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it’s just in my nature

do you want to tell me you love me one more time?

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Dragons and Graves: Fantasy and Genocide Writing in Ratner’s In The Shadow of the Banyan

“The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination”

- Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

No living dragons reside within the landscape of Cambodia under genocide’s conditions. Instead we witness their colossal graves, and mourn what has been lost. The supplementation of fantastical tropes into genocide writing allows for the creation of a transcendental plane. This area of duality permits escapism from genocide. Mzali defines escapism as “allowing postcolonial writers to eschew the concrete, pending concerns of their respective countries through extensive references to mythical and magical events” (Mzali 13). Ratner, however, does not ‘eschew’ the concerns of her homeland. Instead, she infuses rich mythology through the methodology of “Buddhism, oral storytelling, and folklore tradition” (Dong 120). These tropes, highly evocative of pastoral and spiritual imagery, are able to provide an area of self-preserving sanctity for our child narrator, wherein she can cling to the pre-genocidal past. This arguably unrealistic model appears as Raami reads the ‘Reamker’ at the onset of the novel. Herein, the “bodies of men and monkeys and deities alike” (Ratner 24) fall from the sky. Through oral storytelling and folklore tradition, we relive Ratner’s experiences through the eyes of Raami, her fictionalised vessel in which to portray her memoir. However, the infusion of folklore corroborates Raami’s inability to assimilate the egregious conditions of genocide as a child ‘blinded’, and the liminality of trauma accessible through a child’s eyes materialises. In comparison, Madeline Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter prioritises the assimilation of facts, and knowledge of events. Thien’s descriptions are resultantly closer to the ‘truth’ of reality. However, Thien’s narrative mentions the imperative facet of genocide: there are “no landmarks” (Thien 121). As over “1,968 temples and 104 mosques” (Stearn 96) were ravaged by the Khmer Rouge, Ratner divulges the necessity of cultural preservation as the topography of spiritually was destroyed across her land. Fantasy may hinder upon the truth of genocide writing, but it remains a vital resource in the reclamation of identity. Fantasy used in conjunction with genocide writing resultantly allows for a space outside of liminal reality and linguistic spatiality: a place of necessity within genocide.

Raami’s folklore tales are gleaned via her deceased father through ‘oral tradition’. He creates a plane of combined reality and fantasy, such as “when we look at the full moon, we see a rabbit!” (Ratner 129). Her resultant devotion to the fantastical practice of folklore within the novel is thus inspired by a duality: to bear witness to both her father’s legacy and Cambodia itself, and moreover to extricate herself from the conditions of suffering. She firstly bears witness as “a writing back into history of what has deliberately been erased” (Hamdi 24). The deliberate erasure of her father by the Khmer Rouge can only be remedied if Ratner re-embodies him into the linguistic world within her narration. Reiterating the tales of her father to the public domain via fiction resultantly memorialises him. This is not only linguistically, but more importantly, by introducing his presence through narrative, he is reintroduced back into the human psyche through the reader’s eyes. The most succinct example of this is when she reiterates her father’s poetry. “A butterfly preening herself... a god waxing lyrical out of the silence” (Ratner 3). The delicate ‘butterfly’ is her mother, while the strong, patriarchal ‘god’ is her father. Above normative familial tropes, this original poetry stands as testament to the changes of circumstance. Raami’s father’s poetry once the genocide has begun is staunchly different. “Mine is a broken land, scarred and broken by hate – on a path to self-extermination” (Ratner 121). The language is markedly different, ‘preening’ and ‘silence’ standing in staunch opposition with ‘broken…scarred…hate’. This is because through genocidal events, we enter the realm of the impersonal. While few may relate their maternal figures with the imagery of the ‘butterfly’, the ‘broken land’ would be relevant to all who endured the genocide. These landscapes are “inextricably entwined in the production of the past” (Dwyer 425) and thus these words are psychological monuments, which this essay will later return to. Raami subsequently invokes not only idiosyncratic poetry to reference her own family, but uses the language of her father to ‘tell’ the ‘tale’ of genocide. Bearing witness within this text resultantly does not only bear witness to the entirety of Cambodia through memorialising the genocide itself, but bears witness to personal familial relations. Folklore thus helps to raise the ‘spirits’ of the death and bring their linguistic presence back into reality, even if genocide succeeds in murdering the physical body.

Continuing upon the theme of physicality, folklore furthermore helps to transcend physical liminality within genocide writing as a form of escapism. Raami’s father tells her:

I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything: your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering (Ratner 134).

The metaphorical ‘wings’ that he implies are the gift of imagination. Imagination provides access to escapism outside of ‘this world’s suffering’ and ‘the limits of the body’. In providing the ‘extensive references to mythical and magical events’ that Mzali defines as escapism, these ‘stories’ allow Raami’s psychological interiority to flourish after her physical exteriority has been laid to ruination. It is important to note her father mentions that he writes, “because words give me wings’” (Ratner 120). This reiteration of ‘wings’ comes shortly before he is taken away by the Khmer Rouge, as “a hundred tevodas joined him… their wings beating across the dusty sky” (Ratner 135). Through his physical disappearance and eventual death, he is transmuted from man to angel. It is this angelical presence that allows her father’s voice to continually flow throughout Raami’s mind throughout the text. He is “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (Davis 373). However, he possesses a voice present within Raami’s mind that keeps him ‘tied’ to the earthly plane. This is made more complex as Raami, like many others, never learns the outcome of her father’s fate. In places such as S-21, over ‘12,000 prisoners’ entered, while “less than 300 detainees are known to have survived” (Schindel 27). We can thus assume Raami’s ‘hundred tevodas’ are in fact the souls of other Cambodians murdered, flying upwards to one of the several Buddhist heavens. Through the trope of ‘rising’ to the heavens, it is important that physical wings ultimately rescue Raami. This is her main way ‘to escape the world’s suffering’, rather than simply the words of her father. This materialises as a UN helicopter rescues Raami and her mother from Vietnam.  

Invoking the folklore trope, ‘the dot’ of a helicopter “became a dragonfly, then a helicopter” (Ratner 313). The word ‘dragonfly’ preceding ‘helicopter’ highlights how Raami has retreated into her own psychological interiority by the conclusion of the novel. She rejects reality in preferentiality of mythology wherein imagery is flexible, less traumatic: a dragonfly is no danger, whereas a helicopter may signify an enemy. Moreover, within Buddhist cosmology, the dragonfly represents “the reuniting of heaven and earth” (Harvey 12). This duality emerges as the dragonfly is physically able to inhibit both elements of water and air. This is subsequently a reunion for Raami and her father. Through the metaphor of wings, she flies upwards to meet him within the heavens. However, mistaking the helicopter for a ‘dragonfly’ is somewhat problematic. Raami’s excursions across the countryside as she regularly rides in “caravans of oxcarts” (Ratner 141) purposefully transform the landscape into a wholly pastoral scene. We leave our original setting of Phnom Penh, wherein Raami’s father possesses a “BMW” (Ratner 30) and migrate outwards, towards a land “broken and scarred, with holes and ditches” (Ratner 273) where “haunted forests” (Ratner 278) appear. The landscape free of capitalism is hence more imbued with mythology. Perhaps this is due to capitalism generating “arbitrary and unsustainable levels of inequality” (Veetil 21). We observe clear differentiations within class as Raami’s mother warns Raami’s Auntie to “use a knife… scrape it off” (Ratner 94) in regard to her nail varnish. To stand out is to bring attention to oneself, to attract danger. Yet even in the barren hills, inequality exists through the Khmer Rouge policing the civilians of Cambodia. Resultantly, and especially to a Western reader, the idea of Cambodia in itself throughout the 1970s, is a place devoid of futurism. This turns Cambodia into a place of mythology itself. The pastoral imagery stands within direct opposition to the state of genocide. The landscape of fantasy is thus transformed, taking on the aesthetics of Dante’s Inferno.

While I have outlined various reasons wherein fantasy is beneficial within genocide writing, there remain various implications. Bronfen asks: “do we see the real, while denying the representation or do we see the representation, thus putting the real under erasure?” (Bronfen 304). In infusing fantasy within genocide writing, we encounter upon the problem of factuality.  ‘Representation’ cannot accurately portray genocide when infiltrated by mythology. For example, written linguistics do not return Raami’s father to us in a physical sense – the voice we hear internally, as we read, is not his own. Nor do Ratner’s pages correctively state the figures of the Cambodian genocide, or provide the namesake to places laid to ruination. One may argue that fiction is a wholly inappropriate model for genocide, unless it is heavily imbued with factual event. Madeline Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter directly challenges Ratner’s text as such. The infusion of mythology and hope within Ratner’s text disguises the degradation of the genocide. Despite the death of her close family, Raami still describes the world through mythological starred eyes. “The sky a brilliant blue after the usual deluge, brandishing a pair of rainbows, like Indra’s crossbows” (Ratner 250). Even the ‘long, jagged slope’ of the embankment walls of a mass grave are disguised, subject to liminality via a child narrator. Raami questions if the Khmer Rouge are forcing the workers to bury a “dragon yiak” (Ratner 272). The spatiality of a ‘dragon giant’ is enormous, designating the physical immensity of the mass grave. However, through the lens of folklore, our own theorisation to the identity and spatiality of this hole is questioned.

In comparison, Thien’s text reveals the reality of the atmosphere within Cambodia:

A space grew around me, it rose from the soil, a space in which there were no doors, no light or darkness, no landmarks. No future, no past. (Thien 121)

The liminality of both future and past preys upon Thien’s text. This transfixes a space that evades time itself. This stands within direct opposition to the place that Ratner creates, a plane of escapism. Herein Raami can avoid the reality of trauma. She can avoid the factuality that within genocide, there is ‘no future, no past’. Genocide itself cannot occupy spatial time because living amidst such atrocity is timeless, as “the past is done” (Thien 209). This is a duality. The past is done because there is no representation of the past. The cultural narrative is eradicated, replaced and burrowed beneath a new, horrific narrative of pain. This is due to Pol Pot’s ‘Year Zero’ methodology. Raami cannot access the entire truth through her mythology, as she allows a space wherein there are landmarks. Here she attempts to revive the ‘past’ of her father, and allows the ‘prophecy’ of the genocide to “become my story” (Ratner 315). In her dedication to her father and her fierce love for her country, Raami’s narrative can resultantly never exceed representation to become reality. After all, the author “is your personal projection, your idea of the author’ (Bennett 21). Everything is subjective to the mind, it is impossible to create objective fact.

Similarly, Tyner reflects that, “it is not just the identity of a place that is important, it is also the identity that a person or group has with that place… as an insider or outsider” (Tyner 24). Those who identify as being from the Western world cannot have encountered the narrative of the Cambodian genocide. Similarly, those who are not Jewish cannot encounter the narrative of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel corroborates as a Holocaust survivor, that “we speak in code, we survivors, and this cannot be broken, cannot be deciphered, not by you no matter how much you try” (Wiesel 7). Wiesel is correct, there is a unity amongst survivors and the true narrative of genocide is

unapproachable by the outsider. Yet the narrative of the ‘insider’ must be approachable in some form. This is my personal reasoning for the fictional piece that accompanies this narrative. I understand from a critical viewpoint that this is not my ‘code’ to decipher, yet a grotesque fascination to understand the events of human suffering through human nature inspires my writing. My words take inspiration from Ratner’s, yet I cannot truly replicate her style. As “he or she who did not live through the event will never know it” (Wiesel 7), I will never experience the scorching sun, the killing fields as raw holes within the earth, the impact of genocide itself upon my psychological wellbeing. However, this does not excuse the fact that there should be a motivation to educate oneself on the narrative of trauma as an ‘outsider’. We must ‘try’ through the liminality of ‘code’ to ‘decipher’ in a way that is not appropriating, offensive, nor self-indulgent. However, Wiesel speaks only for the Holocaust; the western world is not possessed by the Buddhist values that preoccupy Cambodia. In 2013 over 150 million Theravada, or Southern Buddhist adherents existed, compared to roughly seven million Buddhists being found outside of Asia (Harvey 5). However, the lack of mythology does not detract from holocaust writing.

For example, in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Holocaust is represented via the medium of cartoon mice. However, unlike Ratner’s narrative, Spiegelman’s text does not stray from the ‘truth’ of genocide. “The Germans swung them [mice] by the legs against a wall, and they never anymore screamed” (Spiegelman 110) is not only a horrific image, but one transformed further into the depravity of the Holocaust through animal connotations. With the ‘mice’ representing the Jewish and cats as Nazis, the interplay of power relations and anti-Semitism is increased. One may argue this is inappropriate, following Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 34). The reason we do not find it ‘barbaric’ to inhibit Cambodian culture is due to the western narrative: it is unfamiliar, we cannot grasp it. However, the Holocaust is nearby, familiar, and thus while being known to the western world, as the style in which we live, Wiesel accurately encapsulates the fact that it is simultaneously unknown, as all who preside today can never ‘decipher’ the code, as ‘hard as we try’.

The reason that genocide is not the aforementioned ‘land of fantasy’ is mostly to the notion of childhood innocence. One must question, would this novel be effective as genocide writing if Raami had been an adult narrator? Children are not limited by “participation in social, cultural and ideological institutions and discourses”. They are thus able to “penetrate emotional danger zones” (Wilkinson 125). Under normative circumstances, children embody a freedom from the societal norms that govern the body. They moreover possess a form of agency secondary to their parental commands. However, Raami is arguably simultaneously isolated and involved within the ‘social, cultural, and ideological’ institutions that surround her, due to her unconventional circumstances. It is only due to childhood innocence (reinforced by folklore tales) that she is able to ‘penetrate emotional danger zones’ to keep stable. The reality of events such as genocide may cause an adult to succumb both mentally and physically to the depravity. It can thus be argued that being far beyond a necessity for the childhood realm, folklore is vital within this context as a form of stabilisation and self-preservation for all.

Despite fantasy stereotypically having no place within the horrors of genocide writing, Ratner’s text proves that it is a necessity within the particular realm of the Cambodian genocide. As ‘the Khmer Rouge created a moral and social order base on the inversion of Buddhist virtues’ (Harris 4) the land becomes foreign to residents. However, ‘once shared, poems generate a common sense of place” (Lorimer 181). All those who were afflicted within the Genocide, whether they remained within Cambodia or not, are able to find solace in the fact their suffering is not isolated. The poetry that remains is not beautiful. The linguistics are scarred by the damage enacted upon both the physical and psychological landscape of Cambodia. Yet it provides a voice of solidarity. A comfort in mass consciousness. The poetry of U Sam Oeur, who survived the events of 1975-1979, reveals that “I can’t see across those three wildernesses”. These represent the “killing, disease, and starvation” (McKullough 116) that ravaged Cambodia throughout the genocide. As “all Khmer poets chant their work” (McKullough 116) it transforms poetry into something transcendental. Raami observes her father’s final poem is “an incantation. To bring him back into the world of the living” (Ratner 313). The repetition of these phrases is thus a necessity to Raami, Oeur, and all other Cambodians due to their ability to reclaim the past, to restore humanity into a narrative that has been destroyed. This is symbolic of the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation.

Ratner’s text is wholly involved with the narrative of Buddhism, by invoking the cyclical style of repetition, similar to the notion of the Buddhist circle:

The image of the circle, an allusion to the spiritual concept of samsara, or continuous movement, recuperates the symbol of the wheel of history from its Khmer Rouge iteration and returns it to its nonviolent, Khmer-Buddhist association. (Troeung 104)

‘Continuous movement’ alludes to the idea of the ‘wings’ her father provided her throughout his literature. The connotations of ‘movement’ furthermore remind the reader of Raami’s continuous journey throughout the novel. This is not only in a physical sense, as she migrates across Cambodia, but the ‘continuous’ voices she carries internally. And so:

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and re-knitting, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence… he carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again. (Ratner 310)

Raami ‘reknits’ the narrative of the genocide through mythology. This leads Cambodians ‘back to’ themselves, and returns the ‘lost innocence’ of the land prior to genocide. I wish to compare the idea of Raami’s ‘reknitting’ to the Buddhist circle in explaining the necessity of fantasy within Cambodian genocide literature. While Bronfen wishes to separate the ‘real’ from the ‘representation’ – is it not possible to have the two in mutual coexistence? Regardless of the imperfections imbued upon the circle, there is necessity in possessing any form of representation. A circle will always be a circle, a father will always be a father, even if a reader cannot truly grasp his ‘truth’. The importance is simply that he exists.

“In the isolation of pain, even the most uncompromising advocate of individualism might suddenly prefer a realm populated by companions, however imaginary” (Scarry 11). Pain itself demands escapism. The fictional piece I wrote as a response to Vaddey Ratner’s text tries to emulate the spirit of this. Although my unnamed protagonist is scarred by the Cambodian war, her past reveals dedications to Buddhism and pastoral links via her heritage. To ‘plentiful shrines’ and the bones of a ‘blessed Buddha’. Similarly to Raami, she is only able to continue within her present landscape by clinging to the familiarity of the past. Ratner herself states that “The losses and the brutality in the ensuing years deepened my desire to understand what happened to him, to my loved ones, to my country” (Ratner 318). Ratner could have easily done so in the form of a literal memoir, recalling the facts of her childhood through a narrative that would exclude a ‘outside’ reader, unable to ‘decipher’ the ‘code’ as Wiesel eloquently states. Yet through the trope of fantasy, Ratner is able engage her readers in a dialogue accessible to all readers: the language of childhood innocence, of fantasy and imagination. Through her evocative language we gain more than a duality of knowledge pending to the genocide and folklore, but we receive a personal narrative within which we learn of her family. Ratner can “show us the beauty of her culture and the landscape as only a child can see it, bursting with colour and hope” (Fox 2012). Cambodia’s landscape retains a beauty, despite the atrocity that mars the psychological landscape of the land. And yet these “rainbows” (Ratner 250) that Ratner implies are not only aesthetic, but infer to the hope that ‘bursts’ within civilians eyes, years on. These ‘rainbows’ illuminate Raami’s language and provide optimism in the way only children’s literature is possible.

Ratner resultantly seeks to shift the image of Cambodia as a monolithic place of killing through literary acts of the imagination. Her writing remains responsible to history while importantly unconstrained by it; her dedication to her father’s memory potently memorialises his presence upon each page. Ratner succeeds in a creating not only exploring a transcendental plane of liminality wherein genocide and childhood innocence may co-exist. Yet, rather creating her own folklore, the ‘voice’ of her father lives on within his linguistic embodiment. A mythological ‘god imbued in all who read him to pass on. And thus, Ratner succeeds, as:

“If you make the truth survive, however terrible it is, you are retaliating against humanity, in the only way the powerless have” (Hynes 269).

Works Cited:

• Adorno, Theodor W., and Rolf Tiedemann. Can One live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical reader. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.

• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Print.

• Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Harlow, U.K. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009. Print.

• Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Violence of Representation – Representation of Violence”. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol.1, no.4, 1990. Accessed 12 May 2018.

• Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.

• Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms”. French Studies, vol.59, no.3, 1 July 2005, pp.373-379. Taylor and Francis, doi: 10.1080/10436929008580039, Accessed 9 May 2018.

• Dong, Lan. Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood, 2016. Print.

• Dwyer, Owen J. “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration”. Social & Cultural Geography, vol.5, no. 3, 2004, pp.419-435. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/1464936042000252804, Accessed 5 May 2018.

