Dissertation MA Comparative Literature

Phrae Chittiphalangsri

Introduction: Hybridity in Orientalism

The globalization of the imperial capitalist powers, of a single integrated economic and colonial system, the imposition of a unitary time on the world, was achieved at the price of the dislocation of its peoples and cultures. This latter characteristic became visible to Europeans in two ways: in the disruption of domestic culture, and in the increasing anxiety about racial difference and the racial amalgamation that was apparent as an effect of colonialism and enforced 1 migration. Robert Young

In the Postcolonial world, hybridity begins its life with the question of boundary.
From the whole period of the twentieth century to the turn of the new millennium notoriously flagged by the 9/11 attackwe do not only live with the threat of economic and political instability, but also with the fear of transgressed frontier, invaded borderline, the encroachment of the world into the home and vice versa. It is the presence of the other in us and us in the otherwe and they are commingled, interwoven into an indeterminable many-as-one. It is the self-projection of Kipling in his imperialistic Kim, who, amidst the Oriental setting, could not help but carried on the burden of a White man. It also lies in the fragmentation of Saleem Sinais narrative in Midnights Children that is allegorical to the partition of India after the British colonisation. This intercrossing of the larger public realm and the domestic arena, distance and proximity, East and West, undermines the longstanding Hegelian dichotomous paradigm, betoken its inadequate capacity, and leads to the quest for other theoretical models. Binarism may be credited for its capacity to reveal the structure of difference and its unequal power relation. However, given that opposition defines difference through the lack of one thing in another, it is clear that binarism does not go far enough in formulating other possibilities that exist beyond the principle of absence and presence, lack and need, and hence ends up homogenising itself in its singular mode of application. Saids Orientalism is perhaps the most classic example of this type of binary approach. This groundbreaking book undoubtedly proves a great success and has usually been taken to embody the manifesto of the other which established a foundation for Post-colonial studies, as well as other similar theoretical writings such as Morrisons Playing in the Dark (1992)2 which substitutes Saids the Orient with Black slavery as the centre of American Africanist discourse, as the other whom the White kept at the most debase level in order to confirm the identity of their new White nation as the land of freedom, hope and dream, comparable to Europe. It is to Saids credit that by combining Jakobsonian scheme of difference to discourse analysis and Gramscian hegemony, the
1

Robert Young, Hybridity and Diaspora, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 4. 2 See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1992.

Dissertation MA Comparative Literature

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model of dialectical difference reveals the Wests perverse desire to power, or, to be more precise, its self-confirmation of the supreme invincible power. Promising as it seems, Orientalism nevertheless becomes a site of debates; since by defining the power relations between the East and the West according to the static, Lacanian roles of lack and fulfillment, Orientalism simply reduces the power relation between the West and the Orient into an essentialist economy where both parties assume their fixed roles. These totalising, lack-and-need aspects of Orientalism, as Young points out, lack the historical specificity, thus result in the fixated representation of the two worlds.3 This attack also corresponds to the anthropologist Michael Richardsons comment on Saids interpretation of Orientalism as manifestly ideal and naive because of the absence of anthropological images.4 It is at this point that this essay takes its departure; if Saids method of discursive differentiation is not sufficient in determining the actual relation of the West and the Orient as well as the proper representation of that power relation if not binarism, I would then argue for the model of hybridity as a method that is able to enact the heterogeneous, multi-dimensional and reciprocal aspects of cultural relativism that can claim to truly exist between the East and the Westthe colonial and the hegemonic culturesboth at the theoretical and representational levels. I will not go so far as to claim that hybridity can achieve the actual, politically and historically correct account of the Orient and its relationship with the West, and hence limit my argument within these two levels. The concept of hybridity has three significant forms in the reconfiguration of Orientalism; it undercuts the well-fenced boundary and the presumed essentialism, emphasise the notion of process rather than primordial totalisation, and ultimately yokes together the unnatural, impossible elements to form an anomalous union. Hybridity is a channel through which the one-way power relations between the West and the Orient become reconceived. Homi Bhabha argues that Said assumed too readily that an unequivocal intention on the part of the West was always realised through its discursive production,5 and elaborates the point which was not fully developed by Said, that Orientalism may work at two conflicting levels; manifest Orientalism which operates in a conscious, scientific mode of knowledge, and latent Orientalism which suggests the unconscious, fantasmatic desire of the West.6 Furthermore, Bhabha emphasises the psychoanalytic reading of Saids Oriental stereotype7 in terms of fetishism. The Wests fantasmatic desire, as Bhabha points out, is an unconscious force that subverts the structure of difference for it tends to simultaneously reactivate the
3

Robert Young, Colonialism and the Desiring Machine, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 160. 4 Michael Richardson, Enough Said, Orientalism: a Reader, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2000, p. 209. 5 Young, Colonialism and the Desiring Machine p. 161. 6 Young, Colonialism and the Desiring Machine p. 161. 7 In Orientalism, Said argues that typical encapsulations of Orientalism, namely the journey, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontationall constitute the means for the West to control and make use of the Orient. See the quoted part from Orientalism in Bhabhas The Other Question, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 73.

Dissertation MA Comparative Literature

Phrae Chittiphalangsri

original fantasythe anxiety of castration and sexual differenceand normalise the lack and difference with the substitution of fetish objectthe mothers penis8. In this way, the fetish or the stereotype becomes a hybrid scene where the Wests desire provokes both pleasure and anxiety at the same time; its domination of the subjugated culture is achieved at the price of the joy of fulfillment (e.g. to prove the mastery of the White race) as well as the threat of division (e.g. the miscegenation of the White and the native). Another attack on the homogeneous power relation of Orientalism lies in the lack of reciprocity between subject and object, which disables the object to challenge or resist the subjects domination. Franoise Lionnet links the absence of reciprocity with the anthropological terms acculturation and assimilation which are used to describe the experience of immigrants when becoming absorbed into the new culture in the first world. Lionnet points out that, while the theories of acculturation and assimilation acquire a place in history, they merely reinforce the relation of subjugation between the colonised culture and the hegemonic system, and hence participate in the erasure of the ex-coloniseds past identity and cultural heritage. She also calls for the third way other than becoming the us or being the other, that is, to embrace the non-hierarchised, reciprocal differencethe mtissage of different voices that confirms the fact that we are already contaminated by each other.9 Hybridity also sheds light on the notion of process which has long been covered under the shadow of primordial difference. The problem of binarism is that it takes for granted the a priori fixation of self/other duality, the product of dead hand of history that tells the beads of sequential time like a rosary, seeking to establish serial causal connection10. It is ironic for us to imagine ourselves dwelling in the well-bounded space when in reality we are not; we actually are always working our way towards that enclosed space which must remains distanced in order to keep its solid form. The enigmatic verb to be encompasses the economy of collective consciousness that manifests in a somewhat glossed way terms such as nationalism; to be an English man does not mean picking up a ready-made quality but involves historical references such as race (whether one is a descendant of Anglo-Saxon settlers), and also means the acquisition of English quality through state apparatuses e.g. family, school, church, and certain English institutions such as football clubs, public houses etc. Therefore, to be English is not just to readily possess the English quality, but it means the process which combines references to the English past as well as learning how to be English. In this way, English is an abstract concept in which, in order to be it, one must undergo a process of becoming it. Bhabha describes this notion of process by using the image of the stairwell, an interstitial space that acts as a passage between fixed identifications, upper and lower, Black and White, of which the borders are points where something begins its presencing:

8 9

See Homi Bhabha, The Other Question p. 74-75. Franoise Lionnet, Introduction: Logiques Mtisses: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representation, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity, Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1995, p. 15. 10 Homi Bhabha, Introduction: The Location of Culture, p. 4.

