The Journal of Commonwealth Literature recent issues

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

Editorial

Thieme, J. — 2009-05-20

An Imaginative Life: David Malouf interviewed by Lee Spinks

2009-05-20

"An Imaginative Life: An Interview with David Malouf" presents a wide-ranging discussion of a number of Malouf's major works. Commencing with a consideration of Malouf's personal and artistic beginnings, the interview explores his own sense of his position as an Australian (and a regional Australian) writer, the thematic and stylistic development of his craft as a writer of prose, the development of his distinctive novelistic voice, the place of mythology and historical memory in his fiction, his sense of the relationship between landscape and language and the complex constitution of the character of the Australian settler located as it is between a residual fidelity to the Old World and its presence in a new and other place.

The Fate of the Oolichan: Prospects of Eco-Cultural Restoration in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach

Soper-Jones, E. — 2009-05-20

In Monkey Beach Haisla/Heiltsuk-Canadian writer Eden Robinson depicts both the social disintegration and dynamic adaptation that result when the cognitive maps of a traditional culture are compromised by new realities. In the novel, colonization, industrial development, and ecological degradation have irrevocably changed the "old ways" of the Haisla. The oolichan, a smelt-like staple of the traditional Haisla diet, has been all but extirpated in the rivers of the tribe's ancestral territory. Economic and social realities have changed radically as well. These factors result in the growing irrelevance of Haisla traditions, threatening the integrity of their social cognitive maps. Through the topos of "fascinating cannibalism" Robinson frames a canny critique of literary hermeneutics, fabricating an "authentic" account of Haisla subjectivity and creating moments that are fraught with ambiguity and charged with undisclosed cultural significance; she thus urges readers, in the words of Doris Sommer, to "proceed with caution". Ultimately, Robinson's assertion of cultural difference troubles the novel's easy assimilation into the Canadian postcolonial literary canon.

Violent Dis-Placements: Natural and Human Violence in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

Ferguson, J. P. — 2009-05-20

This article uses theories of space and place to explore the connections between natural and human violence in Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006). By synthesizing concepts from the work of Bill Ashcroft, Benedict Anderson, Yi-Fu Tuan, Homi K. Bhabha, Michel de Certeau, and others, I develop a theory of "placeness" that involves subjective attachment to a physical location, a range of emotional and intellectual investments that convert "empty" space to place. In Desai's novel, however, this transformation is reversible through violence. Just as nature undermines edifices, so too do humans use violence in order to degrade place to space in the hope of rebuilding place according to a different agenda.

Exile Encampments: Whiteness in Alexandra Fuller's Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

Rauwerda, A. M. — 2009-05-20

Alexandra Fuller's 2004 travel/homecoming narrative Scribbling the Cat reveals the problem of persistent whiteness in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The narrative raises questions about the place of African whiteness, and displaced Rhodesian whiteness in particular. This paper argues that Fuller's narrative depicts the tenuous hold white Africans have on their homeland in extensive descriptions of houses that are makeshift, incomplete, and temporary. It suggests, in addition, that rootless houses signify an effort to build a future that does not use the foundations of a violent, racist white past. The different effects of Fuller's descriptions of houses (emphasizing white vulnerability, obdurate distinctions between white and black and efforts to transcend the violence of history) reveal a tension in the narrative between what Fuller explicitly reveals about white Africanness and what she exposes by implication.

"An Unremembered Time": Secular Criticism in Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics

Didur, J. — 2009-05-20

In Pankaj Mishra's novel, The Romantics, Samar writes about his struggle to reconcile diverse cultural influences in his private life with a political context increasingly defined by a narrow definition of Hindu identity during the late 1980s and early 1990s in India. While he characterizes India's political rhetoric as dominated by notions of cultural purity and religious orthodoxy, my essay argues that the novel's setting and historical context is rife with symbols of India's inter-cultural and hybrid past that Samar refers to as emerging out of "an unremembered time". I argue that Edward Said's notion of "secular criticism", with its emphasis on exilic consciousness, is a particularly apt way of unpacking the novel's examination of majoritarianism through ironic representations of Hindu nationalism, Indo-Saracenic architecture and the history of the founding of Benares Hindu University. This paper tracks how Samar's fictional memoir is marked by a growing unease with uneven effects of modernity on Indian society in the midst of escalating sectarian violence in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Indian Mysteries and Comic Stunts: The Royal Tour and the Theatre of Empire

