Homi Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse": Review by Rafey Habib

I have just finished re-reading Homi Bhabha’s essay on the ambivalence of colonial discourse. As teachers of literature, we often remark how much more we see in a poem or a novel in further readings. This was certainly true of Bhabha’s essay for me. I saw so much more in it than in previous readings: so much more pretentiousness and vacuity. This kind of prose is really beginning to embarrass me in front of my students.

And here I am, intending to share with them one of the supposedly crucial texts in post-Colonial studies, which turns out to be a piece of gibberish. Consider this gem: "What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable." This obnoxiously obfuscatory statement invites multifarious critique: firstly, the spatial metaphor of emerging "between" is entirely devoid of explanatory significance. Secondly, the signification of "writing" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. Thirdly, to blandly equate "writing" with "representation" is to ignore the multifold modes of the representational process. Fourthly, it is utterly unclear what the "monumentality" of history refers to. The word monument has one set of connotations; monumentality has an additional set.


Fifthly, let us turn to the connection between the sentence’s subject and predicate: a mode of representation both places the monumentality of history at the margins and mocks the ability of this mounumentality or history to be a model. In order for marginality to acquire meaning, there must be implied the concept of a centre or mainstream; what is the implied centre which can sustain the marginality of history; to what is it marginal? And how can history be imitable? What does this mean? And of what is it meant to be a model? If this is the kind of prose to which we expose our graduate students, what hope can there be for the future of literary academia?

"Not Quite"
Rafey Habib

Not quite, not white, the cliches
Run down your page: it’s all
There: presence, absence,
Difference everywhere.
If only your words had
Memory of their long, long
Journeys; the discipline to
Talk in civil manner with
One another; if only you
Were trained in some science
Or art, philosophy or law
Or rhetoric; perhaps sat
With truly great books in
Your lap; you might not
Produce such portentous,
Pretentious, crap.

Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia: Review by Rafey Habib

I have just finished reading Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia in preparation for my graduate class in post-Colonial literature. Of course this book was warmly received by Rushdie and company on account of its comedy, "irreverence" and its "wild" impropriety.
It is indeed a substantial book, dealing with themes of immigration, racism, class, the status of women, marriage, love, the sheer selfishness and cruelty of human relations, and maturing through adolescence and disillusionment; indeed, the true Buddha of Suburbia seems to me to be not Karim’s father Haroon, who strikes the meditative pose for reasons of self-esteem and money, but Karim himself, presented as an uneducated (formally) but surprisingly astute teenager who is unusually reflective on his own and others’ experience, and who, notwithstanding his adolescent hormones and stereotypical ambitions, has the grace and sense to arrive at broader perspectives informed by filial devotion and moral considerations.

I find the book's overt reliance on four letter words a little tiresome; the explicit descriptions of sex might interest an adolescent but soon become wearisome. The humour, improbable though most of it is (as in Changez’s knocking out of Anwar in the street) is effective and had me laughing aloud. But my complaint is the same as that against so many works in this Anglophone vein. Firstly, inasmuch as they deal with religion, they deal with it on an utterly banal level, selecting the worst possible specimens to represent or embody it. Even the relatively abstract near-authorial meditations are superficial as when Kureishi claims that Islam is based on a series of absolute statements – casually inserted into his text, no doubt, but utterly uniformed by anything approaching historical knowledge or accuracy. Again, there is no single character who embodies in any enlightened way any of the older traditions or beliefs or faiths. Everything "colonial" is presented as whacky, irrational, dirty, hypocritical, situated on one ridiculous extreme or another. My complaint here is that if you are writing a novel which claims to detail the real dilemmas of immigrants – cultural, religious, social – then you need to do your homework. You can’t just, on the basis of your own impulsive rejection of elements of your original culture, engage in emotional extrapolations and generalisations based on nothing but hearsay or supposedly common wisdom or on the repertoire of stereotypes that you claim to be undermining and exploring.