The Island Writes Back: Discourse/Power and Marginality in Wole Soyinka's "The Swamp

Dwellers," Derek Walcott's "The Sea at Dauphin," and Athol Fugard's "The Island"
Author(s): Harry Garuba
Source: Research in African Literatures , Winter, 2001, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 2001),
pp. 61-76
Published by: Indiana University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820807

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 The Island Writes Back:
Discourse/Power and Marginality in
Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers,
Derek Walcott's The Sea atDauphin,
and Athol Fugard's The Island

Harry Garuba

islands. For explorers, islands have always been objects of desire, the
The literature of exploration, slavery, and colonialism is replete with
blank spaces in the vastness of the seas for which he questers long in
their sojourn to bring under the cartographic system of the map and ren-
der them amenable to discursive control. The explorer's narrative, always
pointing from the center to the islands located at the margins of the seas,
is a narrative produced by the center, for the center, and of the center. In
this respect, it is a narrative conditioned by the tropological/narrative con?
ventions and discursive expectations, which govern that relationship. The
investment in otherness, the tropes of its representation, and the entire sym-
bology that went with it have become so well known as to bear no repeat?
ing. And with the advent of the slave trade and colonialism and the
movement from exploration to exploitation came a consolidation of these
representations in a more malignant and sinister direction. To put it sim?
ply, the "blank spaces" and "virgin lands" of an earlier discourse later meta-
morphosed into places of darkness (see, for instance, Smith).
Several critics and commentators have charted the historical and dis?
cursive map of this movement, its shifts, its decisive moments, and th
processes and politics involved in the textual conquest of the other. Wh
emerged from these attempts to historicize and theorize the constructio
of a "Civilisational Other" in opposition to the self-constitution of the West
are a set of descriptive tropes through which this relationship is figur
The most commonly deployed of these are those of Prospero/Calib
and/or Robinson Crusoe/Man Friday and, of course, the island. Throu
the discursive circuits of the Western academy, these tropes have been
endlessly circulated that they have acquired a hegemonic power that vir
tually compels us to accept them as the singular, constitutive determina
of non-Western subjectivity. It is understandable, from the point of view of
the explorer and the colonist, that these images should possess great sig
nificance as descriptive and analytical tools through which the colonia
encounter is processed; and analyses of the power relations they depic
should certainly be of much interest for colonial discourse analysis an
postcolonial theory and criticism. Obviously, no one can reasonably den
the great benefit of analyzing and theorizing the impact of Empire on sub?
jugated peoples. However, relentlessly asking the same questions and usi
the same procedures of research and interrogation within the same obje
field not only yields distressingly few new results but also forecloses other
areas of prospectively fruitful inquiry.

Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter 2001

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62 Research in African Literatures

Island narratives provide one instance where this kind of critical

closure can very easily occur. Islands, by their very geographical location,
evoke those binary oppositions of center and margin, metropole and
periphery, self and other upon which these discourses thrive. And, more
often than not, the collusion between geography and history that seals this
marginalization through the process of colonization raises the temptation
to totalize about island narratives to new heights. This temptation is diffi?
cult to ignore, given that the explorer and colonist, having projected their
own desires and beliefs upon the island space, construct a new narrative
presence and paradigm and inscribe this in the material and discursive
processes through which our knowledge of islands and island narratives is
filtered. As Mike Marais argues in connection with Robinson Crusoe's first
encounter with his island:

Despite the realist illusion of immediacy, this representation ofthe

subject's encounter with colonial space unconsciously reveals that
the former's knowledge of the latter is mediated by European dis?
course, and not determined by the actual physical terrain. For
instance, what Crusoe is described as seeing is not a neutral space
void of all presuppositions but a property?that is, a highly specific
construction of space which, as Lennard Davis argued, is related
to the development in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries of a transcendental subject who evinced a strong desire
to dominate space. (19-20)
And as Mary Hamer asserts in her essay "Putting Ireland on the Map," even
[a]n abstracted and standardized representation of terrain chal?
lenges direct local experience and removes, as it were, the terrain
from the cognitive ownership of those who inhabit it. (184)
Just as Crusoe's first encounter with the island is mediated by Europe
discourse, we are also, as critics, thoroughly interpellated by the discou
of islands and the tropes through which this is presented in narrative a
in critical theory. From this seeming plenitude, the temptation for the the
orist or critic to provide a totalizing metanarrative of islands in literat
or to map what Fredric Jameson refers to as a "cognitive aesthetics"
these narratives sometimes becomes overwhelming. Either as a recog
tion of an always already inscribed archive or as a revisionist attempt
writing back, we all seem to be already implicated in this discourse. Th
Catherine Addison states, for instance:

