The Living Dead in Colonial and Neo-Colonial Worlds Fanon's Mass Attack on the Ego in Cliff, Kincaid and Aidoo

Samira Kawash delineates the importance of the appearance of a vampire in a case study by Fanon in the colonial context. "For Fanon, the colonized is rendered static, hemmed in both corporeally and existentially. Thus fixed, deprived of temporarily and historicity, the colonized become, at the limit, but another element of the landscape"(246). What Fanon terms a mass attack on the ego, the effect of the cultural and social forces of the colonial society culminating in a negation of the colonized individual's sense of identity (250), appears transcribed into a physical form in the malady of Fanon's patient who thinks he has been savaged by a vampire and is not alive and not dead (for victims of vampires can, of course, become vampires). Kawash notes that "if living depersonalization names the attack on the ego characteristic of life under colonialism, then the corresponding name for a corporeal manifestation might be living death" (Kawash 247). An examination of the figures that can represent the living dead, or bodies of colonial subjects, in terms of zombis, vampires and creatures that fall into similar definitions (bodies not alive and not dead, such as the head of the Gorgon and ghosts) in Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise show each author's analysis of the colonial or neo colonial word at hand in terms of Fanon and also how the difficulties of those colonial subjects that suffer mass attacks on the ego can be surmounted. The utility of a reading of Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy with Fanon's concept of the mass attack on the ego in mind is especially apparent in light of criticism of the novel: The novel's protagonist (Sissie), has been called racist, and her denigration of the German "natives" has been compared to Conrad's dehumanized African natives (Hoeller). While Hildegard Hoeller constructively points out that Conrad's Heart of Darkness is, in itself, the heart of darkness of Aidoo's novel (and that Killjoy critiques the racist codes in Heart of Darkness through its use of Conrad's conceptual schema), he does not touch on how the very (apparent) superiority on Sissie's part reflects the colonial depersonalization described by Fanon. The images that characterize this depersonalization in Killjoy are often vampires, zombies and a zombified state; they carry the same meaning that Fanon demonstrates within his patient's fear of the vampire and his experience with its removal of his blood: a state of suspension between life and death; half alive, and yet not dead; a physical manifestation of the psychological effects of depersonalization (Kawash). Aidoo associates these signs of depersonalization with the education that European colonizers have made the medium of "rescuing" native subjects; with the corrupt officials supported by neo-colonial powers; and with the farcical hope held out by racist systems for the acceptance of the full humanity of the African. Aidoo's critique of the cultural and political apparatuses of the colonial world is in itself resistance to them. Sissie articulates, in a letter to her Intended, that what they (Africans who have come to Europe to be educated) have learned is simply "how to die": according to the "comatose intellectuals" created in Europe, "we must hurry to lose our [cultural] identity quickly in order to join the great family of man"(120-1). Here the concept of a being controlled by the will of another (a rudimentary definition of a zombi offered by Wade Davis) relates precisely to the education received by Africans (and, indeed, other Third World peoples) in Europe. This is hammered in by the use of imagery that can relate to slavery, which contextualizes this mention of "comatose intellectuals": the Intended speaks of the "comatose intellectuals" as "gone, gone, gone"; Sissie remembers then "the auctioneers at the church harvests with their little bells. Yes, My Love, they are indeed gone, gone, gone"(121). …