Theoretical and Practical Criticism

Fourth Year, Faculty of Arts

Theoretical and Practical Criticism

By

Prof. Nabila Ali Marzouk

Professor of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, Fayoum

University
 Faculty of Arts

Vision

Faculty of Arts looks forward to producing high caliber graduates imbued

with specialized skills and dedication to contribute to the country's rapid
advancement; a graduate able to do scientific researches, acquire thinking
skills, play a tangible role in his society through participation in social
sciences and humanities and confront challenges.

Mission

Faculty of Arts is charged with providing the community with a generation of

experts and specialists in literary and humanitarian disciplines. It also works
to create community leaders who can contribute to the development of human
society and culture through a commitment to innovation and community
engagement. The faculty also spares no effort to meet the needs of the local
community through providing educational services of high quality to cope
with the challenges of the future.
 Course Description

Theoretical and Practical Criticism: En 414

- University: Fayoum
- Faculty: Arts
- Department: English Language and Literature
- Program(s) in which the course is offered:
- February 2020
1. Basic Information
Code: En 414 Course Title: Theoretical and Practical Criticism Level: Fourth Year/ 1st
semester

Major: English Teaching Hours: 4 Lecture: 4

Instructor: Prof. Email: nam01@fayoum.edu.eg Mobile: 01062194840

Nabila Ali
Marzouk

2. Overall aims of Course

2. Overall aims 1.
of This course aims at:
course:
1. 1. introducing students to the literary criticism in the 19th century and the
20th century.

1-2- introducing students to the different critical theories and approaches to

literature as expounded by T.S. Eliot, Roland Baarthes, Ezra Pound and
Cleanth Brooks, and W.B. Yeats.

1-3-emphasizing on modern critical movements such as Realism,

Naturalism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Impressionism, Expressionism,
Imagism, Modernism, and Psychoanalysis.

3. Intended learning outcomes of course (ILOs)

A. Knowledge By the end of this course, students are expected to be able to
and
understanding A.1. discuss theperiods of modern approaches of literary
criticism

A.2. list the different movements in modern literary criticism to different

time periods

A.3. identify the effect of contextual factors on literary work

B. Intellectual B.1. criticize some literary texts, making use of the critical theories and
Skills approaches

B.2. analyze the text's components to facilitate understanding

 B.3. comment on selected critical texts

C. Professiona C.1.discuss texts laden with critical concepts

l Skills
C.2.evaluate critically a set of selected texts

C.3.compare and make analogies and between different critical approaches

C.4. apply different approaches of literary analysis to selected texts

C.5. write an analysis of a text depending on students' own approach

D. General & D.1. write creatively about a literary text.

Transferable
Skills D.2. appreciate critical texts and the achievements of their authors

D.3. work in groups effectively

4. Course Contents
Topic Week Hours

1. Course Overview 1st 4

2. -Introduction to 19th & 20th century Literary Criticism and the 2nd 4
basic critical terms

3. - Realism as a movement in criticism 3rd 4

4. - Naturalism movement 4th 4

5. - Symbolism movement 5th 4

6. - Surrealism in Literary criticism 6th 4

7. - Impressionism and Expressionism 7th 4

8. - Imagism 8th 4

9. - Modernism 9th 4

10. - The New Criticism 10th 4

11. - The psychoanalytical movement in literary criticism 11th 4

12. -Introducing T.S. Eliot, Roland Baarthes, and Ezra Pound 12th 4

13. -Introducing Cleanth Brooks, and W.B. Yeats 13th 4

14. -Revision 14th 4

5. Teaching and Learning Methods

5.1 Pair Work

5.2 Discussions

5.3 Power point presentations

5.4 Videos

5.5 Lecture

5.6 Brainstorming

5.7 Oral Presentation

6.

6. Teaching and Learning Method for Disabled

Students
In case of having a disabled person, s/he is to be taught in a way that suits his/her disability. This is to
be conducted in co-ordination with the Center of the Disabled.

Copies of teacher hand-outs printed in braille.

Power Point Presentations in braille.

7. Students Assessment

A. Methods Assessment 1: oral questions

of Assessment
Assessment 2: individual assignments

Assessment 3: quiz

Assessment4: final exam at the end of the course

B. Time: Peer and Group work: every week

Home assignments: every week

Final examination:

Total 100 %

C. Mark Distribution Mid-Term Examination %

Final-term Examination 75 %

Oral Examination %

Practical Examination %

Semester Work 25 %
 Other types of assessment %

Total 100%

8. List of References

A. Essential - Bertens, Hans. The Literary Theory: The

References Basics.
B. Recomme El Touny, Gamal. An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Cairo:
nded Books The Egyptian Scribe, 1997.

C. Electronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
Materials and other
sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory

http://www.literaturtheorie.uni-goettingen.de

9. Teaching and Learning Requirements:

9.1. Big clean classrooms.

9.2. Videos of the selected novels.
9.3. enough chairs.
Contents:
Subject Page
Introduction 1
The Return of the Repressed: Unzipping Memories, 3
Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, a Psychoanalytic
Reading
―Returning the Colonizer‘s Gaze‖, Nadine Gordimer‘s 24
None to Accompany Me, a Hybridity in the Making.
Hailing the Wild Being of the World: Indra Sinha's 77
Animal's People, an Ecocritical Reading
Naguib Mahfouz and Lawrence Durrell 114
WORKS CITED 193
 Introdction

To the Student

Dear Student,

So far, you have been studying criticism, or literary criticism as a

theoretical subject. Sometimes, it is even closer to history than any
literature-related topics, especially when it is intended to give you the
history or the development of literary criticism. This prolonged
theoretical study is definitely the essential basis for your preparation as
a graduate of a faculty that prepares you, among other things, to be a
critic of literary works. Some critical works, e.g. Aristotle’s Poetics,
ancient as it is, help considerably, not only in evaluating and criticizing
theoretical works, but also in evaluating works that are performed on
the stage or even introduced as TV serials or as plays. The Poetics
provides you with the framework within which to evaluate characters
in a play or a TV serial. It gives you the ―making‖ of a hero or a villain
and the qualities of a good plot. In the light of this information you can
find a way to assess the artistic work and determine how far the writer,
director or actor succeeded within a certain system of evaluation.
Later, you have been introduced to several interesting literary
movements or trends like neo-classicism, romanticism, metaphysical
poetry, etc. Each of the previous schools, movements or trends had
definitions for the different elements of literature and of how it should
be practiced. They introduced interesting ideas about whether art
should be an imitation of or a deviation from nature and whether it
should involve a spontaneous effort of the artist‘s imagination or a
1
deliberate effort of his calculative mind. The modern age witnessed an
eruption of literary theories and trends. Literature is sometimes seen as
a reflection of life and literary characters as replication of real people.
This widened the scope of literary criticism since it subjected literary
works to theories that originally belonged to fields of life that were
previously considered unrelated to literature. Now, you can assess
literary works according to psychological, political or ecological
theories.
This book introduces you to new theories of criticism and also gives
you examples of practical criticism by showing how various theories
or concepts are applied to literary works. You will be introduced to the
psychoanalytical approach, trauma theory, Eco criticism, postcolonial
theory, the gaze theory and a glimpse of comparative literature. I hope
you enjoy the study of criticism and being introduced to the practical
side of a subject that you perhaps thought was essentially theoretical.

2
The Return of the Repressed: Unzipping Memories, Amy Tan's The
Kitchen God's
Wife, a Psychoanalytic Reading

Nabila A. Marzouk

"The posttraumatic syndrome is the result of a failure of time to heal all

wounds" (Kolk 491).

The relation between literature and psychoanalysis is self-

evident since human nature and human behavior constitute the raw
material for both disciplines. According to Lois Tyson, "literature [is] a
laboratory of human life [that] provides examples of human experience
presumably common to all readers" (5). He presumes that any creative
work carries significant glimpses of the artist‘s unconscious. A literary
text is therefore bound to abide by the principles of psychoanalysis
whether the writer is acquainted with these principles or not. The
twentieth century could be described as a "post-traumatic century"
(Felman 1) that has survived unthinkable catastrophes and is still
subject to bizarre social and political upheavals. As a result,
psychoanalysis, together with other related disciplines, e.g. psychiatry
and neurobiology, have intertwined to analyze and explain human
experience in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
According to Cathy Caruth, PTSD studies how external violence
results in psychic disorders highlighting the "direct effects of external
violence in psychic disorders…the direct imposition on the mind of the
unavoidable reality of horrific events‖ that go beyond control (49). It
3
describes how the horrific realities of life dent the mind and the psyche
of individuals and, as such, could be considered as the most
devastating psychic disorder. So if literature provides a wide spectrum
of human experience, psychoanalytic concepts and theories provide the
tools to analyze this spectrum to its basic colors helping critics and
readers alike onto a deeper insight into human life and experience.
In her seminal work, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), the
Chinese-American novelist and writer of best sellers, Amy Tan
presents a thick slice of the rich lives of three women who have
endured individual and collective traumas at different phases of their
history and under different circumstances. Situating their personal
traumas against a backdrop of highly traumatized pre and post war
worlds results in rich, sophisticated and highly varied experiences that
welcome psychoanalysis. The aim of this paper is to trace the
psychological history of Tan's major characters back to an era when
the dysfunctional behaviors originated by examining these behaviors
mainly against the classical and the nontraditional psychoanalytic
theories by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and Jacques Lacan (1901-
1981), with minor reference to psychoanalytic feminism. The
"unconscious," "family dynamics," "defense mechanisms," and
"anxiety" are psychoanalytic concepts that help fathom the characters'
otherwise inexplicable behavioral patterns. The paper also investigates
how these traumatized women develop various "defenses" as "coping
strategies" that help them "keep the repressed repressed" (Tyson 15).
The concept of trauma both individual and historical is investigated
with reference to the trauma theory as introduced by Freud and
4
developed by Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth and other
critics who all launch their research from where Freud started his.
Nancy J. Chodorow suggests direct recourse to Freud since, hitherto,
no theory can rival psychoanalysis in explaining the unconscious
mental processes as well as landmark concepts such as ―conflict‖,
―self‖, ―anxiety‖ etc. Although several of the male characters show
definite symptoms of trauma, the concept is investigated in relation to
the life experience of the three women only. Tan's male characters are
not developed enough to encourage a psychoanalytic reading. Even
Winnie's first husband, Wen Fu, who always looms in the horizon,
figures only as a destructive force and swirls out of vision after his
separation from Winnie. Previous studies on Tan mainly concentrated
on her feministic views or how her hyphenated characters grappled
with their cultural trauma. The present study applies a psychoanalytic
perspective with total disregard for the cultural background of both the
writer and her characters. It deviates a little from the trodden paths by
examining other topics than "cultural trauma", so enticing as it is for
researches who attempt Asian-American literature. Rather than
shocking the new comers, the different culture here seems to have been
a safe haven, the answer to problems that would have otherwise
destroyed them completely. Suffering that ended in the United States is
what they mainly remember when they think about China.
Freud's "unconscious" is the centerpiece of psychoanalysis. It
refers to a dimension of the human mind that is deeply buried within
the intricacies of the human self and that occasionally rises to the
realm of consciousness in the form of dreams or neurotic symptoms.
5
Freud defines this dimension as "a repository of repressed desires,
feelings, memories, and instinctual drives, many of which … have to
do with sexuality and violence" (Rivikin, 389). Family dynamics have
primary importance in psychoanalytic theory since they provide the
initial supply for the storehouse of the unconscious by starting the
repression of painful experiences and any unresolved conflicts that are
considered too overwhelming to be looked in the face. The Kitchen
God's Wife is structured around the return of the repressed. It abounds
with symbols of the unconscious followed by outbursts of memories,
fears or unacknowledged desires that either direct or explain the
present behaviors or attitudes of the characters. When Helen tells
Winnie that her first husband Wen Fu died peacefully on Christmas
surrounded by his family, she triggers off a sweeping wave of
devastating memories. As van der Kolk asserts, "One of the serious
complications that interferes with healing is that one particular event
can activate other, long-forgotten memories of previous traumas, and
create a domino effect" (492). Both Winnie and her daughter receive
an ultimatum from Helen that, unless they do it themselves, she is
going to divulge their secrets. She forces Winnie and Pearl to
reconstruct their past lives, an act that entails the revisiting of the sites
of many past traumas and the unzipping of memories that, once
released, re-grab the story-tellers in their sway. Winnie and her
daughter heal as they swirl up and down the labyrinthine alleys of the
past and finally come out with a better understanding of who they are
and a reshaping of their once fragile, now tight mother-daughter bond.
In her study of the value of confessions, Teresa Godwin Phelps
6
highlights the victim's need to talk about and interpret her pain and
maintains that "the turning of inchoate pain and grief into a narrative
gives the victim control and distance from the traumatic event and
empowers the victim to get on with his or her life" (57).
After hasty forays into events that have for long been relegated
to the unconscious, Winnie and Pearl decide to come out of the closet.
Pearl pays a visit to her old room of childhood and adolescence where
she finds a locked box with the words "my secret treasures" written
upon it. Pearl remembers that her mother gave her the box thirty years
before and told her to fill it with her secret things. Thirty years later,
they come across the box and notice how heavy it has become with the
secrets it carries. Winnie remembers that when she first came to
America, she was afraid lest her past China memories interfere with
her new life, but she felt that all the past memories were kept in a dark
room which door was supposedly closed forever. For more than fifty
years, she actually manages to keep the door to all her painful secrets
under lock and key. Locked boxes and closed doors are symbols of the
unconscious.
According to Freud, all children experience the Oedipus
Complex "as a rite of passage to adult gendered identity" (Rivikin,
391). As Tyson explains, all people go through the Oedipal bonds
which are considered healthy and natural steps on the road to
adulthood and identity development. According to the object relations
school which appeared after WWII, "the relations between the child
and its objects, especially the mother during the pre-Oedipal period,
shape its personality‖ (Rivikin, 392). A child‘s personality is
7
immensely affected by whether his/her relationship with the mother is
warm and rewarding or distant and frustrating and also by whether
he/she is able to outgrow the obstacles and solve the conflicts that
emerge in the process. Failure in managing the ensuing difficulties
creates psychological troubles. As befitted the time, Freud's main
concern was the Oedipal trajectory of boys, unlike Chodorow, Melanie
Klein, and other psychoanalytic feminists, who reviewed the concepts
and processes of psychoanalysis from a mother-daughter perspective.
The latter perspective far befits the recent analysis since Tan builds the
main parent-child relation in her novel on Winnie's relation with her
mother. In her Reproduction of Mothering, (1978), Chodorow
emphasizes the importance of the pre-Oedipal stage when it is most
likely for the children to be under the care of their mothers. She refutes
Freud's postulation of Oedipal symmetry relying on Jeane Lampl-de
Groot who detected "a negative Oedipus complex in girls" (180).
Groot cites examples of parental studies where the Oedipal
attachments are exclusively feminine, i.e. daughters connect with their
mothers with total negligence of their father-object. According to
Chodorow, these observations directed attention to the uniqueness of
pre-Oedipal mother-daughter bond and modified psychologists‘
opinions as regards the feminine Oedipal object relations theory. As
Welhelm Fliess states in one of his letters to Freud, some mothers
"maintained their daughters in a nonindividuated state through
behavior which grew out of their own ego and body-ego boundary"
(181). Enid Balint adds that this mainly describes a case when the
mother perseveres in extending the Oedipal attachment to fill a
8
deplorable void where her own selfhood should exist. As Balint claims
women suffer those feelings of emptiness when they feel that they lack
influence over their worlds, a lack that precludes the achievement of
their individuality or independent reality. Winnie's mother was
assigned a gender role that stifled the free spirit that was locked in her
tight body in every possible way. Weiwei, who later becomes Winnie,
missed her Oedipal stage to a pre-Oedipal bond that extended beyond
her sixth year. According to the Freud psychological growth, she
shows definite marks of pre-Oedipal fixation.
Lacan, too, describes the stages that mark a child's
psychological growth. His trilogy, the "Imaginary Order," the
"Symbolic Order," and the "Real," highlights basic land marks that
enlighten the journey of tracing the development of Winnie's character.
According to Lacan, the child enters the "Imaginary Order" from six to
eight months, when he/she finally develops a sense of him/herself as
an undivided entity rather than a fragmented, shapeless mass. During
this preverbal stage, the child lives in "a world of perception," where
he/she perceives the world through images rather than words and
cherishes the illusory feeling that he is in complete union with his/her
mother (Tyson, 27). Lacan refers to this preverbal "primary dyad" or
"twosome" with the mother as the child's initial and most significant
experience (Tyson, 27). Initiation into the ―Symbolic Order‖, marked
by acquiring language, witnesses the dissolution of the mother-infant
union, a dramatic event that constitutes a drastic loss that keeps
haunting a person for the rest of his/her life. Lacan explains that that
loss is of such magnitude that a human being spends his/her life
9
unconsciously searching for substitutes for that lost union. Winnie
maintains the dyadic bond with her mother well into the ―Symbolic
Order‖ when, according to Lacan, it should be abandoned in order for
the child to function in the social world. With her mother, she forms a
tight unity that harbors animosity against the father who only figures as
a painful absence in the life of his daughter. Winnie mentions that as a
child, she insisted on seeing the world from the same height as her
mother, and therefore on being carried by her until she was six. In her
sixties, she still carries the marks of this delayed initiation into the
―Symbolic Order‖ as appears in her thin legs which have no calf
muscles. Lacan contends that a timely and successful separation from
the primary bond with the mother is essential for the child to define
who he/she is by setting self-boundaries that establish where others
end and he/she begins. The previous success ensures the building of
the proper mental representations of the external object world which in
turn determines the type of personality a child will have. Winnie
regrets that, the prolonged pre-Oedipal connection with her mother
inhibited her attempts to discover the external world of her house and
her family the way her peers who walked on their own did.
According to Lacan, language is primarily "a symbolic system
of meaning-making" (59).Winnie's fixation on the preverbal stage is
obvious in her verbal inadequacy as appears in her failure to find
words for her meanings. She remembers how difficult it was for her to
express herself verbally. She always found it difficult and confusing to
express herself in words and therefore would usually fail to connect
properly. Winnie cites an instance when she complained that she was
11
hungry while all she wanted to complain about was her inability to find
the appropriate words for her meanings. In another instance, she also
insists on being still hungry, while what she actually wanted to say was
that she was scared of the fighting between her parents and did not
understand what they were fighting about.
According to Rivikin a self is defined by adopting certain
models from the outside world and individuals externalize their
emotions and desires by projecting them onto others, i.e. throwing out
something that is lurking inside the self, causing it to appear as if it
belongs to someone else. He differentiates between projection and
introjection which happens when an individual internalizes a trait of a
certain person and creates an ideal of that individual within
him/herself. Winnie adopts the example of the ideal girl and wife that
is prescribed by society which is everything the opposite of what her
mother had been. The low self-esteem she develops because of the
disgraceful act of her mother, reconciles her to the model of her aunts
who were everything that her mother had never been. She tries to teach
herself how to be a dutiful wife who burns her finger just to make sure
that her husband's soup is only as hot as it should be and throws away
upon her cousin her fears and desire to reenact her mother's attempts to
defy those humiliating social norms. Winnie attacks Peanut for doing
something that she herself has a burning desire to do. While she herself
was fantasizing about kissing Wen Fu, she reprimands Peanut for it.
Winnie admonishes Peanut for tarnishing the name of her family to
satisfy her own desires, a thing that Winnie's mother, not Peanut did.