• Hamdi, Hahrir. “Bearing Witness in Palestinian Resistance Literature”. Race and Class, vol. 52, no.3, 2011, pp.21-42. Sage, doi: 10.1177/0306396810390158, Accessed 10 May 2018.

• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

• Fischer, Rachel K., “Genocide”. Reference & User Services Quarterly, vol. 52, no.4, 2013. www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-351948619/genocide. Accessed 11 May 2018.

• Fox, Genevieve. “Debuts”. Review of In the Shadow of the Banyan by Raddey Vatner. Daily Mail. 18 October 2012.

• Lorimer, Hayden. “Poetry and Place: The Shape of Words”. Geography, vol. 93, no.3, pp.181-182, 2008. Accessed 17 May 2018.

• Mzali, Ines. Approaching the Real through Magic Realism: Magical Realism in Contemporary Indian Literature in English. Diss. Concordia University. 2003. Web. Accessed May 3 2018.

• McCullough, Ken. “Tuning in to the Poetry of U Sam Oeur.” Manoa, vol.12, no.1, 2000.

• Ratner, Vaddey. In the Shadow of the Banyan. London: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Print.

• Schindel, Estela, and Pamela Colombo. Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

• Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

• Thien, Madeleine. Dogs at the Perimeter. London: Granta, 2013. Print.

• Veetil, Vipin P. “The Mythology of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Private Enterprise, vol.31 no.1, 2016, pp.21-36. Accessed 2 May 2018.

• Wiesel, Elie, and Elliot Lefkovitz. Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Print.

• Wilkinson, Robyn. "Broaching ‘Themes Too Large for Adult Fiction’: The Child Narrator in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names.", 27 Apr. 2016. Web. Accessed. 10 May 2018.

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Creative Writing Component:

The following is a response to Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan. A glossary of the terminology used follows.

The perspective is through the character in the novel who bullies Ratner’s protagonist, Raami. The unnamed bully is related to the leader of the Kamaphibal, Mouk, and is relentlessly cruel. The setting for the piece is an area of land where civilians, under the Kamaphibal, are being forced to dig a huge embankment. This is compared to a ‘dragon’s grave’ within the novel. In reality, situated nowhere near the proximity of water – the embankment is a mass grave.

This mass grave forms part of the killing fields where millions lost their lives to the Khmer Rouge 1975-1979.

Each day I prayed for the rains. The once embellished tapestry of foliage had been cleared for the grand solution. One could scarcely tell if the fallen flames of the forest that littered the landscape were the slow death of nature or stains of blood that the earth had failed to hide. Rejected by the soil, silently blaming us for our sins. Decay and ruin licking the wounds of the earth. Naraka.

While we’d broken the land, the wretched of the earth had faltered to crumble away. Eerily, you could hear it creeping at night. Whispering through the flaps of each hut. Kum. Spite. A humming in the air. We’d eradicated their language, shrunken their stomachs, shattered their souls. Yet in the midst of all of this, the internal rebellion remained intact. The cadres had merely shrugged this off. Internal war is impossible without physical strength. These skeletons, bones clicking and clattering with each wheezed movement were no threat. Starved of nutrients, worked until exhaustion – who dared to find the energy for mutiny? Yet still, the straps of our guns, woven around our necks, sat like coiled nooses. Waiting to throttle us in our sleep.

It had started when she was assigned to my brigade. Her name had shifted like the rains in monsoon season. Some called her Raami. Some hissed cripple! Others simply named her with their eyes. Pity. I’d thought that there was no karuna left, no compassion left in this wasteland. And yet she’d somehow dug deep enough into the soil to thumb open the remnants like an overripe mango. And what ounce of compassion or soul did this small, disfigured traitor deserve? A Tiger Princess at that! My eyes, reflecting like the flames scattered across the ground, ignited like cosmic flares in her presence. Spoilt. Rich. Child. If you exchanged luxurious grounds for rice paddies, my own childhood emerged. Air conditioning for sleeping beneath a tied Ox in the scorching sun. Lotus seed porridge, mushroom omelettes, and fresh baguettes exchanged for frogs, snails, a handful of rice.

Oudong is where we’d sprung our seeds. The capital before Phnom Penh rose like a bodhisattva from the earth. Poor in riel, prosperous in happiness. The landscape had fostered us tenderly as the dew coated the blades of grass at dawn. Our temples contained the bodies of prior Cambodian kings. Plentiful shrines and the bones of the blessed Buddha himself contained within a gold sarcophagus. The entire history of Cambodia lay upon our doorstep. Until Khmer Rouge. Until Mouk. A few moons ago I remember as he’d called me over, flaking gold over the top of my head like glittering dandruff.

Childhood innocence had blinded me. He’d sheared the golden Buddha entombed within Arthaross temple. Gold flaking like paint from bark. All my tevodas fell from the sky that evening, their sparks extinguished by the tears pooling at my feet.

It hadn’t stopped. From Buddha’s to bloodline. Grandfather Chenda disappeared overnight. Mouk murmured that he must’ve gotten lost on an evening walk. Tutting. What a silly old man! Weeks later, while tending to the Oxen near the Tonle Sap river, I’d spotted him. Face down, in the shadow of a Banyan tree, a kaleidoscope of bullet holes in his chest. They resembled the swollen freckles children developed across summer suns. His skin, blistering from the heat, looked as if he was shedding it. More snake than man. Then followed Samnang. Father. Mother. Even Sopheap, barely free from the teat, executed in the midday sun. Her grave the size of a lotus flower.

The sky hissed and summoned reality. A grave the size of the yiak lay before me. Sometimes I wondered if these traitors realised. Dressed head-to-toe in black, they travelled like ants across the mountainous embankment walls. Each lurch of the spade, lifting of the soil, plunging them lower into their graves.

No – not reality. The hiss was summoning the dragon home. Slamming her furious weight against the soil. The embankment, solidified by the oven of the sky, roared with newfound energy. Bodies rained off the embankment, the lucky ones entombed within the mud immediately. Hitting their mark. I ran.

As the dragon finally slumbered, full, the soil, swollen like a belly, seemed to reiterate Mouk’s eternal words. To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss. Nowhere was safe.

Stopping to pluck a lone flower that had bloomed in the midst of the rains, I paused to observe the face the organisation had provided me. I witnessed my reflection, and shuddered for our souls.

Glossary of terminology:

Bodhisattva: A person who will become a Buddha at a future point.

Cadres: a small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession.

Kamaphibal: The activists within Khmer Rouge who were specially trained to be particularly cruel. This would be towards the people they murdered or enslaved such as Raami and her mother.

Karuna: Buddhist word for ‘compassion’.

Khmer Rouge: The Communist Party who, under Pol Pot, enacted the Cambodian Genocide.

Fallen Flames of the Forest Tree: Butea monosperma, trees native to tropical and sub-tropical Southeast Asia. They possess vivid red flowers.

Naraka: Buddhist word for ‘Hell’.

Riel: The currency of Cambodia.

Tiger Prince: A descendent of King Sisowath, who was king of Cambodia from 1904-1927. Raami is a ‘tiger princess’ as the result of her bloodline.

Tevodas: Cambodian word for ‘angels’.

Yiak: Cambodian word for ‘giant’.

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To Kill You is No Loss: Silencing Language in Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

- Lawrence Durrell, Justine

Ferdinand de Saussure theorised a language of ‘speechless speaking’. This is possible due to Saussure’s separation of langue, or ‘language’, with parole, ‘words’ (Levenson 75). Interestingly, ‘parole’ translated into English means ‘release of a prisoner’. There is thus a duality: is the act of speaking a release, or a captor? Within Ratner’s text, I argue that the act of speaking takes Raami, our protagonist, as ‘captive’. Ratner’s text corroborates Nietzsche’s theory of language as the “manifestation of political power” (Olsson 6). This manifestation within Ratner’s Banyan appears through the conglomeration of both political and physical power, vocalised through the voice of the Khmer Rouge. It is the volume and threat of the Khmer’s Rouge’s oral ‘voice’, “DOWN WITH THE ENEMY” (Ratner 257) that is accountable for the trauma within the novel. While Scarry argues that “physical pain has no voice” (Scarry 3), the violent outbursts of the Khmer corroborate the volatile nature of their language. Nietzsche subsequently talks about the ‘appropriation of sound’, as “sound defines the object and silences alternative ways of looking at or handling the object” (Olsson 6). Sound ‘appropriates’ victims through violence, silencing them through inundating their narratives. In response, the victims forced silence “provokes a linguistic violence” (Olsson 6). This is through the resultant untranslatability of the silenced figure. It is subsequently not the act of parole, but rather the lack of speech that most poignantly expresses both mental and physical pain within the text. This essay begins by exploring the language of silence, examining how the silent figure is created. This language is not only a form of resistance, but a linguistic violence. This violence thus leads to alienation. This is within both a psychological and a familial sense, with a brief comparison to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Herein I infer that while the texts are designated for differentiating purposes; Kafka’s as conviction of social circumstances, and Ratner’s as an ‘essence’ (Ratner 317) of self-fictionalised memoir, the language of silence remains monolithic: a resistance and form of self-preservation. A new language is resultantly constructed within narratives of alienation and isolation, creating an internalised ‘voice’ of resistance for the subjugated: the language of silence.

Nietzsche’s essay ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ explores the implication of power once imbued into language itself. He recognises the manifestation of ‘political power’ through the example of “the master giving names…. every object and event with a sound… taking possession of it” (Nietzsche Genealogy 7). The ‘master’ is “the State… a race of conquerors and masters… setting its terrifying paws on a subordinate population” (Nietzsche Genealogy 17). This subordinate population is the Cambodian population under Khmer Rouge. Nietzsche observes the terrifying implications of using language as a form of control. This directly correlates with the actions of the Khmer Rouge, renaming Cambodia as ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ and resetting conventional time to ‘Year Zero’. The ramifications of re-naming, re-setting (of attaching the prefix ‘re’ to any modality of culture) are profuse through the danger of appropriation: who retains the power? The Khmer Rouge, through their linguistic superiority, force Raami to experience a “constant knitting and re-knitting” (Ratner 310) of her own narrative. This places Raami as

both a present witness to the Cambodian genocide and simultaneously detached through her role as a ‘silent figure’. The silent figure is thus created as a result of the appropriation of language that Nietzsche implies, as the state begins ‘taking possession’ of the ‘subordinate population’ through the power of language. Resultantly, Raami’s only option is to withdraw into her own narrative: one that is untranslatable; that of silence.

The silent figure is one “that does not want to be part of or take part in the circulation of speech” (Olsson 4). The figure occupies an unsettling spatiality of language wherein their ‘resistance’ is created precisely through the untranslatable nature of their narrative. Herein, voice infers to one’s audible voice. The “circulation of speech” is a social phenomenon. Social phenomena “are activities that prevail among a number of associates by reason of their association and which would have been impossible to them in isolation” (Hayes 376). Language is simply an ‘activity’ used by subjects as a form of communication to provide knowledge of identification. In isolation, the vocalisation of language is arguably unnecessary: if there is other, why speak? However, this communication is not to be doubted, as “with words, it is never a question of truth” (Nietzsche On Truth and Lies 1). If speech provides ‘truth’, then to refuse to ‘take part’ within such a narrative makes one’s character not only untranslatable, but moreover untrustworthy. Subversely, The Khmer Rouge built their Organization on ‘truth’. Raami’s first encounter with the Khmer Rouge portrays this verisimilitude of trust. While escaping Phnom Penh, her family hear the repetition of an incessant chant: “THE ORGANIZATION AWAITS YOU! THE ORGANIZATION WILL WATCH OVER YOU!” (Ratner 40). This implies a mutually inclined model of trust. However, the monotone nature of this chant, endlessly repeating and ‘bellowed through loudspeakers’ is not welcoming. The embellishment of capitalisation within Ratner’s text warns that this is a veiled threat as the chant physically overwhelm the pages of the narrative. This is a forewarning of how the Khmer’s chants, influence, and language will soon empower her own. We witness the internal purge of the Khmer: “YOU’VE BETRAYED THE ORGANIZATION!” (Ratner 258) and the hiring of Raami as a “secret Secret Guard” (Ratner 270) by a leader of the organization. The repetition of ‘secret’ cancels out the secretively of the event all together, and thus the ‘truth’ of a secret is non-existent. As the lack of trust permeates the landscape, civilians trapped within the Khmer’s Rouge’s regime are similarly affected, and thus the truth is ‘hidden’, buried, and most importantly, muted. To ‘take part’ in the circulation of speech is to reveal the truth: yet how can one resultantly tell truth in a land built upon oppositional linguistics? The Bible states “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (CTS New Catholic Bible, John 8:31-36). This raises another vital question, what is truth? Nietzsche argues:

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” (Nietzsche On Truth and Lies 1)

Truths are illusions because they only appear to be truth. By this I infer truth only exists because untruth exists, the paradox allows the other to coexist. The metaphor of coins ‘losing their embossing’ is a key fact of truth: it is flexible. Over the temporality of time, all truths exist upon a shifting scale. Truth is not consistent. Within Ratner’s text, the ‘truth’ shifts depending on the context of truth. For example, while in Phnom Penh, the ‘truth’ of Raami’s narrative, or her identity, allows her to be a princess. On the outskirts, within Khmer camps, the ‘truth’ would silence her narrative entirely. As Pol Pot “purged his nation of educated city dwellers, monks and minorities” (Brinkley 111) he eradicated all with an agenda. Raami’s father, as a prince, is resultantly a prime target for the regime. We witness this as Raami unknowingly reveals her fathers ‘true’ name: “you shouldn’t have told them your father’s name,” Auntie India hissed’ (Ratner 99). It is this ‘reveal’ of truth that precedes and allows his subsequent identification and erasure possible. And thus, the linguistic ‘truth’ of his name leads to his ‘silencing’. This encounter not only explores the creation of the silent figure, but moreover leads us to the impenetrable silence of a childhood narrator.

Raami cannot accurately take part in the aforementioned ‘circulation of speech’ due to her position as a child narrator amidst a genocide. The unspeakable nature of trauma is extrapolated through the lens of childhood innocence. An example of this occurs as Raami describes the killing fields as a “dragon yiak’s’ grave” (Ratner 274), symbolising how mythology and innocence have silenced the ‘truth’ of the reality that surrounds her. Through mass graves resembling ‘dragons’, one could argue that history itself is ‘silenced’ through the improper, childlike voice that is produced by the narrative as there is no affirmative truth proffered. However, within “the mind of a child…” there is “the potential to challenge practices and values that have become accepted features of society” (Wilkinson 125). Unlike adults, childhood remains a land outside of “social, cultural, and ideological institutions and discourses” (Wilkinson 125). An area afflicted by genocide is not a ‘normal’ society, as civilians, once united, murder one another. This is an entirely new, abject setting, as a unified state collapses into oppositional forces.

Cambodia’s ‘practices and values’ have regressed back to practices such as feudalism. The narrative is resultantly skewed. We witness that Raami “didn’t understand” (Ratner 94) the conditions of her life, and we are thus blinded by child liminality. If our narrator cannot access events fully, how is the reader expected to do so? The subversion of this at Ksach, where “to keep it simple… no distinction was made between a child and an adult” (Ratner 245), makes it apparent how Raami is forced to ‘speak’ the narrative that does not translate. She is living a ‘lie’. To look back then is regressive, as victims such as Hong A. Chork mention that their “childhood was lost during those years”. Throughout the genocide, childhood innocence was altered into childhood autonomy.

However, while this implies agency, Ratner proposes that silence is the only voice a child may possess amongst the depravity. We encounter this as Raami interacts with another victim saved by the Vietnamese. As Raami looks at the young girl, “I recognized my reflection in her emaciated face…neither of us could talk” (Ratner 307). This fellow child’s ‘reflected emaciated’ reminds the reader that Raami is not the only young victim of the Cambodian Genocide. Nor is she the only child afflicted through the loss of speech: their silence stems out of the fact there is no vocabulary within the childhood narrative for trauma. Raami reflects, “as if I could talk, as if I had a choice” (Ratner 307). Childhood agency is thus a myth under the Khmer Rouge, yet Raami’s ‘silenced’ voice still speaks to us within the narrative. Nietzsche thus questions: “is language the adequate expression of all realities? (Nietzsche On Truth and Lies 1). Language is verbal, physical, aesthetic. Language is the adequate expression of all realities, but it is important to note that speech does not directly ratify language. Speech is not a necessity or a perquisite for language: “I let out a sob. It was not speech. Nevertheless, it was an expression, a voice of my deepest sorrow” (Ratner 311). Ratner recognises that Raami still has a ‘voice’, even if it is not shaped linguistically. This ‘voice’ is capable of expressing psychological anguish, as it voices Raami’s ‘deepest sorrow’. This is not only audible, through the sound of a ‘sob’, but also physical, as the presumed act of tears ‘speak’, or sign, for the word ‘sadness’. Herein the language of silence is most audible.

One of the most poignant examples of child silence appears through Raami’s friend, Mui, as Raami chances upon the murder of Mui’s family. “Mui’s frightened weeping. I could hear it” (Ratner 300). All language is variant upon circumstance, as a sob can signify either happiness or sadness. However, with the knowledge of Mui’s position as: “Vietnamese, the soldiers had called her. Her skin was too light, they said. Her eyes slanty, Vietnamese eyes” (Ratner 300), the racist context within itself is a prerequisite of what to come. ‘Vietnamese…light…slanty’ are linguistic values that are appropriated onto Mui’s family for the justification of murder, of silencing their bodies. Here is the true example of Nietzsche’s manifestation of political power. The ‘master’, Khmer, is ‘giving name’, false identifiers, to the ‘subordinate’ figure of Mui’s family to justify an unnecessary death. While Elaine Scarry states that “physical pain has no voice” Scarry 3), this scene directly challenges her viewpoint. The Khmer’s commands to “Dig!” (Ratner 300) have a direct physical implication. Physical pain is initiated through the ‘voice’ of the Khmer, leading to physical action, thus producing a silence through the means of death. “Then came the thud of a club meeting skull one, two, and nothing more” (Ratner 301). The voice of physical pain is resultantly inextricably linked and inseparable from physical violence. Scarry goes further:

Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned (Scarry 4).

Physical pain, perhaps resists language as one may be ‘beyond’ vocalisation. However, we may use signifiers. By this I infer the physical form of signs: the visualisation of blood, exposed bone, of any foreign object piercing the skin provides a language where ‘it is never a question of truth’. We are resultantly able to transcribe the body. This occurs as Mui sobs. Sobbing, as an action, requires context to produce a signifier. Yet, once the physical action of a club is enacted, the event becomes translatable, and her silence is no longer the language of pain, but rather the language of death. This is the linguistic narrative of murder, of genocide – command, act, kill. Physical pain has an undeniable voice in such circumstances, as without an audible command, or ‘voice’, murder would not be enacted upon Mui’s family. Olsson challenges Scarry, as “language does take on a violent character, it becomes torture, even resulting in physical effects on its victims” (Olsson 163). Linguistically, pain can never not possess a voice. Whether it is within the physical act of torture, the presence of a torturer, the visualisation of a gun. Any form that signifies pain can be ‘read’ by a body in pain, thus giving agency to a language for pain.

