1. MARABISO SARA 587123-LSC
Tesina finale del corso di Letteratura Inglese Contemporanea
Modulo B - programma 2008/09
Prof. Annalisa Oboe
PERIPHERAL VOICES TRYING TO BE HEARD:
an analysis of the representation of marginal figures
within the postcolonial discourse

2. INDEX
Challenging the centre…………………………………… pg. 3
The condition of the subaltern between historical and fictional
representation…………………………………………. pg. 5
- The emergence of ‘marginal’ identities............... pg. 5
- Stable displacement............................................. pg. 8
- Representation of a peripheral past..................... pg. 11
Subversion of stereotypes………..……………………… pg. 14
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3. CHALLENGING THE CENTRE
The experience of colonialism was not a mere political and economical subjugation for
colonized peoples: its main impact was on the intimate part of their identity and on their daily life,
which were completely upset by the imposition of the colonizers’ cultural system. The building of
the British Empire was undertaken not only through the physical invasion of territories and the
indiscriminate expansion of trades with colonies, but also through a strong attempt to destroy
natives’ cultural heritage in behalf of a complete dominion of what Westerners called “civilization”.
This term was used to define the wide range of interventions made in order to force colonized
peoples to adopt English language, culture, religion, manners and way of living, justifying them
under the umbrella of a self-assumed humanitarian and sympathetic mission: the praised “white
man’s burden”.
The European presence, characterized by the large use of violence to keep control over
the locals and by the imposition of Western education, created a deep gap between the reality of the
colonizers’ actions and the principles of the culture they wanted to transmit. Natives’ identity was
not only denied and hidden, but above all split into clashing fragments that mined the possibility of
a unique consciousness in the individual. The first stage of colonization saw a role of prominence of
English culture, which became the undisputed ‘centre’ of production of anything that should be
taken into account, a sort of privileged point of reference for every other cultural system. From the
Western point of view, other cultures were a mere object of curiosity, something which could add
an embellishment of ‘exotic’ newness to the fixed, immutable centrality of European pride. In
literature, this same pride was the result of the recognition of traditional English models of writing
as an independent body of work, which became the unit to measure the reliability of any other text;
therefore, literature developed side by side with the Empire and contributed to build up an absolute
concept of culture, better explained by the word “canon”. A canon can be defined as an evaluation
reference based on a range of common values taken as standards: it states the rule that has to be
followed, taking on the power to certify authority and authenticity.
The canon was constructed to be unchangeable, but in fact it had a vulnerable origin: it
was wanted and chosen by those who had the power to decide for the others; this means that it was
determined by the silence of these “others”. But what did it happen when the others’ voice became
louder? A change of perspective happened. It was a slow process of change, made of continuous
negotiations between ‘centre’ and ‘peripheries’. Natives became conscious of the oppression they
were victims of and started to claim for the recognition of their own culture by producing their own
literature. The Empire’s image of leader of the world was threaten by this new challenge against its
central canon, thus the colonizers’ reaction was of repression, mainly through censorship and a
strict control over natives’ texts. However, the same cultural models that Westerners imposed in the
colonies gave the chance to native people to build up their own identity and make their voice be
heard; actually, the representatives of marginal cultures took possession of the tools the Empire had
provided for their education and used them to create an independent way of thinking based on the
consciousness that they could give their texts authenticity also without the Westerners’ approval. It
was a real turnover, in which differences of the margin overcame the imperial centre. For colonies,
it was a transition from a state of complete subalternity to a position of subversive power, which
was able to question the most structured frame of values of the world.
Cultural marginality was mainly preserved by language, which became the most
important legacy of colonialism. Linguistic imposition was the first means to control local people
because words acted as a troyan horse on minds, influencing ways of thinking, ways of living and
perceptions individuals had of themselves. However, even though English language subjugated and
moulded their identity, it was through the colonizers’ tongue that natives got the strength to
challenge the centre: they reached a good mastery of English and became able to ‘subvert’ it
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4. without rejecting it. They learnt how to use the colonizers’ language to impose their own culture
and to rise against their oppressors by ‘writing back to the centre’. That is how postcolonialism was
born. The need for freedom of acting, thinking and expressing gave birth to many liberation
movements that subsequentely led colonies to political independence, but also to many literary and
cultural forces that tried to change the locals’ condition of ‘subalterns’. The question we have to ask
ourself is whether this change actually happened or not, and if yes, how it happened. Answers can
be found analysing the representations of ‘the subaltern’, both in history and in fiction, and trying to
understand how differences in representation can affect actual relations of power.
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5. THE CONDITION OF THE SUBALTERN BETWEEN
HISTORICAL AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATION
Defining subalternity is the first step to get into the question of its representation. Generally,
a subaltern is someone who is subordinated to somebody else; but considering the term within the
postcolonial discourse, subaltern becomes synonymous of ‘colonized’, referring to people who have
been subjugated by the hegemonic power of European colonizers. In addition to its basic meaning
of oppression, subalternity gradually moves towards the concept of marginality, thus acquiring a
sense of ‘dangerous’ challenge against whatever emerges as a leading and standardizing
mainstream: subalterns are no more those who are simply overwhelmed by a superior power but
they include everyone who has little or no access to the Empire’s cultural origins. The following
paragraphs try to make an analysis of the subaltern’s figure through the comparison between its
fictional representation and its historical reconstruction in some significant postcolonial films.
