GABRIELLE WATLING
Embarrassing Origins:
Colonial Mimeticism and the Metropolis
in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men and
Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending.
In a Times Literary Supplement article of 1964, V. S. Naipaul outlined the
influence of the British canon on his thinking and wrote pessimistically of
Trinidad's inability to provide him with appropriate models for his writing:
To us, without a mythology, all literatures were foreign. Trinidad was
small, remote and unimportant, and we knew we could not hope to
read books of the life we saw about us. Books came from afar; they
could offer only fantasy ... more and more, as I grew older and thought
of writing myself, [they] made me despairingly conscious of the
poverty and haphazardness of my own society. I might adapt Dickens
to Trinidad; but it seemed impossible that the life I knew in Trinidad
could ever be turned into a book. If landscapes do not start to be real
until they have been interpreted by an artist, so, until they have been
written about, societies appear to be without shape and embarrassing
Fiction or any work of the imagination, whatever its quality, hallows
its subject. To attempt, with a full consciousness of established
authoritative mythologies, to give a quality of myth to what was agreed
to be petty and ridiculous - Frederick Street in Port of Spain, Marine
Square, the districts of Laventille and Barataria - to attempt to use
these names required courage. (Naipaul in Hamner p.18)
So it is not surprising that when Naipaul did write about the Caribbean, he
chose the narrative authority of a Western form and his characters identified
with Western ideals, rejecting their "embarrassing", "petty and ridiculous"
West Indian backgrounds. Peggy Nightingale sympathises with Naipaul's
depiction of "the failure of a shattered society to provide an individual with a
coherent self-concept" (Nightingale, 105), and with his use of history, which
"promise[s] a means to the discovery - or imposition - of order [and] imposes a
pattern on events that are themselves unplanned, chaotic, unrelated in most
people's minds" (Nightingale, 1034). However, Naipaul's attempts to impose
literary order on his chaotic homeland, to "hallow [his] subject", have resulted
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in a collection of tragic heroes whose inability to comprehend their
environment forces them into madness, death and exile.
Naipaul's TLS article invests writing with the power to "[organise] social
existence and social reproduction". In interpreting his country's landscapes,
Naipaul is trying to write Trinidad "into order". But the "internal sense of
belonging" created by the discourse of English Literature with which Naipaul
identifies, also creates "an outward sense of otherness" (Foucault in Terdiman,
p. 54) which results in Biswas' madness and Ralph Singh's exile and reveals
the resistance, inherent in all discourse, to discursive organisation of so-called
social "truths". Naipaul finds himself ambivalently placed as both a West
Indian in Britain and the interpolated subject of Western literary discourse in
Trinidad. This results in his experiencing both the "sense of belonging" and the
"sense of otherness" which characterises Ralph Singh's experiences as the
colonial "mimic man". As Homi Bhabha suggests, the necessarily chaotic
nature of one's environment makes it impossible to produce a "coherent [written]
self-concept" without its being disrupted by the pressures which both hold it
together and force its fragmentation: "the [text's] ... narrative authority and
control [are] lost, precisely because the very objective of narrative - its
plenitude, its signification of a unitary real ... [is] each time, uncannily
interrupted or left incomplete" (Bhabha,1984,116). These effects of colonial
discourse can be seen in Naipaul's use of the bildungsroman form in The Mimic
Men (1967) and in Sam Selvon's parody of the migrant's desire for Britain's
"authentic" culture, Moses Ascending (1975). The efforts of Naipaul's Singh,
and Selvon's Moses to disavow their Caribbean pasts in favour of Britain's
legitimate history are disturbed by the "uncanny forces of race, sexuality,
violence, cultural and even climatic differences" and their memoirs "emerge in
the colonial discourse as [one of] the mixed and split texts of hybridity"
(Bhabha, 1985, 155). In particular, the form of Naipaul's novel is disrupted as
it becomes clear that the motivating fantasy of rejuvenation and cohesion
cannot succeed in the face of the "other" disavowed knowledges (race, sexuality
etc.) which disarticulate the notion of a Western unified self. The resulting
interrogation not only disrupts Singh's fantasy of a coherent self but also
questions the authority and authenticity of the culture from which the fantasy
has originated.
