Global Journal of Human Social Science, H: Interdisciplinary, Volume 22 Issue 7

In his essay “Inversion and Subversion, Alterity and Ambivalence: “Mimicry and “Hybridity” in Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians ”, Eva Becker examines mimicry and hybridity and their ambivalent in postcolonial discourse. Becker stressed in this paper the need for the colonized to adopt mimicry as a strategy to subvert colonial hegemony. According to her, “an ambivalent one that is able to be deconstructed and thus subverted through “hybridity” and “mimicry” illustrates how Alexie’s characters have recovered from the cultural agency” (Becker, 12). This implies that colonial decolonization can only be achieved through the agencies of subversive mimicry which is not most times far from mockery. Aligning with Becker on this view is Nasrullah Mambrol who avers that mimicry should be a channel for the subaltern to resist class oppression. This is because since mimicry is not far from mockery, it should be used to locate a crack in the postcolonial masters and attack with the intention of weakening the power it possesses. He puts it succinctly: … mimicry is never very far from mockery since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics. Mimicry, therefore, locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, uncertainty in its control of the behavior of the colonized (Para. 1). The implication of the above is that mimicry is not just a mere imitation of the values and behaviours of the colonial, postcolonial, or neocolonial masters but a tactic to achieve sarcasm as he observes: [This is because] mimicry has often been an overt goal of imperial policy. For instance , Lord Macaulay’s 1835 Minute to Parliament d erided Oriental learning, and advocated the reproduction of English art and learning in India (most strategically through the teaching of English literature). However, the method by which this mimicry was to be achieved indicated the underlying weakness of imperialism (2). From the above, it is clear that mimicry is a tool to create a crack in the walls of the superstructure and humble their wings of dominance. On her part, Archana Gupta opines that postcolonial literature is replete with such examples of colonial mimicry. Citing the character of Ranjit Kripal in V. S Naipaul’s The Mimic Men who changed to Ralph Singh for the sake of becoming an Englishman and to be respected. However, he becomes ambivalent and disillusioned with a fractured identity at the end. His sole idea of seeing English as a promised land finally fails him: “So quickly [just so soon] had London gone sour on me. The great city, the center of the world, in which, fleeing disorder, I had hoped to find the beginning of the order. So much had been promised by the physical aspect… there is no light like that of the temperate zone” (18). He feels ambivalent and begins to have feelings of discomfort as a result of the disappointment he has received at the end of the day. Gupta presents the effects of the fake life of imitation that the central character receives: “We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown order of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new (146).” This confirms Bhabha’s conclusion after studying the works of Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and V. S. Naipaul “that the effect of flawed colonial mimesis in which 'to be Anglicized, is emphatically not to be English” (qtd in. Gupta 4). Frantz Fanon is another critic who examines the psychological effects of colonial domination in Black Skin, White Masks . According to Fanon, mimicry exposes the trauma of being a ‘Black’ and the lingering desire to be like the Whites. Fanon questions the rationale behind such actions: “What does the Black man want?” (qtd in Gupta, 5). To Fanon, Black is not even a man. Thus, the desire to mimic the White haunts the Black day and night. He concludes: “I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is White” (5). Similarly, Rodríguez Carmona and Miguel Pedro in their essay “ He Milton Homer’d Himself : Parody, Mimicry, and Postcolonial Insurgency in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are ?” analyze “complicity with postcolonial issues of mimicry and parody as oriented to cross-examine colonialist modes of tradition, fiction, and subjectivity. Double talks, ironies, and postcolonial transposals of domination come manifest in this short story whose mockery proliferates in the hesitant uses through which the European tradition is watered down and parodized in order to resist colonialist authority (11). Carmona and Pedro examine how Munro through the agency of characterization paradises the superiority of the Canadian masters. Munro’s story locates somewhere between both constituents of the colonial and cultural encounter and circumscribes itself within an insurgency that openly and self-consciously reflects on the conditions of its own production. The above presupposes that the colonized people interacted with the whites, as well as, examined their behaviours closely, forming certain aspects of their identities. More so, the Europeans, as vividly explored by Edward Said in his well-received work Orientalism (1978), established a belief that they were more sophisticated, refined, closely controlled, and conversant ones as compared to colonized people who were considered as instinctive, primordial, and ill-bred ones. Said argues […it is} the representations of the ‘Orient’ in European literary works, travelogues and other writings [that} contributed to the creation of a dichotomy between Europe and its ‘others’” (43). This dichotomy was central to the creation of European culture as well as to the maintenance and extension of European supremacy over other lands (43). Volume XXII Issue VII Version I 6 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals H Mimicry in Ted Elemeforo’s Fountain of Betrayal