Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Postcolonial Memory
Abstract
European colonialism in the modern era of countries in Africa and the Caribbean is often
characterised as primarily being a situation of domination and oppression of the colonised by
the colonial powers. In this paper, I explore the significance of the works of Jean Rhys and
Derek Walcott in challenging such a reductive view of colonialism, and producing a profound
attitude of ambivalence and ambiguity in postcolonial discourse. I argue such an attitude is
simply the result of attempting to account for the complex situation and diverse legacies of
colonialism. Rhys and Walcott do this by rigorously examining the colonised-coloniser
relationship, not through the lens of imperial politics and power, but from the perspective of
person-to-person relations and culture. In Rhys’s case, her novel Wide Sargasso Sea reveals
the mutual trauma of the colonised and the coloniser, the latter being presented as wielding a
highly unstable power and authority. Walcott’s poetry illuminates the formerly colonised
subject’s ambivalence towards the European cultural heritage he has inherited at least in part
– an ambivalence which is present in and fuels the building up of a new, plural cultural
identity in the aftermath of colonialism. Walcott and Rhys are hence valuable in reshaping
our perspectives of colonialism, allowing us to think of colonial history without the standard
binaries that often pervades postcoloniality.
Keywords: Postcolonial theory; Derek Walcott; Jean Rhys; Caribbean literature; imperialism
Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Postcolonial Memory
‘Sometimes I wonder if you’ve lost your speech.’
…Wave after wave of memory silts the mind.1
– Derek Walcott, ‘A Careful Passion’
Colonial memory is a shifting sand; it is a story in which the line between narrators and
characters is often blurred. I prefer to use the word ‘memory’ rather than ‘history’ because
there is a fundamental ambiguity, a haze of uncertainty that shrouds postcolonial discourse,
as it did the Nellie at the outset of Heart of Darkness. When we look at texts from the
colonial powers from the point-of-view of postcolonial theory, we often find a sense of
repressed memory with regard to the unspeakable narrative of domination. Thus we tend to
ask, and rightly so: What is it that the text cannot say?2 But when the colonised subject
himself, the proverbial ‘subaltern’, speaks, the question we ask has to be: What, indeed, can
he say? We expect to hear anger, horror, hatred – and indeed we do. But we also hear an
attitude of profound ambivalence towards the legacies of colonialism, one which postcolonial
theory cannot ignore.
I
It is tempting to think of the colonised subject’s discourse in terms of a straightforward
dialectic of oppressor versus oppressed. It is not that such a paradigm of colonialism is false;
it is true, but only half-true.3 Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is an important work in the
discourse of the colonised subject because it situates itself within such a dialectic and by
participating in it questions its validity, resulting in an overall attitude of ambivalence
towards the colonial enterprise. It does so, primarily, through its focus on the psychology of
the characters and the patchwork of narrative voices that comprise the novel, which
interpreted in the light of postcolonial theory shed light on the complexity of the experience
of colonisation.
The romance and subsequent breakdown of the relationship between Antoinette Cosway
and the unnamed Rochester acts as an extended metaphor for the multifaceted relationship
between the colonised and the coloniser. It is a relationship that does not permit us to react
merely with righteous indignation or anger, but also with sympathy and sensitivity. Rochester
is in many ways the reluctant colonialist, sent to the Caribbean to procure a wife as a means
of economic reconciliation in his family. This very fact questions any reductionist view of the
coloniser’s motives. Colonialism, though often barbaric in the expression of its domination, is
seldom (if ever) barbarism for the sake of barbarism, conquest simply to take land ‘away
from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves’.4 There
is a plurality of motives on the colonialist’s part – which is not to suggest that any of these
motives are particularly justifiable, but simply that a reductionist view of colonialism as sheer
oppression and violence would be misguided.
Rhys also examines the psychology of the colonialist. Rochester, if initially reluctant, is
also seduced by the exoticism of the islands:
1
Derek Walcott, ‘A Careful Passion’ in Selected Poetry (Oxford: Heinemann, 1993), p. 7.
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 87.
3
C.f. David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), p. 1; ‘We should not see the colonial
situation as one of straightforward oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. Alongside violence and
domination, we might also see the last five hundred years as a period of complex and varied cultural contact and
interaction.’.
4
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 7.
