that

• . . p a s s a g e back through the European text may not issue in transformation. Lamming uses The Tempest in Water with Berries to demonstrate an apparently inescapable textual closure. The rebellious and potentially revolutionary acts of his three protagonists, their attempts to escape Prospero's 'book' through arson, rape and murder, simply reinscribe them within the European archive, since their actions are already pre-scripted not as potentially creative rejection of domination, but as essentialist 'native' or black stereotype.

(430: my emphasis)

Tiffin cites other instances o f rejection which also end tragically, inus confirming the prescripted text: Okonkwo's suicide in Things Fall Apart, Antoinette's in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), etc. And we may add Ezeulu's madness in Arrow of God. Ezeulu's

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insanity is particularly telling because his genuine attempt to negotiate a creative avenue between the two options provided by the colonialist script belongs to a different order from the polarities of mimicry and revolt, even though he ends up in the same cul-de-sac. And Ezeulu sees into the problem of epistemic overthrow and discursive conquest and containment with characteristic clarity, insight and foresight. According to the text, the truly traumatic effect lay in the self-perpetuating propensity of dominant discourses: 'What troubled [Ezeulu] most--and he alone seemed to be aware of it at present--was that the punishment was not for now alone but for all time' (Achebe 1964:219).

This eternal punishment which Ezeulu foresaw, and the epistemic rupture figured in the last sentence of the novel-- 'Thereafter any yam harvested in his fields was harvested in the name of the son' (230)--foregrounds that sense of 'inescapable textual closure' which Helen Tiffin speaks of in connection with George Lamming's Water with Berries, and which Naipaul constantly thematizes in his works.

Thus far, it would appear that deploying the themes and tropes of the classical nationalist writing leads to a contradiction at the theoretical-discursive level, and that adopting the 'inescapable strategy' of re-entering the European archive to destabilize its ontological and epistemologicai codes ends in an 'inescapable textual closure' by unwittingly rehearsing the already written European text.

Ezeulu's attempt at a creative incorporation of the best of both worlds also leaves him with neither. At each stage, the (post)colonial impasse reasserts itself, reproducing, validating and legitimizing the epistemological ground from which it arose.

Negotiated Spaces

In the context of this rather dismal picture of the destiny of the (post)colonial subject in his or her discursive contestation with the West, one important question immediately arises: has the discursive hegemony of the West become so strong that all avenues for creative resistance are foreclosed except to reproduce the colonialist 'script '? By way of an answer we may begin with Raymond Williams's injunction that hegemonic formations cannot be so hermetically sealed as to rule out all possibility of challenge. For Williams, in fact, these formations have 'continually to be renewed, recreated, defenlded, and altered, challenged by pressures not at a[l [their] own' (1977:i22). And some critics appear to have taken Williams's advice that 'the efforts and contributions of those who are in one way or another outside or at the edge of specific hegemony' (113) must always be taken into consideration.

One such critic, Professor Biodun Jeyifo, in two articles on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, turns attention away from Okonkwo and focuses on the colonial subaltern subjects in the novel, those outside the specific hegemonies of the traditional precolonial world and the colonial world. In 'For Chinua Achebe: The Resilience and the Predicament of Obierika', Jeyifo explores the 'profoundly but subtly emancipatory politics' in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and reads the novel as a 'a sustained project of demythologization of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial myths of legitimation and delegitimation' ( 1991:52).

He does this by drawing attention to Obierika rather than the culture hero Okonkwo 'as a sceptical, dissenting and prescient observer of the culture's encounter with the self and the !16

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colonizing other' (58). But, even then, Obierika's awareness o f the falling apart of thlngs, both at the level of the collapse of the identity-forming rituals and institutions of the old culture and the invasion of a new culture, is only just that: a tragic awareness of events which unfold with a historic inevitability against which he is helpless. Biodun Jeyifo registers this prescience and predicament, and suggests that Obierika's ironic insights m a y be representative of Aehebe's own views.

From Obierika's 'deconstructive' observations on both totalizing narratives0traditional and colonial--Jeyifo concludes that while the main narrative line leads to tragedy, it is in the mini-narratives, fragmentary motifs and stories which have to do with 'small people' such as the osu (slaves), outcasts, women, the efulefu, etc . - - in short the colonized subaltern subject m that we find avenues for 'liberation'.