The emergence of ‘marginal’ identities
There is a very elementary query at the basis of the analysis of the dichotomy
centre/periphery, and it is the same query that Edward Said asked himself in Orientalism: how do
we know that a periphery exists? What tells us which is the boundary between the central and the
peripheral? A marginal space cannot be seen in itself: its existence is inevitably dependent from the
presence of another larger space that clashes with it and defines it as a ‘margin’. Said sustained that
the Orient was nothing but a Western-made creation that filtered the knowledge of the real Orient,
changing it into a mere sensation of what could be considered ‘Oriental’; and that is exactly how
marginality is shaped, through the influence of a hegemonic biased image over a defenceless
distorted reality. This means that when identities remain marginal is not because they are born of an
inferior status or lack something, but because they had been chosen to become ‘the Other’, a piece
of the world at the disposal of the rulers’ needs.
This colonizers’ construction of an ideal Other in opposition to their own familiar Self
stands out clearly in The Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, Australia-USA, 2002) where the
Westerners’ need to establish their superiority is extraordinary well-represented both by the general
plot of the film and by some scenes in particular. The film is set in the Australia of the 1930s and
tells the true story of three girls who became part of the so-called ‘stolen generation’. At that time,
colonial government decided to eradicate all ‘half-caste’ children from their aboriginal origins,
forcibly taking them away from their families and bringing them into re-education camps with the
aim of turning them into servants for the whites. This is what happened to the protagonists, but their
desire to come back home was so strong that they managed to escape from the camp and attempted
a long walk home following the rabbit-proof fence that crosses Australia. There is a scene of the
movie which stands out as the most relevant clue of colonizers’ approach to natives: it shows the
Chief Protector of Aborigines, Mr. Neville, giving a presentation of his theory about the so-called
‘unwanted third race’. The Chief Protector was the official controller of all the aborigines and half-
castes of the country and he promoted a plan for the biological absorption of Aborigines into white
Australia. In the movie, during an exemplary speech to a small white audience, Mr. Neville
maintains that there is a rising number of half-caste children who risk to create a future ‘third race’
of coloured people with a percentage of white blood. What strikes most in his words is the
emblematic question: «Should the coloureds be encouraged to go back to black or should they be
advanced to white status and be absorbed in the white population?»; the question is formulated with
the clearly implied assumption that ‘being black’ means being inferior and undesirable, while
‘being white’ adds an innate, inexplicable, undisputed state of superiority. Thus, his presentation
can be considered the symbol of the whites’ shaping of the centre/periphery model of thinking and
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6. it demonstrates the roots of colonizers’ strong will to keep natives in a subaltern status. Mr.
Neville’s answer to his own question is even more representative: he forecasts that eradicating half-
castes from their aboriginal origins, imposing them to get married with the white population and to
be re-educated within colonizers’ cultural system will reduce their proportion of native ancestry,
generation by generation, until it will completely disappear. Thus, Mr. Neville’s attempt of
distorting aborigines’ identity and assimilating it into colonizers’ one can be easily associated to
Said’s concept of a ‘constructed Orient’.
Another fundamental concept to define the borders of subalternity can be taken from
Foucault’s explanation of discourse as a system of knowledge of the world through which the world
itself is brought into being. Foucault’s discourse expresses the way in which power is maintained by
the control of people’s knowledge about what is considered truth. Knowledge becomes the means to
create subjectivity and control the viewpoint from which reality should be understood. On this
assumption, we can say that political oppression is to national identity like cultural manipulation is
to individual identity. Foucault’s concept of discourse explains how the construction of identity
generally develops within a mainstream system of knowledge and classification; in the case of
colonialism, natives’ cultural identity is forced to develop within the colonizers’ system of
knowledge because it is only under the Empire’s control that natives can learn; their own cultural
heritage is denied and suppressed by the European rule. A strong relationship exists between the
history of colonialism and the natives’ condition of cultural subalternity: actually, colonization
changed not only the way people lived before it, but also the consciousness they had of their own
original past. A clear example was the sudden disappearance of natives’ oral tradition, which was
erased and substituted by the teaching of Western ways of recording the past exclusively through
writing. The attempt to cancel local history and memories played a key role in the success of the
colonizer over the colonized because the past forms a large part both of collective and individual
identity; therefore, a distortion of one’s past leads to an easier manipulation of one’s thoughts and
behaviour and to the consequent creation of marginality. Westerners used the imbalance between
themselves and the colonized to transform the experience about ‘the Other’ into an eternally fixed
prejudice aimed to deny any possibility of independent development for the colonies. Natives were
stuck in their subaltern condition, and the intent to impose them Western values was just one of the
measures used to keep control over their own original values and try to convince them that
colonization was there just to “lighten their darkness”.
Once again, we can find reference of Foucault’s idea of a marginality created by the control
over the knowledge in The Rabbit-Proof Fence. When the three half-caste girls are taken from their
family, they are brought to the Moore River Native Settlement, 1200 miles far from their homeland;
here they are supposed to grow up in a climate of segregation and blind obedience to the whites.
