EN3264 | Final Paper | Question 5 | LEE Zhu'ai Sin | A0078720A| 19th November 2013

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EN3264 In Other Wor(l)ds: Postcolonial Theory and Literature

Final Paper

Dr Tania Roy

Politics, Prevarications and Possibilities: The Melancholia of Exile

Question 5 Examine the politics of exile as it ensues from the loss and estrangement of
authentic cultural origins as an especially post-colonial possibility through Said and/or
Bhabha. Then take up your insights into a reading of Rhys and/or Salih.

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Exile, described as an "unhealable rift" of "essential sadness", "terminal loss", "anxiety and
estrangement", features prominently in postcolonial narratives of plural and partial histories
both at the individual and national level (Said 1994, pp. 137). The person in exile, a veritable
"theatre of war" for the performance of colonial ideology, is simultaneously a site of
resistance to these practiced power structures and bereft of the possibility of ultimately
transcending the political exclusion to which he or she is consigned this is the true tragedy
of exile (Bhabha 1984, 131). This brief essay will attempt an analysis of the exilic positions,
prevarications and potential in key characters in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening
Mists and Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark.
(Dis)locating the Exile
Exile is the traumatic inscription of colonial power upon the colonial subject through
irremediable physical, metaphysical and cultural displacement. This deracination is inevitably
accompanied by feelings of helplessness, dislocation, alienation and fear characters such as
Teoh Yun Ling and Anna Morgan testify to this. "It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding
everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born againA curtain fell and then I
was here" says Anna, still longing for a return to the sunny, animated and romanticised West
Indies from whence she had been "untimely" plucked and sent to a cold, still England (Rhys
1934, pp. 7, 15). She remembers only of that daunting passage "hundreds thousands of white
people white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the
other all alike all stuck together" and the certainty of "oh I'm not going to like this place I'm
not going to like this place I'm not going to like this place" (Rhys 1934, pp. 15-16). This
trauma is similarly reflected in the cruelty of Captain Fumio toward Yun Ling and her sister
in the labour camp in Malaya. The savagery of colonial power and the agony which
accompanies that displacement is most viscerally enunciated through the crude chopping off
of the two last fingers on Yun Ling's dominant hand (Tan 2012, pp. 270-271, 281). Such acts

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of barbarism mark a form of physical exile from which Yun Ling, her sister and the other
nameless, faceless casualties of the colonial enterprise cannot return. Less noticeable but no
less powerful an indictment of the political puissance wielded by colonisers is the biological
programming that results from the use of coercive institutions Yun Ling spends only three
years in a labour camp but the habit of rising early stays with her for the rest of her life (Tan
2012, pp. 20, 48). It is the irreversibility of such inscriptions of colonial power upon its exile
subject that contributes to the sense of catastrophe.
The exile's marginal position is also powerfully entrenched by the secondary social exile
from their original communities stemming from the primary act of violence against them.
Military comfort woman, the jugun ianfu, occupied a particularly insignificant social space
because, though victimised, they "would never have been accepted back by their families"
because of the shame attributed spoiled chastity; they are thus victimised a second time by an
unsympathetic and unforgiving society (Tan 2012, pp. 107-108). Yun Hong surrendered
every last hope of a "true" escape from that prison camp because she understood the
implication of her sexual service of Japanese soldiers: irreversible exclusion from the process
of post-Occupation rehabilitation (Tan 2012, pp. 274). Chin Lai Kew, a young jugun ianfu
rescued by Aritomo, was subsequently sold into prostitution by her own father and thereby
committed to an equally brutal exile for a second time (Tan 2012, pp. 311).
Perhaps the most tragic form of exile is, however, the gradual and permanent decline of the
female protagonists' mental faculties. Anna's exhaustion with the superficiality and dreariness
of London means leads to the drifting in and out of unproductive sexual affairs, the frequent
interpolation of happier memories from her childhood days into waking consciousness and
unassuageable depression, and the onset of Primary Progressive Aphasia in Yun Ling sends
her scuttling to recover memories before they become a "sandbar, cut off from the shore by
the incoming tide...what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds,

