Chapter 1

Postcolonial Aspects in Canadian Fiction

A glimpse of the historical evolution of colonialism and decolonization is

necessary before going deep into the details of postcolonial theory. The British

Empire covered a vast area of the earth at the turn of twentieth century which

included large parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada and the Caribbean. But as the

twentieth century ended, the world has witnessed the colonial demise and the

decolonization of millions of people from the colonial masters. The European

colonialism transformed place, reorganized and restructured the environments and

changed the people in nations. It took many different forms and engendered diverse

effects around the world. Colonialism should be studied in its relationship with

‘capitalism’ and ’imperialism’ since it was first and foremost part of the commercial

venture of the western nations that dates back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

It was at this time that the European colonial powers and individual European

travelers like Columbus, Amerigo Vespuchi made ‘voyages of discovery ‘and

pursued the aims and objectives of colonialism to accumulate vast fortunes and

wealth. This naturally led to the exploitation of the natural resources of the colonies

and its disenfranchised people. Colonialism flourished with the Atlantic slave trade

which engendered the forced immigration of millions of Africans of Europe and

America as captive and indentured labour which brought the Asian people to the

Caribbean Islands. This finally resulted in the annihilation of indigenous people in the

American continent, the Caribbean and other areas of migration. The Caribbean, more

than any other region, has suffered in a devastating manner from colonial

exploitation, oppression and marginalization. The Caribbean had a history of five

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hundred and fifty years of displacement and dislocation from the time of Columbus’s

discovery of Hispaniola. So colonialism can be viewed as historical manifestation of

imperialism.

Certainly, there was a profound difference between the colonizers and the

colonized after the process of colonization was completed. The colonizers were

regarded civilized while the colonized were considered as barbaric, if the colonizers

were declared rational, sensible, cultured and learned, then the colonized were

dismissed as irrational, insensible, illogical and ignorant. European colonialism

always wanted to make sure that there was inequality of power that ultimately made

difference between the colonizer and the colonized. The colonizer wanted to generate

a people who would eventually cater to their needs and satisfy their requirements.

They realized that colonialism could not succeed without the exertions of colonized

peoples. They depend on the energies, skills and indigenous knowledge of the

colonized to succeed in their colonial motives. Thomas Macaulay has quoted about

the English education of Indians in 1835. Macaulay is quoted to have argued that:

“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters

between us and the millions whom we govern,-a class of persons, Indian in

blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”.

(Minute on Indian Education 34)

It shows the extent to which colonialism transformed the identities of the

people involved and how colonial situation manufactured colonialists as well

as the colonized. British colonization began to meet with acts of resistance

in the late years not only from indigenous inhabitants of colonized lands but

also from members of the European communities who had settled overseas
 3

and no longer wished to defer power to the imperial mother land. So a process

of decolonization started with the once colonized nations establishing the right

to look after their own affairs. The first period witnessed the declaration of

America’s independence in 1776 which announced that the thirteen American

colonies, then at war with Great Britain, were independent states, and no

longer a part of the British Empire. The second part of the decolonization

spanning the end of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth

century saw the emergence of the ‘dominions’ a term used to describe the

nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Even after the independence of

the once colonized nations by the end of the twentieth century, historical and

cultural consequence in these nations remained stronger. Though the great

powers of Europe stopped furthering their fortunes and ambitions through acts

of colonial settlement, they opened new areas of exploitation and oppression.

Colonialism has taken new forms and new agendas in the new political and

economic global structure. It takes the form of globalization and liberalization,

the militaristic ‘war on terror’, the present transnational economic inequalities,

poverty and disease in Africa and the political unrest in the West Africa.

There was a subtle process of cultural colonization that wrought great damage

to the psyche of the colonized people. Today, the third world nations are in a

mess to tackle with the dual problem of regaining their economic stability as

well as reestablishing their political, social and cultural growth spoiled by the

colonial system. It is very obvious that the imperialists relied on literature for

perpetuating their culture and ideology in the colonies and also for making

their own people back home proud of the phenomenon of imperialism and
 4

subjugation. The energizing myths of English imperialism and the

adventurous spirit of their people to explore, conquer and rule ‘the barbaric’

people were the themes of literature of the period, especially that of the

Victorian period. It reached its culmination with Rudyard Kipling who

glorified imperialism with the strong conviction that ‘civilization was the

Whiteman’s burden’. This has led to the need for the colonized elites and the

Third world intellectuals to rise and articulate their protest against the imperial

power. Thus a colonial nationalist writing was emerged with an objective to

subvert western cultural hegemony. An important antecedent for post

colonialism was the off-spring of Common wealth literature which emerged

from the countries with a colonial history. Common wealth literature

incorporates the works of writers from the European settler communities as

well as writers from countries gaining independence from the British and

writers from the African, Caribbean, and South Asian nations belong to the

category. It produced a fast-growing body of literature written in English by

writers such as George Lamming, Katherine Mansfield, Chinua Achebe etc.

Common wealth literature, in short, was associated only with selected

countries with a history of colonialism.

Post- colonialism often deals with the effects of colonialism on cultures and

societies. As originally used by historians after the Second world war “post-colonial”

had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. The

study of controlling power of representation in colonized societies had begun in late

1970s with texts such as Said’s Orientalism and led to the development of what came

to be called colonialist discourse theory in the work of critics such as Gayathri

 5

Chakravorthy Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Post colonial literary critics re-examine

classical literature with a particular focus on the social “discourse” that shaped it.

Protagonists in post-colonial writings are often found to be struggling with questions

of identity, experiencing the conflict of living between the old, native world and the

invasive forces of hegemony from new, dominant cultures. Postcolonial theory is built

in large part around the concept of otherness. A salient difference between colonialist

literature (literature written by colonizers, in the colonized country, on the model of

the "home" country and often for the home country as an audience) and post-colonial

literature, is that colonialist literature is an attempt to replicate, continue, equal, the

original tradition, to write in accord with British standards; postcolonial literature is

often (but not inevitably) self-consciously a literature of otherness and resistance, and

is written out of the specific local experience. Post colonialism is a way of thinking

and writing about colonialism as a global system to be decolonized. Concepts of

nationality, race and ethnicity and questions of language and power, and the impact of

imperialism on cultural identity and subjectivity constitute vital aspects of post-

colonial condition. A recurring feature of post-colonial writing is the attempt to

identify cultural identity. As oppositional discourse, post-colonial literature seeks to

undermine the European discursive tradition that has fostered and promoted the entire

process of imperialisation. It annihilates the system of conceptualization and

representation that justify and help maintain imperialist power during after the age of

colonialism. In the post-colonial literature, decolonizing impulses attain reinforcement

through the establishment of a different identity which is the result of the authentic

assertion of the indigenous culture and an attempt to resist the totalizing western

cultural hegemony. Before the term “Post-colonial was coined expressions like
 6

“Common Wealth” and “Third World” were used to refer to the literatures of the

erstwhile European colonies. The term ‘third world’ was originally invented on the

model of the Third Estate of the French Revolution. The experience of colonization

and the challenge of the post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new

writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a

specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia,

Africa and Canada and challenges the existing canon and dominant ideas of literature

and culture. “Post-colonial” deals with the cultural and intellectual interactions

between European nations and the countries they colonized in the modern period.

Amilear Cabral comments:

The colonialists usually say that it was they who brought us into

history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history,

our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of

their history. (Return to the Source 34).

The colonized have been part of the processes of subjugation subsequent to the

European advance around the world.

Postcolonial theory is an area of literary and cultural study that seeks a very

strong resistance to the former colonizer. It has come into being as part of the

decentring tendency of post 1960s thought in the west. It also assumes that the writers

who write back to the centre are representing the people of their society authentically.

The most significant effect of postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism is the

undermining of the universalist claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal

humanist critics. There was a preference to judge all literature by a single ‘universal’
 7

standard and thereby, disregard cultural, social, regional and national differences in

views and experiences. The theory doesn’t confine itself to literature only.

Feminism is of crucial interest to post-colonial discourse for two major

reasons. First, both patriarchy and imperialism can be seen to exert analogous forms

of domination over those they render subordinate. Hence the experiences of women in

patriarchy and those of colonized subjects can be paralleled in a number of respects,

and both feminist and post-colonial politics oppose such dominance. Second, there

have been vigorous debates in a number of colonized societies over whether gender or

colonial oppression is the more important political factor in women’s lives. This has

sometimes led to division between Western feminists and political activists from

impoverished and oppressed countries; or, alternatively, the two are inextricably

entwined, in which case the condition of colonial dominance affects, in material ways,

the position of women within their societies. This has led to calls for a greater

consideration of the construction and employment of gender in the practices of

imperialism and colonialism. Feminism, like post-colonialism, has often been

concerned with the ways and extent to which representation and language are crucial

to identity formation and to the construction of subjectivity. For both groups,

language has been a vehicle for subverting patriarchal and imperial power, and both

discourses have invoked essentialist arguments in positing more authentic forms of

language against those imposed on them. Both discourses share a sense of

disarticulation from an inherited language and have thus attempted to recover a

linguistic authenticity via a pre-colonial language or a primal feminine tongue.