There is a particular scene that summarizes white Australians’ imposition of culture over the
natives: it shows one of Mr. Neville’s visits to the Moore River camp to select the fairer-skinned
children in order to move them in a more appropriate settlement. The perspective from which the
scene is shot is that of Molly, the older of the three little protagonists. We can notice that the girl
whispers to one of her companions to get information about the white men’s visit and what strikes
most of the answers is that fairer-skinned children are assumed as «clever than us»; thus, it is quite
clear that life in the camp forcibly guided the children’s opinions and viewpoints towards
colonizers’ system of knowledge. Also Mr. Neville’s words while meeting Molly are of great
significance: «We’re here to help and encourage you in this new world. Duty, service,
responsibility: those are our watchwords». This sentence stands out clearly as a declaration of
superiority and power, of that Foucault’s typical kind of power which is carried out through the
manipulation of knowledge and identity.
However, after a first stage of blind adaptation to colonizers’ precepts, natives started to
realize their condition of subalterns. This was the turning point: locals rediscovered their origins,
their traditions and became aware of the colonial trick which they had been trapped into. Years of
violence, racism and exclusion woke up the natives’ consciousness and gave birth to a new will of
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7. rebellion against the oppressor. Margin began to challenge the centre in order to make its voice be
heard. Periphery started gaining its own strength, acquiring the bravery to face external authority
and affirm itself as an independent subject. Like Fanon maintains, national culture cannot go
without national freedom because the consciousness of being part of a certain set of values is tightly
linked to the capability to independently choose an authoritative guide that represents those values.
So, Fanon claims the existence of a strong connection between the sense of national culture and the
struggle for freedom: culture becomes a means to fight against the oppressors and affirm a new
independent identity, thus its relevance is set in the role it plays in the actual events, not in the mere
recollection of a distant past; its focus should be to mine the roots of occupation not just by
protesting towards colonizers, but by addressing its own people. This kind of national culture does
not display past protests denouncing colonizers’ violations, but aims to show the victims the way
out of those violations; the target audience should shift from the persecutors to the persecuted.
Evident examples of Fanon’s theory can be found in a recent American TV movie, Deacons
of Defense (Bill Duke, USA, 2003). It reconstructs the true story of a group of Afro-Americans that
decided to begin a violent struggle against the cells of racists and KKK members holding the power
over their town. This film shows the regime of segregation to which coloured people were subjected
in the 1960s’ USA and depicts the consciousness-raising of their independent identity, through the
fight for the respect of their rights and dignity within the Western cultural system. A strong accent
is given to the sudden change of mind of Marcus, the protagonist. Since when the police beat him
while he is trying to defend his daughter from their attacks, he stops his lifelong acceptance and
endurance of the whites’ discriminations and, letting years of anger come out, he tries to protect his
community from violence through the same means the whites use to humiliate coloured people. His
group starts acting peacefully in defence of civil rights of Afro-Americans, helped by two white
activists; however, seeing themselves defeated again and again by the harsh xenophobic aggressions
of the whites, they get armed and convince themselves that there can be no change without
responding to violence with the menace of other violence. Marcus becomes the symbol of the
subaltern turning into a convinced warrior, an activist and most of all a winner. He takes his chance
to break away from the centre and emerge as a separated entity which is able to speak on behalf of
itself.
Can the subaltern really speak? Does he manage to challenge the centre? Spivak questions
the apparent emergence of a voice from subalterns in postcolonialism. She maintains that the
colonized cannot gain a real independent identity without separating their perspective from that
imposed by their rulers; thus, struggling for national liberation or civil rights is not enough because
these initiatives are carried out inside and towards the Western system of values. There should be
one more step to take. Since subjectivity is always produced within a determined context, its
transformation into a new identity requires a detachment from this same context in which it was
born; however, the realization of an effective separation from a well-established external cultural
authority is undoubtedly really difficult. Spivak believes that as long as ruling élites detain the
power to call ‘subalterns’ the subaltern and to confine them into a closed circle of differences there
will be no possibility for them to overcome their condition; and more, as long as natives’ culture
does not start to speak by itself and turn the attention to its own people and values there will be no
true voices from the margin.