Islands in literature, mythology, and dream are already feminized

spaces, perhaps reminding their regressive questers of the fluid-
surrounded child in the womb . . . . As an object of male desire,
the island resembles the secluded garden, but unlike the garden
its enclosure is no mere wall or hedge but the most suggestive of
all material things, the sea. Thus, it usually has as its concomitant
the narrative of the voyage, whose direction, always away from home
(and then back), posits the island on the extreme verge of the

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 Harry Garuba 63

imaginative vision, points to it from "here" as "over there" and

invests it with the elusive attraction of Otherness. (687-88)
This critical "mapping" of the contours of island narrative from a feminist
point of view unwittingly partakes of the same "elusive attraction of
Otherness" that the essay sets out to subvert by deploying the binary tropes
of that discourse. The critic therefore finds herself in an ambivalent posi?
tion. Whether in exposing or critiquing the "synchronic essentialism"
(Said) of this discourse, criticism finds itself complicit in seeing the histo?
ries of other peoples within the context of Europe and thus presents it as
a continuation of that history. Perhaps it is pertinent at this stage to state
that what is at stake here is not the "correctness" or otherwise of the tropes
usually deployed in the criticism of island narratives. What is at stake may
be best summed up by this question by Gayatri Spivak:
What is very much a question for me at the moment is that if you
are constructed in one particular kind of language, what kinds of
violence does it do to your subjectivity if one then has to move into
another language, and suppress whatever selves or subjectivities
were constructed by the first? (66)
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question about kinds of violence, we
may concentrate on moving on into another language, which is the major
preoccupation of this paper. To do this, however, it is necessary to recall
first that island narratives are not always constructed from the point of view
of the adventurer, explorer, or colonist and that not all of these narratives
point in a direction "always away from home (and then back)" in that
Eurocentric sense; and to recognize that there are island narratives con?
structed from other positions, such as one in which the island itself is
home, the center in which the narrators and characters live their lives and
maybe sometimes return to after their own voyages outside. A recognition
of this will further lead to an acknowledgment of the fact that there are
always multiple determinations to individual and collective subjectivity,
and that no matter how powerful and compelling one determinant is, it
never entirely erases all others.
To concentrate solely on the "white" presence in the narrative of
islands is to ignore the multiplicity of the experiences of islanders, the
other possible selves and subjectivities available to them beside this figural
relationship to the explorer and colonist outside the island. 'Within every
society," Chantal Mouffe asserts, "every social agent is inscribed in a multi?
plicity of social relations?not only social relations of production but also
the social relation, among others, of sex, race, nationality, and vicinity.
All these social relations determine positionalities or subject positions,
and every social agent is therefore the locus of many subject positions and
cannot be reduced to only one" (89-90).
In the rest of this essay, I try to move beyond the overdetermining
presence of the European, to explore the works of three playwrights and
dramatists who have attempted to refocalize the narrative of the island away
from the perspective of the explorer-discoverer-colonist. These dramatists

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64 Research in African Literatures