The idea of a metaphysical ‘breakage’ appears through Bar-On putting forth the idea of the ‘wall of silence’. Through this he infers that “psychologically damaged survivors refuse to speak about the genocidal past” (Kidron 6) to their children. However, Ratner subverts this: it is not the adult Raami unable to speak, it is child Raami who is unable to “find the voice to share” (Ratner 310), raising a linguistic ‘wall’ between her trauma and the verbal world. It is moreover the adult Ratner who chooses to reveal her story through the medium of Raami. Raami’s ‘wall’ exists in the tense of her projecting it upon her mother, which this essay later touches upon.

Continuing upon the notion of a ‘wall’, Wiesel states that “between our memory and our reflection there stands a wall that cannot be pierced” (Wiesel 7) Therein “literature itself has to speak” (Olsson 2). Literature is the only way of piercing the impenetrable wall of what cannot be spoken. However, in the visualization of a wall, we encounter the idea of linguistic violence. Something must be broken, or rebroken, to access speech. Ratner chooses the medium of fiction specifically as “memory alone is inadequate” (Ratner 318). Reasoning for this is lesser violence. By not straining to reproduce ‘reflection’ to exact factuality, the ‘piercing’ of the wall is not as potent. Ratner is thus able to share the unsharability of pain as “fiction is correlated with empathy” (Bal 1). Through invoking an ‘internal’ language of emotion rather than linguistic language, sharing is possible; yet this is only retroactively. Silence and unsharability permeate the events that occur during the text. It is the after event of writing wherein Raami’s voice is found and the wall is pierced, allowing linguistics that proffer ‘voice’ to the subjugated. This is due to the fact that “literature itself has to ‘speak’, it cannot remain silent if it wants to be literature” (Olsson 2). The ‘voice’ of literature is highly complicated – both impersonal and impersonal. Similar to the Khmer Rouge, Ratner ‘knits’ and ‘appropriates’, constructs a narrative for the reader. The ‘truth’ of the ‘true’ event remains distant, as the outside reader is not allowed access.

We speak in code, we survivors, and this cannot be broken, cannot be deciphered, not by you no matter how much you try. (Wiesel 7)

Wiesel’s quote, though referencing particularly to the Holocaust, is referential to all victims of genocide. The ‘code’ is the internalised language of subjugation that Raami experiences. Moreover, the code is precisely the ‘unsharability’ of trauma. All who were not present for the event are thus excluded.

Thus literature, in invoking linguistic signs, both involves and alienates the reader simultaneously.

Alienation within the text materialises as “the silent figure withdraws from, or restricts form; becomes an Unknown” (Olsson 6). Alienation resultantly refers to the ‘withdrawal’ of Raami both from her psychological sense of ‘self’, and within her familial relations. Raami’s psychological alienation occurs

as she loses her ability to speak. This occurs as Raami breaks the linguistic ‘hierarchy’:

“Useless cripple.”

I mumbled under my breath.

“What?” She hissed.

“I’m not a cripple.” (Ratner 294)

Raami challenging the authority of a Khmer Rouge officer provides linguistic clash as the ‘political power’ of the Khmer’s ‘voice’ is called into authority. Immediately following this scene, a physical clash occurs, as a guard pushes “the tip of his gun deep into my chest…. she [original officer] spat on my face” (Ratner 295). Through the ramifications of these particular scene, Raami ‘goes silent’ as an act of self-preservation:

I took a step back, my feet light as the crab’s. Another step, and another, and further back. Until I reached only silence. Deep within myself, within the dark, grave-like hole, I lay.

They couldn’t touch me anymore. (Ratner 296)

This scene not only reveals the alienation Raami has experienced, using ‘they’ to directly isolate herself, but confirms her decision to ‘step back’ from the vocal world, into silence. In ‘stepping back’, Raami is notably distancing herself from vocalism. To lose a familiar form of language itself is to ‘step back’ into an area of pre-language. Yet, “what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language” (Olsson 4). Despite her attempted act of regression, Raami is unable to escape the monotonous ‘stream’ of narrative. This is precisely Ratner’s point: the violence of the genocide inflicted upon Raami is inescapable. It is eternally embodied within her narrative, even from the post of retrospection. Moreover, genocide is a regressive event through the nature of unsharability. It is uncommunicable through silencing of Cambodians and their culture: there is no referential point. Raami’s uncle notes the loss of “a whole civilisation… buried civilisation” (Ratner 273). By eradicating the language of the Cambodian culture and ‘resetting’ of Cambodia to ‘Year Zero’, the land itself regresses. As buildings and temples collapse, they are effectively buried. Culture is ‘buried’ within the psyche of those who have witnessed the culture. Similarly, as Raami stores her vocality ‘deep within myself, within the dark, grave-like hole’ (Ratner 296), the regressive action of ‘burying’ gives way to silence as a form of death. Thus, through the act of ‘silencing’, we not only lose our speaker’s voice, her cultural landmarks, but we witness the death of language itself, as “languages accompany human groups. They disappear with them” (Hagége 3). Through reiterating Wiesel’s notion of ‘code’ being reserved for those who have ‘survived’, genocide language is the language of death. Only those who survived the Holocaust, for example, access the ‘code’ before it disappears eternally. It cannot be replicated, only reproduced.

The ‘Unknown’ silent figure is not only psychologically alienated through ‘withdrawal’, but moreover experiences social alienation. This occurs through the familial sphere within both Ratner and Kafka’s texts. Division is created through isolation, and silence “becomes a threat that must be controlled” (Olsson 167). Silence alone is not a ‘threat’, it is the ‘act’ of making silence ‘speak’ that renders it as dangerous. This is due to silence standing within direct opposition to the loud voices of the Khmer Rouge. A linguistic battlefield is erected as, ‘In representing the silent figure, literature must represent and… perform linguistic violence directed at the same figure in order to make it speak’ (Olsson 2). Olsson thus recognises that it is only when the silent figure is threatened by linguistics imbued by power that silence becomes a form of resistance. Through challenging normative standards of speech, the silent figure is the aforementioned ‘unknown’ – the silence figure is unpredictable, untranslatable, and a threat. This severely impacts upon the familial sphere as the centre for identity.

Raami’s silence transfigures her ‘self’ to embody the millions murdered within the Cambodian Genocide, the Holocaust, or any form of genocide. Through her language, she reiterates the words of those who have been stripped of their agency. With “each life taken away, a part of it passed on to me “Rather 296). This is the collective voice of trauma, with pain infusing each thought and word spoken aloud. If “to bypass the voice… is to bypass the person in pain” (Scarry 7), the person in pain will consistently be bypassed, inaudible, unless we find them a mouthpiece. Raami is thus the chosen apostle of the silence narrative, yet this is not visible through her appearance. Psychological pain lacks any form of voice, or language, because there are consistent variations, there are no visible signs of trauma upon the body. Thus, when Scarry argues that ‘psychological suffering, though often difficult… does have referential content, is susceptible to verbal objectification’ (Scarry 11) it raises contention. Scarry refers to psychological suffering within this terminology as being ‘heard’ through literary texts. She fails to ‘hear’ the literal modem of psychological suffering and it’s lost voice. Character such as Raami arguably possess no ‘referential content’ to register events such as genocide. This is evidential at the start of the novel as she claims that ‘absence is worse than death’ (Ratner 20). Such a quote is a marked sign of both childhood innocence and her inability to predict the events that are shortly to follow. The ‘Unknown’ is precisely the voice of psychological pain. No two mental illnesses afflict their subject within the same way, whereas a broken bone may consistently need to be reset. The unknown is something terrifying simply because there is no solution: we reject it.

The ‘Unknown’ appears within familial relations as Kafka’s protagonist, Gregor awakes to discover his transfiguration from man into “horrible vermin” (Kafka 3). His presence Is met with disdain, his father “clenched his fist with a hostile expression” (Kafka 22). The hostile reaction to silenced language is similarly met within Ratner’s text. “Why won’t you talk? Why? She gripped my shoulders” (Ratner 298). The actions of ‘clenching’ and ‘gripping’ both indicate stress and a frustration. However:

Forced silence is not to be mistaken for intentional silence, and neither is speech: forced speech is not the same as voluntary speech. Silence always speaks, otherwise we would not notice it. (Olsson 164)

Within both of these scenarios, our protagonists are forced into their silence. The stress of forced speech is that one does not know what to say. However, within forced silence, what can one say that is not already being said? Silence is a powerful tool in that it is not only unsettling, but moreover it is all encompassing of language. Raami and Gregor are resultantly both put under the ‘stress’ of forced speech. Raami states “as if I could talk, as if I had a choice” (Ratner 307) signifying her lack of agency, broken by the Khmer Rouge, whereas Gregor’s voice is similarly altered:

It was clearly and unmistakably his earlier voice, but in it was intermingled, as if from below, an irrepressibly painful squeaking which left the words positively distinct only in the first moment and distorted them in the reverberation. (Kafka 7)

When Raami and Gregor both have scenarios (genocide / shapeshifting) forced into their narrative, it overpowers their current narrative. Both are affected by speech ‘being the medium through which punishment is transformed into material pain and installed as a physical experience in the deviant’s body’ (Olsson 30). We may argue that both Raami and Gregor have not ‘deviated’ from a narrative, yet their voices are unmistakably ‘intermingled’, corrupted by something ‘as if from below’. Importantly, this comes from a place of pain. The distortion of narrative is linked to the earlier idea of ‘buried civilisation’ (Ratner 273). As one struggles with the idea of forced speech and silence, we resultantly empathise with Raami’s mother over Raami’s earlier musing that ‘absence is worse than death’ (Ratner 20). It is not the physical act of death itself that is so traumatic, it is the attack upon our internal memorialisation of a person’s character. The ‘unknown’ replacing the ‘known’ as an abrupt shift to internalise narrative wherein ‘unsharability’ infers as communication breaks down and what was once translatable amalgate into the foreign. This ‘intermingling’ within Raami’s case goes further. Raami not only carries her own narrative, but the imposition of the Khmer Rouge alongside the internalised, silenced ‘voices’ of those she has encountered throughout the narrative. A vital moment appears as Raami’s mother recognises her psychological interiority, the fact that all voices are being ‘passed on’ into Raami’s own. Raami’s mother tells her that “only ghosts await us. I need you to let them go, the voices in your head. I need you to stay here with me, hear me instead, even if you can’t speak’ (Ratner 305). Raami’s language is strained due to the immense pressure: her voice “screamed from the hole where I had buried it” (Ratner 299). The act of reclaiming that which has been buried far below is a violence in itself: it is breaking the ‘wall’, the ‘earth’, it is the hole that resides within the landscape. Violence only leads to violence.

Resultantly, Raami has (albeit limited) choice to speak, if she decides to commit the act of violence. I say ‘limited’ as she can physically speak, there is no medical ailment, yet her psychological wellbeing refuses to let her do so. Breaking the silence is thus not only a physical act, projecting her voice, but moreover a psychological event as she unearths the ‘voice’. And so, akin to Gregor, she refuses to provide any form of vocal exchange to her family. The resultant ‘truth’ of the ordeal is revealed by Scarry in recognising that not only that beyond ‘physical pain has no voice’, but rather that ‘physical pain is language destroying’ (Scarry 19). It is cumulative trauma that has rendered Raami as mute, her language ‘destroyed’. Similarly, the trauma of transfiguration similarly mutes Gregor. This is not only due to his death at the end of the novel, but because it is easier to retreat into his interiority than to verbally confirm the events of shifting species. And thus, speaking aloud is not only detrimental in forcing out what one does not want vocalised, it reveals confirmation to the other. In revealing one’s internal narrative to the ‘outsider’, one’s ‘code’ can be ‘deciphered’. The original language possessed by Raami has been altered, imbued by the language of pain. Her agency at the denouement of the novel does not bear any semblance to her forum at the start of the novel. Speaking is akin to acceptance of this truth, by orally confirming the effect of the genocide. It is thus a betrayal to herself. Raami recognises that ‘in the end, only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive’ (Ratner 277). It is only by retaining an internal form of ‘voice’, no matter how altered by pain, that one is able to retain their own sense of identity, to take solace in the internalised voice: always silent, one’s own personal language.

‘In the beginning, there was silence – no words. The word itself is a breaking out. The word itself is an act of violence; it breaks the silence’ (Adorno 119). Throughout Ratner’s text we experience the subversion of silence, a passive word, into something that is both rejected and transformed into a site of violence by the narrative of the Khmer Rouge. Through this violence, however, we gain a sense of resistance. They ‘cannot touch’ Raami now that she stands within a realm outside of linguistic spatiality.

However, within this place of spatiality, Ratner succeeds in finding the ‘truth’ of her language, as: ‘if you make the truth survive, however terrible it is, you are retaliating against humanity, in the only way the powerless have’ (Hynes 269). The ‘subordinate’ population has thus risen to regain the ‘master’s narrative. Ratner’s novel is a living testament that silence is a strong language. It is the most resolute, yet the most difficult to transcribe. It is the language of pain itself.  

Works Cited:

• Adorno, Theodor W., and Rolf Tiedemann. Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.

• Bal, P. Matthijs and Martijn Veltkamp. “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation” PLOS One. January 2013.

• Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.  

• Hagège, Claude, and Jody Gladding. On the Death and Life of languages. New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2009. Print.

• Hayes, Edward Cary. “The Classification of Social Phenomena.” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 13, Issue 3, November 1911. pp.375-399.

• Hynes, Samuel. The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.

• Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. United States: Golden Classics, 2018. Print.

• Kidron, Carol A. “Breaching the Wall of Traumatic Silence: Holocaust Survivor and Descendant Person–Object Relations and the Material Transmission of the Genocidal Past. Journal of Material Culture. Volume 17, Issue 1, 2003, p.3-21.

• Lascaratou, Chryssoula. The Language of Pain: Expression or Description. Amsterdam Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co, 2007. Print.

• Levenson, Edgar A., and Alan Slomowitz. The Purloined Self: Interpersonal Perspectives in Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. Print.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2015. Print.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich W., and Douglas Smith. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic: By Way of Clarification and Supplement to My Last Book: Beyond Good and Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

• Olsson, Ulf. Silence and Subject in Modern Literature: Spoken Violence. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

• Ratner, Vaddey. In the Shadow of the Banyan. London: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Print.

• Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.

• Wansbrough, Henry. The CTS New Catholic Bible. London: Catholic Truth Society, 2007. Print.

• Wiesel, Elie, and Elliot Lefkovitz. Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Print.

• Wilkinson, Robyn. "Broaching ‘Themes Too Large for Adult Fiction’: The Child Narrator in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names.", 27 Apr. 2016. Web. 10 May 2018.

[fvisualvomits]

Eva Hesse 

[fvisualvomits]

HOME

“Whilst writing I often keep thinking of home. It is usually assumed that a sense of place or belonging gives a person stability. But what makes a place home? Is it wherever your family is, where you have been brought up? The children of many migrants are not sure where they belong. Where is home? Is it where your parents are buried? Is home the place from where you have been displaced, or where you are now? Is home where your mother lives? And, then, we speak of ‘home from home’. I am moved when I am asked the phenomenological question ‘Are you at home in the world?’ In certain places and at certain times, I am. I feel secure and am friendly to others. But at other times I feel that I don’t know where I am. What exactly does the word ‘home’ mean when it is used in everyday life? We speak of homecoming. This is not the usual, everyday return, it is an arrival that is significant because it is after a long absence, or an arduous or heroic journey. If some food is home-made, it connotes something cooked individually or in small batches. It is not something mass-produced, it is nutritious, unadulterated, wholesome. We often say to visitors, ‘Make yourselves at home’; this means that we want people to act without formality, we would like them to be comfortable and to relax. It was ‘brought home to me’ means that I was made to realize fully, or feel deeply, and that what was said reached an intimate part of me. We also say ‘It is time you were told some home truths’. These are truths about one’s character or one’s behaviour that are unpleasant and perhaps hurtful, and which can be expressed only in a caring environment, where people are concerned about you. A home truth is something private. Many of the connotations of home are condensed in the expression: Home is where the heart is. Home is (often) associated with pleasant memories, intimate situations, a place of warmth and protective security amongst parents, brothers and sisters, loved people. “

- Madan, Home and Identity.

I must remind myself that home is not a person. Home is not a stagnant concept that I can return to, a nefarious and cruel rabbit that is constantly leaping out of my reach. Peter Rabbit has gone and fucked it all again.

Is home linear? Is home real? Is home h o m e e m o h home. I want to deconstruct the layers of the word, barricade myself within those 4 letters. I’d love to writhe underneath the sheets of meaning, spread my legs for a shot of knowledge, and elevate myself to a plane of omnipotence.

Perhaps I’d like to embody the definition. I want to be your home. I want to be returned to, but perhaps that’s a cliché. Can you be my home if you’re not a place? If you were a house, you’d be something on stilts, over the Indian Ocean. Beautiful yet providing shade, unique yet simultaneously fragile – ready to bow to the power of the elements. But you cannot be a place.  But perhaps, in your arms, tucked between a clavicle, perfumed by the faint scent of sweat and slightly breathless, entrapped in your aura – is that home? But sometimes home doesn’t have the welcome mat out.

Is home truly where is the heart is, or can the heart ever truly be at home? If taken literally, this flesh Alcatraz is no home. My heart wanders elsewhere.