However, both feminists and colonized peoples, like other subordinate groups, have

also used appropriation to subvert and adapt dominant languages and signifying
 8

practices. The texts of feminist theory and those of post-colonialism concur on many

aspects of the theory of identity, of difference and of the interpellation of the subject

by a dominant discourse, as well as offering to each other various strategies of

resistance to such controls. Similarities between ‘writing the body’ in feminism and

‘writing place’ in post colonialism; similarities between the strategies of bisexuality

and cultural syncreticity; and similar appeals to nationalism may be detected. In the

1980s, many feminist critics began to argue that Western feminism, which had

assumed that gender overrode cultural differences to create a universal category of the

womanly or the feminine, was operating from hidden, universalist assumptions with a

middle-class, Euro-centric bias. Feminism was therefore charged with failing to

account for or deal adequately with the experiences of Third World women. In this

respect, the issues concerning gender face similar problems to those concerned with

class. Mohanty, for instance, criticizes

the assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures,

are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to

the process of analysis. . . Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of

‘women’ as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality

of groups of women.

( Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism 338)

The overlap between patriarchal, economic and racial oppression has always been

difficult to negotiate, and the differences between the political priorities of First and

Third World women have persisted to the present. Such differences appear to be those

of emphasis and strategy rather than those of principle, since the interconnection of

various forms of social oppression materially affects the lives of all women. More
 9

recently, feminism has been concerned that categories like gender may sometimes be

ignored within the larger formation of the colonial, and that post-colonial theory has

tended to elide gender differences in constructing a single category of the colonized.

These critics argue that colonialism operated very differently for women and for men,

and the ‘double colonization’ that resulted when women were subject both to general

discrimination as colonial subjects and specific discrimination as women needs to be

taken into account in any analysis of colonial oppression . Even post-independence

practices of anti-colonial nationalism are not free from this kind of gender bias, and

constructions of the traditional or pre-colonial are often heavily inflected by

contemporary masculinity bias that falsely represents native women as quietist and

subordinate.

One illuminating account of the connections between race and gender as a

consequence of imperial expansion can be seen in Sander L. Gilman’s ‘Black bodies,

white bodies’ (1985). It shows how the representation of the African in nineteenth-

century European art, medicine and literature, reinforced the construction of the

sexualized female body. The presence of male or female black servants was regularly

included in paintings, plays and operas as a sign of illicit sexual activity.

By the nineteenth century the sexuality of the black, both male and female, becomes

an icon for deviant sexuality in general. Furthermore, the relationship between the

sexuality of the black woman and that of the sexualized white woman enters a new

dimension when contemporary scientific discourse concerning the nature of black

female sexuality is examined. The notorious examples of prurient exoticism, such as

the Hottentot Venus displayed on tour in England, provide material examples of the
 10

ways in which signs of racial otherness became instrumental in the construction of a

(transgressive) female sexuality.

In settler colonies, although women’s bodies were not directly constructed as

part of a transgressive sexuality, their bodies were frequently the site of a power

discourse of a different kind. As critics like Whitlock have argued, they were

perceived reductively not as sexual but as reproductive subjects, as literal ‘wombs of

empire’ whose function was limited to the population of the new colonies with white

settlers. The male desire to colonize women can also be read as America’s

colonization of Canada. The exploitation of women also implies the exploitation of

Canada. By highlighting women’s complicity in the process of her own victimization

and exploitation, Atwood by analogy points to Canada’s similar complicity in the

Americanization of Canada and thereby focalizes what she calls” the great Canadian

victim complex” . Canada is being victimized by America and Americanism. The

narrator in Atwood’s Surfacing identifies herself with the victim heron both as a

woman and as a Canadian. The colonial experience torments the Canadian psyche.

The Canadian literature is conditional by the fact that Canada has been a

colony; and as a colony, it has suffered economic oppression and exploitation which

had certain mental and cultural side-effects which condition its literature. Most of the

Canadian writers of Atwood’s generation found 1970s a decade of confrontation.

Every country and culture, has “a single unifying and informing symbol at its core”

and this symbol, be it expressed as a word, phrase, idiom, image or all of these-

functions like a system of beliefs which holds the country together. For Canada,

Atwood argues, this symbol is survival. When we consider woman from a colonial

perspective, we can affirm that she is doubly oppressed as a colonized in both colonial
 11

and male-dominated world. In Surfacing, Atwood’s protagonist is nameless and thus

devoid of an identity. And she has an experience of sexual colonialism when she was

just a school-going child. Surfacing is a novel of discovery. It was a search motif as

its frame; a nameless first person, the female narrator seeks to unravel a mystery, that

of her father’s disappearance from an island in a lake in Northern Quebec. With three

city friends, one of them her lover, she returns to his childhood home and after

exploring the territory in widening circles, pieces together clues her father had left

behind and finally discovers his drowned body. But the description of the search is

simply narrative bait. What the heroine is really exploring and discovering is nothing

but herself. The novel demonstrates the complex question of identity for an English

speaking Canadian female. Identity, for the protagonist has become problematic

because of her role as a victim of colonial forces. Atwood’s novel is built around a

complex of metaphors, a dead frog, an aborted foetus, lost father, all of them

associated in a young woman’s mind following a climatic descent into water which is

also descent in her subconscious. The associations lead her into madness as she

searches for her identity as a woman, daughter and mate. Being a post colonial novel,

Surfacing attempts to replace language, one of the most powerful means of the power

of the Empire, in a ‘discourse fully adapted to the colonized place’, through rejection

and subversion, for an independent identity of a Canadian woman. Atwood’s use of

language in the novel subverts the colonial inheritance and colonial power. The

Theories of colonial discourse reveal how language perpetuates power and constitute

our world-view by constructing reality. Language is not a tool for passive reflection of

reality; instead, it constitutes a person’s understanding of world. The novel subverts

the notion of patriarchy and colonialism through language.

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The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood is a post colonial writer who dealt with

themes of identity-seeking through her Southern Ontario Gothic style of writing. In all

her works, she focuses on Canadian national identity. Atwood’s concern was to free

the Canadian psyche from English and American imperialism. Atwood’s novel

introduces the exotica of the Canadian wilderness, its flora and fauna and the mores of

living in the bush. Surfacing is a postcolonial novel, though not in the traditional

sense. Most postcolonial novels are written by authors from countries that have

gained bloody independence from empires such as Britain, France, Spain, or America.

These novels usually mark the effects of upheaval and bloody revolution,

documenting a search for an independent national identity coupled with a reaction to

the political scarring left by imperialism. Since Canadian independence from Britain

occurred so gradually, Surfacing does not fall into the traditional postcolonial

categorization. Surfacing does, however, explore an emerging Canadian national

identity. Atwood includes a passage about the Canadian national flag, which had only

been adopted in 1965. More important, Surfacing exists as a postcolonial novel in its

consideration of Americans and the way that America exerts its cultural influence

over Canada. To know the dominant force and predict its behavior are the goals of the

colonized individual; these mechanisms allow for the survival of the dominated entity.

And while mimicry may allow for access to some kinds of power, the imitator will

never achieve the status of the original, the real Romans, as Atwood says in her

“Letter to America.” But to establish a third space of signification—as Atwood does

for Canadian literature in Survival and as her narrator hopes to do at the end of

Surfacing—allows for independence and reparation by allowing for a refusal of the

colonized space and thus the refusal of victimhood.

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In post-colonial/colonial discourse, this term is often used to distinguish

between two types of European colonies: settler (or settler-invader) colonies and

colonies of occupation. Nigeria and India are examples of colonies of occupation,

where indigenous people remained in the majority but were administered by a foreign

power. Examples of settler colonies where, over time, the invading Europeans or their

descendants annihilated, displaced and/or marginalized the indigenes to become a

majority non-indigenous population, include Argentina, Australia, Canada and the

United States. Like all such designations, however, ‘settler colonies’ and ‘colonies of

occupation’ provide the abstract poles of a continuum rather than precise descriptive

categories or paradigms. The countries of the Caribbean, for example, are not usually

considered ‘settler colonies’, even though the indigenous Caribs and Arawaks were

virtually annihilated one hundred years after Columbus’ entry into the area. Here the

European ‘settlers’ comprised a relatively small but powerful group of white planters,

while the majority of ‘settlers’ were Africans kidnapped as slaves and forcibly

‘settled’ in the region. Kenya, Ireland, South Africa, Mozambique and Algeria also

provide examples of colonies whose patterns of settlement and cultural and racial

legacies fall somewhere between the abstract paradigms of settler colony and colony

of occupation.

