Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section I Literature, Geography, Environment
- Section II Literature, Culture, Anthropology
- Section III Literature, History, Memory
- 9 Philomela's Retold Story: Silence, Music and the Postcolonial Text
- 10 Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter-memory
- 11 Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly
- 12 (Not) Reading Orientalism
- Index
10 - Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter-memory
from Section III - Literature, History, Memory
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section I Literature, Geography, Environment
- Section II Literature, Culture, Anthropology
- Section III Literature, History, Memory
- 9 Philomela's Retold Story: Silence, Music and the Postcolonial Text
- 10 Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter-memory
- 11 Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly
- 12 (Not) Reading Orientalism
- Index
Summary
The Ghost is the fiction of our relationship to death.
(Cixous 542)Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism.
(Fanon 225)Moving between literature and history, this chapter has three objectives. First, it seeks to forge an unholy alliance between the cannibal and the ghost, and to explore their interworkings in the context of revisionist Caribbean history. Second, it examines the cannibal and the ghost as textual mediators, as means by which Caribbean writers re-imagine their European literary ancestry. And third, it charts the attempt through the shape-shifting cannibal/ghost alliance to transform the orthodox, largely negative perception of Caribbean history, and to set up a counter-memory to the hegemonic European record. The primary texts are the creolized ghost stories of two modern Guyanese writers: Edgar Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (1955) and Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock (1960). In both of these stories the ghost – the ‘uncanny cannibal’ – has a dual function, reasserting the presence of a past (or pasts) that had previously been repressed while estranging that past and converting it into forms that sublimate material exploitation.
Uncanny Cannibals
It is little wonder that Derek Walcott, the Caribbean's best-known poet, begins an essay on the region's past by citing Joyce's familiar epigraph, ‘History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. For the Caribbean region is haunted by ghostly presences, reminders of a history seen as loss, distress, defeat. Walcott takes as his artistic task the deliverance from this collective trauma:
The New World originated in hypocrisy and genocide, so it is not a question for us of returning to an Eden or of creating Utopia; out of the sordid and degraded beginning of the West Indies, we could only go further in indecency and regret. Poets and satirists are afflicted with the superior stupidity which believes that societies can be renewed, and one of the most nourishing sites for such a renewal, however visionary it may seem, is the American archipelago. (Walcott 13)
Walcott drives out the ghosts that crowd in upon ancestral memory, clearing the space for history to direct its gaze towards the future.
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- Interdisciplinary MeasuresLiterature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies, pp. 166 - 181Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008