Ralph Singh adopts a Western gaze through which he can only regard his
hybrid cultural background with despair, and, guided by the "great" European
literary tradition, he writes his memoirs in order to organise the "unplanned,
chaotic" events of his life into some kind of meaningful a pattern. But this
yearning for a Western unity is not the inevitable condition of the colonial text.
Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending parodies the anxiety felt by Naipaul's
characters and reveals a fractured dominant culture which is incapable of
supporting either its own fantasy of identity or the fantasies of its colonial
subjects. Moses too writes his memoirs, but he renegotiates the status of the
"memoir" as a sign of literary authority. Instead of lending substance and
legitimacy to his book, Britain's borrowed literary models are reduced to
Moses' own level, and are consequently hollowed of their status as signifiers of
cultural legitimacy.
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69
If the transportation of the Western bildungsroinan to the colonies has the
effect of revealing the instability of its source, instead of consolidating that
source's authority, then the migration of the native to the centre will reveal
even greater fractures in the structure of European authority. The Western book
becomes "an uncertain textual sign" (Bhabha, 1985, 147) when its bildungsroman
form is displaced from the European to Ralph Singh, the native writer.
Similarly, Singh's appropriation and displacement of other Western signs the politician, the successful businessman, the successful businessman's wife and
European house - from the spatial and temporal sites through which their
meanings have previously been organised, are unwittingly robbed of the
transparency which allows them to operate in European hands as signifiers of
authority in both the metropolis and the colonies. By attempting to construct a
coherent persona for himself from the clichés of British culture, Singh
unintentionally reveals the effort with which the coloniser's coherent façade
is maintained.
As a young colonial student in London, Singh replaces his island persona
with that of his successful English landlord:
I paid Mr. Shylock three guineas a week for a tall, multi-mirrored,
book-shaped room with a coffin shaped wardrobe. And for
Mr. Shylock, the recipient each week of fifteen times three guineas,
the possessor of a mistress and of suits made of cloth so fine I felt I
could eat it, I had nothing but admiration ... I thought Mr Shylock
looked distinguished, like a lawyer or businessman or politician. He
had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to
listen. I thought the gesture attractive; I copied it. (MM 7)
But Singh is mimicking a mimic, a Jew who dies soon after his introduction to
the novel. Shylock's uncertain status and rapid disappearance from the novel
indicate the instability of Singh's models. His fantasy of the genteel dandy
has no referent, even in Britain. The colonial influence which serves as a rolemodel reveals Ralph Singh's fear of his own split subjectivity. He desires the
life of the British aristocrat but also adopts the persona of "the picturesque
Asiatic" (287). Vivek Dhareshwar points out that Singh's "double exclusion"
from life in both Isabella and London is a result of a process of self-fashioning.
He identifies Singh's anxiety as the desire for a "fresh start" on one hand and
the fear of extinction on the other:
The process of mimicry, the constitution of a certain type of colonial
identity, must be understood as a direct response to the exercise of
colonial power which, as Bhabha has shown, produces the "crucial
bind of pleasure and power" thus making possible the creation of an
identity held together as much by mastery and pleasure as by anxiety
and defence. (92)
Singh's inability to escape his past on the island or to inscribe his "fresh start"
on Britain reveals the endless deferral of the colonial fantasy as the model of
British authenticity is "always already" elsewhere.
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In order to entertain the fantasy of the metropolis, Singh must disavow the
reality of his native Isabella. His "life apart" in the colonial school is an
example of this:
We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that
touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in
the classroom: the name of a shop, the name of a street, the name of
street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these
things to which after the hours of school we were to return. We denied
the landscape and the people we could see out of open doors and
windows, we who took apples to the teacher and wrote essays about
visits to temperate farms. Whether we dissected a hibiscus flower or
recited the names of Isabellan birds, school remained a private
hemisphere. (MM 114-115)
Denial of "the landscape and the people we could see out of open doors" situates
the Western school as the constructed "elsewhere" of Singh's fantasies. But as
Dhareshwar points out, "such attempts at simplification, at subjecting himself
to the stereotypes as the scene of fantasy, are always threatened by the very
elements that they are trying to deny, disavow or suppress" (89). The "other
knowledges", the reality of life on Isabella, threaten to expose the fragile
nature of Singh's fantasy. This threat comes perilously close when his school
friend Hok is forced to publicly cross the line between the bracketed life of
school and the "shameful" and "secret" domestic world of his family. Hok's
own fantasy, the world of The Heroes, collapses when his mother appears in
the street and Hok is forced by the other boys and the teacher to acknowledge
her. Singh makes the comparison:
What difference between the mother of Perseus and that mother 1
What difference between the white, blue and dark green landscapes
he had so recently known and that street! Between the street and the
Chinese section of the Carnegie Library; between the placid shopping
mother and the name of Confucius her son had earned amongst us
for his wit and beauty". (117)
Singh avoids similar situations which might link him with life on the Island.