[fvisualvomits]

My king, I want you to know something. Something that I always admired most about you. No matter how violent the storm, no matter how high the waves, no matter how dark the night, you never let the world get inside of your boat. You kept living when everyone else was sinking, and this whole life never got a droplet toward pulling you down to the ocean floor. Admittedly, this last bottle has room enough for the last of my heart because I drank the last of it, myself. Hated it, by the way. Seems my father could have picked a vice that tasted better than rubbing alcohol, but hey, he gave me his last flask when he came downstairs to say that he wanted things to have been different, and I believed him. He said he needed to go down with the ship, but he wished that I didn't, and I believed him. Listen, the want to die is no longer a foreign thought in my mind. A lot of people want to. And I could have died without leaving a note behind. A lot of people do. He started slurring about a memory that he must have caught in the musty air, like a dust particle stuck to the glaze over his eyes. "When you were six years old, I stood inside our home, at a windowsill, and watched you walk back from that boy's house, down the street. I was sick, and went back to bed before I thought you saw me, and when I heard you call out, "Daddy?" I pretended to be asleep. I just didn't have the energy to get up and keep you from believing in the ghosts that you've seen ever since…" He finally fixed his gaze, afraid, and said, "Honey, they've been haunting me, but I hope you don't have to see them any longer." I believe him. If I can give you anything, let it be that I have not bid my farewell from the ocean, but from the moment I waved goodnight after our first victory as body-painted newlyweds in a cul-de-sac colony, looking forward to morning, when our parents would let us sail through the quiet, neighborhood streets, and the dawn would bring us back together again. We were cowboys or we were indians or we were pilgrims, and none of us ever cared that cowboys didn't come here from England, we were just making our pilgrimage toward the sun, searching for freedom and rewriting history for everyone, but mostly us. Baby, I'm still playing our game. I'm just sailing for the new world alone this time. I wish I could come back to tell you what I find, but life has never consulted me before making all of these big decisions, and I stand helpless and hopeless unless the beauty you see in the mystery really points to something. I wish we could explore this together. Let me tell you, to die will be an awfully big adventure, but don't get lost, boy. I want to talk to one another about it, someday. It's time to say goodbye. Such a definite word. An infinite word. An intimate word, but it needs to be heard so that you don't have to wonder why the bottles stopped coming. You need closure to move on. You can't sink with me. You'll get this after I'm gone. And I hope that you can use our tree house to love someone else once the tide has finally set you free. But don't tell her who you built it for. Make her believe that she's the reason you put all those hours into protecting the purity of that place. I think that, eventually, you'll believe it, too. I truly do not know whether time heals all wounds. It sounds like wishful thinking, but I do know that you can't stop living just because someone else has. My love, don't sink. Don't sink. Your Queen

[fvisualvomits]

[fvisualvomits]

No Man Is An Island: Navigating the Female Colonist 

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (Donne 98)

Does woman not have the potential to be an island ‘entire of itself’? In reading Donne’s poem literally, it appears to encapsulate the flaws of men and suggests the man is ‘involved’ within ‘death’, engaging with a conventional reading of colonialism. However, a feminist reading of the poem, similar to Coetzee’s refashioning of Robinson Crusoe, allows a transcendence into liberal modernity. Herein I infer that deconstructing Donne’s text through a feminist lens designates that the female may surpass the male: capable of individualism. The female form ultimately provides, sustains and nourishes human life; it is the basis upon which the very existence of creation is possible. However, Coetzee’s decision to transfigure a male colonist into a female subverts the very notion of the stereotypical subservient, maternal and kind female when she develops the detrimental qualities of a colonist. For western colonialism surpassed the liminality of space, to invade metaphysical and psychological spaces of degradation such as causing epidermalization complexes across variances of skin colour. Foe aims the blur the metaphysical notions of gender through the trajectory of identity. Initially a strong and independent feminist character, Susan Barton rejects Cruso’s patriarchal overtones such as “while you live under my roof you will do as I instruct!” (Coetzee 20). Such utterings are highly both childish and controlling, and perhaps we despair for Barton as she transgresses this strange and impossible land. Yet this phrase simultaneously injects bleak humour, as the sexist narrative extends even to desolate islands where ‘roofs’ are fictitious. However, indoctrinated by England’s imperialistic views, Susan’s morality is undermined by her immediate reference to Friday as her “porter” (Coetzee 8) as an offhanded remark. This language is contemptible and dismissive, yet how can we blame a woman embroiled in a regime conceived by the patriarchy? Despite her initial strength to rebel against Cruso’s authority, Susan acclimatises and conforms to become “his second subject” (Coetzee 11) - no longer colonist, but colonised within Cruso’s phallocentric fairyland. It is important to observe she remains authoritarian to Friday. She is, after all, the middle ground between the two. Hindered by her gender, she is ameliorated from a position of despair by her whiteness. Subsequent to Cruso’s demise, Susan importantly internalises his narrative and identity to become Friday’s new master. She becomes a hybrid form as a female possessing a male narrative.  This is Coetzee’s plaything, his game, as he challenges his readers to conceptualise new reactions to imperialistic custom.

We observe a cataclysm of feminist discourse present within the text. While Barton possesses a female form, her ideological processes are inherently male-driven following her experience upon Cruso’s island. Are male and female psyches under colonist circumstances disparate? Or is gender negligible under the circumstances of white imperialism? In deconstructing a male author’s text, a reader must probe into whether Coetzee is capable of writing a female character adequately without prejudice or imbuing her narrative with masculine characteristics. This parallels a convoluted past, with a wide-ranging report of critique of his previous work. After all, in an interview, Coetzee revealed that his “sympathies in the novel were clearly with “Foe’s foe, the unsuccessful author – worse, authoress, Susan Barton" (Atwell 112). Coetzee posits himself as an ally of Susan Barton, yet his writing does not enhance her character, she is somewhat repugnant. Placing a female ‘authoress as ‘worse’ similarly sparks large implications. Coetzee participating in the sexist commentary, denouncing his position of female authors is an immediate flag that perhaps this is not a narrative that can be trusted. Given this, the novel begins shipwrecked between quotation marks.  To quote something is to be given agency over it, to alter titbits of narrative similarly as Barton does unto Cruso. Yet while we resultantly expect the narrative of part 1 to be from Barton’s perspective, it is not until part 3 of the novel that we manage to escape the quotation marks. To truly access Barton. The quotation marks could either represent what Barton has retold of her story, or they could be a sign of something incessantly sinister. The words may be elusive, as her narrative, through the lens of Foe has been adapted to his ideal narrative. There is no incertitude that he wishes to inject Susan’s tale with flair, as he wishes for “cannibals and pirates” (Coetzee 121) to enter the story and monetize the narrative. Susan, in contention, breaks the 4th wall within literature. She recognises that “Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day to day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal” (Coetzee 121) This is a binary of self-awareness. Susan’s quote summarises the entire systematic approach of novelisation. She, as a character, is at mercy to the expedient influence of both Foe and Coetzee in having the necessitated power to modify her tale. It is furthermore a fantastic if not forlorn reflection upon the state of slavery. In reality, let alone literature, as soon as someone is allowed to alter your narrative, it is almost as if they own you. The power of self-agency is the only modem that prevents non-fiction from transgressing into fiction. As soon as this is destroyed, or colonised upon, individualism is defunct. In lieu of this, Coetzee’s quote could be read as pragmatically sensible, in the recognition that literature is a male-dominated field, and that a female author would be more harshly critiqued. Examples of this are not localised to postcolonial literature such as Foe, the reality of this statement is widespread within literature. Charlotte Bronte poignantly surmises the problem of the ‘authoress’:

“We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice” (Gaskell 265)

The death of female agency within literature is a terrifying concept. This event is witnessed through the Bronte sister’s lamentations, through Daniel Foe publishing Susan’s story, through the twenty-first century as novelists continue to produce stunning literary works under the pseudonym of a male. To declare oneself as ‘woman’ is difficult because, through divergence from the ‘feminine’ path, there is ‘prejudice’. Clearly, to posit oneself as an ‘authoress’ is problematic, as Coetzee places Barton in opposition to Foe as his literal foe. Wherein is the source of such antagonism? While they collide on a multitude of points, the repetitive copulation, and eventually marriage of Barton to Foe implies a subversion of a foe. Yet, perhaps, this is a verification of the lack of agency permitted to a female. In order to achieve her goal of having her novel published, Barton’s only option is to marry Foe and allow him to inscribe upon her his masculinity. Perhaps Barton’s character cannot possess the slightest modem of femininity, as her genesis is inherently patriarchal, proving Spivak’s point that gender consistently fortifies the male as the dominant figure. To navigate the female colonist is to ultimately shipwreck one’s feminist integrity: as long as the patriarchy is enforced, the woman cannot ever truly be colonist – an eternal subaltern to the reign of man.

Women are cogs in the imperialistic murder machine – they remain subjugated to the male, as “the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant.” (Gillen 185). Women exist behind the scenes, staying at home, caring for the children and conducting a variety of sexist practices that exist, even within our present century. This is proof in itself that this ideological ‘construction’ is incredibly effective. Backdating the patriarchy, its conception is pre-history. However, even looking at the original narrative of the hunter/gatherer duality as men/female respectively, there is a clear deviance in power. Perhaps we can almost declare any spatiality, even the Eastern world, before colonisation to be abjectly fortunate compared to a woman trapped in the western topography. These societies, before their dissolution by imperialistic notions, had the potential to be free of wrongdoing. If any problem is to keep arising throughout history, it is that the male figure within itself is inherently problematic. Spivak states: “If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak 82). Dovey’s argument eloquently supplements Spivak’s idea:

“From a political perspective, there are interesting parallels between the feminist problem of a women's language and the recurring 'language issue' in the general history of decolonization", she goes on to say that despite its unifying appeal, the concept of a women's language is riddled with difficulties. Unlike Welsh, Breton, Swahili, or Amharic, that is, languages of minority or colonized groups, there is no mother tongue, no genderlect spoken by the female population in a society, which differs significantly from the dominant language.” (Dovey 82)

A woman’s language is nondescript: it does not exist. Even languages, despite the fact we refer to basal languages as ‘mother tongues’, are rife with the effect of male influence. To follow on from Spivak’s point, with the exemption of Friday as he is mute, even the colonised subalterns retain a position above the female within linguistics. Females are appropriated to a linguistic liminality that demotes our position within society not by the colour of our skin, or our ethnicity, but by the genitalia we are prescribed from birth. One could argue with Dovey that women do have a shared language – of certain movements, or of the stereotypically private girly chats that have existed for years outside of the male eye due to their necessity. We must inhibit a sacred place of femininity if not only for our sanity.

However, I think it is important to question as to why, as a largely hegemonized group for centuries, women have not banded to form a language. In relation to colonisation, I believe it is the motivational force of fear. To rebel against the male narrative in a world such as our own is a betrayal. To deny a man is to betray. To stray into a space that cannot be occupied by the cis heteronormative sphere is to inhabit a place in which a female, due to breaking the ‘rules’ of heteronormativity, must be afraid. As a result of this, perhaps we can never blame Susan Barton for all her injustices – even within the languages she uses within her internal monologue, she is constantly voicing the language taught to her by men. One must resultantly decipher the white imperialist through the dialogue of Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and his critique of euro centralised imperialism and epidermalization. Yet even such a concise and fluent condemnation is vitiated, marred by Fanon’s cultural stereotype of the white female.

Fanon proactively points out that “the white man is the predestined master of his world” (Fanon XVI). While Fanon’s statement is honest in the perception of the necessitation of power within a male sphere, the use of ‘predestined’ is alarming as a word imbued with power, and involving the idea of predestination almost absolves the white male of the blame. After all, if it is predestined, it is meant to be. And how, then, is a woman meant to possess tract, be the ‘master’ of her own existence? While sexist in disallowing female agency, one must acquiesce the reality of the chauvinist narrative of society. It is interesting to note that the direct opposition of this society is the black female, posited against a racist and sexist regime. A figure who is directly and most severely affected by the conditions imposed within such a political sphere. What if Susan Barton was black, and perhaps it was Friday who had washed ashore upon Cruso’s isle as a white man? The narrative would be vastly different and abjectly more violent, no audience can negate this. However, Fanon goes further to claim that “A given society is racist or it is not (Fanon 63)”. This statement is true, yet more complex than Fanon proposes. While a society is or is not racist, it is necessary to provide rationality for this notion. A society is not ‘predestined’ to be racist. Rather, it is racist because of how it is taught, similarly as a child may be raised aggressively. Racism, alongside sexism, homophobia and all matters of evil are not passed through the centuries via blood, they sparked by the internalised systematic oppression that infiltrates society: these behaviours are taught. The predominant sociological structure since the conception of the known order has been patriarchal. Our blame for a racist society can subsequently be ‘predestined’ then upon the ‘master’. I do not mean to absolve the female gender for their applications of oppression, merely to imply that their racism is a secondary effect of what has been taught down by society.

Dovey states that Susan Barton's story “is the story of a woman seeking to authorise her own representation: she challenges the authority of existing representations, and wishes to be recognised as the author of her own speech’” (Dovey 122). However, Barton cannot authorise her own representation, as it is not her own. She steals Cruso’s story, identity, and slave, she inhabits his narrative to the point where she begins to falsify and invent narratives. She creates an ‘old’ Friday, who is ‘a savage among savages’ (Coetzee 95). Friday’s body language, his eating habits, his entire practice of never one insinuating cannibalistic behaviour. However, in colonising over his own narrative as he lacks linguistic agency, Barton can propel herself into mystique with her colourful tale. Despite her repetition of her ‘love’ of Cruso, she seems to continuously berate him once he is unable to argue with her forthcoming. Instead of slavers, Cruso is suddenly at blame for the removal of Friday’s oral appendage. Why? For her own selfish imperialistic value. Her rare opportunity to propel herself without limitation. While it is not her own representation, she is certainly the author. This is the juncture where Barton is not only provided with speech but moreover free speech and artistic reign. The narrative she provides is not limited by patriarchal values, but society is multifariously flawed. Capitalism and vanity thus anchor and provoke Susan towards a narrative in which she is inherently and irrevocably flawed and the ‘truth’ of narrative to profit such apparatus. It is when Barton recognises a threat to this modem of representation that her behaviour becomes incredibly erratic. As ‘master’ of Friday, she is unable to allow him to begin to create his own fate.

“Give! Give me the slate, Friday!’ I commanded. Whereupon, instead of obeying me, Friday put three fingers into his mouth and wet them with spittle and rubbed the slate clean. I drew back in disgust. ‘Me Foe, I must have my freedom!’ I cried. ‘It is becoming more than I can bear! It is worse than the island! He is like the old man of the river” (Coetzee 147)

Friday is not regaining language within this scene, but rather drawing ‘row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes’ (Coetzee 147). The imagery of walking feet is difficult to decipher, but there is a multitude of possibilities. Perhaps these are not eyes, but rather manacles that encircle the illustrated feet. This would undoubtedly unsettle Susan who enjoys pretending that she a glorified, sinless leader of Friday. Referring to an earlier scene she states, ‘I have written a deed granting Friday his freedom…’ yet she immediately refers to their scenario, she is “the barefoot woman in breeches… [with] her black slave” (Coetzee 99). Susan argues that she does not own Friday, yet the inflexion of ‘her black slave’ demystifies this notion. He is ‘hers’, and more important, he is a ‘slave’. The subversion of this, playing Barton as the slave to Friday, throws the narrative off course. “I am wasting my life on you, Friday, on you and your foolish story…a great waste of time” (Coetzee 70)  She informs the reader that her “principal words” for Friday are “watch” and “do” (Coetzee 56). These are not words of leniency but words of direct commandment. The idea of Barton ‘wasting her life’ upon Friday resultantly lacks all coherency. She does not offer him any great favours, exemplified within the laughable scene in which she offers him to ‘return’ to his native land. She notes “all was not as it seemed” (Coetzee 110) between two men are who presumably slave traders. Even if they were not, this is Susan naively offering free merchandise. If Friday did manage to navigate the sea, his presumptive fate would be a replication of events, minus a shipwreck and an island in which he is cared for.

The ‘scheme’ of slavery is so rife that upon denial, the captain merely ‘shrugged’ upon the denial of Friday’s body. When one can capitalise upon an entire race, who cares about a ‘piece of the continent’.

We must further delve, or swim towards the shipwreck of Susan Barton’s character as a perplexing anomaly. Despite having a daughter, a husband is never mentioned, elevating her to an idolatrous feminist figure. Assuming Foe is set directly within Robinson Crusoe’s 1700s narrative, Susan is a ground-breaking persona, a prototype for single mothers. Consequentially, she is the anti-thesis to Donne’s meditations. An anti-individualist, she is not wedlocked nor is she landlocked within her initial narrative form. She transverses between Bahia, ships, and islands obfuscated in the topography of time and spatiality. This allows her to adopt the anti-maternal trope of “British Victorian adventure heroes… [who are] objects of desire” (Phillips 116). Phillip’s quote glorifies the colonial hierarchy yet excludes feminine discourse, the term ‘desire’ is curious via the reality of sour abhorrence. Men raping scores of subordinate women in developing territories is neither ‘heroic’ nor ‘desirable’. The superfluous nature of the male ego, implying that the female sexual appetite is depraved to physical assault is deplorable, and Cruso is certainly not an object of desire within Foe. Barton’s inaugural relationship with Cruso is nongregarious, and she is moreover physically repulsed by Friday, treating him with “distaste” (Coetzee 24). The archetypal, lascivious allegory of the exotic male traveller is thus tousled by Coetzee’s narrative style which exudes a near asexual style. However, Coetzee plays with this trope, as Susan is certainly an ‘object of desire’. Besides the captain of the rescue ship, she fornicates with all straight characters beyond Friday. Given this, each of her sexual encounters transforms the bedroom narrative into an interesting mise-en-scène of dominance, as she insists on being on top of the male. Susan must ‘coax’ Foe in particular, which “he did not seem easy with, in a woman” (Coetzee 139). The deliberate inclusion of ‘woman’ is intentionally confusing. Is sexism so ingrained into the male psyche that any form of authority exercised by a female is uncomfortable? Or is the Victorian period perhaps so prude that any deviation from the missionary position is shocking? Or, ultimately, is Coetzee insinuating that it would be ‘easier’ for Mr Foe to stomach a man sexually dominating his body? After all, “Coetzee, rather than following the easy path of repetition and conformity, ran risks and ignored sensibilities” (Attridge X). In deliberate rejection of ‘conformity’, this postmodern text is certainly aiming to unsettle the reader. Coetzee does not wish for us to have an ‘easy path of repetition’ but rather to play games. The proof materialises as the reader can picture this exchange almost as Susan taking Foe’s virginity through her ‘coaxing’ in a (perhaps psychologically painful) ‘first-time’ experience for him. Herein Susan is sexually deviant, the strong imperialistic native from Cruso’s Island. The implications are confused for Foe: she is meant to be a subordinate female, a visually white equal, yet she is simultaneously an exotic and authoritarian figure, transfigured via her experience on Cruso’s island. From her experiences, away from sheltered Victorian England, she is a hybridity of male and female that is alarming to the sequestered Foe. Yet intercourse with Cruso is substantially different. There is no resistance, rather Susan strokes ‘his body with my thighs’ (Coetzee 44) in language that is tender yet still positions her as the leading force. Despite this, Cruso does not defy her, nor require ‘coaxing’. Cruso has already dominated Barton’s narrative. An example of this appears later in the novel, when Barton discovers a stillborn infant upon the side of the road and panics that Friday may consume the child. She recognises that this behaviour is inherently inappropriate, that she did Friday ‘wrong’ to think in such a manner, but ‘Cruso had planted the seed’ (Coetzee 106). From the point of Cruso’s demise, he has planted an entire gardens worth of seeds within Barton’s mind considering the frequency with which she refers back to him. She has subsumed his narrative into her own, developed his sexual appetite. Her first copulation with Cruso reads as a sexual assault. She pushes him away, yet ‘he held me’ and ‘I resisted no more’ and ‘sat down to collect myself’ (Coetzee 30). The language herein is not of a positive sexual experience but rather a regretful surrender. The implication that she resisted is a conventional rape narrative. While Cruso can and has no qualms in commandeering her body,

Susan is not a sexual threat due to her existence as a female. This is due to the fact Barton fails to possess a penis, with which to psychologically and physically berate her ‘subjects’ as a ‘master’. While a female is certainly capable of physical assault (whether first or second hand, such as through an accomplice) perhaps the female colonist is limited by physicality. Without the potential to sexually conquer through the invasive and demoralising act of penetrative rape, perhaps the complete dehumanisation of an intended subordinate is impossible without the phallus. The androcentric regime of domination will triumph in degradative consequences, and thus the woman colonist may never be as carnally tumultuous.