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Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banksThe bridge gathers as a passage that crosses. (my 11 italics)

Likewise, Lionnet finds mtissage as an instrument that is able to define the chaotic nature of women in postcolonial context, and understand the processes that produce the personal and make it historically and politically unique[that is] the different forms of mtissage that exist in different geographical contexts.12 In this way, process provides an important scene of configuration whereby mtissage can examine the complex identities which are not an end in themselves but multiply organized across discourses and practices.13 Another intriguing aspect regarding hybridity in the Postcolonial context lies in its ambivalent coupling of incongruous elements such as in the issues of miscegenation among Europeans and Orientals, and third-world immigrants in the first world. Robert Young provides a brilliant analysis on the scandalous union between the colonised and coloniser by placing Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus as a hybrid paradigm that gives other insights to Orientalism in which Saids self/other discursive paradigm seems to allow no alternatives because his case is not merely persuasive, but conclusive14. By basing their argument on desire as a primal force, Deleuze and Guattari reject Lacans definition of desire as an unfillable lack that emerges between need and demand, the concept that automatically falls into the dialectical category of difference. Young also points out that by defining Oedipal desire as a collective fantasy15, Deleuze and Guattari seem to break down the traditional concept of epistemology, which assumes the connection between materiality and individual consciousness, and therefore contradict Foucaults emphasis on the productive nature of power, which is also apparent in Saids account of Orientalism, by focusing instead on the repressive hypothesis. The collective repressed desire, when combined with capitalist drive, produces a territorial writing machine that translates everything into the same universal value through its deterritorialisation process. This desiring machine also reterritorialises the decoded values by encoding them into new equivalence forms in other cultures. This territorialising process, when put in the context of colonialism, is what brings the deterritorialised forms of desire that belongs to European imperialistic culture and channel them into the reterritorialised confines of the colonised culture, and thus brings the two distanced continents together in a grotesque union.
Martin Heidegger, quoted in Bhabha, Introduction: The Location of Culture, p. 5. Franoise Lionnet, Introduction: Logiques Mtisses: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representation, p. 4. 13 Teresa de Lauretis, quoted in Franoise Lionnet, Introduction: Logiques Mtisses: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representation, p. 5. 14 Quotation from New York Times. See Robert Young, Colonialism and the Desiring Machine, 1995, p. 166. 15 Deleuze and Guattari build their hypothesis on the assumption that sexuality is the libidinal unconscious of political economy and therefore the social field is immediately invested by desireit is the historically determined product of desire. See Young, Colonialism and the Desiring Machine, p. 166 for further information.
12 11

Dissertation MA Comparative Literature

Phrae Chittiphalangsri

These three aspects of hybridity will be discussed through a comparative study of Jhumpa Lahiris Interpreter of Maladies and Kim Lefvres Mtisse Blanche. These two literary texts, both telling the stories of the Orient, share a hybrid narrative position and legitimacy which centres on the issues of diasporas and miscegenation. Interpreter of Maladies tells the experience of Indian immigrants in American from the perspective of an Indian woman, born to her Bengali parents and raised up in Rhode Island. From the narrative stance, she is an Oriental woman who is armed with an eye of a western Orientalist as well as inheriting a sympathetic viewpoint with her compatriots, and therefore her narrative position is oscillating between the two worlds as well as sets up the question of how far her ambivalent position justifies the representation of power between the East and the West. Mtisse Blanche, written as an autobiography, is a representation of Kim Lefvres life as a mixed-blood child of a French officer and an Annamite woman during the post-World War II period. Her experience as a mixed-race being raised up in Vietnam, living most of her life in France grants her a legitimate position in telling the story of the colonised to their ex-coloniser. Chapter one, This Race Which is Not One: People, Diasporas and Miscegenation, focuses on the in-between people: those who live in exile as in Interpreter of Maladies, and who have to deal with their mixed-race identity as in Mtisse Blanche. The central idea is to figure out how the issue of race is presented in terms of hybridity when set in the context of diasporas, where Oriental people are displaced and influenced by the new environment they live in, and in terms of miscegenation when placed in the problematic milieu such as Vietnam, a nation engaged in anti-colonialist revolution in the 40s-60s. Chapter two Unhomeliness and the Politics of Territorialisation, explores how the imposition of imperialistic capitalism in the colony has affected the colonised people through the spatial representation in the two literary texts, especially the issue of the translation of land under the scheme of Oedipus/colonialism, and the hybrid spatial union of East and West, particularly in terms of unhomeliness. Finally, Chapter three, Dangerous Liaison: Gender and Ambivalent Desire in Orientalism, investigates the relationship between colonisation and gender with regard to miscegenation and diasporas, and focuses especially on how the desire for the other is viewed as dangerous as well as appealing.

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Phrae Chittiphalangsri

Chapter One: This Race Which Is Not One: People, Diasporas and Miscegenation

The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly 16 colored clothing and caps with translucent visors. Ainsi moi, par exemple, jtais connue de Dieu qui connaissait tous les details de ma vie. Mon mtissage, ctait lui qui lavait voulu, pour des raisons que je ntais pas capable de 17 comprendre.

The title of this chapter owes much to Irigarays creation of the feminist concept
of this sex which is not one, but it does not merely claim to replace tout-a-fait this paradigm of multiplicity; rather, I will argue for the multiplicity within multiplicity that reveals the varying patterns of power relations manifested by people of different races and cultures. The people that I will discuss here are the people who are already plural with either their diaspora experience or their miscegenation, and whose identity is further complicated by the ambivalent power structure that cannot manifest straightforwardly due to their hybrid background. I will use Bhabhas concept of stereotype to analyse the ironic stereotypical representation in Lahiris Interpreter of Maladies and mimicry to explore the cultural politics in the discourse of miscegenation in Mtisse Blanche. Stereotype is usually taken as a negative image employed by the West in order to justify its right in dominating the inferior culture. Scholars such as Said and Fanon take colonial stereotype as one of the major factors that perpetuates the oppression of Asian and African people. However, stereotype should not be taken as a falsifying agent nor an end in itself; rather, as Bhabha points out, stereotype is a form of simplified representation because it involves the play within difference under the fixated label that problematises the social and psychic relations between the colonised and coloniser.18 Therefore stereotype is hardly an agent that simply functions as a static, straightforward representation in the colonial discourse as Said might assume. According to Bhabha, with the help of Lacans schema of the Imaginary, the stereotypical racial discourse can be explained as a four-term strategymetaphoric/narcissistic and metonymic/aggressive positions that function simultaneously.19 Furthermore, in order for the stereotype to be effective, the discursive surveillance over the objectthe scopic drive of the colonial powermust depend on the active consent of the object which links the subject to the
16 17

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 2000, p. 43. Kim Lefvre, Mtisse Blanche, Gmenos, dition de lAube, 2001, p. 298. 18 See Homi Bhabha, The Other Question, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 2003. p. 75-84. 19 See Bhabha, The Other Question, for more details.

