Clare Bradford. "The End of Empire? Colonial and
Postcolonial Journeys in Children's Books." Children's Literature
29.1 (2001): 196-218
"The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys in Children's Books
Clare Bradford
To read children's books of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to read texts produced within a
pattern of imperial culture. Works of the past, such as Tom Brown's
Schooldays, The Water-Babies, and The Secret Garden, readily
disclose the imperial ideologies that inform them. Thus, Hughes's depiction of
schoolboy life at Rugby is framed by imperialism, not merely because Rugby's
régime constitutes a training-ground for imperial adventures, as in the case of
Tom's great friend East, who leaves the school to join his regiment in India,
but also because the conceptual world in which the boys are located comprises
two parts: home and abroad, center and margins, as Hughes's depiction of the
tribe of Browns demonstrates: "For centuries, in their quiet, dogged,
homespun way, [the Browns] have been subduing the earth in most English
counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian
uplands" (13). In The Water-Babies, Kingsley's mobilization of
imperial ideologies is distinguished by its convergence of categories of race
and class. When Tom climbs down the wrong chimney to arrive in Ellie's room and
catches sight of himself in a mirror, he sees "a little ugly, black,
ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth" (19). Here, the
grime of the chimney, a signifier of Tom's lowly position within the domestic
economy, is mapped onto the blackness of peoples colonized by British
imperialism.1 Conversely, Tom's ascent to the middle
class is coterminous with his transformation into a white imperial man:
"[he] can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and
rifled guns, and so forth" (243-44). And in The Secret Garden,
Frances Hodgson Burnett represents India as a space marked by disorder, danger,
and sickness, so that Mary's return to Britain restores her to physical and
psychic health (see Cadden; Phillips).
In these texts, the lands and
indigenous peoples "out there" in the far reaches of the British
Empire are "Othered" in order to produce and sustain an idea
fundamental to colonial discourse: that Europe [End Page 196] (and, in
these three texts, Britain) is the norm by which other countries and peoples are
judged. Not that the process of "Othering" is an unproblematic
one—indeed, colonial discourse is shot through with anxieties concerning what
Peter Hulme calls "the classic colonial triangle, . . . the relationship
between European, native and land" (1). Thus, for example, discourses of
Christianity, some of which promote the equality of all people as children of
God, frequently clash with colonial discourse, which promotes the superiority
of white over colored peoples, and so validates the appropriation of land (see Bradford). Nevertheless, despite their moments of uncertainty and their
occasional resistance to dominant ideologies, colonial texts are by and large
organized through such binary oppositions as self and other, civilized and
savage, white and black.
Postcolonial texts are marked
by a more complex and contradictory set of discursive practices, some of which
this discussion seeks to identify and analyze. Although the post of postcolonial
is sometimes read merely as a temporal marker separating a period of colonial
rule from the time after it, many theorists have pointed to the cultural and
historical differences that are concealed by such a monolithic term, and to the
fact that in countries with colonial histories (such as North America, South
Africa, India, Australia), the consequences of colonial rule are played out in
contemporary struggles over power and especially over land (McClintock
9-14; Dirlik 503-4; Ghandi 1-5). Accordingly, my use of the term postcolonial
recognizes the shifting and uncertain significances that attend references to
the imperial project.
A feature common in newly
independent states after colonialism is what Leela Ghandi terms
"postcolonial amnesia" (4), in which painful events of the colonial
period are "forgotten." After Australia achieved nationhood in 1901,
for example, there followed what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner described
in 1968 as "a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale"
(25), an eloquent silence regarding Aborigines and the violence and
dispossession that they endured following white settlement. Most Australian
children's texts produced in the first few decades of the twentieth century
omit Aborigines from accounts of Australian history or reconfigure historical
events to produce stories of white heroism and black savagery, thus positioning
child readers to see themselves as citizens of a white Australia and the
inheritors of a tradition of pioneer endeavor. Such strategies seek to elide
aspects of the past in order to produce a new national identity. But the past
is not so easily forgotten, especially by peoples formerly [End Page 197]
colonized. For as Edward Said notes, interpretations of the present frequently
involve the rereading of the past in an attempt to discover "whether the
past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in
different forms" (Culture
and Imperialism 1). The colonial past is variously rehearsed,
reinscribed, and contested in postcolonial children's texts, and it is
increasingly a site of tension, producing different and conflicting
significances. There are two reasons for this: first, the influence of subaltern
writing, which seeks to recover the voices of colonized people and tell their
stories; and, second, the fact that strategies of silence and forgetting merely
repress colonial memories, the recovery of which is frequently painful and
confrontational.
Tropes of journeying and
travel are prominent in postcolonial texts, many of which rehearse, reexamine,
and parody the historical journeys of colonialism. In this discussion I
consider two British texts: Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(first published in 1964) and Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens
(1974), books as far apart from each other as can be imagined but that
thematize aspects of the relations between empire and colonies. As instances of
"the Empire writing back," I have selected two Australian texts, Pat
Lowe and Jimmy Pike's Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen (1997) and Tohby
Riddle's Royal Guest (1993), and a New Zealand text, Paula Boock's Sasscat
(1994). In all five texts, characters undertake journeys to or from Britain:
the Oompa-Loompas, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, travel from
Loompaland to the imperial center, located in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory;
in The House in Norham Gardens, fourteen-year-old Clare becomes obsessed
by the journey of her anthropologist great-grandfather to New Guinea in 1905.