11
 Missing the Oedipal stage, however, has a huge effect upon
Winnie's love life. As Tyson affirms, this failure continues to damage a
person‘s unconscious even after the parents are dead. For
psychoanalysis, "the unconscious isn't a passive reservoir of neutral
data … rather, the unconscious is a dynamic entity that engages us at
the deepest level of our being" (13). Painful emotions and experiences
are repressed, not eliminated and in their hiding they manipulate and
color a person‘s current experience. A human being becomes like a
puppet whose strings are connected to hidden puppeteers. Without
admitting it to oneself, a person unconsciously behaves in ways that
allow him/her to "play out" the conflicted feelings related to the
repressed painful emotions and experiences. Tyson explains that, a
person should work out a strategy to reach out to and acknowledge
his/her repressed fears, guilty desires, unresolved conflicts and wounds
otherwise they keep distorting his/her life by showing up in the form of
neurosis. Accordingly, a girl who experiences complications in the
Oedipal stage, will presumably seek the love of older men who are
probably already engaged. If she does not realize that the hidden
reason behind that desire is a chronic longing for the love she craved
but never received from her father, she will very probably select a
detached mate. The previous choice will hopefully help the
traumatized girl reenact the uningratiating relationship with her father
hoping for a more gratifying conclusion. Winnie feels elated when she
attracts Wen Fu, the lover of her cousin. She sees them meet and kiss
and give each other love letters and she craves what they have. When
Peanut tells her that he praises her cheeks she goes to the old,
12
neglected greenhouse, symbol of the unconscious, and daydreams
about replacing her cousin in Wen Fu's favors. She also admits that she
never loved Wen Fu, only had a selfish desire to have him for herself.
Winnie manages to hide her true feelings so deep inside and for such a
long time that she does not recognize them herself until she opens up
to her daughter so many years later.
Winnie marries a man who, like her father, selects a wife for
the very wrong reasons. Like Winnie's father, Wen Fu marries her for
her beauty and rich family which he expected to enhance his social and
financial status. Winnie shoos away this fact, obvious as it is, and does
not realize that she is acting out the tragic story of her parents. Tyson
suggests that a girl with such psychological issues usually focuses
upon insignificant matters and seems to be completely unaware of the
obvious similarities between her beloved and her father. When Peanut
faces Winnie with the facts about her prospective marriage, the latter
answers that she is marrying Wen Fu out of obedience for her aunt and
uncle who believe that she should marry first because she is older than
Peanut.
Winnie was forced into the ―Symbolic Order‖ in a most
unnatural way. She did not simply outgrow the engulfing union with
her mother; instead, it was ripped apart into shreds of vague, pitiful
memories. She gets up one morning and her mother was simply not to
be found. She never knows whether her mother ran away, was killed,
died, or something else. In her dreams, she keeps seeing her, sitting in
front of her mirror and crying, "Double Second!" (115), as a reference
to her degrading position among the other wives of her husband. This
13
sudden and dramatic separation from her mother constitutes the biggest
trauma of Winnie's life. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
defines trauma as "a consequence of an extensive breach being made in
the protective shield against stimuli" (25). In her Unclaimed
Experience Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), Caruth defines
trauma as "an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic
events in which the response to the event occurs in the often
uncontrolled, repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other
intrusive phenomena" (15). She describes it as "an event that … is
experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is
therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again,
repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor"
(10), while Tyson adds that it refers to an agonizing experience that
scars a person psychologically. When she loses her mother, Winnie's
first reaction is complete denial; a defense mechanism that is employed
to evade the inappropriate or harmful impulses and wishes of the
unconscious. Freud describes these defenses as "unconscious
processes" that work to "relegate the process of becoming conscious"
(1961, 19). Defenses provide the traumatized person's perceptual
system with a thick shield against the unbearable blows of the outside
world to reduce its effects. Raymond E. Fancher explains that
pathogenic thoughts are buried in the unconscious when they become
the source of intense anxiety. Buried alive, however, they keep sending
signals in the form of symptoms. Fancher explains that the patients
have obviously made the unconscious decision to endure the symptoms
rather than the original thought or memory of the disastrous event that
14
caused them in the first place. The symptoms are the actual shield
since they protect the traumatized person against meeting and re-
meeting the ghosts of the hideous memories. Denial seems to be
Winnie's first defense against the disasters that befall her. She reacts to
the news of her mother‘s disappearance by denying them outright
crying that her mother was not gone. Denial is also her first reaction
when she learns of her son's death. When people break the news to her,
she shouts that they are lying. She insists that her son was not dead and
that she was able to save him by sending him away from the afflicted
place which in fact she was not.
Upon the loss of her mother, Winnie develops a low self-
esteem and an insecure sense of self. She spends a lifetime trying to
impress people and prove that, unlike her mother, she is a good wife
and a devoted mother. As Tyson explains, when a child loses a parent,
he/she is overwhelmed by a feeling of abandonment that quickly
surrenders him/her to feelings of guilt. A child believes that somehow
he/she was responsible by being inadequate or by disappointing the
parent in some way or another. About twenty years later, Winnie
believes she has adapted to her loss by trying not to think about her
mother. However, in the middle of another traumatic situation, under
an air raid, with a child crying for his mother in the background,
Winnie believes she has been abandoned by her neighbor and
companion. Lonely and scared, she pours out all the fears she has been
hoarding in the unconscious. Obviously, in that situation the child and
the loneliness act as "trauma-related triggers" (Kolk, 493).Winnie finds
herself crying: "Ma! Ma!" She was astonished at how naturally and
15
smoothly the words were flowing out of her throat as if the mother
who had abandoned her long ago could have saved her. What Winnie
experiences in this situation responds to Freud's definition of trauma as
a "breach in the mind's experience of time, self, and the world"
(Caruth, 10). Winnie suddenly unites with her young self and the two
selves of the same Winnie exist together in the same place and at the
same point of time which is impossible under normal circumstances.
Rivikin cites "having involuntary intrusive memories" among the usual
PTSDs. (489). Tyson also contends that if the repressed truth emerges
so bluntly before the conscious self, the person who possesses that self
is surely in trauma or crisis.
Freud finds it peculiar and even ―uncanny‖ that certain people
seem to be the favorite victims of disastrous events. If the initial
unpleasant event occurs in childhood, the child feels completely
defeated by its intensity, but, "by repeating it, unpleasurable though it
was …he [takes] on an active part. These efforts might be put down to
an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the
memory was in itself pleasurable or not" (Freud, 1961, 10). Winnie
appears to be the favorite victim of trauma. Enduring a traumatizing
marriage, she also has to endure the death of her first three children. In
her shock and helpless grief, she raises an issue that Lacan poses in his
interpretation of the quintessential dream of a burning boy. Caruth
suggests that the previous dream refers to the history of trauma as the
powerful link that connects and contrasts the decease of a loved person
with the survival of others. They both argue that trauma is rather the
survival of, not the encounter with death. According to a common
16
superstition in China, Winnie considers herself responsible for the
death of her first baby because he became very ill after she dropped her
scissors, a sure sign of bad luck. The repetition here extends to a later
sorrowful event, the suffering till death of Yiku, her second child. For
the first time in their married life, Winnie stands up to her husband
shouting that only a baby would be scared of him. Wen Fu seems to
have instantly acted according to the hint. He directs his anger to their
baby whom he slaps violently across the face. Ever since that terrible
accident Yiku turns abnormal and shortly dies out of her father's
neglect and her mother's helplessness. When her son is six, the age
when her mother decides to flee her bad marriage and abandon her
daughter, Winnie surprisingly does the same. Shortly after she pledges
never to do to her son what her mother did to her, Winnie takes back
her word. The boy cries pitifully breaking the heart of everyone
especially his mother who still insists on abandoning him supposedly
for his own good. The succession of these terrible events illustrates
Freud's concept of "compulsive repetition" or "repetition compulsion"
(1961, xiv) which indicates that "there really does exist in the mind a
compulsion to repeat" (1961, 16) and Caruth agrees, observing that
"the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly,
through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will"
(8). Rivikin confirms the same observation and adds that, although the
repetition is effected through "self-induced situations," (389) it cannot
be avoided since it is the result of repression and the whole scene of
the repetition is directed by the unconscious. Winnie could not but
repeat the destructive behavior of her mother when she finds herself in
17
a similar situation because she was directed by hidden drives buried
deep in the unconscious, a domain beyond her control.
Freud declares that he is much more interested in the "cases
[of repetition] where the subject appears to have a passive experience,
over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition
of the same fatality" (1961, 16). To Caruth what seems even more
striking is ―the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that
is paradoxically released through the wound" rather than the
unconscious, inadvertent repetition of the sorrowful experience (8).
This time, Winnie‘s traumatized child gives voice to his suffering
releasing the long stifled voice of his mother who had to suppress a
burning desire for her own mother to come back. He cries out
imploring Winnie to realize what she is doing to him. The voice of the
afflicted boy not only cries for help, but also bears witness to the fact
that, although she might not be aware of it, his mother has repeated the
past. Caruth maintains that that other voice that speaks from within the
traumatic event possibly represents the unconscious self that holds on
to the memory of the traumatic past event.
Winnie's defenses sometimes break down and result in anxiety.
Freud defines anxiety as "a particular state of experiencing the danger
or preparing for it even though it may be an unknown one" (1961, 6).
Anxiety is an important experience that also "involves a return of the
repressed" (Tyson, 17) and therefore reveals a person's core issues.
Terribly hurt after the loss of her parents and the consecutive losses of
her babies, Winnie develops "a fear of abandonment", which Tyson
defines as a solid belief and the related fears that a person hoards of
18
being deserted by cherished friends or loved ones. Abandonment could
be physical if the person is literally separated from a loved one or
emotional if the latter withdraws love and attention. Winnie's fear of
abandonment is evident in her constant anxiety over her daughter
telling her secrets and breaking her news always to someone else.
When her daughter decides to spend the night in a hotel with her
family, she strives to persuade them to come spend it with her.
Winnie's low self-esteem makes her believe that she is unworthy of
love and therefore will eventually be abandoned. These tiny incidents
make Winnie relive the painful childhood memories of her careless
parents whether or not she is aware of the connection between the
present and past events. When her daughter shows the tiniest
aloofness, she feels abandoned because she had been repeatedly
abandoned as a child. She becomes anxious out of reluctance to give
permission to that fact, relegated for so long into the depths of the
unconscious, to push its way to the surface. Instead, Winnie invents
fake justifications for her feelings that do not go beyond the present
moment and that say nothing about her emotional insecurity. What she
feels is that she is being abandoned by her daughter, but what she says
is that she wants to save her daughter's money. Her unconscious
knowledge of the real reasons, however, makes her anxious. She feels
angry and hurt because some frightening or painful experience which
she has managed to repress is coming to the surface. Even in the case
of Pearl, the daughter who was born in America and raised between
Winnie and her loving American- Chinese husband, there are traces of
Winnie's own childhood traumas. Winnie knows that there is a very
19
strong probability that Pearl is Wen Fu's daughter by the last time he
raped her. She conceals this fact lest Pearl should accuse her of loving
her less than her brother the same way Winnie's own father loved her
less than her siblings for being the daughter of a wife that he resented.
He hated Winnie for having the face of the wife that deserted him.
Actually, the whole society displaces their feelings of anger and
contempt upon little Winnie for her mother's supposedly disgraceful
act. Upon Pearl, Winnie projects all the feelings of hatred, guilt and
anger that she herself harbored against her own father. Projection,
according to Tyson refers to "ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty
desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it, in order
to deny that we have it ourselves" (15).
Things get complicated because Pearl, too, undergoes the
trauma of losing her favorite parent, in this case her father. In a state of
denial, Pearl screams that the sick, shriveled person lying in bed is not
her father. Later, the traumatized girl refuses to see her father in the
casket or mourn his death in any way. She runs out of the room trying
to calm herself down and ward off a flood of tears by taking some
breathing exercises. Overwhelmed by her loss and beginning to
hyperventilate, Pearl rushes out of the room gulping and gasping but
still not crying. Winnie scolds her daughter for not having loved her
father enough in his life to mourn him as she should upon his death. In
this particular situation, it is obvious that pearl's attitude approaches a
spot of the unconscious, fragile enough to arouse anxiety. It is not just
"projection" on the side of Winnie, but a piece of dangerous
knowledge which she has persistently hidden for more than forty years.
21
According to Tyson, "Core issues stay with us throughout life and,
unless effectively addressed, they determine our behavior in
destructive ways of which we are usually unaware" (17). Anxiety
reveals a great deal about personality since a person becomes anxious
in situations that throw stones in the deep well of the unconscious
thereby stirring his/her core issues. The girl's attempt to ward off her
sense of loss threatens to arouse the second biggest trauma in Winnie's
life which is that Pearl's statement could very possibly be literally true.
Winnie is almost sure that Pearl is the daughter of Wen Fu, her first
husband who raped her just before she married her second beloved
husband. She spirals out of control jumping hysterically and frantically
slapping her daughter several times threatening never to stop unless the
girl sheds tears of grief over the death of her father.
Later in life, Pearl, too, projects her feelings of fear and guilt
upon her mother. She criticizes her mother for having so many regrets
and calls her a Chinese Freud who is trying to find reasons for
everything and feeling guilty sometimes even when she did not have
to, citing the illness and death of her father as an example. In fact, it is
Pearl who had regrets and fears related to showing disgust and
resentment instead of care and sympathy towards her sick father. She
looks upon her present ailment as a punishment and conceals it from
her mother lest the latter should confirm the apprehension. It is also
Pearl who, together with her husband, moves in vicious circles trying
to find out reasons for her multiple sclerosis and lives in fear of the
anonymous moment when the remission period might come to an end.