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Phrae Chittiphalangsri

real, or mythical correlate in Bhabhas sense, and hence creates a scopic space of subjectobject relation. Stereotype comes to relate with the Imaginary stage when the subject attempts to form it identity by narcissistically making the other become a part of itselfa metaphoric function of fetishism that tends to substitute ones self with the other. This fetishistic desire for the other is also simultaneously threatened by the aggressive gazing back of the other that performs the metonymic/aggressive task of pointing out the lack of the subject. This ambivalent process, as Bhabha concludes, is [l]ike the mirror phase the fullness of the stereotypeits image as identityis always threatened by lack.20 In the short story Interpreter of Maladies (of which the title becomes the name of the collection), Jhumpa Lahiri explores the play of stereotypes through the characterisation of an Indian family who live in America, the Das, and an Indian local guide, Mr. Kapasi, who also works in a clinic as an interpreter for Gujarati-speaking patients. Apart from their Indian look, Mr. and Mrs. Das, who were born to Indian immigrants, raised, and live in America, are not different from any American in their manners; Mr. Das needs to consult his paperback tour book to learn about places in India, the family cannot speak any Indian language, and they all dress up in a flashy western style compared to local people. The contrast between their actual race and their conduct in this way sets up the first tie in the triple-bind irony; they physically belong to the Indian race but they learn facts about their original country from book written by Americans. The second stage in this irony lies in their act of distinguishing themselves from indigenous Indians; Mrs. Das, whose second son Bobby was conceived by other man, confesses her sin that keeps haunting her for eight years to Mr. Kapasi, the interpreter that she has taken as a kind of spiritual psychic who can cure psychological sickness. Perceiving herself as an American, Mrs. Das has internalised the western stereotypical view towards India as a land of mythical spirituality represented by Mr. Kapasis profession. Moreover, Lahiri has further complicated this stereotypical irony by placing the third tie in Mr. Kapasis respond to Mrs. Dasthat he is attracted to her as a foreigner who finds his banal career romantic. The threefold irony of stereotype expressed in the short story echoes Bhabhas argument that colonial stereotype never works straightforwardly and rather involves hybrid fusion of narcissism as well as disavowal. The first stage in this stereotype, the Indian people in westerners dresses, is the play of reversed stereotypical representation that transforms the colonial subject into the White ideal ego. As Bhabha and Fanon always remind us, the scenes of subjugation of the colonised are enacted everydayso constantly that the colonised become whitewashed, and succumb to the dominant ideology of their new land. Although we do not know how the Das family acquires their American identity as it is not presented in the story, I would like to discuss this issue by comparing two characters from other two stories; Mrs. Sen from Mrs. Sens and the male Indian protagonist in The Third and Final Continent. Both characters are immigrants from India who settle in America, but they express different attitudes of becoming absorbed into the American milieu; Mrs. Sen follows her husband who
20

Bhabha, The Other Question p.77.

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teaches at an American University but she has a hard time struggling with the new atmosphere where [e]veryone, this people, too much in their world21, while the Indian protagonist in the latter story, who was born in India and studied in London, finds America, his third and final continent a destination where he can live happily, as he told his son that if [he] can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle [his son] cannot conquer.22 We see in Mrs. Sen a sense of irreconcilability that results in her rejection of western culture; she cannot embrace a community where people do not care about one another, old people are looked after in a nursing home, and driving car is compulsory. On the other hand, the Indian protagonist does not find the cold American society impossible to get along with, rather it makes him think of life as a journey where overcoming obstacle is a prove of success, and American dream is possible for any ragto-rich adventurers. What we have here is two possible reactions of Indian immigrants to their new environment; the positive/narcissistic and the negative/aggressive responses. An Indian Immigrant in the land of freedom tends to assume a discrete image that is equivalent to his/her surrounding, assimilating the other or the ideal White ego into the self; however, he/she is still threatened by the lack of the real in that White ego as signifier. The stereotype of America is therefore destabilised by its symbolic shortage that occurred when the real enters the symbolic order. Mr. and Mrs. Das in the first stage of the irony are the personification of the American stereotype, and its lack is to be presented in the following stages of the irony. The second tie in the irony is the fundamental point in the construction of stereotypical representation in this story; Mrs. Das self-identification as American and alienation of Indians as the other is precisely the indicator of the inherent flaw of her stereotypical identity. By alienating herself from her Indian roots, she also enters the realm where there is something whiteness cannot offer, and in her case it is the spiritual consolation that is missing from Americanness and which she thinks she could find in India where mythical solution avails. The fact that Mrs. Das takes Mr. Kapasis mythical interpreter job seriously simply gives emphasis to her visualisation of Indian peoplethey are the real that she cannot find in Americaand through that scopic drive, she provides herself with an active consent of the objectMr. Kapasito pursue that image of the real, and by bringing that illusion into picture, she then can control Mr. Kapasi as a fetish object of her fantasy. This irony comes full circle in the final stage when Mr. Kapasi, an oriental subject, becomes attracted to Mrs. Das, a pseudo-White woman who treats his career as exotic. For Mr. Kapasi, a compliment from Mrs. Das opens a new channel through which he can identify himself with the western romantic dream; in this case it is his dream of becoming a real interpreter between nations. He muses on the idea of writing her some letters, and exchanges their secret desire:

21 22

Jhumpa Lahiri, Mrs. Sens, Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 2000, p. 121. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Third and Final Continent, Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 2000, p. 197-198.

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He hoped that Mrs. Das had understood Suryas beauty, his power. Perhaps they would discuss it further in their letters. He would explain things to her, things about India, and she would explain things to him about America. In its own way this correspondence would fulfil his dream, of serving as an interpreter between nationsWhen he pictured her so many thousand of miles away he plummeted, so much so that he had an overwhelming urge to wrap his arms around her, 23 even for an instant, in an embrace witnessed by his favorite Surya.

In that instant Mr. Kapasi yearns for a narcissistic response of Mrs. Das to his power embedded in the magnificent temple of Surya; it is also a disavowal of his Indian hackneyed identity of an interpreter which ironically complete the fullness of this stereotypethe lack of his real identity in fact lures him to believe in that illusion proclaimed by his scopic drive as well as active consent. At this point we then have a complex circle of how stereotype is formulated, destabilised, reshaped and circulated in colonial discoursean immigrant Indian forms his/her identity through the narcissistic yearning for the White identity as well as the disavowal of its lack. He/she then alienates his/herself form the indigenous Indians in order to exercise his/her fetish desire over them, and finally the indigenous Indians become fascinated with the pseudo-White Indians through their narcissistic/disavowal feeling to embrace them as well as paradoxically being threatened by their lack of Indianness. Hybridity in Interpreter of Maladies involves the ambivalent narcissistic/metaphoric and aggressive/metonymic formulation of the Imaginary relation between the colonised and the coloniser. While Lahiri seems to play with the ambivalent psychoanalytic power relation, Lefvre takes a more serious and political stance in engaging with cultural mimicry she has experienced in Vietnam in order to portray miscegenation as a highly problematic discourse. Miscegenation undermines the colonisers power, not just because it produces a generation without an exact source and whose impurity contaminates the Whites racial superiority, but because it creates a channel through which both the colonised and the coloniser become engaged in the ambivalent dialogue of domination and revolution. Such channel takes a form of a mixedrace child who physically is a mimic man, that is not white but not quite in Bhabhas term. I use the term mimicry here, not totally in the sense that Bhabha uses to refer to an Anglicised Indian man, but to show the status of the mixed-race people who, from birth, can almost be a White man, that is, the mimic version of the White man. Furthermore, I would like to modify Bhabhas concept of mimicry by linking it with the precise issue of enunciation, that is mimicry in the discourse of miscegenation manifests in the form of forced mimicry in which the subject is neither the addresser nor the addressee, but the addressed. This question of enunciation, of who is speaking to whom, is commented upon by Young who remarks that [f]or Bhabha mimicry itself becomes a kind of agency without a subject, a form of representation which produces effects, a sameness which slips into otherness, still has nothing to do with any other,24 and he also notes that Bhabhas concept of enunciation, unlike Saids paradigm, allows the specificity of
23

24

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 2000, p.59. Robert Young, The Ambivalence of Bhabha, White Mythologies, Writing History and the West, London, Routledge, 1990, p. 148.

