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Michelle Lee

Prof Maria Taroutina

YHU3274 Painting the Orient

23 November 2019

Plague, Hybridity, and Post-Colonial Horror in Yvette Christiansë’s “The Name of the

Island”

The South African poet Yvette Christiansë, whose family emigrated from the island of

St. Helena, tells a fragmented cultural history of the island in her poetry collection Castaway

(1999). In particular, she focuses on the island as Napoleon Bonaparte’s place of exile.

Christiansë imagines the disgraced general reflecting upon his past, portraying St. Helena

through his eyes.

In this essay, I will analyse the use of horror in Christiansë’s poem “The Name of the

Island” in its depictions of the plague at Jaffa during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. I argue

that by depicting horror in the form of plague, Christiansë deliberately evokes the association

between horror and the Orient in order to examine its underlying tropes and assumptions. I do

so by comparing her depiction of plague to the anxieties seen in contemporary cultural

depictions of the plague in Egypt, in particular Antoine-Jean Gros’ Bonaparte Visits the Plague

Victims of Jaffa (1804). Through this comparison, Christiansë can be seen as turning the fear

and anxiety provoked by the Orient against its colonizers, exposing the precarity of their

justifications of superiority and bringing a buried discomfort with the violence of imperial war

to the surface. The poem can thus be read in relation to the genre of post-colonial horror

literature, which uses the horror of hybridity in order to unsettle and subvert Orientalist

discourse. However, Christiansë goes beyond using horror merely to unsettle Orientalist
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discourse, instead proposing an alternative manner of knowing the Orient that does not rely on

Western cultural depictions but instead privileges the embodied knowledge of native residents.

Homi Bhabha suggests that the concept of hybridity, or the “interstitial passage between

fixed identifications”, can be used to threaten the discursive regime described by Said in

Orientalism in which the positions of the European subject and the Oriental object assume

fixed roles. It does so by drawing attention to the ambiguous and multi-faceted identities which

challenge the division between colonizer and colonized and can be deployed through

mechanisms of disturbance such as “fetishism, paranoia, [and] sly civility" (Easthope 341).

The genre of post-colonial horror, with its tropes of “spectralisation, the return of the repressed,

uncanny (mis)recognitions, possession (and dispossession), excess, [and] the ‘monstrousness’

of hybridity”, can be seen as unsettling Orientalist discourse via its evocation of anxiety and

fear. In particular, a major theme of post-colonial horror is “infection and inhabitation”. The

trope of infection challenges the colonial desire to draw “boundaries and borders, whether […]

national or bodily”, producing fear through its evocation of hybrid identities and bodies that

mutate and circulate (Gelder 35).

The fear of hybridity in relation to plague can be seen in Darcy Grigsby’s analysis of

the public perception of plague during the Egyptian campaign as seen through visual

representations of the plague at Jaffa. She examines Gros’ Bonaparte Visits the Plague Victims

of Jaffa (1804) (fig. 1) as an example of the fears surrounding plague and the ways in which

these fears were addressed or suppressed via cultural production. Grigsby identifies a central

component of the horror of plague as the fear of taking on characteristics of the Orient’s

environment, blurring boundaries between colonizer and colonized. She sees this in the

ambivalent and startling depiction of plague-stricken French soldiers in Gros’ painting. Not

only have the soldiers been infected with the plague, their supine and unclothed figures take on

“’orientalist’ figurations of regression, chaos, and heightened sexuality”, prompting a Salon

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critic to ask whether they had “taken on the air and character of the country” (70). The

permeability of their body to the plague thus reflects an imagined vulnerability to the perceived

degeneracy of the Orient as place.

According to Grigsby, one way in which the fear of hybridity may be averted is through

the Orientalist trope in which well-maintained Western dress becomes an emblem of

civilization in the face of barbarity. She sees Gros as signifying Napoleon’s bodily integrity

through the use of costume. By depicting Napoleon’s “close-fitting French uniform” in contrast

to the “loosely covered plague victims as well as the robed Arabs”, he constructs Napoleon’s

military authority in the face of this fear by depicting his body as discrete and bounded in

contrast to the diseased bodies of the soldiers. However, Grigsby also points out the risk of

employing such a trope. In the face of “the vast landscape of a demoralized land”, she writes,

the well-dressed colonizer runs the risk of being merely an “absurd and impotent remnant of

Western culture” (73).

In “The Name of the Island”, Christiansë thus evokes the horror of hybridity by

depicting Napoleon’s clothed body as permeable to plague amidst the landscape of St. Helena.

Here, Napoleon’s body becomes one with the house he lives in, “the walls of the house”

metonymically associated with “the walls of his body” (3). The walls of the house, a man-made

structure designed to give shelter against the elements, can be seen as a metaphor for the

clothing that symbolically protects Napoleon against the diseased environment of the Orient.