A wonderful example of the success of subalterns’ subjectivity as Spivak means it is
represented by the film The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, Jamaica-USA, 1972): this film is
made with and for Jamaican people. It is not for the great distribution; instead, it aims to transmit
clear and simple messages to the Caribbean local public. Producers, themes, language, actors,
songs, places, all of these are local, are the real parts of the fictional story they are to perform. What
most differs from the rest of postcolonial filmography is right its home-madeness and simplicity,
through which the movie manages to go straight into people’s minds, showing them a concrete
example of how to make their voice come out and stand for itself. Colonies are not represented but
‘misrepresented’ here: the plot exalts the figure of a young man seeking fortune in the capital who
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8. is soon turned into a criminal by new circumstances, difficulties and bad acquaintances; his
unrespectful attitude towards police and ruling authorities in general is symptomatic of the hidden
intent of this fictional work to reverse the usual Western frame of values. The director does not
depict Jamaica simply as a desrupted victim of colonialism, unable to overcome its misery; he adds
to its hardships a sense of common pride, pride to be Jamaican, pride to live in a city which is the
true opposite of a smart, beautiful Western city, pride to be part of a reality which is far from
imitating, and thus being accepted by, the hegemonic centre. In this pride we can finally recognize
the voice of the subaltern speaking and the emergence of a new identity from the margin: by
declaring their ability to create culture, to have fun, to construct their own perspectives and to subtly
mock the colonizers’ ones without feeling scared, Jamaicans really challenge the canon and its
stereotypes. Considering the plot, the colonized’s will of independence is personified in the figure
of Ivan because he is never content with what the status quo of the city can offer him: while staying
at the preacher’s, he cannot stand his rules and precepts; when the American record-producer offers
him only 20$ for his song, he initially refuses and tries to get played by other producers; when he
understands that José can get much more money than him by dealing a larger drug business, he
decides to rebel to his authority and emerge he himself as a leading figure. All of these episodes are
related each other by the common underlying concept of disruption of an external established
domination and of claim to one’s own chance to choose one’s way. That is why Ivan becomes a
hero among his people and around the city, even if he is certainly a negative hero; but it is just the
negativity that gives this character the right to generally represent one of the subaltern’s voices that
really succeeded to be heard in postcolonial fiction and to challenge the centre. Ivan’s crimes cease
to be mere crimes because they embody everything going against colonization, oppression and
imposed rules. Ivan’s figure is the icon of an emergence of the postcolonial periphery in opposition
to the ruling imperial centre.
Stable displacement
The representation of the subaltern within colonialism and postcolonialism is not a mere
declaration of the whites’ oppression and violation of human rights, but also the expression of a
series of tensions that this chapter of human history generated inside the heart of all its victims.
Colonization left a harsh legacy to the peoples it conquered, a legacy that goes further beyond its
economical and political consequences: individuals, families, the entire native societies were
distorted by the arrival of Westerners’ civilization and forced to evolve within a foreign set of
values and among enormous contradictions. Continuing the analysis of The Harder They Come’s
protagonist, we can easily distinguish some other features of subalternity that should be underlined.
Ivan’s search for improvement is not only a symbol of the subaltern’s ability to speak and challenge
the oppressors; it also stands for the infinite search of a lost identity, which can never be
accomplished. There is a constant condition of instability in each moment of Ivan’s life: he can try
again and again but he will ever be defeated by the impossibility to overcome difficulties and
achieve his desires. The more he tries the more he is overwhelmed by circumstances and by him
himself, because he has not got a definite road to follow. The harsh reality of the city added to his
inner rootlessness destroy Ivan’s expectations, making him, besides a folk-hero and an ambassador
of the subaltern’s voice, also the portrait of their disorientation and displacement, frailty and
powerlessness. The protagonist’s disrupted self recalls a concept of identity which is very close to
Stuart Hall’s idea of cultural identity. It is an “identity as becoming”: a continuous negotiation
betwen different pieces of personality happens inside Ivan and he finds himself unable to unite them
in a single flow. He moves to town with the illusion to live better and achieve his goals; but once
there, he is not only defeated and emargined, but also changes his previous targets after tasting real
problems. At the beginning, his adaptation to criminal life is just a means to survive but after a
while Ivan enters the logic of crime and is not able to come out of it anymore; it becomes his own
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9. way of thinking and acting. Ivan personality finally turns out to be a mixture of an honest country
boy, a determined dreamer, an lonely orphan, a music artist, an opportunist, a lover, a killer, a
leader, an hero and a subaltern, all together. There seems to be a permanent alternated performance
of these various parts of him, in response to various respective external inputs. Thus, taking again
one of Hall’s concepts, we can assert that identity is a product, not a fixed essence. As the figure of
Ivan demonstrates, identity can be considered a self-construction of one’s Self within the
representations one gives of it. Consequently, identity can never be complete and unique, as it is
part of a process of creation and it evolves as sudden as our images of ourselves change.
The Harder They Come offers another important element that deserves our attention: the
presence of “Babylon”. This term is used to identify the city of Kingston - seen particularly in its
emargined ghettoes and slums - with a sort of ‘hell’, a dangerous place in which there is no chance
to live a simple, normal and quiet life. In the collective imagination, Babylon represents a state of
caos, disorder and mess related to misery and criminality; this idea is confirmed by the first chapters
of Ivan’s story, when he wanders alone around the streets without finding home, work or fortune, is
cheated or refused by other town dwellers and finally ends up in getting into criminal activities.
However, there is a certain ambivalence in the meaning of Babylon in this movie because it is also
an image of the margin in itself, something definitely separated from what a Western viewpoint can
see of it; it signifies home, every-day culture and family: actually, Jamaicans see the ghettoes as
beautiful places that are part of their subjectivity and intimate identity. Babylon takes clearly a
double value. Ivan slowly takes his own part in the life of the ghetto and totally integrates in it until
he has to escape from police: considering his experience, we can assume that the initial condition of
displacement the city generates in the subaltern can be soon overcome once its rules have been
assimilated. This consideration brings us back to reaffirm the strong message this film wants to
communicate: a successful emergence of the subaltern’s identity.