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particular colonial circumstance to shape the form of mimicry. While the agency of Bhabhas mimicry, which produces an ironic effect on the colonisers part, neither has a subject nor intends to engage with the other or the colonised, forced mimicry in the Vietnamese context as portrayed in Mtisse Blanche on the other hand seriously calls into question of who are the addressor and addressee as well as what is addressedan enunciating structure in which Vietnam employs the mtis children as a channel through which it can respond to the French colonisation. Given that Vietnam during the 40s-60s was influenced by the Communist anti-colonialism uprising which advocated the doctrine of nationalism in order to promote patriotism among Vietnamese,25 racial loyalty therefore played a significant political role in the Vietnamese national integration scheme in which the French-Vietnamese mtis were considered a threat to national stability, and became the subject enunciated by Vietnam as well as sent back by France, hence forms the colonial discourse of miscegenation. Born as a mtisse, Kim became the addressed subject of forced mimicry which hardly allowed her to choose her own identity. As a descendant of a French soldier, Kim was regarded as French rather than Vietnamese; even her own mother always treated her as a daughter of a superior race. When she saw Kim carried a heavy basket of their rationed meat on foot a long distance home, she could but lament Kims ill fate:
<< Ma pauvre enfant! Murmurait-elle. Une fille de ta race nest pas une paysanne! >> Et elle se mettait pleurer. << Si tu tait leve en France, tu recevrais une ducation au lieu de vivre comme les 26 gens dici! >>

Education in the mothers opinion is rather associated with European race, and it is also the source of power as suggested in the Foucauldian paradigm of knowledge/power. Having French blood running in her body, Kim is presumed to possess better education than the natives since she belongs to the civilised culture. With these values imbued in her by the mother and the French orphanage she attended when she was six, Kim had to strive to achieve that standard in order to become a proper European, and vouloir, cest pouvior is the proclaimed motto she upheld as her guiding light. However, Kim was also trapped in the ambivalent yearn to be a genuine Vietnamese, mainly due to her need for social acceptance and being treated as a compatriot. Other children did not want to play with a mtisse who was abandoned by the French father; her mother had to hide her in a big jar to save her from Communist-nationalist inspectors. Kim was placed on the French army side in the War simulation, a practice carried out by the Vietminh anti-colonial troopall these antagonistic treatments make Kim dream of an accident that me videraient de ce sang maudit, me laissant pure Vietnamienne, rconcilie avec mon entourage et moi-mme.27

25

See William Duiker, The Rise of Revolutionary Movement (1900-1930), The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, Colorado & Oxford, Westview Press, 1996. 26 Kim Lefvre, Mtisse Blanche, Gmenos, dition de lAube, 2001, p. 96. 27 Lefvre, p.14.

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On a broader scale, Kims ambivalent situation is like many cases of forced mimicry faced by the mtis in French Indochina; they are left with two possible solutionseither trying to upgrade to the civilised culture of Europe or subsiding into the patriotism for Native motherland. By choosing the former, these Eurasians will fall into Bhabhas paradigm of mimicry in which their attempted, westernised manner becomes an ironic imitation that at the same time undermines the so-called hegemonic culture. Their chance of becoming French is placed at the point of enunciation where the French authority addresses them of the upgrading schemethe mtis must denounce the inferior native attributes and prove that French blood circulates in their body. According to Ann Stoler, the Society for the Protection and Education of Young French Mtis of Cochinchine and Cambodia, who issues the Europeanising arrangements for the Eurasians, based its judgment on the contemptuous assumption that the immoral Vietnamese mothers would only leave their mtis sons taking the path of vagabondage, and their mtisse girls a plunge into prostitution.28 Also, many evidences, mainly documents from French tribunal court in Indochina, have shown that in order for the mtis to be considered French, they must have a substantial level of French attributes, namely speaking the language, having French taste and love of patrie29. In other words, if the Vietnamese Eurasians want to enjoy the privilege of the French, they must mimic the French through available French ideological state apparatuses in the colons such as French schools or French religious orphanage like the one Kim attended. We may view this scheme of France as an attempt to make up for their loose, excessive, immoral conducts that result in the generation of mtis children in Indochina. However, ironically enough, the making up scheme merely confirms the moral instability of the coloniser themselves. Nevertheless, by choosing the latter, the mtis have to tolerate racial discrimination inflamed by nationalist propaganda of the Communist movement led by Ho Chi Minh; they can hardly escape the fate of again being the addressed agent that encompasses the Vietnamese reaction towards their coloniser. In this way, the mtis are not only the channel through which the Vietnamese express their resistance but they are also a substitute for France; a France that Vietnam can handle, control and manifest superior power over. This is a kind of forced mimicry that performs as a message from the addressor (Vietnam) to the addressee (France), a kind of disavowal that articulates an indiscrete vengeance. All through her life in Vietnam, Kim have never met anyone who defends the mtisthey, the fatherless Eurasians, the strangers in their own land, are just an obstacle to the independence of Vietnam; [l]e futur Vitnam indpendant naurait pas besoin de ces enfants btards.30 Both Lahiri and Lefvre deserve much praise as they are successful in presenting colonial discourse as involving a highly hybridised paradigm. The playful tone of irony in
28

See Ann Stoler, Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia. Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 26-28. 29 See Stoler, passim. 30 Lefvre, p. 44.

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Interpreter of Maladies contributes tremendously to the construction of ambivalent stereotypical representation of westernised Indians versus indigenous Indian. The authentic experience of Kim Lefvre in her autobiography increases the degree of violence Vietnamese Eurasians had to encounter in their forced mimicry. The multiplicity of immigrants and mixed-race people is always underwritten with the force of hybridity that shapes their experience.

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Chapter Two: Unhomeliness and the Politics of Territorialisation

Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth Gilles 31 Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Following Young, we might argue that colonisation is almost synonymous with territorialisation in terms of the translation of the land. Colonisation becomes involved with translation due to the western implementation of the concept of property which does not exist in the pre-colonial state in the land of the Native; the concept that has widely been taken as a theoretical basis for scholars in the field of postcolonial translation32. Robert Young points out that Deleuze and Guattaris concept of territorialisation comes in contact with translation because of the relation between the land and the state, or the imposition of civilisation over primitivism that develops into a larger system of the imposition of economic (capitalist) roles and identities33. Using Young and Deleuze and Guattari as reference parts, this chapter attempts to investigate this notion of the translation of land by the force of colonial/capitalist desire through the process of cultural reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation, how it forms the hybrid union of East and West in a highly problematised power relations of the issues of diasporas and miscegenation, and how the politics of territorialisation is imposed on the spatial representation in Interpreter of Maladies and Mtisse Blanche.
Diasporas may be the best source where various forms of territorialisation have been perpetuated for two main reasons; exilic experience, with its undefined cultural stance, creates new cultural links that influence the transformation of practices at both central and peripheral spheres, and subverts the claim to authenticity of the hegemonic culture. This phenomenon involves the process of cultural territorialisation in which the flow of cultural values is decoded and encoded into a new cultural currency which connects peripheral communities to the central ones, vice versa, or among the peripheral themselves. This multiplicity has challenged the classical ethnographic assumptions that

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, quoted in Nikos Papastergiadis, The Deterritorialization of Culture, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity, Massachusetts, Polity Press, 2000, p. 118. 32 See further details in Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained, Manchester, St. Jerome, 1997. 33 Robert Young, Colonialism and the Desiring Machine, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 172.

