Mimicry,

Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity

When Robinson Crusoe set foot on the island and declared it his own, a new page
was inscribed in the history of colonialism. The shipwreck becomes a historical
moment in this history. Defoe is able to create a textual plantation with the undaunted
Robinson at its center, involved in a double (d) divine action of invention and original
self-invention. The footprint, however, will unsettle his undisturbed tranquility, and
fear enters the stage. Neither the bible nor his guns will bring him peace. Crusoe will
undergo the painful experience of recurrent traumatic nightmares before the event.
The silence is broken. The Other has already inhabited the Self prior to the uncanny
encounter: anxiety invades the body and mind of the stranded hero. The "textual
empire" is shaken by the unknown: "The island is full of noises." The captured
absent/present utterances are therefore unbounded; authority is de-authorized (is it?),
and writing hybridized.

What is hybridization?, Bakhtin asks:

It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance,

an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic
consiousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social
differentiation, or by some other factor. (358)

When on a certain Friday, the encounter actually happens, Crusoe will demonstrate to
the highest degree of perfection the noble qualities of an English tradesman-
Gentleman: those of making and self-making, prowess and determination. Driven by
an instinctive sense of a charitable concern for the meek, he rescues a young criolos
cannibal from being devoured by other cannibals. Faithful to the already-established
Spanish tradition, he names him Friday, teaches him English, the words of God, and
above all, the basics of humanity; in other words, he has driven him out of utter
darkness to an overwhelming whitening light.

Under these conditions, however, Crusoe paradoxically is more isolated than ever
since the words he hears are his words --the very words he wanted Friday to say, to
repeat. Crusoe is blinded by his narcissism. He seems, Brantlinger states, "almost to
will his isolation, and to cling to it even when it is being invaded" (Brantlinger 3).
Friday does not exist. Friday is a lie, an illusion created by a mad masterly
imagination. He is an ever incomplete, insubstantial image, a mere inorganic shadow,
a dark spot on the ground, an image. Friday is filling an empty space cynically
prepared and strategically organized by the colonizer as a speaking subject. The
mirror-image that Friday is striving to see reflected will be a distorted one, a neither-
nor : one that is ambivalent, doubled. "It was one of the tragedies of slavery and of the
conditions under which creolization had to take place," Kamau Brathwaite states,
 that it should have produced this kind of mimicry; should have procduced such
"mimic-men." But in the circumstances this was the only kind of white
imitation that would have been accepted, given the terms in which the slaves
were seen .

Nevertheless, some postcolonial critics argue that it is precisely this kind of mimicry
that disrupts the colonial discourse by doubling it. For them, the simple presence of
the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the
ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for
absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity. Hence, today, the term hybridity
has become one of the most recurrent conceptual leitmotivs in postcolonial cultural
criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within
essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading contemporary
critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in
colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer's
ambivalence in respect to his position toward the colonized
Other.

Along with Tom Nairn, Homi Bhabha considers the confusion

and hollowness that resistance produces in the minds of such
imperialist authors as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E.
M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their colonialist grandiose
rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent economic and
political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far
as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps which are

the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book.They

mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces
of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differnces which
emerge in the colonial discource as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If
the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply
commands authority.

His analysis, which is largely based on the Lacanian conceptualization of mimicry as

camouflage focuses on colonial ambivalence. On the one hand, he sees the colonizer
as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a
mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective
strategies of colonial power and knowledge " (Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then
that colonial power carefully establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and
dominance; that, while it is aware of its ephemerality, it is also anxious to create the
means that guarantee its economic, political and cultural endurance, through the
conception, in Macaulay's words in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835),"of a
class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern --a class of persons
Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in
intellect"--that is through the reformation of that category of people referred to by
Frantz Fanon in the phrase, "black skin/white masks," or as "mimic men" by
V.S.Naipaul.
On the other hand, Bhabha immediately diverts his pertinent analysis by shifting the
superlative certainty of the colonizer and the strategic effectiveness of his political
intentions into an alarming uncertainty. Macaulay's Indian interpreters along with
Naipaul's mimic men, he asserts, by the very fact that they are authorized versions of
otherness, "part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire, end up emerging as
inappropriate colonial subjects...[who], by now producing a partial vision of the
colonizer's presence (88), de-stabilize the colonial subjectivity, unsettle its
authoritative centrality, and corrupt its discursive purity. Actually, he adds, mimicry
repeats rather than re-presents....(author's emphases ), and in that very act of
repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centred. What is left, according to
Bhabha, is the trace, the impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the
slippages in colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes
towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself more in
the form of a "menace " than "resemblance"; more in the form of a rupture than
consolidation.

Hybridity, Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant
cultures. The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture is
premised are deconstructed by the very entry of the formerly-excluded subjects into
the mainstream discourse. The dominant culture is contaminated by the linguistic and
racial differences of the native self. Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabha's
interpretation, as a counter-narrative, a critique of the canon and its exclusion of other
narratives. In other words, the hybridity-acclaimers want to suggest first, that the
colonialist discourse's ambivalence is a conspicuous illustration of its uncertainty; and
second, that the migration of yesterday's "savages" from their peripheral spaces to the
homes of their "masters" underlies a blessing invasion that, by "Third-Worlding"the
center, creates "fissures" within the very structures that sustain it.