The Journal of Commonwealth Literature current issue

Editorial

Thieme, J. — 2009-08-27

When Language is a Delicate Timepiece: Mavis Gallant in conversation with Marta Dvorak

2009-08-27

This discussion with Mavis Gallant, whose "brilliant sense of place"¹ and unsettling prose diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje have paid tribute to, addresses the ways in which craft draws on double, plural, or displaced identities in turn rooted in colliding or intermingling belief systems. The writer engages with a wide range of considerations, from the unfurling of fascism to the relations between the visual arts and literature, thus providing a valuable testimony of modernity in mutation. Gallant’s reflections on early modernists from Stein and Hemingway to Joyce and Beckett disclose the close relations between reading and writing practices, and her critical yet imaginative engagement with questions of perception, apperception, and representation offers us a privileged view of the creative process on the march.

From Page-Poet to Recording Artist: Mutabaruka interviewed by Eric Doumerc

Doumerc, E. — 2009-08-27

Mutabaruka is a dub poet who has been performing in Jamaica and all over the world since the 1970s. Over the years he has made his mark both as a page-poet and as a dynamic performer and he has reached his audience through sound recordings and books. In this interview he discusses the reasons that initially led him to write, the development of dub poetry as opposed to deejay music, the relationship between his poetry and traditional English poetry, the importance of religion in Jamaica and his work as a radio host (for his show "The Cutting Edge") and record producer. Well-known poems by Mutabaruka, including "Revolutionary Poets", "Dis Poem" and "The People’s Court" are also discussed, providing some insight into their composition.

"Free to Come to Grief": The Problems of Formal Freedom in Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences

Evans, L. — 2009-08-27

This article situates Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences in the context of a Guyanese cultural tradition. I consider the idea of a community of literary voices, both as it is figured within this formally complex text and as it is envisaged through McWatt’s intertextual dialogue with an earlier generation of writers and through his anticipation of future readers. Moving between a discussion of political freedom and imprisonment in the context of Martin Carter’s writing and an analysis of the textual power relations operating within Suspended Sentences, I focus on the concept of freedom of expression as it relates to the idea of a communally-articulated Guyana. By setting Linda Hutcheon’s ideas on the relationship between freedom and postmodernist writing against the very different views of Wilson Harris, I explore the limits of McWatt’s metafictional devices, reading them in relation to the text’s thematic concern with empty promises. I suggest that, in the context of the disillusioning social and political realities of post-independence Guyana, McWatt’s backward glance at visions of the future combines a longing to share in the optimism of his literary predecessors with a critical distance from them. In this light, I argue that Suspended Sentences at once projects a promise of community and suspends it indefinitely.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Colonial Girl: Emily Carr and Judith Wright

Collett, A., Jones, D. — 2009-08-27

In their autobiographical writing, painter Emily Carr and poet Judith Wright record a remarkably similar experience of how growing up in colonial/postcolonial Canada and Australia shaped them as artists. Although each identified strongly with the region of her birth, and felt a deep love of its landscape, issues of belonging preoccupied both women from childhood on as they negotiated their place within the family, the immediate society and the nation. Neither could fully conform to family expectations, nor comply with the restrictions society sought to impose on them as artists and each actively sought, or else found herself cast in, an outsider role. Carr and Wright’s self portraits each have something in common with James Joyce’s representation of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an insider/outsider figure who seeks to escape the confining networks of nation and society, only to find himself thoroughly entangled in them.

Women of Affairs: Contrasting Images of Empire in Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet

Banerjee, J. — 2009-08-27

Critics still find an element of "Raj nostalgia" in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Yet right from the start he uses an old engraving of Queen Victoria to expose the false and damaging premises on which the Raj was built. Dwindling on its journey through the Quartet, this picture is at length discarded. In contrast, Scott’s "primary" image (which also harks back to the Victorian period) is that of a girl running, at first in the shadow cast by old atrocities, but eventually into a greater freedom, a new "wholeness". The historical sweep of the Quartet, and its analysis of the political issues involved in the disintegration of the Raj, should not obscure Scott’s fundamental purpose here: to tackle the "many-headed dragon" of prejudice by rejecting the system that promoted it; and to encourage instead, particularly through his independently-minded and stout-hearted women characters, a commitment to a postcolonial and post-racial society.