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without an identity, with no future, no past"(Tan 2012, pp. 33). The threat of becoming,
against her will, such a non-entity is an indication of that deep-seated anxiety inspired by
exile. Because mental exile is the disembodiment of the self and an incomprehensible,
inexorable destruction of identity, the "pathos of exile" is therefore that homecoming is "out
of the question" (Said 1994, pp. 142). What options are left for the exile then?
"The sheer fact of isolation and displacement" can result in two very different reactions from
the exile, first the fetishisation of exile, wherein the exile "resists all efforts at amelioration,
acculturation and community", and second, where the exile sacrifices "critical perspective"
and "moral courage" in order to belong. The futility of repeated attempts to "belong"
frequently give way to the strident assertion of a new, if hybrid, identity or nationalism (Said
1994, pp. 146). The following section will address this in greater detail.
Fetishisation of Exilic Condition as Identity-in-Difference
"Exiles are always eccentrics who feel their differencethe exile jealously insists on his or
her right to refuse to belong " (Said 1994, pp. 144-145). The act of naming or labelling is one
way through which difference (and ethnic difference in particular) is contended. Anna was
especially sensitive to this pervasive if not always entirely conscious Other-ing political
programme of categorisation; when Hester remarks that "I always thought that considering
everything you were to be much pitied", Anna exclaims in response that, "You're trying to
make out that my mother was coloured" (Rhys 1934, pp. 56). As a result of this extreme
sense of difference, Anna also repeatedly tells Walter Jeffries, her first lover, that "I'm the
fifth generation born out there, on my mother's sidea real West Indianthe fifth generation
on my mother's side", thereby reifying the ethnic profile she otherwise wants desperately to
be rid of. This compulsive and continual restaging of her identity as "coloured" functions to

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defiantly substantiate the label that others actively give her as someone "born somewhere
hot the girls call her Hottentot" (Rhys 1934, pp. 12).
However, readers discover her desire to actually fit into white society in London: Anna
quickly appropriates the materialism of England in her greedy desire for expensive clothing, a
symbol of status and wealth (pp. 23-24). She also remembers that "the sins of the fathers
Hester said are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" the verbal
insistence on the fact that she was (at least) five generations removed from the supposed
contamination of blackness is met with the disillusioning reality of the inescapability of that
singularly despised heritage (Rhys 1934, pp. 45-47). At the same time Anna experiences
double exile through the rejection of the black community, embodied in Francine's dislike for
Anna's whiteness; "I would never be able to explain the [Francine] that I hated being white"
(Rhys 1934, pp. 62). "Just beyond the frontier between "us" and the "outsiders" is the perilous
territory of not-belonging", a state of perpetual limbo, of the desperate oscillation between
two poles never perfectly reached; this is among the most unspeakably terrifying of
peripheral positions an exile is forced to occupy (1994, pp. 140).
Stubbornly resisting the names she had been given (Tominaga names her Kumomori, for
instance) and the names she might have adopted, Yun Ling announces and affirms her right
to an 'original', pre-war identity: "My name is Teoh Yun LingI never changed the order of
my nameI had never taken on an English name just to make it easier for anyone" (Tan
2012, pp. 37). Later on, Yun Ling also asserts her right to be different by permitting Aritomo
to design and create a horimono for her, despite the fact that to be tattooed meant to be exiled
once again from community tattoos were commonly accepted marks of an outcast or
criminal (Tan 2012, pp. 160, 162, 284, 332-3). The horimono could also be an attempt at
recomplete a physique mutilated and broken by war, although one-eyed Magnus himself puts
an end to that possibility when he sadly tells Yun Ling, "[That feeling of incompleteness] will

