I wrote the preceding explanation of the work in the midst of making it, and as an outline to the curators of the show Home/Ground as part of SCAPE: New Zealand Art and Industry Biennial thus, I suspect in part foregrounding themes relative to the curatorial premise. For strangely as I read back over it today I am struck by my elucidation upon certain themes and surprised to find a silence regarding those I now consider (remember) as being central to the work. Is this what a re-reading is? In the space since the work was made my attitudes have shifted? My reasons and understanding. And I bring these unbeknownst to my own work? For I recall the motives for this project as radically different to what I selected to write on. If I had not written down these thoughts, I would assume that the ones I hold now in view of these works are the ones I held then when I was making them. Which 'me' made these works I wonder? What meaning was I (am I) trying to extricate from my emotions, my thoughts?This earlier text reads so distressingly (horrifyingly) personal; about my child hood - of fitting in, of being mixed race – and searching for a resolution of this state: being positive about the hybrid. I can see that it comes entrenched with Bhabhian desire to reassimilate this term. To grasp it, to show it off for what it can be: ambivalent, beyond binary definitions, fluid. To own it. Yet today, I can help but think that this hopefulness wreaks of a young adult trying to affirm herself, and assuage those teenage years of doubt, brownness( not white, not black) and insecurity. These positivist aspirations seem forced with hope. Seem naïve with hope. Now I don't think I am so concerned with my criss-crossed body, maybe I have finally grown into myself, or maybe I have just given up. Whichever, in this position of self-hood, I see other vital things in the work.
The title is a perfect entry for this re-reading – its circumscribes a resistance to the hybrid figure I outline, and yet I don't elaborate on this literary reference in placing the work. The line comes from the final passage of EM Forsters' A Passage to India, with Fielding and Aziz are out on their last ride together, trying, as always in that novel, to connect. Fielding rides into Aziz and beseeches: 'Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. 'It's what I want. Its what you want.' But it cannot happen. The horses veer off, the earth surges up between them, and the two men are wrest apart in this deafening confrontation of the world around them which cries out in its hundredfold voices 'No, not yet,' and to which the sky in agreement responds 'No, not there.'In a novel which strives for meeting points, lingering at the crossroads of our hearts and minds and which similarly echoes Margaret's passion in Howards End -
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
- at the close of A Passage To India we are shown the impossibility of such trespass within the world we exist. A world which seems to beckon us with promises of connectedness and yet seems destined to fail us each time we attempt a crossing over. What is this nature minding us to step back? Unfortunately it is not the wind or the trees which conspire against us, but simply our nature, (again the theme recurs) we make these distinctions in out minds and then believe them to be true. Adela tries to know Aziz and is confounded by her desires and her memory and her culture in a foreign place. In a cave. Aziz tries to know Fielding, befriends Mrs Moore and accommodates Adela's many interrogations only to be confounded by language: cultural, judicial and intimate. The beast and the monk cannot be assimilated, will deny coming together. The hybrid will be resisted by language, denied representation.
In Homi K Bhabha's brilliant chapter Articulating the Archaic in The Location of Culture, he explores early modernist colonial literature as defined by Walter Benjamin - the sum of a complex cultural memory elicited in the tension of the homelessness of the modern novelist with the arcane wisdom of the storyteller whose craft is assigned by 'his own people' - to examine what he posits as the conspiracy of silence around the colonial truth. Reading specifically Forster's A Passage to India and Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, he unearths an inextricable and great silence. A silence which not only ascribes the indescribable, but which goes so far as to mock the function of language, the dominant narrative. A silence which refuses translation: Boum ouboum is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it... if one spoke silences in the place or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same ou-boum.
Bhabha finds this resistant attitude in the Boum ouBoum of the Kawa Dol in the Marabar caves. Precisely because for whatever else proceeds in those caves also precedes this novel of Colonial confusion: of utterances, of testimony, of interpretation and translation. In between the want to reach out, to understand, between identity and reality we are left only with a silence that will not be answered, that sticks its thumb up at the binary divisions of colonial space: nature/culture, chaos/civility. Following this thread through the literature we pick it up in the quest for the words, descriptions and narratives which underline Marlowe's search for Kurtz. Having journeyed through the barbarism of the Belgian Congo, faced with the enigma of place, lacking meaning, with deranged utterances: 'words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares' we are left with 'the Horror, the Horror.' And again with Nostromo; having embarked upon the mission of his life he is betrayed and berated within the silence of the Great Isabel, and mocked by the owls death call 'Ya-acabo! Ya-acabo! it is finished, it is finished'
This is the conspiratorial mocking silence of Colony, the Horror, the finish, at the end of two points is the denial of what is occurring: the hybridisation of space, of relations, of language. It is this denial that Bhabha has defined, argued against and provided salient alternatives across the breath of his work. And I fancy it was in heartfelt agreement with this contention that I wrote this first explanation of the series. So then, what for this silence? Is it just another colonial betrayal of the issues which underpin this project. Or something else?
