Mimicry and Performative Negotiations of Belonging in the Everyday: A Synthesized Analysis of Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

By Jannik Kohl

In the past three decades, Nira Yuval-Davis' concept of belonging as well as Homi K. Bhabha's concept of mimicry have received considerable attention within social and cultural sciences, as both are involved in discussions concerning the construction of social identities and the relationship between self and Other. Within these fields of social research, the two concepts have proven to be attractive analytical categories in order to re-think traditional and essentialist views on processes of social identification, while at the same time highlighting the importance of fluid and more intersubjective notions of those processes. However, due to some blind spots in their conceptualizations, both have been subject of critique for ignoring important dimensions of social realities.
The paper aims to show that by synthetizing both concepts into a new analytical framework, it will be possible to overcome those shortcomings and gain new insights into the process of social identification. In order to prove the viability of this synthetized concept of belonging as a possible analytical concept in literary studies, the framework will be applied on the analysis of the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Caribbean author Maryse Condé. In doing so, the thesis addresses the question of how subjects are capable of negotiating their everyday belongings in contexts of social power relations which are characterized and expressed through intersecting forms of hostility and oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: kipu
• Release date: Sep 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9783946507406

Jannik Kohl

Author: Jannik Kohl graduated in Sociology (B.A.) and InterAmerican Studies (M.A.) at University of Bielefeld, Germany. He was a visiting student at Complutense University of Madrid and at the University of Guadalajara. During his academic career, he worked as a research assistant at the DFG Research Center (SFB) 882 From Heterogeneities to Inequalities, as well at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Conflict and Violence Research (IKG).

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Chico.

1. Introduction

In 2008 at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, the long termed rivalry between two of the most prominent and significant authors of the Caribbean, namely the two Nobel Laureates V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, culminated in a genuine scandal. On the second day of the festival Walcott performed The Mongoose, a poem that consists in a bitter reckoning with Naipaul’s remarks concerning the Caribbean region and its cultural production, paired with a hodgepodge of dirty anecdotes about Naipaul’s private life that were aimed at questioning his moral integrity – as the following excerpt from his poem illustrates:

For five years he waited / India and England were in his citation / Of gratitude, but not the Negroid nation […] The Mongoose came home to the canes / He phoned, he wanted us to go to the club Miramar / A dingy nightclub on the Port of Spain waterfront / Screwing negresses is part of his memoir / He doesn’t like black man but he loves black cunt / This is a common fact in his late fiction / He told me once he thought sex was just friction. (Walcott 2008)

Hence, just like the mongoose, which was imported in 19th century by the British Empire from India to Trinidad in order to diminish the population of black rats and reduce their damage on the sugarcane plantations, Walcott describes Naipaul, whose grandparents once migrated from India to Trinidad, as an accomplice of Great-Britain while at the same time disdaining his country of birth Trinidad and its entire population. Although the polemic poem is, of course, not representative for the whole body of Walcott’s literary and poetic career, it serves as a starting point for the present thesis, as it marks the escalation of a several decades lasting feud between both Nobel Laureates, in which terms like belonging, mimicry, authenticity, and even racist prejudices informed the central inquiry about cultural production and Caribbean identity. Furthermore, with regard to the style of confrontation and the content of the poem, several authors have pointed to the significance that masculinity plays in the conflict. This observation is insofar relevant for my thesis, as it reflects the fact that, historically, heteronormative positions have proven to be the rule rather than the exception in the discussion and construction of Caribbean identities.

Walcott’s polemic at the Calabash Festival represents the peak in a dispute that started four decades earlier, consisting in opposing opinions with regard to the sphere of cultural production in the Caribbean region. In his autobiographic travelogue The Middle Passage (1962) as well as in his novel The Mimic Men (1967), V.S. Naipaul characterizes the region as a culturally bloodless landscape, which lacks any sort of cultural production, since every piece of art represents a pale imitation of European works. At the same time, Naipaul expresses at various occasions his distanced relationship to his country of birth, reflected in his lacking sense of belonging towards the island – a motif that constantly shaped his early literary creations (Zhou 2015, 13f.). As his work did not receive as much attention in the Caribbean as it provoked in Europe, Naipaul did not hesitate to pick up racist stereotypes that disdained the Trinidadian population in order to expose their supposed cultural inferiority and their disinterest for cultural progress. In addition to this, he repetitiously expressed his feeling of belonging to Great-Britain and its literary tradition, which he presumed to be culturally much more advanced in comparison to the West Indies.¹ Thus, as a consequence, Naipaul found himself caught in the crossfire of criticism, which was most prominently expressed by his colleague Derek Walcott (1998).