Both Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen and The Royal Guest focus on
visits by Queen Elizabeth to Australia, and in Sasscat, Win, a young New
Zealander, travels to London, and her sister, Sass, dreams of becoming an astronaut.
These journeys rework the themes of place and displacement that are so common
in postcolonial literatures (see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 9), but the ideologies of the five texts are
far from uniform. For although postcolonialism might seem to be invested
with notions of progressivism and transition to a brave new world, in fact
postcolonial texts display the heterogeneity of postcolonial cultures, with
their traces of colonialism, their mix of complicitness with and resistance to
colonial ideologies (Hodge and
Mishra xi-xii), and their spasmodic irruptions of neocolonialism. [End
Page 198]
As Bob Dixon pointed out in
his groundbreaking work Catching Them Young (1977), Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory works as "aparadigm of imperialism" (110), with
Willy Wonka exercising imperial power over the colonized Oompa-Loompas.2 Dixon is quite correct to see Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory as adhering to the ideologies of
nineteenth-century novels of colonial adventure, but there are important
distinctions to be made: Dahl wrote Charlie in the 1960s, well after the
disintegration of the British Empire; and though the heroes of Haggard,
Marryat, and Henty travel from Britain to the strange and barbaric lands
"out there" in the empire and back again to the safety of Britain,
the Oompa-Loompas are brought from their home in Loompaland to work in Willy
Wonka's chocolate factory. Dahl's version of the journey thus involves the
displacement of colonized people and their mass transportation to the imperial
center, to be commodified as cheap labor. Indeed, the Oompa-Loompas signify two
kinds of displacement: they displace the local workforce sacked by Willy Wonka,
and they themselves are displaced from Loompaland. Dahl sidesteps the first
kind of displacement by treating workers as mere cogs in Willy Wonka's machine,
not as people and even less as individuals. And the Oompa-Loompas' displacement
from their homeland is elided through Dahl's representation of Loompaland, in
whose jungles lurk dangerous creatures such as hornswogglers, snozzwangers, and
whangdoodles, and where the Oompa-Loompas can find nothing but green
caterpillars to eat. In this way, Dahl constructs the home of the colonized as
a place characterized by absence and poverty (specifically of cacao beans), so
that the Oompa-Loompas' voyage to Willy Wonka's factory, smuggled in
"large packing cases with holes in them" (68), is an insignificant
price to pay for the privilege of working for Willy Wonka and of being supplied
with cacao beans and alcoholic beverages such as butterscotch and buttergin.
Dahl's treatment of the
Oompa-Loompas exactly conforms with Edward Said's description of the ways in
which the West has rationalized colonial processes with claims that colonized
people were "provided with order and a kind of stability that they haven't
been able . . . to provide for themselves" (Culture
23). Within this fiction of Western benevolence and generosity,
colonized peoples are represented as recipients of largesse; homogenized and
robbed of individuality, they exist as a discursive figure, "them" as
distinct from "us," whose duty it is to appreciate the magnanimity
with which they have been treated. Such a "leap to essences and
generalizations" (Culture 24) effectively elides [End Page 199]
the variety and specificity of colonial experience, suppressing, for example,
the histories of colonized peoples sold to the slave trade or exploited as
cheap labor in various parts of the British Empire. Willy Wonka's Oompa-Loompas
are effectively enslaved, but through the mediating figure of Willy Wonka, Dahl
positions children to read their enslavement as reward and privilege.
This strategy can be seen most
clearly in the episode in which Willy Wonka relates the story of his discovery
and "liberation" of the Oompa-Loompas. The children and adults who
are taken on their tour of the factory first see the Oompa-Loompas from a
distance, in a narrator-focalized sequence. The following exchange serves as a
transition to Willy Wonka's first-person narrative:
"Oompa-Loompas!" everyone said at once. "Oompa-Loompas!"
"Imported direct from Loompaland," said Mr Wonka proudly.
"There's no such place," said Mrs Salt.
"Excuse me, dear lady, but . . ."
"Mr Wonka," cried Mrs Salt. "I'm a teacher of
geography . . ."
"Then you'll know all about it," said Mr Wonka. "And oh,
what a terrible country it is. . . ."
(66)
Whereas Mrs Salt is
incontrovertibly an adult, Willy Wonka, an "extraordinary little man"
(57), his face "alight with fun and laughter" (57), is attributed
with qualities intended to persuade child readers that he is one of them,
aligned with them against adults (and specifically teachers) such as Mrs Salt.
The contrast between Mrs Salt and Willy Wonka is an epistemological one as
well: whereas Mrs Salt knows theory (the "facts" of geography), Willy
Wonka's knowledge is based on his practical experience of Loompaland. Through
these strategies, Willy Wonka is established as a figure who speaks
authoritatively to implied child readers about the Oompa-Loompas and their
land.
Wonka's depiction of the
Oompa-Loompas (66-68) proposes a series of oppositions between himself (as
ideal and idealized imperialist) and his colonized workforce. Wonka is, first
of all, knowing, whereas even the leader of the tribe of Oompa-Loompas
is unable to understand anything beyond his physical symptoms of hunger.
Contrasting values attach to place: Wonka's pride in the glories of his
factory, compared with the Oompa-Loompas' readiness to leave their homeland.