Many critics and writers have commented on the ambivalent position of

settlers in settler colonies, especially where they constitute a racially distinct majority

with regard to the indigenous inhabitants or where they have imposed a dominance

through force of arms and political institutions. Settlers are displaced from their own

point of origin and may have difficulties in establishing their identity in the new

place. They are frequently constructed within a discourse of difference and inferiority
 14

by the colonizing power (‘colonials/colonial’) and so suffer discrimination as colonial

subjects themselves.

At the same time, they act as the agents of that power, and their own identity

depends in part, at least initially, on retaining their sense of difference from the

‘native’ population. In this sense they are simultaneously both colonized and

colonizer. Settlers may seek to appropriate icons of the ‘native’ to their own self-

representation, and this can, itself, be a form of oppression where such icons have

sacred or social significance alienated by their new usages. On the positive side, as

settlers themselves become indigenes in the literal sense, that is, born within the new

space, they begin to forge a distinctive and unique culture that is neither that of the

metropolitan culture from which they stem, nor that of the ‘native’ cultures they have

displaced in their early colonizing phase. The new culture may, and indeed often does,

involve borrowings from both of these prior social and cultural forms. Post-colonial

theorists have responded to these new societies and cultures in a wide variety of ways,

ranging from those who stress the complicit nature of these cultures and suggest that

this is somehow absolute and inescapable to those who see them as defining examples

of the rejection of a ‘pure’ model of culture, a model that is at the heart of the colonial

process itself and its sustaining ideology

Like gender and race, the concept of class intersects in important ways with

the cultural implications of colonial domination. It is clear that economic control was

of significant, if not primary importance in imperialism, and that economic control

involved a reconstruction of the economic and social resources of colonized societies.

Consequently, class was an important factor in colonialism, firstly in constructing the

attitudes of the colonizers towards different groups and categories of the colonized,
 15

and increasingly amongst the colonized peoples themselves as they began to employ

colonial cultural discourse to describe the changing nature of their own societies.

However, it is less clear to what degree categories like class were able to be employed

as descriptors of colonized societies without undergoing profound modifications to

accommodate their cultural differences from Europe. The first contention to be

answered is the notion that the kind of inequity and injustice, exclusion and

oppression found in post-colonial societies is simply explicable in terms of class. The

Eurocentric and universalist bias of such a contention is obvious. Nevertheless, it is

clear that in many ways the idea of a binarism between a proletarian and an owning

class was a model for the centre’s perception and treatment of the margin, and a

model for the way in which imperial authority exercised its power within the colonies.

This conjunction is hardly surprising given the fact that ideas of class and race were

deeply intertwined in nineteenth-century European thought, with figures like

Gobineau, sometimes called ‘the father of modern racism’, motivated in his

production of a theory of race and degeneration by his own aristocratic fear of the

degeneracy produced by the emerging power of the new urban bourgeoisie . The

legitimization of sociopolitical (class group) interests by appeals to racial origins was

a strong feature of nineteenth-century French thought, as myths of origin, Germanic

and Gallic, were employed to legitimate different positions in the class struggles of

the time. A similar association can be found in much nineteenth-century English

thought, with appeals by literary texts to ideas of Norman and Saxon blood as features

of a similar if less violent debate between the aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie.

The concentration of manufacturing in England and the use of colonies as sources of

raw materials meant that colonial societies exercised no control over the ‘means of
 16

production’. At the same time, a modern class analysis involves more than simply

identifying the owners of the means of production and the wage-slaves of classic

Marxism. It involves identifying the specific and complex array of class interests and

affiliations that are established in the wake of capital investment in the colonies. It

also involves an analysis of the ways in which the colonized themselves replicate the

groupings of the capitalist system, with the emergence of distinctive forms of ‘native’

capitalists and workers whose social role will often be the result of an intersection of

their place in the new social and economic structures with their own, older social and

economic formations.

The question of class in colonial societies is further complicated by the kinds

of cultural particularities that intersect with general economic categories. For Marx, as

for Engels, the universal grouping of all pre capitalist societies as either feudal or

‘Asiatic’ meant in effect that any detailed analysis of socio-political groups in non-

European societies was effectively precluded. For example, any analysis of ideas of

‘class’ in societies such as India, in which traditional caste divisions, replicating

economic and social disadvantages from generation to generation, may be overlaid by

modern, post-industrial forces, needs to take into account the ways in which models

of class-divided groups, such as workers or capitalists, often cross and conflict with

the older caste boundaries. Where these identities and differences coincide, they may

reinforce the kinds of privileges or oppressions that a classic Marxist class analysis

would emphasize. Even those settler societies, such as Australia, that would seem to

reproduce the existing class structure of Britain more exactly than any other kind of

colony, clearly do not do so in any unproblematic way. Thus, they may reproduce

many aspects of the imperial centre and may even perceive themselves to be
 17

filiatively related to it, they often construct opposing myths of their democratic or

classless nature, or operate along lines of internal division based on perceived racial

or religious differences that have completely different orientations from that of the

officially acknowledged Mother Country. Such myths of egalitarianism or democracy

clearly do not reflect economic truths since inequalities of wealth prevail in all these

colonial situations, but they may well reflect self-perceptions that are important

aspects of the construction of a new national mythology and identity.

Since recent post-colonial theory has tended to concentrate on the issues of

race, ethnicity, and, to a lesser extent, gender in the colonialist definitions and

opposing self-definitions of colonized peoples, the importance of class has been

downplayed. Few if any attempts have been made to see how the formation of

categories such as race, gender and class, both historically and in modern practice,

intersect and coexist. The need to find ways of articulating the importance of

economic structures to the formation of these categories of analysis is increasingly

clear. An analysis of class has a crucial, if complex, role to play in emphasizing the

link between representation and material practice in post-colonial discourse. This

revision is necessary because in the final analysis the means of representation and the

means of production act together reflexively to create the complex conditions of the

various colonial and post-colonial societies

Post colonial reading is a way of reading and re-reading texts of both

metropolitan and colonial cultures to draw deliberate attention to the profound and

inescapable effects of colonization on literary production; anthropological accounts;

historical records; administrative and scientific writing. It is a form of deconstructive

reading most usually applied to works emanating from the colonizers (but may be
 18

applied to works by the colonized) which demonstrates the extent to which the text

contradicts its underlying assumptions (civilization, justice, aesthetics, sensibility,

race) and reveals its (often unwitting) colonialist ideologies and processes. Examples

of post-colonial readings of particular texts include Eric Williams’ interrogation of the

formerly authoritative texts of Caribbean history in British Historians and the West

Indies (1966); contemporary re-readings of the works of canonical European

anthropologists such as Malinowski; numerous post-colonial re-readings (and

rewritings) of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in French, English and Spanish; re-readings

of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park etc.

The notion of a ‘post-colonial reading’ need not be restricted to interrogating a

body of works (for example, documents dealing with the European history of an area)

nor to rereading and rewriting individual texts .A post-colonial rereading of, for

instance, English literary history would (hypothetically) involve far greater stress on

colonial relations between England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and the

historical and contemporary effects of these relations on literary production and

representation. It would also involve reconsidering English literature literary

production as less a series of domestically inspired changes and progressions than one

emanating from and through the imperial process and/or colonial contacts. Thus, for

instance, modernism can be argued to be the product of Europe’s contact with the so-

called ‘savage’ cultures of Africa and the South Pacific; while post- structuralist

theories such as that of Derrida might be reread as less the products of the Parisian

intellectual climate than inspired or significantly inflected by colonial experience.

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In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood used the two kinds of theories such as, Colonialism

and Post-colonialism, because the novel depicts on searching of their identity and a

woman who returns to her hometown in Canada to find her missing father. She is

accompanied by her lover and another married couple, the unnamed protagonist meets

her past in her childhood house, recalling events and feelings, while trying to find

clues for her father's mysterious disappearance. Little by little, the past overtakes her

and drives her into the realm of wildness and madness. Most of the novels of

Margaret Atwood are replete with the theme of victimization and survival, the part of

cultural life of Canada and actively engage with problems that are not just national

concerns but are also the social, political and traditional issues that will determine the

survival of their country.

By the time Surfacing was published, she had already published several books

of poetry. Atwood’s writing has been published in more than thirty languages.

Surfacing takes place in Quebec, and the unique identity of Quebec’s population

comes into play in the novel. Quebec is the only Canadian province populated by

residents of French (rather than British) descent. Atwood wrote Surfacing at a time

when the cultural differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada were

manifesting themselves in terms of rising Quebec nationalism. The 1960s saw the

Quiet Revolution in Quebec: a series of economic and educational reforms coupled

with a secularization of society. The Quiet Revolution afforded Quebec greater

political and economic autonomy, giving Quebec’s French citizens a sense of

nationalism and a desire to separate from Canada. Atwood marks this political change

in Surfacing. Surfacing does, explore an emerging Canadian national identity. More

important, Surfacing exists as a postcolonial novel in its consideration of Americans

 20

and the way that America exerts its cultural influence over Canada. Atwood claims

that America’s subtle cultural infiltration of Canada is actually a form of colonialism.