While Susan may colonise Friday in a multitude of ways, she does not sexually engage him. Barton is, however, certainly fascinated by Friday’s priapic distance. Dovey notes Friday’s “absent penis/tongue allows him to figure as the phallus for Susan Barton as woman writer; he becomes a fetishized phallus" (Dovey 127). Does Barton fetishize Friday? Her physical repulsion due to his muteness denies this theory. The conjecture of penis/tongue is covertly sexual as two objects of an erotic appendage, two ‘promontory’ parts ‘of the main’, yet what is the effect if Friday lacks both addendums? He is feminised, easier to control, and moreover becomes not an object of desire, but rather an object of apathy on which to project her own insecurities. Barton even reaffirms in a weirdly covertly sexual scene with Friday she ‘does not mean to court’ him. She speaks of kissing ‘cold statues of kings and queens’ and of “marble” and of the “dead” (Coetzee 79) – if this is the language of courtship, it is certainly a unique approach. This is a woman speaking to her slave, as she proffers a self-confessed ‘long, issueless colloquial’ (Coetzee 79). Her speech is patronising, demeaning, and moreover complete gibberish to Friday. ‘Marble’ immediately segregates Friday as it infers Susan’s preference for a white man. The conjunction of ‘cold/marble/dead’ moreover paints a morbid picture that suggests necrophilia tendencies. Perhaps, embroiled in a daydream and lost in her ‘issueless’ spiel of words, ‘she envisions her ‘dead’ Cruso. If Friday could understand Susan’s drivel, it would formulate an incredibly complicated sexual legacy for Friday. After all, “in every case, the language and the consciousness through which the servant’s world is mediated is the masters” (Attridge 17). While this would perhaps resonate if Friday listened to Barton, he seems entirely distant from her. He seems to do the bare minimum, not to please her, but merely in an act of self-preservation as he does not know where to go next. Friday is trapped on the English isle, only slave to Barton due to his lack of having elsewhere to go, subject to Barton’s will.

It is almost as if Susan externalises a maternal prowess over him. Perhaps it is less colonialism and more her desire to probe into Friday’s truth, to find some variable of language that will allow spatiality for his narrative. More so than her own narrative, she is near obsessive for Friday’s tale. She does not, thus, fetishize his phallus, but rather his tongue. I explain this by a regression to Cruso’s island. Throughout the narrative, the few words Friday has been taught are ‘as many as he needs’ (Coetzee 21). The words he knows are not complex, yet perhaps this is the language of colonisation: minimal linguistics. Short, commanding words that convey a direct message. This is experienced when Cruso teaches Friday to ‘open his mouth’ (Coetzee 22). This is a forceful and incredibly invasive procedure, especially when aware of Friday’s lack of tongue. The ‘dark’ (Coetzee 22) is a metaphor for the language of colonisation itself through the primary example of the colonised – Friday, as a slave, will never be able to vocalise his narrative. Instead, his rhetoric and his heirloom of colonisation is the language that Cruso bestowed upon him. Europeanism is thus implanted within Friday, governing his actions despite the fact he cannot comprehend it. Barton’s reaction to this intimate encounter is incredibly maternal. Knapman notes the discretions between the treatment of slaves across variations within gender.

“Instead, through their kindness, benevolence, and reliance on moral suasion rather than force, white women made racial tolerance, if not racial equality, the hallmark of their relations with non-Europeans. It was the European male who stood with whip in hand over his black labourers, not the European woman” (Knapman 107)

Barton, despite her flaws, could arguably be said to want Friday to be free. Although, perhaps this is for her own self-gain. Friday is nothing but help to Susan, yet she seems to consider him a burden upon her life.  Upon Cruso’s Island they stand within equality, yet being passed the baton of ownership divulges her towards a loss. Her ‘moral suasion rather than force’ invites an uneasy narrative wherein she simply berates Friday. There is no affection towards him, in fact, she only seems to truly care for Friday once in the lens of Foe. In a position where she is under scrutiny and there is the potential impact upon her narrative, she behaves as she wishes her ‘people’ to view her. Unfortunately, the narrative that Susan provides for herself is flawed. She treats Friday unjustly despite his lack of choice. He is a direct threat to the narrative she has stolen, adapted, metamorphosed into a wonderful and exotic tale when perhaps it is a great tragedy. She appropriates him in every way conceivable.

While this essay is about feminism and colonisation; their modalities are the same. Two systems of power oppressed by the same force: the heteronormativity of the white patriarch as ‘master’, ‘predestined’ to ‘shipwreck’ us forevermore. Society, nor gender, are staticised forms. A female colonist under the influence of a patriarchal society is, unfortunately, nearly as detrimental as a male herself in the metaphysical repetition of the narrative. However, the female form is limited within physicality, especially within a sexual context due to lack of phallic commandment. A woman’s morality and ethics, her attitude, within such a society are proscribed from the lessons learnt from birth. We discover retribution through forms of ‘moral suasion rather than force’ as a result, but what if a female genderlect was introduced? Through subscribing to rhetoric based upon ‘morality’ and of a ‘unifying appeal’, could this matriarchal sect not introduce intersection? To eliminate racism, to redefine the very definition of a ‘colonist’. Not as commander of another’s body, nor narrative, but to make advances towards inclusivity for all towards equality. Mr Foe states, ‘the island is not a story in itself’ (Coetzee 117). Not is the conception a colonist that of a colonist – shifting registries of meaning allows for change, to transcribe detriment into delight. Yet while such inscriptions and liminality upon reform exist, we can answer Spivak’s essay: Can the Subaltern Speak? The answer is fundamentally and eternally a resounding no. Female or black, tongue or not, to enact subordination is to eradicate a voice entirely. For perhaps one could argue there is nothing more subordinate than the female, as ‘the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge’ (Spivak 82). Barton is only obsessed with the narrative of Friday as male because she has no claim to a voice. In providing Friday’s voice, she validates her own, as she splutters, swimming toward the island, away from the shipwreck of her tragic noiselessness. The horror of the darkness in Friday’s throat, where the tongue should belong, is not her empathy for Friday: it is the self-realisation of her position of a woman, where the tongue shall never belong, lost in the devastation of the wreck.

Works cited

• Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. Print.

• Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. California: University of California Press, 1993. Print.

• Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Print.  

• Donne, John, and John Sparrow. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Print.

• Dovey, Teresa. "The Intersection of Postmodern, Postcolonial and Feminist Discourse in J.M. Coetzee's Foe." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 119-33. Web. 23 Dec. 2017.

• Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto, 2008. Print.

• Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, and Linda H. Peterson. The Life of Charlotte Bronte. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Print.

• Gillen, Paul Bates., and Devleena Ghosh. Colonialism & Modernity. Sydney: UNSW, 2007. Print.

• Haggis, Jane. "Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender?" Women's Studies International Forum 13.1-2 (1990): 105-15. Web. 10 Jan. 2018.

• Phillips, Richard. Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

[fvisualvomits]

"It's one they say has a ghost in the garden..." (Ondaatje 30)

Disappearance and Degeneration: The Ethicality of Bearing Witness in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost 

One can only hope for ghosts to be contained within the garden. In Sri Lanka, there are so many ghosts that they walk, barely disguised, amongst the living. The Sri Lankan civil war relentlessly entrenched the deaths of “more than 20,000 people” (Nilsson 1329) into the psyche of civilians. Vibrant Sri Lanka was resultantly transformed into a macabre death world, where mortality and annihilation walked hand in hand, rather than ‘6 feet’ apart. Bearing witness aims to consolidate the trauma of loss, to provide retribution and composure in such troubled times to those afflicted. It proffers the preservation of sanity within gruelling scenarios, conserving those who have ‘disappeared’ and immortalising their legacies. However, time is a vital, fragmenting factor, enforcing a multiplicity of disappearances that transcends physicality. It eliminates the very essence of a human soul: the sound of the deceased’s voice is forgotten, their scent irretrievable, their very bones disintegrated. The temporality of what can be preserved and what we can ‘bear witness’ to is resultantly within a perpetual state of liminality. While this places boundaries upon bearing witness, the practice is necessitated by lack of alternative, it is the only requisite for peace. Samuel Hynes remarks that “if you make the truth survive, however terrible it is, you are retaliating against inhumanity, in the only way the powerless have” (Hynes 129). Ondaatje’s purpose for Anil’s Ghost is the ‘survival’ of the ‘terrible truth’. Anil and Sarath’s quest to identify Sailor’s remains transcends Sailor’s skeleton – it is the first step in denying the government absolution from blame. Solving Sailor’s mystery is ‘retaliating against inhumanity’ to provide a voice for the ‘powerless’ civilians such as Ananda who are affected.

This essay begins by exploring the ethics of bearing witness altogether in troubled states such as Sri Lanka. Should we bear witness? Can we explore ethics and ‘truth’ in a land devoid of ethics, as the designated protector of the people (government) transforms into the enemy? Most importantly, what allows Anil, a Sri Lankan expat, the agency to return to her origins and unsettle the narrative? Certainly, the notion of who is able to bear witness is certainly a focal point of Ondaatje’s novel. It is ultimately the ‘true’ Easterners, the truly ‘powerless’ who are able to access the ‘truth’, not the returning westerner who is allowed to admission to the truth. It is certainly Ananda whose narrative is most aligned with this depravity, as a victim himself, However, through Sailor’s tale, Ondaatje strays from the conventional narrative of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The advances towards identifying Sailor transpire via the necessity of touch. While Sailor is metaphorically ‘disappeared’, he retains a physical presence via his skeletal remains. Realistically, the ‘disappeared’ was literal: the bodily forms of those selected spirited away into thin air, without any clues towards deciphering events. Ananda’s wife is never found. He is resultantly our most apt and poignant source to analyse and divulge the true impact of being ‘disappeared’: the secondary effect of ‘degeneration’. His attempted suicide is one of the primary scenes within the novel, and his characterisation integral in divulging how to appropriately bear witness. Bearing witness is a highly complex system of trying to restore and rationalise what has been lost, yet as with all traumatic scenarios, one must be incredibly careful in how to enact the process. Through his complex and compelling narrative, Ondaatje sets up a riveting duality of disappearance/degeneration and physical/psychological effect. As the reader, we must probe towards the consequences of bearing witness itself, and Sarath’s murder is our gateway towards this, as while distressing and “undefended” (Ondaatje 286), or unjustified, it is arguably the only knock-on benefit of Anil and Sarath’s initial inquest. His sacrifice allows the potential for Anil to return to America with her evidence – yet we are intentionally left in the dark as to whether she successfully escapes. In such a precarious game of life or death, perhaps sometimes the injury outweighs the gain. More than simply a restoration, perhaps bearing witness is simply a wish to return to the past and find solidarity in relations. Palipana is the exemplary model for Ondaatje, as he bears witness in a unique way. He escapes the atrocity of Sri Lanka to inhibit a space that is pre-trauma, pre-pain, pre-loss. His ocular degradation is almost a blessing as he can identify the ‘truth’ without witnessing the visible trauma. Yet in the case of a death - a psychologically cruel event - the metaphorical sense of digging for the corpse is ultimately as traumatic as the physical. The soil of pain is occasionally best left unturned.

The events of the Sri Lankan Civil War did not only constitute a vast ‘disappearance’ in bodies but a shocking loss of social normality and created mass panic. As the ghosts walked along their familiarised routes, they permeated and altered the atmosphere in incomprehensible ways. The alteration within the general mood is palatable, as stereotypical “war brings to any society it’s electric, exhilarating atmosphere” (Hynes 111). This ‘atmosphere’ is not the reality of war, but rather the boyish glorification of war that existed in examples such as British enlistment propaganda. Stereotypical war is enacted upon other societies, perhaps subordinate or distant, but always the Other. Civil war is a subversion of conventional war. An ‘exhilarating’ atmosphere is replaced by tentative ‘sides’ and a detonation of all normalisation. Civil war is “a battlefield gothic without a battlefield – or a battle. It makes excruciatingly vivid what war may become when absolute power confronts absolute powerlessness” (Hynes 253). The tactics within the civil war are beyond immorality, they sabotage all formality of virtue as there is no clear division of friend/foe, any indication of what step, in any direction, will lead oneself into enemy territory. And “how is a formless war, a war without a front, to be won?”, after all? If there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ then there is resultantly no ‘truth’. The practice of bearing witness is resultantly inhibited within civil war, as without the ability to share one’s fears with friends, family, friends, there is inevitable severe psychological trauma. The internalisation of death through natural causes is difficult; the unjustified murders of entire families and communities are impossible to vindicate. Sri Lanka echoes George Orwell’s 1984, wherein the world is in a state of perpetual siege through an omnipresent governmental presence. However, instead of violence being enacted within the private eye as within Orwell’s novel, Sri Lanka is riddled with public torture wherein mutilated bodies bear enemy threats to… anyone. There is no particular message, nor is there a particular target. This is killing for the sake of killing, abasement and torture as threatening symbols, yet there is a state of warfare with no clear war. Milena Marinkova notes that:

“The numerous instances of display of tortured bodies in the novel suggest that the public humiliation of the corporeal serves not only to instil terror but also to affirm control in a moment of major epistemological slippage.” (Marinkova 120)

The public humiliation of the ‘corporeal’ is a brutalist method of dissuading civilians not to rebel against the government, to ‘instil terror’ to the point of silence. Foucault’s panopticon within Discipline and Punish is similar to the idea of what is occurring within Sri Lanka. We have civilians. similar to inmates, self-policing themselves in a state of terror. This is what transforms Sri Lanka into death world, the omnipresent ‘terror’ to ‘affirm control’. Similarly, to Foucault’s panoptical model, when civilians (or inmates) believe that they are being observed, they will regulate their behaviours to align with what they believe is expected of them. However, policing a society in such a manner completely eradicates individualism. The people are ‘powerless’ not only in their attempts to protect their lives but also due to their lack of agency and personality. These civilians are dead men walking, not only because of the omnipresent risk of death, their psychological trauma, but also because of eradication of language in the face of objection. Without language and communication, there is no community civilisation, a ‘powerlessness’ through a liminality of linguistics. Even aesthetic linguistics are shunned in fear of discovery, and so without verbalisation or written content, the lack of trust destroys all potential records of the ‘truth’. Anil and Sarath’s inaugural relationship is insight into the social atmosphere, permeated by a widespread hesitance to trust others. Anil immediately doubts Sarath’s position, wondering if he is “neutral in this war” (Ondaatje 25), and Sarath makes sure Anil’s tape recorder is off, “and only then answered her question” (Ondaatje 41). They are both alarmed to reveal any ammunition that could implicate themselves to the other. In the event of bearing witness, one would expect an intimate and personal relationship between a forensic pathologist and an archaeologist within a partnership. However, within the civil war, even professional modalities of bearing witness are redacted and proscribed towards neutrality. Ondaatje questions:

“How to render the act of witnessing ‘safe’ amidst the epistemic violence of hegemonic and hegemonising constructions of history and culture that provide the enabling context for extrajudicial killings and terrorism.” (Salgado 129)

Witnessing is naturally perilous under ‘epistemic violence’. Within civil war, it is precisely the ‘epistemic’ knowledge that renders witnessing ‘unsafe’. To be aware is to be at risk. Anil and Sarath’s bearing witness is enacted through verbal yet distant roundabouts until she directly confronts ‘which side’ he is on. Even though Sailor is already a skeleton, she is afraid Sarath may “disappear” (Ondaatje 49) him. Herein lies the problem: despite a skeleton’s lack of identity, the physical form is integral to bearing witness. This rationalises the vexed atmosphere of the war: identity with a physical loss. We cannot bear witness to invisible bones. Moreover, even when we believe Sarath and Anil have developed a confident relationship, it is undermined by Anil’s “fears” (Ondaatje 265) that Sarath has still betrayed her, despite his involvement in compiling a report that would condemn the Sri Lankan government. Ultimately, it is Anil’s ‘fears’ themselves that ‘render the act of witnessing’ unsafe. Her doubts of Sarath provide momentum, the premature delivery of their report to the government and its subsequent ruination, alongside Sarath’s murder. Reader, alongside Ananda, must bear witness to this hecatomb in various, yet ethical, ways, in which I return to later in this essay.

While Anil and Sarath’s modalities of bearing witness are not ‘safe’, Palipana’s practice of bearing witness is unique in his isolation. His rejection of a contemporary lifestyle and his preconceived notions of how to extract ‘truth’ are idiosyncratic. He is able to divulge through from the medium of touch alone, his senses heightened from ocular loss. While the fact is accessible, the truth is not. He suggests that “we have never had the truth” (Ondaatje 98). This undermines the entire ‘quest’ of Anil’s Ghost as we probe for Sailor’s ‘truth’: the details of his murder, the ‘how’ and the vital ‘why’? Minoli Salgado divulges that our “central concern is not so much how to bear witness to traumatic events, but how to find ‘truth’ – or rather truths – in variable and shifting registers of meaning” (Salgado 129). Ondaatje’s text is certainly concerned with multifarious truths, I concur that ‘how’ is our direct path to the truth. The novel is obsessed with ‘how’ – ‘how’ Sailor was murdered, ‘how’ he was chosen, ‘how’ he can be used as a voice for a subjugated voice of Sri Lanka. ‘How’ and ‘Truth’ are concurrent, and from an evidence point of view, intrinsically linked. Furthermore, how do we find truth within death, especially death as isolated as a ‘disappearance’? While we can clutch at the facts of Sailor’s death, we don’t ever know the ‘truth’. While identified as Ruwan Kumara, a mine worker, he was chosen by a “billa… a monster, a ghost” (Ondaatje 265) as ‘the rebel sympathiser’. The ‘monster’ trope adds a black humour to the narrative. This is the demon that lurks under your bed, in the dark and inside your closet: except instead of being a wives’ tale or a child’s vivid imagination, it is a terrifying reality that at any moment, the ‘monster’ will snatch you.

However, unlike Ruwan, Palipana is safe in his grove, “governed only by the elements” (Ondaatje 80), his bearing witness towards history is convoluted. He does not have the threat of the panopticon, perhaps in his age, he is moreover exempt from ‘fear’. After all, “the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, knowing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive” (Mmbebe 30) Palipana is not only surviving ‘disappearance’ and psychological ‘degeneration’, he directly challenges it. He is embedded in Sri Lanka’s roots both literally and metaphysically and thus has the power to not only bear witness but moreover to create witness.  Can we trust a man who invents facts, rather than deciphers them? Is this not what every author does? His tactics to propel himself into scholarly fame are perhaps overly ambitious and consequently calamitous, but simultaneously genius in their genesis:

“He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century… [yet] there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts” (Ondaatje 77)

Is linguistic truth is limited to certitude? Everything that has been created, whether linguistically, physically, has stolen a prerequisite of what has come before. For Ondaatje’s text, fiction certainly has the potential to resemble while not replicating truth. Through informing westernised readers of the events happening in Sri Lanka, knowledge is spread. The narratives will not be exactly akin to reality, yet similar to Palipana’s oeuvre, they are nugatory. Ondaatje’s text resultantly bears witness even unto itself, as it both educates and simultaneously mourns the transgressions of civil war.

Once again, we must consider the ethicality of bearing witness as a whole. Anil’s intrusion into Sri Lanka is certainly well-intentioned, yet an extreme failure of bearing witness is the insensitivity and precautions granted towards locals by westernised influence. A pivotal example is via looking forward to the 2004 Tsunami and the extant ramifications of the civil war:

“The humanitarian system also showed limited competence and creativity in challenging the inhumanity of a war that set new precedents in a pattern of abuse and instrumentalization of relief programs that deepened the humanitarian consequences of the war.” (Niland 3)

Anil’s system shows ‘limited competence’ in how she enacts her agency. She submits the incomplete government report through bearing witness in an act of self-preservation. In prioritising herself, she damns Sarath. As a westerner, she exempts herself from the repercussions of opening Pandora’s box: she knows she can return to England and begin a new narrative. Ondaatje recognises the westerner’s ability to “opt out” (Ondaatje 283) of the atrocities within the Eastern world. “The American or Englishman gets on the plane and leaves. That’s it… the tired hero… he’s going home. So the war to all purposes, is over. Go home. Write a Book. Hit the circuit” (Ondaatje 282). This statement exudes undertones of hostility. Is this Ondaatje’s own internalised guilt from not being present in Sri Lanka throughout the war, an expat similar to Anil? It is a directly hostile social commentary perhaps on the system of bearing witness as a whole as system congruent to cultural appropriation. I infer that the westerner may leave the area of subjugation with a stupendous tale, yet they retain none of the calamity they have caused or intercepted. The story of the Sri Lankan skeleton is colonised, adapted to a western rhetoric of storytelling while ignoring the detrimental reality – a ‘reality fiction’ that excludes those affected.