21
 Caruth explains that trauma is more concerned with how a
certain catastrophic event keeps coming back to haunt the afflicted
person rather than with the violent event itself. About thirty years later,
Pearl comes very close to her trauma when the atmosphere of her
father's funeral is reenacted upon the death of Auntie Du. When she
looks into the casket, Pearl does not see Auntie Du, but her father. Her
defenses break and the same PTSD attacks her. The door of the
unconscious breaks open with a sob that escapes Pearl‘s chest and her
eyes overflow with the tears she held back thirty years earlier. She
collapses and gives vent to her buried feelings of anger and bitterness.
Tyson maintains that a core issue can function as both a core
issue and a defense and that core issues can be the cause or the result
of each other. If, for example, fear of abandonment is a person's core
issue, he/she is expected to develop fear of intimacy as a result. Fear of
intimacy is "the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional
closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain
emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from
others at all times" (Tyson,16). A person attempts to avoid the possible
future separation by not getting too close in the first place. The
conviction that all her loved ones will inevitably abandon her, leads
Winnie to avoid emotional intimacy with the only one who does not.
She calls her third baby "Danru,"meaning "nonchalance," hoping that
her baby will never be susceptible to emotional attachments, not even
to his own mother. She admits that she herself tries very hard not to
love her babies. Avoiding emotional involvement with others works as
a shield protecting the person who is apprehensive about old
22
psychological wounds being opened. Relationships with significant
others, spouses, lovers, siblings or offspring, once they get too close
will inevitably dredge up all the painful experiences that a person has
carefully been hiding. Describing her relationship with her daughter,
Winnie admits that they were like two strangers, trying to keep a
prudent distance. Too painful wounds will be salted should mother and
daughter get close enough. When they meet after a long separation,
Winnie does not exchange the customary endearment signs with her
daughter and granddaughters. They do not hug or kiss or show the
usual manifestations of happiness at reunion. What mother and
daughter keep from each other is much more significant than what they
share. There is a lot to avoid because there is a lot to keep hidden.
According to Tyson, avoidance refers to keeping away from people,
places or situations that are expected to arouse a person‘s anxiety by
resurrecting parts of a repressed experience. The relation between
Winnie and Pearl is itself "an exercise of avoidance" (Graham, 130).
Pearl states that she always has to trade lightly as if besieged by
landmines. She knows nothing about the bizarre life experience her
mother had in another continent, yet, she is a constant reminder and
perhaps a connection to that hideous past. Winnie is a reminder of her
daughter's apparently shameful acts after the death of her father. When
Pearl looks at her mother, she becomes aware of the distance that
separates them and the barriers that preclude real communication and
sharing of experience leaving both equally lonely.
In her book Unclaimed Experience, Caruth makes ample
reference to two works by Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
23
(1961), and Moses and Monotheism (1939), which she regards as
essential pieces if contemporary critics were to comprehend the
profound meaning of survival which lies at the core of human life and
experience. War-flavored, the two books demonstrate the relation
between Freud's theory of trauma and historical violence. She
describes as perplexed, Freud's observation of "a psychic disorder that
appears to reflect the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of
historical events on the psyche" (Caruth, 50), yet uses it as a starting
point to explain what Freud called "the war neuroses" and considers
them both vital to understand trauma and traumatic repetitions as
forces that shape the human life. She agrees with Freud that the real
trauma is not the encounter with death, but the continuous awareness
of having survived and suggests that trauma is not simply about the
aftermath of destruction but is also, basically, ―an enigma of survival"
(49). Caruth maintains that the act of survival involves the chronic
awareness that the confrontation with death and the necessity to protect
one‘s life is a full time job, but she also partially attributes the PTSD to
the experience of having to survive the death of loved ones. In his
book Trauma and Media, Allen Meek, too, cites Freud to call upon the
reader to perceive history as the story of a trauma since he, Freud,
widens the scope of the concept to cover social collectives as well as
individuals. James Berger agrees asserting that historical events have
quite an impact on the psychology of individuals. Meek calls for a
theory of ―historical trauma‖ in response to the modern culture that
condones terror and mediated violence. That theory should be
necessary since some events are essentially traumatic for specific
24
groups or even full nations. A large number of people share the same
certain characteristics because they were contemporaries of the same
catastrophic historical events. He argues for the definition of historical
trauma as "bearing witness to specific events and experiences" and "an
open-ended, experimental approach to engaging with the violent and
catastrophic legacies of the past" (40). Shane Graham agrees and, in
his essay "This Text Deletes Itself," maintains that traumatic
happenings are necessarily collective since they cause psychic
disorders that afflict whole families, communities or even nations.
Winnie and Helen exemplify Caruth‘s claim that sharing a catastrophic
experience creates a peculiar bond between individuals. The two
women bear witness to the war between China and Japan which
Winnie views as the real beginning of WWII. The memory of that
catastrophic event works as a bond that unites, yet frightens away the
two companions. Each works as a trauma trigger that constantly
threatens to open the other's Pandora box and that is why, although
they cannot separate, they cannot get too close either. Living for years
under the horrors of war Winnie and Helen acquired certain
characteristics that kept them alive then. They are both very meticulous
about money and are always reluctant to throw away anything. So far
away from the time and site of their trauma, Winnie and Helen
establish a business reminiscent of the atrocities of war. They make
funeral wreathes and as soon as Pearl enters their shop, she is instantly
welcomed by a scent that reminds her of funeral parlors. After forty
years of living as an American citizen, Helen still stuffs her bag with
many necessities lest a war should break out while she is not prepared.
25
Under the war trauma, Helen retrieves childhood memories that she
thought were buried beyond retrieval. Instead of giving something into
a starving beggar's bowl, she would simply devour more food herself.
The more starving beggars she saw, the keener Helen was to stuff
herself with food. At present, she still keeps a bag full of food beside
the door, just in case. Winnie believes that Helen is doing this because
she cannot free herself of sad childhood memories when her family
almost starved to death. In her childhood, Helen showed the same
reaction; she tried to stuff herself with food, but her mother punished
her by giving her nothing to eat for three consecutive days. That is why
seeing people suffering from the lack of food rubs salt into her old
wounds. Shoshana Felman refers to the fear that haunts a traumatized
person lest "fate [should] strike again" as "crucial to the memory of
trauma … only this time around, one might not be spared nor have the
power to endure" (67). Helen suffered a childhood trauma that was
awakened by the historical trauma that threatened famine in addition to
death.
As Winnie explains to her daughter, war changes people in
significant ways and shows them different versions of themselves. To
save her own life and that of her companion, Helen heavily beats a
man and steals his pedicab. So many years later, Helen develops
defenses to avoid acknowledging the existence of that other self inside
her. Her "selective memory" modifies past events and attributes to
herself kind acts that she did not do while at the same time deleting
from her mind all the shameful behaviors. When Winnie reminds her
of the pedicap episode she, not only denies it, but feels offended that
26
her friend could ever accuse her of such a shameful behavior. Selective
memory refers to the way people protect themselves against the
remembrance of incidents that would threaten the ego model a person
internalized. It is a defense mechanism that describes a person‘s ability
to modify or erase painful or shameful memories to keep his/her
integrity, therefore self-image, intact.
According to van der Kolk, people vary in the way they
respond to traumatic events. Some people‘s personal characteristics
help them adapt to terrible events while others who lack creativity and
flexibility become fixated on their traumas. Helen is obviously a better
adapter than her friend. She is one of the efficient adapters for whom
"memories of particular events are remembered as stories that change
over time and that do not evoke intense emotions and sensations"
(Rivikin, 491). Winnie says about her that she always changes the past
into something that she could accept. She admits that she has recreated
and reinvented the past several times for different reasons. As for
people who develop PTSD, however, "the past is relived with an
immediate sensory and emotional intensity that makes victims feel as
if the events were occurring all over again" (Rivikin, 491). When
Helen refers to Winnie‘s first husband, Winnie still suffers the PTSD
she had more than forty years ago. She stops breathing because her
mind presents her with an almost real life picture of the abhorred man.
Although she has not seen him for more than forty years, she could
still feel his hateful breath on her neck.
Freud describes dreams as perhaps the most reliable method of
revealing and examining the unconscious and the related mental
27
processes. He explains that ―dream-works‖ could expose and change a
person‘s unconscious thoughts by modifying them according to the
contents of the dream (1913, 253). Unlike ordinary dreams which are
mostly wish-fulfilling, trauma-induced dreams are characterized by a
recurrent retrieval of the stored memories about the catastrophic
action. The patient usually wakes up with renewed fright, having re-
witnessed and relived the details of the horrible experience. Caruth
agrees with Freud that a return of the traumatic experience is only
evident in the mode of dreams or symptoms. The fact that traumatic
dreams force themselves upon the patient against his own will is a
proof of fixation on the traumatic moment. These dreams "are
endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the
anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis"
(Freud, 1961, 26). Years after her arrival to America, Winnie keeps
screaming in her dreams that her first husband was coming to get her.
Pearl, too, is haunted by a dream that exposes her fixation on the
trauma of losing her father. The dream, being always in a hospital,
reflects her worry over the deterioration of her medical condition and
her anger and helplessness at being told that it has no known causes or
cures. She projects her feelings of guilt and her inexhaustible trials to
find a reason for everything upon her mother who, according to Pearl,
thinks that whatever is done might be undone if the reasons behind it
were thoroughly defined. Like her mother, Pearl blames herself for the
death of her father, once because she did not pray sincerely for him to
be cured because he was irrevocably transformed by his illness and
another because of the way she treated him when she would not
28
respond for his pitiful calls for help. Pearl rejected her father's
weakness and dependence upon her and her mother for help and
punished him for destroying the picture she cherished for him as a
strong man and a rock of assurance. The dream reflects her feelings
that her own illness could be a punishment for her lack of gratitude and
her fear lest her mother should raise the accusation. In the dream, it is
she who protests and demands an explanation for the ungrateful
treatment she receives but nobody responds to her. The only answer
she gets in the dream is finding her father in a dirty hospital corner,
where she is finally given the chance to make it up for him.
Lacan's major concepts, the "Symbolic Order" and the
"Imaginary Order" constitute useful psychoanalytic tools to explain the
significant transformation that overtakes Winnie's personality in the
second half of her life. It is noteworthy here to indicate that the
―Symbolic Order‖ is the meeting point between psychoanalysis and
feminism, since it stands for the rules and restrictions that women need
to break with in order to reevaluate their lives and responsibilities. It is
the world where "others have needs, desires, and fears that limit the
ways in which and the extent to which we can attend to our own needs,
desires, and fears" (Tyson, 30). Ever since her mother abandoned her,
Winnie had been doing her best to be a good citizen in the world of the
―Symbolic Order‖, trying to impress people by her orderly behavior.
When her aunts neglect her teachings in how to be an efficient
housewife, she is eager to teach herself by observing and imitating
exemplary behavior. When her father tells her that she should blindly
adopt the opinions and attitudes of her future husband she feels
29
grateful that he was careful enough to teach her such a useful lesson.
However, Winnie never stopped yearning for the freedom and ultimate
satisfaction she experienced in the Imaginary Order as appears in
pursuing her "objet petit a," craving things that connected her to that
phase. "Objet petit a" or "Object small a" refers to "anything that puts
me in touch with my repressed desire for my lost object" (Tyson, 28).
Even at seventy-five, Winnie still craves the English biscuits her
mother used to feed her in her early childhood. Wherever she goes, she
keeps a replicate of the dresser her mother used to look at and talk to
herself. According to Tyson we never really succeed to repress the
―Imaginary Order‖ which continues to occupy a background position
of an individual‘s consciousness even though the foreground remains
under the reign of the ―Symbolic Order‖. Although the ―Imaginary
Order‖ reigns over a certain zone, it does not control or restrict life the
way the ―Symbolic Order‖ does. On the contrary, it condones
nonconformity and urges individuals to defy the social norms, which
are the backbone of the ―Symbolic Order‖. ―The Imaginary Order‖
helps people recognize their human value and achieve their artistic
potential because it generates creativity and innovation. Winnie
reconnects with the ―Imaginary Order‖ through her encounter with
Min, the mistress of her own husband. Min's connection to the
―Imaginary Order‖ is obvious in her multifaceted artistic talent and her
sexual freedom. This brief encounter with the ―Imaginary Order‖
inspires Winnie to revolt against her husband and change her life. It is
significant that dancing, which Min teaches Winnie is what first
introduces her to Jimmie Louie and initiates their romance which
31
eventually empowers her to break with all the teachings of the
―Symbolic Order‖. Winnie is still drawn to the ―Imaginary Order‖ as
appears in her artistic talent that is manifest in the fantastic flower
patterns that dazzle her daughter as she enters her mother's flower
shop.
In The Kitchen God's Wife, compliance with the ―Symbolic
Order‖ is the rule, while deviation is punished by the death of the
trespasser except in the case of Winnie when it is punished by
imprisonment since she fluctuates, back and forth between the two
orders. Those who join the ―Imaginary Order‖ leave rules and
restrictions behind and inhabit a land of no boundaries. This lack of
control provides the only resistance a person can show to confront the
―Symbolic Order‖. Crossing the borders between the two orders is
symbolized by the movement Winnie makes from her residence with
Wen Fu's traditional family where everybody pretended to be kind and
content to the kingdom of women, a part of town inhabited by
independent women who decided that their lives and bodies belonged
to them and uprooted the myth of male superiority. This women abode
is an externalization of Lacan's ―Imaginary Order‖ standing as a world
of ideas in defiant opposition to rules and traditions and as soon as she
steps inside, Winnie significantly calls it the bad section of the city.
Instead of failed warriors (the world of men), this place is inhabited by
victorious women remaking their own lives and also by
nonconformists (prostitutes) and intellectuals (writers, artists and
students). Instead of using weapons to fight over the wealth of the
land, the inhabitants of this section live on the products of the intellect,
31
and feed on each other‘s ideas. Winnie's acceptance of that new world
of women independence is marked by the new attitude she adopts
towards the call "Forbidden stories" launched at her by a book vendor
(433). In between two worlds Winnie meets "the Real," a realm that
"both the Symbolic and the Imaginary Orders attempt to control or
avoid (Tyson, 32). According to Lacan, The Real is the
―uninterruptable dimension of existence‖ and is "made up of both the
symbolic and the imaginary" (113). It is a feeling that an individual
experiences when life seems meaningless and of no purpose. The Real
guides people to recognize the transient nature of truths and values that
have governed life for so long that people have come to regard as
eternal and timeless. This recognition enables people to see through
dominant rules and ideologies and think of them as hoaxes or means of
manipulation that could simply be replaced.
On the thin line separating two worlds, Winnie stops for a long
second to contemplate what it means to be on the other side of what
she has hitherto identified as herself and her frame of reference and see
them for what they are. She realizes the absurdity of her situation
holding fast to all that, for her, means misery and unhappiness, while at
the same time denouncing her opportunities of having a real life that
offers true love and puts an end to shameful pretensions. At the
crossroads between good and bad, Winnie's perceptiveness becomes
sharper and her field of vision wider and more comprehensive. In a
split second, good and bad become so fluid that they exchange their
positions and suddenly, Winnie‘s mind in invaded by a huge hoard of
childhood memories, family pictures and major events. However,
32
everything and everyone she previously cherished and revered feel like
an imposture. Life experience in its entirety seems grand and trivial,
sad and elevating, a sham and a solid truth all at one and the same
time. Her reservoir of secrets, disagreements, misunderstandings,
victories and defeats sounds hollow and unimpressive. Winnie was
suffocating under the pressure of that thunderous flash of intellectual
and spiritual illumination that pierced her being and all she wanted to
do was run away. And run away is what Winnie does, but to a different
life of her own making where good and bad are to be defined
according to her own codes. She leaves her sadistic husband and joins
Jimmie Louie in America and that decision, made within a moment
when she encounters the "Real", gives her back her life.
Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman place a lot of emphasis on
bearing witness to trauma, a process that involves a narrative of intense
human suffering and extreme psychic trauma as well as a listener to
that narrative. Most critics suggest that "trauma manifests itself
primarily as a loss of language, coupled paradoxically with the
compulsion to talk about that loss" (Graham, 127). Only when the
traumatized person gathers the ability to articulate and transmit the
story of the pain by telling it to someone else and then absorbing it
again, can he/she assimilate that event and make it plausibly fit within
his/her life experience. This belated assimilation of an event that,
when it first took place, was too shocking to be assimilated generates
the healing process. If the relation between literature and
psychoanalysis is, as Caruth maintains, a "relation between knowing
and not knowing" (9), Laub views the emergence of that narrative as
33
"the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the 'knowing' of the
event is given birth to" (57). Laub emphasizes the role of the listener as
a participant and co-owner of the traumatic narrative that manifests
peculiar literary qualities. The traumatic narrative, with its
reenactments and repetitions of an event that takes place beyond the
boundaries of normalcy, abides by no rules of reality. Such a story
violates the principles of causality, time and place since it has "no
beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after" (Felman, 69).
It requires an efficient narrator who can reconstruct his/her inchoate
misery into a story. The traumatic event eludes the wisdom of its
victim, never offering him/her the chance to attain a proper closure.
Winnie never knows whether her mother willingly abandoned her or
was forced to, so, she says that that abandoned six-year old girl will
always be waiting hopefully in a little room in her heart. It is this lack
of proper closure that keeps the trauma survivor in the grip of, yet
never in touch with the core of his/her traumatic reality. The listener is
assigned the sophisticated mission of unfastening that grip by
unleashing the tongue of the trauma captive. To achieve this mission,
"a therapeutic process- a process of constructing a narrative, of
reconstructing history and essentially, of re-externalizing the event-
has to be set in motion" (Felman, 69). Coming to grips with the
intriguing plot of the narrative of trauma, becomes the responsibility of
the narrator and the listener alike during this process, mainly based on
Freud's talking cure. Faced with the threatening fact that she and her
friend have become the only witnesses to each other's traumas, Helen
decides to unburden her heart to a member of the following generation.
34
She realizes, however, that only the survivor of a trauma is entitled to
reconstruct its story and consequently forces both Winnie and her
daughter to assume their responsibilities as listeners to, therefore co-
owners of each other's trauma. She performs her function as "a witness
to the witness" being "the enabler of the testimony- the one who
triggers its initiation, as well as the guardian of its process and of its
momentum" (Felman, 58).Unzipped, however, Winnie's lips prove to
have been holding back a lot more than even her almost life-long
companion would expect. Constructing her narrative, Tan's heroine
reconstructs history, and in so doing re-externalizes traumatic events
that hitherto held her in their clutches. Pearl carries out her function as
a witness to a trauma witness, since her mother moves beyond the
personal to recount the story of a historical trauma that shaped the
collective identity of her contemporaries. Winnie intertwines the
personal and the collective in a tight knot which she finally places into
the hands of her daughter who internalizes the defeats, victories and
silences of the older generation and, through her very listening,
becomes a participant in them. Pearl will have to struggle, perhaps
forever with the question of her parenthood, but she will also have to
view and review the scenes of destruction and massive killings
whenever she looks at the photo album where her father registered in
pictures their life in China. Accepting the invitation to visit China, the
site of Winnie and Helen's individual and collective traumas, Pearl
gives her consent to join them in the binding oath that kept them silent
for over forty years. Listening to them reminisce about their past lives
in China and agreeing to accompany them in their journey back there,
35
Pearl is actually acknowledging her responsibility as a co-owner of
their trauma and a bearer of testimony. All the boxes are emptied; all
the wounds are reopened, cleaned and left to hopefully heal. This
internalization of another's trauma is manifest in her willingness to
partake of a certain potion from a magic spring Winnie and Helen once
visited in China commenting that, back there, they were able to
retrieve the time they were so young and drink the water they claimed
was as heavy as gold and tasted like sweet flower seeds. Having joined
them in their forever pact, Pearl confirms that she, too, can taste and
feel the sweet water. She also claims that it has the magical effect of
making a person remember all the things that were presumed forgotten
although in fact they were only buried in the unconscious. That
magical potion obviously refers to the talking cure they have all tasted,
the cure that "went down inside you, changing everything … your
heart, your mind" rendering "everything inside you peaceful, no
worries, no sorrows" (526). Only then does Pearl comprehend why her
aunties and even her own mother are made the way they are. They fit
quite gracefully within the context of a past that molded them into their
present selves using a hot fire that did not burn her. Their denials
regarding the terrible facts of their lives started back in the past when
they both stood in the midst of the rubble of what had been their own
houses looking at the dead bodies of their country people and
pretending they were the empty clothes of men, women and children.
Amy Tan entices, not only her heroine, but also her readers to
the borderline where all the difficult choices converge. She guides
them to a point where they can see through life when it is stripped of
36
the blinding garment of familiarity that causes the living to look, yet
not see life for what it is. At that rare moment of clear vision, it takes a
person only a few seconds to size up his/her situation. Readers end up
with questions far more complicated than those they begin with. They
make the journey across the mundane to the transcendental until it
becomes almost terrifying to proceed any further. Laws and traditions
are neither rocks nor oceans that were brought down to earth with the
advent of man or even perhaps before him. They were themselves
invented by man and could/should therefore be reinvented when
people's lives fall into disarray. Actions and decisions that could
otherwise be deemed adventurous and risky appear sensible and
plausible. The absurdity of putting up with depressive situations
instead of changing them becomes as crystal clear as that of accepting
someone else's views as a legacy instead of creating one's own. Caught
in a whirlpool of social, ethical and emotional issues, Winnie could
save herself only by being herself, not one of the numerous ready-
made women that a society can receive at the end of the conveyor belt
with the words "made in China" written upon them. That could very
possibly be the reason why Tan does not ponder much on cultural
differences and the difficulties of exchanging one homeland for
another. The real movement in the novel is not the one that Winnie
makes from one country to another. The real journey effects a change
in stance, state and status. It is a journey from one self to another, from
being a kitchen god's wife, to being the goddess determining her own
fate.

37
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<http://www.pep-

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Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative,

and History. USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

1996. Print.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering:

Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1979. Print.

----------. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. London:

Yale University Press, 1989. Print.

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony, Crisis of

Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.

London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans.

James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton& Company,

1961. Print.

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Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, eds.

Reading Seminar XI, Lacan's Four Fundamental

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New York, 1995. Print.

Fliess, Robert. Ego and Body Ego: Contributions to their

Psychoanalytic Psychology. New York: International

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Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, Third

Edition. Trans. by A. A. Brill. New York: The

Macmillan Company, 1913; Bartleby.com,

2010.www.bartleby.com/285/. [04/10/2014].

Graham, Shane. "This Text Deletes Itself: Traumatic

Memory And Space-Time in ZoeWicomb's David's

Story." Studies in the Novel 40. 1 &2 (2008): 127-145.

Print.

Klein, Melanie. The Psychoanalysis of Children. Trans.

Alix Strachey. NewYork: Grove Press, 1960. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan

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 Sheridan. New York: Norton and Company Inc, 1978.

Print.

Lampl-de Groot, Jeanne. "The Evolution of the Oedipus

Complex in Women." The Psychoanalytic Reader. Ed.

Robert Fliess. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1927. 180-94. Print.

Meek, Allen. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories and

Images. U.K.: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Phelps, Teresa Godwin. Shattered Voices: Language,

Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions.

Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print.

Rivikin, Julie and Michael Ryan., eds. Literary Theory: An

Anthology. 2nd. N.Y.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print.

Rivikin, Julie and Michael Ryan. "Strangers to Ourselves."

Literary theory, an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivikin and

Michael Ryan. 2nd. N.Y.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Print.

Shapiro, D. Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books,

1965. Print.

41
Spillius, Elizabeth Bott, ed. Melanie Klein Today,

Developments in Theory and Practice. London:

Routledge, 1988. Print.

Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God's Wife. N.Y: Ballantine

Books, 1991. Print.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 2nd ed. N.Y.:

Routledge, 2006. Print.

Van der Kolk, Bessel A., Alexander C. McFarlane, and

Lars Weisaeth. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of

Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society.

New York: The Guilford Press, 1996. Print.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Origin/intro.htm ,

Raymond E. Fancher, 03/11/2014.

41
 “Returning the Colonizer’s Gaze”, Nadine Gordimer’s None to
Accompany Me, a Hybridity in the Making.

―When colonizer and colonized come together,

there is an element of negotiation of cultural meaning‖ (Huddart, 2).

―Cultural colonization‖ has proved much more influential than

territorial colonization. If the first usurps lands and properties, Lois
Tyson states that the second inculcates in the colonized systems and
values that ―denigrate the culture, moral, and even physical appearance
of formerly subjugated people‖ (419). The cultural and psychological
influences of colonizers remain much longer after the withdrawal of
their canons and soldiers. The powerful wind of change which sweeps
away the traces of their wheels and footprints, find indelible the traces
of their manners and attitudes. The ―dynamic psychological and social
interplay between what ex-colonial populations consider their native,
indigenous, pre-colonial cultures‖ and ―the residual effects of colonial
domination on their culture‖ (419) comes at the heart of postcolonial
studies and major related issues, e.g., post colonial identity. Ex-
colonized countries have so profusely imbibed colonizers‘ culture that
it became almost impossible to distinguish it from indigenous culture.
However, it is not worthwhile for the ex-colonized to preserve some
cultural aspects and disown others on basis of the nationality of these
aspects. Therefore, several postcolonial theorists claim that
―postcolonial identity is necessarily a dynamic, constantly evolving
hybrid of native and colonial cultures‖ (422). They even go further to
argue that hybridity should not be confined to the unwilling cultural

42
exchange (culture transfusion) among contesting or warring countries,
but ―is rather a productive, exciting, positive force in a shrinking world
that is itself becoming more and more culturally hybrid‖ (422).
Among post-colonial theorists, Homi K. Bhabha distinguishes
himself by a set of illuminating concepts that pump new blood into the
veins of the movement as a whole. These concepts call for a new
understanding of cross- cultural relations and a novel approach towards
colonialism. In several instances he explains his views by referring to
other major critics, e.g., Said, Fanon and Julia Kristeva. He disagrees
with Said‘s view that ―colonial power and discourse is possessed
entirely by the colonizer,‖ and considers it ―a historical and theoretical
simplification‖ that he challenges (Bhabha,1983,23), but, according to
Richard King, Bhabha adopts the Derridean notion of difference which
highlights the ongoing ―deferral and differentiation of meaning within
texts in order to emphasize the inherent ambivalence of colonial
discourse‖ (202). Colonial discourse is the result of a hybridization
process that inevitably ensues when colonizers and colonized meet and
interact in ―an agonistic space‖ (202). King maintains that,
―Discourses, like texts, can come to mean different things and be
appropriated for heterogeneous purposes‖ (202). Bhabha explains that
we ―should not see the colonial situation as one of straightforward
oppression of the colonized by the colonizer‖ (Huddart, 1) and cites
evidence referring to the ambivalence of the colonial situation
especially that his reading of Lacan comes in agreement with this
ambivalence. Bhabha‘s understanding of the mirror stage sheds light
on his evaluation of the colonizer-colonized relationship. In his The
43
Location of Culture, (1994), he suggests that ―Like the mirror phase
‗the fullness‘ of the stereotype-its image as identity- is always
threatened by lack‖ (77). ―Aggressivity‖ and ―narcissism‖ that are
basically entwined in the mirror stage also overwhelm the colonial
situation. This ―doubling‖ describes the ambivalence inherent in the
colonizer/colonized relationship. There is always ―both an aggressive
expression of domination over the other and evidence of narcissistic
anxiety about the self‖ (Huddart, 29). The colonizer‘s aggression
appears in his persistent attempts to show his superiority, but this fails
to cover for the real instability of his identity. Bhabha claims that in
―the objectification of the scopic drive there is always the threatened
return of the look; in the identification of the imaginary relation there
is always the alienating other (or mirror) which crucially returns its
image to the subject.‖ A reevaluation of stances is, therefore, vital for a
reevaluation of the whole experience within the wider scope of the
present and in relation to major issues that were not known when
colonialism was almost covering the globe. How could the insistence
on cultural difference, so deeply engraved in the history of colonialism
be adhered to in relation to globalization? How could the world avoid
the cultural freeze/stalemate that would inevitably ensue should
colonizers and colonized hold fast to their historical stances?
Responding to these issues, Bhabha advocates ―critical thinking‖, as ―a
process‖ opposed to ―theoretical critique‖, a procedure which does not
contain the truth‖ (1994, 81). He argues that ―Political positions are not
simply identifiable as progressive or reactionary, bourgeois or radical,
prior to the act of critique engagée, or out-side the terms and
44
conditions of their discursive address‖ (22). This indicates that
Political positions ―are always in context, in relation to specific debates
and issues, and are not, therefore, ‗left‘ or ‗right‘ outside specific
situations‖ (Huddart, 12).Critical thinking, ―just as ambivalent as the
colonial discourse‖(13), enables thinkers to destroy the boundaries of
the stable and the expected and therefore attain a new perspective on
traditional issues.
Bhabha believes that the ―histories and cultures (of
colonialism) constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we
transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations‖ (Huddart, 1).
Accordingly, he calls for the adoption of new interpretations of old
concepts such as ―mimicry‖ and ―the uncanny‖, besides new concepts
especially hybridization. Building on his understanding of mimicry and
stereotypes, he uses ―the uncanny‖ to analyze the postcolonial
experience. The term is ambivalent and lends itself to various
explanations, so it might be convenient to use only the definitions that
influenced Bhabha the most, i.e., the definitions offered by Sigmund
Freud and adopted by psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva. The
uncanny is ―that species of the frightening that goes back to what was
once familiar‖ (Freud, 2003:124). Bhabha uses it in many contexts to
refer to ―All the hesitations, uncertainties, and ambivalences with
which colonial authorities and its figures are imbued‖ (Huddart, 54).
He finds it particularly convenient because he believes in the
―uncanniness of culture.‖