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cultures could be mapped into autonomous and bounded spaces34. In this way, the territorialised moments of diasporas therefore perform a connection with the intrusion of the world into the home, as well as the transformation of the home into the world; this is what Bhabha calls the unhomely moment, the condition that establishes a boundary: a bridge, where presencing begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of relocation of the home and the world.35 Unhomeliness is the site of the unspoken, an enunciating agent of the minority discourse which cannot find any representative voice in the official historical events. In this way, as Bhabha argues, the representation of the home and the world finds its problem at the heart of historical time and fictional space; how the unspoken of the immigrants can be enunciated in the so-called uninterrupted and mono-directional passage of time.36 One possible way of looking at this unspeakability is to find the source that enacts the flow of the world into the home, and the main force of that imperialistic power of the world is that of capitalism and its politics of territorialisation. A Real Durwan is the story of that territorialised moment that turns the public realm into the domestic, and in return shapes the public moments, that is through the domestic incommunicability with the outside world. Boori Ma, a widow immigrant who had a luxurious life back in India, leads her life in America as a stairwell sweeper in a flat building filled with Indian residents. Sleeping under the letter boxes down stair, Boori Ma has been assigned the role of a real durwan37 by other residents who are pleased by her presence in the alley although they do not possess anything valuable:
Still, the residents were thankful that Boori Ma patrolled activities on the alley, screened the itinerant peddlers who came to sell combs and shawls from door to door, was able to summon a rickshaw at a moments calling, and could, with a few slaps of her broom, rout any suspicious 38 characters who strayed into the area in order to spit, urinate, or cause some other trouble.

While other residents do not seem to be bothered by their cramped conditions, Boori Ma suffers a great deal from her demoted life in America since she is used to a lavish indulgence India once offered; [h]ave I mentioned that I crossed the border with just two bracelets on my wrist? Yet there was a day when my feet touched nothing but marble. Believe me, dont believe me, such comforts you cannot even dream them39. The fact that Boori Ma is a mentally deranged old woman who has a daily routine of lamenting to the residents of the building about her past luxurious lifestyle seems to justify the decision that, by giving her a job with certain responsibility, she would be honoured despite her poor living condition under the letter boxesshe is a durwan not a mere sweeper. In this way, Boori Ma is elevated; it is a kind of compensation to her previous status in India, and this also reflects the sympathetic relationship among the
Nikos Papastergiadis, The Deterritorialization of Culturep. 116. Homi Bhabha, Introduction: The Location of Culture, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 9. 36 See Homi Bhabha, The World and the Home, Social Text, No. 31/32, (1992), p. 141-153. 37 Durwan is a guard or watchman in Bengali. 38 Jhumpa Lahiri, A Real Durwan, Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 2000, p. 73. 39 Lahiri, p. 71.
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immigrant residents of the flat building. When Boori Ma, a durwan, visits her fellow residents on certain afternoon, [t]he residents, for their part, assured Boori Ma that she was always welcome.40 The trauma of Boori Ma is the first moment of unhomeliness in the story; while the fellow residents find their new life in America not too unbearable, Boori Ma, on the other hand, chooses to repetedly plunge herself into the past which is lived in the present of her mind. The time of the present in its aesthetic process, according to Bhabha, does not perform a transcendental passage but a moment of transit41; it is a dialogue between the historical time and the fictional space that spatialises the indescribable distress of the colonised into the discursive unhomeliness. For Boori Ma, the act of burying herself under past luxurious moments becomes an inquiry to the political history of colonial Indiathe partition of the country into India and Pakistan in 1947 that led to a deterioration of the caste system in which high-caste people, to whom Boori Ma may belong, enjoy exuberant privileges. The domestic prosperity is forced to succumb to the Western politics of territorialisation; the British imperialistic desire over India deterritorialises the countrys traditional system of caste into the Westerns universal currency of human equality. The deterritorialised Indian immigrants who no longer belong to the caste system all become reterritorialised into the equal, poor, second-class citizen of the first-world nations. Nevertheless, the effect of this doubled process of territorialisation that imposes on the mental space of Boori Ma appears to be something of a personal trauma that even her fellow Indian residents cannot understand. Either Boori Ma keeps the memory of luxurious India because she is truly of noble birth or because she wants to escape the harshness of immigrant life by living in illusion, we do not know. The only certain thing is that this ambivalent moment of unhomeliness is known to only Boori Ma herself; whether that glorious past is true or just illusion, she dwells in it as home and hence alienates herself from other immigrant residents who cannot recognise her unhomeliness and thinks of her as a pitiable mad woman. Believe me, dont believe me, the phrase she keeps saying after each of her anecdotes becomes the liminal certainty that is simultaneously trying to convince the audience of the moment of her homeliness as well as estranging herself from her fellow residents who can barely imagine that image of her home. The unhomely moment has developed from Boori Mas personal trauma into a larger territorialised space of the Indian immigrant flat-building that perpetuates the second type of unhomeliness, which again claims Boori Ma as its victim. If we map down this Indian immigrant flat-building, it becomes a space of the home, with Boori Ma as a guardian who keeps the home away from the intrusion of the world. The home is where people have sympathy for the other and barely have a concept of property or possession because they are poor blue-collar workers. It is also the home that is safe from any danger from the outside worldtradesmen, drunkards, pestsdue to the services of Boori Ma. But then, with the coming of a washbasin that Mr. Dalal, who has been promoted from an
40 41

Lahiri, p. 76. Homi Bhabha, The World and the Home, p. 144.

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accountant to the distributor of the toilet parts company, has installed in the stairwell for public use, the residents, who only brush their teeth with stored water poured from mugs, are so overjoyed with the Western comfort that every morning they have to queue up at the stairwell to use the basin. The emergence of the basin not only signifies less inconvenience, but it also leads to the series of materialistic addictions that turn the congenial residents into a group of selfish spenders. The force of capitalism has plagued the homely space of the immigrant flat-building by deterritorialising the value of sympathy and reterritorialising it into materialistic relationships. The residents begin developing their sense of property and possession after the Dalal start equipping their flat with telephones and go on holidays; the wives also become obsessed with bartering or pawning their silver and gold accessories in order to renovate their flats like the fortunate couple. The home is intruded by the world, but the one who becomes the victim of this unhomeliness is not the residents of the building, but Boori Ma, the durwan who is the only person who is not re-and-de-territorialised like other residents. She still inhabits the space of past India, her present; but the territorialised building has simply doubled the public degree in her previous moment of her unhomeliness. As a durwan, Boori Ma can no longer fight the invasion of the world; she leaves her place under the letter boxes and sleeps under the rooftop in order to let the workers coming in and out to install the basin, leaving the gate unlocked which ironically causes someone to steal that very basin. In the end Boori Ma is banished from the building where all the residents become proprietors of certain things; Boori Ma has endangered the security of this building. We have valuables. The widow Mrs. Misra lives alone with her telephone. What should we do?42 Believe me, believe me she said, this time, no matter how much she yearns for the acceptance from the public, her domestic moment can only be contingent in the trauma of unhomeliness, and never takes an absolute shapeit is a hybrid space where the boundaries of the home and the world can only touch one another in the continuous liminality. While Lahiri does not clearly portray the unhomeliness of Boori Ma as having a substantial effect on the public moment, Lefvre subtly portrays the unhomely moment, that, when occurs through the issue of miscegenation, points to the historical disjunction within Frances colonial politics. For Vietnamese Eurasians, miscegenation is a discourse that in many ways encompasses their unspoken ambivalence into what Ann Stoler calls the European politics of abandonment43, which in fact reveals the complexity of Mtissage that was first a name and then made a thing. It was so heavily politicized because it threatened both to destabilize national identity and the Manichean categories of ruler and ruled.44 Given that colonial mtissage is probably pure complexity, therefore there has never been a straightforward way to view the economy of power relations in the miscegenation discourse. In this way, by introducing the concepts of unhomeliness and the politics of territorialisation into the analysis of this discourse, we can see that the
42 43

Lahiri, p. 82. See Ann Stoler, Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia. Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 26. 44 Stoler, p. 45.