And in 'Okonkwo and His Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonia| Discourse', Jeyifo elaborates upon this project by fastening upon a 'single, brief mention of Okonkwo's mother" (1993:848) in the novel as an occasion to conduct an exegetical excavation o f most o f the mini-narratives and under- textualized subjects in it, and proposes an agenda for a truly liberationist post-colonlal African critical discourse based on a recuperation of issues o f gender.

Biodun Jeyifo's 'archaeology' of the silenced, under-textualized subjects on or outside the hegemonic edge of colonialist discourse, and his insistence that the critic recognize their different and differentiated histories, are important for the constitution of an emancipatory African post-colonial discourse. But for the purpose o f this investigation into the avenues available for overcoming the (post)colonial impasse, it would appear that these charactersw Okonkwo's (unnamed) mother, the osu and the efulefu--who exist on the margins of discourse, and for whom the critic speaks, do not (regrettably), in Achebe's text provide examples of triumph against the colonial episteme. Indeed, their 'liberation' may serve the ironic end of delivering them into the world of mimicry, as the t~/xt in fact suggests. For our purpose, then, we may turn to major characters involved in conscious eontestation with the colonialist 'text', characters already written in Prospero 's "book', so to speak, but who by their actions challenge it, upset its bounded binarisms, and open up its closure.

These characters may be said to exist in the interstices rather than on the margins of discourse, rejecting the either/or ethos, and celebrating the liberating spirit captured in the desire for both/neither and the will to transgressivity. To illustrate these instances of negotiated (transgressive) spaces in (post)colonial discourse we shall turn to two texts which re-enact the drama of the colonialist 'text' of mimicry and revolt, deploying the tropes of parody and melodrama to capture the aporias and slippages which unsettle the essentialism and binarism of its discourse.

Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel (1963) and Derek Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1970) thematize the colonial encounter as a struggle for supremacy between contending discourses at the literal and metaphorical levels. At both levels there are material and metaphorical prizes to be won.in the forms o f a bride and cultural vindication, and land and freedom, respectively. The allegorical thrust o f the plays is clearly foregrounded, and the battle-lines are drawn usin~ unmistakable colonialist stereotypes; each character represents a particular subject position within the universe of colonialist discourse, and their actions, more

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often than not, conform to its logic. Within this restricted (post)colonial space, both .~uthors create characters who transform that space and thereby negotiate an avenue out of the impasse of the colonialist text.

The Lion and the Jewel is a conventional comedy that employs the cliched motif of two suitors and a bride to explore the theme of tradition and modernity within a specific colonial environment. The schoolteacher, Lakunle, in love with the ways of the white man, mimics and glorifies all the trappings of modernity, as he understands them, and pours scorn on the customs and traditions of his own people. These customs and traditions are exemplified in the village chieftain, Baroka, who clings with a crafty stubbornness to the ways of his ancestors. Both characters are presented as stereotypical representations of two choices in the archive of colonialist discourse. But Baroka possesses something else, the ability to traverse the boundarie¢ of this discourse and rupture its closure. Baroka's refusal to he hounded by this discourse, his dependence on trickery, wile and guile, and his ability to appropriate the 'fantastic' in European technology are all markers of the ultimate indeterminacy of his character. In this respect, he is rather like Esu, the Yoruba trickster-god, or the tortoise, the Nig~an folklore figure of trickery. His victory over Lakunle, in the end, occurs because, even while appearing in the role of the arch-traditionalist, he negotiates a space for himself in the interstices within the boundaries erected by colonialist discourse. From this negotiated space, he acts within and outside the rules that govern each paradigm, reinscribing and subverting them with a daring duplicity that leaves his opponents confused.

It is instructive that Baroka chooses a 'machine' from the rational, scientific world of technology--the stamp-making machine constructed by the palace blacksmiths--to make his point. In trying to seduce Side, the village helle, transformed by the magic ofthe camera into a beautiful model in a glossy fashion magazine, Baroka uses the pioy of the photograph, but this time he puts it on a stamp, a functional, utilitarian object.