However, the house is depicted as permeable and defenseless against the natural elements of

the island’s landscape, with the unceasing wind constantly blowing through it. Napoleon

imagines the wind blowing through the house to be “a bushel of rats, bristling in his hat” (3).

The house becomes the tricorne hat, an iconic part of his military uniform; its failure in

protecting him against the horrors of the Orient can be seen in how it is now infested by rats,

carriers of bubonic plague. In another stanza, Napoleon imagines the house as “[going] tighter,
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tighter/ like a corset around a sick man’s liver” (1). The close-fitted, well-starched nature of

his uniform, rather than signifying boundedness, now becomes restrictive and limiting. The

absurdity of his garments in the landscape of the Orient is suggested by likening them to a

“corset”, suggesting the emasculated nature of the well-dressed colonizer by imagining him in

a feminine article of clothing. In this instance, Napoleon’s clothing fails to shield him from

external horror, as he has already succumbed to a growing horror within. The house is described

as tightening “around a sick man’s liver”, a reference to the stomach ulcer which pierced

through Napoleon’s stomach wall and reached his liver, leading to his death in exile. By

referring to his liver, not his stomach, Christiansë suggests that Napoleon has succumbed

completely to chaos and disorder, with the spread of the ulcer throughout his organs suggesting

that even the internal order of his body has been breached. Through the horror of disease, she

thus imagines the horror of the Orient as having invaded and overcome Napoleon, exposing

the fragility of the Occident’s constructed superiority in relation to the ‘barbarity’ of the Orient.

Another aspect of the horror of plague which Grigsby identifies is the fear of feminine

passivity and defeat. She argues that under the masculine, militaristic society of the Napoleonic

state, masculinity was often “naturalized as the gender of courage” (78) by linking the opposing

term of femininity to weakness and defeat. This link between passivity and defeat can be linked

to persistent French fears of sodomy, the ultimate emasculation, rumoured to take place at the

hands of Arab conquerors. The horror of plague again becomes a means by which fears

surrounding the Orient emerge, as the plague-stricken soldiers evoke a sense of anxiety due to

the “swooning” and “limp” femininity of their passive bodies (76). Grigsby sees Gros as

attempting to secure Napoleon’s masculinity in the face of the lurking threat of feminization

and defeat by the Orient through the homoerotic gesture in which he penetrates the plague-

stricken soldier’s bubo with his bare finger.

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Christiansë evokes this fear by using homoerotic imagery to depict Napoleon as passive

and feminine in his status as defeated exile. Inverting the gesture of Gros’ painting, she

imagines Napoleon’s diseased body being probed by the finger of his conqueror:

Still another day, the wind pierces the

walls of the house, the walls of his body,

like a finger pushing into his intestines.

He can point exactly where the intrusion

took place. He wants it marked, where, one night

he woke from a dream of an Englishman

thrusting a finger into his diaphragm

and separating his organs.

(Christiansë 3)

Again, Christiansë uses tropes of infection and inhabitation to challenge the national

and bodily boundaries drawn in relation to the Orient. In these lines, Christiansë likens the

wind which “pierces […] the walls of his body” to “a finger pushing into his intestines”. The

homoerotic act of anal penetration reinforces the repeated references to Napoleon’s loss of

bodily integrity, which like disease is presented as an “intrusion” which threatens the

boundedness of the body. Crucially, this act of homoerotic penetration is linked to Napoleon’s

military defeat by the British, as he dreams that it is carried out by “an Englishman”.

In depicting Napoleon’s defeat under the same terms of homoerotic power struggle

which the French projected onto their military interactions with the Orient, Christiansë exposes

the implied violence inherent to the association between military victory and non-consensual

sexual penetration. The Englishman’s act of probing is depicted as a violent imposition of

rationality and order over Napoleon’s disordered body, taking on the same characteristics used
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by Gros to differentiate Napoleon from the Orient and thus justify his military authority.

Christiansë depicts the violent “thrusting” of the Englishman’s finger as an imposition of order

upon Napoleon’s undifferentiated insides, “separating his organs”. While Napoleon can “point

exactly where the intrusion/ took place”, and “wants it marked”, Christiansë implies that

Napoleon’s own desires for rational order go unheeded as he assumes the role of the passive

and submissive Oriental signifier. Instead, she moves the site of the probing from the torso to

the “diaphragm”, implying the silencing that goes along with the imposition of imperial

violence.

The silencing of Napoleon’s demands for naming, for acknowledgment of the violence

enacted upon him, reflects a third fear that Grigsby identifies as surrounding the plague at Jaffa.