Wonka is an adult, the Oompa-Loompas perpetual children; Wonka an amused
observer, the Oompa-Loompas objects of his colonizing gaze. Above all, the
Oompa-Loompas are promoted to child readers [End Page 200] as ideals of
how colonized peoples should behave toward their imperial lords: they are
satisfied, hardworking, and grateful; moreover, they never forget their
colonial place, wearing the clothing that marks them as primitives: "They
still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle. They insist upon
that" (68). Racialized and objectified as Others, the Oompa-Loompas are
thus distinguished from the book's implied readers, who are positioned as
"normal" subjects, citizens whose clothing and way of life mark them
as being at home in Britain in a way the Oompa-Loompas are not. Dahl's
representation of colonized peoples suggests, by inference, that native peoples
who turn against imperial rule, or who reject the subservience modeled by the
Oompa-Loompas, contravene a model of social and imperial interactions
naturalized as correct and appropriate. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
produced in the decade following a dramatic increase in the migration of West
Indian, African, and Asian people to Britain, and six years after the
anti-black riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham, thus proposes a social and
economic structure that treats colonial workers as unskilled and poorly paid
factory fodder.
In its promotion of
colonialism, its homogenization of the colonized, and its strategies of Othering,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory harks back to texts of the nineteenth
century; in contrast, Penelope Lively's House in Norham Gardens displays
many of the tensions and uncertainties of postcolonialism, within a complex and
subtle narrative. Both texts play with what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the
"contact zone," the "space of colonial encounters" (6)
where colonizers and those colonized meet and negotiate relations of power and
influence. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory promotes the idea that colonial
hierarchies are maintained "at home"—that is, in Willy Wonka's
factory—just as they were "out there" in Loompaland. The House at
Norham Gardens, in contrast, sets one contact zone against another through
its shifts in time and place, between 1970s Britain and colonial New Guinea.
Clare Mayfield, the protagonist of the novel, lives with her two great-aunts in
an Oxford house that constitutes a time capsule of imperialism, for it is
filled with the objects and records of Clare's great-grandfather, an anthropologist
who "went to queer places and brought things back" (21). Clare
discovers in the attic a tamburan, a carved shield from New Guinea, and becomes
absorbed by the historical and cultural significances of this object, finally
donating it to the Natural History Museum, where it is incorporated into the
collection named after her great-grandfather. The tamburan is the central
symbol [End Page 201] within the novel's exploration of cultural and
historical difference, a strand of meaning that intersects with two others:
Clare's own sense of becoming an adult who is both like and unlike her
fourteen-year-old self, and themes of aging, physical change, and death,
centered on "the aunts."
Within its contrapuntal
organization, The House in Norham Gardens circles around symbols and
ideas connected with space and time. The house itself, a nineteen-room
Victorian marooned among new buildings and old buildings converted into flats,
is remote from modernity, since Clare's aunts live quietly in their library,
reading and observing; the house is replete with the past in the form of old
photographs, china, books and a lavatory "in brown mahogany with the bowl
encircled in purple flowers and a cistern called 'The Great Niagara'"
(18). While the narrative chronologically follows a few months (from winter to
spring) in Clare's life, a series of flashbacks at the beginning of each
chapter traces the process of colonization in the New Guinea village from which
the tamburan originates: the coming of Europeans to the village in 1905, the
destabilization of an ancient culture, the destruction of forests, the loss of
cultural identity, the tribe's journey to modernity. Or, rather, this is how
the narrative represents colonization, and the how of Lively's
representation discloses the limitations of the epistemology on which it
relies.
Whereas Dahl's treatment of
the Oompa-Loompas trumpets the inferiority of the colonized, Lively's depiction
of the New Guinea tribe is tinged with regret and nostalgia, as can be seen in
the first of the novel's descriptions of the valley:
There is an island. At the heart of the island there is a valley. In the
valley, among blue mountains, a man kneels before a piece of wood. He paints on
it—sometimes with a fibre brush, sometimes with his finger. The man himself is
painted: bright dyes—red, yellow, black—on brown skin. . . . The year is 1900:
in England Victoria is queen. The man is remote from England in distance by
half the circumference of the world: in understanding, by five thousand years.
(7)
The island, the valley, the
mountains, the kneeling man, are objects of a Eurocentric gaze that describes
and evaluates them in relation to their remoteness from England. The narrative
itself, implying the existence of a knowing observer, inscribes the valley, and
the painted man, [End Page 202] as vulnerable to the encroachment of
modernity. At the same time, the mobilization of a temporal contrast ("The
man is remote from England . . . by five thousand years") enacts avast and
unbridgeable gap between the narrator and the painted man. In its
authoritativeness, its knowingness, its emphasis on difference, this passage
mobilizes the discursive strategies of Orientalism, which, in Said's terms,
defines itself through "the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations"
(Orientalism 40) through which it orders the study of the
Orient. In Lively's descriptions of the village, the New Guinea tribesmen are
represented, in their pre-colonized state, as living in a coherent and ordered
society—they "celebrate the mystery of life with ritual" (37). But
their culture is defined and fixed through its difference. They have
"known no influences, learned no skills" (37)—that is, they have
known no influences and learned no skills defined as such by the narrator,
whose knowledge and ideological stance are naturalized as normative.
