‘As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape – the shape of my past.’ [1]
Jacques Derrida’s insights on spectrality provide an illuminating framework in which to engage with texts concerned with the unresolved histories of colonial oppression. The main concept proposed in his book Specters of Marx (1994) is the notion of ‘hauntology’, a term used to refer to a spectral sense of the past in the present. The principle idea that hauntology circles around – “Experience” of the past as to come, the one and the other absolutely absolute, beyond all modification of any present’ – is particularly useful when engaging with the postcolonial as a literary genre. [2] In a sense, it dismantles the idea of the ‘postcolonial’ altogether by refusing temporal divisions between past, present and future. In its failure to acknowledge historical ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends,’ hauntology rejects the distinction between an oppressed ‘colonial’ past and a freed ‘postcolonial’ present. Instead, we are called to live ‘beyond all living present’, ‘before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.’ [3] We must ‘learn to live with ghosts.’ [4]
In what follows, I will draw on the Derridian concept of hauntology to explore how the history of oppression in the West Indies is memorialized in the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid and Jean Rhys. I will focus on Kincaid’s second novel Lucy (1990) that relays the experience of a nineteen-year-old girl who leaves her British-ruled Caribbean homeland to au pair for a wealthy family in New York. Alongside Lucy, I will examine Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) that tells the story of Anna Morgan, a young Creole woman living an alienated existence in London following her forced departure from her home in the West Indies. A parallel can be drawn between Lucy and Anna whom despite their different sociohistorical locations both identify with the oppressed. Thus equally for both, the past coexists with the present as their individual identities are bound within a wider historical context of colonial oppression. I will argue that by permitting this traumatic history to survive as a haunting element within the colonial subjects present, both Rhys and Kincaid mystify conventional understandings of history as temporally located in ‘modalized presents.’[5] Instead, they ‘think the ghost.’ Indeed, they ‘speak of the ghost, to the ghost and with it’,[6] as the oppressive weight of history remains a ubiquitous echo in their protagonists’ consciousness.
Before further analysis, it is necessary to assert the critical role of memory in establishing this historical consciousness. Both Rhys and Kincaid use memory to bind their narratives, and can be seen to engage in what Derrida refers to as a ‘politics of memory, of inheritance and of generations.’[7] In February of 1934, Rhys wrote of her novel in a letter to fellow writer Evelyn Scott; ‘The big idea … something to do with time being an illusion I think. I mean that the past exists – side by side with the present, not behind it; but what was – is.’ [8] Whether it is intrusive flashbacks to the smells and colours of Dominica or fleeting memories of imperial aggression, Rhys locates the Caribbean as a haunting presence within Anna’s consciousness via a series of fragmented disruptions. By contrast, Lucy’s present is directly informed by the history of colonial oppression, as she interprets her new world and relationships through the lens of the conquered. Despite their different approaches to locating history within their narratives, memory plays an equally pivotal role for both in binding past with present. Yet according to Brogan, memory performs a more fundamental function; it confirms who we are, as ‘the loss of faith in memory spells the erosion of ethnic identity; when we are close to forgetting, we are close to not existing.’[9] Following this, hauntological memory functions as a powerful mode of resistance, as the act of remembering itself offers Lucy and Anna a means of withstanding the threat of ontological erasure that the colonizer imposes on the colonized.
The traumatic history of the Atlantic Slave Trade that span from the fifteenth through to the nineteenth centuries haunts a large proportion of postcolonial fiction. The traumas sustained by this history are collective in nature, and Rhys and Kincaid are not the first nor will be the last to engage with the specters of slavery. For Lucy, the ‘spirit’[10] of the slave lives on in the power dynamics between herself and her employers, Mariah and Lewis, as she interprets her role of servitude in their household as a reformation of the ‘master’/‘slave’ dichotomy. In the novel’s opening lines, Lucy informs us that ‘the room in which I lay was a small room just off the kitchen – the maid’s room.’ She describes the room as ‘enclosed like a box – a box in which cargo travelling a long way should be shipped.’[11] By use of the word ‘cargo’, Kincaid alludes to the commodification and shipment of the enslaved across the Atlantic Sea. By aligning Lucy’s position as au pair to the history of slavery, a ‘spectral moment’[12] is registered and the past collapses into the present. What is of more interest, however, is Lucy’s resistance to the inferior position that history endeavors to site her in, and her following assertion – ‘But I was not Cargo’[13] – marks her first confrontation with the indelible stains of history.