2
It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret
loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing – I want what it hides
– that is not nothing.5
This image of exoticism – indeed, the very concept of what is exotic – is the result of a
construction of the Other, ‘untouched’, virginal, waiting to be conquered, what Edward Said
called the ‘Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient’.6 There is a striking
echo of this image construction of the Other in Derek Walcott’s poem, ‘To a Painter in
England’, when he says:
…I
Send this to remind you of personal islands
For which Gauguins sicken…
You who defined with an imperious palette
The several postures of this virginal island…7
Western conquest, in the context of Rhys’s novel, is symbolised by Rochester’s sexual
conquest over Antoinette, in a relationship that begins with a mutual search for happiness and
trust. It is this relationship that puts a human face onto the reality of colonialism, a face that
defies easy caricatures. While Antoinette is, at the end, the obvious victim of the colonial
relationship, being transformed into the mysterious madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre, in
the process of which even losing her name, Rochester is not unworthy of our sympathy. The
Western image of the virginal Other is challenged by Daniel Cosway’s remark, ‘You are not
the first to kiss her pretty face’ (WSS, p. 80). Rochester’s subsequent rejection of the idealised
image of exoticism is thus summed up by his words:
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I
hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. (WSS, p. 111)
There is a sense of trauma and betrayal, more than just guilt, which more adequately
explains why seemingly benign texts from the colonial powers like Jane Eyre and Mansfield
Park cannot speak of the colonial experience. The oppressor is a victim of his own pursuit, a
dynamic not, for the most part, reflected by imperial politics and economics. It can only be
read on the human face. Our ‘definitions of power’, as Walcott puts it, ‘must go beyond the
immediately political’.8 Rochester, despite taking on the role of the colonialist and thinking
himself able to rely on the law, finds in the world of obeah and magic an alternate power
structure represented by the likes of Christophine, who ‘dismantl[es] his coded message of
imperial power’ when she says, ‘No police here… No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark
jail either. This is free country and I am free woman’ (WSS, p. 103).9
One of the means by which the colonial power structure is subverted in Wide Sargasso Sea
can be interpreted in the light of Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry. In the same way that
mimicry in colonial discourse normalises the colonised subject by creating a ‘reformed,
recognizable Other’ who can be appropriated,10 Antoinette’s mimicry of Rochester undercuts
his authority, as when she mimics him saying, ‘She won’t stay very much longer’ (WSS, p.
5
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 54.
Edward W. Said, ‘Crisis [in orientalism]’ in David Lodge and Nigel Wood (eds), Modern Criticism and
Theory: A Reader (Essex: Pearson Education, 2000), p. 274.
7
‘To a Painter in England’ in Walcott, pp. 2-3.
8
Walcott, ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry? (1974)’ in Robert D. Hamner (ed.), Critical Perspectives on
Derek Walcott (Colorado, Lynne Rienner, 1997), p. 52.
9
Angela Smith, ‘Introduction’ to WSS, pp. xix-xx.
10
Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’ in Philip Rice and Patricia
Waugh (eds), Modern Literary Theoy: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 361.
6
94). Antoinette becomes a ‘blurred copy’ of the coloniser who becomes a ‘threatening’ force
to his power. 11 This mimicry from the colonised subject ‘disrupts the authority of the
colonizer’s language, and can reveal an inherent absurdity in the colonial enterprise’; as with
the confused parrot who mimics French and Creole patois, the fundamental question we ask
the coloniser is, ‘Who is there?’.12
It is hard, then, to understate the subversive quality of Wide Sargasso Sea in the face of the
standard paradigm about colonial domination and oppression, though such a paradigm also
exists. The complexity of the colonial reality forces us to rethink any simplistic binaries of
oppressor versus oppressed, but instead leads us to feel a certain ambivalence about the
colonial legacy. It is not that oppression does not take place – the familiar motif of the
Caribbean as a garden paradise that has been despoiled recurs throughout Wide Sargasso Sea,
and one finds concurrence in Walcott’s ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’ when he says:
What was the Caribbean? A green pond mantling
behind the Great House columns of Whitehall,
behind the Greek façades of Washington,
with bloated frogs squatting on lily pads
like islands…13
But Rhys expands the dialectic of oppression from within by giving Antoinette, the colonised
subject previously silenced in Jane Eyre, a voice, as well as presuming to take on the voice of
Rochester, the coloniser. Being herself from the West Indies, the whole novel becomes a
work of meta-mimicry, weaving together different narrative voices and perspectives to
highlight the complexity of colonial relationships. As the dictum goes, ‘nations themselves
are narrations’;14 using narration and counter-narration within the same novel, Rhys subtly
questions the validity of reductive postcolonial narrations. Given the mutual trauma of the
colonial experience and the instability of imperial power, it is thus important that we make
use of the hermeneutic tools of postcolonial theory to prevent any slippage into a one-sided
narrative view.