"uncover" other possible positions from which these narratives can be told
by adopting the point of view of the so-called other. ("But how can we be
discovered when we were never covered?" asks Salman Rushdie's narrator
in The Moor's Last Sigh). In the three plays that I examine in this pap
there is a striking similarity of preoccupation in the dramatists' endea
to tell the stories of the islands from the islanders' own perspective and in
their own voices. In the process of doing this, they all appear to dwell with
a focused intensity on the exploration of issues of discourse/power a
marginality, the same issues that engage the Eurocentric narratives, b
this time from a different viewpoint. Their insistent interrogation p
duces an aher-native message, which undermines the usual representati
we encounter in narratives of/from/and by the center.
Thus far, I have used the terms "island narratives" and "the narrative
of the island" without precisely describing what I mean. There are any
number of ways in which the term "island narratives" can be used and they
may refer to the limidess number of narratives set in islands or any in
which the island figures as a commanding presence and trope. Even ifwe
exclude those that I have described as narratives of/from/and by the cen?
ter, we are still left with a bewildering number of texts. Reading J. P. Clark-
Bekederemo's The Raft, Femi Osofisan's Another Raft, Tanure Ojaide's
Labyrinths ofthe Delta and Delta Blues & Home Songs, to take Nigerian exam?
ples, and oral tales of islands and seas with their stock of island figures and
motifs, the difficulty of "handcuffing" these within a definition becomes
obvious. And then there are all of these narratives from the Caribbean that
bring the sudden realization that there is an expansive sense in which all
of this literature can be described as being composed of island narratives!
The first sentence of Simon Gikandi's Writing in Limbo: Modernism and
Caribbean Literature announces this chilling reminder: "Caribbean litera?
ture and Culture are haunted by the presence of the 'discoverer' and the
historical moment he inaugurates" (1). The vast proportions of these nar?
ratives highlight the difficulties, if not the sheer unfeasibility, of trying to
give a precise definition of these narratives or trying to construct a meta-
narrative that accounts for all instances of island narratives. Our state?
ments about these narratives must therefore be necessarily tentative
provisional; aware at every point of the possibility of error and car
enough to recognize within our discourse the presence of the lurki
unavoidable aporia.
In keeping with this provisional character therefore, I will desc
island narratives simply as those narratives that to some extent them
the island and the island experience and employ them as a major or
nizing framework of the narrative. This should not be taken as some
generic category or as a unified object of knowledge; rather it shoul
seen as a polemical site for interrogating and investigating the critica
courses that have been generated in relation to islands and the narra
connected with them. The conjunction "and" is important here becau
separates and connects at the same time, and by splitting up and com
ing in one double maneuver, it draws attention to the distinction bet
islands (as objects), on the one hand, and their representation, on

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 Harry Garuba 65

other, while also pointing to the impossibility ofthe former being available
to us without the active mediation of the latter.
The term "the narrative of the island" is less problematic. It simply
refers to the manner in which island narratives have been theorized. To
state it somewhat tautologically, it refers to the narrative constructed in
ical narratives to account for island narratives. As stated earlier, this narr
tive of the island that has since become the dominant one reproduces
explorer-colonist's military conquest in a discursive conquest that is t
textualized in the figures of Prospero/Caliban or Crusoe/Frida
Postcolonial writers and critics employ the binarisms provided by t
model as a platform from which to write back to destabilize, subvert, rev
or generally raid and ransack the archive in assertion of the other's ri
of self-representation and in repudiation of the hierarchy. Texts of this s
have become the favored quarry of critics involved in the postcolonial
ject, and in some strange ways texts that do not do this are consider
either inferior or unrepresentative. Gradually, a new countercanon of pos
colonial texts has evolved, attached by difference to the Western ca
Barbara E. Bowen in her essay 'Writing Caliban: Anticolonial Approp
ations of The Tempesf draws an elaborate history of anticolonial appro
tions of Shakespeare's island narrative and then suggests furth
anticolonial, feminist readings to show that the play "has become a gr
on which Third World writers meet, not because of Shakespeare's 'uni
sality' but because writers before them have found Shakespeare's play a sit
for thinking about colonialism through literature" (94).
The use of this and other canonical Western texts as "sites for think?
ing" about third world peoples and cultures is precisely where the prob
lies. Quite apart from privileging the European presence and trapping
other within its discursive structures, it confines narratives from other cu
tures to the prisonhouse of allegory. The most famous statement of thi
perhaps to be found in Fredric Jameson's 'Third World Literature in t
Era of Multinational Capitalism" where he makes this telling declaratio
All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical,
and in a specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national
alkgories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when
their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of
representation such as the novel. (69)
This statement, which led to the well-known debate with Aijaz Ahmad
the direct result of a well-intentioned, totalizing desire to present all third
world texts as existing in a contestatory relationship with the Weste
canon. This pronouncement, however, leaves the unfortunate impressio
that third world texts only acquire legitimacy and significance to the exten
to which they engage with the discourses of the West.1 Be that as it may,
is still necessary, for the purpose of my argument, to draw attention
Jameson's qualification towards the end of that statement where he ref
particularly to those texts that are to some degree dependent on "weste
machineries of representation." For even though the form he singles o
is the novel, "western machineries of representation" may be extended