The ‘slave’ is a more ambiguous figure in Voyage in the Dark as typical power relations between colonizer and colonized are complicated by Anna’s racial privileging as a ‘white’ Creole. Nonetheless, the servant upholds a ghostly existence in the protagonist’s consciousness. This is best evidenced in Chapter 5 as the words ‘Maillotte Boyd, aged 18’[14] repeat in Anna’s mind whilst she lies in bed with Walter. A name, as we are informed earlier, that she had read on ‘an old slave-list at Constance once.’[15] If, as Derrida asserts, ‘the specter is always animated by a spirit’[16] then the ‘spirit’ of the specter here is the enslaved woman. Yet in place of Lucy’s stark resistance, Anna displays a slave-like submission to male imperial domination by following with ‘But I like it like this. I don’t want it any other way but this’.[17] Gregg reads this scene as ‘the “sins” of Anna’s slave-owning fathers and their commodification of the slave woman’s body recoiling upon the daughter as the “past” and the “present” converge and the “I” is shown to be “Other.”[18] Whilst Anna’s inherent privilege in the colonial power structures determines a different relationship with the history of slavery, it is clear that much like Lucy, the oppressive past of the West Indies has laid the foundations for her present relationship with Walter. Where Lucy overtly sites herself as ‘servant’ to Mariah ‘the master’,[19] Anna seems to employ the Carib to symbolize her own sense of estrangement. As Hawthorne puts it, she ‘identifies with the Carib as a symbol of loss, defeat and passivity, like her, a victim of European domination.’[20] Thus despite Anna and Lucy’s respective submission and resistance, the inferiority complex that haunts both protagonists in the post-slavery era is the direct result of a collective memory of imperial racial and ethnic oppression.
The act of naming, or failure to do so, is employed strategically by both writers as a ghostly reminder of the colonizers attempt to erase the colonized. In an interview with Moira Ferguson in 1993, Kincaid tells us that ‘the people who lose … they don’t have names’, but ‘the winners all have names.’[21] In Lucy, the granting and denying of names appears to be haunted by the historical power dynamics between the victors and the vanquished. The novel’s first chapter is entitled ‘Poor Visitor’, which is the name that Lewis assigns Lucy shortly after her arrival, as he perceives her to ‘not be part of things.’[22] By naming Lucy merely the ‘Visitor’, Lewis adopts a Columbus-esque demeanor in ascribing a name to what is not his to claim. He performs a ghostly re-enactment of the naming process that Columbus undertook himself on discovering the island of Antigua in 1493. This obvious association between naming and claiming essentially forces Lucy to re-endure the pain and shame of the past. However, the final chapter is entitled ‘Lucy,’ after the eventual spelling out of her full name ‘Lucy Josephine Potter’ at the end of the novel. Mariah and Lewis, on the other hand, remain until the novel’s closing with no patronymic name. Whilst Ferguson believes this to be Kincaid alluding to the historical erasure of African names,[23] I would argue that the oppositional granting/eradicating of names here performs a more pivotal function. It signifies a small conquest of Lucy’s own as it reaffirms her own individual identity whilst reversing the threat of ontological erasure onto the colonizers. Once again, Lucy uses her present situation as a tool to combat the past and poses a stark challenge to the inferior position that history endeavors to site her in.
Rhys employs naming also, but in order to highlight the ignorant tendency to homogenize ‘native’ people rather than to oppose oppressive practices. This is evident in the opening pages of Voyage in the Dark as Maudie informs us that Anna gets called ‘the Hottentot’ due to her being born in ‘the West Indies or somewhere.’ [24] By naming Anna ‘the Hottentot’ – a name used to refer to the Khoikhoi native peoples of southwestern Africa – she is at once dehumanized and denied an individual identity. Furthermore, by referring to her birthplace as ‘the West Indies or somewhere’, Maudie fails to acknowledge a place as well as a person. Instead, Anna is homogenized as ‘Other.’ Joe can be seen to repeat this process at a later point in the narrative as he suggests Anna’s father to be named ‘Old Taffy Morgan.’[25] By falsely naming her father in this generic way, Joe denies Anna an individual heritage. Instead, he suggests her existence to be marked only by a collective Caribbean history. Whilst it is evident that Rhys and Kincaid engage with naming in their novels to different ends, for both its employment is historically rooted in and haunted by the colonizers desire to deny the colonized an individual identity.