After Naipaul took his aversion against the cultural scene of the Caribbean to a new peak in the year 1972 by claiming that nothing has ever been created in the West Indies, and nothing will ever be created (quoted after Walcott 1974, 8/9), Derek Walcott intervened in the controversy with his essay The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry? (1974). While agreeing with Naipaul on the mimic condition of Caribbean cultural production, Walcott realizes a positive re-interpretation of the concept of mimicry. In doing so, he calls into question Naipaul’s idea about the originality of cultural products: The absurdity of pursuing the anthropological idea of mimicry then, if we are to believe science, would lead us to the image of the first ape applauding the gestures of what we must call the first man (…) henceforth everything can only be mimicry (Ibid., 7/8). Thus, Walcott takes the stance that cultural goods never exist for themselves but, on the contrary, are always related to another in their intellectual invention and manual production, as it seems simply impossible to define originality or to localize the original version of a certain piece of art at all. By introducing the example of Carnival as a cultural practice in the Caribbean, Walcott emphasizes on the procreative dimension of mimicry, a phenomenon that always implicates efforts of imagination, reinterpretation and translation.² Subverting the meaning of Naipaul’s affront against the outcome of cultural production in the West Indies, Walcott twists the words of his rival – a rhetorical operation that impressively shows the creative dimension of mimicry: Nothing will always be created in the West Indies, for quite long time, because what will come out of there is like nothing one has ever seen before (Ibid., 9).

As an introductory example the debate illustrates the intensity with which Caribbean artists participated in public debates about identity formation and cultural production. Furthermore, the controversy serves to characterize three principal aspects that formed the core of the conflict and which also reflect the central interest of the present thesis; the construction of belonging and social identities in the Caribbean and the role that mimicry plays in these processes, both under the critical gaze of gender relations.

The intensity of the feud and its historico-political background correlates with the fact that both issues at stake, mimicry as well as belonging, received considerable attention in different fields of social research during the last three decades (Lähdesmäki et al. 2016). The most attractive elaborations have probably been formulated by Nira Yuval-Davis and Homi K. Bhabha, who introduced belonging and mimicry as analytical categories in order to re-think traditional and essentializing views on processes of social identification, highlighting instead the importance of fluid and more intersubjective approaches to those processes. Both authors share the conviction that social identities are not to be considered as fixed possessions of the subject, but more likely as something that is produced and constructed in the subject’s everyday relationships with Others. Furthermore, they place the subject and its agency at the center of attention, without neglecting the significance of social power relations. Hence, both concepts will allow us to engage in more detail with the leading question of the thesis: How do subjects negotiate their belongingness in everyday interactions with Others?

At the same time, however, it is important to point to the fact that both concepts have received different points of criticism for ignoring important dimensions of social realities due to some blind spots in their conceptualizations. These critical interventions mark the point of relevance of the present thesis, as the principal aim lies in dissolving the respective shortcomings of both concepts by synthesizing them into one single analytical framework. By virtue of doing so, the thesis will contribute to the elaboration of a new perspective concerning the role of the subject in the process of social identification and the construction of social boundaries. In approaching this goal, the thesis is structured in three different chapters.

The second chapter aims at a historical approximation to the construction of identities in the Caribbean, by which the relevance of the research interest becomes accentuated. Similar as in any region that was colonized by the European powers, knowledge production about the colonized Other formed a fundamental aspect of colonial rule in the West Indies. As a consequence, the non-White population of the region experienced a form of, what Spivak calls, epistemic violence with regard to their representation in colonial discourse (Spivak 1988, 280/281). The effects of this kind of epistemic violence may be best described in the words of Frantz Fanon, who stated that I am overdetermined from without (Fanon 2008, 87), or, as Jean Bernabé and his colleagues formulated: We [the Creoles] are fundamentally stricken with exteriority (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1990, 886). Thus, as a direct response to this epistemic violence and the objectification of the Caribbean Other in discourse, the area of cultural production has shown to be an important field in which diverse approaches on Caribbean identities were fought out on different levels, as they were discussed theoretically by authors and artists alike, as well as realized in practice through various literary representations.

Hence, while the majority of traditional European models of identity were based on the imagination of the national community in terms of a supposed ethnical homogeneity and racial purity of its members, the example of the Caribbean calls these concepts into question. In direct response to those European concepts, the discussion of identity in the Caribbean went hand in hand with the recognition that processes of cultural formation are, in fact, the result of dialogical relationships between different cultural entities, highlighting therewith the importance of hybridity as a precondition of social identities.

However, the last three decades have witnessed a new wave of Caribbean feminist voices that scandalize the blindness towards gender relations within those concepts. According to them, the discussion of Caribbean identities was largely held by men and is therefore inherently linked to a masculinist vision of the world – as we were already able to witness in the case of Naipaul and Walcott, for instance. While criticizing their reductionist understanding of identity by defining it primarily in ethno-cultural terms without taking into account other important aspects of social life, these interventions highlight the necessity to include an intersectional perspective that focuses on power relations in everyday life. Hence, this point marks the transition from the historical to the theoretical part of the thesis, which will deal with the concept of belonging, as it proves to be a more justifiable proposition for the understanding of social realities and identifications.

In the third chapter of the thesis, we will therefore engage more deeply with the concepts of belonging and mimicry, in order to synthesize both into a new analytical framework. In general, debates about feelings of belonging are deeply involved in relations of power, as the emotional intensity and the escalation of the conflict between Naipaul and Walcott has shown. This gets displayed, on the one hand, by the fact that Naipaul now and then encouraged racist stereotypes in order to reassure himself of his belonging to Great-Britain. On the other hand, however, Walcott went beyond the limits of legitimate critique by condemning Naipaul’s lack of belonging to the Caribbean as a cultural and social betrayal against the entire Caribbean population, therewith subordinating the individual freedom of decision-making under the supposed interest of an imagined collective.

This observation is in line with Nira