The system of knowledge
invoked here is that of anthropology-more specifically, the model of social
anthropology prominent in 1974, when The House in Norham Gardens was
published. The following comments by the Australian anthropologist Gillian
Cowlishaw describe how anthropology was mobilized in Australia to
"manage" what was commonly called "the Aboriginal problem,"
but they refer more broadly to the uses to which it was put in former colonies:
"From its establishment as a university based discipline there was an
underlying, unstated moral task associated with studies of [indigenous]
culture. This was that anthropology would supply expert knowledge about that
culture that would be used to develop appropriate policy. . . ." (22). In
exactly the same way, Lively's description of the New Guinea tribe constructs
an "expert knowledge" of what is in the best interests of the tribe.
Here is the final episode in the story of the tribe's colonization:
Houses are built for the tribe, and roads. They learn how to drive cars,
use telephones, tin-openers, matches and screw-drivers. They are given laws
that they must obey: they are not to kill one another and they must pay their
taxes. They listen to the radio and they make no more tamburans, but their
nights are rich with dreams. The children of the tribe learn how to read and
write: they sit at wooden desks with their heads bent low over sheets of paper,
and make marks on the paper. One day, they will discover again the need for
tamburans, and they will make a new [End Page 203] kind of tamburan for
themselves, and for their children, and their children's children.
(165)
The underlying assumptions of
this passage are that Western laws will prevent bloodshed ("they are not
to kill one another") and that the members of the tribe will embrace the
icons of the Western lifestyle (houses, cars, telephones, tin-openers). If
their entry into modernity precludes the making of tamburans, the gift of
literacy will eventually enable the children of the tribe to "make a new
kind of tamburan," but this will be possible only because of their
deployment of Western systems of knowledge.
This story of colonization
intersects with a series of dreams in which Clare observes the tribesmen
seeking the return of their tamburan. As her dreams increase in urgency and
intensity, they symbolize Clare's own groping after subjectivity; more important
for this discussion, they expose the error of her great-grandfather in taking
the tamburan from the tribesmen, who had at first believed that their European
visitors were tribal ancestors. Significantly, Clare seeks a solution through
an appeal to anthropological knowledge. Her Ugandan friend John Sempebwa is
established within the text as an authority on native peoples: he is himself,
he says, a "detribalized African" (75); moreover, he is a student of
anthropology. When he tells Clare that the New Guinea tribes "stop making
tamburans . . . as soon as they've jumped into the twentieth century. . . .
They seem to forget how, or why they did it" (99), the principle of
cultural discontinuity is promoted: that colonialism has effected a decisive split
from the traditional culture of the painted man who created the tamburan.
Clare's conclusion that "If it can't be where it belongs, then a museum is
the best place" (169) implies that there is no longer any
"where," so that the museum, and the disciplinary formations of
anthropology, become custodians of the object and its cultural meanings.
Lively's representation of the
New Guinea tribe is, of course, a far more progressive representation of
colonial relations than that encoded in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But twenty-five years after its publication, its faultlines are clearly
visible. The New Guinea tribesmen (and the figures of Clare's dreams are, true
to the phallocentric traditions of anthropology, always male) are consigned to
the past of primitivism; the sense of loss and regret that permeates Lively's
depiction of the tribe enacts the meaning, implied throughout the novel, that
the painted man represents the true and authentic culture of the [End Page
204] tribe, a culture preserved only through anthropological knowledge, and
specifically by museums. In Lively's descriptions of the colonization of the
tribe, the New Guineans are attributed no agency, no capacity for reflexivity
or adaptability, but wait passively for the return of the ancestors. Gillian
Cowlishaw's summary of anthropological models of the 1960s and 1970s is
strikingly close to the mood and tone that permeate Lively's depiction of the
tribe: "The metaphor of destruction became intrenched, fixing the complex,
ongoing events of colonisation into a one way process of collapse to which the
appropriate response is passive sorrow" (25). The novel is thus caught
between its contestation of the imperial past (exemplified by Clare's
great-grandfather) and its privileging of modernity as a dynamic, protean,
complex state that, paradoxically, needs primitivism as its opposite
term, objectified as the embodiment of stillness, simplicity, and fixedness. The
House in Norham Gardens concludes with Clare looking intently at her aged
and beloved aunts and realizing that what she is doing is "learning them
by heart," memorizing them against the time when they are dead. For the
New Guinea tribesmen, on the other hand, there are dreams, but no memories;
there is a dim consciousness of tradition and a nostalgia for it, but the
culture is incapable of adapting and transforming itself.
In Jimmy and Pat Meet the
Queen, written by Pat Lowe and illustrated by Jimmy Pike, colonization does
not effect a rift of memory; instead, traditional knowledge, tested against the
land of its production, constitutes a proof of tribal identity in contemporary
Australia. Jimmy is "a Walmajarri man," from the Great Sandy Desert
in Western Australia; Pat, his wife, "comes from England." The
conjunction of histories and traditions exemplified in the partnership of Jimmy
and Pat allows for broad comedy based on contrasted modes of speaking and
thinking, but Jimmy and Pat is a hybrid text in other respects as well.
It is at once a tract on land ownership in Australia and an illustrated book;
its implied readers constitute a combination of older children, adolescents,
and adults; its narrative combines the standard English of Pat with the Creole
used by Jimmy in conversational exchanges; its illustrations draw on traditions
of Aboriginal art but depict aspects of contemporary life. In these ways it
exemplifies "transculturation," the term used by Pratt to describe
how colonized and formerly colonized people engage in negotiations between
their own culture and that of their colonizers (6).