It is not only literal ghosts but metaphysical ghosts that haunt the streets of Sri Lanka due to both ‘disappearance’ and ‘degradation’. One could surmise that degradation is the secondary effect of disappearance. As the numbers of fatalities soar, the psychological climate concurrently ebbs. Ananda’s attempted suicide, following by Sarath’s murder, are both incredibly important in exploring nuances of sensitivity within Anil’s Ghost. Through including Ananda within their search for ‘truth’, Sarath and Anil severely err by forcing him to relive his trauma of losing his wife. He has clearly decided, in a deep state of depression, to leave the home of his in-laws and to isolate himself to a “petrol station” (Ondaatje 157). In a move similar to Palipana, we can assume he has done so not only to avoid the potential damnation of isolation but detach himself from reality. Perhaps his self-banishment from society, especially within a petrol station is a sign of incoming suicidal intentions. Surrounded by petrol (if the station has not been ransacked for use in homemade bombs), he is in a site of danger, easily set ablaze. Initially asked only to identify a skeleton, we may assume that he is unaware of the ‘digging’ he must partake. His revived trauma is evident through his decline into alcoholism. His drinking “hadn’t become serious until he began working on the head” (Ondaatje 164). As a man, formerly “unconcerned’ (Ondaatje 159), even as they cross a roadblock, this is a steep emotive declination. Something is unmistakeably triggering Ananda to reject sobriety alongside reality. A particular scene predicates the incoming trauma of Ananda’s inimical personality. Anil discovers Ananda drunk, playing her headphones upon his head:

“Tom Waits singing ‘Dig, Dig, Dig… channelled itself into his inner brain, and he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him”. (Ondaatje 165)

The ‘dig, dig, dig’ is no linguistic coincidence by Ondaatje. Ananda does not speak English but the particular scene stands an allegory for his suppressed anguish. In handling Sailor’s skull, he is plunged into a death narrative. In ‘digging’ for Sailor, or Ruwan Kumara as he is identified, he must ponder the fate of the skull. Unfortunately, “war persists in the minds of those who have fought or suffered” (Hynes 282) and Ananda’s mind is in perpetual conflict. He cannot ‘escape the sounds within him’. Put simply, the civil war has rewritten Ananda’s account. His narrative is a perverse amalgamation of various modalities of trauma and suffering. Unfortunately, Anil has proved that Humanitarian influence ‘deepened’ the ‘pattern of abuse and instrumentalization’. To return to ‘Dig Dig Dig’, a particular lyric is “But we don't know what we dig 'em for.” We must ask of Anil: Why do we dig in gardens that do not belong to us? Human nature is a labyrinthine maze, yet I proffer the reason of self-gain. In self-bettering, of resolving her absence from the country, her giving back is a selfish modem of internalised conciliation for her abandonment of her ‘roots’. Such regrets are inappropriate to the extent of appropriating Ananda’s sadness through the loss of his wife. By openly weeping in front of his recreation of Sailor’s likeness, it is near insulting. Ananda’s narrative of loss, the entire archive of Sri Lankan loss is not Anil’s to lament. In a culturally appropriating narrative, one must not impose as Anil does so by openly weeping. Ananda resultantly attempts suicide directly after this event:

“Ananda was lying against a corner, trying with what energy he had left to stab himself in the throat. The blood on the knife and in his fingers and down his arm. His eyes like a deer in her light. The sound coming from God knows where. Not his throat. It couldn’t be his throat.” (Ondaatje 191)

Ananda has “called forth the dead” (Ondaatje 192) and this phrase has a duplicity. Ananda is presumably gurgling, blood seeping from his throat in an unnatural, guttural tone. The repetition of ‘dig, dig, dig’ when the ‘d’ is emphasised resembles a noise akin to heavy dripping, as Ananda’s blood seeps into the floor. We can read this as Ananda’s ‘truth’ leaking, his blood akin to his mental state. Something that should not be revealed leaking from private to public sphere. His truth. Anil recognises her miscalculation in saving him soon after, “she had interrupted his death. She was the obstacle to what he wanted” (Ondaatje 193). This does not only provide commentary upon the appropriation of bearing witness but any form of appropriation that involves a narrative outside of one’s own. One simply does not have the right to invade upon anyone else’s narrative.

However, in the bare honesty of suicide, Salgado observes that “Ananda represents the artist as a truth seeker, and it is his fate, according to Ondaatje, that forms “the central core of the book’ as “he is the only person to effectively humanise sailor” (Salgado 137). Ananda’s ‘humanisation’ of Sailor is not only through providing a rough cranial reconstruction, but the addition of emotion within his facial attributes. Instead of simple phrenology, we possess characterisation. Ananda manages to encapsulate the true pain of the Sri Lankan war and integrate it because it is a necessity, because it is his own. It is his own method of bearing witness to the tragedy that has befallen his wife.  Beyond his work, he is attuned to Sailor. Ananda is a working-class man from a village seemingly as remote as Sailor. Perhaps Ananda is alarmed that it could easily have been him, rather than Sailor, who was chosen as a sacrifice to police civilians. Familiar narrative, especially that of tribulation, is perturbing. We reject intimate narratives in our own way of self-preservation. To further unsettle and humanise his characters, Ondaatje provides a short story based upon Ananda’s wife, Sirissa. Her story only serves as an extension of his tragedy, a wife with ‘silk-like hair’ (Ondaatje 169) who teaches in a school, a woman who is inherently good. Who, within her narrative, lacks any implication of being an insurgent. Through a personal narrative, an injection of compassion, our personal narratives are brought into account to bear witness to the afflictions of others. Yet this injection of such tales ethical? “The human heart may be colder and crueller than our experience has shown us” (Hynes 269). Through providing a narrative as such, purposefully upsetting a reader, we empathise. We posit ourselves in their shoes, replace their familial relations with our own. We imagine and feel the torture and pain the government inflicted. Is this not triggering for people who have lost their loved ones or recently experienced a great trauma, such as death? While I doubt that Ondaatje purposefully sets out to trigger people, this kind of deviance from the path, similarly to what the government have done in their attack upon the insurgents, can have expansive ramifications that may inspire further events. Hynes probes into this narrative style:

“Personal narratives are not like that… they don’t glorify war, or aestheticize it, or make it literary or heroic; they speak in their own voices, in their own plain language… they make war actual, without making it familiar. They bear witness” (Hynes 30)

Personal narratives can certainly aestheticize war, as Ondaatje has proven. Moreover, despite being a fiction, it has been noted that fiction borrows from reality, except in the case of fantasy novels. Could Ondaatje’s novel not be read as a personal narrative? A non-fiction? It certainly isn’t heroic, but it is definitely familiarised through a variety of voices that bear witness to the reality of atrocity. Perhaps it is the provision of ‘calm’ scenes, cut into a disturbing narrative that only confounds our emotive selves. We will all experience loss in the trajectory of existence. It is merely a sliding scale, afflicted by a conglomeration of factors, that decrees how potent this loss may be. We cannot help but bear witness in any atrocity, as all atrocities are part of the human condition.

Alternatively, Sarath’s death at the conclusion of the novel, sacrificing himself so Anil can (potentially) escape with their results, can be read as the sole ‘ethical’ death within the novel. His suicide provides plausible cause for the retribution of thousands of others within Sri Lanka. Sarath, resultantly, ascends toward the status of a Bodhisattva. It is no coincidence that Ondaatje mentions that ‘he [Ananda] and the woman Anil would always carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena” (Ondaatje 301) before the carving of the statue begins. This directly proposes the idea of bearing witness within one’s heart and the liminality of linguistics. Bearing witness is something that is best kept within the private sphere, the psyche, rather than exposed. It is the only way it can be retained as a ‘truth’, without adaptation. Ananda wears, both physically and mentally, “Sarath’s cotton shirt – the one he had promised himself he would wear for this morning’s ceremony” (Ondaatje 301). These subtle references to Sarath, assuming Ananda is aware of his fate, implies not only Sarath’s embodiment within Ananda’s identity, but within the statue, as it looks toward the ‘ceremony’, a new way to celebrate bearing witness. There is necessitation to wearing Sarath’s shirt and thus this ceremony patently involves his physical (cotton shirt) and metaphysical (ghost) presence. The Buddha statue in question possesses a “pure sad glance” (Ondaatje 303) which encapsulates a man such as Sarath, or anyone who has born witness to the events in Sri Lanka. Yet this statue stands as more than a nod towards Sarath, it is the representation of anyone subjected to injustice. The eyes being painted are an allegory for truth, not only within Sri Lanka but all depraved narrative. The act of painting, of ‘opening’, stands for raising awareness of trauma and injustice. Ananda’s mentioning that the statue is looking ‘north’ is a nod to the ‘true north’ as upon a compass. Not only a physical guide such as upon a compass, but a metaphysical representation the ‘truth’ one so desperately seeks.

Ondaatje has proven that “the helpless man opposes by bearing witness” (Hynes 274) yet this is clearly uncomplicated when the nonhelpless intervenes. Bearing witness is a complex manner of responding to tragedy, insofar as there are no limits as to how we enact it, only limits within its truth. We can expose our response to trauma in abundant and diverse ways because pain is monolithic. I propose that one could compare Anil’s Ghost to Edward Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of The Mountain King’ (YouTube, In the Hall of the Mountain King). The erratic narrative arch of the novel is concurrent with the thunderous and frenzied climaxes of the orchestra as the protagonist of the musical piece, Peer Gynt, ‘digs’, or travels, deeper into a mountain, similarly as Sarath and Anil grow closer to the facts of their investigation. Ondaatje’s interruptions of narrative to include snippets of other tales, such as that of Sirissa’s, collude with the backing strings coming in. This is the narrative decide in which Ondaatje builds up a more cohesive account of degradation, how the orchestra raises tension. The repetition of the music becomes familiar, as do the characters within the novel. With each stroke of a bow, or page, the composition accelerates. This shadows the urgency and macabre pressure upon Anil and Sarath to resolve their transgression promptly as they attempt to outpace the ‘degeneration’ unfolding. Time, as the combatant threatens governmental disarray alongside destroying keystones who would have witnessed the epoch within Sailor’s history. The culmination of the orchestral piece is a terrific clatter. It echoes the narrative arch in which we discover that Sarath has been murdered before the crescendo fades to a peaceful silence. For we certainly experience a ‘clatter’ in the form of shock as Gamini pulls the blanket away to expose a mutilated Sarath. The silence of Grieg’s opus resonates with the scene in which Ananda paints the eyes of the reconstructed Buddha, a resolution despite a precarious journey.

Comparing aesthetic linguistics to audible shift proves that the process of internalising events and trauma is consistently similar. We could compare these patterns to a panic attack, the tension building as the heartbeat increases before, suddenly, everything is just as before – although it is not. Something is different, slightly skewed from before. The same applies to civil war, if not all mediums of conflict. Post-event, normality resumes, although there is a marked difference amongst those who have opened their eyes to ‘truth’. Bearing witness is a modality divulging truth that is so prolifically complicated that perhaps it cannot ever bear ethics, as it is an art so subjective within itself that it can never be truly understood, except within a personal narrative.

Yet ultimately, no matter how we choose to bear witness, it requires a semblance of physicality. If not the body of the ‘disappeared’ or lost, the emotions that internally bear witness. We use bearing witness as our fight against ‘degeneration’, yet the two are mutually exclusive. We cannot experience trauma without long-term, widespread effect. And so, eternally amongst us, but just out of reach, these ghosts reside under unmarked gravestones. Is a gravestone not a flower, a graveyard not a garden? Civil injustice waters the stones and the flowers bloom at an alarming rate. Occasionally the weeds of a government official infiltrate the garden, entangling with the countless young infantile stems, suffocating their narratives. But there is no one left to tend for the plot, for all the gardeners, like their crops, have wilted, traumatised by the effects of the deathly drought. Perhaps one day, a visitor will tend the garden, but the eternal question will be if they can do so without damaging the indigenous crops.

Works Cited

• Berliner Philharmoniker. “Grieg: Peer Gynt/Järvi” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, June 14.   2010. Web.   29 Dec. 2017.

• Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.  

• Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1997. Print.

• Marinkova, Milena. "Perceiving […] in one’s own body: The Violence of History, Politics and Writing: Anil’s Ghost and Witness Writing." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.3 (2009): 107-25. Web. 01 Jan. 2018.

• Niland, Noah. Inhumanity and Humanitarian Action: Protection Failures in Sri Lanka. Feinstein International Center, Tufts University: Medford, USA. Web.

• Nilsson, Ann-Charlotte. Children and Youth in Armed Conflict. Nijhoff, 2013. Print.

• Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost. London: Vintage, 2011. Print.

• Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.

• Rosenblatt, Adam. "Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity.” Human Rights Quarterly 38.1 (2016): 224-28. Web. 05 Jan. 2018.

• Salgado, Minoli. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place. Routledge, 2012. Print.

[fvisualvomits]

going to be fiddling about with some visual spoken word (as i’m far too shy) in levi’s style.

[fvisualvomits]

my highest ever uni mark (74, a presentation)

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Into the Lighthouse’: A psychoanalytical reading

Pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.

Modernist lifestyle themes -

Changing attitudes to narrative perspective and novel form

No modernist agenda or outline: but with Freud’s ideas coming into popularity it was impossible to ignore their impact on literature and art. Modernism possesses multiple and perhaps unreliable narrators, subjectivity, and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Symbolism James p.138: Nothing was simply one thing!

The novel is not concerned with the plot but rather the interiority of multiple characters.

Psychoanalysis conscious/unconscious: Descartes and ‘I think therefore I am’ instead of physical actions – what is not revealed is true. By its very nature, the symbolism of literature in Modernism was incapable of being simply stream of consciousness – notably in the titular symbol of the lighthouse. despite Woolf stating:

‘I have not studied Dr Freud or any psychoanalyst – indeed I think I have never read any of their books: my knowledge is merely from the superficial talk. Therefore any use of their methods must be instinctive.’ (Letters v. 36)

Freud’s idea of the conscious/unconscious is vital in reading ‘To the lighthouse’ in terms of the Lighthouse and Mrs Ramsey herself. However, his theory of the Oedipus complex presents itself within their children in relation to Mr Ramsey. 

Into the Lighthouse and Woolf’s own life:

 Father rented Tallad House in St Ives, Cornwall, from 1882, as a summer retreat.

 Woolf’s mother died when she was 13.

 Leslie Stephen (Woolf’s Father) became deeply depressed following this death

‘Transfixed by the portrait of their mother, her sister Vanessa wrote, ''It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.’ (Lily Briscoe on page 110 (3.2) ‘Perished. Alone The grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places’ – Lily is not physically alone, but psychologically without the mother figure of Mrs Ramsey)  

Woolf thought of painting as did Lily Briscoe – an exploration of creative output.

Woolf’s brother Adrian was not allowed to visit the lighthouse, similar to young James Ramsey. 

Alix Strachey, a practising psychoanalyst and an old friend of the Woolfs, discussing why Leonard had not persuaded Virginia to see a psychoanalyst about her mental breakdowns, concluded ‘Virginia’s imagination, apart from her artistic creativeness, was so interwoven with her fantasies – and indeed with her madness – that if you had stopped the madness you might have stopped the creativeness too… It may be preferable to be mad and be creative than to be treated by analysis and become ordinary.’

The Oedipus complex - 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams (1910 official)

James Ramsey is infuriated by his father’s presence due to the love he possesses for his mother. 

‘Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it… his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way then he was (James thought)’ (1 Woolf) – the murder of Basil Hallward in Dorian Gray 

‘The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than he had ever loathed anything in his whole life.’ - Knife

Implying his mother is ‘better’ is clearly a sign of this, yet his fellow brothers and sisters are not fond of Mr Ramsey. While the boys have grown out of their Oedipus complex, the females perhaps feel neglected by their father, as Cam later confirms (I shall return) the next quote goes further:

‘But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them… but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion, which vibrating around them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother’ (27 Woolf)

Here James goes further: indicating that not only does he hate his father and love his mother, but here he recognises the disturbing nature of this: guilt in association with his confession. This ‘twang and Twitter’ may not only allude to this but his fear that his father recognises his attachment to his mother.

‘Tyrant’ (125 Woolf )(Both children refer to the father as such) ‘Well done! James had steered them like a born sailor. There! Cam thought… you’ve got it at last. For she knew this was what James had been wanting, and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or his father or at anyone… His father had praised him. (153 Woolf)

This is the resolution of the Oedipus complex, as James, in particular, finds resolution within his father, allowing him to develop a mature sexual identity under Freud. Cam’s feeling of neglect by her father is also resolved (a strong theme in Woolf – Walter Pater absent father. (superego formed)

Mrs Ramsey & The Lighthouse

As a lighthouse guides those lost at sea to safety, Mrs Ramsey is the pivotal character representing emotional security to those around. She harbours her guests in their times of emotional distress: 

‘She looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke… ‘it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes… ‘she was searching, she was beautiful like that light’ (46)a

Caroline Ramsey projects her character onto the lighthouse. This is perhaps an escape from the emotionally damaged characters that surround her namely in the form of her husband, a key scene of her fragility is chapter 8 when she asks ‘going somewhere, Mr Charmichael?’ and he ignores her, causing her to reflect on her interior trauma – ‘never did she show a sign of not wanting him’ – internalised guilt

The ego, driven by the id, confined by the superego, repulsed by reality, struggles to master its economic task of bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it; and we can understand how it is that so often we cannot suppress a cry 'life is not easy'!  If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness, it breaks out in anxiety regarding the outside world, moral anxiety regarding the superego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id. (78 Freud 1933)

The struggle of the ego constantly to maintain a happy persona. She immediately returns to reading James the fisherman and his wife in order to please her son.  Depression?

The portrait painted by Lily Briscoe of Mrs Ramsey, although abstract, reflects that of Oscar Wilde’s own Portrait of Dorian Gray. A once beautiful portrait reflects events that have occurred – In Dorian’s case his increasing corruption, but in Lighthouse it is the but perhaps it is not the physical portrait itself that changes greatly but the perspective of Lily, much altered that heightens the portrait in aesthetic value. 