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never go away" (Tan 2012, pp. 195). In her attempt to reconstitute or restore an earlier
identity, Yun Ling also tries to build a garden in honour of her sister, mimicking what Yun
Hong's life may have been like if she had not been killed (Tan 2012, pp. 153). Similarly,
Tatsuji abandons the 'glory' of being a tokko pilot for Teruzen's dream to live a good life as a
simple fisherman in Kampong Penyu (Tan 2012, pp 235-236). Nevertheless, these dreams are
remnants of an inaccessible, irretrievable past; the exile is left to fumble through identities
constructed upon clumsy categories of "victim", "perpetrator", "colonised" and "coloniser".
Edward Said discusses the intimate relationship between nationalism and exile wherein
"nationalism is an assertion of belonging[which] fends off exile"; two are "opposites
[necessarily] informing and constituting each other" (Said 1994, pp. 139-140). Yun Ling is
almost unable to learn from Aritomo because of her grave mistrust, hate and anger toward
what looms monolithic in her mind as the cruel Japanese, or all Japanese "they'll have to
hang their emperor first before I'd ask for help from any of them" (Tan 2012, pp. 50-51, 86).
Frederik is therefore puzzled when Yun Ling apprentices herself to Aritomo; "How do you
face a Japafter what they did to you?" (pp. 105). This logical slippage permitting the
conflation of nationality with the specific groups or individuals actually responsibility for the
trauma of colonialism is necessary to Yun Ling's construction of herself and all of Malaya as
the "victim Other" to overweening Japanese power. This owes to the fact that "exiles
feelan urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves
as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people [anything else] would be "virtually
unbearable, and virtually impossible"; a new or restored identity frequently brings out "the
least attractive aspects of being in exilean exaggerated sense of group solidarity, and a
passionate hostility to outsiders, even those who may in fact be in the same predicament as
you" (Said 1994, pp. 141). This statement further clarifies for the reader the initially
tumultuous relationship between Aritomo and Yun Ling because of the latter's inability to

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transcend the most obvious fact about Aritomo: his ethnicity. Aritomo saw himself a mere
gardener, and furthermore one in political exile; it therefore irked him that Yun Ling believed
he, as a Japanese, "owe[d it] to her" to sell back her sister's watercolour painting (Tan 2012,
pp. 86). Yun Ling's continued refusal to distinguish fairly between "Japanese" and "colonial
oppressor" is further evidenced in her vindictive statement, "I will decide what the Japanese
people have a right to" in response to Tatsuji's argument for the right of the Japanese people
to appreciate Aritomo's ukiyo-e (Tan 2012, pp. 35). Establishing these artificial oppositional
national groupings is a way in which exiles attempt to reintroduce themselves politically,
though this frequently requires the unquestioning complicity of uncritical audiences in
believing and perpetuating the logical slippage.
Yun Ling is eventually found instead to be in the "perilous territory of non-belonging" (Said
1994, pp. 140). At first, Yun Ling's reassertion of a violently denied, dehumanised and
objectified self, or maruta ("log"), ironically appears to presume the validity of the colonial
juxtaposition between the empire and its colonies, as she attempts to reverse instead of
undermine such inequalities in the relationship. This reformulation of history, (ethnic or
national) identity and power relations is a "re-constitutive project" that had failed to rise
above the fact of 'ethnicity' (1994, pp. 146). The near-obsession with ethnicity results in the
hardened persecution of those conceived as 'outside' the community, thought this does not
lead to closure for the exile herself. Exacerbating this is the inability to appeal to her
membership in Malaya. Her "modern" English education and Straits Chinese heritage are
disparaged by two groups of "genuine" locals; one group disparages her "banana"-hood
Yun Ling learns about the tale of Hou Yi only very belatedly and remains unable to speak
Chinese, two important cultural markers of belonging within an ethnic Chinese community.
Yet Yun Ling is also "the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicised, is
emphatically not to be English"; Yun Ling's insistence on not adopting an English name or