As I've noted, an important
line of resistance to earlier literary and [End Page 205] cultural
studies of colonialism is embodied in subaltern studies, described by Leela
Ghandi as "an attempt to allow the 'people' finally to speak . . . and, in
so doing, to speak for, or to sound the muted voices of, the truly
oppressed" (2). Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen alludes to the
dispossession experienced by Aboriginal people, but its insouciance and
subversive wit are anything but muted. On learning that the land of his people
is regarded by kartiya (white) law as Vacant Crown Land, Jimmy invites the
queen to prove her ownership by one concrete and decisive test: that she knows
where to find water in "her" desert. The queen agrees to travel to
Walmajarri country, and after a long search she concludes that she is indeed
unable to locate any waterholes and that the land belongs to "the
Walmajarri mob" (29).
In The House in Norham
Gardens, tribal knowledge and traditions are represented as failing to
survive colonization, so that they can be preserved only within systems of
Western knowledge; in Jimmy and Pat, in contrast, Western epistemologies
are pitted against the ancient and continuous traditions of the Walmajarri,
whose knowledge is based on the land itself and on ritual journeys undertaken
over many thousands of year s. The nostalgia that informs Lively's depiction of
the New Guinea tribe derives from an Orientalist emphasis on the primitive
nature of their culture, which is quarantined in a past that is discontinuous
with modernity. The Aboriginal culture promoted in Jimmy and Pat
combines traditional beliefs and knowledge with elements of contemporary
Western culture: Jimmy and Pat's letter asserting Walmajarri ownership of the
land makes the sly suggestion that the queen "may be glad to get away from
[her] family for a while" (9); the Walmajarri people follow their
traditional journey in a Suzuki and a Toyota. This hybridity is a marker of a
set of cultural forms at once fully Aboriginal and selectively modern.
Jimmy and Pat displaces
colonial hierarchies through its juxtaposition of standard and Aboriginal
English and its mobilization of intertextual references. Here, the queen meets
Jimmy and Pat at their desert camp:
Then a door in the [helicopter] opened, and out stepped the Queen of
England.
Jimmy and Pat walked forward to greet her. Jimmy held out his hand while
Pat tried to do a curtesy in her King Gees.
"Hello old woman," said Jimmy, and Pat gave him a hard nudge
in the ribs. [End Page 206]
The Queen took Jimmy's hand. "How do you do?" she said, with
her gracious smile.
"Do what?" Jimmy asked Pat.
"She means how are you going," Pat explained, on tenterhooks
in case either of them said the wrong thing.
Jimmy turned back to the Queen. "I'm right," he said.
(12)
For Australian readers, this
episode evokes the newsreels, photographs, news reports, and verbal
commentaries that have always surrounded royal visits to this country. In
particular, it recalls the iconic moments when the queen emerges from car,
plane or train, to be greeted by her Australian subjects. Usually, such moments
are pictured within the broader context of a watching crowd or a line of
dignitaries awaiting their turn to be blessed by the royal presence; here, the
queen walks alone into the desert, so that the book's implied readers are
interpellated as the observers of a scene at once familiar and strange. The
queen enacts the rituals of royal visits through the "gracious smile"
that strategically ignores Jimmy's "Hello old woman" and through the
greeting "How do you do?," but in taking the final "do" as
a transitive verb, and responding "Do what?," Jimmy subverts the
queen's reliance on a formulaic phrase intended to maintain social hierarchies
and insists on locating speech within a context of interpersonal relations.
Jimmy Pike's illustration of
the camp where the trio sleep deploys an aerial perspective (figure 1). For all its apparent artlessness, this picture subverts
hierarchies of power and race through its positioning of the queen, in her
swag,3 placed alongside the figures of Jimmy and
Pat in their shared swag, and against the white ground of the page. If the
queen is at the same level as Jimmy and Pat within a democracy of desert life,
she is allowed a signifier of royalty in the tiara that is placed neatly by
her, but this is not the only sign that distinguishes her from her companions:
her two corgis sleep near her, while Jimmy and Pat's hunting dog sleeps at
Jimmy's feet; and her high-heeled shoes, so inappropriate to desert use, invite
comparison with the serviceable footwear of Jimmy and Pat. Pike's deployment of
a limited number of forms and participants is a feature common in traditional
art, which "[uses] a minimalist system of classification to establish a
complex network of connections that in Western traditions is associated with
metaphor" (Hodge and Mishra 96). In this picture, the key elements are
the human and animal participants, seen within a set of relations that [End
Page 207] displace Western notions of social status. The figure of the
queen is smaller than those of Jimmy and Pat, suggesting that despite her tiara
she is young in the ways of the desert and in need of the guidance of her
companions.
Figure 1.
From Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike, Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen, pp.
16-17. By permission of Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike.
When, finally, the moment of
testing comes, and the queen must identify the waterholes that will prove
whether she is the owner of the land, the broad humor of the following exchange
relies on slippages and contrasts between registers:
The Queen put her lorgnette up to her eyes and gazed out over the
country, but for the life of her she couldn't see any water.
"There are no waterholes!" she declared.
"Bullshit!" said Jimmy, and Pat grimaced into the bushes.
"There's a waterhole that way, and another waterhole that way, and
another waterhole right there!" He flung out his arm in different
directions as he spoke.
"And cowpoo to you too!" said the Queen. "There's not a
drop of water to be seen! This is a desert!"
"Well, I'll show you!" said Jimmy.
