Identity as Liminality in Post-Colonial Fiction: Nadine Gordimer.’s The Pickup and Bessie Head.’s A Question of Power

This paper sets out to analyze the interstitial/liminal aspect of postcolonial literature as ciphered in the narratives of Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head. A Question of Power and The Pickup both voice hybrid subjects in terms of race and gender, and thus represent the new epistemological space that this literature opens up. Focusing on the shifting identities of the female characters in these novels, we will establish a connection between the praxis of post-colonial writing as a continuous refocusing of cultural certainties and the relocation of the familiar in the uncanny. Keywords: Liminality, Post-colonial literature, Neo-colonialism, Hybridity. Resumen: Este artículo pretende analizar el aspecto liminal de la literatura postcolonial tal y como se refleja en la narrativa de Nadine Gordimer y Bessie Head. A Question of Power y The Pickup articulan la voz de individuos híbridos en cuanto a raza y género, y, de este modo, representan el nuevo espacio epistemológico que esta literatura abre. Al centrarnos en las identidades variables de los personajes femeninos de estas novelas, trataremos de establecer una conexion entre la praxis de la literatura postcolonial como un continuo reajuste de certezas culturales y la reubicación de lo familiar en lo extraño. Palabras clave: Liminalidad, literatura postcolonial, neocolonialismo, hibridez. In The Newly Born Woman (1986), Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément established the crucial connection between logocentrism and patriarchy that has informed feminist discussions at large. Interestingly enough, they also recognized in the hierarchical opposition man/woman the basis for the dichotomy “Superior/Inferior” that permeates colonial discourse. The female, like the colonial other, occupies “this space, always virginal, as matter to be subjected to the desire [the male] wishes to impart” (Cixous & Clément 1986: 65). As Luce Irigaray has put it, “[w]omen, signs, commodities, and currency always pass from one man to another; if it were otherwise, we are told, the social order would paralyze all commerce” (Irigaray 1998: 576). Commerce, patriarchy and colonial discourse depend on what Homi Bhabha has referred to as the concept of “fixity”. According to * Fecha de recepción: abril 2004 Fecha de aceptación y versión final: marzo 2005 ** Estudiante de doctorado, Curriculum of Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; venegas@email.unc. edu. Identity as Liminality in Post-Colonial Fiction:. 202 José L. Venegas Caro de la Barrera Odisea, no 6, ISSN 1578-3820, 2005, 201-214 Bhabha, fixity is “a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition” (Bhabha 1996: 37). This form of knowledge based on the stereotype is placed at the very core of the epistemic regulations that enable the emergence/persistence of colonial/patriarchal discourse. Within this epistemological framework, neither the female nor the colonial other are granted the possibility to reach any sort of personal identity, since they are fetishistically discursivized as objects of desire. It is when these objectified groups use the analytical tools that have been previously used to silence them, that the presence of patriarchal authority and the validity of colonial discourse are revealed as “ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” (Bhabha 1986: 169). This is where the concept of hybridity plays a central role as it unsettles the cornerstone binarism of the colonial/patriarchal episteme. “Hybridity,” Bhabha writes, “represents the ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification —a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority” (Bhabha 1986: 174). The voice of hybrid subjects is of central relevance for the study of postcolonial literature as it represents a new epistemological space that begs for self-authentication. In their desire to express their identity, post-colonial writers can be argued to go through some sort of rite of passage. As Victor Turner points out, Arnold Van Gennep, in Rites of Passage (1908) distinguishes “three phases in a rite of passage: separation, transition and incorporation” (Turner 1982: 25). For the transition stage, Van Gennep chose the term ‘limen’, the Latin for “threshold. ” In anthropological terms, the liminal stage operates as an anti-structure where the initiand in a given society experiences a blurring of social distinctions and strays from the prevalent order of the rest of the community. This critical term seems adequate to delve into the implications of the hybridity of post-colonial writing. Placed in the agonistic locus between center and margins, liminality is the non-space liable to generate new worlds. In Turner’s words, “ ‘[m]eaning’ in culture tends to be generated at the interfaces between established cultural subsystems . Liminality is a temporal interface whose properties partially invert those of the already consolidated order which constitutes any specific cultural ‘cosmos’” (Turner 1982: 41). However, it should be noted that the liminal does not irrevocably lead to a discursive center, but can operate as a permanently transitional space where referents stand in a catachrestic relation to cultural signifiers. Commenting on Turner’s inferences, Mihai I. Spariosu aptly affirms that “the liminal as the cunicular may not necessarily always lead back to a center; on the contrary, it may, under certain conditions, lead away from it in a steady and irreversible fashion” (Spariosu 1997: 38). The general implications of post-colonial narrative as liminal space can be closely tested in the analysis of two novels that trope the figure of the female and/or the colonial other as the interstitial locus where new epistemological ground emerges as a consequence of the voicing of the formerly silenced object of desire. Both Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001) and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) explore the possibilities of a hybridity that goes beyond the impositions of the neocolonial fixity of apartheid in their