45
 Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary
generalizations,
its mimetic narratives, its homologous empty time, its
seriality, its progress, its customs and coherence. But
cultural authority is also unheimlich, for to be
distinctive,
significa-tory, influential and identifiable, it has to be
translated, disseminated, differentiated,
interdisciplinary,
intertextual, international, inter-racial. (Bhabha, 1994,
136–7)

In his writings, Bhabha argues against the ―multiculturalist‖

notion that ―you can put together any number of cultures in a pretty
mosaic‖ (1991, 82). For him, ―there are no cultures that came together
leading to hybrid forms; instead, cultures are the consequences of
attempts to still the flux of cultural hybridities‖ (Huddart, 4). Hybridity
implies that ―the colonial space involves the interaction of two
originally ‗pure‘ cultures (the British/European and the native) that are
only rendered ambivalent once they are brought into direct contact
with each other‖ (King, 204). However, the idea of ―pure cultures‖
interacting is not Bhabha‘s main interest which is actually ―the third
space‖ resulting from that interaction and what occupies that space
which enables other positions to emerge‖ (Bhabha,1991, 211). He is
more interested in the ―liminal‖, the gray area occupying the borderline
stage which is critical for the creation of a new culture.
South Africa presents a unique example of liminality in
which the colonizer and the colonized have to live side by side even
after the colonial situation is terminated. Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel
Prize winner, has been preoccupied by the social context of apartheid
46
for more than forty years. She has been acknowledged by ―critics and
readers alike …as an uncompromising anti- apartheid spokesperson‖
(Dimitriu, 1). Gordimer‘s views after apartheid are almost identical to
Bhabha‘s evaluation of the colonial and postcolonial experience. She
suggests that ―all civilizations including China and Japan have been
the result of intersections and clashes.‖ She quotes the Congolese
writer, Henry Lopes who affirms that ―every civilization is born of a
forgotten mixture; every race is a variety of mixtures that is ignored‖
(Gordimer, 1999, 28). Bhabha agrees suggesting that ―the scraps,
patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs
of a coherent national culture‖ (1994, 722). In her first post-apartheid
novel, None to Accompany Me, (1994), Gordimer employs the
paraphernalia of everyday life to reflect either the coherency or
incoherency of a national culture in the making. The new hybrid
culture should inevitably be a composite of the colonizer and
indigenous culture. Gordimer presents South Africa in the borderline
stage when the country has just won the freedom of the black majority.
The aim of this paper is therefore to examine how far Gordimer‘s post-
apartheid novel demonstrates Bhabha‘s views in relation to
postcolonialism. Attention will particularly be given to the concepts of
―mimicry‖ and ―the uncanny‖, being so related to each other and also
comprehensively illustrated in the novel.
The novel opens with a party thrown ―the year the prisons
opened‖ (5) - 1990. The party is given by the Starks, white activists, to
welcome their son who arrives from London, welcome black returnees
from exile, and mark their wedding anniversary. In the airport, black
47
returnees appear in the costumes of their different places of exile, ―the
black leather caps of East Germany, the dashikis of Tanzania, the Arab
keffiyeh worn as a scarf‖ (36). These odd combinations refute the idea
that we can firmly draw boundaries between individual nations.
Hybridization has never stopped. Even though these natives were away
from the colonizer, they have obviously imbibed ―patches‖ and ―rags‖
from other cultures. This initial situation of the colonizer acting as a
hostess to natives changes by the end when the colonized manages to
return the gaze.
Colonialist discourse stands on two basic assumptions, the
superiority of the European colonizers (Eurocentrism), and the
inferiority of the indigenous peoples they invade. Apparently the
colonizers equated technical and military advancement with cultural
and humanitarian advancement. They saw themselves as ―the
embodiment of what a human being should be, the proper ‗self‘‖
turning the colonized into ‗other‘,‖ and ―therefore inferior to the point
of being less than fully human‖ (Tyson, 420). Indigenous cultures had
been devalued for so long that ex-colonized were left with ―a
psychological inheritance of a negative self-image and alienation from
their own indigenous cultures‖ (419). The colonizers consolidated the
idea of their superiority by creating colonial subjects, i.e., ―colonized
persons who did not resist colonial subjugation because they were
taught to believe in [the colonizer‘s] superiority and, therefore, in their
own inferiority‖ (421). Colonial subjects are people with a double
consciousness or vision. The way those subjects perceive themselves
and the world is always divided between two contesting cultures: their
48
indigenous culture and that of the colonizer. Among colonial subjects
are people who had the European culture forced upon them in exile
like the Maqomas. The Maqomas‘ lengthy stay in exile could be
measured by the age of their daughter who was born away from home.
The girl, except for color, is more European than African which is
natural considering her being a production of the European society.
Back home, she struggles to learn what was supposed to be her mother
tongue. Mpho‘s in-between position is reflected in the way she equally
feels at home almost anywhere, in London, South Africa, her gogo‘s
Alexandra house and the Starks house. It is also obvious in her
appearance. Her clothes show that she is an embodiment of the
reconciliation between the past of resistance and the present. She
―combined the style of Vogue with the assertion of Africa… Her hair,
drawn back straightened and oiled to the gloss of European hair, was
gathered on the crown and twisted into stiff dreadlocks, Congolese
style‖ (49). Mpho is a

beauty of the kind created by the cross-pollination of

history …a style
of beauty [that] comes out of the clash between domination
and
resistance…Mpho was a resolution in a time when this had
not yet been
achieved by governments, conferences, negotiations…
of the struggle for power in the country which was hers.
(49)

Bhabha explains that migrants have a peculiar position. Mpho was not
literally forced into exile and for her, ―migrancy [was] upwardly

49
mobile‖ (Huddart, 52). Her hybrid identity is ―marked by an uncanny
ability to be at home anywhere, an ability that always might be the
burden of having no home whatsoever‖ (53). She also exhibits what
Bhabha describes as the ―uncanny fluency of another‘s language‖
(1994, 139), being fluent in English and totally ignorant of what is
supposed to be her native language (139). Sally laments: ―that‘s pretty
humiliating…have your daughter taught your language as if it‘s French
or German‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 50). Accordingly, Mpho leads a ―half-
life‖ as divided as the colonial identity, since these ―figures of
doubling and halving mark the experience …of the migrant…in the
same way as colonial identity loses its moorings through mimicry‖
(Huddart, 53).
As a result of belonging nowhere and everywhere,
―Propriety and impropriety become confused and doubled‖ (Huddart,
54). A little hesitant before having an abortion, Mpho, who sleeps in a
T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse on it, runs to her grandmother‘s house
(gogo‘s house). Gogo stands for the marginalized minority group who
act as the last defense against the total demise of national culture. She
is the nation-state trying to assert itself as a coherent unified body by
―appealing to the historical durability of its identity‖ (Bhabha, 1994,
772). Bhabha suggests that ―the nation fills the void left in the
uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language
of metaphor‖ (139). Among the strategies followed to achieve this
form of self-authorization is ―indoctrinating‖ the young in the
indigenous traditions. Bhabha calls these strategies the discourse of
―nationalist pedagogy‖ (772). Accordingly, a nation simultaneously
51
struggles to define itself in terms of its ―contemporaneity‖ and also in
terms of its relevance to the present world that does not have much
resemblance to life in the past (772). For Mpho, gogo represents a
―nostalgic … vision of the community‖ who could offer an alternative
to the one solution that Sibongil (Sally), her mother, imported from
Western culture (Huddart, 52). The combination of Mpho, now with an
African ―doek tied over her fancy hair style… ironing on the kitchen
table,‖ and her gogo ―peeling potatoes into a basin on her spread lap,‖
is an uncanny apparition that confronts Sally with how far she has
moved away from traditional African thinking and principles
(Gordimer, 1994, 185). The uncanny ―is a way of reviving… past life,
of keeping it alive in the present‖ (Huddart, 53). This explains Sally‘s
furious reactions at the slightest hint of a repetition of the humiliations
of the colonialist past. The uncanny
is not something that we can control or access
directly-
the feeling of uncanniness is essentially an
involuntary
recurrence of the old and familiar. This involuntary
quality
suggests that the uncanny would better have remained
hidden- what retutns to haunt you is actually
something
you do not want to face again. (Huddart, 55)

In European clothes, a ―hound‘s-tooth tweed suit and knotted silk

scarf,‖ Sally imposes European thinking and European ways of life
against gogo‘s weak resistance. ―We are not white people,‖ (Gordimer,
1994, 185) is gogo‘s sole justification and defense for her stance
against the abortion of Mpho‘s baby.
51
 Sally‘s westernized manners emphasize her departure from
her Africanness and ―her stance before all that was familiar to
[Didymus]‖ (Gordimer,186) and his mother. Gogo‘s modest kitchen
utensils pose a striking contrast to Sally‘s modern European kitchen.
These utensils, however, stood as Didymus‘ ―childhood reassurances
against hunger in many lean times‖ (186,187). They stand for the
security of the nation and the warmth of his indigenous culture against
the loneliness and coldness imparted by the kitchen of his wife where a
cold meal left in the oven or the microwave informs him that his wife
will not be home for lunch. Frued uses the uncanny to explain ―the
feeling we get when experiences of childhood that have been repressed
return to disrupt our everyday existence‖ (Huddart, 52). It is also ―what
alienates or estranges us from whatever we thought was most properly
our own‖ (56). For Didy, the revival of these memories embodies the
disturbing fact that there is no place now where he can feel at home.
―The uncanny,‖ Bhabha suggests, is also the ―unhomely‖ (1992, 144).
He calls it ―vernacular cosmopolitanism, which opens ―ways of living
at home abroad or abroad at home‖ (2000, 587). Sally states facts that
drive her message home; ―We‘ve been alienated from what is ours…
You (her Daughter) were robbed of your birth that should have been
right here… Take back your language‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 50). Her
powerful presence finally wins the battle and reminds Mpho ―of what
their long life away from home made of her‖ (186). The daughter, too,
has her definite form of hybridity that she should achieve. ―Once
home,‖ she realizes, ―the new world had to be made of exile and home,
both accepted‖ (186). This view agrees with Bhabha‘s rejection of
52
rigidly-defined identities built upon a national form. He does not
entirely reject the idea of a national identity, but he suggests that this
identity should be open to change, to embrace ―rags‖ and ―scraps‖
from other cultures. ―The strategy of self-authorization,‖ according to
Bhabha, ―coalesces, not around the antagonism between self and other
(home vs abroad, us vs them), but through the constitution of an
ideological subject whose withinness is itself divided‖ (Hale, 667).In
this situation, Sally and Mpho act as colonial subjects who glorify the
colonizer‘s traditions against their own.
Gordimer presents situations where ―self and other are locked
together‖ (Huddart, 30), i.e., where the colonized forcefully looks back
at the colonizer threatening his sense of self. She emphasizes the
colonized‘s agency through mimicry (30).Colonial subjects adopted
the colonizer‘s tastes and lifestyle which they were taught to find
superior to their indigenous culture. From Bhabha‘s view,
[C]olonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed,
recognizable
other, as a subject of difference that is almost the
same, but
not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of
mimicry is
constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be
effective,
mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its
excess, its
difference. (1994, 86)

Colonial ideologies stand on the assumption that ―there is structural

non-equivalence, a split between superior and inferior which explains
why any one group of people can dominate another at all‖ (Huddart,
53
40). Colonial discourse, therefore, desires the colonized to be
―extremely like the colonizer, but by no means identical‖ (40). A shade
of difference should always be there as a reminder of the colonial
mission. Bhabha maintains that mimicry ―is not slavish imitation, and
the colonized is not being assimilated into the supposedly dominant or
even superior culture‖ (39). He believes that the agency of colonized
peoples ―has often been underplayed when it does not fit our usual
expectations of violent anti-colonial opposition‖ (2). If the colonizer
depends on this shade of difference to prove his superiority, then the
strife to prove their sameness, on the part of the colonized, is a form of
resistance, neither disavowal of the self nor slavish imitation. On the
other hand, this desperate attempt to highlight and prove a distinction
between himself and the colonized renders the former significantly
anxious about his identity. This anxiety reveals a gap in colonial
discourse- ―a gap that can be exploited by the colonized, the
oppressed‖ (4).

Gordimer forwards situations where the colonized defies the

colonizer and mocks the imperial institution. The position of Vera, the
white activist, as a house owner and a generous hostess to blacks
irritates Sibongile. Sibongile exhibits symbols of a double
consciousness obviously as a direct result of her twenty years of exile.
Back home, she prefers to spend the transitional period before she gets
a house of her own as a guest in the house of her white friend rather
than that of her mother-in-law. Again, she is infuriated at being given a
room in a hotel that had previously been used by poor whites. It
54
evoked uncanny memories of past humiliations. Double consciousness
causes an unstable sense of self which is markedly heightened in exile.
Sally is furious at the idea of being treated as a guest in her own
country, yet, ―she and Didy have moved away from that cheek-by-jowl
existence they were at home in, the old days, Chiawelo‖ (Gordimer,
1994, 48). She has obviously been familiarized to the European
standards of everyday life which happen to be different from the past
Chiawelo standards ―when there was no choice‖ (48). Vera‘s place
with two bathrooms, ensuring a degree of privacy even for guests, is
chosen over the Alexandra house where gogo still has to ―go out of the
house across a yard to a toilet used by everyone round about‖ (51).The
Starks‘ house represents many compromises that Sally reaches in her
way to reestablish herself as a citizen of a South Africa that has to be
equally the nation of both excolonizer and excolonized. She acts as a
mirror that faces Vera with her reflection that is extremely, but not
exactly like her. Gordimer here agrees with Bhabha‘s view that the
―key to the subversion of colonial discourse… can be found in the
subversive mimesis of the colonialist by the colonized native‖ (King,
203). This view explains how Bhabha‘s notion of hybridity serves to
offer examples of ―an anti-colonial subversion‖ from within (203).
Gordimer emphasizes the colonized‘s agency through mimicry which
she introduces as a strategy of ―subversion that turn[s] the gaze of the
discriminated back upon the eye of power‖ (Bhabha, 1985, 35). This
poses the question of whether the colonizer deliberately uses mimicry
as a means of resistance. Sally and Vera meet twice for lunch, once
while Sally had not yet established herself in her country and another
55
after she had. In their first meeting she shows up ―elegant in black
suede boots draped to the knees‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 46) and instead of
talking about the real issue, that of being treated as a guest in her own
country, she shoots her indignation at the restaurant menu. Vera,
feeling perfectly at home, asks for ―whatever was the special for the
day‖ (46). Sally, pining for the at-home feeling and pining for choice,
scrutinizes the menu with the premeditated purpose of finding it short
of what she craves-fish. The menu helps her open up and move on to
the point: ―Lousy; everything is lousy, not even possible to get what
you wanted to eat‖ (47). But after Sibongile is established in a new
house and also in the Executive Committee of the new government,
she attempts to stand her grounds as the hostess in her country. She
invites Vera to a restaurant of her choice where she feels at home and
is perfectly known to the waiters. She wallows in exact, meticulous
food selections and specifications and her orders convey confidence
and power. Asserting her position as a hostess, when coffee arrives,
Sally ―arrange[s] the cups and pour[s] it measuring her words with the
flow‖ (131). Sally and Vera have similar, though not identical
purposes and missions. She is a female political activist who relegates
her personal life, not her femininity, to the background. In this respect
she is nothing like Vera who is so neutral to her femininity that she
looks almost like a man. Advancing to the position she has longed for
in the political life, Sibongile usurps the seat and the attention she is
entitled to by advertising her ―undocile femininity‖ (78). Her rejection
of the male appropriation of power is evident ―in the way she used her
body: coming into conference… on high heels that clipped across the
56
floor, no attempt to move discreetly‖ (78) in a conference room or a
political discussion. Sibongil causes a stir in the political life similar to
the ―stir of legs and seats as perfume marked the progress of her
breasts and hips to her place‖ (78).

Sibongile and her husband adopt and present two different

attitudes towards mimicry and also various degrees of adapting to the
new circumstances. Separation from the homeland causes the
colonized to feel caught between two cultures while belonging to
neither. The colonized finds himself ―arrested in a psychological limbo
that results not merely from some individual psychological disorder
but from the trauma of the cultural displacement within which one
lives‖ (Tyson, 421). Didymus is the embodiment of the phenomenon
which postcolonial critics refer to as ―unhomeliness‖ (421). To be
―unhomed‖ is different from being ―homeless‖ (421). To be unhomed
―is to feel not at home even in your own home because you are not at
home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis had made you a
psychological refugee, so to speak‖ (Tyson, 421). In exile, Didy
spends twenty years struggling for the rights of his people risking his
life and liberty. However, he comes back home to a country that
adopted a way of life very similar to that of the ex-colonizer. In a
drastic opposition to his expectations, he is relegated to the sidelines
while his wife, also unexpectedly, soars to the heights of black political
life. This variance in political status and switch of roles between Sally
and Didymus is also reflected in the details of their everyday life. In
the mornings, Sally ―would be snatching up files, briefcase,
57
keys…while [Didy] was dipping bread in coffee‖ (75). When she
comes back, the ―thick atmosphere of the world of discussion and
negotiation came from her hair and skin‖ (75) and Didymus ―scented it
as a dog sniffs the shoes of its master to trace where he‘s been‖ (75). In
bed, Sally‘s ―body beside him invaded the whole bed‖ (125).
Didymus is ―a time warp‖ (39). He cannot break the bond with
his old self as a fighter and cannot transcend the past. Sally is
disgusted at his reluctance to insert himself in the new life which has to
embrace the past and the present, black and white. Accordingly, his
―whitening curls sat like the peruke of a seventeenth- century courtier
worn stately on his black head‖ (39). What actually infuriates Sally is
her husband‘s ―slavish imitation‖ of the colonizers‘ ways in order to
gain their regard. In spite of his long history as a fighter, Didy fails to
stand his grounds when colonization comes to an end. Starting her
political career, Sibongile is totally against compromise. The reasons
Didymus gives for imitating whites prove that for him mimicry does
not transcend ―slavish imitation.‖
Why do you think we turn up in suits and ties instead of
the Mao
shirts and dashikis the leaders in countries up North
wear? So that
the Boers on the other side of the table will think there is
a code
between us and them, We‘ve discarded our Africanness,
our
blackness is hidden under the suit-and-tie outfit, it‘s not
going to
jump out at them and demand. (77)

58
Sally‘s response reflects that she adopts mimicry as a means of
resistance and that the change of her appearance or ways of life is
inevitable since all cultures are apt to change, even without
colonization, as a result of cultural contact. According to Lois Tyson,
many postcolonial critics argue that ―postcolonial identity is
necessarily a dynamic, constantly evolving hybrid of native and
colonial cultures (422).‖ They even assert that ―hybridity… does not
consist of a stalemate between two warring cultures but is rather a
productive, exciting, positive force in a shrinking world that is itself
becoming more and more culturally hybrid‖ (422). Sally vehemently
contradicts Didymus‘ opinion on the ground that these items of
etiquette should be neglected on purpose to convey a bold, clear
message informing ex-colonizers that ―there is no respect due to them‖
(Gordimer, 1994, 76). Sally, however, appreciates the value and
convenience of a message conveyed by clothes and never fails to dress
herself appropriately for a formal occasion or ―public exposure‖ (182).
Invited to a reception party by a new embassy in Pretoria, she appears
―confident and attractively…in African robes and turban‖ which she
wears, not out of personal nationalistic motives, but ―for such
occasions.‖ (238). Sally still finds time and energy to dress herself
properly for an important appointment even while terribly worried
about her only daughter. She consents to the idea that there should be
―nothing showy‖ (183) about her, but finds it part of her duty as a
politician to be ―a walking billboard for home products‖ by wearing
garments and jewellery designed and made in their own country‖
(238). Still, Sally has to reach a compromise by meeting the
59
expectations of all the parts concerned. Her appearance reflects her
successful hybrid identity when she matches ―carved wooden
bracelets‖, African style, to ―tailored skirt and jacket‖ (238). She
considers it necessary to neglect her personal taste that ―must be
subordinate to the cause‖ (183).
Sally is not as tough as she usually shows herself. Like her
husband, she is haunted by insecurities that are related to the past of
colonialism. She is contradicted on her way home by black female
street sweeper who works as an alter ego facing her with ―the
probability that gave her an internal cringe‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 52). As
Freud confirms, ―as soon as something happens in our lives that seems
to confirm … old discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the
uncanny‖ (2003, 154). Sally knows very well she could have been that
woman. There is a definite sense of ―the return of the dead‖ (154).
Adults certainly arrive at ―a proper sense of self‖, but for Freud, ―this
self never gets rid of…inappropriate…beliefs or attachments…the
uncanny… remains a partial presence in what is appropriate‖ (2003,
154). ―Waken suddenly, shaken alive into another light, another
existence. Sally is drawn over to her other self, standing there, the one
she started out with, this apparition‖ (Gordimer, 52).
Oupa is another example of a colonial subject whose
double consciousness is heightened by the forced double separation
from his homeland, once to the Robin Island and another from his
village to the city in search of a job. Back home, Oupa migrates so
swiftly between identities. In the city, he is a free, young man who
befriends his white boss and political activist, Vera, and falls for
61
Mpho, the London girl. Vera blames herself for not connecting his
westernized appearance to an affair with Mpho. ―When the young man
came to her office wearing a new lumbar jacket, brown suede…and
asked …whether a current play was to be recommended‖, she should
have guessed for herself that that London taste was a sign of a
relationship with the westernized girl (Gordimer, 1994, 103).
Surprisingly Vera discovers the other face of Oupa when she meets his
village wife and kids who are still heart and soul immersed in the
indigenous culture. Oupa does not seem to strike a balance between the
present and the past and it is not a coincidence that the flat he takes in
the city had been occupied twenty years before by a victim of racism.
He himself ends a victim of colonialism and the lack of ability to form
a new self based on a hybrid culture. So, hybridity could face
challenges within the construction of the same person ―whose
withinness is itself divided‖ between two cultures, choices or self and
other (Hale, 667).
Oupa‘s wife represents the colonized‘s struggle to negate the
colonizer‘s stereotypical opinion of the indigenous culture.
Fastidiously cleaning their houses and kitchen utensils, black women
are actually striving to negate the idea that poverty and dirtiness are
equivalent to blackness. Consequently, a black woman removes the
blood and the remains of a human brain from her doorstep with the
same logic she scrubs away the remains of a cooked cattle brain from
her pan, thus erasing the material evidence of a devastating attack of
which she herself is a victim.