(27) [End
Page 208]
The queen's declarations
"There are no waterholes!" and "This is a desert"
insist on the primacy of Western (and queenly) knowledge, but her invention of
"And cowpoo to you too," in response to Jimmy's "Bullshit!"
traces a shift from "high English" to a demotic register, enacting a
destabilization of hierarchies.4 Following the group's collective action of
digging in the region of a waterhole, her response to the discovery of water is
a thoroughly colloquial one: " 'Well, I'll be buggered!' said the
Queen" (29).5
The quest for water, with its
associated competition between the queen and the Walmajarri people, can be
understood within schemata of Western folk literature; but the outcome
of the quest, and the narrative's validation of Walmajarri ownership of the
land, are loaded with ironies that undercut notions of an ending in which all
live "happily ever after." This is signaled on the inside front cover
of the book, where conventional statements concerning the truth or otherwise of
narratives are parodied in the following words: "All the people and places
in this book are real. The story is true, although most of it hasn't happened
yet." With considerable lightness of touch, Lowe here alludes to the
historical and political contexts to which the narrative relates: the stories
of dispossession and appropriation that it evokes and the long struggle by
indigenous Australians for recognition as the original owners of the land and
for continuing rights to it. Most of all, Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen
insists on the capacity of Aboriginal culture to transform its repertoire of
textual and artistic forms. This is a far cry from Lively's representation of
an indigenous culture reliant for its preservation on Western systems of
knowledge.
Tohby Riddle's The Royal
Guest also tells the story of a visit by Queen Elizabeth to Australia, but
this text discloses another set of postcolonial significances that refer to
Australia's history as a settler colony. Colonial distinctions between white
settlers and Aborigines relied on hierarchies of value that placed Aboriginal
people at the lower end of the Chain of Being and, following Darwin's Origin
of Species, as a race locked into an early stage of human evolution. But
distinctions of a different sort always attended comparisons between British
people who settled in Australia and who gradually came to see themselves as
"Australians," and inhabitants of the imperial center. Some of these
distinctions manifest themselves in comparisons between the culture and
refinement of Britain and a rough-and-ready Australian culture; others insist
on the vitality and health of the New World, compared with an effete and
exhausted Old World. Riddle's story, which comprises an [End Page 209] account
of "the last visit of the Queen," when "times were tough"
and "people were wondering if the costs of such a visit could be
managed," alludes to these comparisons and dismantles them.
Figure 2.
From Tohby Riddle, The Royal Guest, p. 3. By permission of Tohby
Riddle.
The queen in The Royal
Guest is parodically represented as a collection of features: she wears a
sensible blue coat, serviceable brown shoes, white gloves, and a benign
expression, and she carries a handbag (figure 2). Riddle's narrative, unfolded in a deadpan style, tells how
"a Mrs. Jones of Padstow" offers to billet the queen during her visit
to Sydney: "She had plenty of room and a comfortable inflatable mattress
that the Queen was welcome to. She need only bring her sleeping bag." The faux-naïve
quality of Riddle's text is replicated in the accompanying illustration (figure 3), which shows the figure of Mrs. Jones performing a deictic
function by pointing to her house, which is defined by the details of its
exterior as a working-class home of the 1950s: its neat, bungalow-type style,
the featured cactus in a pot near the door, the decorative butterfly under the
house number, the diamond-shaped panes of glass set in the front door, and the
metal gate behind which Mrs. Jones stands. [End Page 210]
Figure 3.
From Tohby Riddle, The Royal Guest, p. 5. By permission of Tohby
Riddle.
In the narrative that follows,
the queen, carrying her rolled-up sleeping bag, arrives by plane and proceeds
to the bus stop, where she catches the bus to Padstow, "go[ing] over her
speeches to the nation in her head" during the trip. She spends the
evening playing cards with Mrs. Jones and her friend; on the following day,
after some moments of anxiety occasioned by the illness of Mrs. Jones's cat,
the queen gives a public address before returning by train to Mrs. Jones's
home. She is awoken the next morning by "the sound of cartoons on the
television," but the Jones children are sent outside to play so as not to
disturb her. To thank Mrs. Jones for her hospitality, the queen gives her one
of her old crowns, and the narrative concludes with the queen continuing the
royal tour to Melbourne, "where she would be staying with the Bradley
family of Footscray," another working-class suburb. The comedy of The
Royal Guest derives from the incongruities that it implies, particularly
those between the queen's wealth, fame, and social class and her relocation
within the habitus of working-class life. Catching a bus to Padstow, and seated
behind a small boy licking an [End Page 211] ice cream and in front of a
sleeping elderly man (figure 4), the queen is represented as neither more nor less than an
elderly woman, connected to the other participants in the illustration by their
common use of bus travel, in which social status is subordinated to the
physical organization of the public transport system. Similarly, the queen is
incongruously incorporated into the Jones household, whose physical and social
interactions are wildly different from those customarily associated with royal
life. Thus, Mrs. Jones, her friend, and the queen sit cozily around the kitchen
table playing cards; the queen is obliged to hold the family's sick cat on her
knee as Mrs. Jones takes her to meet the prime minister; and the Jones children
perch on the end of the queen's inflatable mattress as they watch their morning
cartoons.
Figure 4.
From Tohby Riddle, The Royal Guest, p. 11. By permission of Tohby
Riddle.