Surfacing is Atwood’s most remarkable novelistic achievement in which the

technology- nature conflict is cast in political terms. It serves to illuminate Atwood’s

strong nationalist as well as feminist ideologies. As in the novel, the protagonist goes

through an archetypal retreat to the irrational world, the wilderness where she

undergoes transformation through contact with native and Quebec cultures before

reintegrating into society.

According to Barbara Hill Rigney, Surfacing, more than any other of

Margaret Atwood’s novels is also ‘border country’, halfway between poem

and novel, theological treatise and political manifesto, myth and realism.
 21

Chapter 2

Postcolonial Impulses in Surfacing

“It’s too late; I no longer have a name. I tried for all those years to be civilized

but I’m not and I’m through pretending” (Surfacing 168).

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is set in the Canadian wilderness of Northern Quebec,

and the unique identity of Quebec population comes into play in the novel. Quebec is

the only Canadian province populated by residents of French descent. Atwood wrote

Surfacing at a time when the cultural differences between Quebec and the rest of

Canada were manifesting themselves in terms of rising Quebec nationalism. The

1960s saw the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a series of economic and educational

reforms coupled with a secularization of society. The Quiet Revolution afforded

Quebec greater political and economic autonomy, giving Quebec’s French citizens a

sense of nationalism and a desire to separate from Canada. Atwood marks this

political change in Surfacing. Most postcolonial novels usually mark the effects of

upheaval and bloody revolution, documenting a search for an independent national

identity coupled with a reaction to the political scarring left by imperialism since

Canadian independence from Britain occurred so gradually. Surfacing does, explore

an emerging national identity. The images and the use of language in the novel

portray a Canadian identity, the essence of which could be found in simple drive to

survive. Atwood perceives a resemblance between woman’s powerlessness and

passivity in relation to the male aggression and domination, and Canada’s similar

posture in relation to the more powerful and expressionist U.S. culture. She implicitly

problematizes Canada’s quest for identity in woman protagonist’s similar quest and

thus inscribes her nationalist concern within her feminist ideology. The threat of
 22

Americanism to Canada’s national identity is emphasized in Surfacing. Identity, for

the nameless protagonist who is part of Canadian society has become a hurdle

because of her being a victim of colonial forces. She has been colonized by men in

patriarchal society and by culture. During the protagonist’s search for her father in

Canadian wilderness, she is shocked at the mutilation, the damage caused to the lake

and the island by the Americans. She feels that the American tourists enjoy destroying

nature. She misses the ideal Canadian past. This does not seem to be the northern

Quebec she once knew. They “kill nature for their sport. They are anti-life, anti-

nature”. The heroine, who right from her childhood had believed in non-violence,

protests against the monstrous indifference to the sufferings of other living beings.

Surfacing does not just deal with the victimization of women. It also deals with victim

men, victim children, victim unborn babies, victim birds, animals and victim nature at

large. Surfacing exists as a postcolonial novel in its consideration of Americans and

the way that America exerts its cultural influence over Canada.

The exploited, mutilated and diseased protagonist, on her return from Toronto

to northern Quebec discovers that her helplessness is indeed, helplessness of the entire

Quebec landscape. She finds that Canada is being victimized by Americans and

Americanism. Atwood explores the ways in which an individual (self) gets implicated

in power relationships of the society and establishes its position in forms of

domination or victimization. The protagonist revolts against the American way of life

because she feels the pattern of society has constrained her and her ‘self’ has been

marred by this ideology. She decides to fight against the modes and customs of the

society with which she found herself in conflict. The protagonist exemplifies

Atwood’s stand that there should be a position in between those extremes: positions
 23

of victim and victimizers. It is unfortunate and yet a hard fact that the Canadian

government depends on U.S.A for support and collaborates with the Americans-

“bloody fascist pig yanks”, even though it means the exploitation of its people. The

heroine notices that even nature is a victim of civilization and is being contaminated

and spoiled. Atwood’s protagonist is pained to notice the damage inflicted upon the

Canadian landscape by business and modern technology. She can see the signs of

Americanism as soon as she takes the road to Quebec. The novel begins by drawing

our attention to the fact that nature is a victim of the disease which is “spreading up

from the south” (7), “the white birches are dying “while the elms are already “dead”.

The protagonist notices “the thick power lines running into the forest” (9). The

innocent hills have been destroyed. The spread of industries required power

generation and so, the level of the lake was raised which meant the destruction of

tress- a fact, which shatters the protagonist. She can see “the needle trees and the

cutting dynamited in pink and grey granite and the flimsy tourist cabins” (9). The lake

is flooded so, “people drown every year, boats loaded top-heavy or drunken fishermen

running at high speeds into dead hands, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly

decayed, floating under the surface” (34).

The island has, in fact, undergone such shocking changes that the protagonists

returning home after nine years cannot find her way. “Nothing is the same” (13). Her

“home ground” has become a “foreign territory”. She cannot locate the way and

exclaims “But this is not where I lived” (28). The island is now no longer the land she

once knew. The island does not provide any security and she is annoyed with her

father for having failed to protect the island against this devastation. Just as she could

not accept the fact of her own mutilation by a man, she finds it difficult to reconcile
 24

with the mutilation of nature. “I’m starting to shake …I’ll start crying, that would be

horrible, none of them would know what to do and neither would I” (13).

Everything appears different and disturbing to the protagonist who loves the beauties

of nature. Instead of the lush-green trees what she now finds are “the gigantic stumps,

level and saw-cut remnants of the trees”. She is distressed to think that “the trees will

never be allowed to grow that tall again, they’re killed as soon as they are valuable,

big trees are scarce as whales” (52). The protagonist, for whom nature is animate,

feels shocked to see that “newly broken stubs, wood and pith like, splintered bones,

ferns trampled” (135). She guesses “they’d been here, their tractor-tread footsteps

dinting the mud-path in front of me like excavation craters” (135). This is not the end

of nature’s victimization by Americans and as the protagonist moves on, she finds that

the ‘power company’ is still making surveys for further exploitation and hence she

can see the felled trees and numbered posts in the bay. Obviously the relationship

between nature and Americans is a relationship of exploitation and consequently the

entire landscape is vandalized. Further in, the trees they

“didn’t cut before the flood are marooned broken and gray-white, tipped on

their sides, their giant contorted roots bleached and skinless; on the sodden

trunks are colonies of plants, feeding on disintegration, laurel, sundew the

insect-eater, its toenail sized leaves sticky with red-hairs. Out of the leaf nests

the flower rise, pure white, flesh of gnats and midge, petal now

metamorphosis” (194).

The beauty of nature is being destroyed due to Americans morbid obsession

with power. The Americans feel concerned with anything else, except what helps
 25

them succeed in their goal. These ‘yank pigs’ are feared to soon ‘swing a deal’ with

the Canadian government, which will be “a bunch of puppets as usual... to give them

the water cheap” because “this country is almost all water if you look at map” (111).

The protagonist is aware of the Canadian government’s vulnerability before America.

American imperialism seems to have ruined the cultural and religious values of the

protagonist’s land. It pains her but what pains her more than anything else is the fact

that quite a few local people have taken fancy to Americanism and, as a result, the

past culture, values and traditions are fading away. In fact, the very spirit of her place

has been destroyed by the colonization of America. She feels nostalgic for the love,

warmth and happiness the island ‘far from the madding crowd’ used to offer, and

misses the friendship among the individuals and families where even language did not

create a barrier. The imperialism has also broken the “bond between parents and

children”. Joe never mentions his parents. Ann says hers were “nothing but people”

and David calls his “the pigs”. They have accompanied the protagonist to the island to

search for her missing father, and her reasons for being in the island embarrasses

them, they don’t understand it. “They all disowned their parents long ago, the way

you all supposed to” (18).

It becomes clear that American men do not even encourage a strong mother-child

bond of love. The protagonist is agonized to find that fascinated by the American

dream of power and material success, the children have started from the island to the

city though once it was believed that “future is in the North” (9). In fact “that was a

political slogan once” (9). But now beguiled by Americanism, people of Quebec have

started looking up to the south for their future; North contains “nothing… but the past

and not much of that either” (9). She is disappointed to see that the cow has been
 26

killed by “the milk bottle” and the horses by the motor cars. The shed where cows and

the horses of Paul used to lie “is now a garage” (20). She laments that “no one keeps

hens or cows or pigs anymore, its’ all imported from fertile districts. The bread is in

wax paper wrapper tranche” (28-29) and sugar comes in cubes wrapped with

“advertisement paper”. She feels betrayed that Madame makes tea “on a new electric

stove” and thinks “she should have remained loyal to her wood range”. What the

narrator now faces is the rootless mechanized, dehumanized culture. She calls the

Americans the “rotten capitalist bastards” who have almost destroyed the Canadian

identity- not only its physical, geographical identity but the cultural identity too. It is

not only the roads, the food and the buildings which are different; the Canadians now

speak in English and try to ape the American dress, American styles, food habits and

culture.