A cursory glance over the pairings I have drawn exhibits the language of Empire that lies within. Of cultural and political conflict. Of cold wars and chilly embraces. Of back door dealings and couplings. Communist walls and emotional barriers. There was an obvious tongue-in-cheek employment of these relations of Empire with the positions of the bodies. Consent or rape? Enlightenment or plunder? These are the meeting points and trespasses of Colonial bodies, and which Ashish Nandy so deftly illustrates in The Intimate Enemy. Perhaps this is the strength of this particular body of work, the complete ambivalence they encompass, and in doing so they attempt to transcend the confounded silence of the colonial narrative, and give voice to the unknown happenings, be they in caves, across dark stretches of river, in the storehouses of memory . And perhaps my first explanation was wider in scope with its positive aspirations, then my current one. “Intimacy: the word holds the horror…Intimacy: it was violation and self-violation”, writes Naipal in the Mimic Men.
I am still muddle-headed by the shifts that have occurred across my field of vision. Of thinking. And perhaps this impossibility I have come up against in my re-reading and re-visiting of this work comes closer to the silence at the heart of this project. And in my need to interrogate this work, and the narratives within: Empire, sense and sexuality, and my current reaction to the hybrid figure I find an answer in Bhabha's diagnosis of Adela's character post the Marabar Caves :
obsessively trying to think the incident out, somatizes the experience in repeated, hysterical narratives. Her body, Sebastianlike, is covered in colonies of cactus spines, and her mind which attempts to disavow the body – hers, his – returns to obsessively: 'Now, everything transferred to the surface of my body. - ... He never actually touched me once. ... It all seems such nonsense ... a sort of shadow.' It is the echochamber of memory
An obsessive return.My body pierced with the cactus spines of Colony will not relent. It makes an obsessive return to the body of work and repeatedly attempts to understand it, and remember it. I think there is a sadness within these works. The heads often hung in melancholic despair, featureless. Through their abstraction I thought I was pursuing grander aims, the sky , the cosmos– the unknown limits this hybrid encounter may push towards. Beyond the totems the scars and taboos of the body.
But can we escape the subject? Baudrillard's cunning proposal states the object has already defeated the subject, and the trick is accepting this position. A disappointed definition. Is this not the ruse of the Kawa Dol that sets mind and body astir, the cynical mocking owl, the brilliant shades that transform our perception of a man. And this position of acceptance is not yet successfully straddled by this hybrid subject that we want to put up on a post-colonial pedestal. And still I can't get past that. (Not through the art work or the writing.) The boulders are still separating any possible intercourse.
A disavowal of the body.These contemporary hybrid places we inhabit, it is true can no longer simply be written off as nonsense. In the space between you and me. Us and them, we are marked. Not simply echo chambers. For we are touched and likewise our bodies are not just the memories but also the scars - of these historical shifts, of empires, of colonies, of white men on black women, of men against men. These are today's bodies and testimonies to the past. Yet they are also intimate places, of our mixed histories, our caresses across these places, between these places, between ourselves. Be it the hybrid space of interlopers, or the hybrid bodies of people like me, like my partner half Egyptian half Italian, there is always something denied, for it still remains that we can never be both here and there. There is no home. No ground. And as much as the hybrid cypher desires to bridge these terms, the home/grounds will not support it. Thus we will never access Italy or Egypt or Malaysia – no matter how much we may speak.
And so I will continue to introduce myself mindful to the Australian twang that accompanies this naming of myself, and wait with baited breath to have this name thrown back at me with the strong consonants, singing vowels and questioning inflexion of the native speaker. 'Its complicated,' I am defined, as others weary of explaining: 'Yeah she may look a bit like us, but brother she definitely ain't.' And it is complicated. The hybrid position is complex, neither here nor there. Always changing. Always challenging a re-reading of the master narrative. A re-viewing. And yet, I cannot escape feeling that the silence cannot be de-limited within the borders of the Colonial narrative, any more than it can be possessed by our Post-Colonial situations. It is still with us - tailing our movements in that deafening,arcane silence which occurs with each introduction of ourselves. The silence which Bhabha has tried to place with the hybrid – the in between figure – is not an answer. For it becomes in its turn just another subject with which we we begin to define against. And more alarming, Baudrillard again, with which the object has already taken its due. The paradisal union of two halves is just that - a yearning. A myth.
Always on the move. A shape-shifter.
The wider we travel - us half-castes, us off-castes - further afield from those hybrid cities of Sydney, Vancouver and Auckland in search of definitions it too follows, and just seems to exacerbate the non-sense we encounter. So still it echoes, never a home coming, just a constant straddling – a constant reaching out for time, for place, for peoples, for hearts. For hearts....