In different but related ways,
Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen and The Royal Guest construct ironic
reversals of other journeys, colonial and postcolonial. In Jimmy and Pat,
the queen is thrust into a landscape and culture that are alien to her and that
expose the shallowness of her knowledge in comparison with the deep knowledge
of the "Walmajarri [End Page 212] mob"; shadowing the queen's
displacement are the colonial stories in which Aboriginal people were removed
from their lands and forced to live in alien country. The Royal Guest
builds its understated comedy out of the queen's insertion into the frugal
world of the Jones family, but through his deployment of 1950s settings, Riddle
collapses two journeys: the triumphant progress of the young queen throughout
Australia in 1954, following her coronation, and "the last visit of the
Queen," when "times were tough." The scenes of adulation that
surrounded the queen in 1954 thus shadow the surreal comedy of her visit to
Padstow, plotting the social change that has seen a move toward republicanism
and away from traditional associations with Britain. Nevertheless, the failure
of Australians to approve the 1999 referendum on whether Australia would become
a republic with an Australian head of state exemplifies the extent to which the
colonial past signifies values such as "safety" and
"reliability" at a time of rapid social change.
Most of all, both books insist
on the radical instability of the sign "queen" in contemporary
Australia. In Jimmy and Pat, the queen is associated with the legal
category "Vacant Crown Land," a phrase that reflects Australia's
dependence on the British legal system. In Jimmy's terms, the land is not
vacant (being occupied by the Walmajarri people), and the idea that it belongs
to the queen is patently silly in the face of her inability to locate
waterholes, so that the sign "queen" signifies powerful tensions
between colonial history and Aboriginal traditions. In both Jimmy and Pat
and The Royal Guest, the queen is relocated in settings devoid of
signifiers of royalty, power, and social class, except for the tiara that she
discards for her desert journey and the "old crown" that she gives
Mrs. Jones. Without such signifiers, she becomes merely a person—a somewhat
inept tourist in Jimmy and Pat and, in The Royal Guest, a
temporary member of the Jones family. And this separation of the sign
"queen" from signifiers relating to Australia's historical links with
Britain argues for a redefinition both of "queen" and of
"Australia." Whereas Dahl's Oompa-Loompas are figures of fun within a
schema that locates them at the margins of British culture, the Queen is
displaced from the metropolitan center and reconstrued as a figure marginal to
Australian and Aboriginal cultures.
Paula Boock's Sasscat
thematizes a journey from New Zealand to Britain that involves another form of
postcolonial displacement. Sass and Win Abbott have always preferred to believe
that they are adopted; their parents Madge and Pete, whom they call "the
Pets," [End Page 213] seem to them to be so utterly ordinary, so
devoid of sophistication and good taste, that the girls have invented for
themselves elaborate histories to account for their sense of having been "cruelly
planted in a low income, low IQ family in the backblocks of New Zealand"
(8). In fact, Win turns out to have been adopted as an infant, whereas Sass
finds, to her consternation, that she is the natural daughter of "the
Pets." Accordingly, Win journeys to London to search for her mother, while
Sass remains at home through her summer holidays, which are a time of waiting:
for Win to return, for the results of her School Certificate examination, for
her developing sense of a subjectivity that does not depend on her relationship
with Win. These months of apparent hiatus, like the similar period during which
Clare dreams of New Guinea tribesmen in The House in Norham Gardens,
involve a sequence of significant moments when through empathy, self-assertion,
and reflection Sass becomes an active subject in her world.
The narrative see-saw between
Sass and Win, signaled through the letters and stories they exchange, enacts a
set of comparisons and contrasts between New Zealand and Britain, Arawa (where
Sass lives) and London, the Abbotts and the Lowells, Win's "other"
family. Sass's sense of imprisonment with "the Pets" is metonymic of
her imprisonment within a New Zealand that seems parochial, backward, remote
from the metropolitan center. Conversely, Win's flight to discover her mother
is that most postcolonial of quests, a search for origins and beginnings that
promises her a sense of her own reality. In the following excerpts, Win writes
of her discovery of her mother, and Sass responds:
They [the Lowells] live in Chelsea—it's very posh there. All I know is
that Edward works in 'the City'—that's finance, and the twins go to public
(that's private) school. Eleanor said of course you understand I was very young
and it seemed the Right Thing to Do. . . . I love the name Lowell—don't you
think it's much more literary than Abbott? Maybe it could be my pen name. . . .
Anyway, I'll write more about the E-Lowells after tomorrow. You can pass this
on to the Pets if you like—it saves me writing twice.
(42)
I am thrilled your mother is infinitely superior to all other mothers
you've endured in the past. . . . Lowell is indeed a far more literary,
aristocratic and intelligent, cultured, English, snooty bloody polo-playing
surname than the lowly Abbott you've [End Page 214] suffered for the
past eighteen years. It is of course the name of nobody remotely related to
you, but then neither is Abbott . . . Sasha Catriona Abbott (another
pretentiously named peasant from the colonies.)
(46)
Win's description of the
Lowells discloses a set of implied contrasts with her New Zealand family: their
"posh" Chelsea setting against the Abbotts' humble home in Arawa;
their wealth and privilege against Madge and Pete's occupations (respectively,
cleaner and bus driver); the "literariness" that Win projects onto
the name "Lowell," against the "appalling Woolworths
paintings" (13) with which Madge and Pete decorate their home. And, of
course, this cluster of contrasts constitutes part of the larger contrast
between Britain as metropolitan center and New Zealand as colonial outpost.