61
 On the other side stands the colonizer whose response
reflects the hesitation he experiences in reaction to the colonized‘s
solid returning of the gaze. Bhabha always raises the issue of the
colonized‘s agency. He maintains that ―objectified figures of the
colonized are more than just objects‖ (Huddart, 45) and returning ―the
gaze‖ shakes the colonizer‘s sense of self by reminding him of that
fact. Bhabha argues that neither the black person nor the white are
complete in terms of their sense of self when it is considered within the
context of the colonial discourse. In one of Vera‘s parties an English
man shows up ―in a catfish-patterned dashiki‖ while a ―small black
woman wearing the western antithesis of her white husband‘s outfit
satin trousers and a string of pearls in the neck of her tailored shirt,
stood by looking up now and then to others in the manner of one
watching the impression he was making‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 145). The
woman explains that his ―clothes does not make him a black man‖ and
that she

is his party piece…so they can be impressed he‘s married

a black.
Don‘t you know I‘m his passport? I‘m his credentials as a
white
foreigner. Because he can produce me, it means he‘s on
the right side
That gets him in everywhere. (Gordimer, 1994, 145)

The behavior of that white young man shows that he is experiencing

difficulties regarding his sense of self. He needs the support of the
colonized to appear whole in front of a post apartheid South Africa and
ironically it is he who mimics the colonized, not only in appearance,
62
but also is his political tendencies. In his ―Of Mimicry and Man‖,
Bhabha uses a psychoanalytic concept ―the scopic drive‖, to explain
mimicry as ―a visual strategy‖, thus connecting it with the stereotype.
The scopic drive highlights one of Lacan‘s concepts, ―camouflage‖,
―which refers to blending in with something in the background that
none the less is not entirely there itself‖ (Huddart, 46). Bhabha
declares that he uses these psychoanalytic concepts to clarify how
mimicry exceeds the colonial authority. The visual aspect of mimicry
proves that colonial and racist discourses cannot be separated,
something which he reiterates by the rewriting of his famous
formulation: ―almost the same but not quite‖ which became ―almost
the same but not white‖ (Bhabha, 1994, 89).
Mimicry, as Bhabha explains it, is ―an exaggerated
copying of language, culture, manners and ideas‖ (39). In this way
mimicry is also ―a form of mockery‖ (29), not servitude since
exaggeration is also a sort of difference. Bhabha‘s postcolonial theory
is therefore ―a comic approach to colonial discourse‖ (Huddart, 39). In
his theory he undermines and even mocks the pretensions and
allegations of colonialism. Zeph Rapulana is an example of mimicking
the colonizer aware of his insecurities. He always appears neatly
handsome in elegant European clothes. His status in his rural
community is secured by ―neat clothes‖ (Gordimer, 122). This
appearance, however, infuriates Odendaal, the white farmer, who
considers it boldness and an attempt on the part of a black to be his
equal. Odendaal actually feels insecure at seeing a black, so similar to
him, shaking awry the beliefs that justify his position as a colonizer
63
and with them his sense of self. Rapulana shakes Odendaal‘s selfhood
by not conforming to the stereotypical picture he cherishes for a black,
his preconceived picture of the colonized. As a colonizer, Odendaal
wants his stereotypes to be fixed.
Vera, the white activist embodies Gordimer‘s undergoing a
―phase of increasing literary self- consciousness‖ (Head, 46). In other
words, Vera is striving to answer Gordimer‘s ―perennial question:
where do whites fit in?‖ (46). In this novel the question is posed in two
parts, ―where do whites fit in? and where blacks?‖ (46).The division of
the question is itself a comment on a hitherto straggling hybridity.
Hybridity should not indicate an exchange of positions or a
replacement of the colonizer by the colonized. Thus Gordimer employs
―technical adaptations that…run in tandem with her investigations of
the adjustments required of all groups in the new power-sharing, with
its attendant political complexities, compromises, and ambiguities‖
(46).This feature of hybridity is explored through the themes of
―space‖ and ―sexuality.‖ The theme of space is ―a major preoccupation
of Gordimer‘s‖ (47). In previous novels her presentation of
―geopolitics‖ has been wrapped in symbolic or mythological hints, but
in None to Accompany Me, issues are presented more literally by the
outspoken Vera who, nonetheless, is equally capable of denouncing the
white extremists‘ idea of ―ultimate laager‖ (47). She explores ―the
theme of rural and urban‖ control as ―an index of repression‖ and as ―a
focus of political resistance‖ since apartheid was based on ―zoning‖
(47). Gordimer‘s stance is that finding a utopian impulse in the values
of indigenous black community, should not ―eschew the actualities of
64
deprivation in the peripheries of South African urbanization‖ (47). The
idea that a hybrid culture is still out of reach is emphasized by
Gordimer‘s ample reference to who should control a certain space and
whether this is done in harmony with other bits and rags of everyday
life. Space and architecture is one domain where blacks fail to achieve
mimicry to the extent of ―almost the same, but not quite.‖ Practical
politics and how it is translated into tangible change in the life of
blacks can be reflected in the treatment of urbanization.
Huddart maintains that psychoanalysis is so vital to
Bhabha‘s work because ―postcolonial criticism is itself a project
aiming to analyze the repressed ideas and histories that allowed the
West to dominate so much of the world‖ (52). He explains saying that
―the colonized nations offer striking resources that transform our rigid
sense of the grand narratives of modernity and… an uncanny echo of
histories that modernity might prefer had remained hidden‖ (52). The
―uncanny,‖ in the case of Gordimer‘s female characters, seems to act
as a positive element endowing them with the power to move forward,
in the case of Sally, or confront and reform the past, in the case of
Vera. The uncanny is connected to what Freud calls ―repetitious
compulsion,‖ which refers to ―the way the mind repeats traumatic
experiences in order to deal with them‖ (55). In this sense, the feeling
of ―uncanniness is… the feeling you get when you have a guilt-laden
past which you should really confront, even though you would prefer
to avoid it‖ (55). When whites seek to absolve themselves of past
injustices by offering blacks flats in classy suburbs evidence of these
injustices prove indelible. The confrontation between Sibongil and her
65
mother-in-law, when the latter denounces black traditions thereby
announcing an affinity with western ways of life is highly diminished
in value when examined in context. The encounter takes place in a
house with its broken-pillard stoeps and dust- dried pot-
plants,
battered relic of real brick and mortar with two
diamond-paned
rotting windows from the time when Alex was the
reflection of
out-of-bounds white respectability, yearned for,
imitated, now
standing alone on ash-coloured earth surrounded by
shacks, and
what had once been an aspiration to a patch of fenced
suburban
garden now a pile of rubbish where the street dumped
its beer
cans and pissed, and the ribcages of scavenging dogs
moved like
bellows. (Gordimer, 1994, 50)

The past keeps coming back haunting the present and moulding it in
the very shapes that the guilt- ridden person is striving to forget or at
least avoid. The reason that Bhabha uses the uncanny is that ―it is
possible to compare the childhood of an individual with the beginnings
of a modern western history: in both cases, something is repressed but
inevitably breaks through the veneer of civilization‖ (Huddart, 52).
The neighborhoods where Gogo and Oupa live is also an example of
the failure to create a hybridity between the European modes of
structure and the African ways of life. The ample description of
squatter camps and the neighbourhoods where black people live is a
proof of this failure. Mimicry fails in the field of architecture when it
66
depends on ―the adoption of trappings without attention to the material
underpinnings‖ (Head, 48).The projects of housing blacks in suitable
apartments built after European styles collapse proving Gordimer‘s
rejection of the imposition of Eurocentric modes of art and architecture
on the realities of African life. Gordimer‘s definite rejection of
Eurocentrism is also reflected in Vera‘s anxiety at the end of the novel
at a possible romance between her grandson and Mpho although she
assures him that her fears are not related to their difference in colour.
The writer is obviously concerned lest certain European cultural modes
should be ―potential limitations on black African experience if not put
to some new hybridized purpose‖ (52).
The way Vera reacts to the gradual replacement of whites by
blacks is quite consistent with her attitude towards apartheid. Apart of
Vera feels that that house of hers was ―acquired dishonestly.‖ It was
her ―loot by divorce‖ (Gordimer, 1994, 304). She got the house
through her first in-laws who did not know whether ―they…were part
of Europe or part of Africa.‖ (304)
Vera‘s shaken sense of self makes her convert the patio
―meant for white tea parties… to a study where strategies for restoring
blacks to their land were worked out.‖ (293). She allowed the
Maqomas to ―pragmatically [make] use, as of right-and this was
recognized unembarrassedly by the Starks- of the advantages [the
house of] the white couples had‖ (39). Alone in the house, Vera has a
feeling that they (herself and the house) are like ―old partners in a
crime‖ (304). To get rid of this feeling and redeem her sense of self,
Vera gives up her position as a hostess to become the tenant of a small
67
annex to the house of a black activist and capitalist- Zeph Rapulana.
On Sundays, she serves him, an act rich in symbolic value,
for it rebalances the century-old injustice the blacks
have
suffered, and puts everybody in his or her right place-
the
black, who is the original owner of the land, as the
landlord;
the white, who is a guest and passerby in Africa, as his
tenant.(Vivan)

According to Dominic Head, Gordimer‘s heroines prove

that ―a public role can be allied to personal need and expression‖ (49).
The expression of Vera‘s sexuality ―fits her political commitment. This
kind of politics of the body has always been important for Gordimer,
and it has, of course, a special relevance in South African fiction‖ (50).
In the 1950s, trans-racial relationships were banned, so exploring these
relations sheds light on the issues of resistance and hybridity. Free,
especially adulterous, sexual relationships in Gordimer have a
liberating influence on the involved parties. The utter failure of the
Oupa/Mpho episode proves that hybridity could also be a black- black
issue especially for blacks who spent considerable time away from
their native community exiled in different places. Head maintains that
throughout her career, ―Gordimer has been preoccupied with how such
cultural hybridity can be achieved for postcolonial Africa in general
and South Africa in particular‖ (50). On the other hand Vera‘s affair
with Otto Abarbanal inspired feelings of pride and freedom, but never
betrayal while it lasted. This intimacy helps her overcome her

68
revulsion at the knowledge that he is a ―Hitler baby‖ and helps him
exorcise the Nazi experience. For Gordimer, ―sexual expression and
transgression flout the biological policies intended in the racist social
structure of South Africa; and the biological hybridity implied in free
sexuality indicates, by extension, a cultural hybridity‖ (50), in
agreement with Bhabha‘s view about the hybridity of cultures as a
―mixedness‖ or even ―impurity of cultures‖ (Huddart, 4). He applies
this ―mixedness or ―impurity‖ to the sense of identity for colonized and
colonizer. He explains that as subjects ―we both create and are created‖
because our identities are constructed partially by the choices made by
other people whose identities are also constructed by the choices we
make (14).
Often in Gordimer‘s novels ―political commitment goes
hand-in-hand with free (especially adulterous) sexual expression‖
(Head, 50). Considering the fiasco of the Mpho-Oupa episode, which,
certainly not haphazardly, is also situated in One-Twenty-One, this
free expression could be seen to denote a failing rather than a
successful hybridity. This is another case where the ―the domestic and
historical spheres invade each other‖ and ―uncannily, the private and
public become part of each other‖ (Bhabha, 1994, 9). Having an illicit
affair while unaware of the hardships of black neighbours indicates a
separation rather than a merging of cultures. It almost empties the
episode of positive significance and again raises the issue of ―almost
the same but not white,‖ as Bhabha rewrites his statement (89). Vera
receives uncanny signals from One-Twenty-One that remind her of
past injustices on the domestic and historical levels. That flat is where
69
she betrayed her husband and spent her time neglecting her daughter
who grows up into a man-hating lesbian. Unaware of ―the squalor of
the subletting above Otto‘s bed,‖ Vera almost echoes Mehring of The
Conservationist who embodies a ―parallel between geographical and
sexual acquisition‖ (Head, 51). This idea is further strengthened when
a parallel is also made between Oupa‘s failure to keep One-Twenry-
One and the fiasco of his extramarital affair with the westernized girl.
Freud is specific when he explains how the uncanny works in such
cases when a guilt-ridden person is forced to confront a reminder of
the past. For him, ―any repression is necessarily incomplete, and so
any past is just about to break through into the present. For
psychoanalysis, the traces of past beliefs and experiences remain
present in the mind‖ (Huddart, 55). Before she has to confront all this
Vera perhaps believes that she is a self-sufficient person, but she
cannot be unless she confronts the past and builds her hybrid identity
not excluding the colonial experience. In this sense the uncanny is
―something that might inspire us to reevaluate our identities [it] opens
a space for us to reconsider how we have come to be who we are‖ (65).
Concluding her novel, Gordimer, gives her statement about
the wished for hybridity indicating that man has been striving to
achieve it for much longer than he thinks. She hopes ―the violent
brotherhood of Cain and Abel can be transformed into the other
proclaimed brotherhood only if it is possible to devise laws to bring
this about‖ (1994, 316). White and black, East and West should find
new ways to deal with each other on equal bases putting in mind that
they do not have to be the same or almost the same. Barbara Temple-
71
Thurston indicates that according to the novel, ―cultural as well as
social harmony is [still] extremely difficult to achieve‖ (Sakamoto, 3).
Itala Vivan, however, believes that the situation that Gordimer creates
at the end with her white heroine keeping her limits as a tenant of the
annex to a black man‘s house is a good start. This situation ―allows her
to build a new and original position in the South Africa world by
putting the white writer (and her heroine) at its margin. It is as if the
white intellectual had understood that that it is now time for her to
listen to blacks and be at their service‖ (Vivan). The important thing at
the end is that Gordimer finds it possible to move beyond the
restrictions of race and colour in discussing her characters especially
the young. The classifications of black and white, oppressed and
oppressor have no future in South Africa. Everyone is everywhere
doing everything. Ivan and Ben (white characters) move to London
where they fit better, but so does Mpho. Adam, son and grandson of
white people, leaves London to Africa where he seems to blossom. The
boy lives his life beautifully dating girls regardless of race and almost
innocent to the knowledge of black and white. The writer and her
characters seem to have developed the ability to move beyond the past.

71
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Rice, Philip and Patricia Waugh. (2001). Modern Literary Theory. 4th
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Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. (2004). Literary Theory: An
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76
Hailing the Wild Being of the World: Indra Sinha's Animal's
People, an Ecocritical Reading
Nabila Ali Marzouk Ahmed
Professor of English Literature
Head of the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty
of Arts, Fayoum University

"Educated people should make nature their friend" (Commoner

3).

Bringing ecology and literature together is a new, old tradition

that registers an interest in depicting and analyzing the diverse
stances and attitudes that people have adopted towards nature
throughout different phases of history. The relationship between
the world of the human and that of the nonhuman has been in and
out of focus by various degrees throughout the history of critical
theorization. In his Beginning Theory (2002), Peter Barry traces
this interest back to the 1790s British Romanticism and the 19th
century American Transcendentalism, movements that sing the
praises of nature and the wilderness. These trends paved the road
to the "green studies," or "ecocriticism" which addresses global
issues that pose serious threats to the entire world. As most
ecologists now agree, it has become crucial "to find ways of
keeping the human community from destroying the natural

77
community and with it the human community" (Glotfelty 72). Air
pollution, global warming and the pictures of sea animals and
birds showing up in sad oil coats in place of lovely, bright scales
or feathers, is a condemnation of none other than man, Mother
Earth's most controversial guest. The aim of this paper is to
address the issue of man's destructive behavior towards the
environment by conducting an ecological study of Indra Sinha's
nature-oriented text, Animal's people (2007). Selected concepts
of ecocriticism are discussed to reveal how Sinha's novel grounds
the reader in ethically, politically and philosophically referential
situations by the fictionalizing of a real life environmental
disaster, namely, the Bhopal accident, one of the worst industrial
disasters in history. In 1984 Bhopal was hit by a fatal gas leak
that killed, sickened and mutilated thousands of civilians and
threatened to plight various future generations. That
environmental disaster was caused by a huge Union Carbide
chemical factory. Events, characters, and elements of the
landscape are employed to explore the effect of culture on nature
in relation to the views of critics and modern philosophers whose
contributions highly enriched and enlightened the field, and
paved the way for critical theorists like Francois Leyotard and
Jacques Derrida. Derrida‘s occupation with the posthuman rather
than the human is a cornerstone pillar of ecological studies. The
present debate cannot be separated from "nation state," the most
78
fundamental concept of realism, especially that recent thinkers
and philosophers emphasize the urgent need for modern citizens
to widen the scope of the self and political identity to surpass the
tight principles of the territorial as a foundation for national
solidarity. These efforts are expected to "generate a stateless or
multi-state nationalism" (Gersdorf 420). The new world
economy, especially with the emergence of the World Trade
Organization [WTO], has established an economic system that
boldly penetrates borders, especially those of the third world
countries through Transnational Corporations [TNCs]. Masao
Miyoshi describes these TNCs as extremely troubling since their
lack of national allegiances results in a deficient sense of moral
or ecological responsibility. Finally, this paper highlights a
subject that, according to Axel Goodbody, has not been
sufficiently tackled in Anglo-American debate, namely, the
ecological role of literary texts in enhancing and illuminating
environmental discourse.
Upon its publication, Animal's People was acclaimed as a
remarkably humane book that tells a significant chapter in the life
of contemporary India. The novel's value as a seminal work that
takes the reader to the heart of the global environmental crisis,
however, has not hitherto been given due attention. In agreement
with the principles of racial ecocriticism, the novel exposes the
injustice of the super powers that choose to exhale the poisonous
79
gases of their industries in the air of third world anonymous cities
through TNCs. So, this novel adopts a new approach in depicting
environmental crises unlike most nature-oriented texts that tackle
the issues of indigenous cultures suffering at the hands of the
newcomers.
Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as "the study of
the relationship between literature and the physical environment"
(xx). Richard Kerridge agrees and explains that it is a project
which main purpose is to study how the values and ideas
embedded in literary texts contribute to environmental issues.
Lawrence Coupe enhances the definition adding that ecocriticism
is definitely a novel type of pragmatics, while Catrin Gersdorf
and Sylvia Mayer view it as a concept that basically disagrees
with, challenges and even overturns long standing political,
ethical and cultural norms. Donelle N. Dreese states that
ecocriticism comprises several disciplines that are connected by
an intrinsic interest in the environment, e.g. ecofeminism,
environmental justice, deep ecology, social ecology, etc. as well
as disciplines that do not show direct connection with scientific
ecology such as neurophysiology. These definitions emphasize
the nature of ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary project that
combines the specialized knowledge of various academics
particularly environmental philosophers and literary critics with

81
the ultimate aim of reaching an ideological analysis of literary
works.
One of the major concerns of ecocriticism is to emphasize
the posthuman against the humanist allegations of man's
superiority over other forms of life. Louise Westling sees that this
approach to the posthuman redefines the role and place of the
human being within the ecosystem since it questions and erases
the illusionary boundaries that set apart the human species from
their fellow creatures. John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
are two modern philosophers whose views are of particular
importance for ecocritics, since they employ the principles of
quantum physics and evolutionary biology to define the place of
man in the world from an ecological perspective. Their work
helps posthumanist theorists deflect people from the idea of
"anthropocentrism", a biased concept which regards the human
species as the elite corps of the universe. The humanist approach
views people as superior creatures whose language and ―self-
reflective consciousness‖ set them apart from the other
inhabitants of the natural world. The ideas of Darwin and
Einstein instigated critics and philosophers to disprove the
Renaissance and Enlightenment allegations that eventually
estranged the humankind from fellow creatures who also have to
contend with the tangled matrix of life upon earth.