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movement of territorialisation in the politics of abandonment has ironically caused the moment of unhomeliness that in return undermines the French colonial intrusion by pointing out the colonisers political and moral instability. During the first half of the twentieth century, abandonment of the mtis children in Indochina invoked a series of racial and moral controversy of European misconduct in the colons. Some European feminists engaged in the protection of the neglected mixedblood children while some colonial officers were deeply concerned about the problem of European underclass generation born and raised in the impoverished colony.45 Abandonment not only signifies the irresponsibility of the European fathers but whose consequences also prove a highly problematised as well as politicised discourse that outlines the fault lines of colonial authority: in linking domestic arrangements to the public order, family to the state, sex to subversion, and psychological essence to racial type, mtissage might be read as a metonym for biopolitics of the empire at large.46 The suggestion is clearly stated: the biological union of a European man and a Native woman that results in a mixed-race child also becomes the writing of colonial spacethe sexual territorialisation that associates the land with femininity so that the masculine coloniser can conquer and possess. In this way, the normal domestic union is subverted by the flow of imperialism that translates the women of Vietnam into a kind of property that one can own and throw away regardless of family obligations. The outcome of the territorialised Vietnam, together with its translated women, take a form of the Vietnamese Eurasians who themselves perform the moment of unhomeliness, a condition in which they cannot locate themselves domestically in either Vietnam or France. The unhomeliness of Kim is an example of the indescribable, traumatic experience of the mtis population in Vietnam which places them in the transit moment in which their hybrid presentof having French and Vietnamese blood circulating in their veins becomes a threat to the primordial national history of both France and Vietnam. While the French seem to be concerned about the mtis children as a symbol of degradation to their prestigious race, as Stoler points out, the Vietnamese also find it impossible to place their trust in the mtis. The scene where her childhood friends refuse to play with her for fear of her mtissage has clearly depicted the political injustice in the discourse of miscegenation that has already shaped the understanding of the young Vietnamese.
<< Dommage que tu sois mtisse! Regretta quelquun. On ne pourra pas temmener avec nous, on sera obligs de te cacher sans arrt! - Et comment savoir que tu niras pas nous trahir?>> ajouta quelquun dautre. Je protestai: <<Vous ai-je jamais trahis?>> Jtais blesse. Je savais que ce ntait quun projet vague mais jtais trs triste tout de mme.47

Unhomeliness in Mtisse Blanche is not only about the actual traumatic experience of the mtisse who hardly finds her home in the two cultures, but also in terms
45 46

Stoler, p. 26. Stoler, p. 20. 47 Kim Lefvre, Mtisse Blanche, Gmenos, dition de lAube, 2001, p. 100.

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of narrative representation in which unhomeliness performs the ironic strategy of subversion that allegorises the political contingency in colonial Vietnam. Lefvres narrative of mtissage constantly emphasises this unhomely moment which seems to run pararell with the revolutionary war in Vietnam. Kims childhood wish that she could find at the end of the forest near her aunts home in Tuyn-Quang a new country filled with mtis population that will save her from the unhomely trauma:
Et qui sait ce quil y avait au bout de ce bois? Peut-tre trouverais-je un nouveau pays, peupl de mtisses? Jaurais un pre mtis, une mre mtisse, un oncle mtis, et mme mon 48 institutrice serait mtisse. Personne ne me remarquerait car je serais comme tout le monde.

The purely imaginative desire which cannot be realised in the actual situation in Vietnam nevertheless becomes a powerful irony that sheds light on the fact that Vietnam is the true miscegenated country where the political instability makes its people feel unhomely and can hardly align themselves with either the French or the Vietnamese authority. In the train that Kims family take to flee from Hanoi to Tuy-Hoa when the Vietminh troops in the capital begins a fierce attack, some of the panicked passengers light the incense sticks while other elderly passengers pray; they are not afraid of the French but the Vietminh soldiers who wage war against the coloniser. The revolutionary war has extended to everywhere and its violence forces the people to live under the threat of whoever turns aggressive, with no recognition of the ideological patriotism or nationalism which always remains an intangible concept:
On vivait dans la crainte du Vit-minh comme on craignait jadis les tigres de la fortpersonne ne semblaient penser que les Vit-minh taient nos compatriots. Ces gens ignorants englobaient dans la mme peur le colon Franais et le combatant Vietnamien.49

The Vietnam from the perspective of an in-between mtisse is then revealed as the land filled with hundreds of thousands of unhomely mtis people who are forced to live in between the agony of habiter nulle part; these people do not even have any idea of the present time as it is all so turned upside down that their transit moment is dominated solely by fear and the fight to survive. It is the territorialised Vietnam where both France and Vietnam fight to claim it as their property; blood, life, family, love, loyaltyall are sacrificed for the sake of public demand that is impossible to satisfy. This desiring machine that turns France into a hungry coloniser and Vietnam into an aggressive resistant force in this way allows for the specificity of incommensurable, competing histories forced together in unnatural unions by colonialism (my italics).50 Up to this point, we can see the long line of consequences taking effect after the ignition of the abandonment politicsthe translation of land into femininity and property, the unhomeliness of the mtis children that ironically reflects the actual war situation and the incongruous amalgamation of Eastern and Western histories. However, the ultimate outcome lies in the counter-effect of the European fathers abandonment; the anarchic
48 49

Lefvre, p. 41. Lefvre, p. 110-111. 50 Young, p. 174.

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transit situation of the unhomely Vietnam undermines Frances colonial politics in two ways. First, unhomeliness proves that the French sovereignty is not at all mighty since it ironically perpetuates a resistant force that employs the same means the French imposes in their politics of colonialismviolence and nationalism. Second, the abandonment of mtis children simply reflects the French fear of degeneration; they will no longer be as civilised when their descendants are born in a backwards culture and contaminated by the Native blood. Unhomeliness in Mtisse Blanche somewhat proves Bhabhas argument that there is in the unhomely moment an incommunicability that shapes the public moment.51 Diasporas and miscegenation are the issues that are politicised through the politics of territorialisation in which the boundary of the home is trespassed by the force of the world. While Lahiri cleverly plays with the spatial representation of the coming of capitalism and the illusive past trauma of an immigrant, Lefvre downplays the French politics of abandonment by portraying the mtis unjust experience that ironically coincides with the countrys anarchy, a fact which further undermines French colonialism. There is a high degree of hybridity that also alerts us to how we all live unconsciously in the territorialised world.

51

Homi Bhabha, The World and the Home, p. 143.

