Explore notions of the gaze in at least two texts.

        In order to have a profitable tourist industry, the Caribbean is forced to look at itself from the gaze of Western countries.  Their lens sees golden beaches and pure blue seawater.  Even Brathwaite flippantly remarks that ‘You must know of the Caribbean from television’.  However, this Caribbean is not reality.  Such awareness of this self-deception shows that

‘the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for the Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe’

Such a prostitution of the country can be seen in Brathwaite’s poetry, with the land being exploited and ‘ruled by silver sugar cane’.  He describes the Caribbean islands as ‘a mighty curve’, a sentiment also echoed in his poetry, as shall be explored later.  Such an ‘intrusion of European culture’ into people’s daily lives is also reflected in the education system.  Brathwaite remarks that  ‘In 1492 Columbus ‘discovered’ (as it is said) the Caribbean’, yet people were already living there.  This is reasserted in that ‘Englishness’ (if we can call it that) was predominant in the Caribbean classroom:

‘British literature and literary forms, the models which had very little to do, really, with the environment and the reality of non-Europe – were dominant in the Caribbean education system’

These are two completely different worlds, running parallel to one another, at no point can they coincide.  The experiences of England and the language that develops from them cannot possibly equate to life in the Caribbean.  As Brathwaite famously said, ‘The hurricane does not roar in pentameters’.  It is like trying to force a jigsaw piece to fit another picture.  Such a Westernised view of one’s own homeland blinkers the perception of it, cheapening it to the extent that such prostitution of the land through tourism is deemed acceptable, and those that pay are those with no voice.

        In an interview with her editor, Mahasweta Devi discusses the problems the tribals in India face.  She emphasises the difference in values between the tribals and the Western world, saying that ‘individual pomp and splendour are unknown’ and that they are similar to Native Americans in that they believe ‘that land and forest and river belong to everyone’.  This is in stark contrast with the newly commercialised India, as a result of Colonialism.

        Devi recognises the complete dissimilarity between tribal and modern India, saying that ‘The tribals and the mainstream have always been parallel.  There has never been a meeting point’.  As a result of this, the mainstream attempts to place the ‘gaze’ (or Western lens) upon its own minorities when it has only just had it placed upon itself.  This complete indoctrination into the values of their previous oppressors leaves India’s mainstream in a difficult position.  Education is key, and the Devi’s comments on the education of the tribals echoes the sentiments of Brathwaite: ‘“When we go to school, we read about Mahatma Gandhi.  Did we have no heroes?  Did we always suffer like this?”’.  Mainstream India is now the aggressor, and forcing its minorities to suffer the consequences of their attempt at ‘modernisation’:  ‘They [tribals] have not been a part.  Yet they have paid the price.  I am wary of the West’; Devi’s wariness of the West is not unsurprising considering the legacy of Colonialism.  Devi is aware that if we subject everyone to the Western gaze, it can only lead to the annihilation of culture:  ‘Only in the names of places the Native American legacy survives’.

The tribals are forced to adapt to a more Westernised life in order to survive, but at the price of annihilating their culture.          The tribals original belief in symbiosis with the natural world is in stark contrast with mass deforestation that the British brought in during Colonisation.  They are being subjected to the Gaze, being made to re-assess themselves unnecessarily and as such are ‘suffering spectators’.  Having no active part in mainstream India they are nevertheless subject to its laws and ‘They branded the small tribes as criminal tribes because they lived in the forest and did not take to cultivation’.  Their reluctance to embrace a new way of life meant they were criminalized.

What is interesting is that Devi identifies herself as an Indian writer rather than a Bengali one, and is ‘proud of this’.  However, by attempting to identify herself with an entire country and the many languages and cultures within it she is reducing their own individual impact and the necessity of individuality within the whole.  She professes to believe that ‘The individual cannot go on suffering in silence’, yet she is losing a sense of her own individuality in order to reduce the ‘gaze’ of the Government and the Western world.  They are unified, but not a nation.  By lessening her marginalized status she becomes more generic, and such a method is effective for the tribals in a country where the ‘local administration are bribed’.  The Government are preying on the tribals because they are a minority with no political sway.  In forcing them to conform, they increase India’s ‘oneness’ with the Western world:

‘They are you easy victims, they are your prey and you hunt them.  The system hunts them.  And wants to brand them.  The system which hunts them and uses them as a target is the criminal’

By ‘branding’ them, they seek to differentiate the tribals from the mainstream, as if to show the outside world that they are a minority, an insignificant number not to be considered when thinking of ‘India’.