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altering the order of her name is an instance of this (Bhabha 1984, pp. 128). Another group of
ethnic Malay bumiputra insinuate an inherent disloyalty to Malaya due to her ethnic, if not
cultural, "Chinese-ness" (Tan 2012, pp. 69). Although angry at the injustice of this aspersion,
Yun Ling fails to see how she recycles such stereotypes and prejudices in her treatment of
Aritomo. Yun Ling's story thus speaks to an unresolvable inadequacy of racial tension as the
sole explanatory variable in the examination of the predicament of the incredibly isolated
exile, one that resists the disciplining prerogative of naming.
Mimicry and the Futility of Defiance
The figure of the exile is uniquely positioned to subvert its own liminal status through the
perception of "the entire world as a foreign land", thus rendering real the possibility of
original and plural vision(s) (Said 1994, pp. 148). The exile's ability to "stand away from
'home' in order to look at it with detachment" is an important mechanism through which his
or her identity-in-difference is alleged (Said 1994, pp. 147). Yet this very ability to see at
once multiple interpretations of reality is also "risky" because the "habit of dissimulation is
both wearying and nerve-racking" and there exists every probability of a turbulent descent
into irredeemably schizophrenic mental state (Said 1994, pp. 148).
Anna's troubled musings, frequently punctuated by disorderly memories of her birthplace,
about how "sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other
times England was the real thing and out there was a dream, but I could never fit them
togetherit was as if I were making up the names" provides evidence of this disruptive effect
(Rhys 1934, pp. 7-8, 67). In another haunting passage Anna's image of a cold, still and
unwelcoming England coalesces around the singularly mournful notion of perennial hurt. She
observes that "it was funny I could giggle like that because in my heart I was always sad,
with the same sort of hurt that the cold gave me in my chest" and juxtaposes this against the

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"warm and gay" but faraway blackness that characterised her home in the West Indies,
something she desperately desires to return to and be, the unspecified Other to Europe's
sterility and pretension: "I wanted to be black. I always wanted to be black" (Rhys 1934, pp.
14, 27). In spite of Anna's attempts to convince herself that "of course, you get used to things,
you get used to anything", she ultimately recoils in bewilderment and horror at the lifestyle
foisted upon her by circumstance; "My God, this is a funny way to live. My God, how did
this happen" (Rhys 1934, pp. 35, 57). The exile is therefore cut off from the possibility of an
enlightened, detached vision of physical and political exclusion.
Homi Bhabha argues for the ambivalence of the mimetic mode of colonial discourse because
of the inherent "desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of difference that is
almost the same, but not quite" (1984, pp. 126). The ambivalence of mimicry constitutes
colonial subjects as "partial presence", whose experiences of exile concretise and undermine
colonial power and knowledge. Two instances of this are Anna's unsuccessful attempts to
pass off as sterile and refined white person while being powerfully drawn to happier
"blackness" as well as Magnus' remark that Yun Ling, for all her hate for the Japanese,
"admire[d] themin [her] own way" and showed this through her apprenticeship to Aritomo
(Tan 2012, pp. 193). To Frederik, her father and the Counter Terrorists, Yun Ling's
rehabilitated and romantic relationship with Aritomo was a distinct betrayal of Malaya and
cultural values; this precluded her re-assimilation into a home community and extended
indefinitely her exile to "perilous territory of non-belonging" (Tan 2012, pp. 105, 301).
Yun Ling had also "asked Father Kampfer to teach me Japaneseonce they realized I could
speak simple Nihon-go, the [Japanese] guards started treating me better than the other
prisoners" (Tan 2012, pp. 267). Yun Ling understood that to speak the same language would
be to gain partial entry into the "insider group" of the Japanese colonisers. From this position
of relative comfort she often fatally abused the confidence of fellow prisoners (Tan 2012, pp.

