Anglophone Lifewritings and Formations of Colonial Identities
Session Coordinator: Julie Codell
Professor, Art History and English, Arizona State University
C/o School of Art--Mail Code 1505
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-1505
julie.codell@asu.edu

 

“Derek Walcott’s Omeros as Metissage”

Some have questioned Derek Walcott's New World epic Omeros (1990) because it relies so much on Western literary form, but Walcott has in fact manipulated that form in order to write back to the dominant discourse. His narrator plays the Augustinian memory: he travels around the globe and across time, reinterpreting and rewriting history for the postcolonial as best fits his present identity, as hybrid. Narrating as a collective as well as an individual "I," Walcott uses autobiography to attempt to make meaning and find identity for himself and those like him who fail to find their inheritance in the Western version of history, and he immerses this life writing within the epic form. The Greek art of metis is about metamorphosis; Walcott himself has argued that the postcolonial, rather than reject one part of his heritage in order to embrace the other, should accept both and emerge renewed. Omeros, then, is indeed a work of metissage—structurally as well as with content—and as such attempts to heal the postcolonial wound through a reinterpretation of both the epic of the Western literary canon and that canon's traditionally individualistic autobiography.
Carolyn Hall
University of Iowa
challbison@hotmail.com

 

“Memory, Identity, and Empire in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family”

Empire seems largely missing from Michael Ondaatje's 1982 autobiographical work, Running in the Family. Critics have complained the book is too ahistorical, too relentlessly and sentimentally focused on the private and the familial, that it does not situate the story of the author's family within the wider framework of Sri Lanka's colonial and postcolonial history. It is easy to see the book's preoccupation with memory and identity as Ondaatje seeks out stories, gives them multiple voices, and struggles to glimpse how they are linked to his own identity. However, this struggle almost always gets played out within the limited context of family. Memories in the book are personal, and identity for Ondaatje seems largely a function of coming to terms with family experiences and his own connection with his father. The discourse of memory in the book does not seem to include the memory of colonization, and the exploration of identity seems to ignore the long historical role British colonization played in its formation. To counter such a reading we need take a closer look at how Ondaatje's text weaves a subtle, perhaps even unconscious meditation on empire into the contours of what looks like a family romance.
Paul Jay
Loyola University Chicago
pjay@luc.edu

 

“A Residential School Memoir: Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days”

Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days (1988) heralded an explosion of writing about the residential school experience in Canada. A narrative re-creation of life at the Garnier Residential School told by one of its survivors, Indian School Days defied this institution’s self-chronicles and mobilized a collective response to the official silence these “protectorate” institutions had maintained. My paper draws on recent theory of the memoir to illuminate the historical work that Johnston performs in his residential school narrative. Central to my consideration is the undercurrent of resistance in this otherwise playful, reminiscent account—a resistance traceable to Johnston’s subversion of official discourses, descriptions of his classmates’ defiance of the priests’ absolute authority, and affirmation of collective resilience. Using memoir’s discursive and stylistic flexibility, Johnston reconstructs the daily life of the school with ludic humour and incisive criticism. By concentrating on the roguish behaviour of the students, antics that brought richness to their existence while also enabling their psychological survival, Johnston resists what Gerald Vizenor calls “hypotragic” versions of history. Indian School Days affirms the collective solidarity formed in this environment, a sense of community that was not broken by the personal and social trauma experienced within this institution.
Deena Rymhs
Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario
7dmr@qlink.queensu.ca

 

Indian Victorian: Gandhi's Autobiography

Anxious over the Western origins of autobiography, Gandhi does not write a "real autobiography" (his phrase) but records his "experiments" with truth in a tentative, open-ended life. A world full of temptations from sex to meat-eating shapes his development through many mini-conversions without the single dramatic conversion common in Victorian autobiographies. Such drama was modified by Gandhi's pragmatic use of domestic life as the mise-en-scene of his daily struggles. Gandhi's intercolonial subjectivity came from living in Britain, South Africa, and India. His time in England as a law student fashioned an incubation for his later "Indian" self: there he discovered Islam and even Hinduism. An admirer of Ruskin and Carlyle, Gandhi reinvented Carlyle's themes of repentance, austerity, abstinence, duty, and nationalism, and his metaphor of clothes as representing historical change in Sartor Resartus. Gandhi "Indianizes" Carlyle's hero by identifying his autobiographical subjectivity not with the anointed (Carlylean hero as divinity, prophet, king) but with the dispossessed and the feminine. Gandhi's bricolaged, diasporic self redefines "Victorian" to appropriate and resist Victorian post-industrial culture and idealize pre-industrial Britain, also idealized by Carlyle and Ruskin, as a model for India.
Julie Codell
Arizona State University
julie.codell@asu.edu