81
 Most posthumanists regard evolution as a registration of
the journey that supposedly transformed the human species from
animal to human. In his "The Animal that therefore I Am"
(2002), Derrida insists that it is unacceptable, even ridiculous to
view ―the animal‖ as such an unsophisticated being yet give that
being precedence over other numerous presences that deserve our
high esteem. Merleau-Ponty calls for the registration of an
―organic history‖ that should seek to prove the sentience of the
nonhuman world by investigating the tightly braided dynamism
of the entire living community. He claims that the various
analyses that investigate the human body, nature, life and
language in their richness guide scientists and philosophers into
exploring what he calls the Lebenswelt, i.e. the ―wild Being‖ of
the natural world.
In Animal's People, there is an obvious glorification of
nature, not as a romantic presence or a backlash against the
human drama, but as an equally living entity that shares life in all
its complexity and fullness. Elements of the landscape are
presented as main actors in the drama of life. Sinha chooses to
tell his story from the perspective of a four-footed boy called
Animal who proudly cherishes his position as a member of the
animal kingdom. When his body posture earns him that name,
Animal instantly sees the logic and rejects the attempts to push
him higher in the chain of evolution by fixing his form or
82
manners. The boy himself represents a missing ring in the
Darwinian chain of evolution, being a four-footed human being.
Goodbody describes the boy as free of guilt as well as the
standard human ties and ambitions. He prides himself on being
an animal, therefore, free of the routine human prejudices related
to politics and religion. Sinha seems intent on confirming the
agency of different members of the nonhuman world in forming
opinions, expressing attitudes and taking action to act on what
they believe. They issue their verdict on events that affect their
wellbeing as much as that of the humans and proceed into action
to execute their will. Scorpions share Animal's initial attitude
against a European journalist who wants to turn the disaster into a
business deal by recording the victims‘ stories. Later, Animal
changes his attitude, but scorpions do not. When he fetches the
tapes, he discovers that they were destroyed by nonhuman, albeit
sentient agents of the wild being; rain and scorpions combine
forces to render the tapes unusable. Ma Franci, a French nun,
believes that, eventually, nonhumans will become the hand of
justice and even the balance against those who humiliated the
earth. She tells Animal that the time will come when little beasts
will grow huge, acquire human faces and be the sovereigns of the
universe, whereupon they will sentence to death whoever abused
the environment. Ma Franci's prediction is an embodiment of
Stephen Rose's insistence that "it is in the nature of living
83
systems to be radically indeterminate to continually construct
their-our- own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our
choosing" (Rose 7).
Sinha's respect of the wild Being shows in Animal's
reverence of the nonhuman. He lives as part of Merleau-Ponty's
“Lebenswelt" sleeping in trees, befriending animals and
accepting the evil side embedded in their nature. He taps the
ground several times to warn snakes lest he should tread on them
and lives in peace with scorpions inhabiting the wall of his abode.
Never does Animal consider killing any of these dangerous
beings. On the contrary, he endows them with feelings and
understanding. Discussing the scorpions with Ma Franci, they
refer to them as friends and neighbors. One day Animal enters his
abode to find Ma Farnci patiently giving instructions to an
impatient scorpion squatting in the palm of her hand. He then
steps aside so as not to interfere upon the scorpion‘s privacy.
Jara, a dog, is Animal's companion and girlfriend. When
he enumerates his loved ones he mentions Jara along with Ma
Franci and Nisha, his human friends. Jara is included as a
prominent member of a Khaufpuri team of environmental
activists. She is also his accomplice in tricking people off their
money. Animal treats Jara as his equal, neither condescendingly
nor humbly.

84
 On several occasions Sinha presents man's encounter
with the wild which is manifest in situations where humans are
fixed in the gaze of animals. Returning the human gaze, animals
alert humans to their active agency as emphasized by the equal
relationship between Animal and his animal and insect friends.
This assertion of autonomy on the part of animals, momentarily
"decenters our anthropocentric world view" (Goodbody 187). On
various occasions Jara expresses consent, rejection, amazement,
etc. She is always articulate enough to voice out her stance giving
credit to Wetling's claim that nonhumans have languages that
might be different from the humans‘ albeit equally capable of
enabling them to communicate via gesture and sounds.
Depicting Animal‘s uninhibited lifestyle, Sinha is
indeed reminiscing about Nietzsche‘s call upon the human
species to retrieve their lost animality by removing the
accumulative layers of the decadent civilization of self-
indulgence. In order for the human species to survive, they have
to dispel misconceptions about their position at the top of the
biological chain and consider a way of life similar to that of
animals. Animal's People adopts the principles of deep ecology
by rejecting the humanistic views that objectify the natural
environment, thereby establishing barriers between man and the
surroundings and dethroning him from his hypothetical position
as protector of the planet. Barriers encourage man to pursue the
85
ominous behavior of abusing nature and finally end up facing the
present environmental disasters.
The idea of a sentient, indeterminate nonhuman world
extends far beyond animals. According to the principles of deep
ecology "all life on Earth from humans to ecosystems to soil
microbes possess equal intrinsic values, values which exist
independent of human needs and desires" (Dreese 5- 6). In his
world of sentient beings, Sinha includes things and objects as
well as animals and plants and emphasizes the overwhelming
agency of Mother Earth. He explains that ―the wild‖ requires an
establishment of communication and intelligent relationships
between the human and nonhuman not excluding a single
element. Elli, one of the novel‘s environmental activists, declares
that when she speaks of her community, she essentially includes
water, trees and every single rock not just friends and neighbors.
Her views agree with Dewey's claim that nature, not only shares
man's indeterminacy and agency, but also adheres to moral and
aesthetic values, which testifies to "something that belongs to
nature as truly as does the mechanical structure attributed to it in
physical science" (2). Elli explains that, like people, elements of
the physical environment keep their promises by pursuing their
typical behavior. Moon, sun, rocks and trees behave as they
should by shining, providing protection or food and, to keep their
promises right back, human beings should respect and protect the
86
environment holding it as a friend and an equal. This view agrees
with Glotfelty's assurance that every single part of nature has
being or spirit. They share the human fate of emerging in
different shapes and undergoing inevitable transformations that
constitute what is known as the life cycle.
In the 1970s, James Lovelock introduced the Gaia theory
which perceives earth a living organism, a conscious entity with a
will of its own. The Gaia theory can be traced back to the
indigenous convictions of American Indians, and has an immense
impact on ecocriticism. According to that theory earth is
intelligent and alive in the same exact sense that human beings
are. In Animal’s People, Earth takes an active part in the protests
that demand severe punishment of the trespassers. In the
morning of the mock trial, Earth is heard growling out her
pronounced protest. She was shivering and vibrating not out of
fear but fury.
Parallel to the human team wedging a law war against the
abusive company, is the team led by Mother Earth to reverse the
destructive effects of modern civilization. Inside the death
factory, now deserted because extremely poisonous, Animal
detects another form of resistance. A war of justice was being
wedged to avenge Mother Nature. A coalition between seeds and
birds that drop them in the right places help brave troops of wild
sandalwood trees advance to retrieve the land that was usurped
87
by the poisonous factory. Wind and creepers form the right and
left wings, the one puffing its gusts in the right direction to push
away polluted gases, while the others, appropriately thick and
powerful, were climbing to the top, tightly wrapping their
persistent wooden fingers round the pillars and the pipes of the
factory absolutely determined to bring everything down.
Presenting plants as capable beings with hands [wrest
and knuckles] is a proof of Sinha's departure from the Humanist
dualisms of human/nature and mind/body. Heidegger insists that
human beings are absolutely set apart from the world of the
nonhuman being the only species with language and a
particularly advanced body shape and system. He finds it
appalling to think of humans sharing bodily kinship with animals,
let alone plants that come even lower in Darwin's chain.
Heidegger lays particular emphasis upon the "hand" which he
cites as the epitome of difference between humans and other
creatures with paws or claws. He goes even further in his What Is
Called Thinking? to insist that ―thinking‖ is exclusive to the only
beings blessed with language and hands. Presenting plants as
having hands, according to humanist standards, expresses Sinha's
belief that they can, not only think and take decisions, but also act
upon what they believe. His novel is a response to Christa
Grewe-Volpp's invitation to recognize nature as a cultural
construction and an active entity of autonomous presence that is
88
also a willful constructor capable of partially but effectively
determining the course of life. Like Merleau-Ponty, he states that
all forms of life are intertwined in one interdependent ecological
existence. Evidence to support the previous assumptions is
present in the recent findings of physics and biology.
Gersdorf contends that the theories of quantum
mechanics and relativity provide ample evidence against the idea
that nature is an intelligible machine. Bohr, Einstein and
Heisenberg demonstrated "the relativism and situatedness of
knowledge, the dynamism, reciprocity, and indeterminism of
physical entities and forces" (35). To express the idea that nature
is trying to stand its grounds against the destructive inventions
that man introduces, Sinha describes a battle where both
electricity, man-made light, and the natural moonlight wrestle to
encompass wider batches of earth. The iron and concrete that
form the death factory are also in a battle. Roaming the factory,
Animal hears the pipes howling and moaning as a result of the
wind blowing across and through them. When he puts his ear to
their surface he believes he hears the screaming voices of the
victims who died when these very pipes leaked their poisonous
gases.
Posthumanist philosophers contradict the allegations that
language is exclusive to humans. Those who believe that humans
covered the whole distance from animal to Homo sapiens,
89
maintain that language co-evolved with the human race, as it did
with all the other species, as a result of mutual reaction.
Merleau-Ponty asserts that language originated as a response to
the wild Being that was already speaking to the human species at
the elementary level of sensory experience. Thus language
equally belongs to all the elements of the sensible world, man
included. He calls upon people to restore awareness of the "wild
Being" by reviving their sensitivity to the articulate voices that
reverberate in spaces previously assumed to be silent. Merleau-
Ponty asserts that "language lives only from silence; everything
we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which
we never leave" (126). Ecologists replace the idea of a "mute
land" with the conviction of a wild Being that is full of voices.
Sinha gives voice to the overwhelming silence of nature, which is
as powerful as the spoken language, and also to the members of
the nonhuman world. He does this either by translating their
messages into human language or by presenting them as
participants in the wordless world language of music. He
reproduces Jara's "rrrr," (17) the birds' "clap, clap," (12) the rain's
"plink PLONK plank" (49), the frog's "crikkk" (48), etc.
When Animal tries to explain his love for Nisha, she
places her finger on his lips and tells him that he can convey his
message more articulately by being silent since silence is itself a
language. People mock Sinha's protagonist, calling him a crazy
91
boy because he hears voices where they can discern none. The
defiant boy confirms that he actually hears voices beyond their
limited hearing scope and says that he would consider himself
crazy if he denied what he heard and pretended to believe in what
he did not believe in. What really happens is that Animal's
immersion in the wild Being enables him to hear the voices of
silence, and receive the messages that are delivered through the
sensible world of the nonhuman. Sinha's characters ridicule
Heidegger's statement about language being exclusively human
by crossing the boundaries of traditional languages. Ma Franci
shares Animal's gift of getting a message, no matter in what
language it has been delivered. Animal has the ability not only to
hear the unspoken thoughts of people but also grasp the side
conversations and passing talks of all types of animate and
inanimate beings. He articulately communicates with birds,
animals, insects, rocks and trees. He is engaged in an ongoing
dialogue with his surroundings. While everyone could only see a
locust spreading its wings, Animal hears it talking about how
pretty and gorgeous it is and he responds by giving it a warning
lest a bird should devour it. Animal's People is a wakeup call for
the readers to acknowledge the articulateness of the nonhuman
world and sharpen their sensitivity to the numerous languages
that its inhabitants speak. The language that Sinha introduces is
not confined to words or sounds since it comprises the voices of
91
things such as forests, waves, insects and the wind. It is a sort of
deep understanding that ensues as a result of listening to the
voices of the silence. Animal displays a gift for understanding the
essence of voices and sounds without the confinements of any
particular language. He declares that the words he does not know
pour their meanings into his ear. He suggests this type of
language as a means of communication among people of
conflicting interests, and finds it more conducive of meanings
and concepts. Addressing a European journalist, Animal explains
that people can perfectly communicate outside the traditional
boundaries of any linguistic code. Rejoicing, celebrating and
grieving seep their meanings back and forth between the hearts
and minds of all types of creatures. He also cites the voices of
various animals and natural elements, such as psss, sss, rrr, haaa
rrr, kha and khekhe, as symbols of that common language.
Sinha relates man's artistic activity to his ability to
perceive the language of the wild Being of the world. He shows
that there are levels of communication between man and that
world. Animal, his protagonist, is able to comprehend the
language of earth, plants and animals, but a true artist like Somraj
moves beyond that primary level of understanding. He ascends to
the higher levels of reciprocating them in a harmony that elevates
him to unprecedented summits of uniting with the wild Being.
According to Dewey, "Art is the result, the sign, and the reward
92
of that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is
carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction into
participation and communication" (22). Somraj and the wild
Being participated in a wordless conversation that takes them all
beyond restrictions, feuds and crude meaningless classifications
of and prejudices against different forms of life. On the other
hand, polluting the environment kills Somraj's artistic ability. In
Sinha, it is only the artist [messenger between the two worlds]
who can be launched in this process of being united with the
world in its entirety, human and nonhuman and his art is evident
in his ability to transform these mutual messages into forms that
are comprehensible to humans such as poetry, paintings,
literature, music, etc. Goodbody explains that nature in its
wholeness constitutes a sort of silent language which uses sounds
capable of conveying the essence of everything. The ability to
interpret these sounds is the special gift of the artist.
According to Westling, human beings "are intertwined
with this flesh of the world – the dynamic community of things
and beings around us- in an embrace from which human language
emerges and which it shares with many other voices or
languages" (38). Somraj calls upon Animal to bear witness to
how the supposedly silent spaces of time and place do in fact
cradle the singing and speeches of a most eloquent, beautifully
varied ecological community. It is through Somraj, the artist of
93
the novel, that Sinha demonstrates his belief in the connection
between man's artistic activity and his awareness of the rich and
varied life force that penetrates the nonhuman world. Animal
acknowledges the intelligence and agency of the wild Being, but
Somraj opens his ears to its spiritual and aesthetic aspects. He
guides him to appreciate how the charming mélange of human
language and the voices of other creatures constitute the artistic
sense of the universe. Somraj approaches Animal while the latter
is experiencing a state of connection with the wild Being. The
boy was melting with admiration while the beautiful flowers of a
large frangipani tree were dancing with ecstasy to the rhythms of
the rain drops hopping through their lively leaves when Somraj
calls upon him to open his ears to the voice of silence. The
brilliant artist is actually Sinha‘s deputy delivering his sacred
revelation to deaf ears that filters out essential messages of the
wild Being. He draws Animal as well as the reader‘s attention to
the fact that the word ―silent‖ consists of the same exact letters of
the word ―listen‖ and interprets this as a sign that silence is not
silent. While Animal superficially interprets a frog‘s ―crikkk-
crikkk‖ as a search for a mate, Somraj perceives the music in the
message. From him, readers along with Animal learn that the
frog‘s melody is said to have inspired ―dha‖, the sixth note of the
common musical scale. Together, they acknowledge the music
produced by the melodious rain drops and the gentle breeze as
94
they appreciate that produced by bows and strings. The silence
enveloping Animal is soon revealed to host multifarious voices
that have to harmonize together in order to create the sweet
orchestra of the world. This orchestrated landscape is the source
of inspiration for Somraj, the brilliant artist. All the elements that
Merleau-Ponty refers to as the wild Being participate in creating
the music that keeps the world balanced. Humans can figure out
these messages if they attune themselves to them. Sinha extends
the concept to include "things" like the creaking of doors and
bicycles, the snapping of branches or the swishing of a horse‘s
tail. He emphasizes the view that man is but a voice among many
others that all have to collaborate to form a coherent harmonious
whole. This mutual understanding embodies the concept of
"anotherness" as opposed to "otherness." Gersdorf points out that
while the first regards other beings as man‘s equal partners,
brothers and sisters, the latter regards them as strangers or aliens.
Animal addresses nonhumans as equals and partners. He
addresses his dog friends as brother and sister and keeps telling
them that they are his equals.
According to W.D. Howells (1968), "the moral progress
of the race found its microcosm in the development of man from
the savagery of boyhood to the ethical consciousness of civilized
adulthood" (306). Gersdorf agrees and adds that the progress of
the human being from embryo to adult is itself a solid evidence of
95
the unbreakable ties between the human and the nonhuman
community. In an obvious reference to his belief in the
continuum from animal to man, Sinha introduces man in different
stages of development. Several fetuses (e.g. the kha-in-the Jar)
that are kept in fluids and trapped in jars feature as major
characters in the novel and give rise to the question of whether
man is experiencing an evolution process in reverse, especially
that the protagonist himself moves a step back in the march of
evolution by walking on four and also by being so focused on
sensual pleasures. The chain that Sinha introduces from the kha-
in-the Jar [fetus] across the four-footed Animal to Zafar and Ma
Franci who are spiritually refined is a demonstration of Pico della
Mirandola's 1487's manifesto, On the Dignity of Man. In his
manifesto, Mirandola refers to mankind's enormous ability to
reshape him/herself by either plummeting into the nadir of
brutality or ascending to the disembodied heights of spirituality
to compete with the angels. On the other hand, the environmental
exploitation, so connected with social corruption, gives rise to the
queries that Jean Francois Lyotard poses in The Inhuman.
Lyotard is real skeptical about the human experience. He
suggests that the so-called process of human development could
very probably be an opposite process of deterioration into
becoming inhuman. More seriously, he wonders if succumbing to
the inhuman might not really be the proper thing for mankind to
96
do. Moving a step back in the Darwinian chain supports Glen
Love's statement that the extended evolutionary journey might
not be able to move on without recourse to the animalistic. The
strain of civilization on Animal, as he moves from living
absolutely like wild animals fetching food with the stray dogs
meal by meal to an educated person who works and gets paid, is
symbolized by the conflict he undergoes to suppress and hide his
sexual desire. During this critical phase of his life, Animal
experiences a heightened awareness of the principles that govern
the human life. It is obvious that the Darwinian motto, ―survival
of the fittest‖, is still rattling in the head of humanity to guide the
actions and important choices of individuals and institution.
Animal becomes aware of concepts like "environmental racism"
and "environmental justice" and is embedded in the core struggle
of the novel to fight the first and attain the second. He is enrolled
in the human system of life when he is hired by environmental
activists to work for money, therefore start paying for the things
he used to get for free. The boy regrets having tasted the pleasure
of spending money. As he gets enmeshed in the world of human
civilization, Animal experiences feelings of guilt. For the first
time he spends sleepless nights over the wrongdoings of the day.
In this phase of life he represents the question that Merleau-Ponty
poses about defining the place of the human with consciousness
in the chain of evolution.
97
 By the end of the novel, however, Animal experiences an
evolutionary regression which is symbolized by a complete
reunion with the wild Being. He gives up the symbols of
capitalistic civilization, shorts and a zippo that were given to him
by a European journalist in return for his story as a victim of an
environmental disaster. . That bargain marks Animal's initiation
into the world of "exchange value" and "the process of
commodification" when he is introduced to "ephemeral,
disposable goods produced by market capitalism" (Gersdorf 164).
The absurdity of Animal's holding on to commodities that he
does not really need gives evidence to Ludwig Maurice's claim
that these commodities are manufactured with the obvious
intention of enhancing the exploitative systems. It is significant
that that lighter, a symbol of the super power's environmental
racism, was implicated as the possible main cause of the
recurrence of the disaster. Subjecting Animal to the hard choice
between primitive and civilized ways of life puts into question
Allan Chavkin's opinion that people have to reject the power of
evil and destruction. They should unite against the encroachment
of lifeless things, bulldozers, fences, pavements, etc. upon the
beating heart of the natural community.
According to Goodbody, hunting is a basic activity to
explore the man/nature relationship across the essential
nature/civilization divide. The hunter occupies a liminal position,
98
standing on the threshold separating the two worlds and living
equally comfortably in both. He connects equally powerfully
with both worlds by feelings of empathy and identification and
relies on both for self-realization. Hunting also reflects human
worry about the resources of nature becoming so scarce as to
cause a shortage in basic needs. After Animal gets immersed in
the comforts of modern life, things escalate again to bring him
back to the horrors of pollution which, Sinha confirms, will bring
about the apocalypse. He flees the intricacies of civilization and
throws himself back into the bosom of the wild to find it much
less welcoming than it had been before. As a representative of
civilization, Animal is reprimanded by nature for the misuse of
natural resources. Trees blame him for the lack of water and
demand that he find nourishment for them as well as for himself.
Sinha negates Heiddeger's concept of man's superiority
to the nonhuman world. Addressing the wild, Animal desperately
tries to establish his superiority, screaming that he deserves the
respect of forest inhabitants and claiming his position at the top
of the evolutionary list. The inner spirit of the forest vibrates with
a rejection of his appeal and an assertion of their equality. This
exchange stands in line with Lawrence Buell's concept of "biotic
egalitarianism" (303) according to which all beings have an
intrinsic value. Accordingly, a creature so law in the chain of
evolution like the lizard has exactly the same right as a human
99
being to think of itself as the center of the universe and be taken
as such.
As Matt Cartmill states, the hunter is a basically
ambiguous figure. He is a prominent participant in the wild life
which he seriously harms. From a historical point of view,
hunters have always regarded themselves as nature lovers and
also as friends of the nonhuman world with its animal inhabitants
whom they shoot and eat. In primitive societies, hunters used to
appeal to animals to forgive them before they were killed.
Traditionally, hunting is employed in literature as the vehicle "of
our closest encounter with the wild animal, a site of immersion in
nature and rediscovery of what is felt to be our true human
nature" (Goodbody 168). Sinha employs a hunting scene to
reveal human nature and show how man's relationship with the
world of the nonhuman has deteriorated. He ridicules Animal's
loss of the hunter's instinct and cites it as evidence of man's
failure to be nature's true friend. From the beginning Animal is
ridiculed as a hunter who seeks his prey in garbage. A hunger
attack, however, forces him to hunt for a living prey in the forest
but the story ends in utter disgrace. Animal was extremely
apologetic and shows the lizard due respect, but the latter still
outwits him and manages to save his precious life after a short
fight. It boasts that while it will eventually be able to get over its
broken rib, Animal will never be able to get over his nature. He
111
describes Animal as deficient in animal instincts, therefore a
failure as a hunter. Sinha uses this encounter with the wild to
reveal another aspect of hunting as "a natural vehicle for
genetically programmed, aggressive and destructive human
instincts" (Goodbody 169).
Sinha's respect for nature is also evident in his revival of
the value of instinctive or intrinsic knowledge that man derives
from nature. Zafar's team relies mainly on basic knowledge
common between human beings and animals. When he insists on
recruiting Jara, Animal protests that an animal cannot contribute
to the team but Zafar insists explaining that the dog can
contribute a lot using her fine senses. The team adheres to the
tools of perception that man shares with the wild Being,
highlighting the status of Mother Earth as the first guide and
teacher. Zafar never wears a watch. Instead, he depends on the
sun to know the time. There is also multi reference to nature as a
witness and preserver of man's history which she records in a
very special way. Leaning against the walls of an old building,
Animal learns the history of the morning and the previous night
by contemplating the stones and the cracks in the road. The
persevering grass shooting through the walls of the old building
tells him that the factory lands were orchards before the
transnational corporation transformed them into cement and
stones. This reading of history connects man's environmental
111
behavior to the status quo concerning the effect of this behavior
on the nonhuman especially when Animal sounds deeply grieved
at the sight of skinny cows going through the garbage. The
behavior and attitudes of the environmental team reflects Sinha‘s
discontent with "our recourse to increasingly sophisticated
weapons and the gradual displacement of strength by cunning, of
the body by intellect" (Goodbody 184). Replacing technology
with the senses is a rejection of "the dilution of the life force in
the process of civilization" (184). Although Sinha highlights the
essential type of knowledge inherent in the regular fixed system
of the elements, he does not overlook the agency and sentiency of
the earth revealed in its ability to outlive man's destructive
behavior.
Zafar and his multi-species, multinational team are
engaged in an uphill battle which symbolizes the struggle to
move from nation state to other allonational formations in which
a citizen‘s nationalism is measured against his/her environmental
behavior. Ma Franci, a French nun who spends her life in
Khaufpur, refuses to leave to her home country and finally dies
defending the poor and afflicted declaring that her home is the
afflicted place she is defending. American Elli, too, admits that
she detests the company and joins in the protests to have it
demolished. Elli's ex-husband, as well as the lawyers who come
to defend the company and protect its people against the law
112
consider themselves primarily answerable to the government of
the United States whose best interests lie with a certain economic
system. Elli, Ma Franci and all the environmental activists hold
themselves answerable on behalf of the environment even when
that puts them in opposition to their local governments. For them
answerability requires them to act against such practices that
result in degrading the environment or jeopardizing its
inhabitability. Together with human multinational activists,
Animal's People, swarms with eloquent nonhumans that present
allonational citizenship. Environmental activists agree on
defending all the environmentally afflicted spots regardless of
political or economic interests. They erase the geographical
boundaries and transcend the allegiances of nation state to form
the nucleus of a green state thus defying the degradation of
nature.
Zafar's team embodies Robyn Eckersley's concept of the
green state which introduces a new type of patriotism to unite the
citizens of the world. Establishing the new state requires a
reconsideration of major concepts that deceive citizens of the
nation states into believing that they have no alternatives.
Ecological philosophers, however, suggest that shared objectives
and interests, especially when they are concerned with saving life
on the planet, are stronger bonds than ethnicities or common
passports. The process of globalization so undermines a nation's
113
authority within its borders that a nation state in the true sense
becomes a fallacy. TNCs raise the issues of answerability and
affectedness. Khaufpur is an everysmalltown that is targeted to be
the site of risky industrial businesses by influential countries that
wish to shift the chemical danger elsewhere. The economic or
military pressure of The U.S. turns local governments into tyrants
that stand against their citizens denying them the basic right of
self-determination. Eckersley also condemns the double
standards that govern the way the world addresses an issue,
always taking into consideration how militarily and economically
powerful a country is. "You'll talk of right, law, justice," Animal
tells the European journalist, "Those words sound the same in my
mouth as in yours but they don't mean the same (3). In a
transnational/green state agenda, super powers and countries
whose economic projects straddle borders should act as equal
ecological partners of the countries that host their investments.
They should not act selfishly protecting themselves against
environmental damages by shifting it elsewhere. This, however,
stands as a challenge since it destabilizes the long established
reality of the nation state and its pillars of sovereignty which rests
upon asserting, not eradicating, borders. Nations are actually
"imaginary communities based on abstract rather than embodied
social bonds," hence, argues Eckersley,