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66 Research in African Literatures

include critical practice as conducted in the academy, especially in respect

of island narratives. The narrative of the island is a product of these criti?
cal and theoretical machineries of representation and, by its constant
deployment, consolidates their dominance. But when we use the island
itself as the "site for thinking" about island narratives, the change in posi?
tionality may inaugurate a movement away from the monopoly of "the
alterity industry" (Huggan 130) and perhaps return the island to "the cog?
nitive ownership of those who inhabit it."
As one step in this direction, I choose to focus on three dramatic texts
in which the islanders rather than the colonists are focalized.2 These plays,
all written in English and by three of the most important dramatists of the
third world, claim the island experience in different ways that, I would
argue, undermine the synchronic essentialism ofthe Eurocentric narrative
of the island by introducing into it a much needed historical dynamism. By
discarding the material and figural centrality of the explorer-colonist,
these plays return to the lived reality of the island communities to record
the daily lives of the people. Their struggle with nature in all its harsh
unpredictability is placed side by side with their confrontation with local
power, represented by the custodians of the religious, cultural, and politi?
cal ideologies that control and dominate their lives. In this, there is neither
romanticization in the manner of Negritude or the tourist brochures, nor
suppression and erasure, as in colonialist discourse. There is the insis-
tence, at every point, on a historical and cultural past of which the present
is an expression.
Incidentally, these three plays also plot a narrative of their own that I
shall briefly describe as a prelude to my examination of the texts. In Wole
Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers, the island is seen as home, the center or
point of origin, if you wish, from which the islanders sometimes depart on
their own voyages "out there." To play with the tropes of postcolonial dis?
course, this re-location of the island as home and center may be seen as a
sign of subversion but for these indigenous peoples, there is hardly any
European presence to subvert. The mainland, a boat-trip away from the
island, is not Europe but the city of commerce to which one brother trav?
els and quickly severs himself from all ties of blood and home. And home,
in an ironic twist, is not the paradise of harmony, bliss, and repose, from
where the womb-warmth of the mother-land beacons, as that image features
in the national imaginary of Negritude and nativist/nationalist discourses.
Home, in this play, is where the hurt is. And for Igwezu, the central char?
acter, it becomes the place from which to flee, not because of any external
agency but because of the internally conflicted nature of the society and
the contradictions with which it is riddled. The island simply refuses to
provide the consolations of home or, more appropriately, the consolations
of the notion of home.
Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin presents another picture of t
island as a diasporic home, a new home after the "dispersal." Though t
"dispersal" can be seen as a historical pre-text, this history is not dwe
upon. What is explored is the quotidian lives of the islanders in their o
island home, away from the colonizer's gaze. And here again, where tr

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 Harry Garuba 67

brochures of palm-strewn beaches and glorious sunshine have constructed

a marketable tourist paradise, the reality of the lives of the islanders rises
in unmistakable refutation of this textual representation. Here is a space
in which nature is unremittingly brutal, one in which the metaphors of
Prospero and Caliban in whatever guise are not foregrounded and the
frame of reference is decidedly local. To toy with the tropes of postcolonial
discourse once again, this postdispersal home may be conceived as being
a-babble with Caliban's speech, but then again the dialect3 of the islanders
is a folk speech that bears none of the unease of Caliban's linguistic colo?
nization. It is a language in which the people are fully "at home." It may be
a cobbled miscellany of different languages, but it is still a language which
they own. Unlike James Joyce's hero in A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man,
their tongues do not tremble before this language, because they claim it as
a native tongue in all its hybrid originality.
In Athol Fugard's The Island we arrive at the point where the island
becomes a penal colony, a prison for political activists confined to some
kind of internal exile. It is in this play that the full force of a new colonial
history implodes upon the stage and we find a sense of displacement and
alienation. The island's geographical marginalization as territory becomes
at this point an index of the political marginalization of the island subjects
who have become prisoners to a human and institutional agency located
outside the island. The story of Robben Island?the island from which the
play takes its tide?is a noteworthy exemplum of the role of islands in the
history of exploration and colonization. Robben Island, well known in the
last days of the apartheid regime in South Africa as a prison for political
resistance leaders, has had a long and interesting history connected to the
demands of exploration and colonialism:
For the first two centuries after Dias first rounded the Cape of
Storms in 1488, Robben Island was used to feed the sailors on
passing ships. It was also used as a post-box for their letters and
occasionally as a prison for miscreant sailors. During the period of
Dutch rule at the Cape (1652-1806), the island continued to be
used as a pantry, but also became increasingly important as a
prison, mainly for Cape criminals, black and white and political
prisoners from the East Indies. ("Robben Island")
This movement from pantry to postbox to prison coincided with the need
of European adventurers who needed first a food station to replenish thei
supplies and then some kind of postal office from which they could send
letters home, and finally a place to which the troublesome could be ban-
ished:

As early as 1525 a Portuguese ship is said to have left prisoners on

the island. The island's first political prisoner was a local Khoikhoi
leader Autshumato who was banished by the Dutch governor Jan
van Riebeeck for allegedly stealing cattle in the 1650s. ("A Brief
History of Robben Island')

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68 Research in African Literatures

After Jan van Riebeeck, the practice of sending political leaders to the
island continued, even when the British took over. Many Xhosa and
Koranna leaders, captured during the Frontier Wars of the 1880s, were
sent to the island. Over the years, Robben Island (from "robbe," the Dutch
word for seals) has served as prison and place of exile for slaves from
Angola and West Africa, princes and chiefs from the East and from Africa
who resisted colonial domination, and then lepers and the mentally ill.
Perhaps its most famous political prisoner before Nelson Mandela was the
Xhosa prophet Nxele who was banished to the island for leading an attack
on Grahamstown in 1819. Makana, as he was also known, together with a
group of thirty prisoners tried to escape but the boat capsized and he
drowned. His name came to be associated with resistance and this is why
the island is sometimes referred to as the Island of Makana (See A Brief
History).
Athol Fugard's play therefore focuses on islanders for whom, this time
around, the island is not a home but a prison. The progression from home
through diasporic home to prison that these plays plot seems to me to cap?
ture the progressive marginalization of islands within the cultural econo?
my of colonialist discourse. And the shift from home to prison has
important implications to which we shall return later.
At this point, a brief review of the three plays under consideration
here is necessary to highlight the major concerns of each and underscore
the points of similarity and divergence among them. First, all three plays
are one-act dramas set on islands. They all possess simple plots in which
there is intense concentration on a single action with a ruthless pruning of
all extraneous material that does not enhance this simple movement to
something rather like a "punch line" conclusion. In The Swamp Dwellers and
The Sea at Dauphin, the action takes place within the span of one day, and
there are just six characters in each of the plays, apart, that is, from the
attendants to the Kadiye in the former and the chorus of Dauphin Women
in the latter. In The Island, there are only two actors and the action takes
place within a few days. These make for a certain condensation of effect by
creating a singularly oppressive and closed atmosphere in which the dilem-
mas of the communities can be explored through the lives and actions of
a few characters. The impression created is that of a few people trapped in
a cycle of futility but engaged in a heroic struggle against the elements and
against the centers of power to which they are held hostage.
A similar structural pattern seems to underlie the progression of the
action of the plays. They all begin by painting in vivid detail a picture of
the deprivation and destitution of the lives of the inhabitants of these
islands. The first stage directions and actions ofthe characters focus almost
exclusively on depicting this scene of desolation and debilitating poverty.
In The Swamp Dwellers,
[t]he scene is a hut on stilts, built on one ofthe scattered semi-firm islands
in the swamps. Two doors on the left lead into other rooms, and the one on
the right leads outside. The walls are marsh stakes plaited with hemp ropes.