Kincaid’s notion of ‘Made in England’ – those three words, as she tells us, that ‘ran through every part of my life’ – maintains a hauntological presence in both novels.[26]
For the protagonists, it functions as a relentless reminder of the history of imperial rule and the overbearing presence of England and ‘Englishness’ in the lives of the colonized. This is best illustrated in Lucy’s response to Mariah’s suggestion of going to feed ‘the minions.’ [27] After pondering on the word ‘minion’, she resolves that ‘A word like that would haunt some one like me; the place where I came from was a dominion of someplace else.’[28] Here, the word ‘minion’ rouses Lucy’s historical consciousness, as it stands as a signifier to her identity as inextricably bound with the history of imperial aggression. On hearing the word ‘minion’, Lucy experiences the past as present as her position of inferiority within the colonial power structures is reaffirmed by the colonizer. The fact that she receives this impression due to a mistranslation of Mariah’s meaning if of even greater significance, as it demonstrates the ubiquitous, albeit sensitive nature of Lucy’s repressed past.
Where the history of British imperial rule figures explicitly in Kincaid’s narrative, it is often coded and embedded within Rhys’s. For example, in Chapter 5 as the phrase ‘What is purity? For Thirty-five Years the Answer has been Bourne’s Cocoa’ repeatedly interrupts Anna’s consciousness. [29] ‘Purity’ is a brand of Cocoa that has been acquired for English consumption through the imperialist exploitation of East African raw material.[30] Thus the advertisement functions here to expose the very irony of the concept of ‘Made in England’, as the product’s true identity has evidently been misappropriated. It is interesting to note that this haunting reminder of imperialist exploitation intercepts the narrative as Anna spots the advertisement on a nearby newspaper. In contrast to Kincaid, Rhys appears less able to situate Anna’s Caribbean history alongside England in any consistent fashion. This is likely due to her identity as a Creole, as floating between the imperial English and ‘black’ native, she perceives herself to be ontologically divided. Rhys uses formal fragmentation to reflect Anna’s conflicted sense of self as she abruptly oscillates between the past and present, the real and imaginary. Moments of history are arbitrarily located in the narrative as if they are grappling for existence, for example when Anna follows on from a song with a formal passage on Caribbean history; ‘The Caribs indigenous to this island were a warlike tribe … but they are now practically exterminated.’[31] Immediately after, the narrative switches back to the present as Anna ‘ate the lemon cheese tart and began the song all over again.’[32] In other instances, Rhys italicizes fleeting allusions to colonialism in order to replicate a similar sense of conflicting voices. Both writers, however, can be seen to employ repetition to ingrain historicity within both the protagonist and readers consciousness. It is clear that memory operates on a more intrusive level for Anna, as unlike Lucy, she is denied a cohesive sense of identity. Yet despite this difference, both Rhys and Kincaid ensure that the memory of imperial rule exists as a haunting presence within their protagonists’ consciousness, which informs and navigates their perception throughout.