The theme of Babylon leads directly to that of “movement”, which stands as another
consequence of colonialism and another element of displacement for the subaltern. In The Harder
They Come Ivan is a country boy moving to town to seek fortune. His origins are faint: there is a
vague reference to a dead grandmother, the semi-presence of a distant and unresponsive mother and
the total absence of a father. The movement from country to town denotes his tangible rootlessness
and forecasts the ‘stable’ instability he is condamned to. Gilroy interprets movement as a part of the
formation of culture: creating irregularities and insecurities, travel is something that strongly
contributes to the construction of identity; at the same time, the fractures it provokes prevent
identity to realize itself completely. The theme of travel has a certain importance in postcolonialism
because it can be considered the basis of colonization: Westerners travelled towards the rest of the
world in order to expand their possessions; later, people from the colonies were moved from their
homelands towards the West to become slaves; after the abolition of slavery, many natives
deliberately moved to Western countries to seek fortune and improve their living conditions.
Therefore, we notice that ‘movement’ is a constant in colonial history, becoming a constant in the
development of the colonized’s identity too. Which kind of movements can be relevant in our
analysis of the subaltern’s representation? One has been already mentioned above: the movement
from country to town; it is present in The Harder They Come, but also in Cry, The Beloved Country
(Darrell Roodt, USA, 1995), a South African film inspired by a novel of Alan Paton. The main
character is a black priest that travels from the countryside to town looking for his sister and his
son. Once arrived, he discovers a world extremely different from both what he was used to and
what he expected. Indeed, Johannesburg is depicted as another Babylon. Again, the movement
causes confusion in the protagonist, making his beliefs swallow and his viewpoints change
suddenly; the rupture of his idea of the world gives him the premises to modify his entire identity.
This movie represents the city exactly as Babylon is in the collective imagination: the place of
damnation, caos and loss. The first urban scene is characterized by the darkness of night time: an
emblematic parallelism with the idea of the city as a typical place of moral and mental darkness for
the human being, later confirmed by the behavioural deviation of both the priest’s relatives who live
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10. there. In this film, the decay of Babylon is not implicitly connected to colonizers’ exploitation like
in the Jamaican one; here, the perspective returns to the whites and the blacks are shown at the
margin of society because they are considered easily corruptible and naturally prone to crime.
However, this downgrading representation of the South African town mainly aims to highlight its
‘counter-image’, that is, the way in which the subaltern are strictly confined into a definite box of
prejudices and limited in the development of their own identity.
Movement can also refer to a collective movement, as in the case of diasporas. Colonized
peoples are those who firstly experienced diaspora: for instance, the large phenomenon of slave
trade from Africa to America was one of the greatest diasporic movements in history. The
descendants of the peoples who lived these diasporas inevitably suffer a dispersion of their cultural
identity because they assimilate the new cultural system but keep alive some of their original
cultural elements and blend them with those they learn in the receiving society. They are forced to
fragment themselves into different and clashing cultural pieces and, starting from these fragments,
to create distinctive forms of identity; but the new product can never reach a satisfactory level of
completeness and homogeneity. The gaps between the various parts that constitutes a diasporic
identity make of rootlessness and instability its regular characteristics, leaving the subaltern in a
permanent state of anxiety and uncertainty. A fictional representation of these consequences can be
found in the film 1947, Earth (Deepa Mehta, India, 1999), which tells the story of a multi-ethnic
group of friends living in Lahore, a Pakistani city, in the days before and during the partition of
India. The sudden collapse of the city, symbol of the collapse of the entire country, is seen from the
eyes of a little Parsi girl who functions as a bond for all the characters playing a role in the plot.
From a mere political viewpoint, the division of India has been considered the right solution to the
religious and ethnic problems of the country. In fact, partition upset people’s life at any level,
raising violence, fear, cruelty and hatred even among people who had ever trusted each other. The
outlook from the inside of the events is particularly striking because it gives an immediate
impression of the devastating emotional impact of partition and diaspora on every-day life. There is
a scene that I consider one of the most significant of the entire movie: when partition is announced
and violence begins to possess the city, Lenny, the little Parsi narrator, unfortunately witnesses a
very cruel incident and, since that moment, she cannot avoid thinking of it. The happening has such
a strong effect on her mind that she reproduces the same violent act on one of her dolls. This scene
is a perfect representation of how much individual identity can be affected and distorted by external
events; moreover, it may be taken as a symbol of the disruption caused by the independence and
partition of India. The greatest effect of partition was the movement of an enormous number of
people from one side of the border to another. 1947, Earth is set in Lahore, one of the cities that
most suffered this movement because of its closeness with the borders, and it perfectly shows the
effect of this forced diaspora: one of the Parsi family’s friends, a Sikh, decides to move from
Lahore because the city is going to be assigned to Pakistan, the Muslim side. He visits the Parsi
family before going, in order to ask them the permission to leave some of his belongings by them;
we can immediately notice in his words that he is not pleased at all to leave and claims that they are
taking him away from his homeland and breaking his own country into two pieces, calling it a
“happy independence”. By this scene, the audience realizes how partition and diaspora raised hatred
and pain among the population, altering previous balances, increasing tensions and distorting
individuals’ perception of what was happening. People who were forced to move were victims of a
laceration in their cultural identity that could never be cured and is still reflected in the
contemporary Indian population.
