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    Post colonial

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    16 views6 pages

    Week11 Writingposcolonialityandfeminism

    Uploaded by

    Jordy13
    Post colonial

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 6
    46 Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism TRINH T. MINH-HA* Won EMPTY OUT with age. Die and rise again, accordingly invested with new meanings, and always equipped with a secondhand memory. In trying to tell something, a woman is told, shredding herself into opaque words ‘while her voice dissolves on the walls of silence. Writing: a commitment of language. The web of her gestures, like all modes of writing, denotes a historical solidarity (on the understanding that her story remains inseparable from history]. She has been warned of the risk she incurs by letting words run off the rails, time and again tempted by the desire to gear herself to the accepted norms. But where has obedience led her? At best, to the satisfaction of a ‘made-woman,’ capable of achieving as high a mastery of discourse as that of the male establishment in power. Immediately grati- fied, she will, as years go by, sink into oblivion, a fate she inescapably shares with her foresisters. How many, already, have been condemned to prema- ture deaths for having borrowed the master’s tools and thereby played into his hands? Solitude is a common prerequisite, even though this may only ‘mean solitude in the immediate surroundings. Elsewhere, in every comer of the world, there exist women who, despite the threat of rejection, resolutely work toward the unlearning of instirutionalized language, while staying alert to every deflection of their body compass needles. Survival, as Audre Lorde comments, ‘is not an academic skill... I is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’ (Lorde 1981: 99). The more one depends on the master’s house for support, the less one hears what he doesn’t want to hear. Difference is not difference to some ears, but awkwardness or incompleteness. Aphasia. Unable or unwilling? Many have come to tolerate this dissimilarity and have decided to suspend their judgments (only) whenever the other is concerned. Such an * From Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989. 264 WRITING POSTCOLONIALITY AND FEMINISM artitude is a step forward; at least the danger of speaking for the other has ‘emerged into consciousness. But itis a very small step indeed, since it serves as an excuse for their complacent ignorance and their reluctance to involve themselves in the issue. You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal-relocation-reeducation-redefinition, the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality, your voice ~ you know. And often cannot say it. You try and keep on trying to unsay i, for if you don’t, they will not fail to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said. ‘THE POLICY OF ‘SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT’ ‘With a kind of perverted logic, they work toward your erasure while urging you to keep your way of life and ethnic values within the borders of your ‘homelands. This is called the policy of ‘separate development’ in apartheid language. Tactics have changed since the colonial times and indigenous cultures are no longer (overtly) destroyed (preserve the form but remove the content, or vice versa). You may keep your traditional law and tribal customs among yourselves, as long as you and your own kind are careful not to step beyond the assigned limits. Nothing has been left to chance when one considers the efforts made by the White South African authori- ties to distort and use the tools of Western liberalism for the defense of their racialistically indefensible cause. Since no integration is possible when terror has become the order of the day, I (not you) will give you freedom. Iwill grant you autonomy ~ not complete autonomy, however, for ‘it is a liberal fallacy to suppose that those to whom freedom is given will use it only as foreseen by those who gave it’ (Manning 1968: 287).... The delimitation of territories is my answer to what I perceive as some liberals’ dream for ‘the inauguration, namely, of a system in which South Africa's ‘many peoples would resolve themselves unreluctantly into one’ (289). The governed do not (should not) compose a single people; this is why I am eager to show that South Africa is not one but ten separate nations (of which the White nation is the only one to be skin-defined; the other nine being determined largely on the basis of language - the Zulu nation, the Swazi nation, and so on). This philosophy ~I will not call it ‘policy’ ~ of ‘differentiation’ will allow me to have better control over my nation while looking after yours, helping you thereby to gradually stand on your own, Ic will enable you to return to ‘where you belong’ whenever you are not satisfied with my law and customs or whenever you are no longer useful to ‘me. Too bad if you consider what has been given to you as the leftovers of, ‘my meals. Call it ‘reserves of cheap labor’ or ‘bantustans’ if you wish; ‘separate development’ means that each one of us minds her/his own business (I will interfere when my rights are concerned since I represent the State) and that your economical poverty is of your own making. As for ‘the Asiatic cancer, which has already eaten so deeply into the vitals of South 265 TRINH T, MINH-HA Africa, [it] ought to be resolutely eradicated’ (Jan Christaaen Smuts, quoted in Fischer 1954: 25). Non-white foreigners have no part whatsoever in my plans and I ‘will undertake to drive the coolies [Indians] out of the country within four years’ (General Louis Botha, quoted in Fischer 1954: 25). My ‘passionate concern for the future of a European-type white society, and that society’ right to self-preservation’ is not a question of color feeling, but of nationalism, the ‘Afrikaner nationalism [which] is a form of collective selfishness; but to say this is simply to say that itis an authentic case of nationalism’ (Manning 1968: 287). Words manipulated at will. As you can see, ‘difference’ is essentially ‘division’ in the understanding of many. It is no more than a tool of self- defense and conquest. You and I might as well not walk into this semantic trap which sets us up against each other as expected by a certain ideology of separatism. Have you read the grievances some of our sisters express on being among the few women chosen for a ‘Special Third World Women’s Issue’ or on being the only Third World woman at readings, workshops, and meetings? Why not go and find out for yourself when you don’t know? Why let yourself be trapped in the mold of permanent schooling and wait for the delivery of knowledge as a consumer waits for her/his suppliers’ goods? ‘The understanding of difference is a shared responsibility, which requires a minimum of willingness to reach out to the unknown. As Audre Lorde says, ‘Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap ‘of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the ‘oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that itis the task of black and third world women to educate white women, in the face of tremendous resistance, as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. Ths is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. (Lorde 1981: 100) One has to be excessively preoccupied with the master’s concerns, indeed, to try to explain why women cannot have written ‘the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare,’ as Virginia Woolf did. Such a waste of energy is perhaps unavoidable at certain stages of the struggle; it need not, however, become an end point in itself Specialness as a soporific soothes, anaesthetizes my sense of justice; it is, to the wolman of ambition, as effective a drug of psychological self- intoxication as alcohol is to the exiles of society. Now, i am not only given the permission to open up and talk, i am also encouraged to express my difference. My audience expects and demands it; otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come to hear a Third World ‘member speak about the First (2) World, We came to listen to that voice of

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