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 Harry Garuba 69

The room is fairly large, and it is used both as the family workshop and
as the 'parlour' for guests. About the middk ofthe right half ofthe stage is
a barber's swivel chair, a very ancient one. On a small tabk against the
right wall is a meagre row of hairdressing equipment?a pair of clippers,
scissors, kcal combs, lather basin and brush, razor?not much eke. A dirty
white voluminous agbada serves for the usual customer's sheet. (81)
The "semi-firm" island presented in this opening scene mirrors the fragili-
ty of the island economy. The people are barely able to survive at the basic
level of subsistence. The hut on stilts, the walls of marsh stakes and hemp
ropes, the ancient swivel chair, and the dirty white sheet all underscore
their level of impoverishment. And in The Sea at Dauphin, we encounter a
similar setting of hardship and privation:
A windward island in the West Indies, on its nerve-wracked Atlantic coast,
two hours from sunrise. Age-grey morning before the fisher menfik, gum-
eyed, hitching their trousers, to the latrine on the beach's spit on the
bay...then by the grey false light of daybreak afisherman comes to the lit-
tered beach, bare footed, wrapped in a moth-ridden sweater against the
October cold, carrying a dented tin, coih of marlin twine, and a bamboo
pok. He wears a cap with the braid shredded, and pants quilted with
patches.. .Soon another fisher man GACIA, stak and drunk, twice as tat-
tered, in his old constabk's cloak comes deadfooted down the beach. (45)
Then The Island first presents us with a virtually bare stage:
Centre stage: a raised area representing a cell on Robben Island. Blankets
and skeping- mats?the prisoners skep on thefloor?are neatly folded. In
the corner are a bucket of water and two tin mugs. (195)
Immediately thereafter follows an elaborate mime by the prisoners. The
"back-breaking and grotesquely futile labour" of digging up sand, filling
the wheelbarrow, and emptying it at precisely the point where the other
prisoner is digging is painstakingly re-enacted. The playwright spares no
effort in depicting this sisyphean task which goes on interminably: the
grunts, the beatings, the moans, the squeals of the wheelbarrow, the hand-
cuffs and shackles, and finally the exhaustion. The metaphoric description
of the warder Hodoshe as "the green carrion fly" incidentally recalls the
"normal viciousness of the swamp flies" from which the characters in The
Swamp Dwellers suffer.
These scenes that set the stage for these plays are a brutal repudiation
of the convention of somnolent lands and pastoral paradises awaiting the
arrival of History. These are islands with their own histories; and islanders
engaged in their own struggle with an oppressive natural and human envi?
ronment. The natural environment represented by the sea which sur-
rounds the islands is uncompromising in its demands. In Soyinka's play,
the floods constandy ruin the crops and what is left behind is "poisoned by
the oil in the swamp water" (92). This basic problem of economic insecu-
rity is transformed into an ontological predicament for the villagers whose
lives are governed by this rhythm of unpredictability. Escape to the city, the
option chosen by the young and able, does not solve the problem because

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70 Research in African Literatures

the city turns out to be just as dehumanizing. Walcott's play also plays up
this predicament: the land is infertile, the sea is unpredictable, and these
problems are accentuated by the fishermen who set out against the odds
and end up drowning one after the other, bound in an unending fatalistic
rhythm. Indeed, this fatalism and its complementary feeling of absurdity is
a central theme in Fugard's play.
A general atmosphere of foreboding and expectation pervades these
plays. In The Swamp Dwellers the very first line?"Can you see him?"?estab-
lishes this. Makuri and Alu, the ageing couple of the swamps, are con?
cerned about the fate of their son who has gone out to inspect his flooded
farmland. Can he find his way back in the treacherous swamps? Will he get
lost in the slough like the others?
ALU {puts aside her work and rises): I'm going after him. I don't want
to lose him too. I don't want him missing his foothold and van-
ishing without a cry, without a chance for anyone to save him. (83)
This pattern of foreboding and expectation, also repeated in The Sea at
Dauphin and The Island, is set beside a string of reminiscences that estab-
lishes the active presence of a past. The characters' awareness of this histo?
ry is what gives meaning to their lives and attests to their identity, first as
individuals and then as a community. Makuri and Alu recall their wedding
night when they made love for the first time on the riverbed and the sand
gave way under them and they almost sank; Afa, the wizened old man in The
Sea at Dauphin, remembers his erstwhile colleagues and fellow fishermen
who lost their lives in the sea; and John and Winston revel in memories and
projections about friends and families back in New Brighton. The humor
and pathos of these reminiscences are unmistakable, especially those of the
old married couple and the prison couple. And Afa's elegiac evocation of
the memory of his dead colleagues is rendered with a peasant lyricism,
which captures the poetic aura of the fated lives of the fishermen.
AFA

Since Bolo drown. Everybody say Boileau would never drown. And
Habal, Habal drowning there last year. And in September is not
Annelles, Gacia brother they find two mile behind Dennery, one
afternoon a boy catching crab, walking, see him on sand, when all
the maitre boat looking for him by Trou Pamphile, his body swell,
and the boy turn this thing with his foot and when he finish it was
Annelles, drown like what, like Raphael, and Boileau.
When the young Jules decides to take to the sea, Afa looks out to the sea
and says: "Last year Annelles, and Bolo, and this year Hounakin.. .And one
day, tomorrow, you Gacia, and me...And Augustin ..." (80). Given this
background of absurdity, the characters in all three plays are intensely
aware of the ironies and perplexities of their lives and the existential
impasse with which they have to contend. In a sense more real than the
simply metaphorical, they are all imprisoned in their circumstances.
Their awareness of this imprisonment leads them to acts of rebellion
and revolt. In The Swamp Dwellers and The Sea at Dauphin, the rebellion is