When he witnesses the aftermath of a drowning while on holidays, he lets his
friend Deschampsneufs tell the story at school to avoid being associated with
local events (135).
Singh rests his hopes for self-identity on Britain's restorative power and
the claims to cultural authenticity, which he believes colonial Isabella cannot
make. His failed marriage and disastrous political career in Isabella lead him
back to Britain, where he adopts the fantasy of the retired country gentleman:
"My imagination, feeding on the words 'country' and 'hotel' created pictures of
gardens and tranquillity, coolness and solitude, twittering hedgerows and
morning walks, spacious rooms and antique reverences. They were what I
required" (297). But the static, elegant Britain required by Singh is a myth.
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71
What he finds is a Britain traversed with highways where the inhabitants
only stop to die:
[I]t was holiday time, as I quickly discovered: the season of ice-cream
tubs and soft-drink bottles, pissing children and sandwich wrappings.
Hotels were full and squalid or half-full and very squalid
Ceilings
were decayed, cramping partitions paper-thin, forty watt light bulbs
naked; and always in tattered sitting rooms there were tattered copies
of motorcar magazines, travel magazines, airline annuals. Country
roads were highways and gardens car-parks. Tall hedgerows, which
prevented escape from packed holiday motorcars, turned narrow
lanes into green tunnels of death and destruction; broken glass was
crushed to powder at intersections. And there were the inns of death
itself, areas of complete calm, where the very old had gathered to die.
(298)
...
Singh's own hotel is a place to which the dispossessed escape because there
is nowhere else to go. Having alienated themselves from one life, they have
failed to turn their desire for a "fresh start" into reality in the colonial centre.
Singh discovers that the source of his fantasy is as fractured and hybridised as
Isabella and that he is condemned to life as a mimic of an endlessly deferred
self-presence and unachievable social coherence and stability.
Ralph Singh adopts "characters" for his locations - "the dandy, the
celebrant, 'the Picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes and the 'intruder"
(Dhareshwar, 79) - but fails to find a comfortable space for himself regardless
of his character or position. In Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending, Moses, a West
Indian immigrant, also creates a character and dreams of fresh starts. After
buying his house in Shepherd's Bush, Moses tells his fellow West Indian roommate, Galahad: "This is the parting of the ways
You can have this whole
basement room to yourself. When I leave here, my past will be behind me, you
inclusive" (2-3). When Moses adopts a character, he, like Singh, favours an
illusory white, British respectability. His dismissal of Galahad is reminiscent
of Prince Hal's disavowal of Falstaff after his accession to the throne:
"Presume not that I am the thing I was,/For God doth know, so shall the world
perceive,/That I have turned away from my former self./So will I those that
kept me company" (2 Henry IV, Vv, 57-60). In his new role as "Master of the
house" (4), Moses similarly tells Galahad: "You may visit when you feel like
it, but remember your station. There will be no bonhomie 'tween us" (3). Selvon's
parody works because it reflects on the textual authority of Shakespeare,
drawing it into the realm of the comic and inappropriate, whereas the
canonical English names remain untouched ideals in Naipaul, as if aspiring to
them should still be possible. The "hallowing" of the Caribbean which
Naipaul hopes to achieve by "adapt[ing] Dickens to Trinidad" is revealed as a
"hollowing" gesture by Selvon's parody of such desires.
Like Singh, Moses finds a temporarily unified self in the borrowed guise of
a Western cliché, the English writer and landlord:
...
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After all these years paying rent, I had the ambition to own my
property in London, no matter how ruinous or dilapidated it was. If you
are a tenant, you catch your arse for ever, but if you are a landlord, it is
a horse of a different colour. Take the HP, for instance:
"Er, Mr. Moses, er, I'm sorry about this procedure, but we usually
ask if our customers know anyone who will be prepared to act as
guarantor? Perhaps your landlord?"