Hauntological memory primarily functions in the novels to aid the protagonists’ awareness of the colonizer’s desire to control, possess and appropriate. Whether it is the appropriation of history or identity, the act has its roots in the violent historical relationship between the conqueror and the conquered. The daffodil leitmotif that runs throughout Lucy’s narrative functions as the exemplary colonial trope, as the Wordsworth poem to which it refers has become emblematic of the indoctrinating colonial education system.[33] Mariah orders Lucy ‘Now, Look at this … These are daffodils. I’m sorry about the poem, but I’m hoping you’ll find them lovely all the same.’[34] Mariah’s desire to navigate Lucy’s gaze here is interpreted by Paravisini-Gebert as a ‘mimicry of colonial control’,[35] yet the colonizers attempted mastery of the colonized in fact works to expose the latters resistance to this control. Lucy responds aggressively; ‘I wanted to kill them. I wished that I had an enormous scythe; I would just walk down the path, dragging it alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down at the place where they emerged from the ground.’[36] Lucy’s urge to kill the daffodils here can be likened to Anna’s desire to destroy the gloves ‘straight from England’ in Voyage In the Dark – ‘Oh, you naughty girl, you’re trying to split those gloves; you’re trying to split those gloves on purpose.’[37] Both the daffodils and the gloves act as signifiers to the colonizer’s relentless desire to control and possess, and are bound to an entire history of colonial oppression. Furthermore, Mariah’s ordering of Lucy to look at the daffodils causes the past and the present to collide as Lucy casts her ‘beloved daffodils’ into a scene of ‘conquered and conquests’, and the colonial power structures in their relationship are reaffirmed.[38]
To conclude, hauntological memory is continuously altering both experience and perception throughout Lucy and Voyage in the Dark. Equally, the historical consciousness that Rhys and Kincaid use to bind their narratives functions to bring their protagonist’s repressed past into line with their present, as a sense of ‘filial memory’ enables them to hear ‘the rumbling sound of ghosts chained to ghosts.’[39] However, as I have illustrated, both writer’s engage with this collective history in very different ways and to very different ends. By the closing of Kincaid’s novel, Lucy does in fact acknowledge historical ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’; ‘I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past … your past is the person you no longer are.’[40] Whilst Derrida asserts that one must reckon with one’s specters, [41] it appears that where Lucy confronts and overcomes the specters of colonialism, Anna somewhat submits to them. The former’s resolution on the ‘past’ suggests that history-making has become a process of cathartic healing for her just as much as for Kincaid, who professes; ‘I am someone who has to make sense of my ancestral past – where I am from, my historical past, my group historical past, my group ancestry’[42] It is necessary to note, however, that for both writers hauntology performs an equally fundamental function in enabling them to ‘recover’ a Caribbean history that is otherwise omitted. Through writing, they are able to somewhat rescue the West Indies of their childhood, ‘for never was anything more vanished and forgotten.’[43] Undeniably, Rhys and Kincaid reconstruct colonial history in a way that cannot be achieved in historical texts or scientific theories, and returning to my introductory point, both novels, in their refusal to consign the unresolved histories of colonial oppression to the past, seek to counter the celebration of the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial.’
[1] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 90
[2] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xx
[3] Ibid., p. xix
[4] Ibid., p. xviii
[5] Jacque Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xx
[6] Ibid., p. xix
[7] Ibid., p. xix
[8] Jean Rhys, Letters 1931-1966, p. 24
[9] Kathleen Brogan, ‘Ethnic Memory, Ethnic Mourning’, in Cultural Haunting, p. 130
[10] Jaques Derrida, ‘the specter is always animated by a spirit’, Specters of Marx, p. 3
[11] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 7
[12] Jacques Derrida, a ‘spectral moment’ is one that ‘no longer belongs to time’, Specters of Marx, p. xx
[13] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 7
[14] Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 48
[15] Ibid., p. 47
[16] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 3
[17] Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 48
[18] Veronica Marie Gregg, ‘The 1840s to the 1900s: The Creole and the post slavery West Indies’, in Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole, p. 119
[19] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 143
[20] Evelyn Hawthorne, ‘Persistence of (Colonial) Memory’: Jean Rhys’s Carib Texts and Imperial Historiography, in A Review of International English Literature, p. 94
[21] Jamaica Kincaid, ‘A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid’, in The Kenyon Review, p. 185
[22] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 13
[23] Moira Ferguson, ‘Lucy: A New Site’, in Where the Land Meets the Body, p. 108
[24] Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 12 (accentuation added)
[25] Ibid., p. 107
[26] Jamaica Kincaid, ‘On Seeing England for the First Time’, in Transition, p. 33
[27] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 37
[28] Ibid., p. 37
[29] Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 50
[30] Veronica Marie Gregg, ‘The 1840s to the 1900s: The Creole and the post slavery West Indies’, in Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole, p. 124
[31] Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 91
[32] Ibid., p. 91
[33] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Lucy (1990)’, in Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion p. 123
[34] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 29
[35] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Lucy (1990)’, in Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion p. 126
[36] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 29
[37] Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 36
[38] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 29
[39] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 5
[40] Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 137
[41] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xx
[42] Jamaica Kincaid, ‘A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid’, in The Kenyon Review, p. 171
[43] Jean Rhys, Letters 1931-1966, p. 133
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