American culture is closely linked up with machines. The barometer has been

replaced by ‘Dial the weather machine’. The “dollhouse-seized church” on the hillside

is seen neglected with peeling-paint and a broken window. There seems to be hardly

any place for God and religion in this materialist culture. The protagonist is distressed

to notice that the Canadians have assimilated American values to such an extent that

they had started shown contempt for their own culture; which they feel is inferior.

When the protagonist is back home after several years, she visits a store for some

food, but she discovers that “they’re making fun of me” (28) and she realizes, “I’ve

made a mistake; I should have pretended to be an American” (28).

Her disappointment with the Canadians who copes with American values gets further

depended when she links it up with the reply she got from a man. When she asked

him “if he knew this part of the country, my part”, the man shook his head and said,
 27

“Des barbares, they are not civilized” (28). Surfacing voices Atwood’s sensitiveness

to the impact of Canada’s border relationship with the United States, of Canadian

consciousness- the threat of American imperialism to Canada’s national identity.

We must notice that the gas station which has stuffed moose “to attract

customers” (14) is owned by a Canadian. But the moose, like most of the second-hand

Americans, have been dressed as Americans and the flag they are given to wave is “an

American flag” (14). The protagonist draws the reader’s attention to the fact that it is

the business culture, which is responsible for killing the moose. She says: “Those

weren’t here before” (14).

She who was bred on the belief that “killing was wrong… only enemies and food

could be killed”, (150) feels shocked to realize that the country she has reached is

“founded on the bodies of dead animals. Dead fish, dead seals and historically dead

beavers…” (44). To her, Americans are people who kill just for fun, for recreation, for

establishing their power. There is no rationale behind the havoc wrought by them. The

protagonist comes to see a dead heron “hanging upside down by a thin blue nylon

rope tied round its feet and looped over a tree branch, its wings fallen open” (137).

This wanton senseless killing shocks her. A heron is “beautiful from a distance”, but it

is “valueless” in the sense that “it couldn’t be tamed or cooked or trained to talk”

(133). The heron has been killed because “food, slave or corpse” is the rule in these

“killers” culture. Anything which cannot be used for food of for service has no right

to exist. It must be destroyed, “the only relation they could have to a thing was to

destroy it” (135). The heron was killed and strung up “like a lynch victim” simply “to

prove they could do it, they had the power to kill”, (135) just as her ex-lover had

mutilated her as “his proof that he was still young… a certificate framed on the wall”
 28

(170).The protagonist, in fact, sees her own predicament in the death of the heron.

“Anything we could do to animals we could do to each other. We practiced on them

first” (139).

It is very difficult for her to reconcile with the fact that “the innocents get slaughtered

because they exist, I thought, there is nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them,

no conscience or piety” (147). “The animals die that we may live...And we eat them,

out of cars or otherwise: we are eaters of death” (160). The protagonist compares the

power-obsessed culture with the culture of “those countries where an animal is the

soul of ancestor or the child of God” (147) and thinks that at least they would feel

guilty. She feels that the concept of guilt is alien to the culture of these “killers”. The

protagonist is agonized by the inhumanity and greed of the Americans- “That is the

way they are, they will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything

they don’t have themselves” (215).

She feels that they wish to exploit and victimize Canadians as well as their country-

geographically and psychologically. They wish “to show us we were in occupied

territory”(142) and the narrator feels that Canada’s need for survival manuals can

never come to an end because the tension under which the Canadians live can never

come to an end, although this tension, the narrator feels, can hardly ever find a place

in history. Canada’s being in the position of a victim disturbs the narrator so much

that she returns to this issue over and over again. A searcher’s party which arrives on

the island makes her fear that they have come to shoot her or bludgeon in her skull

and hang her up by the feet from a tree. So obsessed are the Americans with their lust

for power that they do not refrain from attacking even the place “where the Gods

lived” (170). They don’t think it is dangerous for them to go there without knowing
 29

about the power, they might hurt themselves, a false move, metal hooks lowered into

the sacred waters that could touch it off like electricity or a grenade”(170). The

protagonist appears to be soothed by imagining a divine power, which could

overwhelm and destroy even the Americans. She says:

“I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I realized it

wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and

women both. They’d had their chance but they had turned against the Gods,

and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted to be a machine that could

make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without

disturbing anything else, that way there would be rescued” (176).

It may appear that the narrator is confused as to whom she hates: men or Americans.

Actually she hates both because they are exploiters. Men exploit women and the

Americans exploit human beings: both men and women, animals and nature. Thus the

domain of victims is much larger in the case of Americans than in the case of men.

Hence she hates the Americans much more than she hates men. She is so sick of them

and their destructive tendencies. She wished death and extinction for the Americans

as “they spread themselves like a virus, they get into brain and take over the cells

change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference” (148).

Furthermore, David is in the narrator’s view, “an impostor, a pastiche” with “second

hand American… spreading over him in patches like manage or lichen” (174). The

static photograph is replaced by the film, “Random Samples” which fixes, kills and

fragments. It too turns the living into the artificial. Here the victim is not an image but

a real person, Anna, who is a character in the novel.

 30

Surfacing furthers Atwood’s supposition, that Canada is a victim, that Canada

is a colony, and that it is possible to imagine Canada as, therefore, a postcolonial

survivor, a country, like Atwood’s nameless narrator seeking to articulate and map the

unspeakable and luminal space of the border. Late in the novel, the protagonist, in

essence, becomes that space. She says, “I no longer have a name,” and “why talk

when you are word,” and she also states: “I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing

in which the trees and animals move and grow. I am a place”. (236).

Through David, Atwood shows some concepts of cultural colonialism, particularly

how the American intrusion have shaped the attitude of Canadians. The protagonist’s

reason for being her home town embraces David because he is a mechanized man of

metropolitan modernity, who hardly bothers about his roots and has disowned his

parents long ago the way he supposed to be in the society in which he lives. Atwood

even shows through David and Anna’s relationship sexual power politics in the

society in its most destructive form. Margaret Atwood becomes a social critic in her

use of anti-Americanism in the novel. The narrator finds that nature is being

contaminated and spoiled by business and modern technology. America comes to

represent anyone who is alienated from nature. There is the contrast in her food habits

in the beginning and the end of the novel. In the beginning she takes tinned food, fish

and all kinds of foods but in the end she relies on uncooked food. Anna is a victim, as

woman and of civilization. The victim image is sustained till the end of the narrative

when the narrator comes to feel that she is strong enough. The narrator returns to

society, there is a tremendous transformation in her personality for the better. She

returns to struggle and survive with dignity. The protagonist becomes a ‘metaphor’

for all those who are exploited and abused because of their powerlessness. Survival is
 31

key word for Margaret Atwood. The Canadian postcolonial theme of guilt surfaces in

the novel. Being in search of her roots, the protagonist identifies first with the

colonizers as she is under the modern Darwinian influence of ‘the survival of the

fittest’.

Atwood’s Surfacing can be read as a work that posits Canadian identity as

postcolonial by situating that identity with an entangled matrix of colonial dominance

and cultural subjugation by the United States. But the novel also complicates

postcolonial identity by situating its protagonist in “border country”, the luminal

space both between and outside categorization and language. It is from within this

space that boundaries, binary classifications, and language break down and out of

which a narrative of continually shifting colonial power dynamics emerges. In order

for the narrator to break through to a liminal border country, she must experience the

breakdown of all of the oppositions in which she initially believes. Over the course of

several days that she spends on the island, the narrator confronts her previous and

unacknowledged abortion and the immediate loss of her father, but she is also forced

to recognize and then renounce the self-proclaimed victimization she feels to be

caused, primarily, by an American ideology inherently linked to the technology and

development that intrudes upon Canadian wilderness, and, secondarily, by her

previous lover. She is forced to “surface” into a different national and gendered

consciousness, one that requires that she view victimization as a shifting process

established in the contact zones between cultures and people. Thus Atwood’s novel

highlights the interrogation of identity from a postcolonial perspective. Her nameless

character is colonized by patriarchy, cultural imperialism, and geographical

colonization. This leads to her displacement and disconnectedness from her own life.
 32

The novel also shows two types of colonization: physical with reference to Canada

and women and psychological. The colonized people are oppressed, silenced,

marginalized and victimized through language, culture, and history.