By his persuading Sidi that her photograph will he on every stamp, carrying mail in and out of llujinle and all over the world, Sidi succumbs to the fantastic dimensions of his proposal. She will no longer be only a model and a beauty, but she will also serve as a bridge between people, carrying messages between people and places, linking, opening up, and bridging communities and peoples beyond boundaries of time and space. Before this idea, Lakunle's pretences to modernity and the magic of the new 'white" world become banal and uninspiring. Baroka's triumph represents the ascendancy of that sense of 'play', of instability and endless difflrence, which cannot be captured by the binarism of the colonialist regime of representation.

in Ti.Jean and His Brothers the same dialectic is played out in another context. Here the contest takes the form of a direct challenge by the Devil, who doubles as the White Planter and Colonist. The challenge is short and simple: any of the three brothers who can make him feel human emotions--rage, anger, human weakness--will he rewarded with a bowl full of sovereigns and will never know hunger, but have wealth, fulfilment and peace. If, however, they fail, they will he killed. The White Planter, 'who owns half the world, in the Kingdom of night', controls all the resources, sets the terms ofthe game, and determines all the rules. Of the three brothers, two are representative figures drawn from the stereotypes of colonialist discourse: Gros-Jean is all physical strength and no sense, a quick-to-anger robot without the

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controlling intelligence of a brain; Mi-Jean, on the other hand, is all brains and no practical ability, a narcissistic philosopher given to abstract theorizing with no contact at all with reality, a fisherman always forgetting the bait but remembering debate, and so he is caught 'between de bait and debate...' (Walcott 1970:87).

In the contest that emues, Gros-Jean's physical prowess fails him, and Mi-Jean's intellectual pretensions turn out to be of no use: the devil devours them. But Ti-Jean, the boy of wit and cunning, becon~es the little David who brings down Goliath. Seen against the background of the failure o f h~s,two brothers, Ti-Jean's success becomes the victory of a third alternative over the bina.ry narrative of colonialist discourse.

The story of the three brothgrs, each setting out his own way and employing his own resources to meet th¢ "challenge of the Devil, is re-enacted with a parabolic simplicity. Following the allegorical outlines of the folk fable, the play also inscribes the trickster figure as its hero. Ti-Jean is able to outwit the Devil because he refuses to play by the rules set by the Devil. When he is sent to catch the bleating goat, he castrates it; when ordered to go count the leaves on every stalk in the canefield, he instructs the workers to burn down the canefieid, and even goes further to set the house on fire. By refusing ,:o be constrained by the rules, he rejects the closure of the discourse in which he partici.~tes, and charts a new course for himself..

This new course, charted by Baroka and Ti-Jean, ma~ be ~eferred to as the 'third text', the text which participates in, but also resists, integration into the binarism of colonialist discourse. This text disturbs the stable, settled meanings of the colonialist script by a celebration of 'playfulness'. This 'playfulness', 'aalike the purely textual practices o f some deconstructionists, has a political content and sign[ficahce which can only be described as emancipatory. Here the political positioning of 'playfulness' is strategic, working itself out as a permanent ambivalence which forecloses closure,and the binarism of the colonialist text.

Its major tropes are parody and pastiche; and its end is the fragmentation o f hegemonic and totalizing narratives. The 'third text' is, in fact, everywhere present in the everyday lives and practices of Third World peoples! in their languages and religious beliefs, their modes of self- and social cognition, their verbal and plastic arts, and in all other areas o f expressive culture. It is this 'third text' that we, as critics and theorists, need to reread and repossess to slip out of the hegemony of the post-colonialist regime of representation.

To quote Stuart Hall again:

The purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one's intellectual and academic reputation but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain--to produce a more adequate knowledge of--the historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.

(I 988:36)

Just as we construct pasts for ourselves, so also do we construct futures for ourselves, both in the field of culture and of social action (literature and history). This paper represents one such effort at reconstruction and transformation.

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Ahmed Essop

Wisteria

The night is not for sleep In the trellised arbour There are perfumed moonbeams

Fallen Blooms

A jacaranda tree stands beside a mosque Its roots above the tarmac near the bole Its shade is covered with a lilac halo That worshippers trample on, in spring

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