On the previous writing I wrote about the relation
between literature and structure and also representation and structure. What I
left behind, what I did not write in that writing is a conclusion that leads to
a kind of question, do literature plus structure create representation? What made
me come to such conclusion, or question, is that by structuring an image
through the means of literature, anyone can represents anything and that also
prove that literature does have some use for anyone too.
Now this usage of literature, or the usefulness of
literature has been used, utilized by some. One of its examples is the writers
of post-colonial literature. Reading such literature make me realize that such
literature exist, and was made is for none other reason than to picture what
colonialism had left behind on its once colonized territory. One of
post-colonial works is One out of Many written
by Naipaul. In that short story, the main protagonist, a native Indian, is,
seemingly, forced in the end to adapt to his new life in the United States
because the behavior he has always do doesn’t fit with the value in the new
place.
What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a
writing, a mode of represen-tation, that marginalizes the monumentality of
history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which
supposedly makes it imitable.
What I see, when I relate the work with the above
quotation from Bhabha’s Of Mimicry and Men,
Naipaul represented post-colonial experience through the work, perhaps to
describe it, and then displayed the mockery of the mimicry through the
protagonist. The protagonist did the mimicry after experiencing unpleasant
experience when he walked around in the United States only to find that
everyone sees him as a weird person. The U.S., to my knowledge, doesn’t have
anything to do with the colonizing of India by the British, but the seeing of
the protagonist as a weird person by some people of the U.S. in the story, some
of them being Indians too, displays that the colonized is weird, is different,
is more inferior to the power of the West or the colonizer. The mimicry done by
the protagonist seems to display that, even by mimicking the more powerful
culture or values that do not belong to him, doesn’t solve his problem of
finding his own new identity in the new place, because in the end the
protagonist is having an identity crisis that led him to the decision that he
won’t be the native/the colonized, and he won’t be the western side, colonizer
side of a person.
Mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or
repression of difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends
presence by displaying it in part, metonymically.
Relating that to Bhabha’s, I guess, the protagonist
did that to defend himself from the eyes that see him as unfit or weird for
them. It is not only about taste I think, but also about his identity to the
people in the new place, America. He started to question why this “me”, the
behavior that I have seems to be a problem, seems to be abnormal for them, where
in my home, back in India, his behavior does just fine to the people there. A
person only defends when he or she is in danger of something, and to the
protagonist, perhaps, the danger came from the environment that rejects him
through his conduct. The protagonist, that displays post-colonial experience,
needed to mimic, because he needs camouflage to defend him and his presence,
and the protagonist did it metonymically by trying to present himself as not
himself, but as the new environment wants him to be.
Works cited:
Naipaul, V.S. One out of Many.
Bhabha,
Homi. 1984. “Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in October, Vol.
28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis (Spring, 1984;
pp.125-133). The MIT Press retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467