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299). Such actions would have poisoned the other prisoners against her and, had they
survived, created an intolerable post-colonial life for Yun Ling. To a society that had
constructed itself on notions of honour (recall the rejection of the jugun ianfu), Yun Ling's
failure to observe her position as "slave of the Japanese" automatically excluded her from
membership (Tan 2012, pp. 274). Yet Yun Ling was as clearly not counted among the ranks
of the Japanese and so her character falls into the "perilous territory of non-belonging" (Said
1994, pp. 140). There were no other survivors, however, so Yun Ling's traumatic experiences
remain invalidated and incomplete. Anna Morgan also remarks that "it was sad, when you lay
awake at night and remembered things", that "nobodycares a damn about me" (Rhys 1934,
pp. 53). This abject sense of non-belonging is attributable to social structures far beyond that
which the exile can control "[English women have] that beaten, cringing look...because
Englishmen don't care a damn about women" (Rhys 1934, pp. 70).
Exiles also try to enact the process of homecoming through "defiance and loss", thereby
"lend[ing] dignity to a condition legislated to deny dignity" (Said 1994, pp. 138). Magnus, an
exile from South Africa, is the proxy character through which the colonial experience of
Malaya is articulated. In spite of the prohibition against the hoisting of foreign national flags,
Magnus flew the Transvaal flag, taught Frederick Afrikaan and filled his Cape Dutch-styled
home with reminders of his homeland (Tan 2012, pp. 42-3, 161).Magnus also gleefully
names his tea estate Majuba after a particularly glorious battle in which the British were
trounced by the Boers, appreciating the fact that every day his tea was being sipped
everywhere by the same British colonisers (Tan 2012, pp. 43). Magnus had a tattoo of a
"beautifully rendered eyeset against a rectangle of colours that I realised represented the
Transvaal flag" incised upon his body by Aritomo, a figure Yun Ling is unable to dissociate
from the violence of colonialism (Tan 2012, pp. 194). The irony and inexpressible sadness
which accompanies the unspoken vanity of Magnus' resistance breaks through the speech of

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Yun Ling's brusque father, who insists the Afrikaans lost the war and that was the end of it.
The futility of defiance is therefore another defining trait of the exile, and the body upon
which symbols of ethnicity and allegiance are read remains a critical medium through which
colonial power is irresistibly and repeatedly exercised.
Anna's character is also able to erect only a limited, inarticulate, often violent and instinctive
resistance to her exile. An important reason for this is the debilitating childhood experiences
she had under her bullying stepmother Hester, who told her "don't say my goodnessmy
badness, that's why you ought to say" (Rhys 1934, pp. 60). This suggested to the young and
impressionable Anna that she was worthless or inherently irredeemable, and that this was a
corollary of a staining "blackness" percolating through the generations. She takes comfort
instead in her ability to "hit somebody pretty hard with [her] bracelet" if she wanted to, and in
jamming her cigarette down hard on Walter's hand when she believed he was laughing at her
(Rhys 1934, pp. 74 and 126). Anna tries to carve out a new community with the chorus-girls
and Mrs Robinson "simpering, wanting [Mrs Robinson] to know that I could speak French,
wanting her to like me" but these were largely unsuccessful (Rhys 1934, pp.150-151). The
crippling disability of not being able to communicate authentically with anyone around her
eventually results in the resignation to her mute and immutable status as exile (Rhys 1934, pp.
120, 126, 147).
Edward Said declares, "exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it
happens to you"; Anna, Yun Ling and the many other characters in both novels are either
born or thrust into exile (1994, pp. 146). The tragedy of exile is precisely the irrecoverable
state of the exile, the futility of resistance and the exilic reality of fundamentally belonging
nowhere at all (Said 1994, pp. 140). The importance of this realization provides a critical lens
with which postcolonial texts may be re-examined.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhabha, H. (1984). "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse". October, Volume 28,
Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, pp. 125-133.
Rhys, J. (1934). Voyage in the Dark. London: Penguin Books.
Said, E. (1994) "Reflections on Exile" in Robinson, M. ed. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Boston:
Faber & Faber, pp. 137-149.
Tan, T. E. (2012). The Garden of Evening Mists. Newcastle: Myrmidon Books.