This was the fear of the Orient as associated with a shadowy and opaque absence of knowledge,

produced by the popular rumours regarding Napoleon’s poisoning of his own plague-stricken

soldiers. While these atrocities were directed against Napoleon’s own men, they became

associated with the Orient due to their taking place in the context of imperial war. In the context

of these rumours, Gros’ depiction of the triumph of rational knowledge over unknown fear

through Napoleon touching the sick man is linked to the function of the painting as an official

piece which uneasily attempts to dispel persisting rumours about the real nature of events.

Christiansë uses horror in the trope of haunting to convey the atrocity of imperial

violence which has been covered up and repressed. In these lines, she imagines the victims of

plague seeking their revenge:

“Now the wind brings them.

Green as sickness, they gather

on the other side of his window

gather and stretch far back, right

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down to the dock, and out onto the water,

like ants that have found a honey trail.”

(Christiansë 3)

Haunting is a recurring theme in post-colonial theory in the works of Spivak and Bhabha

amongst others; this pervasiveness can be seen as due to its “affective dimension”, which

through the production of anxiety “creates a sense of the imminently important, present, and

disruptive” (O’Riley 1). In instances where histories of violence have been repressed from the

colonial narrative, the fear of haunting represents a fear of the “return of that which has been

written out of history” (2). In this stanza, the plague victims take on spectral qualities; their

undead nature is suggested by their faces, “green as sickness”, and the weightless manner in

which they are gathered by the wind and hover “out onto the water”. The horror of haunting is

produced by the ghosts’ refusal to be suppressed. The image of the ghosts “like ants that have

found a honey trail” suggest that they approach in a slow but persistent parade, vulnerable

individually but unstoppable in their numbers. This sense of creeping dread is emphasized by

the way in which the last five lines consist of a single sentence. Broken up into lines of similar

length by enjambment, the sentence describes the physical “stretch” of the ghosts’ approach,

creating a sense of their steady advancement towards the entrapped Napoleon. Again, his body

is portrayed as barely holding off the elements as the ghosts brought by wind “gather/ on the

other side of his window”, pressing up against the walls that serve as a metaphor for the

boundedness of his body. By imagining the plague victims as returning to haunt Napoleon,

Christiansë suggests that what is repressed must inevitably return, with the resultant anxiety

produced by the fear of the truth coming to light. The horror of the Orient is the indirect child

of Napoleon’s atrocities against his own soldiers in Egypt, which occurred in the context of his

campaign of imperial violence. By imagining the same horror as coming back to haunt him in
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what Bhabha has termed the “return of the oppressed” (Ginsburg 231), Christiansë confronts

Napoleon with the atrocities of his actions.

Christiansë thus uses the logic of horror to expose the precarity of Orientalist

constructions of difference between colonizer and colonized. Yet at the same time, she draws

a clear line between the fears she portrays and reality, making the point that these fears are

merely constructs of Napoleon’s imagination. Throughout the poem, there is a repeated motif

of dreams and awakening. Napoleon is described as having “woke[n] from a dream of an

Englishman”; the plague victims are described as “gather[ing] like silence for a man/ woken

horribly”. The poem returns to stark reality in its final stanza:

Most days, the wind

is just the wind and the island

does not even support nightmares.

(Christiansë 4)

By making it clear that Napoleon’s fears are imaginary in nature, Christiansë differentiates the

reality of St. Helena from the dreams, fantasies, and obsessions that constitute the imaginary

Orient. In doing so, she can be seen as reclaiming the island from the representations imposed

upon it by Orientalist discourse.

As such, Christiansë’s use of hybridity and horror ultimately aims to destabilize the

way in which Western cultural representations and forms of knowledge production construct

colonial authority in relation to the Orient. This can be seen in a stanza in which she considers

the problems of representation in relation to portraits of Napoleon:

The tragedy of existence: that a man can never

see the top of his own head or the back of his own

head, or the side of his face. Not really. Ever. While

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others can see things. If he has a speck of dust on his

cheek, a flake of ash on his hair, a small bare spot

bare enough for a gob of well-aimed spit.

(Christiansë 2)

These lines can be read in the context of official artistic production under the Napoleonic

regime, in which the state used censorship and repression to tightly control representations of

Napoleon. This tight control over the way Napoleon was depicted was tied to the precarity of

his claims to power. Porterfield and Siegfried argue that in order to secure Napoleon’s political

legitimacy, artists such as David and Ingres invented a new “politics of embodiment”,

portraying Napoleon’s physical body as the manifestation of his right to rule. Yet, the process

of representing a new imperial France “placed male military bodies at the center of Imperial

art and defined them through and against the bodies of their others (orientals, conquered

enemies, horses)” (9-10). This process of representing Napoleon’s authority in relation to

Orientalised others can be seen in Gros’ Plague at Jaffa.