114
there seems to be no good reason for denying the
significance of other kinds of imaginary communities
that come into being in response to common
problems that transcend national boundaries or
simply in response to human suffering or ecological
degradation wherever it may occur in the world.
(185)

For Eckersley, the green state does not completely annihilate the
principles of homeland or belongingness, although it undermines
territorial allegiances. Basic concepts, however, are redefined and
enhanced to denote new references and acquire extra
significance. The Bakhtinian-based principles, "answerability"
and "affectedness", are two such concepts. In the green state,
answerability shifts a citizen's ethical responsibility from
traditional governments to the environment wherever it is
damaged or humiliated. Instead of being answerable to
parliaments and congresses attached to traditional governments,
citizens of a green state will have to answer to the inhabitants of
any region where environmental crimes are committed. The
principle of affectedness requires that before policies are
implemented, all human and nonhuman entities that might be
affected as a result should be taken into consideration. The
traditional parliament will have to be replaced by a hyper
parliament, one that has members from different parts of the
world since the problems discussed relate to their wellbeing or

115
since they are united by common objectives or allegiances. To
implement this policy, the green state has to be a transnational
democratic state, since the new world order finds exporting
environmental problems perhaps easier and faster than the export
of products. Global warming and air borne diseases, unlike
human beings, cannot possibly be confined to a native territory
and are not obliged to show their passports before they cross
borders. The hyper parliament needs also to be hyper democratic.
All the creatures affected by human decisions should have their
interests considered. In the 1970s, Gary Snyder suggested that
Congress members ought to find a mechanism whereby whales
could present their demands to the American government. More
recently in 1992, he introduced the idea of ―village councils‖
where all creatures ought to be represented not excluding a single
species. Although Australian philosophers Joanna Macy and John
Seed agree with Snyder, they acknowledge the impossibility that
plants and animals should stand on their own. They therefore
suggest that the proposed parliament could give them voice by
acting as if they were present and also by honestly acting on their
actual behalf transcending the traditional view of animals as
insentient beings that should serve the needs of humans.
Whether called "pastoral", "nature writing" or "green
studies", ecocriticism continues to be of vital relevance, not to a
region and not to a species, but to the survival of the planet.
116
Though primarily concerned with environmental issues, it is
basically a reminder for man to make a halt, look back and
consider how far he has gone and in which direction. Was it a
wise decision for man to part from the animal in him, therefore
lose the prudence that inspired him to revere nature as his one
and only guide and sanctuary? Has he been in an evolution
process, or is he now in need of one in the opposite direction?
Whatever the answer, man needs to find new interpretations for
long established concepts. The interpretation of Darwin's "fittest"
should shift from ―the strongest‖ to the most tolerant and capable
of inculcating new perceptions. A lot of boundaries have to be
erased, and not all of them are made of barbed wires. Abstract
boundaries could have fatally tangible effects. Concepts that have
been embedded in people's thoughts for generations show up in
political and social scenes disguised as facts that are almost too
sacred to question. That a patriot's duty is restricted within the
borders of a certain region called" homeland", is one such fallacy
disguised as a fact. All people are citizens of the earth, and the
revival of interest in the green studies is a wakeup call for man to
give a nudge to the dormant values of justice and altruism that
should now be his tools for survival and his chance to prove that
he is in fact "the shepherd of Being" (Heidegger 220). Finding
alternatives has become vital. It is ridiculous that when a human
being and a virus desire to cross borders, it certainly is the virus,
117
by far the more destructive that is allowed first. More ridiculous
still, is man's hoping against hope that he would reach a different
destination every time he takes the same road.

118
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Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: University
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Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996. Print.
Barry, John, and Robyn Eckersley, eds. The State and the Global
Ecological Crisis. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005.
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Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory, An Introduction to Literary and
Cultural Theory. Second Edition. UK: Manchester University
Press, 2002. Print.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau,
Nature Writing,and the Formation of American Culture.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
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Cartmill, Matt. A View to a Death in the Morning. Hunting and
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Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
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Catrin, Gersdorf, and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Nature In Literary And
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Chavkin, Allan, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, A
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Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and
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Coupe, Lawrence, ed. The Green Studies Reader. London:
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Dewey, John. 1980. Art as Experience. 1st ed. New York:
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Dobson, Andress, and Robyn Eckersley, eds. Political Theory
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Dreese, Donelle N. Ecocriticism, Creating Self And Place in
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Edward O. Wilson. The Diversity of Life . Cambridge, Mass.:
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Glotfelty, Chyrell and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader,
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Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
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Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking? Trans. F.D.Wieck
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David Farrell. San Francisco: Harper, 1977. 323-339. Print.
Howells, W. D. The Altrurian Romances. Eds. Clara and Rudolf
Kirk. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. Print.
Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells, eds. Writing the
Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London: Zed Books,
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Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic
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West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print..
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Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York:
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Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman. Trans. G. Bennington and
R. Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1991. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston:
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Miyoshi, Masao. 1993. ‗A Borderless World? From Colonialism
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Critical Inquiry 19: 726-51. Print.
Nielsen, Greg M. The Norms of Answerability, Social Theory
Between Bakhtin and Habermas. Albany: State University of
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Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration on the Dignity of Man.
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112
Westling, Louise. Merleau-Ponty‘s Human-Animality
Intertwining and the Animal Question
https://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/EnvironmentalCenter/Loui
se%20Westling%20-%20Merleau-Pontys%20Human-
Animality%20Intertwining%20and%20the%20Animal%20Quest
ion.pdf Retrieved 06/02/2015

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ABSTRACT
This essay is an attempt to investigate what happens when two
writers who come a very long way from two different parts of the
world meet in a certain point by deciding to give a statement
about the same topic. Naguib Mahfouz and Lawrence Durrell are
two worldwide figures who come from different parts of the
world. Their roads, however, must have crossed at least once in
―Lady of the Dew‖ or ―that city of ours‖ as they respectively call
Alexandria. The Alexandria Quartet is the outstanding feedback
of Durrell‘s stay in Alexandria/Egypt in the era between 1942
and 1945. Mahfouz published his Midaq Alley in 1947. The
events of both novels occur before tremendous social and
political changes take place in Egypt with the July Revolution.
Both novels have the ghost of WWII either looming in the air or
serving as a background reality. The same categories of
characters, e.g., the homosexual, the prostitute and the magzub
are impressively zoomed in in both novels. So the same
categories of characters are seen against the same temporal and
topographical milieus. That offers a very good chance to examine
how and perhaps even why, descending from different cultural
backgrounds, the two writers differ in the way they view and
evaluate the same category of character and conduct. The attitude
of each writer could possibly be attributed to the different attitude
of their societies towards various notions and practices such as
114
sex, tolerance, social taste, and the prototypal, socially acceptable
male and female sexual and social roles. The Midaq Alley and
the Alexandria Quartet lend themselves easily and gracefully to
lengthy, enjoyable character juxtaposition. For purposes of
conciseness, however, this paper will be restricted to juxtaposing
the characters of the magzub in both novels.

This essay is an attempt to investigate what happens when

two writers who come a very long way from two different parts
of the world meet in a certain point by deciding to give a
statement about the same topic. Naguib Mahfouz and Lawrence
Durrell are two worldwide figures who come from different parts
of the world. Their roads, however, must have crossed at least
once in ―Lady of the Dew‖ or ―that city of ours‖ as they
respectively call Alexandria. The Alexandria Quartet is the
outstanding feedback of Durrell‘s stay in Alexandria/Egypt in the
era between 1942 and 1945. Mahfouz published his Midaq Alley
in 1947. The events of both novels occur before tremendous
social and political changes take place in Egypt with the July
Revolution. Both novels have the ghost of WWII either looming
in the air or serving as a background reality. The same categories
of characters, e.g., the homosexual, the prostitute and the magzub
are impressively zoomed in in both novels. So the same
categories of characters are seen against the same temporal and
115
topographical milieus. That offers a very good chance to examine
how and perhaps even why, descending from different cultural
backgrounds, the two writers differ in the way they view and
evaluate the same category of character and conduct. The attitude
of each writer could possibly be attributed to the different attitude
of their societies towards various notions and practices such as
sex, tolerance, social taste, and the prototypal, socially acceptable
male and female sexual and social roles. The Midaq Alley and
the Alexandria Quartet lend themselves easily and gracefully to
lengthy, enjoyable character juxtaposition. For purposes of
conciseness, however, this paper will be restricted to juxtaposing
the characters of the magzub in both novels.

The character of the magzub, a sort of wise fool with

religious bearings, is not uncommon in Arabic literature. He is
usually a homeless man who, besides the truthful predictions and
judgments he throws at people, displays odd behaviour and
bizarre attire. Among the most notable magzub figures is sheik
Darwish whom Mahfouz represents in his Midaq Alley. In
Balthazar, too, Durrell introduces a most distinguished Egyptian
magzub who roams the dark, deserted alleys of Alexandria as a
most sordid spirit that seems not to belong to this world. At the
time when Mahfouz and Durrell introduced the previous works
116
magzubs enjoyed certain credibility in Egypt especially among
the uneducated. Introducing a magzub in a work of art was
perhaps a part of preserving an element of Egyptian folklore.
Although Mahfouz‘s Midaq Alley swarms with ignorant
uneducated Egyptians Mahfouz stripes his magzub of any
holiness or extraordinary spiritual powers. He definitely
extinguishes the mystic halo that is supposed to surround his head
by showing him as a less-than-ordinary man who can not even
put up with a new system that threatens his career. On the other
hand, Durrell‘s magzub perfectly fits in the traditional magzub
figure that the Egyptian reader expects. He waddles in power and
mysticism. His exceptional powers give him strength and
influence and make him the fearless person he is. In Balthazar
Durrell mystifies what Mahfouz in Midaq Alley demystifies.

The magzub who figures in the Quartet as the magzub,

appears in the Midaq Alley as skeik Darwish, which is almost the
same thing since the words magzub, sheik and Darwish (dervish)
are sometimes used synonymously in Egypt. Sheik Darwish is
introduced at the very beginning of the novel as a permanent
client of the Alley's coffeehouse. He is in but not from the Alley,
since at midnight he leaves for nobody knows where. He does not
have a fixed abode for Mahfouz declares that Darwish is a
wanderer "with no home and no purpose, " (Deeb, 1991,34). The
117
mundaneness with which Mahfouz recites the history of sheikh
Darwish absolutely strips him of any holiness or mysticism. He is
simply a man whose integrity of mind is shattered after a series of
frustrations related to his professional life. He was almost
dismissed from his job as a sixth – grade teacher of English in
one of the Awqaf schools. Awqaf is perhaps where he got the
title of sheik in the first place. By an unfortunate change of
system, Darwish becomes an eighth grade clerk at the ministry of
Awqaf. He was astonished out of reason by the social and
financial degradation that he could not possibly bring himself to
accept. The man was simply suffering from a psychological crisis
and not getting any help. As Mahfouz indicates, he "gave way to
despair, his nerves almost in shreds… He became notorious as a
rebel, always complaining, extremely stubborn and obstinate, and
very quick – tempered. Scarcely a day went by without his
becoming involved in an argument or quarrel‖(Mahfouz,
1989,12).
Darwish could not swallow the degradation of being
declared as not sufficiently qualified for his job as a teacher of
English. His whole being stood on the defense. He was fixated on
the idea of proving his efficiency in English. As defensive
measure against public degradation, he assumes haughtiness and
exhibits exaggerated trust in his professional abilities.

118
He was renowned for his self – assertive manner and defiance
towards every one. When a dispute flared up between him and
another person, as often happened, he would address his
adversary in English. If the man should complain at his using a
foreign language unnecessarily, Darwish would shout in great
scorn: "Go off and learn something before you argue with
me!‖(Mahfouz, 1989,12)
Reports of his "bad temper" and his blustering egotism" took
him even further inducing him to write all his official
correspondence in English on pretext of his being "a technical
man not like the other clerks". At the same time Darwish
neglected his work completely. His mind always went back to the
source of the problem. He was simply trying to prove his
efficiency by showing off his knowledge of English vocabulary.
The man was showing definite symptoms of psychosis and
absolutely receiving no professional help. In a crescendo of
frustration, despair and deadly strife for self- assertion, Darwish
insisted on seeing the deputy minister himself. The man was far
much his superior, but when Darwish entered his office ―looking
very serious and respectful,‖ he greeted him ―in a man – to – man
fashion‖ and addressed him ―in a manner filled with confidence
and self – assurance.‖ The man almost blasphemes when he
alleges that: ―I am a messenger to you from God with a new
cadre.‖ Thus, in a pitiful diminuendo, Darwish Effendi dwindles
119
into Sheikh Darwish who put an end to his career in the ministry
and all communication with friends, acquaintances and family.
He just wanders off ―into the world of God‖(Mahfouz, 1989,12),
as people express his case. The process of transferring Darwish
Effendi into Sheikh Darwish has nothing to do with the quest of
the approximation of God or divine truth. The only religious
thing about him is that he ends whatever sparse talk he starts by
expressing his love for a holy Moslem figure, the granddaughter
of Prophet Mohammed who is significantly called ―the shelter of
the helpless.‖
Mahfouz takes his magzub lightly and leaves the reader in
no doubt as to the man‘s real value. Sheikh Darwish ―was loved
and honoured‖ because ―his presence was welcomed as a good
omen because he was considered a holy man of God.‖ But apart
from this he ―could not, despite what simple folk said, perform
miracles not predict the future‖(Mahfouz, 1989,13). Mahfouz
states in black and white that the only value skeikh Darwish has
exists only in the heads of those who believe in him and those are
mainly ―the simple folk,‖ as Mahfouz defines them. The man is
absolutely void of any exceptional powers. According to
Mahfouz, Darwish is ―either distracted and silent or extremely
talkative without even knowing particularly what he was
saying‖(Mahfouz, 1947,17). This definitely refutes any attempt to
attach any real value to whatever he says that might by
121
coincidence have bearing on the future. He is a powerless,
harmless man who is usually called a ―holy man‖, or a ―wali‖,
but occasionally insulted or made fun of. Expressing her disgust
at the Alley people, Hamida mocks everybody, Sheikh Darwish
not exempted: ―and there is sheikh Darwish plodding along with
his wooden clogs striking the pavement like a gong‖. Hamida‘s
mother, too, mockingly interrupts her daughter saying: ―who
would make a better husband for you than Sheikh Darwish?‖
This mockery is supposed to humiliate Hamida and lower her
self- esteem. In answering her mother, Hamida carries the
mockery even further: ―with a shake of her behind,‖ she replies:
―what a rich man he must have been. He says he had spent a
hundred thousand pounds on his love for our lady Zainab. Do you
think he would have been too mean to give me ten
thousand?‖(Mahfouz, 1989,25)
When one morning Salim Alwan gets angry with Sheikh
Darwish, he openly insults him. Alwan goes as far as descending
a curse of God on Darwish: ―it is a cursed day for me when I see
your face in the morning, you idiot! Get out of my sight, a curse
of God on you! Ironically, it is Alwan who descends the curse on
the Sheikh, not vice – versa. It is remarkable that Sheikh Darwish
can not defend himself, not even with a single word, He is
transfixed in his place as if the curse really hit him ,as though