"1 beg your pardon, I am the landlord."
"Oh ... how silly of me ... if you'll just sign the form here, SIR ... sit
down ... use my chair."
I can also be on the other side of the door when people come to
look for rooms.
"Is the landlord in?"
"I am the landlord."
"Oh ... I'm looking for a room."
"I don't let out to black people."
SLAM.
I might even qualify for jury service.
"1 hereby deem you a rogue and a vagabond. You will go to jail,
you worthless scamp, and await Her Majesty's pleasure."
These are only some of the privileges that would be mine. (MA 2)
But Moses' experiences mock the desire for the coloniser's unity and reveal that
unity as mythical. Once Moses becomes a mimic man, he unintentionally
renegotiates the authority of the adopted culture's claims. Moses' authority
and pretensions to intellectualism are constantly interrupted by the "other
knowledges" which immigration has brought to Britain. His house is occupied
by Pakistanis, West Indians, Australians and a British "migrant" from the
"Black Country," his manservant, Bob, all of whom eventually override his
authority as landlord and interrupt his fantasies of middle-class
respectability.
If Moses cannot achieve his desires in Britain, then neither can anyone else.
And that includes members of the Black Power movement who occupy his
basement. The Black Power group represents an aspiration to a black
authenticity in a paradoxical reversal of Moses' (and Singh's) desires for a
white respectability. The movement is personified by Galahad, Moses' onetime flatmate and competitor for the attentions of Brenda, the Black Power coordinator. Moses, who has one eye on his new middle-class status, is suspicious
of Galahad's efforts to press-gang him into the Black Power movement. In
adopting Black Power, Galahad too is trying to replace his hybrid West Indian
background with an authentic negro culture, which is reminiscent of the search
for ancestral "roots" by African peoples in North America and the Caribbean at
the time the book was written. But Moses' appraisal of Galahad's "Black
Power glad rags" overlays Galahad's efforts to achieve a coherent racial
identity with the very West Indian knowledge which Galahad is trying to
disavow:
He arrived in his Black Power glad rags. Starting from foot to
head, he have on a pair of platforms, yellow socks, purple corduroy
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73
trousers, a leather belt about six inches broad with a heavy brass
buckle and some fancy, spiky chunks of metal studded in it ("That's
my weapon. Look." He haul the belt right out of the loops and wield it
like a Viking. "I will slaughter a white man one day.") ... Round his
neck he had a heavy chain like what peasants in Trinidad tether their
cattle with ... When I opened the door Galahad raise his right hand up
in the air making a fist of his fingers as if he going to bust a cuff in my
arse, and say, paradoxically, "Peace brother. Black is beautiful." (10)
Moses' description of Galahad's affected Western clothing, Viking-like pose
and aggressive "peace" salute question the movement's credibility and reduce
its status as an influential lobby group to that of a fashionable tyranny. Any
authority which Galahad hopes to exercise over Moses is undercut by comments
such as "Round his neck he had a heavy chain like what peasants in Trinidad
tether their cattle with." Selvon, like Trinh T. Minh-ha, is suspicious of
"strategies of reversal" (Trinh, 72), such as the Black Power movement, which
simply invert the master/slave relationship instead of deconstructing the need
for such oppositions. As a Caribbean Hindu, Selvon sees Black Power as merely
another example of one minority trying to claim authority over others. He
argued in a 1979 address:
Caribbean people carry their bad habits with them wherever they
go, and as Federation collapsed in the islands, so constant
disagreement kept them apart. When Black Power came into vogue,
it widened the gulf and emphasised the displacement of the Indian.
Black Power was never for the "coloured" races as such. It was for the
black man only. Like the White Bogey, we now had the Black Bogey to
contend with. And once again, the strategy of keeping people apart, of
creating division, came into operation. The wheel of history groans
and squeaks as it repeats itself, but the process is everlasting, for the
lesson is never learnt. (19)
Moses Ascending satirises Black Power's claims to both authenticity and
authority by revealing its complicity with Western power structures and their
temptations. The group's American leader spends his time in London driving a
Mercedes which he lends to Galahad for picking up girls. And his hasty
departure from London with the movement's embezzled funds overturns any
title to political authority or racial solidarity which the group's elite may
have claimed for themselves. The "wheel of history" which displaced the
African in the eighteenth century has now turned, and it is the African who is
exercising power over other West Indian minority groups. Selvon says of
cultural definitions, "In defining the Trinidadian, we have got to remember
that everyone of us comes from immigrant stock, unless we can claim ancestry
with an indigenous Carib or Arawak" (1979, 21).