In contrast to these Orientalist paintings, Christiansë sets out a clear contrast between

the two-dimensional representations of Napoleon versus the schizophrenic three-

dimensionality of his embodied person. The inability of his physical body to be captured by a

two-dimensional surface is suggested by the multiple surface of “the top of his own head or the

back of his own/ head or the side of his face”. She uses the three-dimensionality of his body to

suggest the failure of his attempts at control over the way he is depicted; there is a certain

incapacity for self-reflection suggested by the fact that he physically cannot see all of himself,

especially not in the way others see him. Instead, she links the anxiety for control over self-

representation to an increased vulnerability to criticism, with Napoleon’s inability to control

the way others see him leaving him open to “a gob of well-aimed spit”. This criticism, the “gob

of spit”, can be seen as the purpose of Castaway. Her description of the uncontrollable spilling-
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over of Napoleon’s body in this stanza can be linked to her depictions of hybridity throughout

the poem, which challenges the colonizer’s perceptions and representations of himself.

Instead, Christiansë looks for alternative ways of knowledge by which the Orient can

achieve self-representation. This desire to give St. Helena its own voice, to allow it to speak

for itself, can be seen through the motif of naming suggested in the title “The Name of the

Island”. The island ironically remains unnamed throughout the poem, despite Napoleon’s

concerns with naming as seen by the way he “says his name over and/ over” (2). He names the

island “the worst place” (1), wanting it to be “marked” as the site of his defeat (3). Yet, instead

of naming the island as St. Helena, Christiansë begins the poem by calling it “My

grandmother’s island”, identifying it not through an official name but through her intimate,

familial relationship to the place. She suggests its resistance to Western discourses of

knowledge through the way its fog “whispers and sings to itself” in defiance of cartographic

markers such as “lighthouses and watermarked maps” (1). This can further be seen in the

contrast between this poem’s title, “The Name of the Island”, and the title of the second poem

in the collection, “The Island Sings Its Name”.

The critic Meg Samuelson argues that Christiansë uses genealogy as an alternative form

of history that challenges imperial impulses to name, map, and conquer in response to the way

Bonaparte’s legacy as a great man of history has dominated St. Helena’s presence in the cultural

imagination (30). This is seen in “The Island Sings its Name”, in which Christiansë details an

intimate personal knowledge of the island spoken through “[her] grandmother’s voice” (5). She

imagines her grandmother’s sensory and physical experience of the island “underfoot” (7),

imagining herself slipping into “the bough of [her grandmother’s] arm” to see the island

through her senses (6). In contrast to the embodied politics of Orientalist art, in which the

bodies of colonizers are depicted as superior in contrast to the bodies of the colonized, she
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imagines a genealogical history which gives voice to forms of embodied knowledge passed

down through historically silenced indigenous bodies.

Through her use of horror, Christiansë can thus be seen as exposing the instability of

representations of Napoleon’s military authority, as predicated upon the signifier of the Orient.

She does so through tropes of hybridity and haunting, or “infection and inhabitation” in the

context of plague, which challenge clear divisions between European subject and Oriental

object. These tropes unsettle Orientalist discourse through the disturbing anxiety they produce,

which Christiansë highlights in her depiction of plague as an all-pervasive horror threatening

Napoleon from both without and within. Ultimately, Christiansë reproduces the fear of the

Orient in order to challenge it. She does so by differentiating the island’s existence from the

Napoleon’s imagined fears, separating physical landscape from the dreams and fantasies that

constitute the imaginary Orient. In doing so, she calls for an alternative knowledge of these

places, one that is constructed through genealogical tradition and embodied experience.
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Figures

Fig. 1. Gros, Antoine-Jean. Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa. 1804, Louvre,
Paris. “File:Antoine-Jean Gros - Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa.jpg”, Wikimedia
Commons, Wikipedia, 2007, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antoine-Jean_Gros_-
_Bonaparte_visitant_les_pestif%C3%A9r%C3%A9s_de_Jaffa.jpg. Accessed 23 November
2019.
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Works Cited

Christiansë, Yvette. Castaway. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1999.

Easthope, Antony. "Bhabha, Hybridity, and Identity." Textual Practice, vol. 12, no. 2, 1998,

pp. 341.

Gelder, Ken. "Global/postcolonial Horror: Introduction." Postcolonial Studies, vol. 3, no. 1,

2000, pp. 35-38.

Ginsburg, Shai. "Signs and Wonders: Fetishism and Hybridity in Homi Bhabha's the Location

of Culture." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, pp. 229-250.

Grigsby, Darcy G. “Plague: Egypt-Syria.” Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary

France. Yale University Press, London; New Haven, Conn;, 2002.

Porterfield, Todd B., and Susan L. Siegfried. Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David.

Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pa, 2006.

Samuelson, Meg. "Yvette Christiansë's Oceanic Genealogies and the Colonial Archive:

Castaways and Generations from Eastern Africa to the South Atlantic." Eastern African

Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 2014, pp. 27-38.