In Survival: A Thematic Guide of Canadian Literature, Atwood says, “Stick a

pin in Canadian literature at random and nine times out of ten you’ll hit a victim”

(39). Northrop Fyre defines survival as “living through a series of crises, each one

unexpected and different from the other” (220). Atwood also presents four “Basic

Victim Positions,” which include denying victimization, acquiescing in victimization,

repudiating victimization, and becoming a “creative non-victim” (Survival 19). The

Canadians are innocent, vulnerable, pacifist victims: women as well as Canada are

treated like children. They are obsessed by landscape and puzzled by its diversity.

Canada is a country made up of different ethnicities: the Natives, the English and the

French. They are both culturally and racially different. Canada has also suffered a lot

because of atrocities of miscellaneous colonization. These occupations have not only

their influences on military and materialistic fields, but also they have depended their

roots into cultural identity, economy and sociology. Feminism and Post-colonialism

are interrelated; both struggle against injustice and oppression: they center on

revolting against perils of societal, colonial subjugation. In the novel the heroine

could achieve survival by revolting against both physical and spiritual powers

represented in western civilization by giving up language, the language which

colonialism has imposed upon her/ Canada in order to wipe out her identity. This is

also a kind of alienation or inferiority. She has risen from death to life:

“I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it

nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more
 33

disastrous than the truth would have been. The word games, the winning and

losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have

to be invented, withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death.

(249).

The importance of Atwood’s novel is that it tentatively explores a number of

questions that suggest that the post-colonized would also be a valid indicator to

Canadian identity. In the novel, quest for the lost father becomes also the story of a

descent into madness as the wilderness and isolation conspire to allow a previously

unacknowledged and un-mourned trauma to break through the surface. A scene

towards the end of the novel where the protagonist goes under the water to observe

some submerged India rock paintings and then surfaces again become the symbolic

acting-out of her journey into the depths of madness. With this madness comes a

superior or more lucid understanding of her past, a surfacing out of it, which means

that madness cannot be regarded as wholly negative. The novel is itself narrated by

this unnamed and possibly unbalanced protagonist. This strategy of using an

‘unreliable narrator’ who contradicts herself at various turns exemplifies the

provisional, inconclusive and tentative nature of the text. Atwood concocts a madly

potent allegory of the rift between a mechanized, modern world of autonomy and the

old animalism that lurks just beneath. For the narrator, living in the city is as if

bearing numerous kinds of burdens. Everything in the city for her is a difficult task.

Getting alone with so many people makes her uneasy. She cannot fit herself into the

surrounding at all. Every time she recalls the nights she spent in the city, she suffers

the tension of emotion.

 34

In the night I had wanted rescue, if my body could be made to sense,

respond, move strongly enough, some of the red light-bulb neurons,

incandescent mole-cules might seep into my head through the closed

throat, neck membrane. Pleasure and pain are side by side they said

but most of the brain is neutral; nerveless, like fat. I rehearsed

emotions, naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate,

react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the

others and memorized it. (112)

She is unaccustomed to the pressure of modern life. She cannot get used to the life in

the civilization. Therefore, she confronts so many difficulties during the period she

spends in the city. It’s such a hard time in her life.

The inside of my arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an

addict’s. They slipped the needle into the vein and I was falling

down, it was like diving, sinking from one layer of darkness to a

deeper, deepest; when I rose up through the unaesthetic, pale green

and then daylight, I would remember nothing. (112)

The narrator’s unaccommodated situation in civilization is displayed in her

narration as well. Shoes for her “are a barrier between touch and the earth” (164).

David and Anna’s car is nothing but “a lumbering monster.” The “Americans” are

intruders. As Hilde Steals notices in “Surfacing: Retracing the Paths of (Self-)

Mutilation,” the narrator disdains everything symbolizing civilization and never wants

to change herself.

These foreign signs signal the deterioration of the “original”

landscape, caused by the intervention of other human beings, an

 35

interference that she associates with violation. The environment that

underwent a process as a result of changed context “betrays” her [the

narrator’s] expectations. (46)

Therefore, when the narrator comes back to her birthplace, goes fishing with her

friends, and eats artificial food on the natural land, she even has a sense of

complicity. A sense of crime rises gradually in her mind because she is aware of her

taking part in doing something bad to nature.

We knelt down and began to pull at the weeds; they resisted, holding

on or taking clumps of soil out with them or breaking their stems,

leaving their roots in the earth to regenerate; I dug for the feet in the

warm dirt, my hands green with weed blood. Gradually the

vegetables emerged, pallid and stunted most of them, all but

strangled. We raked the weeds into piles between the rows, where

they wilted, dying slowly; later they would be burned, like witches, to

keep them from reappearing. There were a few mosquitoes and the

deer flies with their iridescent rainbow eyes and stings like heated

needles. (77)

After perceiving her own complicity, she then turns to despise what the “Americans”

do to the natural island and even compares them with dogs. They should preserve the

beauty of the environment rather than destroy it.

After we landed we found that someone had built a fireplace already,

on the shore ledge of bare granite; trash was strewn around it, orange

peelings and tin cans and a rancid bulge of greasy paper, the tracks

of humans. It was like dogs pissing on a fence, as if the endlessness,

 36

anonymous water and unclaimed land, compelled them to leave their

signature, stake their territory, and garbage was the only thing they

had to do it with. (111)

The “Americans” unscrupulously do things bad to nature in order to demonstrate

their power. They repeatedly ravage and rob the landscape with their own will and

disregard the reciprocal relationship between humans and the land. Human beings

exist in the natural world. They should give thanks and preserve it with all efforts.

Without the support of natural system, it’s impossible for humans to sustain

themselves well.

Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly,

anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn’t

kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that

way we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the tall killing

the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them out of cans or

otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting

inside us, granting us life. Canned spam, canned Jesus, even the

plants must be Christ. But we refuse to worship. (141)

It’s ironic that human beings worship Jesus Christ for his sacrificing life for them but

contempt animals’ for giving life to provide them food. Birds and fish in the novel

are victims that convey the embarrassing condition. The way of human’s exploitation

of nature is connected to the oppression of women through the narrator since she is a

woman who suffers painfully from the domination of men and civilization and has a

special bond to nature. Both nature and women contribute to human society but are

repressed under men’s commanding power.

 37

Women have no names in the rural town. Everyone is called “Madame.” They are

only objects that belong to men in the male-dominated society. They exist to satisfy

the physical, domestic and sexual needs of their spouse or male companion. Names

for them are not important at all because individuals are not significant. The

narrator’s abortion of her child is then portrayed as brutal as a butcher’s slaughter of

livestock in the novel although the narrator deliberately describes it as if she goes

through a delivery:

After the first I didn’t never want to have another child, it was too

much to tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t

want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not

yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you

might as well be a dead pig, your leg are up in a metal frame, they

bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or

snickering practicing on your body, they take the body out with a

fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up

with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won’t let

them do that to me again. (79)

The narrator is cut into two after the cruel and forced abortion. “I [am] emptied,

amputated;” the narrator says,” I [stink] of salt and antiseptic, they [have] planted

death in me like a seed” (145). This compelled event hurts her physically and

mentally since how she feels is never the concern.

Metaphors have long ceased to be regarded as purely linguistic expressions,

and today metaphors are also a conceptual phenomenon, bridging language and

thought. The specific form of metaphors enables Atwood to establish a duality to an

 38

extent that would hardly have been possible using just ordinary non-figurative

expressions. In Surfacing, there is, on the one hand, the nameless narrator’s quest for

her lost father in the wilderness of Canada; on the other hand, there is the emotional

world of the narrator. These emotions usually have strong negative associations, and

in this way Atwood creates an omnipresent feeling of uneasiness and danger.

Frequently humans and also their emotions are compared to or forced to share

qualities with insects, reptiles, and amphibians. As Atwood s metaphors are extremely

unconventional and innovative, we readily visualize her expressions, and

consequently they have a significant impact on our understanding of the novel. The

reader is constantly invited to imagine shared properties between man and various

animals because Atwood wants us to see how man victimizes himself and his

environment. In order to survive, mankind must come to terms with its own

victimization and save itself and the earth from exploitation. This study takes into

account several postcolonial notions such as mimicry, ambivalence, disavowal,

subversion and hybridity, while siting the female body as an equivalent of the

deceptive, trickster-like postcolonial “Other”. We cannot deny the feminist overtones

in the novel, which often present us with heroine’s process of individuation, or in

other words, with her quest for selfhood. The novel logically alludes to patriarchal

domination and social oppression. Atwood’s novel tries to establish a parallel between

feminism and post colonialism. Indeed, both patriarchy and colonialism can be

regarded as the exertion of power, of domination imposed on subjects who are then

regarded as subordinate. Patriarchal society imposes on women the same submissive

role as that inflicted by colonizers on colonized subjects. Atwood’s novel, Surfacing,

 39

introduces a more marginalized woman, confronted with the past and present

prejudices of the region where she grew up.