Sass's response ironically accords with Win's view but dismantles it through
her insistence on the slipperiness of signifiers. Thus, the
"poshness" that Win admires is re-visioned by Sass, who sees "Lowell"
as a "snooty, bloody polo-playing surname." And Sass's treatment of
the signifier "mother," which carries the colonial associations of
"mother England" as well as of Win's discovery of her birth mother,
insists on Madge's role as adoptive mother (guiltily sidestepped by Win) and,
most tellingly, on Win's appropriation of a name (that of her birth mother's
husband) to which she has no connection. Sass's self-description as
"another pretentiously named peasant from the colonies" is a
characteristically postcolonial ploy, simultaneously acknowledging the
marginality of the colonial and mocking the center's pretensions. This exchange
dismantles the colonial idea that self-realization can be achieved through a
return to the ancestral certainty of Britain; moreover, Sass's subversive
reading of the name Lowell undermines the very notion of "center" and
"margins."
At the end of the novel, Win
returns to Arawa, though temporarily, since she has obtained employment in
London (ironically, through an old friend of Pete's). To Sass's question
concerning which name she will use (Abbott or Lowell), Win responds as follows:
"Abbott," she said, "Abbott, Abbott, Abbott."
Sass gave a half-smile. "What's wrong with Lowell?"
"What's wrong with Lowell?" Win repeated. . . . "Lowell
means classist, sexist, racist. Lowell means stiff upper lip and hide the
illegitimate daughter. Lowell means what a shame about your accent [End Page
215] dear, and here's a nice, fat cheque to keep you at a safe,
unembarrassing distance. . . . All in all, I think I had a lucky escape."
(115)
Win's revised reading of the
name Lowell accords with Sass's earlier interpretation and so privileges the
latter's view from the margins. But whereas previously the comparisons between
center and margins (focused on the opposition of Lowell to Abbott) was
incorporated into larger oppositions between England and New Zealand, Win's
decision to return to Britain discloses another possibility—that her return
will not constitute a journey "home," to a lost mother, but to a site
where Win will develop a subjectivity no longer limited to a choice between
opposites. This type of subjectivity involves a mixture and fluidity of
elements: that is, Win can be an Abbott, and a New Zealander, at the same time
that she lives in London and embarks on a career.
Sass's realization of agency
and self-determination involves a revisioning of herself and her world through
her interactions with Win, her parents, her new neighbors, Hester and Jonathan,
and a local "rich boy," Trent. The closure of the narrative enacts a
mix of significances, centered around the moment when Sass receives her School
Certificate results, which reassure her that she is intellectually capable of
achieving her dream of becoming a scientist and of gaining a place in NASA's space
course for young achievers: "There was a small smile appearing at the
edges of Sass's mouth. Win grinned. 'I'll come visit you at NASA, promise.' And
the whoops that followed had the entire neighbourhood, including Hester,
looking skyward" (108). In one sense, the closure of Sasscat affords
a quite conventional resolution in that a gifted but insecure adolescent learns
to value herself, but Sass's projection of herself as an astronaut also
constitutes a contemporary version of the postcolonial journey. While her dream
of gaining a place at NASA seems to signal the substitution of one set of
imperial relationships for another, the idea of space travel symbolizes a
definitive escape from the smallness and remoteness of New Zealand, as well as
from the fiction that Britain is the true psychological center for postcolonial
subjects.
Colonialism is never over and
done with, despite Dahl's attempt to persuade his readers that the
Oompa-Loompas love the chains that bind them and Lively's nostalgic
representation of a people who have lost their culture. There is thus no
possibility of "the end of empire," so influential and pervasive are
the effects of imperial rule on its former [End Page 216] colonies; and
children's books will inevitably continue to rehearse and revisit the events of
colonization. Most significantly, the indigenous peoples of Britain's former
colonies continue to experience the effects of their displacement and of the
appropriation of their land, and it is highly likely that subaltern voices will
continue to provide child readers with stories formerly suppressed or elided.
Clare Bradford is an associate professor of literary studies at Deakin
University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the editor of the journal Papers:
Explorations into Children's Literature, and has published widely on
picture books and colonial and postcolonial literature for children. Her most
recent book, Reading Race, a study of representations of Aborigines in
Australian children's literature, will be published by Melbourne University
Press in 2001.
Notes
1. Such intersections of race and class were common
during the second half of the nineteenth century: "T. H. Huxley compared
the East London poor with Polynesian savages, William Booth chose the African
pygmy, and William Barry thought that the slums resembled nothing so much as a
slave ship" (McClintock
54). When visiting Ireland, Kingsley commented on the
chimpanzee-like appearance of the Irish poor: "to see white chimpanzees is
dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins,
except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours" (McClintock 216). Apes were commonly seen as figures
straddling the margins of race and class; blackness "naturally"
distinguished black people from white, but a special horror surrounds the
figure of the hybrid who is both white and notwhite, enough like "us"
to serve as a reminder about how "we" might descend to this level.
2. Dixon points out that the original American
edition of 1964 and the first British edition of 1967 depict the Oompa-Loompas
as black and as "imported direct from Africa" (112), whereas the
revised 1973 edition removes these references.
3. The word swag is derived from a British
dialectal term and refers to a bundle or roll containing the bedding and
personal belongings of a traveler through the bush.
4. High English is glossed
in Jimmy and Pat as "a form of English spoken by kartiya people,
using long words and difficult expressions" (30).
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