Stafford, J., Williams, M. — 2009-05-20

This article considers the records of three royal tours ranging from 1869 to 1920 and finds points where the voices of difference within empire merge, where authors adopt contrary stances for different audiences, or where a single text discloses conflicting positions. In Canadian Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson's reconstruction of an 1869 tour by Prince Arthur contemporary public accounts are revisited and the indigenous actors are presented in culturally specific terms. In the account of the Duke and Duchess of York's 1901 tour of New Zealand, two voices — one settler, one Maori — collaborate and there is an obscurity about who is speaking where. In the private letters of the Prince of Wales' 1920 tour of New Zealand the manicured script of imperial performance is undercut. Such elaborations, elisions and subversions of authorial voice raise questions about the confidence with which we assign ideological positions to the different parties in empire.

"'Dis poem is vex bout apartheid': Representations of South Africa in Three West Indian Poems"

Alvarez, D. — 2009-05-20

This article examines the ways in which three West Indian poems written between 1979 and 1992 — "Soweto" by Kamau Brathwaite, "Bedspread" by Lorna Goodison and "We Are Formed from Volcanoes" by Opal Palmer Adisa — engage the history of South Africa under apartheid. I argue that while Africa as a place with its own historical destiny is rarely encountered in West Indian literature, the texts that I probe constitute a minor yet important exception to this rule. At the same time, however, it is clear that the three poets and others who have written or sung about Africa and South Africa have done so in ways that reveal their own preoccupations, desires and anxieties as West Indians. That is, the representation of "South Africa" as a "real elsewhere" is always already bound up with its representation as an imagined or invented land, one that has been idealized or in some way essentialized.

"Enthralling but at the same time disturbing": Challenging the Readers of Small Island

Lang, A. — 2009-05-20

This article explores the responses of readers who encountered Andrea Levy's novel Small Island through the 2007 project Small Island Read. Through an analysis of the pleasure and discomfort experienced by these readers, it suggests that Small Island was able to keep them in the thrall of its narrative arc, while simultaneously challenging them to consider the stereotypes distorting their perceptions of others and while conveying uncomfortable information to them, such as the disparity between the representation of the "mother country" to colonial subjects and lived reality in wartime England. The responses also furnish evidence of the ways literary features can both facilitate and obstruct a text's transformative potential, and how Levy's text helped readers to overcome destabilizing effects such as chronological shifts and use of dialect. It argues that the reception of Small Island raises important questions about the divide between academic and other kinds of reading within postcolonial studies.

Books Received

2009-05-20

Editorial

Thieme, J. — 2009-02-19

"Hello, Canada! It's fine to have you here": Canadian Nationhood, Women and Popular Fiction during the Second World War

Smith, M. D. — 2009-02-19

This paper explores original material from a collection of Canadian mass-market magazines that were intended for a female audience during the Second World War. Of these magazines, Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal were the most popular, reaching an estimated audience of one and half million readers each month. For the duration of the War, both periodicals devoted themselves to telling readers about war-related topics, causing both the non-fiction and fiction contents of the magazines to become infused with nationalism. Women were addressed as national subjects and asked to dedicate themselves to the War effort in every aspect of their lives; simultaneously, Canada's relationship with Britain during a time of war was both taken for granted and scrutinized in the articles and romance fiction directed at these women. In order to understand these twin phenomena, I begin by providing a brief overview of the articles, advertising and editorial commentary within the magazines, and then move on to an analysis of the short story, "Lady Going West". Published in July 1942, the story is a representative example of the fiction circulated by Chatelaine and the Journal from 1939—45. In essence, it combined the conventions of the romance genre (thought to be the preferred genre for female readers) with underlying anxieties about the War in a way that, ostensibly, soothed those anxieties. The story thus communicates much about how the War was imagined through popular fiction, as it explores both women's role within the nation at war and Canada's relationship with the United Kingdom.

