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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Metaphor and postcoloniality might seem to be unrelated and perhaps even antithetical as academic subjects. After all, isn't the analysis of metaphor wedded to universalist philosophy and formalist poetics, to Aristotle and the New Criticism? And isn't postcolonial literary analysis grounded in sociohistorical approaches to culture, race, and nationality, in critical methods that privilege narrative mimesis over lyric figuration? Perhaps. But, improbable though it may seem, the two areas remarkably intersect, and their unnoticed convergence might help us to rethink not only their relation but also each of the fields. Consider, for example, the implications of this convergence for the Anglophone literary canon, in which poetry is conspicuously subordinate.(1) The relative metaphoric density of poetry has contributed to the genre's marginalization, often making it less susceptible to being read as ethnographic mirror of the postcolonial condition. But if metaphoricity and postcolonialism, are affiliated as structures of experience, and if metaphor is indeed a principal discursive site of postcoloniality, then perhaps more attention should be granted to Anglophone poets like Loma Goodison and Kamau Brathwaite of the Caribbean, Okot p'Bitek and Christopher Okigbo of Africa, Eunice de Souza and A. K. Ramanujan of India. For the purposes of this essay, this last writer will be treated as exemplar of the convergences between metaphor and postcoloniality, after some preliminary reflections on the discursive overlap between the two fields.(2)
"Displacement," "transfer," "migration"--these terms belong to the standard lexicon of postcolonial studies, but they also appear in well-known discussions of metaphor. Etymology begins to help explain this strange intersection of vocabularies. Basic to the word metaphor, Greek for "transference," is the metaphor of movement in space; that is, metaphor metaphorizes semantic and hermeneutic change as spatial movement from one place to another, one "realm" or "context" to another. "[P]hora," as Paul Ricoeur points out, "is a kind of change, namely change with respect to location"; "[t]he epiphora of a word is described as a sort of displacement, a movement from ... to....'" Further, "metaphor is the transposition of a name that Aristotle calls `alien' (allotrios)"--a word that implies "borrowing," since "[t]he displaced meaning comes from somewhere else" (Rule of Metaphor 17, 18, 19).(3) Found scrawled on the wall of a university bathroom, "Transference," "Displacement," "Alienation," "Borrowing," "Movement between Realms," "Change of Location" would probably seem to echo lectures on postcolonialism, not metaphor. But this conclusion would be overhasty, since the study of metaphor and the study of postcolonialism are both concerned with what has been called "the location of culture," or perhaps even more crucially its dislocation. Metaphor and postcoloniality are both conceived of in terms of the movement, transference, or alienation of discourse from one place to another, a movement that involves not only a one-way shift but inevitably a bi-directional hybridization. While postcolonial literary study articulates the cultural convergence of places known as "East" and "West," "North" and "South," "metropole" and "colony," metaphor is, according to I. A. Richards, "a transaction between contexts" (94). "Things, or ideas which were remote appear now as close," Ricoeur writes of metaphor, describing the "rapprochement," "epiphora," or "transfer" of metaphor as "nothing else than this move or shift in the logical distance, from the far to the near" ("Metaphorical Process" 233). Lest these analogies seem merely the product of etymological play on Aristotle's terminology, let us look at a more recent analysis of metaphor that trades heavily in the geographic language usually associated with postcolonial studies. In his influential Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman conceives of metaphor as the bringing together of two different "realms," notably described as "disjoint" or "native and foreign" (81, 72). What happens as a consequence of an "expedition abroad" from one realm to another, after metaphorical "migration" or even "invasion" (73, 74)? A "reorientation": the convergence transforms each of the realms (72). Describing metaphor, Goodman sometimes sounds like a bizarre cross between Aristotle and V. S. Naipaul:
The home realm of a schema is the country of naturalization rather than of
birth; and the returning expatriate is an alien despite his quickening
memories. (77)
Its travels result in some displacement on its return (otherwise we