II
‘There is always the other side, always.’
– Antoinette Cosway (WSS, p. 82.)
There is a certain nebulous quality to the memory of colonial domination, and Rhys is not
alone in the Caribbean in articulating a sense of ambivalence about the experience of
colonisation. If on the part of European authors there is a repression of memory, the
psychology of the colonised subject suggests selective historical amnesia, whether deliberate
or otherwise. ‘Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now,’
(WSS, p. 39) says Antoinette in response to Rochester’s question about the name of the
village Massacre. Walcott says more poignantly in his Nobel Lecture, ‘The sigh of History
meant nothing here [in the Antilles]… We make too much of that long groan which
11
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: Key Concepts (London: Routledge,
2000), p. 114.
12
Smith, pp. xviii-xix.
13
Walcott, ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’ in Collected Poems 1948-1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1986), p. 393.
14
Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. xiii
underlines the past’.15 Forgetfulness is not forgiveness, but perhaps the former prepares the
way for the latter. It seems one must forget a little in order to forgive more.
Walcott is certainly not an author who can be accused of any postcolonial ‘Stockholm
Syndrome’, as it were, with regard to his relationship with the former colonial power. There
is no genuflection to Europe in gratitude for the carrying of the so-called White Man’s
Burden all the way to Africa and the West Indies. Walcott recognises the reality of colonial
violence:
Corpses are scattered through a paradise…
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salient of colonial policy.16
And yet he makes known his ambivalence:
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?17
The ‘English tongue’ that Walcott professes his love is a synonym for the whole cultural
tradition of the West which formerly colonised subjects, in sharing the language of their
colonisers, now participate in as a colonial inheritance. Walcott sees this not as an
opportunity for revenge but as a possibility for creative reconciliation with the traumas of
one’s colonial memory, and as fertile ground for the creation of culture. With a mature sense
of forgiveness, perhaps by a little wilful forgetfulness, Walcott writes, ‘We know that we owe
Europe either revenge or nothing, and it is better to have nothing than revenge. We owe the
past revenge or nothing, and revenge is uncreative’.18
One crucial aspect of postcolonial theory, hence, is the development of new cultures and
national identities, shaped irrevocably by colonial memory. What is inescapable, perhaps, is
the postcolonial subject’s definition of oneself in terms of Europe, no longer as a ‘blurred
copy’, but as a cultural progeny, however ambiguous the formation of identity may continue
to be. It is telling, then, that one of Walcott’s early collections of poetry is entitled ‘In a
Green Night’, taken from Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘Bermudas’. Walcott’s poetry can be seen
as the fruition of a prolonged cultural encounter between Europe and West Indian lands,
whose identities and destinies are interwoven. Hence the European cultural presence for
Walcott’s poetry it does not make his Caribbean identity any less authentic, because Walcott
does not succumb to simplistic reactionary desires. Walcott makes this point rather directly in
‘The Schooner Flight’, saying, ‘I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, / I had a sound
colonial education, / I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m
a nation.’.19 Walcott then intuitively agrees with Salman Rushdie’s point that ‘[o]ur identity
is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times,
15
Walcott, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber and
Faber, 1998), p. 68.
16
‘A Far Cry from Africa’ in Walcott (1986), p. 17.
17
Ibid., p. 18.
18
Walcott (1974), p. 57.
19
‘The Schooner Flight’ in Walcott (1986), p. 346.
that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is
not an infertile territory for the writer to occupy’.20
The discourse of mimicry from the postcolonial subject, in this case, is no longer a
vindictive force, but a gathering of the fragments of memory, like the reassembling of the
fragments of a broken vase with a love ‘stronger than that love which took its symmetry for
granted when it was whole’, even if the pieces ‘are disparate, ill-fitting, [and] contain more
pain than their original sculpture’.21 We see this dynamic actively at work in poems like
‘Sainte Lucie’, an evocation of Walcott’s native country of Saint Lucia, in the mix of Creole
tongues with English:
I have forgotten
what pomme for
the Irish potato…
sea-bursts,
au bord de la ‘ouvière.