Of Territorial Borders and Test Cricket: Exploring the Boundaries of the Postcolonial State

Scott, B. — 2009-02-19

This article explores two notably different representations of the border that has divided India and Pakistan since Partition in 1947. I begin by discussing the Ambala Tribune 's coverage of the 1955 India-Pakistan Test cricket series. During this series, an estimated 20,000 Indians were given permission to attend the Third Test in Lahore — creating what one newspaper described as "the biggest mass migration across the frontier since Partition". I then examine the role the same border plays in Saadat Hasan Manto's 1953 story, "Toba Tek Singh". Here, rather than facilitating non-coercive international movement, the border becomes a repressive mechanism of the state, a cordon sanitaire designed to prevent the "warm handshakes and cordial embraces" that would eventually take place in 1955. In this article I attempt to account for the differences between these two narratives and for the fluctuating modalities of the border they describe. I also offer some thoughts on what such differences might tell us about Indo-Pakistani relations more generally, and about the nature of the border separating these postcolonial nation-states.

When East Meets East: Framing the Sino-South Asian Diaspora

Rastogi, P. — 2009-02-19

This essay examines the contours of Chinese identity in the Indian subcontinent through three Sino-South Asian texts: "Travels Afar" (2001) by Chinese-Pakistani writer Maria Tham, "In Search of Lin Jia Zhuang" (2001) by Chinese-Sri Lankan writer Milan L. Lin-Rodrigo and The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories (2006) by Chinese-Indian writer Kwai-Yun Li. The shared configurations of the two autobiographical essays and the short story collection — all three are triangulated narratives involving ancestral origin in China, birth and adolescence in South Asia and eventual migration to North America — highlight a forgotten circuit of diasporic movement: one that does not simply follow an East-West pattern of migration, but also inhabits a middle place in the Indian subcontinent. In placing these three works next to each other, I sketch the thematic preoccupations of the twice-migrant Sino-South Asian diaspora, particularly focusing on where we can situate writing and writers that are Chinese in ethnicity, South Asian in upbringing and North American in location.

Amitav Ghosh's Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide

Tomsky, T. — 2009-02-19

Focusing on Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide, this article explores the challenges faced by cosmopolitans seeking to make an ethical intervention in a subaltern space. By dramatizing the encounter between bourgeois characters and the traumatic history of people inhabiting the Sundarbans region of Bengal, Ghosh suggests that an unreconstructed cosmopolitanism is incapable of addressing social injustices; to effect any positive change, the cosmopolitan must undergo a transformation. This paper locates affect as the agent of that critical transformation, a surplus that is transmitted beyond the horizon of personal witnessing and into the larger community of writers and readers.

Illegal Diasporas and African Refugees in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea

Helff, S. — 2009-02-19

Taking its cue from recent studies about African diasporas and Khalid Koser's thought- provoking work on illegal diasporas, this article sets out to investigate representations of African refugees and illegal diasporas in Abdulrazak Gurnah's topical novel By the Sea (2001). By relating Koser's concept of illegal diasporas to Jacques Derrida's understanding of unconditional hospitality this article considers narrative modes through which illegality and the limits of hospitality are negotiated in Gurnah's novel. Within its fictional negotiation a complex and heterogeneous picture emerges which challenges common stereotypical images of "the African refugee" in Britain and Europe by revealing national and societal inclusion and exclusion strategies. This, however, means that Koser's concept of illegal diasporas is central to an understanding of Britishness on the one hand and the fabrication of a European concept [Europagedanke ] on the other.