121
―bolted to the ground‖(Mahfouz,1989,210). His reaction is
simply childish.
Mahfouz himself takes his magzub lightly and denies him
the respect given to a really religious man like Radwan Al-
Hussainy e.g. The man is a funny sight for the reader to laugh at.
While given a detailed description of the features of almost every
character in the novel, the reader is only given a detailed
description of the funny, bizarre attire of the Sheikh. The detailed
description of the Sheikh‘s attire is for the reader to be amused
and convinced that magzubs are destitute of real holiness that the
uneducated might attribute to them. Sheikh Darwish‘s
heterogeneous clothes are not as funny as they appear to be. They
are a reflection of the conflict between the traditional world and
the modern world. Darwish is a living manifestation of the
heartless social and bureaucratic change that drastically alters the
lives of individuals. Laws and systems defy each other just as
every single piece of Darwish‘s clothes does not match the other.
The lack of harmony between the different pieces of Darwish‘s
clothes is only a reflection of the lack of harmony between the
laws and rules organizing work in the different ministries. The
mental and psychological distraction of Sheikh Darwish and the
state of being in between are also reflected in his appearance.
Every part of his clothes belongs to a different era or a different
social class with a final social effect that shows the disgraceful
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disparity and disharmony between eras and classes. Darwish, like
kirsha‘s cafe, and the Midaq Alley as a whole, combines relics of
different eras.
Darwish is a man in his fifties dressed in a cloak with sleeves,
wearing a necktie usually worn by those who effect western
dress. On his nose perches a pair of expensive – looking, gold –
rimmed spectacles. He has removed his wooden sandals and left
them lying near his feet. (Mahfouz, 1989,3)
Sheikh Darwish has absolutely no role to play even in the
impoverished social life of the Alley. Nobody really asks him for
help or opinion. In his despair, the cafe poet appeals to him:
―sheikh Darwish, does this please you? In a tragically significant
situation when the cafe owner is replacing the old cafe poet who
had been entertaining customers for twenty years by a radio,
Darwish‘s reaction is simply funny. His comments are irrelevant
to the situation and ―non of the coffee – house visitors had so
much as turned to him‖(Mahfouz, 1989,6). The only reaction
Darwish shows is a meaningless mechanical movement like that
of a tuning fork:
He lowered his head slowly, moving it to the left and to the right
as he did so, with movements gradually decreasing in extent until
he at last returned to his previous immobile position. Once again
he sank into oblivion.(Mahfouz,1989,6)

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 Darwish‘s lack of real reaction is juxtaposed with the
reaction of a real religious man. Radwan Al-Hussainy who, when
he fails to dissuade the cafe owner from his decision, decides to
help the poet in a practical way by offering him money and trying
to find a job for his son. Hussainy is an impressive man whose
appearance stirs the coffee customers into interest and
admiration. Mahfouz mocks Darwish even further by
demonstrating in detail the childish way in which he behaves.
When insulted, Darwish stands
as though bolted to the ground and then a look like that of a
terrified child came into his eyes. He burst out weeping. His
voice… rose to a rear – scream until it reached kirsha, uncle
Kamil and the old barber, they all rushed to him, asking what was
wrong. They led him off to the coffee – house and sat him down
in his armchair doing their best to calm him. Kirsha ordered a
glass of water and uncle Kamil patted him on the shoulder,
saying sympathetically: Put your fait in God, Sheikh Darwish. Oh
God, keep us from evil. For you to weep is an omen of some
misfortune to come … Oh God give us grace. (Mahfouz,
1989,210)
Darwish behaves like a sulky child. He keeps on weeping and
howling while his breath gasped and his limbs trembled. Then he
shut his lips rigidly, pulled at his necktie and stamped the ground
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with his wooden clogs. Eventually Darwish‘s wailing reaches
Salim Alwan who reproaches himself for angering one of God‘s
holy men and asks for the sheikh‘s forgiveness. Alwan could not
put up with the sheikh‘s anger. It seems to him that ―the whole
world was weeping and wailing.‖ He believes that angering the
―saintly man‖ would disturb his peace with God. Even uncle
Kamil who is rarely moved by events, is disturbed by the
Sheikh‘s anger and takes it as a bad ― Omen of some misfortune
to come‖(Mahfouz, 1989,210). But Kamil in represented as a
superstitious person. He seems to classify people and things into
good and bad omens and refuses to hang a picture of a political
candidate for fear that it might affect his business. So, apart from
his being a bad or good omen, Darwish has no impact on people
inside or outside the alley. Mahfouz also uses Darwish to convey
some of his funny comments. When Kirsha‘s wife reprimands
him for his homosexual affair exposing her fierce, most
unfeminine nature, Darwish comments saying: ―O Kirsha, your
wife is a strong woman. Indeed she has a masculinity which
many men lack. She is really a male, not a female. Why don‘t
you love her then?‖(Mahfouz, 1989,71)
Mahfouz makes sure he has exhibited in black and white
the criteria according to which people detect a magzub or a
supposedly holy man. When the political candidate is interrupted
by the meaningless irrelevant talk of Sheikh Darwish he gets
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angry. But when he sees the bizarre appearance of the man, he
realizes that he is a saintly man of God. The man‘s holy status is
defined by his idiotic, chaotic appearance. Henceforth, the
candidate calls him, ―our reverend sir.‖ The opinion of the
political candidate, too, does not really count since he is a corrupt
person who bribes a corrupt cafe owner and almost all the Alley
people making use of their ignorance and poverty. May be that
hypocrite does not believe in Darwish at all but is simply trying
to measure his mentality to that of the Alley people so as to win
them. So, maybe his evaluation of Darwish does not really count.
In another instance Zaita, the cripple maker, instead of crippling
one of his clients, decides to teach him imbecility and some
ballads in praise of the prophet. This way, Zaita expects the man
to pass as a magzub. Imbecility and the religious ballads are
supposed to promote the cripple seeker from a more beggar to
magzub.
Sometimes Sheikh Darwish acts as a chorus who gives a
general comment on events or even Mahfouz‘s comment, which
always comes on behalf of the public. His comments are a
mixture of wisdom and foolishness. Sometimes Darwish‘s
comments are quite irrelevant and even ridiculous. While uncle
Kamil and other Alley people are discussing death and the
hereafter, Sheikh Darwish talks about worms and frogs. And
when the political candidate asks for the Sheikh‘s prayers,
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―emerging from his silence‖, Darwish spreads his hands wide in
blessing and intoned: ―May the devil take you! May God destroy
your house‖(Mahfouz, 1989,132). Darwish‘s behavior here is
quite funny, nevertheless, it gives an honest statement, which
reflects an understanding that Darwish does not have, of the
reality of the situation. It is actually Mahfouz‘s statement, safely
and prudently put on the tongue of the magzub to save Mahfouz
direct confrontations of any kind. By virtue of his being a
Magzub, Sheikh Darwish can be as bold and honest as he wishes
without fearing the wrath of his presumably superiors. It is not
difficult for the other Alley inhabitants to realize that the political
candidate is corrupt, but being in need of his money or equally
corrupt themselves, they tolerate him except of course for Sheikh
Darwish who needs no money. He is a verification of idea that if
you crave nothing, you own everything. Striving for what he
believed to be his right never avails him. He only loses his job
forever together with his family and friends in the bargain. But
when he puts down his arms and wanders ―into the world of
God,‖ he knows ―neither worry, grief nor need.‖ He moves into

a state of peace, contentment, and beatitude

such as he had never known before. Even
though he had lost his salary, gone, too,
was his dependence on money. Though
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 he had lost his own family and friends,
everyone he met became his family.
(Mahfouz, 1989,16)
While readers meet Mahfouz‘s magzub in a starkly
mundane and realistic atmosphere with his feet firmly touching
the ground, they meet Durell‘s in the aroma of a religious
celebration encompassing people of different sects and faiths,
Moslems, Christians, Jews, etc. Durrell‘s magzub is a frightening
man whose personal life is never approached. Nothing is revealed
about his personal life, not even his name. He is represented
against a religious background, in the aroma of a religions
celebration attended by ―the dozen faiths and religions‖ of
Alexandria. The man instantly envelops the reader in an
atmosphere of fascination and charm. He moves in a cloud of
mysticism and has a command of unusual spiritual powers and
insight into people‘s subconscious. He is first introduced to the
reader as a ―gaunt and terrible figure … shooting out the thunder
bolts of a hypnotic personality to a fearful but fascinated
crowd‖(Durrell, 1958,150). The man is feared by people even
those who are known for their super mentality. When Nessim
knows that his forceful brother, Narouz, is going to meet magzub
he asks him to be careful. Narouz himself admits that he ―must be
careful,‖ and that it must be dangerous‖ to get within his eyes.‖

128
when Narouz asks the tatooist about the magzub the man answers
him with ―startled eyes‖(Durrell, 1985,153).
In the Midaq Alley the reader is given the details of the
process whereby Darwish Effendi, the English teacher, changes
into Sheikh Darwish, the man of God. It is a process that has
nothing to do with religious meditation or the desire to get to
know God. The details of how Durrell‘s magzub became a
magzub, though not given in detail either, are obviously related to
the man‘s intense meditation on the absolute truth. The man is
reported to have isolated himself in the desert for a long time.
People state that he ―was once alone in the desert for
years‖(Durrell, 1958,152). The Quartet‘s magzub is said to be
taking refuge in madness to escape the pressure of perhaps too
much religious knowledge. Following the magzub, Narouz
notices that ―the holy man walked slowly as if bowed down by
the weight of pre-occupations too many to number and almost too
heavy for a mortal to bear.‖ Narouz thinks of the magzub as a
man who ―had sought the final truths of religious beneath the
mask of madness‖. The man‘s being a magzub is explicitly
related to his feverish quest for divine knowledge that is beyond
the limits of mortals. Narouz knows that he could ―measure the
divinity of the man, the religious powers from which he took
refuge in madness‖ and was ―in a passion of reverence for one

129
who he knew had sought the final truths of religion beneath the
mask of madness‖ (Durrell, 1958,153).
Darrell‘s magzub is not a peaceful, childish man like
Mahfouz‘s. If readers still know nothing about the physical
appearance of Sheikh Darwish, they know that Durrell‘s magzub
is as fearful as a goblin who is allowed to step out of the Arabian
Nights. He has a ―ravaged face, the eyes of which had been
painted with crayon so that they looked glaring, inhuman, like the
eyes of a monster in a cartoon … terrible eyes burning like live
coals,‖ with ―foam bursting from between his teeth‖(Durrell,
1958,150,154,151) in case he is excited. But while readers know
all the details about the bizarre appearance of Sheikh Darwish,
they know nothing about the attire of Durrell‘s magzub except
that he is dressed in a coarse gown with long sleeves.
The Quartet‘s magzub is while Darwish is not, really
endowed with supernatural powers. He is an awesome,
impressive personality. Narouz shudders as he looks at him: ―One
felt the power of his personality shooting out into the tense crowd
like sparks from an anvil‖ and ―trembles from the shock of the
encounter… It was as if an electric current were passing in his
legs, making them tremble‖. Even after he has already left the
man. Narouz‘s ―body was still shaking with the reaction as if
afflicted by pins and needles – or as if an electric current were

131
discharging through his lions and thighs. He had, he realized,
been very much afraid‖{Durrell, 1958,151,155,156).
Darrell's magzub is described as "a religious maniac‖, ―the holy
man‖, ―a very good man‖, ―the fanatic‖, ―beloved of the
Prophet‖, ―wise one and beloved,‖ ―the magician‖, ―nightmare
mystic‖, ―the strange personage of the night,‖ ―saint‖, etc. He is a
hypnotist who hurls …oaths and imprecations at the circle of
listeners." He derives his miraculous abilities from "the power of
the spirit" which fills him when he " comes, into his hour.‖
Durrell declares his magzub to he possessed of "superman force,"
quite unlike sheikh Darwish who proves completely helpless
should anyone decide to attack him. While not in his hour,
however, i.e. destitute of spiritual abilities, ―no more power‖
could be discerned in him. The eyes, ―under the cartoon image of
the crayon… were blank and lusterless, and their centers were
void of meaning, hollow, dead." Narouz feels that it "wan as if he
had pinned a man already dead to the corner of the wall in this
abandoned yard" (Durrell,
1958,150,152,151,154,155,152,155,150,151,154).
Durrell‘s magzub has a fearful insight into people‘s
subconscious. His terrible eyes sink into people‘s souls and see
into their subconscious for hidden impurity. He takes his clients,
to "the outskirts of the light, "in the darkness and into the middle
of "a small cluster of abandoned shrines shadowed by leaning
131
palms‖(Durrell, 1958,150). The man has the power not only to
detect sinners, but also to purge them through a beautifully drawn
hypnotherapy process during which he forces them to submit
their subconscious and be reduced to their mere inner realties and
show and face the animal nature inside them. Exposed, the
subconscious is concretized into the form of the most closely
matching animal, accordingly, some people bleat like goats,
while others crawl like scorpions, bark like donkeys, or hoot like
an awl. The process also involves the humiliation of the victims
who are treated like the animals they imitate/act like.
The holy man stood in an island of the fallen bodies he had
hypnotized some crawling about like scorpion, some screaming
or bleating like goats, some braying. From time to time he would
leap upon one of them uttering hideous screams and ride him
across the ring, thrashing at his buttocks like a maniac, and then
suddenly turning, with the foam bursting from between his teeth,
he would dart into the crowd and pick upon some unfortunate
victim. (Durrell,1958,150)
The man could not possibly be deceived and instantly detects
anyone who is faking being hypnotized. Whoever is pretending is
dragged "with super human force" and with sudden quick pass of
has talons the magzub would ―kill his light.‖ He shrieks at the
fallen bodies addressing the sinners inside: "fiends, unclean ones
… you and you and you … thrusting forward his talon …
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threatening and attacking the hidden unclean lines." The evil
power seems to shrink and retreat in front of the attack. The
circle gave before each onslaught"(Durrell, 1958,151).
The magzub has the power of insight especially into the
subconscious of the impure. He does not wait for people to come
to him and expose themselves by asking for help, and neither is
he deceived by the most deceptive appearance. He shoots out of
his place like a thunderbolt when his accurate insight/radar
detects the impurity of a most respectably – looking sheik who is
proclaimed to be of the seed of the Prophet. Magzub bursts
through the crowd with ―flying robes… sank those terrible eyes
into him " to fetch/ search his subconscious. The ―old sheik
suddenly went dull, his head wobbled on his neck and with a
shout, the magzub had him down on all fours grunting like a
boar.‖ There and then, starts the process of purging the sheik by
turning inside out his animal nature, which is, like others, capable
of sin. The sheik, too, is humiliated by being dragged by his
turban, the sign of dignity, and hurled among the others. The
sheik then rises to his feet and performs " a lonely little
ceremonial dance." According to different religious sects,
exhausting and humiliating the body is believed to give full reign
to the spirit/sharpen the spiritual sensitivity of the person. Fully
exhausted, the Sheik no more behaves like an animal. He sings:
"Allah. Allah!" in "thin, bird – likes tones" and he trod a shaky
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measure round the circle of bodies. The bird – like voice could be
a symbol of the spirit, which is usually symbolized by a flying
bird. At the beginning it is a thin voice because the power of the
spirit is still not in full control. But as the purgation process
advances, the spirit reigns as indicated by the sheik‘s voice
"suddenly breaking into the choking cries of a dying animal."
The animal embodying/ concretizing the sinful, lowdown nature
is dying while the spiritual power is taking over. The old man
then recovers quickly after the magzub frees him and seems
"little the worse for his experience" (Durrell, 1958,151,152).
Apart from being a capable hypnotist, the Quartet's magzub is
actually endowed with supernatural powers. It is amazing how he
can expose not only future, but also past events involving people
who no longer exist in this world. While "in his hour" and, filled
with the power of the spirits, the magzub empowers Nessim to
will his " eyes to enter the earth and his mind to pour through
them." The vision Narouz sees as a result becomes so real that he
feels drugged by a haze rising from water of canals that exist only
in the vision. Both narouz and Nessim believe what the former
sees about how Justine's child dies. Like a sincerely faithful man,
the magzub does not claim to have any power in himself – All his
power is a gift from God: "Mighty is Good, " he declares," In him
is my scope" (Durrell, 1958,154,156,157).

134
Darrell's magzub is/ Durrell seems determined to encompass his
magzub in a halo of supernatural atmosphere very unlike
mahfouz‘s magzub who could always be taken lightly. In his
encounter with narouz, a shaft of light leaking across the well of
darkness from some distant street – lamp gives him "only a
lighted head like a medallion." In his encounter with Narouz, the
magzub gives a real show of his supernatural capabilities. Durrell
exposes the spiritual force of his man against a spiritual
atmosphere rich in crucifixion connotations. When he approaches
the man, Narouz feels that he "stepped forward into the radius of
this holy man's power"(Durrell, 1958,154,153).
Dimly Narouz saw the man's arms raised in doubt, perhaps in
fear, like a diver, and resting upon some rotten wooden beam
which in some forgotten era must have been driven into the
supporting wall of a byre an a foundation for a course of the soft
earth – brick. Then the magzub turned half sideways to join his
hands, perhaps in prayer, and with precise and deft calculation
Narouz performed two almost simultaneous acts. With his right
hand he drove his dagger into the wood, pinning the magzub‘s
arms to it through the long sleeves of his coarse
gown.(Durrell,1958,155)
Shortly, the magzub "sank to a kneeling position on the dry earth
with both hands still crucified to the wall" and "turned his eyes
upwards into his skull with what seemed to be a fatigue which
135
almost resembled death." A shaft of light from some distant street
lamp falls on the magzub giving him only ―a lighted head like a
medallion." The man raises his hands and rests them on a rotten
wooden beam " which in some forgotten era must have been
driven into the supporting wall of a byre.‖ Durrell creates an
atmosphere rich in crucifixion connotations. When the magzub
was supposedly trying to join his hands in prayers, Narouz
quickly drives his dagger into the wooden beam through the long
sleeves of his coarse gown." Shortly the magzub "sank to a
kneeling position on the dry earth with both hands still crucified
to the wall" and" turned his eyes upwards into his skull with what
seemed to be a fatigue which almost resembled death" (Durrell,
1958,154).
Darrell's magzub is a man who seems to be driven into madness
by his feverish desire to know God and the weight of the divine
knowledge he gained and the approximation of God he attained,
perhaps while he remained for years alone in the desert. The
occupation that Narouz describes as almost too heavy for a
mortal to bear cannot possibly be of a worldly nature since the
Magzub is a man who seems completely detached from ordinary
social affairs. He wears a coarse gown and inhabits" a great
deserted yard" where he lives by himself among "shattered
fragments of dwellings and dust – blown tombs"
(Durrell,1958,153)
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It is interesting, however, that while it is the East that has always
been reputed for its belief in the supernatural spiritual abilities of
magzubs, it is Durrell and not Mahfouz who represents a magzub
who lives up to his name. Notably, it is Mahfouz‘s magzub who
is drawn to actual size realia. Mahfouz‘s magzub is what
Egyptians call a ―baraka‖, i.e., something that people might
cherish as a good omen although it has no practical value while
Durrell‘s is the folkloric Egyptian magzub incarnate. Behind this
is perhaps Durrell‘s typical fascination with the East. Coming so
close to the wonderland of his preconceptions, Durrell could only
see what he saw across the sea from another continent. Maybe he
did not live in the real Alexandria or with real Alexandrians but
rather looked for pictures to match his fixed notions about the
East. He was investing in his preconceived notions about the
mysterious east and giving his readers something they craved.
Mahfouz, on the other hand, is already part of the picture.
Perhaps one day he really sat beside Sheikh Darwish in Kirsha‘s
coffeehouse and saw him falling asleep in the middle of an
absurd sentence. Maybe Mahfouz felt that it was his duty to open
the eyes of his countrymen to the realities of magzubs who are
not all of them as peaceful or harmless as Sheikh Darwish. The
common practice of an Egyptian magzub would be to make a
living by deceiving people out of their money by pretending to
have supernatural powers that he does not really have. So in this
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particular respect, Mahfouz‘s book is perhaps meant to have an
educative illuminative purpose. Mahfouz is an eye on events and
a look from the inside and it is not easy for a person to perceive
the fascination of a landscape of which he himself is a part. He
had to make a halt and give a real- to -life magzub especially at
that era when Egyptian novels had a tradition of introducing
magzubs who at least successfully predicted the future. Whatever
sentences they occasionally dropped here or there would have
unmistakable bearing on the future and reveal an inexplicable
insight into people‘s innermost motives and thoughts.

138
 WORKS CITED
Deep, Maruis.(1991). ―Naguib Mahfouz‘s Midaq Alley: A socio-
cultural Analysis in Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz.
Edited by Trevor Le Gassick. Washington: Three Continents: 27-
37.

Durrell, Lawrence. (1958). Balthazar.USA: Pocket Books.

Mahfouz, Naguib.(1989).Midaq Alley.6th ed. Translated by

Trevor Le Gassick. Cairo:AUC Press.

Mahfouz, Naguib.(1947).Midaq Alley. Egypt: Egypt Library

Press.

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