Come back to me,
my language.
Come back…
moi c’est gens Ste. Lucie.
C’est la moi sorti;
is there that I born.22
The dislocation and disorientation of the colonial experience reveals itself in the fragmented
memory of the postcolonial subject, and language becomes a symptom of this fragmentation
and a tool for reassembling the broken pieces, through a process of self-examination and
rediscovery.
The colonial legacy, then, is a source of vitality, even as it is rooted in pain. There is, amid
the ambivalence of postcolonialism, a lingering sense of injustice that postcolonial theory
must deal with, especially when expressed in such raw terms as Antoinette’s words,
‘Justice… It’s a cold word. I tried it out… I wrote it down several times and always it looked
like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice’ (WSS, p. 94). Yet if we are not, as Walcott
says, to seek revenge, whence do we find consolation? For Walcott, it is not in the
uncertainty of memory, but in a sense of history. With an epic sensibility, he writes in the
poem ‘Sea Grapes’ that ‘a schooner beating up the Caribbean // for home, could be Odysseus,
/ home-bound on the Aegean’.23 Walcott situates the post-Enlightenment colonial enterprise
in the context of the ‘ancient war / between obsession and responsibility’ which ‘will never
finish and has been the same’. 24 We observe a similar contextualisation in Marlow’s
evocation of the Romans going to England in ancient times in Heart of Darkness.25
This rethinking of the overarching postcolonial narrative suggests that post-Enlightenment
colonialism is the successor to a long lineage of conquest and domination, dynamics that
have been present from the earliest times of human civilisation. Nothing of the cruelty or
oppression of colonialism is justified by such a rethinking, of course, but it gives us an added
perspective, forcing us to re-evaluate our reductive categories and to accept a certain sense of
ambiguity about the nature of colonialism. It is easy, as a form of postcolonial hand-biting, to
20
Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 15.
21
Walcott (1998), p. 69.
22
‘Sainte Lucie’ in Walcott (1986), 310-14.
23
‘Sea Grapes’ in ibid., p. 297.
24
Ibid.
25
Conrad, p. 7.
politicise modern colonialism with the politics of skin colour. Chinua Achebe does precisely
this in his lecture ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in which he
accuses Joseph Conrad of an ‘obsession’ and ‘fixation on blackness’, because of the sentence
‘A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms’ in the novel –
‘as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms!’,
Achebe retorts.26 In many ways, just as the image of the Orient is constructed by the West to
justify colonialism, much of colonial bitterness stems from a constructed image of racial
politics, essentially reductionist in nature with regard to framing the postcolonial narrative –
as if all that mattered to European powers was the colour of their colonised subjects’ skin.
Without wanting to suggest that race has not often been an important factor in image
construction, one simply cannot reduce colonised-coloniser relations to the issue of skin
colour. If not, what shall we say of those who were victims of imperial domination despite
sharing racial characteristics with their colonisers? Race does not always lend itself to easy
binaries, either – we hear the young Antoinette’s confrontation with the reality that ‘[o]ld
time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger’
(WSS, p. 10).
Yet history and memory in postcolonial theory continue to be separated by a certain gulf.
The effects and legacies of colonialism are diverse – even rich – and postcolonial theory must
not be bound by reductive binaries about colonised-coloniser relations if it is to account for
the diverse reality of postcoloniality. Rhys and Walcott are valuable in reshaping the
dominant mode of postcolonial narration, shifting the nerve centre of discourse from political
power and domination to the power and domination of culture, intellect and the emotions.
Hence, postcolonialism continues to be marked by an inescapable ambiguity and
ambivalence. That is the fundamental attitude with which the formerly colonised subject who
inherits the literary and cultural traditions of Europe looks at the classics and evaluates his
memory of colonialism. One cannot help but be struck by the gap between the high-minded
philosophies of Western civilisation and the ‘prolonged and sordid cruelty of such practices
as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection’.27 At the same time, the
history of human civilisation reveals the inevitability of conflict and domination in one form
or another. Even as the postcolonial subject finds a voice with which to speak, his memory
continues to be silted by the waves of history. ‘The classics can console’, says Walcott, ‘But
not enough’.28
26
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ in Vincent Leitch (ed.), Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 1790.
27
Said (1993), p. xiv.
28
‘Sea Grapes’.
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—
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—
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