Critics have also regarded Surfacing as a re-writing of Joseph Conrad’s Heart

of Darkness, which makes it doubly interesting within the context of postcolonial

studies. Indeed, we can consider the marginality of Atwood’s surfacer as an ironical

echo of the colonizer’s situation of loneliness, which eventually drives him mad. Both

novels take place at a level which lies beyond reality: indeed, Conrad’s narration

sounds removed from reality by the use of an unknown narrator who retells

Marlowe’s story, while Atwood’s story immediately strikes the reader as unreal

through its numerous gaps and inconsistencies, linked to the narrator’s construction of

a self-deceptive identity, a construction. She practices self-deception when she recalls

her fishing trips with her brother. Indeed, she pretends that the fish which she caught

were willing, thereby diminishing her feelings of guilt. Self-deception in Surfacing

often occurs when the heroine tries to mimic other people’s behavior while refusing

any responsibility for it: for instance, she accepts to kill the fish, but refuses to

acknowledge the evil which this action entails. Therefore, deception here functions as

a crucial element in the illustration of one of the novel’s main theme, namely the

existence of evil, which the heroine definitely cannot easily accept. The protagonist

also shows difficulties to face the fact of death, when her parents are concerned,

especially in relation to her father’s disappearance: in chapter eleven, she obviously

refuses to admit that her father might have died, claiming that he is merely gone on a

trip and will eventually come back. The heroine comments on her state of “otherness”

as follows: “Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in

 40

others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform” (72). Hence the

protagonist needs to use mimicry in order to escape such torments.

Concealment is another defensive strategy, which the narrator chooses to

practice while facing her father’s disappearance. Indeed, she mentions the necessity

for her to hide her fear and maintain a semblance of order, especially as she thinks her

father has gone crazy, and will inevitably sense her fear. Hiding and lying to oneself

and others has thus become a survival technique. The narrator therefore uses the same

tactics when she realizes that she has to organize a search trip for her father, about

whom she says: “I could disguise it as a fishing trip”(105), once again resorting to her

well-known deceptive tricks. When she later tries to discuss her relationship with Joe,

she once again pretends to tell the truth, while thinking: “The voice wasn’t mine; it

came from someone dressed as me, imitating me” (107).

This quote clearly draws an attention to the mimicry process which the narrator

undergoes. Significantly, she immediately mentions her fear of feeling dead, frozen,

alluding to the “missing part” of her. She further adds that she cannot remember any

photographs being taken at her wedding, once again, a weird element. Chapter twelve

plays a pivotal part in the development of the novel’s theme of alienation and

fragmentation, because it closes on the heroine’s recognition of her hybrid state. The

heroine’s regression to animal life highlights her struggle to be accepted as hybrid.

The novel features several characters who display difficulties to adjust to society.

From the start, the protagonist is said to be alienated and gives the reader an

impression that she has not found her place in society yet and longs for a certain kind

of recognition. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Anna practices palmistry

and hints at the narrator’s alienation: indeed, when reading the narrator’s hand, Anna
 41

explains: “You had a good childhood, but then there’s this funny break”(8), which

constitutes a first allusion to the heroine’s hybrid state. Further, the film made by the

heroine’s fellow travelers functions as an effective metaphor for their fragmented

identities: indeed, it consists of a series of bits and pieces, put together at random, and

failing to achieve significance, thus comparable to the characters’ chaotic life. As the

narrator puts it at the very beginning of the book: “How can you tell what to put in if

you don’t already know what it is about?”(10), a remark that shows her total

incomprehension of the project. Further, it also applies to her own identity. Later, she

comes closer to her moment of epiphany, to her acknowledgement of the existence of

evil, to her understanding of animal cruelty even in herself. The narrator repeatedly

stresses her feelings of numbness, her lack of sensitivity, which can be explained by

her obvious reaction to the more instinctive aspect of her personality. She clearly

expresses her fear of dying for displaying emotions which are not really hers:

I rehearsed emotions, naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate,

react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and

memorized it. But the only thing there was the fear that I wasn’t alive: a

negative, the difference between the shadow of a pin and what it’s like when

you stick it in your arm, in school caged in the desk I used to do that, with

pen-nibs and compass points too, instruments of knowledge, English and

Geometry, they’ve discovered rats prefer any sensation to none. The inside of

my arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an addict’s. They slipped the

needle into the vein and I was falling down, it was like diving, sinking from

one layer of darkness to a deeper, deepest; when I rose up through the

aesthetic, pale green and then daylight, I could remember nothing”(111).

 42

The heroine’s state of numbness, together with her need to mimic emotions instead of

really living them, comes to the fore. Further, she inflicts pain on herself with the help

of what she calls “instruments of knowledge”, thereby associating knowledge to guilt,

a feeling she is incapable of experiencing. Moreover, Atwood’s dexterity shows in the

image of the needle, associating a childhood episode with the heroine’s deeper secret,

her abortion. At this stage, the association of compass needles with a totally different,

surgical atmosphere intimates that there is more to the narrator’s numbness than the

pain of mere childhood alienation. Indeed, the last lines of the quote definitely refer to

a deeper, more tragic kind of trauma, which, as the narrator confesses, has caused a

total loss of memory – or an irresistible need to deceive. The narrator also constantly

emphasizes her own emotional emptiness, her inability to love and share feelings, a

state which stands at the core of her desire to engage on her quest for self knowledge.

Talking of David and herself, she observes: “we are the ones who don’t know how to

love, there is something essential missing in us, and we were born that way, Madame

at the store with one hand, atrophy of the heart”(137). The heroine compares her state

to a handicap, because it prevents her from living a normal life. Yet, she also

mentions that she was born with it.

After her descent into the lake, the narrator acquires a different vision of

herself, which forces her to acknowledge her hybridity. She then engages on an

inward journey, which takes the form of a regression to animal behavior, in the hope

of gaining knowledge of how to behave in the patriarchal world. This phase of

regression involves a series of rituals: feeding the dead, not being allowed in certain

places, washing her hands, dropping her wedding ring into the fire, burning her

father’s book, slashing a knife through her parents’ clothes, eating natural food, red
 43

one if possible. She believes that those rules will enable her to establish contact with

her dead parents, who, through their own trickster-like hybrid nature, might function

as guides towards a more spiritual way of life. The whole scene naturally involves a

last dive into the lake, as a ritual of purification which enables the protagonist to

achieve vision. The heroine’s understanding of her dead parents’ message contains

clear hints at an acceptance of hybridity. It works as a plea for open-mindedness:

“Now I understand the rule. They can’t be anywhere that’s marked out,

enclosed: even if I opened the doors and fences they could not pass in, to

houses and cages, they can move only in the spaces between them, they are

against borders. To talk with them I must approach the condition they

themselves have entered; in spite of my hunger I must resist the fence, I’m too

close now to turn back” (180).

This allusion to the border echoes the heroine’s perpetual feeling of “otherness.”

Moreover, the protagonist eventually accepts her difference – as this is probably the

substance of her parents’ message to her. This acceptance of her “otherness,”

described as a difficult, painful process, involves the heroine’s literal starvation. It

symbolizes her struggle to achieve self knowledge. The feeling of communion with

nature which she then experiences makes her call out “I am a tree”, “I am a

place”(236). Evidently, she has accepted her animal component, as a first step

towards her integration into society.

Finally, the heroine’s most vivid realization of her hybridity occurs when she decides

to return to normal life. Watching her reflection in the mirror, she thinks. In it there’s

a creature neither animal nor human, furless, only a dirty blanket, shoulders huddled

over into a crouch, eyes staring blur as eyes from the deep sockets; the lips move by
 44

themselves. This was the stereotype, straws of hair, talking nonsense or not talking at

all. To have someone to speak to and words that can be understood their definition of

sanity.

The heroine is thus faced with her own in-betweeness, whereby she gains an

awareness of the dangers of her regressive attitude. She understands that her quest for

hybridity, far from being limited to the discovery of her animal side, also includes the

acceptance of social conventions in order to evade insanity. This constitutes a crucial

moment in the heroine’s psychological development, since it initiates her return to

society – be it successful or not.

In the famous episode of the dive into the lake, Margaret Atwood develops a

powerful metaphor of postcolonial acknowledgement of identity: the heroine decides

to discover her spiritual in-betweenness under the guise of a search for her lost father.

Atwood shows us how the fragmented, self-victimized individual, so ill at ease within

patriarchal culture penetrates a totally different realm thanks to the acceptance of her

own “otherness.” The narrator achieves a magic realist fusion with the wilderness.