Another aspect of the instable conditions the subaltern is subjected to is worth analyzing: the
contact of different cultures often produces a creolization of mindsets, giving birth to a brand new
form of ‘being’, which Bhabha calls hybridity. Hybridity derives from the state of ambivalence that
the colonized are necessarily brought into by the same will of the colonizer: actually, considering
the fact that Westerners’ arrival in the colonies means the imposition of their culture on the natives,
and that their main aim is ‘domesticating’ and ‘civilizing’ local peoples, we can easily deduce how,
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11. at some point, natives themselves tend to change their attitudes towards those of the whites in order
to be accepted by the new social system. Thus, the colonized try to loose part of their ‘otherness’
imitating the Westerners and putting themselves in an ambivalent middle position; they change their
original identity into something that is similar, but never completely identical, to that of the
colonizer. Referring to the fictional representation of this situation of ambivalence, we find some
interesting points in the South African film Cry, The Beloved Country. Here, even though the
viewpoint remains that of the whites, the figure of the so-called ‘mimic-man’ (ref. Bhabha) is
clearly displayed. The protagonist is an emblem of the subaltern that re-shapes his original identity
taking the colonizer’s religion, values and behaviour, but still finds himself stuck in an inferior
position; and what is even worse is that this character seems to let himself be submitted and
controlled, accepting to live within the prejudicial and discriminating borders in which the whites
want him to live. He decades in a sort of self-degradation and his painful condition is not put into
question at all, though largely represented in various scenes of the movie. It seems that colonial
abuse is interiorized by the colonized in the forms of both a permanent fear and a complete devotion
for the whites and the cultural system they impose.
However, we should consider that hybridity is produced within a space which lays between
the purposes and expectations of the colonizer and their effective fulfilment, a gap in which two
opposite cultural certainties come into contact and, clashing each other, finally mix themselves.
Bhabha calls this contact zone ‘in-between third space’ and asserts that the ambivalence it generates
in the subaltern’s identity is due to the same natives’ attempt to reproduce their oppressors’ cultural
attitudes, which inevitably leads to the mockery of the colonial intent to maintain a full control over
the subaltern’s cultural re-education. On Bhabha’s opinion, imitation causes mockery and mockery
is a strong element of disruption for colonial authority, because it allows the subaltern to put the
seeds for the emergence of their own voice. This feature of the subaltern’s hybrid identity is not
present in the representation given by Cry, The Beloved Country, which is evidently directed
towards a Western audience and tends to strengthen a Western postcolonial approach. A good
presentation of the ‘in-between third space’ is rather present in The Rabbit-Proof Fence. The figure
of Mr. Neville stands for the colonizer’s denial of an unwanted hybridity in the colonized because
his politics aims to avoid the creation of the so-called ‘third race’ of half-castes, thus aiming to
avoid the creation of an ambiguous and challenging middle space too. The whole film is charged
with the strong will of the whites to delete any possibility of mediation or ambiguous mixture
between the two cultural and ethnical opposites, the native “Other” and the Western “Self”.
Bhabha’s ‘mimic-man’ is real and realized through the presence of half-caste children, but is also
harshly fought at the same moment of his birth. It is just this battle that confirms the importance of
hybridity for the subaltern: the more the colonizer want to suppress ambiguity, the more ambiguity
gains strength to challenge their authority and assumed superiority. Creolization becomes a menace
for the certainties in which the colonial dominance has always based itself, revealing how limited
and weak the colonial rule has always been. The next step would be to understand how much this
menace had an effective role or relevance in the actual events that determined the end of
colonialism and how real was the chance for the subaltern to speak their own voice out loud.
Meanwhile, it would be also worth considering how the subaltern’s history is represented in
postcolonial fiction.
Representation of a peripheral past
Traditional historiography mainly focuses on ‘high politics’, that is, on historical events
concerning the macro-sphere of national governments, political élites, ideologies and international
relations. What happens in the lower ranks of the population affected by these events remains
almost always unknown. Thus, the first move to understand the role of the subaltern in history is to
radically changing the perspective through which history is told. Postcolonial and subaltern studies
have been the first attempts towards this change of position: they maintain the necessity to
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12. emphasize the decisive role of the subaltern in the construction of their nations and in the processes
of independence. Native people have been subjected, and their story erased, both by the colonizer
and the local dominant classes under ethnic, caste, religious and social differences, which have been
used as means to destroy the seeds of raising national cultures. The main problem faced by the
postcolonial will to re-interpret history from the eyes of the subaltern is to effectively trace back
natives’ voice within the discourse of dominant historiography: many of the natives’ historical
sources have been really hidden or deleted, such as oral traditions, and there is a concrete difficulty
in providing proof of the subaltern’s past; this fact threatens the claim for the emergence of an
independent identity and subjectivity of the subaltern. Therefore, not even postcolonialism has been
able to give a definite answer to the question of the possibility for the subaltern to speak or not and
the debate is still ongoing.