‘It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision’ (154)

Resolution – of the Oedipal complex, perhaps Lily is projecting her affection onto the portrait. Or perhaps, using Freud further, this has all simply been a dream or series of dreams – short time span of novel (afternoon) / (10 years later) (Afternoon)

[fvisualvomits]

unnotable men with different names (a rchlrnshw copy)

phil: he’s your first boyfriend - an innocent, a good egg. the one who ignited the type. you vaguely remember video chatting on msn, him singing to you. it was a growing experience, he took good care of you and you still fondly cuddle the bear he bought you for christmas sometimes. he’s probably one of the best. perhaps it was childhood innocence, perhaps it was something else - but this is a fond time. a good experience. you still remember the first kiss despite this being around 10 years ago. you remember nights huddled in a friends garage, curled up on a tiny sofa. you remember playing on swings. of movie theaters and of a plethora of scenes. you remember hasty handjobs, of beds and making out. he dumped you in a depressive episode and that led to getting together with william. you think of him often. you speak, sometimes. you’re glad he’s doing well. you worry sometimes about how much you hurt him by having a new boyfriend within a week of the conclusion.

william: william is the first person you had sex with. william is a pop punk dream, obviously a musician. he’s the first boy you’ve kissed with tattoos. he is much older. he is a predator. he changes as if by overnight, going from someone to texts you constantly to completely distant - from nice, to someone who is hardened. his dad once walks in on you fucking to the hokey pokey. you experiment, a lot. he has a good dog. at prom he gets so drunk he passes out lying face down, so you have to sit in the shower and hose him down because he’s beyond inebriated. i remember long drives for cigarettes, and the time a close friend attempted suicide, he cried in your arms, thanked you for being so calm, so composed, so understanding. i remember my own drunken escapades at Reading, heavy petting in crowds. you suddenly feel a crippling pain in your stomach. you ignore it for a few days until putting a hot water bottle to your side, scalding your skin, is more bearable than the pain. the doctor suggests it might be an ectopic pregnancy. you panic. it’s only appendicitis, he grows more distant than ever. you, in your blissfully ignorant youth, find messages on his phone from another girl. he cries. he pleads. you forgive. months down the line you find out he was cheating on you. of course he fucking was. he goes from something treasured to a man with a stupid fucking tree tattooed on his chest. one day you see he’s dressed up as a santa. you laugh, you nearly cry with the hilarity. the last contact you have is him one day sending you pictures of his new shitty tattoos. you laugh, deleting the pictures. you still remember his birthday.

harry: was your last proper boyfriend. he’s cute, dark copper skin and a smile that’s so infectious it could light up a room. he’s damaged in his own way due to the loss of a mother at a young age. you have absolutely fucking nothing in common except drinking, laughing, sex. you tour australia together, have sex in awkward hostel beds, spend days in bed watching films and tv. it’s a fight, even getting into his head. he is easily jealous, easily annoyed. the way he says ‘baaaabe’ is something that wrenches your heart every time. you get a house together. you break into parks at night, you dance in fountains that turn out to be memorials, you go to drum and bass nights and spend all your time drinking hooten on the top of kings cross hostel. ultimately, it fizzles out. you become severely depressed and drained even being around him, you break up. you stop eating. you collapse into yourself. you continue to work and live together, waking up alone in ‘your’ bed is a daily struggle. you pine. just like all the others, you finally get over him eventually. in the last month you’ve seen him around brighton 3 times - you laugh.

toby: toby and you met at a wombats gig in god knows what year. he’s not your type. he’s an office type, football and beers and your stereotypical man. he’s kind and a family man, he’s popular and he’s funny. something bad happens and you’re not sure how, but you end up talking. excessively. all day. you’re both on holiday and you spend half your time going places to get wifi, to steal hidden messages, little flirtations and a smile or two. something about it makes you feel... safe. you plan to meet up as soon as you’re both back. it drags. you go for drinks and your heart is pounding out of your chest. everything is great yet it also feels incredibly secretive. one day he asks to meet up and he ends things with you. you feel numb, but you recognise that it wasn’t going to work. you see each other from time to time, and perhaps your heart might twinge a tiny bit, wondering what if, but you’re happier. good person.

andy - andy initially feels way too out of your league but everyone describes him as ‘nice’. he talks about his ex on the first date. this rings alarm bells. you sold him a ticket to 2000 trees, years ago. things are great and you’re beyond pleased - he meets friends, flatmates, comes to your work do. you allow yourself to get attached, for the first time since ‘harry’ and you’re absolutely petrified. you spend most nights together. it feels very innocent. he talks about you meeting his friends, something changes. a friend informs you that she’s seen him meeting with an ex. one day, he stops talking to you. your abandonment issues, your fear of rejection, they extrapolate. you’re out with an old friend from home, you walk into a bar. you look up and it’s the first time seeing him in months, because you’re a bit drunk - you run out. you’re gobsmacked, you’ve seen him once since, walking down the road with a girl. sometimes you wish you’d confronted him at the pub, or simply received an answer. while you’re over him, you struggled with the psychological trauma of enduring a ghost. sometimes, perhaps in the shower or on rainy days, you wonder, why?

tom: you’ve known tom for years. you’ve always fancied one another, from the beginning. you met on bebo, oddly enough. in 2009 you meet up often, going to a multitude of gigs in london. you discuss nearly everything with one another, you have long phone calls that go on to the stupid hours of the morning. one messy night, in london, you end up kissing. i forget who was cheating, but we buried the secret and put it to the side. years pass, of platonic friendship. one night he comes to visit you in brighton and it’s the first time in years you’re both single. you’re drunk, he finds your bag. on impulse, you kiss him. that night you have sex. suddenly you’re embroiled in a ‘thing’ together. you go to bestival together and it’s very coupley, which you can’t complain about. you go for walks in the woods, find hidden art, the whole relationship is a complete mischievous adventure. you eventually have to end it due to seeing them primarily as a friend. you haven’t spoken in a while, but you’ve seen each other since. another one you wish only the best for.

arthur: arthur is someone that you’re not even sure how you met. you know the first time was at your birthday party, sure. however suddenly you’re alone, nearly every day, hanging out on the sofa. talking. then suddenly you’re kissing, and then it goes from there. he drops out of school and is near permanently at yours. it’s peaceful, it’s nice, it’s being relaxed within the company of someone. you don’t know if you’re attracted to them conventionally but there’s some charm around them that has you utterly hooked. you go to gigs, driving home to cuddle up on the sofa. one night, you have sex in a frosty van outside your friends house. you spend countless nights talking about nothing and feel reassured in the space of an intellect. you’re getting little to no sleep over this boy. you spend a week locked in a studio with arthur and some friends, he tries to push you away but it just ends up happening anyways. distance ruins it. you’re still friends. nothing but affection for arthur.

connor: connor is the definition of a softboy. he describes himself as a goth. he’s incredibly soft spoken, a voice like velvet. looks dorky, silly with a lopsided grin and glasses. you adore it. you invite him round initially on a drunken whim, he’s high as a kite - you’re amazed he even showed up. he’s a quiet introvert. he’s covered in tattoos. he’s got an almost nervous, distanced aura about him. one day he comes round when you don’t feel well, and ends up missing trains because you’re busy chatting, kissing. your sexual saga was hilarious. skin so soft you don’t want to stop touching it. anxiety and depression naps all round. you’re somewhat smitten. he goes away for an extended period of time, it ends. upon return he’s been speaking to an ex. you distance. you run into each other sometimes. connor was a question mark.

(all names changed)

[fvisualvomits]

the events of manchester have flicked a horrible switch in my brain. i feel this permeating sadness each time i check the news, praying for something happy. something to take solace within. praying for someone to have been found. have survived. instead, i see a 20-year-old girl losing both her parents, someone not far off my age. and when i spend every day with an anxious knot, worrying about my family, my friends, the general state of the world and then something like this happens. at a concert, which is something that has ALWAYS been my place of solace, it fucking hits home. my friends all love music, i know so many people who have entered that arena. there were fucking children. you killed an 8-year-old fucking child. a beautiful young girl with the whole world lying at her feet will probably never experience her first kiss, her first love, travelling the world. and that fucking kills me. 

i feel this resonating feeling of emptiness from my toes to my skull.

and on the other hand, there’s the racists, the xenophobic and islamophobic cretins that plague Facebook, the isis comments i read on twitter and people who fucking say ‘they deserved it’. the lovely Muslim people i pray are not going to experience any prejudice. 

an 8-year-old girl who probably isn’t even aware of our own fucking trauma toward Syria, of the eastern world, deserved death? after enjoying what i assume was her favourite artist?

i know terrorism works by instilling fear. i know it’s meant to make us angry, to make us retaliate, to further justify their regime of hate. 

i simply hope we can eradicate all this violence. each day i jump at the smallest noise. the armed police are not my haven.

i can’t overthink this anymore. 

[fvisualvomits]

i guess sometimes there is never an answer

to why i am sad, sometimes

or to why some people have disappeared throughout my years

but i have

watering the plants nails running down the inside of my wrist the first drops of rain and the pure smell of it turnover’s album hugging, intimacy the days i am kissed dressing up. dancing around my room. smiling. the seafront view soundtracked by the chatterings of love the christmas lights that shine through my window unconditional love synesthesia for my favourite band onomatopoeia, allusion, disgruntled, allure - the words i like. dogs! everywhere! 2 beta blockers across a whole month a good job, with good people, doing good in the world the happy tears i’m currently crying platonic cuddles an ever increasing sense of self worth, and decreasing anxiety - free from the hormones that ravaged my brain in february black and white films gigs coming up! live music. shivers down my spine. primavera. days in bed doing nothing masterchef! great british menu! black skinny jeans and black velvet books, their spines dostoevsky and camus, my heroes who reside underground routine fat pot bellied pigs and cows the days i wake up and the air is electric goya’s black paintings hip bones, collarbones the ability and freedom to travel and be free self sustainability an abundance of gin a furry blanket, and 9 pillows feminism on the rise a face i hate less, and body i am slowly growing to care for pressed flowers

and an increasing knowledge that empathy is not always a curse. these are the moments i am filled with a swelling, erupting, overwhelming feeling of love. overthinking is only a way of bettering yourself.

[fvisualvomits]

"From afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity… as soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying.’[1] Use this statement as the starting point for an essay in which you discuss representations of war and/or terror under 21st-century conditions.  Focus on one of the texts we have studied in this module. (67) 

Dear Western reader, perhaps the word ‘terrorist’ conjures an image of a dark-skinned man, possessing a thick beard. Is he dressed in a thawb[2]? Does he have dark, piercing eyes? You envision Osama Bin Laden, founder of Al-Qaeda, the organisation claiming responsibility for 9/11. Terror under twenty-first-century conditions has become represented by a conventional Muslim man’s appearance. Mass islamophobia in the Western World has been generated by 9/11 and subsequent attacks. These events have redefined terrorism as the ‘world narrative belongs to terrorists’[3] from this point onwards, shaping our discourse. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, however, does not condemn our Muslim protagonist, Changez Khan, as he becomes anti-American. Khan’s transgression from ‘terrified’ to  ‘terrifying’ is ignited by his suffering of institutional racism despite model citizenship. This essay resultantly seeks to explore the importance of appearance within the representation of terrorism. It furthermore aims to delve into the justification of terrorism by our subaltern narrator. Khan’s story interrogates the origination of ‘barbarity’, and allows us to empathise with his motives. Hamid deviates from taking the conventional Westernised anti-Muslim approach. The result is original and thought-provoking representation of terrorism.

Firstly, Changez’s representation through his appearance as a Muslim man is vital in the relation of his ‘growing’ terrorism. The third sentence of the novel immediately affirms that his guest needs ‘not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America’[4]. Hamid utilizes Changez’s beard as a narrative tool, mocking preconceptions of the ‘terrorist’ appearance. This ridicule is highlighted Changez’ return from Manila to his co-workers:

‘It is remarkable, given its physical insignificance – it is only a hairstyle, after all, the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen.[5]’

           Changez recognises that there is something dangerous about a Muslim man with a beard alongside an element of humour. It is ‘only a hairstyle’; the growth of hair follicles should not define a person and their perceived malicious intentions.  Moreover, a white male is allowed to grow a beard without any ramification. Perhaps what we denominate from the Muslim appearance is something of secrecy – what lies beneath the mystical hijab, the beard, and the turban. However, there is a clear opposition that is designated by the colour of one’s skin in denoting what defines a threat. Changez ‘does not wish to blend in with the army of clean-shaven youngsters’ because he is ‘deeply angry’[6]. He purposefully sets himself across from the white, barefaced majority as ‘a form of protest… a symbol of my identity’[7]. Changez – a name conveniently alluding to the fluidity of his identity - has accepted that this ‘protest’ aligns him to the visual profile of the terrorist. However, through his anger, this is the desired alignment. Possessing beard or no beard, the narrative of his body that Westerners read will always claim ‘terrorist’. Similarly, within Amy Waldman’s The Submission, a character named Mohammad Khan is denied his chance to build a 9/11 memorial due to his Muslim name. This is despite being an American-born, non-practising Muslim. Mohammad’s beard is similarly symbolic as his girlfriend Laila angrily retorts that “next you’ll shave for them”[8], referring to his white oppressors.  Shaving would thus invoke a departure from a Muslim identity, an action shunned within the Muslim front. Similarly to Fanon’s quote, there is a segregation of ‘them’ and ‘their, beard or no beard – “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”[9]. Bush’s quote implies there is intermediary position possible. You are either American, or you are a terrorist. Where can a character like Changez, with his fluid identity, fit into such a proposed model? There is no such space.

This influence of with us/against us propaganda is explored when Changez is racially attacked even when lacking his ‘lustrous beard’[10].  The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) actually include lack of facial hair in determining passenger risk profiles. This falls under ‘face pale from recent shaving of beard’[11]. It is almost as if by getting rid of the beard, the terrorist is trying to disguise their apparent radicalism – yet if they have a beard, they are also projecting their threat. This is reinforced by media profiling, within which ‘the terms Islamic or Muslim are linked to extremism, militant, jihads as if they belonged together inextricably and naturally’[12]. The subaltern cannot ‘win’ against their perceived terror due to the proselytization of anti-Islamic propaganda. Flying back to New York from Manila leads to the most poignant of profiling attacks, as Changez is isolated from his colleagues:

‘I was escorted by armed guards into a room where I was made to strip down to my boxer shorts – I had, rather embarrassingly, chosen to wear a pink pair patterned with teddy bears, but their revelation had no impact on the severe expressions of my inspectors’[13]

Within this scene, our protagonist is subjected to a humiliating strip search at the hands of American airline security. The significance is his isolation despite being part of a team due to racial profiling for his Muslim appearance. This is despite the fact there is a one in eighty million chance of a profiled flier being a Muslim terrorist[14]. Changez’ attire of ‘pink’ and ‘teddy bear’ underpants creates a humorous scenario any Caucasian would have received leniency for. However, the ‘severe expressions’ of his inspectors suggests that there is no room for levity. Changez, working for a prestigious company with a pristine record, is represented as a terrorist merely through the colour of his skin. This is repeated within a pre-beard scene. A random man approaches Changez, stating ‘akhala-malakhala’ before calling him a ‘fucking Arab’[15] to which he humorously points out that in fact, he is not an Arab. Institutionalised racism has infiltrated society to the extent anyone possessing a dark skin tone can be branded a potential jihadist.

           Despite this, Hamid’s representation of terrorism is unique. At the commencement of the novel, we are unaware of Changez’ history. He is portrayed as an aforementioned ‘lover of America’[16]. There is no reason to doubt his character initially. However, Changez’ reaction to 9/11 stirs questions of his morality and our empathy as readers:

‘I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realised that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one – and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.’[17]

           This is where the narrative of the novel begins a sharp departure from standardised portrayal. At this point, we have experienced Changez’ hard work to implement himself into the American system. He dares identify himself as ‘a young New Yorker’[18], aligning himself with the country he is apparently happy to see destroyed. However, as abhorrent as this language initially is, Changez is capable of justifying this train of thought. He is ‘caught up in the symbolism of it all’[19]. Is this not symbolic justice for anyone who has suffered under the net of colonisation? Hamid’s experienced this, yet ‘these weren’t people who looked like me, these were white people’[20]. The fact ‘white people’ smiled at such atrocity – the slaughter of their own; it is enough to bring the fundamentals of perceived terrorism to its knees.  The terrorist mindset transcends skin colour, it leaves no discourse free of doubt. Perhaps it is human nature to find pleasure in destruction; perhaps we all possess a repressed terrorist urge. Don DeLillo believed ‘they [the terrorists] have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback’[21]. I would like to examine this quote in relation to Richard Clutter’s, stating that ‘democratic systems must ‘play by the rules’ and thus cannot respond in a comparable fashion to terrorist attacks’[22]. I disagree with both statements. The Western governments cannot go beyond the ‘bounds’ of ‘passionate payback’ and can ‘respond in comparable fashion’ as the west sets the parameters for the rules. The West is immediately exempt in civilian mass murder ‘legitimate targets’[23], due to altering the name of their game – ‘counter-terrorism’. All violence is thus justified as it is in direct opposition to terrorism. Changez recognises this as he becomes disillusioned with America. He observes that ‘no other country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many so far away, As America’[24]. America is the true terrorist within the subaltern mind, the initiator of the game of cat and mouse. Perhaps the events of 9/11 could be considered the East’s method of counter-terrorism.  

Consequently, we cannot punish Changez, as he becomes an anti-American lecturer in Pakistan. He teaches what he believes is correct for the future of his native land. He teaches ‘greater independence for Pakistan’s domestic and international affairs’[25]. This is not malicious, yet it goes against the aims of America and is thus a threat. Peter Neumann states that members of Al-Qaeda ‘had all experienced tensions in their personal lives or were faced with deep and sustained crises of identity[26]’, similar to Changez.  Changez’ experience of the West, the ‘tensions’ and ‘crises of identity’ inflicted upon him by the country are what turns him against it. George Bush’s ‘with or against’ speech America leaves no space for Changez. This is how he is reduced from pro-Pakistan to anti-American. Changez, despite being ‘a believer in non-violence; the spilling of blood is abhorrent to me’[27] is hazardous to the American ideal. He observes his own statements in ‘the occasional war-on-terror montage’[28]. In other words, he defines himself as a pacifist, yet he is still considered an enemy within the war on terror due to ideological discourses. While it is understandable to oppose religious fundamentalism, Changez is the reluctant fundamentalist who does not want bloodshed. Hamid thus represents terror through Changez as a threat that is mistranslated through the Eastern body.

What does the word ‘terrorist’ embody for an Easter reader? Hamid leaves this unclear. The narrative simply represents terrorism as something that all humanity is capable to enact. Changez is anti-American but believes in non-violence. His appearance fits the ‘terrorist stereotype’ because his psychological interiority is damaged by his discrimination. By the denouement of the novel terrorism transcends violence to become something desirable. Being anti-American means being pro-Pakistan. There is certainly an accusatory blame toward the Western World lurking. Terrorism may once have been something local but Changez, teaching in Pakistan and living in America, proves that the threat remains omnipresent. Only today[29] Britain’s counterterrorism chief suggested Britain is about to experience “an enormous and spectacular attack” from the Islamic state[30] (ISIS). Terrorism in the twenty-first century is something, like Changez, fluid. Hamid’s experience of Caucasians smiling at the tragedy of 9/11 suggests that ultimately, we all vary between different states of terrorism: ideological and physical.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Constance Farrington, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Avalon Travel Publishing, 2000), p.21

[2] The traditional Arabian clothing for men consists of an ankle-length garment similar to a robe.