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 Harry Garuba 71

against institutionalized religion and its agents. Igwezu and Afa, who have
literally lost all there is to lose and now inured with the hardened crust of
poverty and tragedy, decide to do away with the other kinds of shackles fash-
ioned by human hands and presented with the gilded beauty of religion.
They reject the illusory consolations of religion and worship and challenge
the priests who grow rich on the poverty of the people. Kadiye, the priest in
the former play, is a striking contrast to the poverty that surrounds him. He
is a figure of obscene wealth in the midst of dearth: "a big voluminous crea-
ture of about fifty, smooth-faced, except for litde tufts of beard around his
chin . . . . At least half of the Kadiye's fingers are ringed. He is followed by
a servant, who brushes the flies off with a horse-tail flick" (94). With the ter?
rible strength of despair, Igwezu challenges this priest who thrives on the
sorrows of the poor. Trapped in the swivel chair, the Kadiye cannot escape
the wrath of Igwezu's interrogation and is forced to listen to his "sacrile-
gious" outburst. When he is finally released, he bolts out, shaken and dis-
traught, swearing that Igwezu will pay for his actions. Afa becomes just as
furious with the priest Lavoiser when he hears of Hounakin's death. When
Augustin says that Hounakin was just a poor lonely man who "didn't have
nobody or nothing" and the priest replies that he had God, Afa explodes in
"blasphemous"4 rage:
AFA

God! (He turns and empties the fish pail on the sand) That is God! A
big fish eating small ones. And the sea, that thing there, not a
priest white, pale like a shark belly we must feed until we dead, not
so young Frenchman lock up in the church don't know coolie
man because he will not beg! . . . Dauphin people build the
church and pray and feed you, not their own people, and look at
Dauphin. Gardez luil Look at it! You see? Poverty, dirty woman,
dirty children, where are all the prayers? Where all the money a
man should have and friends when his skin old? Dirt and prayers
is Dauphin life, in Dauphin, in Castanaries, in Micoud. Where
they have priest is poverty. (73-74)
Igwezu's denunciation of the Kadiye and Afa's fulmination against the
priest and religion in general belong to the same order of revolt against
local centers of power and authority that keep the people oppressed and
hold them in permanent subservience. This act of resistance again
becomes a major theme in The Island. The anti-clericalism of the former is
transformed in the latter into full-blown political activism and resistance.
In Fugard's play, issues of colonialism, of race and color, of political
disenfranchisement and tyranny come to the fore and the resistance
assumes the "writing back" dimension of postcolonial discourse. We do not
need to concentrate here on the various strategies of "writing back"
deployed in this play. Suffice it to say that the prisoners, John and Winston,
take a classical European text, Antigone, and rewrite and perform it in a
manner that inscribes their own meanings within the text. It needs to
be noted at this point, however, that the three plays, like all good plays,

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72 Research in African Literatures

invariably recall other plays, other texts and techniques of drama

representation. Several critics have remarked upon the influence of Gr
tragedy and the dramatists of the Irish renaissance, especially on
J. M. Synge's Riders to the Sea and on Soyinka and Walcott in these plays, a
others (including Fugard himself) have pointed out The Island}s indebt
ness to alternative theater forms, Beckett's absurd drama, Brecht's e
theater, and Grotowsky's poor theater among others.6 This range and
diversity of influences shows that these plays are works by artists who are
quite well aware of the classical, Western tradition and other traditions
play-making.
It should be clear from the analysis so far that in the three island nar?
ratives explored here the islanders rather than the outsiders are focalized;
their experiences are rendered from a similar perspective of misery and
marginalization in relation to the natural elements and the operations of
power; and these experiences are neither ahistorical nor essentialized but
rooted in the lives and specific histories of the people. In the three phases
of island habitation presented in the plays?the island as home, as dias?
poric home, and then as prison?one element common to all of them is
the presence of a vibrant local history that is very different from the pack-
aged myths of colonialist discourse, on the one hand, and of Negritude
and nationalist discourses, on the other. These specific local histories pro?
vide a pertinent example ofthe pitfalls of theoretical generalizations ofthe
kind observed by Arun Mukherjee in "First World Readers, Third World
Texts: Some Thoughts about Theory and Pedagogy":
The postcolonial theorists' generalizations about "all" "postcolo?
nial people" suggest that Third Worldism and/or nationalism
bind the peoples of these societies in conflictless brotherhood,
that inequalities of caste and class do not exist in these societies,
and that their literary works are only about "resisting" or "sub-
verting" the colonizer's discourses. (27)
In these plays, as we have seen, the colonizer only fully becomes the cen?
ter of attention when the island becomes a prison. And without the colo?
nizer, other local conflicts and inequalities abound that command the
attention ofthe islanders. These conflicts have very litde to do with the col?
onizer but all to do with the internal dynamics of the societies and the
economic and other problems with which the people have to contend.
The leveling out of divergent subjectivities and identities under the
discursive power of colonialism and nationalism involves the erasing or
bracketing off of other experiential realities that do not conform to the
codes of this discourse. Texts that seek to create a space where other island
subjectivities can be represented in their own right also seem to find no
place in the cultural economy of island narratives. The critical attention
received by each of the three plays examined here and their position and
status within the oeuvre of each of the playwrights throws a revealing spot-
light on the power of postcolonial discourse and its figuration of the nar?
rative of the island. The Swamp Dwellers and The Sea at Dauphin hardly
feature in reading lists of African or Caribbean or postcolonial literature,