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Chapter Three: Dangerous Liaison: Gender and Ambivalent Desire in Orientalism

One of the major points of Orientalism that attracts so much attention is Saids initiative suggestion that the Orient has been repeatedly associated with sexuality, especially the threatening type encompassing fecundity. His study of Flauberts fascination with the Orient as the land of sexual pilgrimage especially his encounter with the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem that inspires the allure of female characters in his Orientalist novels namely Tanit, Salammb and Salom52reveals the political power relations at work despite the dominant aesthetic theme that prevails Flauberts works. The representation of the Orient as a symbol of feminine sexuality becomes the motif that is singularly unvaried and seems to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies.53 Nevertheless, Said regrettably declines the decision to speculate on the underlying discourse of such issues:
It is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance. Nevertheless one must acknowledge its importance as something eliciting complex responses, sometimes even a frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists, and Flaubert was an interesting case in point.54

To take up the point where Said left off, let us go back to the idea of stereotype discussed in chapter one, which I will employ as means to analyse Saids question of Oriental sexuality. Certainly the issue would cover a broad scale as Said has suggested, in this regard my discussion will be limited within the categories of diasporas and miscegenation in which, I would argue, the Orientalist stereotypical representation of gender is subverted, destabilised and ultimately hybridised by the two enunciating oppositions. The idea of misplaced people and their gender stereotype is central to the construction of the short story Sexy in Interpreter of Maladies. Again, in this story Lahiri plays with the reverse stereotype but does so in terms of gender. It is an anecdote of a White woman who is attracted to an Indian immigrant in Boston which runs parallel with the story of an Indian immigrant in Montreal, a husband of her Indian colleagues
52 53

Edward Said, Orientalist Structures and Restructures, Orientalism, New York, Vintage, 1979, p. 187. Said, p. 188. 54 Said, p. 188.

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cousin, who falls in love with an English woman he met on the plane and leaves his wife for her after just a moment of conversation. These two anecdotes are intentionally juxtaposed that they seem to point to the left-out sexual encounter between White men and Native women that forms the pattern of Orientalist gender relationship in general. The variation of what I would call the standard structure of attraction into White woman-Native man pattern (and Native Man-White woman in the latter case) reveals a further complicated process in the way in which gender stereotype in Orientalism works; and in Sexy, it is precisely the unconscious fetish desire for the other that constructs the reverse pattern of attraction. In the classic case of Orientalism, especially the literary representation of the Orient as portrayed by Flaubert, the object of desire is usually associated with femininity, an attribute that indicates the sign of productivenessthe quality that will bring the source of life to anyone who possesses it. On the other hand, if the structure of attraction works the other way round, that is, the Native man becomes the object of desire of the White woman instead, the intention is therefore no longer for the desire to possess that feminine power of productivity. Rather the female subject tends to identify herself with the male, mysterious object of desire, who would return the gaze of what she lacks which is also what she desires. Miranda, a twenty-two year old operator at a public radio station in Boston is immediately attracted to Dev, a married Indian man who catches her eyes from their first meeting in the cosmetics department with his exotic and somewhat feminine look:
He held a slip of paper covered in a precise, feminine handThe man was tanned that was visible on his knuckles. He wore a flamingo pink shirt, a navy blue suit, a camel overcoat with gleaming leather buttons. In order to pay he had taken off pigskin gloves. Crisp bills emerged from a burgundy wallet. He didnt wear a wedding ring. The man was glancing in a mirror, too, quickly wiping the cream from his nose. 55 Miranda wondered where he was from. She thought he might be Spanish, or Lebanese.

Married and not wearing a wedding ring, Dev exhibits a kind of sexual promise as well as threat in which Miranda is seduced to take the risk in having an affair with him. The imaginary backdrop of this structure of attraction underlies the visualisation of the other who possesses certain quality that Miranda does not have; for example, he is tanned while she is as pale as paper56. Furthermore, Dev is very much different from her previous lovers in high school and college in that Dev was the first always to pay for things, and hold doors open, and reach across a table in a restaurant to kiss her hand57; in other words, Miranda unconsciously makes Dev, as the other, as part of herself because she finds in Dev what she may have lost in the White symbolic orderperhaps the sense of warmth, romance, admiration and some sort of understanding that she unknowingly longs for, something that will complete her. Dev comes to save her in that moment of loneliness. When he says that he admires her for leaving her house in Michigan to live in Boston on her own, although it is not actually something admirable, Miranda senses that he understood herunderstood how she felt some nights on the T,
55 56

Jhumpa Lahiri, Sexy, Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 2000, p. 86-87. Lahiri, Sexy, p. 87. 57 Lahiri, Sexy, p. 89.

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after seeing a movie on her own, or going to a bookstore to read magazines, or having a drink with Laxmi, who always had to meet her husband at Alewife station in an hour or two.58 At this point, we see Miranda, as a White woman, professes her desire to her male, Indian sexual object not because of his fecundity as Flaubert might have sensed from Kuchuk Hanem, but because as a woman in the discourse of romantic love (or the discourse of Orientalism), Miranda feels the need for gentle treatment from the man to make herself feel complete from the symbolic order she has been through her life. However, as the story reveals in the end, Mirandas fascination with the Oriental man who at first seems to offer what she needs turns out to be a kind of self-illusion when she discovers the true meaning of sexy. The word sexy is a motif that combines Mirandas anecdote with the sub-plot of the husband of Laxmis cousin in that both sketches reflect the attitude of the Native men towards White woman in the context of diasporas. Both Dev and the husband of Laxmis cousin are attracted to White women because they find them sexythe truth that comes to Miranda when Rohin, the 7-yearold son of Laxmis cousin, tells her why his father leaves them:
Rohin fastened the zipper to the top, and then Miranda stood up and twirled. Rohin put down the almanac. Youre sexy. He declared. She remembered the day in the Mapporium, standing across the bridge from Dev. At the time she thought she knew what his words meant. At the time theyd made sense. What does it means? What? That word. Sexy. What does it mean? He cupped his hands around his mouth, and then he whispered, It means loving someone you dont know. Thats what my father did, Rohin continued. He sat next to someone he didnt 59 know, someone sexy, and now he loves her instead of my mother.

The motif sexy is fundamental to the representation of the gender stereotype in this story in two ways; first it leads to the revelation of the underlying discourse that perpetuates what Miranda thinks to be the real that is missing from her moment of loneliness; second, the attraction the two westernised Indian men feel for the White women points to the ambivalent power structure within the domain of gender in Orientalism. The assumed real that Miranda finds in Dev is in fact the fixated label of Orientalism that misleads her to think of Dev in terms of romantic love, and the most dangerous moment in this liaison is that she seems to be attracted to his Indianness rather than Dev himself; learning about Indian cultures in Boston become a kind of obsession to hershe tries to memorise Indian words from the menu and even attempts to transcribe the Indian part of her name (Mira) into her Filofax. Orientalist stereotype therefore proves a dangerous liaison in which one is in love with the stereotypical image instead of the actual person. While woman like Miranda tends to focus on the stereotype by trying to decipher it and making it part of her, Dev and the husband on the other hand leave the image of the White women in a distanced, unknown, mysterious figure for a kind of
58 59

Lahiri, Sexy, p. 89. Lahiri, Sexy, p. 107-108.