Moses resists incorporation into the authenticating Black Power movement
but does not see the irony of his own reversal of the master/slave opposition in
his relationship with Bob, his white "man Friday", whom he describes as "a
willing worker, eager to learn the ways of the Black man" (4). Nor does he
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notice the irony in his search for authentic ethnic experience amongst his
tenants. While contemplating material for his memoirs, Moses decides to
question his Pakistani tenants in order to trace the ethnic experiences which
Galahad has accused him of avoiding:
In this selfsame house dwelt two Pakis who might provide the very
impetus I so sorely needed to get back my opus! Men of mystery and
topicality, men in the news and views, for it is a well-established fact
that when the communication media tired of lambasting the Blacks
and the Paddies, they take a lag in Paki arse. (MA, 45)
Moses hopes to find "men of mystery and topicality" who will provide him
with a Pakistani "knowledge." But Faizull and Farouk appear to have no
interest in establishing an authenticating movement in Britain and claim no
ethnic privilege for themselves. Moses sets out to discover a Pakistani "truth",
but instead tries to incorporate his tenants into an already known set of
stereotypes:
"I am talent scouting for the BBC," I say. "I am looking for
interesting subjects who could appear on This is Your Life."
"That's an ITV programme," he say.
"1 am a freelance," I explain. I was forgettuig that these days
every manjack looks at television, like drinking a glass of water or
putting on a shirt.
"You'd better see Farouk about that," Faizull say. "Nothing
interesting ever happens to me. I just go to work, and come home to
sleep and eat, like everybody else"
"You Pakis must have it rough just like we West Indians." I tried
again. "Haven't you ever been addressed as a black bastard?"
"No," he say.
"No skinhead ever bash you?"
"No" he say. "1 live a very ordinary life. I just go to work and come
home to eat and sleep." (MA, 46-7)
In resisting the Pakistani stereotypes, Farouk constructs himself as the
"manjack" of Moses' disappointment. Farouk and Faizull cannot be "placed" in
terms of any existing model as they do lead interesting lives helping other
Pakistanis to illegally enter Britain. However, their status as disinterested
transporters of Pakistani immigrants is also problematic as their motives
appear to be exclusively economic and they make no claims to any Islamic
brotherhood, even though they observe Islamic holidays and religious feasts.
They have "no real [culture] to return to" (Trinh, 72) but their adoption of
Western business practices is also informed by their native "knowledges". Their
identity circulates between contradictory signs of ethnicity and Westernisation
and, despite Moses' attempts to create a knowable portrait of the Pakistani in
Britain, they are literally impossible to describe.
Moses and Singh both desire an uninscribed place onto which they can
inscribe a new life "a fresh start" - for themselves. But they also hope to
participate in an existing culture on which they inscribe their fantasies about a
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75
unified Britain. They fail on both counts because Britain is neither the
"uninscribed space" nor an "authentic and unified culture". In writing their
memoirs, both Singh and Moses speak from a space which has clearly already
been inscribed, not with the culture of secluded and genteel country hotels, but
with the knowledges of all its inhabitants, including his own hybridised West
Indian culture, and in so doing, they rob the sign of civilised and genteel
Britain, and its agent of transmission to the colonies, the "book", of their
transparency. As a child, Ralph Singh suspects that his native Isabella will
not be able to fulfil his fantasies of order and originality and so looks for them
in the metropolis. Moses Ascending mocks the idea that Britain can provide a
"unitary real" for anyone regardless of whether they identify with the
Western myth of authority or another "authentic" cultural model such as the
Black Power movement. Moses is a caricature of the migrant who wants to
become "more British than the British" as his efforts only confirm that the
"British" no longer exist as a transparent sign of cultural authority. This also
has implications for the Anglo Saxon British as the culture of noblesse oblige
and class privilege through which they identify themselves is no longer
tenable in a world shot through with knowledges which do not recognise it.
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Dhareshwar, V. "Self-Fashioning, Colonial Habitus and Double Exclusion: V.S.
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