shouldn't even know it had been away); but the displacement is far from
total. . . . (83)
Does it matter that one can talk metaphorically about metaphors in ways that recall postcolonial displacement, relocation, and transfer? expatriation, diaspora, and migration? alienation and hybridization? Or is it merely a coincidence? It pays, of course, to reflect on why one can describe sex in terms borrowed from death, argument in the language of construction, and wars as if they were games (Lakoff and Johnson; Lakoff and Turner). In none of these cases is the metaphorical traffic between realms essential, but neither is it negligible. So too, I would suggest, the analogies between metaphor and postcolonialism should awaken us to our oddly geographical understanding of metaphor, and, conversely, to the prominent role that metaphor ought to play in our understanding of postcoloniality. Although metaphor has often been deconstructed as a totalizing trope of identity and organicity, a postcolonial perspective can help to renew our awareness that displacement, difference, and alienation are no less inherent than equivalence in the structure of metaphor.(4)
Perhaps I could spell out further some implications of the analogies between metaphor and postcoloniality. Dislocations of discourse, meaning, or culture from one context to another are fundamental to both the metaphorical sentence and the postcolonial text. Moreover, complete integration within the new discursive or cultural field produces dead metaphors and overassimilated, art. In order for the newly hybridized discourse to reorient perception, a tension must remain between the native and foreign, tenor and vehicle, focus and frame. Metaphorical or poetic discourse, as Victor Shklovsky famously argued, renews perception by "defamiliarizing" the world (13). It disrupts the "[h]abitualization" that "devours" objects, slowing down perception and making the world "unfamiliar" again (12). Similarly, in third world literatures, juxtapositions caused by colonization and migration throw into relief what habit normally conceals, defamiliarizing the cultures of colonizer and colonized. Split vision is characteristic of postcolonial literatures, a seeing of cultures in terms of one another. Phrases like "split reference" and "stereoscopic vision" have also served to describe how metaphor produces and maintains a tension between two modes of perception or reference.(5) Further, the rhetoric of "sameness" and "difference," with an emphasis on "the tension between same and other," is basic to analyses of both postcolonial texts and of metaphor (Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor 256). "[T]he meeting of two distant realities" is how one poet, as if writing about the postcolonial experience, defines metaphor.(6)
Admittedly, to emphasize the location of postcolonialism, like metaphor, within discourse, culture, or rhetoric is to risk diminishing its sociopolitical basis. The postcolonial aesthetics of intercultural hybridity and metaphoric tension arose out of a historical matrix of violence, occupation, and resistance. Opening up the metaphorical resemblances between metaphor and postcoloniality, one personifies metaphor, as if tenor and vehicle were like peoples brought together by geopolitics, and depersonalizes postcolonialism, as if colonizer and colonized were less peoples than linguistic, discursive, or rhetorical units. Like any comparison, this one inevitably highlights some aspects of each term and shuts others into darkness. Yet such an emphasis might be salutary at a time when political and sociological analysis often overshadows the figurative dimension of postcolonial aesthetics, at the risk of reducing postcolonial literatures to demographics and politics. By teasing out the homologies between metaphoric and postcolonial hybridity, displacement, and split perception, I hope to make visible other underlying reasons for the dramatic ascendancy of postcolonial literatures in the second half of the twentieth century. To explain why the postcolonial experience is especially amenable to aesthetic expression, in particular to highly figurative modes like lyric poetry and magical realism, it helps to consider that dislocations of meaning, unexpected conjunctions of discourse, stereoscopic vision, defamiliarizing incongruities, linguistic hybridity, and consciousness of sameness in difference are intrinsic to both postcoloniality and the structure of metaphor. Hoping to suggest the crucial importance of metaphor in postcolonial literatures as rhetorical locus of stereoscopy, hybridity, and dislocation, I explore the postcoloniality of metaphor and the metaphoricity of the postcolonial as exemplified in the...
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