The Nightingale's Wanderings: Sarojini Naidu in North America

Arora, A. — 2009-08-27

This essay examines the letters that the prominent Indian poet and nationalist leader Sarojini Naidu wrote to Gandhi and her daughters during her 1928—1929 tour of North America. These letters record her impressions of the "New World", of her reception and of the sentiments these perceptions and reception evoked in her. In her epistolary reflections and public lectures, Naidu presents herself as a self-confident cosmopolitan Indian woman, a poet and writer, and a female nationalist with her own mind. Naidu’s performance of modern Indian womanhood during her tour allowed her to craft a self to gain legitimacy within the assumptions and demands made of her both within America and by Indian (male) nationalists. Her travel letters — implicated in multiple conversations regarding nationalism, gender and inter-imperial connections — engage the intertwined histories of India, England and North America in the first half of the twentieth century.

"Perceiving [...] in one's own body" the Violence of History, Politics and Writing: Anil's Ghost and Witness Writing

Marinkova, M. — 2009-08-27

This article discusses Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost as a form of witness writing, which does not become a redemptive spectacle of, or a cure-all solution to, the civil war context of the text. Resisting transparent representation and absolute cognitive mechanisms, Ondaatje’s work bears witness to the irreducibility and opacity of difference through its emphasis on the corporeal and the tangible. Intimate and affectionate, witnessing emerges in the novel as a gesture of micropolitical empowerment whereby unwitnessed stories and unacknowledged witnesses are recognized and validated. Engendering anxiety rather than relief, however, the intimate and disturbing scope of Anil’s Ghost does not redeem history through art; instead, by unsettling the fundamentals of optical transparency and absolute knowledge, this act of witness writing exposes historical whitewashings and excisions, and offers affectionate caress in the irreparable sutures of macropolitical pressures.

Islam and Modernity in the Works of Two Contemporary Malay Anglophone Writers: Che Husna Azhari's "Mariah" and Karim Raslan's "Neighbors"

Ng, A. H. S. — 2009-08-27

Literature written in the English language remains a contested terrain in Malaysia, especially amongst Malay writers who must carefully negotiate between their identities as Malays (symbiotically yoked with Islam) and as individuals living in a modern and increasingly globalized world. This essay explores the strategic compromises writers have to make when writing about sexuality, religion and identity. Its focus is on the issue of polygamy in "Mariah" by Che Husna Azhari and homosexuality and middle-class values in "Neighbors" by Karim Raslan. I argue that these writers have to deploy irony in their narratives in order to introduce taboo issues without seeming to endorse them overtly.

Betrayal of Form: The "Teeming" Narrative and the Allegorical Impulse in Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Chen, C.-y. — 2009-08-27

There has been a tendency among postcolonial critics to naturalize the proximity of the postcolonial literary imagination and allegory, with Rushdie’s work and even his career being seen as prominent instances of this proximity. Most such readings view allegory as a straightforward mode of literary expression in which the "message" of the allegorical sign is granted singular importance, while its formal features often go unheeded. Coterminous with such a conception of allegory is the assumption that it is supposed to function at a "critical distance" from the subject-matter in question. This article argues that Rushdie’s allegorical practice works differently. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, I read the allegorical images in Midnight’s Children as emblematic of a particular symptom of postcoloniality, the impossibility of the postcolonial subject’s breaking free from the colonial legacy, on the one hand, and from the hegemonic nationalist discourse of the postcolonial condition, on the other. Yet it is precisely when the postcolonial subject is overpowered by the hegemonic discourse’s demands that s/he makes sense of the historical condition that the nonsensicality of the hegemony is exposed. I also suggest that a Benjaminian reading helps put in perspective those discussions of Rushdie’s position, which suggest his putative "complicity" with hegemony.

Ben Mtobwa (1958--2008)

Gromov, M., Primorac, R. — 2009-08-27

Books Received

2009-08-27