[3] Don DeLillo, ‘In The Ruins of The Future’, The Guardian (The Guardian, 22 December 2001) <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo> [accessed 9 March 2016]

 [4] Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Penguin Books, 2013). p.1

[5] Hamid, p.148

[6] Ibid, p.148

[7] Ibid, p.147

[8] Amy Waldman, The Submission (London: Windmill Books, 2012), p.226

[9] George W. Bush, ‘President Declares “Freedom at War with Fear”’, 2001 <http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html> [accessed 9 March 2016].

[10] Hamid, p.87

[11] Spot Referral Report (U.S Government, 23 March 2009) <https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1695316/spot-referral-report.pdf> [accessed 10 March 2016].

[12] The Guardian, ‘Media Has Anti-Muslim Bias, Claims Report’, The Guardian (The Guardian, 14 November 2005) <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/14/pressandpublishing.raceintheuk> [accessed 8 March 2016].

[13] Hamid, p.85

[14] Bruce Schneier ‘The Trouble with Airport Profiling’ (Forbes, 9 May 2012) <http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceschneier/2012/05/09/the-trouble-with-airport-profiling/#3b4272541ddf> [accessed 6 March 2016].

[15] Hamid, p.135

[16] Ibid, p.1

[17] Ibid, p.83

[18] Ibid, p.51

[19] Ibid, p.83

[20] Fred Kaplan, ‘Mira Nair on “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”’, Movies (The New York Times, 9 August 2014) <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/movies/mira-nair-on-the-reluctant-fundamentalist.html?_r=0> [accessed 10 March 2016].

[21] DeLillo, In The Ruins of The Future

[22] Richard Clutterbuck, Living with Terrorism (United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1975), p.9

[23] Peter R Neumann, Old and New Terrorism: Late Modernity, Globalization and the Transformation of Political Violence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009).

p.29

[24] Hamid, p.207

[25] Ibid, p.203

[26] Neumann, p.77

[27] Hamid, p.206

[28] Ibid, p.207

[29] March 7th, 2016

[30] John Bacon, ‘UK Terror Chief Warns of “Enormous” Attack’ (USA TODAY, 7 March 2016) <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/03/07/uk-terror-chief-warns-enormous-attack/81431322/> [accessed 7 March 2016].

[fvisualvomits]

‘We need to consider seriously the fact that even the most dystopic visions of science fiction of the last half century cannot replicate events that have actually taken place, events that we have seen, recorded, and reproduced. We don't need to speculate. We know what the end of the world looks like. We know because we've seen it, and we've seen it because it's happened.’ – (James Berger) Use Berger’s statement as the starting point for an essay in which you discuss representations of apocalyptic reality in the twenty-first century in relation to one of the texts we have studied on this module. (68)

 Berger’s quote is frankly idealistic in analysing dystopian literature. It is not the replication but the representation of a degenerated life that strikes the reader towards negative emotions. Failing to do so, how can a text be ‘dystopic’?  Cormac McCarthy probes the limitations of the dystopian novel with his 2006 work The Road. He uses Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to explore the binaries of man vs. man, weighing the taxonomy of human life in segregated examples of ‘any common migratory killer’[1], the enemy, and ‘they’[2], our protagonists. This is of particular relevance to the present via the Black Lives Matter movement. He also explores man vs. nature in an attempt to explore catalysts of apocalypse and human responsibility. McCarthy contrasts the landscape of his futuristic novel to our own. The implied similarities strike us with fear of the unknown, as terrorism and nuclear warfare advance. Through ‘advancement’, the idea of Dante’s Inferno is introduced, wherein progression forward is actually a regression toward hell. This leads to permeating dystopian thought as the futility and danger of perceived development is unveiled. McCarthy inverts conventional tropes create a dystopian future that warns us towards protecting our present.

The Road is arguably one of the most important biopolitical novels of the twenty-first century in dissecting the man vs. man binary. I use biopolitics to mean ‘a politics… that takes hold of and controls the phenomena of life’[3], focusing on the branch of thanatopolitics[4]. Foucault argues that the mobilisation of the entire population ‘for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity[5]’ became normalised in the 20th century. Instead of politics governing McCarthy’s survivors in a regulated society, a sheer lack of ethical morality allows for Homo sapiens critique. McCarthy’s mysterious apocalyptic event has led to transcendence beyond conceivable notions of barbarity, encompassing graphic cannibalism. A ‘phalanx’[6] of cannibals is eager to hunt fellow survivors, possessing ‘slaves in harness’ and ‘a supplementary consort of calamities’[7]. This imagery provides a colonial portrayal of the cannibal trope unsettled by the setting of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence states ‘all men are created equal’ yet the ‘land of the free’ has regressed into hellish slavery and rape despite a futuristic, typically progressive, setting.  The modern post-colonial allusion sets the Western World apart from the Other, laws that lay illegality to such actions regulate the current West. McCarthy thus inverts such tropes to unsettle our preconceptions. Western consumerism has surpassed materialism to involve the consumption of fellow humanity. Foucault’s biopolitics is disregarded as ‘purification of the race, especially as it takes place in Nazism’[8] is ignored for mindless slaughter within the concordant race. McCarthy resultantly implies that fatidic events eradicate the possession/preservation of life binary. Foucault states ‘power took possession of life in the nineteenth century’[9] models of power play have been enacted since ancient scenarios such as war[10]. While prior biopolitical warfare was once enacted for land/slave conquests, twenty-first-century terrorism involves gratuitous murder. Fred Dallymayr suggests that:

“This is probably the most disturbing aspect of our age: not only the fact of widespread destruction, but the presence of geopolitical agents and agendas deliberately pursuing the aim of “nihilation ” or the destruction of life”[11]

Dallymayr’s quote captures the fragility of human life in a present day, possessing new methods of human extermination. At least six countries[12] are in possession of ‘the fact’ (nuclear weapons) capable of committing mass slaughter. The simultaneous use of said weapons would render the population of the earth greatly reduced, and the landscape drastically altered akin to McCarthy’s land. I will return to how McCarthy’s landscape bears signs of nuclear winter.

Expanding upon Dallymayr’s citation, we have entered an age wherein the murder of innocent civilians is encouraged by terrorist cells such as ISIS representing ‘geopolitical agents’. However, in McCarthy’s novel, the witnessed ‘nihilation’ reaches new bounds. We observe ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit’[13]. This is a graphic display of abased biopolitics and a contemporary link can be drawn to the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the conception of the movement in 2013, American history has witnessed a racial divide due to the victimized nature of black civilians. Similarly to the murder of the infant, the movement is based on a young boy, Treyvon Martin, who was contentiously murdered in cold blood. Instead of the preservation of the young, ensuring the continuation of civilisation, the young are being hunted towards extinction.  

The biopolitics in the case of the man/boy is in direct opposition to the majority. This binary involves the protective, nurturing nature of father over son. The man’s purpose in life is the preservation of his son’s existence, to the extent, ‘the boy was all that stood between him and death’[14], and that if his son perished he would ‘want to die too’[15]. This is the inversion of the ‘bad guys’[16], slaughtering all in their path. Instead of prioritising his own life, the man extenuates his role as ‘mother’ to the boy for her departure. This is exemplified by the experience with the ‘big man’[17], stating his consort are eating ‘whatever they can find’[18] before grabbing the boy. Not only does the man kill this predator, he must ‘wash a dead man’s brains out of his [the boy’s] hair. That is my job’[19]. The man is desperate to keep his son both physically and metaphorically ‘clean’, reinforced by his reminder that ‘the things you put into your head are there forever’[20]. He yearns for his son’s mind to remain unpolluted like the landscape, free of defeatist thought as he always takes the ‘positive’ route, ‘it’s all right’ and ‘it’s okay’[21]. Life preservation amongst our protagonists retains similarity as such to our present Western values; to the extent, the man must promise his son ‘we won’t hurt the dog’[22]. McCarthy uses his dystopian text to procure the empathy and instils fear via familiarity. As D.H Lawrence states, ‘society, now and forever must be ruled or governed’[23]. The importance of this biopolitically is apparent through the events of the novel, yet this point raises questions. Who should do the ruling? Who is responsible for the consequences?

Expanding Dallymer’s theory of worldwide ‘nihilation’, we can look at the damage being enacted upon our earth. McCarthy comments upon environmental degradation by focusing upon the scenery of forests and ocean landscapes. Humanity has stripped the land bare of all resources. There are only scenes such as the ‘remains of an orchard’[24] and ‘barren slopes’[25]. These adjectives connote the severity of which the land is devoid of life. The aforementioned ‘bad man’ who attempts to kidnap the son even has ‘a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance’[26]. The insinuation is that the birds have been gone for so long that even an animal so simply shaped cannot be properly replicated. Similarly, the bodies of water they encounter such as the dammed lake to the sea have ‘nothing’[27] left in terms of food.

                              Figure 1:  The Road (2009)                           Figure 2: Amazon Deforestation

 The Road[28] opens with imagery of scourged fields and deteriorated, dead trees in both the novel and the 2009 film adaptation. The similarity of this scene with the reality of a deforestation zone is striking and suggests this is an intentional reproduction. A vital scene appears as two trees fall in succession, ‘there was a sharp crack from somewhere… then another’[29]. These trees serve as a contemporary analogy symbolic for the twin towers as they collapse. Similarly to Ground Zero, all landscapes within the novel have been covered by ‘dust and ash everywhere’[30] in place of life. When they return to the man’s childhood home there are ‘the bones of a small animal dismembered and placed in a pile. Possibly a cat.’[31]. The nameless remains echo 9/11 in the impossibility of claiming identity via the destruction enacted upon the body. The man’s claim that ‘all the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later’[32] sounds prophetic in relation to this. Is McCarthy referencing mass deforestation, as ‘the planet has already lost eighty percent of its forest cover to deforestation’[33], or is he hinting at increased nuclear terrorism occurring, felling buildings like trees?

           McCarthy further hints at placing the blame for his dystopian territory upon the twenty-first century via his descriptions of the ‘alien sea’[34]. The sea has transformed, through spoliation into the Other and is thus beyond recognition. In our reality, 93% of the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached white partially due to ‘global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions’[35]. The sea in our own time has thus adopted an alien-like appearance akin to McCarthy’s text. Thomas Hawkins’ painting of ‘The Great Sea-Dragons as They Lived’ in 1840 is of particular interest in comparison to The Road:

Figure 3: The Great Sea Monsters Book (Cover) – Thomas Hawkins[36]

The man speculates upon ‘great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in cold darkness’[37], while Dave Egger’s The Circle mirrors the sentiment of what is hidden in the ‘darkness’:

‘They were hidden in the dark water, in their black parallel world, and knowing they were there, but not knowing where, or really anything else, felt, at that moment, strangely right.[38]

This quotation lies parallel to McCarthy’s, wherein the man retains hope for what lies beneath the surface, namely for ‘life in the deep’[39]. Egger’s and McCarthy’s quotes lie in continuance with the image depicted by Hawkins, of ‘Great Monsters’ lurking beneath the sea surface, behemoths carrying the eternal ‘fire’[40] of life.  His hope is spurred by his desperate nostalgia and his desire to give his son a somewhat palatable life.

           In the further juxtaposition of Eggers’ The Circle with McCarthy’s The Road, it is important to compare the linear nature of a ‘road’ with a ‘circle’ to Dante’s Inferno. Egger’s novel The Circle examines anti-utopian life through the notion of a disguised dystopia. The scenery is utopian, ‘wild with pacific colour’[41] in contrast with ‘dark beyond darkness’[42]. McCarthy’s world is consumed by ‘grey light’[43] while the landscape is the circle is ‘spotless and blue’[44]. These colour representations are that of heaven vs. hell, yet the worlds bear striking similarities. We thus introduce Dante’s Inferno and the layout of his perceived ‘lower hell’:

                                                              Figure 4: Dante’s illustration of Lower Hell in Inferno

Within both The Circle and The Road, it is completing ‘the circle/the road’ that leads to depravity. In The Circle, increased surveillance leads to ‘a world of perpetual light’[45]. This represents knowledge and illumination of secrecy, whereas our protagonists in The Road aim for the literal meaning of light, breaking past the Beckettian darkness of their surroundings. Foucault’s theory of the panoptical prison[46] is relevant as fear of being ‘watched’ conditions our characters. The completion of the inner circle is delving further into hell, whereas the dashed line can be compared to a ‘road’, also leading to apocalyptic doom. This extends the notion of ‘what lies below’ in metaphysical and mental terms, through ‘the man’s’ death and Mae’s totalitarian dictatorship.

Following Dante’s model, within The Road, our characters witness those ‘violent against their neighbours’ through the phalanx. Those ‘violent against self’ is experienced through the mother’s suicide to escape this damned life. Before descending further toward Geryon[47] and ‘The Great Barrier’, we enter the area reserved for those ‘violent against God, man, and nature’. Enter the scene in which the father and son discover the cannibal’s stores:

‘Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. Jesus, he whispered’[48].

This passage successfully integrates all three of these aspects. The father takes Jesus’ name in vain whilst the cannibals defy human nature to consume their fellows. This represents both a moral and a physical descent as the father passes down ‘[49]rough wooden steps’ to reach these wretched souls. Through such depravity, the dystopian thought is inevitable, and no one is safe from despair. The repeated connotation of ‘blackened’ recalls the aforementioned baby, and hints further at the issue of Black Lives Matter that has set a ‘mood’ for our generation.

           The pessimism infiltrating The Road is not dissimilar from the twenty-first-century mentality. The wife’s lamentation that ‘they are going to rape us and kill us and eat us’[50] is not foreign in our times. Women walk alone at night similar to our protagonists in the fear of being watched hence a large resurgence in feminist thought. The Black Lives Matter movement is necessary due to the number of innocent people who are being killed by police brutality. While we have not reached the stage where they physically ‘eat us’, the mental panic gnaws at our brains. The world stands as a conglomerate of uncertainties and fears, especially for generation X, as a result. It is estimated that ‘350 million people of all ages’[51] suffer from depression and that ’10 times more people suffer from major depression now than in 1945’[52]. While reasons for this are varied, the reality is impossible to avoid – we are experiencing a ‘mental’ apocalypse. The man struggles with his reality, especially as their bullet supply depletes. At the start of the novel, he questions himself: ‘Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?[53]. This is a question of life or death – in a perilous scenario, is he going to be capable of murdering his son as an act of mercy? Moreover, what matter is the concept of time when death is inevitable? As Berger states, ‘apocalypse is our history; what difference does a change in the calendar make?’[54]. After all, they will die ‘sometime’, even if it is ‘not now’[55].  Death is not apocalyptic but realistic.

To conclude, I reference a quote by Orwell:

“All of the things you’ve at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries… It’s all going to happen.’[56]

Orwell’s quote covers the content of this essay in a prophetic manner. Apocalyptic thought is increasing and the introduction of post 9/11 novels have only set the mood further. The ever-approaching threat of terrorism is not inherent within the human condition, but a primary concern of our century. ‘Abandon all reason, avoid all eye contact, do not react’[57] croons Thom Yorke. Foucault’s panopticon is still enacted today as we shadow our protagonists of The Road, avoiding the gaze of those around us to preserve our own discourses. However, it is impossible to not ‘react’, subjecting to the authority of those who govern our bodies and our planet. This is what gives McCarthy’s text such poignancy. He purposefully keeps the limitations of his landscape vague and we are left pondering the purgatorial event. Has devastation been caused by man, or nature, a nuclear winter or the eruption of Yellowstone Super Volcano?[58] ‘A long shear of light and a series of low concussions’[59] are reminiscent of a nuclear bomb compared to the inescapable ash across the land, evoking volcanic eruption. The blame is vague, but the message is clear: ‘sometime’ is not far off.

 [1] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.197

[2] Ibid, p.190

[3]Jakob Nilsson, Sven-Olov, Foucault, Biopolitics and Governmentality (United States: Södertörn, 2013). p.73

[4] Thanatopolitics is a philosophical term that discusses the politics organizing who should live and who should die (and how) in a given form of society.

[5] Michel Foucault and Robert Hurley, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1990). p.137

[6] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.96.

[7] Ibid, p.96

[8]Mika Ojakangas, ‘Michel Foucault and the Enigmatic Origins of Bio-Politics and Governmentality’, History of the Human Sciences, 25 (2012), 1–14 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695111426654>. p.4

[9] Michel Foucault and others, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) p.252.

[10] The first war in recorded history took place in Mesopotamia in 2700 BCE between Sumer and Elam.

[11] Fred Dallmayr, Against Apocalypse: Recovering Humanity’s Wholeness (United States: Lexington Books, 2015). p.1.

[12] The countries that have conducted thermonuclear weapon tests at present are the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, the People’s Republic of China and India. North Korea claimed in January 2016 they had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb yet this has been disputed.

[13] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.213

[14] Ibid, p.29

[15] Ibid, p.9

[16] Ibid, p.108

[17] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.68

[18] Ibid, p.66

[19] Ibid, p.77

[20] Ibid, p.11

[21] Ibid, p.27

[22] Ibid, p.86

[23] D.H Lawrence, Apocalypse, ed. by Mara Kalnins, Cambridge (Reading: Granada Publishing). p.13

[24] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.94

[25] Ibid, p.33

[26] Ibid, p.65

[27] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.19

[28] John Hillcoat, The Road (USA, 2009).

[29] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.35

[30] Ibid, p.5

[31] Ibid, p.26

[32] Ibid, p.35

[33] Anonymous, ‘Deforestation Statistics’ (The World Preservation Foundation, 2009) <http://www.worldpreservationfoundation.org/blog/news/deforestation-statistics/#.VyoN8aODGko> [accessed 3 May 2016]. 

[34] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.230

[35] Michael Slezak, ‘Great Barrier Reef: 93% of Reefs Hit by Coral Bleaching’, The Guardian (The Guardian, 5 May 2016) <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/19/great-barrier-reef-93-of-reefs-hit-by-coral-bleaching> [accessed 3 May 2016].

[36] John Martin, John Martin: Apocalypse, ed. by Martin Myrone (New York: Distributed in the U.S. by Abrams, 2011). P.50

[37] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.234

[38] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). P.83

[39] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.234

[40] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009)

[41] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). p.1

[42] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.1

[43] Ibid, p.2

[44] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). p.1

[45] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). p.491

[46] Discipline and punish

[47]Geryon is the Monster of Fraud. He is a winged beast with ‘the face of an honest man, the paws of a lion, the body of a wyvern, and a poisonous sting at the tip of his tail’. He lives between the Seventh and Eighth circles of Hell within Dante’s Inferno.

[48]Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.116

[49] Ibid, p.116

[50] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.58

[51] WHO, ‘Depression’, World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2016) <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/> [accessed 1 May 2016].

[52] Mark Tyrrell, ‘Major Depression Facts’ (Clinical Depression.co.uk, 2014) <http://www.clinical-depression.co.uk/dlp/depression-information/major-depression-facts/> [accessed 29 April 2016].

[53] [53] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.28

[54] James Berger, ‘Introduction’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 46 (2000), 387–95 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-2000-1006>. p.388

[55] [55] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.58

[56] George Orwell, Coming up for Air, ed. by 1st World Library (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library - Literary Society, 2004). P.274

[57] Radiohead, Burn the Witch, Burn the Witch, 2016.

[58] BBC, ‘Science & Nature - Supervolcano’, BBC, 2005 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/supervolcano/article.shtml> [accessed 5 May 2016].

[59]Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.54