An easier and more immediate evaluation can be developed considering how postcolonial
fiction deals with the history of and from the marginal side. First of all, it is fundamental to explain
the relation between history and its fictional representations. From Foucault’s point of view, the
historical discourse is mainly a re-writing of what is often witnessed by historical documents, but it
can never be really traced back to the authentic sources or events happened in the past. Thus, the
historian is not simply listing a series of objective facts but is ‘telling’ his personal interpretation of
those facts, because the same act of re-thinking the past in order to present it to an audience can be
considered a ‘poetic’ act, with a certain degree of fiction in it. This premise about an historiography
which is much more associated with narrative than with science reveals the great importance that
historical fiction can have in the reconstruction of the real past. The distance between history and
fiction becomes shorter: the use of an exclusively scientific approach to the description of historical
events is replaced by the consciousness of an actual impossibility to reach ‘the truth’ and the
acceptance of a literary approach to history, which finally resembles at and blend with story-telling.
In dealing with the history of the periphery and detaching from that of the centre, the
viewpoint should shift from the ruler to the subaltern and produce a sort of ‘counter-(hi)story’, that
is, a version of the past completely revised from a marginal perspective, which focuses not on
governments, trades, battles or treaties, but better on people’s every-day life. As explained before,
marginality is always created through underlining differences against a pre-determined centre and it
is often that same centre that decides how to establish it. With the birth of postcolonialism, this
decision is challenged and undermined even in its literary expressions. Postcolonial novels stop a
long-running Western tradition of exoticism in the story-telling regarding the ‘Orient’, and
definitely abandon a literature only aiming to praise the Empire institutions. At the same time, other
fictional forms develop within the postcolonial discourse: films we analysed so far are a concrete
example of the attempt to overturn the centrality of the West also in the modern visual arts.
However, not all of them can play a decisive role in the construction of a history told from the
margins. For instance, in Cry, the Beloved Country, even though the contradictions produced by
apartheid are clearly represented, racism is still seen from the whites’ viewpoint: the blacks’ loss
into dissolution, crime and fear is depicted as something unavoidable because of their own innate
proneness to subalternity. Thus, the film, although dealing with the problems raised by colonization,
continues to show what the Empire wants to show of that situation; its implicit message is that the
subaltern need to be re-educated and must conform to Western rules and values. Here history is
distorted into a story aiming to teach the natives the best behaviour to integrate with and be
accepted by the whites, which is nothing else but requesting their complete submission.
Considering the Indian film 1947, Earth, we can distinguish a very different approach to the
fictional representation of history. The purpose of the movie is right to display the effects of
political choices on common people and how the colonial past deeply affected the post-colonial life:
India’s independence and subsequent partition provoked conflicts among internal groups that before
were living together in peace and friendship; moreover, it prompted the creation of ‘new’ subalterns
among the subalterns. Actually, during the great diaspora that followed the decision to divide India,
besides loosing their homes and depart from their families or friends, those moving from one side of
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13. the country to another were often victims of indiscriminate violence that left them even more
vulnerable than before. History of the days of partition is turned into fiction, but this time into a
successful historical fiction, which is able to shift the perspective towards that of the oppressed,
focusing on that face of reality which has never been highlighted by traditional historiography. The
narrator is one of the characters of the story and is perfectly able to reflect all the emotions, the fears
and the contradictions experienced by the real protagonists of the historical event. Disruption of the
subaltern is analysed from the insight, not through the usual preconceptions of the mainstream. The
subaltern’s outlook is present also in The Rabbit-Proof Fence: it is symbolized by the three girls’
escape and long-walk home and by their strong will to fight against colonial institutions that want
them away from their family. The sad chapter of Australian history referring to the so-called ‘stolen
generation’ is displayed not only through the natives’ eyes, but above all through the eyes of its true
protagonists, thus turning the movie into a means of challenge against the dominion of the Western
version of the facts.
However, the perfect fictional subversion of traditional ways to represent the colonial past
can be identified with The Harder They Come. Colonial history plays a decisive role in all the levels
of meaning in which the film can be analysed: it is produced by, for and with Jamaican subalterns,
resulting totally separated from the mainstream; the challenge of its marginal viewpoint is clearly
recognizable through all the scenes and dialogues; language, characters and locations are local,
deliberately excluding any colonizers’ influence. Moreover, there are many references to the
consequences of colonization on Jamaican postcolonial life. The story provides clear evidence that a
subtle form of colonialism still exists even though it is not officially admitted: the island is
corrupted by and dependent on USA policy, and we can easily deduce it from scenes referring to the
trade of weed, to the power plays among police, government and USA hidden forces, to the
devastating corruption surrounding all the natives’ every-day activities. An emblem of the main role
that new colonialism plays in this country is represented by the same protagonist’s fruitless attempts
to see his song produced with an adequate reward: the record-production market is totally
monopolized by a unique brand, which is an American brand actually; this is why Ivan finds
himself defeated in the struggle for a better recognition of his work and is bound to simply accept
the dominant rules. The Harder They Come is a fictional close re-elaboration of an historical reality
which is still alive; it is able to effectively narrate how much the colonial past still burdens on the
colonized countries, keeping them weak and subjected, preventing the locals to gain real freedom
and, through these means, reaffirming its superiority. Nevertheless, at the same time, the film is
probably one of the most important successful declarations of the subaltern’s own independent
voice because it gives an interpretation of reality that directly comes from a true peripheral
perspective.