        In Devi’s ‘The Hunt’, the ‘gaze’ of the coloniser is put into effect immediately, with the italicised words (which were in English in the original version) slowing down the reading.  This forces the reader to acknowledge the legacy of colonialism and acknowledge the ‘relationship between language and culture, language and structure’.  The narrative lens focuses our attention on the multifaceted nature of the ‘gaze’, as the reader sees the commercial value of land and the idea of possession and ownership through looking:  ‘The train goes on, the engine gasps; now the ravine swallows the train’. The ravine, as a natural part of the landscape is not italicised, but its human ability to ‘swallow’ the train demonstrates the limitations of technology in comparison to the power of Nature, which Mary later symbolises.  This can be compared to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which ends with the incredibly patronising District Commissioner deciding to write a book about his experiences in the village:  ‘He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’.  Such a condescending tone results from the Commissioners’ sense of ownership, as the train attempts to own the landscape here.

        When the reader first meets Mary, we cannot see her properly.  Her own gaze rebuffs attempts at intimacy, demonstrating her strength of will in defiance of the coloniser – and yet it is still a part of her:

‘- It’s good of me to let you pick the mahua.  It is government property.  I could hire people and have the fruit picked and I don’t do it.

- Let the hired people come and see.  I have my machete.

Mary’s voice is harsh and grim.

Prasadji says, It figures.  White blood’

The narrator emphasises Mary’s heritage, using the blood of the coloniser to explain her volatile temperament and her sense of ownership.  Because of her fierceness, it is stated that ‘Everyone is afraid of Mary’.  This fierceness is not the only attribute from her Australian father:  ‘Yes, there is something true in Mary, the power of Australian blood’.  This power is inherent within her, and men are attracted and scared by it.  Our view of Mary is complicated because of her hybridity, with Mary finding her skin a ‘resistant barrier’ to men and believes that ‘When you see a white daughter, you kill her right away.  Then there are no problems!’ .  This signifies her status of constant Otherness, even without the ‘gaze’ of the Western world.  Within what she considers her own culture she is Other:

‘Because she is the illegitimate daughter of a white father the Oraons don’t think of her as their blood and do not place the harsh injunctions of their own society upon her…she is unhappy they don’t’

Her desire to belong overrides her self-reliance, and yet, despite this lack of cohesion, Mary is the one who ‘resurrected the real meaning of the annual hunting festival day by dealing out justice for a crime committed against the entire tribal society’; whilst this may appear negative, Devi admits that she thinks that ‘as far as the tribals or the oppressed are concerned, violence is justified.  When the system fails in – justice, violence is justified’ and Tehsildar’s treatment of Mary falls into this category.

        Tehsildar is a laughable figure in his pseudo-Western outfit, yet as Mary says, he is not the only one: ‘“Brokers like you, with tight pants and dark glasses, are ten a rupee on the streets of Tohri, and to them I show this machete’.  He has ineffectually internalised the coloniser gaze, as he has lost his 'true' sense of self.  Unfortunately, ‘Tehsildar represents the mainstream’, and his desire to possess Mary inexplicably consumes him:

‘Mary has had a bath today.  So her body is clean and smooth, her hair oiled and braided.  A printed sari worn with the end spread in front of her breasts, brass ornaments on wrist and ear.  Mary enters with tea and snacks on a tray, Tehsildar Singh sits up.  Wow!  What a dish! In these woods?’

This highly sexualised vision of Mary illustrates the commodification of women by the Western ‘gaze’.  In Tribal societies, women were much respected and honoured, but they were easily taken advantage of, as Mary’s mother shows.  Hybrid’s such as Mary are a physical representation of the effect of not only Colonisation but also the ‘gaze’: ‘Because he can’t catch me.  If he does his love will vanish.  The white man also loved my mother’.  Like the Creole, the ‘imposed language’ of Brathwaite, Mary does not fully belong with the villagers, and yet neither would she belong in Australia.  The ‘gaze’ Exoticises women to Colonisers, in the same way that the land is perceived to be theirs as well.

        Tehsildar’s death is because of his lack of respect for not only women but also his environment.  Tehsildar is ‘a city bastard’, and with the laughable offer of demonstrating ‘the twist dance of the city this evening’, he reduces village life and ritual to nothingness.