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sexual excitement which is in contrast to their Indian wives who are beautiful but too familiar. White women are therefore something the Indian men choose to admire but would rather not possessthis may reflect the ambiguous power structure that is simultaneously politicised as well as engendered between the male Native and the female White in which the male Native can only but fancy female Whiteness from afar while the White man can easily possess the Native woman. These two effects of stereotype also indicate a dangerous liaison in which possession signifies the violation of colonial gender code in which only White men can possess Native women and not vice versa. For Miranda can possess but the stereotypical image of the Indian man while Dev and the husband, despite the Western values they have grown up with, only fall for the White womens sexiness but not the women themselves. The ambivalent desire for the other does not completely suggest the antiOrientalist solution to either Miranda or Dev. Rather, the realisation of gender stereotype in the discourse of Orientalism further emphasises the difficulty in accepting and differentiating the real desire and the unconscious, politicised fascination; for Miranda says to herself she would see him one more Sunday, perhaps two. Then she would tell him the things she had known all along: that it wasnt fair to her, or to his wife, that they both deserved better, that there was no point in dragging on.60 The two enunciating agents therefore engage in a truly hybrid relationship that informs the latent side of Orientalism. The violation of colonial gender code also deserves much discussion with regard to mixed-race woman as a sexual object. In Mtisse Blanche, one of the most remarkable events in her life is her affair with the school music teacher who is already married and has also been through many affairs with other school girls. The teachers Lolita-like attraction with young girls, nevertheless, proves an exception in Kims case; he is attracted to Kims being both strange and familiar at the same time:
<< Mais tu me plais justement parce que tu nes pas vietnamienne tout--fait. Vois-tu, tu es vietnamienne sans ltre, cest l ton attrait. Quand je te regarde, tu mes la fois familire et trangre. Et jaime a. Tu devrais ten rjouir au lieu de ten attrister. Que tu es bte! >> (my 61 italics)

This simultaneous feeling of the familiar and strange corresponds to the process of metaphoric/narcissistic and metonymic/aggressive in Bhabhas description of the stereotype formulation in the Imaginary order in that the teacher tends to find the metisses charm in the narcissistic Vietnamese features as well as a kind of disavowal that her Frenchness offers which also points to the lack in his Vietnamese symbolic order. Nevertheless, such attraction also involves the colonial gender code in that the male Vietnamese would at first be allured by the mtisses Vietnamese attributes and then by her French mtissage. Her earlier encounter with her aunt Thas husband62 when she was
60 61

Lahiri, Sexy, p. 110. Kim Lefvre, Mtisse Blanche, Gmenos, dition de lAube, 2001, p. 254. 62 Le concubin de Tante Tha

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thirteen is precisely the moment in which she realises that although her mtissage renders her more desirable than other pure Vietnamese girls, the main feature that would first attract Vietnamese mens attention is the familiar, Vietnamese look. That is the reason why her aunts husband sets a lustful eye on her, but this later subsides when her mother tries to dress her up la franaise:
[Les hommes vietnamiens] maimaient mtisse jaune et non mtisse blanche. Pour aigullonner leur intrt, il fallait que je fusse vietnamienne dabord, avec un je ne sais quoi de franais qui me rendait exotique leur yeux. Je navais plus dattraits ds lors que javais lair 63 dune Blanche. (my italics)

Like Dev in Sexy, the teacher and the aunts husband find it impossible to violate the colonial gender code; they are unable to desire the real White woman like the way a French soldier desires a Vietnamese girl; they can just desire a mtisse whose Vietnamese blood opens a channel through which the violence of breaking the code would be lessened. In other words, the metonymic/aggressive mode of gazing at the French mtisse seems to be covered under the politicised, colonial scheme that renders the metaphoric/narcissistic mode more powerfulone cannot like the states enemy no matter how much completeness it can offer. It is a dangerous liaison in which attraction across boundaries must give way to the powerful discourse of colonialism. Gender in Orientalism in many ways cannot avoid being politicised and closely related to power struggle between the colonised and the coloniser. While Saids discussion of Flaubert establishes a kind of gender power relation between the West as the one who gazes and the East as the one who is gazed at, Lahiri and Lefvre has shown that, in the context of diasporas and miscegenation, a desire for/of an Oriental subject is never straightforward but always highly hybridised due to the diminishing distance between the East and the West in the forms of an Indian man living in America or a French-Vietnamese mtissea liaison that turns dangerous in the postcolonial world.

63

Lefvre, p. 176.

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Conclusion

Let me conclude this essay by citing Youngs introductory paragraph to his

The imposition of the universal time by establishing the imaginary Longitude Zero or the Prime Meridian is achieved at the price of the threat in which the assumed totality of the West is always destabilised by the very difference it creates by dividing the world into the Occident and the Orient through the Meridian line. In this way, by becoming universal, the world itself also becomes a hyphenated entity in which two anomalous cultures are yoked together in a hybrid cohabitation; there are half French-half Vietnamese students in Paris, Anglo-Indian businessmen in Boston or a golfer like Tiger Wood who proclaims himself a Carib-Asian living in America. Diasporas and miscegenation are two evidences of what the imperialistic force has done to the modern world; it combines the East and the West through the western implementation of military strategy, nationalism, patriotism and other state ideologies that is responded by the East either in terms of resistance such as mimicry or the fetishistic reaction in the formulation of stereotypical images, or in the traumatic, unhomely experience that can hardly be accommodated in the standard western narrative. Interpreter of Maladies and Mtisse Blanche have exhibited such conditions of the hybrid/hyphenated world in the three ways proposed in the introduction. First, with their accounts of diasporas and miscegenation, they bring the two hemispheres into the very heart of their tales of the postcolonial world. Interpreter of Maladies does not put aside the boundaries between the East and the West but cleverly plays with them; Lahiris characters are those who do not live within any border but precisely dwell in ita smalltown Indian interpreter who dreams of becoming an international translator, a stairwell sweeper who laments on her past glorious life in India, a White woman who is fascinated with an exotic, romantic Indian man. Born and raised up in a colonial Vietnam, Kim as a mtisse becomes the border that divides as well as combines France and Vietnam; she is the embodiment of hatred against the coloniser as she is usually taken as French by the
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Robert Young, Hybridity and Diaspora, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 1.

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angry, patriotic Vietnamese, but she also epitomises the dangerous liaison since her Frenchness becomes a channel through which the Vietnamese men can admire but not possess. Second, with regard to the issue of identity formation, the sense of something in process seems to prevail in both stories as Lahiri and Lefvre attempt to portray the moment in which the misplaced or mixed-race people are trying to make sense of themselves and the surrounding world. Both Indian immigrants and Kim have to struggle with their identity in the postcolonial world in which there is no specific historical references to the collective identity such as a kind of Englishness an English man can assume spontaneously; they can but fight for their identity to be accepted in the chaotic world, that is, to always be in the process of identity, or to be in Bhabhas metaphoric condition of the stairwell that links the upper and lower levels, but never reaches any of them.65 Third, the outcome of the post-colonial hybridisation is the unnatural union of the East and the West, which is narrativised in what Bhabha terms as the moment of unhomelinessa transit time in which the personal trauma of the exilic experience repeatedly engages in a dialogue with the historical public realm, hence forms an unhomely moment that merges the domestic pain with the public condition. The anomalous marriage of the domestic and the public also involves the process of territorialisation in which the domestic values are transformed into the equalised, capitalist code in order to suit the public arrangement. The unhomely moments of Boori Ma and Kim are precisely enacted by the territorialising force that aggressively relates their home with the world, and hence establishes a hybrid union of two competing histories which is almost beyond accommodation in the postcolonial narrative. It is hybridity that brings voice to Lahiris Indian characters in exile, and Kims life as a Eurasian in colonial Vietnam, when no exact cultural background can offer an appropriate narrative mode. Their lives are just a few examples of how people in the Modern world live in a profoundly hybrid worlda place which Bhabha describes as in the beyondan exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delhere and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth.66

65 66

See Bhabha, Introduction: The Location of Culture, p. 4. Bhabha, Introduction: The Location of Culture, p. 1.

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