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14. SUBVERSION OF STEREOTYPES
The analysis developed so far should lead to some concluding ideas about how
postcolonialism dealt with the representation of marginal figures. Considering postcolonial fiction,
our aim was to discover whether its main purpose of making the subaltern’s voice emerge has been
achieved or not and, if so, with how much effectiveness. As Stuart Hall maintained, a ‘canon’ is
generally assumed as fixed and immutable but in fact it cannot be fixed forever: the Western
cultural canon imposed to the colonies was inevitably bound to be overcome and substituted by
other forms of hybrid culture sooner or later, in spite of all the efforts made by the colonizers to
keep control over the natives. The most relevant contribution of postcolonial discourse to the defeat
of canonical cultural schemes can be identified with its attempt to challenge the dominant
stereotypes of the mainstream. For instance, in the films analysed above, the figure of the subaltern
acquires different connotations on the basis of how much of canonical stereotypes is taken into
account. Cry, The Beloved Country is probably the nearest to Western visions and values because,
even if referring to their condition of pain and difficulty, it implicitly portrays black natives as
primitive, instinctive creatures that will never be able to afford better levels of civilization, unless
submitting to the whites’ rules; it subtly perpetrates the racial dichotomy of the superior, civilized
white against the inferior, rude black. In Deacons of Defence the figure of the black begins to be
reversed and to gain more power, but the image of black heroes fighting for their rights in the 60’s
USA is just a mere application of white principles to the subaltern’s status. The film presents them
as warriors against the unjustified violence of the whites but they are not claiming their part within
society by affirming an independent identity and culture; instead, they seem to fight to be
recognized as true American citizens exactly like whites are, to shout out loud their successful
standardization to American culture, not their right to freely express their original differences and
peculiarities.
The Rabbit-Proof Fence takes one more step towards an effective representation of the
subaltern’s voice because the protagonists embody the celebration of their ‘being different’. The
three girls’ escape against the colonial government’s will stands for a declaration of the natives’
desire to be independent and proud of their own original identity. The audience is deliberately
brought to hold with the three girls’ determination to go back home because the film focuses on
their suffering and makes colonial rules appear like inhuman unjustifiable violence. However, this
positive celebration of the subaltern’s diversity is not so productive in terms of challenging the
central canon because it continues to present the native as the opposite of the white colonizer, thus
keeping the old binary system of thought. What would be really useful in fiction to support the
emergence of peripheral voices is contesting the canonical representation of the subaltern from
within: this means that it is necessary to deconstruct their figure through the elimination of all the
elements recalling or connecting to Western influence on native culture. Depicting the subaltern’s
fight against violations, or their claim for independence, or their enormous distress, means basically
to reaffirm the existence of a great gap between people of different origins and to convey the belief
that cultural diversities will keep their distance and separation forever. The subaltern’s identity can
be effectively represented only by detaching from every previous familiar portrayal of it, and
turning the attention on something of completely new and unexpected by the audience. This is
exactly what happens in The Harder They Come: there are no reference in it about the clash
between the colonizer and the colonized or about the struggle of the subaltern against their
oppressors; the film is a simple story of local people for a local audience describing the reality of
Jamaica as it is. The protagonists are not heroes, nor desperate symbols of the consequences of
colonization; they are just Jamaicans performing their own culture and expressing their own way of
living, both in its originality and its contradictions. Colonialism is still present in the form of 'new
colonialism', but it is shown through the veils of subtle irony and political critics. The effects of this
form of ‘post-colonization’ are visible and criticized throughout the story, but they do not constitute
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15. the final message; instead, the movie mainly aims to give Jamaican people the chance to feel real
protagonists of this work of art and to see themselves truly represented as an independent culture for
the first time. Their identity of Jamaicans is constructed neither on the basis of its difference against
that of the Americans nor calling back to its African origins: it stands out by itself as a voice able to
speak on its own.
Now, turning the attention to history, how can we deduce whether the subaltern’s voice
finally gets to be heard or not? Perhaps a concrete answer to this question does not exist yet. There
are episodes in postcolonial history in which marginal figures effectively gained a position of
prominence and contributed to the improvement of the subaltern’s condition of inferiority: some
examples are the end of apartheid in South Africa, or the conquest of civil rights by black
Americans, or achievements like Mabo decision and the ‘National Sorry Day’ after years of
struggles of Australian Aboriginal peoples. However, adding a personal remark, I do think that even
nowadays many peoples are prevented to exist as independent subjects and to freely express their
cultural identity; and very often these peoples are the same that suffered the oppression of
colonialism during the 19th
and 20th
century. New forms of colonization are taking place in many
countries of South-East Asia, Africa or South America. The ‘civilized’ West still rules politically,
economically and culturally among many of its old colonies − even though in a non-official, subtle
way − and there are few chances for their populations to overcome this sort of subjugation because
they lack adequate means to effectively emerge. Moreover, we can clearly notice the reflections of
the old West-centred canonical way of thinking in our contemporary societies, often dealing with
the migratory phenomenon, and the consequent face-to-face with cultural diversities, through
prejudicial and counterproductive measures or policies; the praised Western values of democracy,
respect of differences and freedom are still contradicted by our same attitudes towards other
cultures, often reaffirming the old principle of a certain superiority of Western identity over the
others and preventing the today’s subaltern to let their voice be heard.
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