In the Vicinity of the Land of the Almost: The Stylistics of Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter

Matos, N. — 2009-02-19

This article offers a reading of Kincaid's most stylistically convoluted novel, Mr. Potter, reconnecting its paratactic structures to the numbing emptiness of Roderick Potter's inner world. Commenting on Kincaid's earlier novel Lucy (1990), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identified "paratactic" and "subjunctive" modes as crucial to Kincaid's style, linking the weak connectives of paratactic grammar to the characters' affective withdrawal and alienation. An equal synergy of form and content is marked, I suggest, in the flimsy connectives that "attach" Mr. Potter to his context and reflect his own tragically indifferent attachments. But more remarkably, these same paratactic structures also open Mr. Potter into the subjunctive space of narrative redress — the posited world of rewritten histories; of textually incarnate regrets, conjectures and desires. The parataxis of Mr. Potter thus emerges not as nihilism, but as a means for constructing and sustaining alternate realities, a "land of the almost" to supplement the land of the real.

"Magic that Battles Death": Pauline Melville's Marvellous Realism

Renk, K. W. — 2009-02-19

Situating three stories from Pauline Melville's short story collection The Migration of Ghosts in relation to Wilson Harris's refiguring of Carl Jung's concept of the "alchemical imagination" as well as in relation to notions of magical and marvellous realism, I argue that Melville uses her alchemical imagination to transmute marvellous realism from a mode that represented a "strange", but "commonplace" New World reality to a mode that reconnects to the unifying philosophic underpinnings of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Drawing on its historic roots as a Latin American/Caribbean reaction to conquest, Melville's marvellous realism reconnects with a philosophic era that rejects the fragmentation of thought, disciplines and eras. By re-establishing a connection to an era that promoted the unity of magic, science and all living things, Melville's alchemical imagination restores memory, transmutes consciousness and dispels fragmentation.

"Everyday Abnormality": Crime and In/security in Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys

Lenta, P. — 2009-02-19

This article focuses on representations of crime, the anxiety it generates and the technologies of security and surveillance employed to keep it at bay in Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys: Joburg and What-what (2006). Portrait with Keys is a hybrid work, showing the influence of French documenters of the quotidian such as De Certeau, Perec and Lefèbvre. It is an experiment with genre that combines biography, autobiography, historical writing and the essay to explore the everyday life of Johannesburg, the city in which its author lives and works. In this article, I consider Vladislavic's project and reflect on the way in which his depictions of crime, insecurity and security measures are connected to it. I distinguish his treatment of this topic from other attempts to engage with it. Finally, I identify and comment on Vladislavic's ethical and political concerns.

Sunlight and Salt: The Literary Landscapes of a Divided Family

Shamsie, M. — 2009-02-19

This paper combines memoir and criticism to compare the treatment of Partition, class, colonialism, history and gender in two Partition novels from the same family: Sunlight on a Broken Column by the Indian writer Attia Hosain (1963) and Salt and Saffron (2000) by the Pakistani writer, Kamila Shamsie. Both novels portray a young woman's struggle for selfempowerment alongside their country's assertion of independence. Attia Husain's narrator, Laila, grows up in feudal pre-Partition Lucknow, never agrees with Partition and is heartbroken by the division of her family and the disappearance of her world; Kamila Shamsie's narrator, Aliya, the daughter of urban, Karachi professionals, does not question Pakistan, but, haunted by a bitter quarrel between her Pakistani grandparents and their Indian siblings, she looks for answers in history and their princely past. What family links do these novels reveal? Where do they differ? How has the gap of the two generations influenced both writers and their writing? This essay provides a personal comment on these questions because Attia (1913—98) was my aunt, and Kamila (b. 1973) is my daughter.

Books Received

2009-02-19

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007

Parashkevova, V. — 2008-11-18

Australia

Ikin, V., McKenzie, K. — 2008-11-18

Canada

Chlebek, D. — 2008-11-18

The Caribbean

Harrison, S.-M. — 2008-11-18

East and Central Africa

Musila, G. — 2008-11-18

India

Narayan, S. A. — 2008-11-18

Malaysia and Singapore

Talib, I. S. — 2008-11-18

New Zealand

Hamilton, S. — 2008-11-18

Pakistan

Shamsie, M. — 2008-11-18

South Africa

Warren, C. — 2008-11-18

Sri Lanka

Perera, S.W. — 2008-11-18