of prejudices about other cultures, how much of Western identity is constructed upon the negative identity of others’ (1992, 9). Benita Parry has devoted several studies (1987, 1992, 1997) to an apparent critique of the relentless construction of ‘a model of colonial discourse overwhelmingly concerned with processes of othering’ (1987, 33), yet has been unable to free herself from talking about ‘imperialism’s epistemic violence’, its ‘agonistic space’ (29) and its ‘valorizing gladiatorial skills’ (54). Indeed, her call to arms is uncompromising: ‘The common pursuit of all who engage in the study of colonial discourse [must be] to reveal the limits of a Western modernity which had accommodated slavery and colonial genocide and was complicit with the imperial project’ (1997, 10).
Yet some champions of Said’s Manichaean model of colonialism nevertheless managed to open up spaces in the binarist severity of his thesis. Homi Bhabha (1982, 1994), once referred to by Robert Young as forming with Said and Spivak the Holy Trinity of postcolonialism, posed important challenges to Saidean doctrine, notably in his notion that the colonial subject, despite always being mediated through the lenses and pages of the coloniser, could frequently disrupt colonialist assurance through parody, mime and unguarded reportage. In my own reading, I had come across many instances of such delightful one-up-manship on the part of reported African subjects. One example comes from Guy Tachard’s account of a Khoi servant from the governor’s household at the Cape of Good Hope who in the 1680s had deserted,
saying that he would not submit to the rack of a regular life, that the Dutch and such other nations were slaves to the earth, and that the Hottentots [Khoikhoi] were the masters of it, that they were not forced to stand with the hat continually under the arm, and to observe a hundred uneasy customs; that they ate when they were hungry, and followed no other rules but what nature had taught them (1688, 72).
An even more striking spoof of colonialist presumptions occurs in an early seventeenth-century Dutch source that records a local response on the Gold Coast to European traders’ complaints about theft: ‘[They said] we are rich and have great stores of wares, and brought ships full unto them, and took great pains and labours to sell it, and were so long before we sold it, that they thought it fit to help us therein, that we might the sooner be rid thereof’ (Artus, 1600, in Purchas, 1625, 6: 318). A sharper local response was recorded by Charles Wheeler, who in the early eighteenth century had spent ten years in West Africa:
The discerning natives account it their greatest unhappiness that they were ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the traffic of slaves, and that before our coming they [had] lived in peace; but, say they, it is observable that wherever Christianity comes, there come with it a sword, a gun, powder and ball (Smith, 1744, 266).
Although these utterances are all of the ‘they say’ variety, and Gareth Griffiths has warned that there is always ‘a real concern as to whether what we are listening to is really a subaltern voice’ (1994, 75), there can be little doubt about the immediacy and authenticity of the voices just behind these reports. They once again confirmed for me that the Orientalist paradigm was wide of the mark regarding a significant sector of the Western discourse of Africa.
If supporters and exponents of Said’s views have at times contributed provocative possibilities for my own project, so of course have an array of critics who from the outset had taken issue with Orientalism. One of the earliest, Dennis Porter, spotted two major flaws in Said’s argument that would at first hardly be commented on – his achronicity and his fundamental essentialism: ‘Said asserts the unified character of Western discourse on the Orient over some two millennia’, and ‘he ignores in both Western scholarly and creative writing all manifestations of counter-hegemonic thought’ (1983/1993, 152).
These shortcomings failed to register with most of the scores of British and American reviewers who welcomed the book – ‘Said’s Orientalism appears to be a monolithic and uncontested discourse’ marvelled Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg in 1985 (191) – but they became ever clearer. By 1994, Ali Behdad charged that ‘in denouncing the essentialist and generalizing tendencies of Orientalism, Said’s critical approach repeats these very faults’ (11). A few years later, a sustained critique came from Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997), who argued that ‘Said falls back on discredited kinds of essentialism and displays a determinism which reduces the entire Western cultural canon to an archive of bad faith and Orientalist defamation’ (154). Such criticism has reverberated and intensified down the years. Recently Robert Irwin described Orientalism as ‘a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations’ (cited in De Bellaigue 2006, 6–7).
Yet, while the Occam’s Razor effect of Orientalism has continued to be cited as a major weakness, Said had himself long since pointed the way out:
Against this static system of ‘synchronic essentialism’… [which] presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of such pressure is narrative…. What seemed stable … now appears unstable…. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change…. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision (1978/1985, 240).
This optimistic insight not only undermines much of the main thesis of Orientalism, but in its privileging of the transformative, even subversive, powers of narrative, it has matched my own experience of the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa. Seamus Heaney has remarked that ‘poetry is a symbolic resolution of conflicts insoluble in experience’ (1989, 1412), and this is true also of narrative, especially romance. Mark Currie has explored this notion – ‘Sometimes it is exactly the imprecision of narrative fiction that appeals’ (1998, 51) – and has demonstrated that all narrative encodes ‘values which often subvert what might be called the conscious intention of the narrative’ (5; see also Bruner, 1991 and Van Wyk Smith, 1997a).
Such reconciliatory and potentially subversive functions of narrative are also implied in Jean François Lyotard’s seminal exposition of postmodernism, La condition postmoderne (1978), as a persuasion sceptical of the ‘grand’ or ‘master narratives’ of imperialism, world faiths, racism and other ‘great metanarratives of legitimation’, and as preferring instead the multivocal and multivalent ensembles of ‘little narratives’ of humanity (Lyotard in Cahoone 1996, 482–483). My reading of the library of Africa had yielded many such by-ways, and they seemed worth exploring.
Furthermore, Said’s promotion of narrative pointed to another approach that was to prove most valuable in my own investigations, namely Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic imagination (1981). Bakhtin’s proposal that all discourse (even the apparently univocally racist) is in fact polyphonic and based on the reciprocity or at least dialogic nature of all utterance, while at the same time no utterance can ever be wholly inclusive or fully in control of its intentions, would open up new vistas on the Eurocolonial discourse of Africa. I shall return to this thesis in due course.
Despite Said’s championing of the power of narrative, his own evident neglect of the ‘little narratives’ of colonial encounter continued to draw fire. Aijaz Ahmad, though regarding Orientalism as ‘undoubtedly in the entire career of literary theory the grandest of all narratives of the connection between Western knowledge and Western power’ (1992, 13), nevertheless launched a comprehensive critique of Said’s thesis as being itself Westernised and dismissive of actual Oriental resistance. For Ahmad, Said was concerned mainly ‘to displace an activist culture with a textual culture’ (1992, 1), and was evidently ignorant of a ‘vast tradition, virtually as old as colonialism itself’ (174), of a Western counter-discourse critical of its own colonialism.
The fear that a theorised postcolonialism born from Said’s endeavours would merely textualise the real agonies of ‘the