        In killing him, then, Mary rids herself of the male Colonisers’ gaze:

‘Then first she throws Tehsildar in the ravine, his wallet, cigarettes, his handkerchief.  Stone after stone.  Hyenas and leopards will come at night, smelling blood.  Or they won’t’

She takes his money then rids herself of the Western wallet and other nonessentials.  Even the animals around her will assist in her murder by eating the evidence.  

        With the emphasis back on the natural, and the fact that Mary bathes naked, Devi is asserting that the natural balance has been restored.  In this she shows that ‘The nonhuman environment is presented not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’.  Such prominence given to the strength and beauty of the land only serves to highlight Mary’s own feminine power.

Brathwaite’s poem ‘Calypso’ focuses on the strength and beauty of the land prior to human (but most strongly Western) intervention.  Within each stanza there is a shift in focus as well as time.  The narrative lens focuses the attention (the gaze) on the creation, then exploitation of the islands and how history is encoded in the landscape.  The first stanza focuses on the stone that ‘bloomed into islands’.  The flower imagery illustrates the beauty of such an event, whilst a phrase such as the ‘curved stone hissed into reef’ demonstrates the latent – as hissing is a warning action – power there.  The lone line of: ‘bloom of the arcing summers…’  isolated the sublime and timeless beauty.

        The poem, in its second section then goes on to focus its attention on the interconnected history of the people and the landscape through the commodification of the land.  Now ‘ruled by silver sugar cane’ for ‘cutlass profit’ - a cutlass being a naval sword – it refers to profit for the colonisers rather than the people of the land.

Having islands that are now ‘ruled by sugar cane’ leads to the effective prostitution of the land and Fanon’s reference to a country being the ‘brothel of Europe’ through, in this instance, tourism.  With references to ‘sacred pink tourists from the frozen Nawth’, the false reverence of ‘sacred’ mocking the need for such people, compounded by the phonetic ‘Nawth’.  Due to tourism and the false ‘gaze’ through which the country is seen, the relationship with the land is distant.  This creates an existential paradox as the inhabitants see themselves as apart from nature due to their dependence on Western money and technology, and the subsequent distance from nature.

        This distancing is shown through the figure of ‘black Sam’, a reference to the Sambo figure of nineteenth century Southern America, a negative caricature.  It became a general pejorative term for a black male based on disparaging stereotyping of a black slave.  By using this term, Brathwaite links the prostitution of the land with the degradation of its people and he differentiates them from the Colonisers: ‘John with the European name’.  Such tension shows the difficulty in celebrating nature when the colonisers were at pains to restrict access to it.  The memory of Colonisation lives on in the land, and thus there are two coexistent views of it:  the brutality of the plantation system juxtaposed against the non-human, wild parts of the landscape representing freedom.  There is a need to compromise and use all memories as, in Brathwaite’s words  ‘we haven’t got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience’.  It shows the impotence of the people, with clever Johnny ‘now nigratin’ overseas…’  with the obvious pun on the word ‘migrating’, although it is against his will and thus he becomes one of many people trafficked throughout the world.

Overall, the notion of ‘the gaze’ is problematic.  To remove the influence of Colonialism is impossible, as it influenced so much of modern life, and to ignore it would be to ignore the fact that human history is implicated in natural history.  The problem that ‘the gaze’ brings with it is the necessity for those of once-colonised nations to see themselves through their own and their ex-colonisers eyes.  However, characters such as Mary show that an uncompromising view of self in relation to no one else can be beneficial, but also lonely.  Devi and Brathwaite also showed the bigger picture; that while a view of self might have changed, it is nothing compared to the changes to culture and language.  However, something so inherent needs to change with the times, no matter how unfortunate they are.

---

Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, (London: Penguin, 2001)

Barry, Peter, ‘Postcolonial Criticism’, Beginning Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)

Brathwaite, E. K., ‘Calypso’, Rites of Passage, ( ____________)

Brathwaite, E. K., History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, (London: New Beacon Books, 1984)

Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination:  Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press, 1995)

Devi, Mahasweta, ‘The Hunt’, Imaginary Maps, Trans by Geyatri Spivak, (New York: Routledge, 1995)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘Nature’, The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1820-1865, sixth edition, ed by Nina Baym (New York, London: WW Norton & Company, 2003)

Fanon, Frantz, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in The Wretched of the Earth, (London: Penguin, 1990)

Spivak, Gayatri, ‘The Author in Conversation’, Imaginary Maps, trans by Gayatri Spivak, (New York: Routledge, 1995)

---