She then embraces nature’s modes of communication when regressing to an animal

stage and confronting her parents’ ghosts. This exploration of an unknown territory is

another characteristic of postcolonial writing. Hybridity itself has proved a useful

concept in order to analyze the protagonist’s response to the wilderness. In many

instances, the heroine’s feeling of “otherness” and inadequacy is amplified and

distorted by her immersion in wilderness.

At the end of the novel, the nameless narrator returns from the border spaces-

the constantly shifting spaces where language and identify break down- that define

her five day period of self-imposed isolation. But her temporary occupation of
 45

“border country” gives her the ability to be more nuanced and discerning and less

absolute in the designations-the words-that she ascribes to aspects of both her national

and personal identity. And as the narrator hopes to do at the end of Surfacing allows

for independence and reparation by allowing for a refusal of the colonized space and

thus the refusal of victimhood.

 46

Chapter 3

Conclusion

Atwood’s Surfacing is an exhibition of the inner conflicts of a Canadian

woman who falls as a prey to the power politics of gender in a patriarchal society and

to the impact of neo-colonialism of her land. The nameless protagonist suffers from

humiliation and feels the crude display of power by male over the female analogous to

the power wielded over the land by the colonizers. She moves to her home place

where she has grown up to look back to her roots and the past for she realizes roots

alone can validate and legitimate her true identity. The major features of post-colonial

literatures projects the concepts of place and displacement. “It is here that the special

post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or

recovery of an effective identifying relationship between the self and place”. The

heroine therefore undertakes a journey to her native with her friends under the pretext

of searching her lost father. Her present identity as a victim, a colonized, powerless

subject makes her contemplate over her past and the intuition guides her to take the

help of the past to understand the present status which in turn would be indispensable

in shaping her future. Being sensitized to the issues of exploitation, domination,

interference and seduction she now possesses extra power to sense and see the ruins

wrought on her native land by the colonizer. When brooding on the binaries

male/female, colonizer/colonized she feels a strong bond between her and her land.

As the history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities on women,

the history of colonialism violates the sanctity and freshness of the wilderness of her

Canada. The lands are reshaped and reconstructed according to the needs of the

imperialistic colonizer and the country’s resources are dissipated.

 47

The U.S invasion steals the natural beauty of the locations by infiltering into

the fresh rivers, lakes, deep jungles and vegetated lands. She condemns the fresh catch

and tourist’s movements of the Americans. The construction of the tourist cabins and

entertainments make her gaze not in wonder but out of fear and disgust. The trees are

axed, birds are killed and the resources of the land are depredated as though they own

them while the owners shrink in shame and shiver in fear. The dead heron hanged by

a nylon rope speaks of violence and the acceleration of unwanted technology. Burial

is a ritual that denotes the last honour showered upon the dead. Since the dead bird is

not buried but hanged, it is as though the dead is being dishonoured. It is a symbol of

disgrace inflicted on the nature by the looters. The power of language also prints its

mark on the mind of the protagonist. She feels empowerment comes to a person

though verbal communication. Communication is an expression of power and

language is the forceful tool. The status of women as a subaltern as pointed by

Gayathri Chakravorthy Spivak is noteworthy here. Gayathri Spivak focusing on

female subaltern feels, “If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no

history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow”.

The protagonist recalls the dry relationship that existed between neighbors, her

mother and Mr. Paul because of the language problem. Language becomes a barrier

for their good friendship. A conscious inability planted in the minds of the natives is

also considered to be damage to the self esteem and renders a complex that result in

easy submission. Though attained independence from the imperialistic governance,

the country and the people still experience the influence of the ex- colonial power.

The instinct to survive instigates her to self question herself. Though at the surface
 48

level the anger is directed towards the neo-colonizers, the USA and the Britain, the

real anger is pointed towards the Canadians who allowed them to be repressed.

Like the wilderness and abundance of Canada, the protagonist with her

prudent decision made herself fertile and life within her will lead her to a fruitful

future. The loss and the search of her father gets entangled by the search of her own

self which bear fruit by an act of drowning and surfacing. Surfacing in many ways is a

brilliantly accomplished novel, where the protagonist drowns as an innocent victim

but emerges as a wise, confident and an experienced individual.

The tension between Toronto and the narrator’s childhood home, the green

world of wilderness and the gray world of the city, the urban and the rural animate the

novel. The society and the natural world cannot coexist. The characters rely on

modern conveniences, see themselves as superior to nature and fail to take the lessons

that nature offers. The urban South, US, invaded and endangered the natural world of

trees, animals and lakes and threatened the Canadian culture. The neglected North,

Canada is now full of mosquitoes, weeds and tourists who hunt leave their garbage

behind. The narrator longs for the past and she quests for identity. The protagonist

realizes a desperate need to regain and reclaim identity. She expresses her anxiety

about the uses of large scale industrial technology which leads to alienation, de-

humanization and domination. Her stern warning is that the spectacular speed of

technological development will leave a far more terrifying impact on people, land and

its resources. Surfacing consistently uses ideas associated with aboriginality to make

its critique of white culture. The language that would establish a difference is absents

from the Canadian landscape- both French and English are imperial languages. The
 49

novel hints at some of the things (Indian archeology, colonial forms) which do point

to both a colonial past and a pre-colonial past.

Atwood packs Surfacing with images of Americans invading and ruining

Canada. The Americans install missile silos, pepper the village with tourist cabins,

leave trash everywhere, and kill for sport. David even goes so far as to theorize an

American invasion of Canada for Canadian fresh water. Atwood depicts American

expansion as a result of psychological and cultural infiltration. The narrator calls

Americans a brain disease, linking American identity to behaviors rather than

nationality. To the narrator, an American is anyone who commits senseless violence,

loves technology, or over-consumes. David claims he hates Americans, yet he loves

baseball and imitates Woody Woodpecker. Atwood depicts American expansion as

destructive and a corruptive psychological influence. The narrator mentions power

several times before going mad and actively seeking “the power”. The narrator

decides not to be a victim. The narrator’s mention of powerlessness echoes her earlier

search for “the power” during her madness. The narrator had searched for ‘the power”

in her dead parents, Indian gods, and in nature. Here, her resolution not to feel

powerless marks the moment when she finally seeks refuge from her social isolation

by internal means. Canadian identity is characterized by the symbol of survival. This

symbol is expressed in the omnipresent use of “victim positions” in Canadian

literature. Atwood considers Canadian literature as the expression of Canadian

identity. According to this literature, Canadian identity has been defined by a fear of

nature, by settler history and by unquestioned adherence to the community.

The other characters in the novel are Mr. Percival, the narrator’s employer,

who is a publisher of children’s books. He is a Canadian by nationality but is

 50

interested in publishing only that which can sell in the English and American market.

The protagonist ironically calls him ‘a cautious man’, one who avoids any book

illustrations that he finds disturbing. He asks narrator to create illustrations, which do

not fit her perceptions of a child’s taste. The narrator called Quebec Folk Tales as

lifeless and commercial. Bill Malmstrom is a member of the Detroit branch of the

Wild life Protection Association of America who is an executive type who tries to

look like an authentic ‘woodsy’ type. He makes an offer to buy the cabin so that his

group can use it as a retreat. He appears to be a typical ‘American’ and the narrator

distrusts him. Evan is an owner of the Blue Moon cabins. He is an old “bulky Laconic

American” who works as a guide. The narrator hires him to take them to and fro the

cabin. Claude is son of the owner of the village motel and bar. He is a thin “motteled”

young man with an Elvis Presley haircut. In addition to helping his father run the bar,

he works as a fishing guide. The problem of establishing a personal and social identity

is a recurrent theme in postcolonial literature. In Surfacing Margaret Atwood explores

this problem in a manner which parallels that of third world writers in striking ways.

In Canada, colonial exploitation is seen as a kind of exploitation of both nature

and women. Colonial power structures have gone deep into the collective

unconsciousness of Canada and have become a metaphor for nature exploitation. As a

result of her search for identity, the narrator achieves her enlightenment. She rejects

the odious elements of civilization, its value, its clothing and its canned food. She

thinks, everything from history must be eliminated. Americans kill the nature just for

fun, for recreation and establishing their power. They senselessly kill the heron. She

feels that Americans wish to exploit and victimize Canadians and their country both

geographically and psychologically. The narrator thinks that to be an American is

 51

unable to understand that we must treat the universe with care because nature is

sacred. The protagonist seems prepared to return to the city with new courage and is

prepared for challenges of life. She emerges as a brave woman who is capable of

establishing her identity.

Thus the final response to Surfacing is emotional. In the novel nameless

narrator has first tried to live on the surface, cut off from herself, her past, her place

and others. She realizes the inadequacy of the amnesiac condition and gradually

descends “back to the past, inside the skull, it is the same place” (219). Only to find

that this immersion, while cleansing and illuminating, is not the final answer either;

one cannot insulate oneself in a hard shell of logic, nor can one become entirely

illogical, non human other.

 52

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