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 Harry Garuba 73

and in studies of the authors, they are seen as marginal early pieces, main?
ly of passing interest before focusing on the major plays. This, in spite of
the fact that they provide a mine of material for the critic interested in
comparative studies and/or in tracking down influences. The Island, on the
other hand, features regularly in these lists and is not considered a minor
Fugard play. One possible explanation for this, I want to suggest, is that
this play, dealing as it does with the theme of apartheid, invariably sum-
mons those binarisms that are the regular fare of postcolonial discourse
and can thus be very comfortably hitched to its discursive bandwagon. And
this perhaps is where the final problem lies: that texts that do not lend
themselves to the dominant discourse and its methods of analysis are
either marginalized or ignored.
Helen Tiffin's cautionary observation in "Post-Colonialism, Post-
Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History" is very impor?
tant in this regard:
For all this theoretical investment in the question of "otherness",
certain tendencies within Euro-American post-structuralism and
post-modernism have in practice operated in the same way in
which the Western historicising consciousness has operated, that
is, to appropriate and control the "other", while ostensibly per?
forming some sort of major cultural redemption?specifically, for
post-structuralism, the reformation or revolutionising of Western
epistemological codes and cognitive biases. (170)
As the price for its overwhelming success within the academy, postcolonial
theory and criticism may unfortunately have succumbed to this practice as
well. Repression and erasure are two ways in which one narrative of the
world is superimposed on all other narratives and becomes recognized as
the only narrative. This dual process of repression and erasure fixes the so-
called other in a position of permanent marginality in which "writing back"
appears to be the only option. Edward Said and Stuart Hall describe the
two axes through which this operates. In Culture and Imperialism, Said
observes: 'The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from form-
ing and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and con?
stitutes one of the main connections between them" (xiii). And as Stuart
Hall argues in "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation":
The ways we have been positioned and subjected in the dominant
regimes of representation were a critical exercise of cultural
power and normalization, precisely because they were not super-
ficial. They had the power to make us see and experience our?
selves as "other." Every regime of representation is a regime of
power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet
"power/knowledge." And this kind of knowledge is internal, not
external. It is one thing to place some person or set of peoples as
the other ofa dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to sub?
ject them to that "knowledge," not only as a matter of imposed will

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74 Research in African Literatures

and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective

conformation to the norm. (213)
It would appear that texts that resist this "cultural power" are ironically also
confined to marginality, as we see from the examples given above. Perhaps
the only way to conclude is to recall Linda Hutcheon's observation in The
Politics of Postmodernism that the "ex-centric 'other' itself may have different
and (less complicitious) modes of representation and may therefore
require different methods of study"(38). In the criticism of island narra?
tives, it is particularly important to always bear this in mind.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper grew out of an interest in island narratives that goes

to my master's dissertation at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1981
which I undertook a comparative study of the plays of Wole Soyink
Derek Walcott. The second chapter of that study examines The Sw
Dwellers and The Sea at Dauphin within the context of their thematizati
the island experience. Some of the material in that dissertation has i
ably been integrated into this essay.
I also wish to acknowledge with gratitude the work of my coll
Dr. Catherine Addison who made available to me her paper on Byr
The Island and shares my interest in island narratives.

NOTES

1. For an account of die response to Jameson's argument, see Aijaz Ahmad's

'Jameson's Rhetoric of Otiierness and the 'National Allegory.'"
2. It is important, in diis regard, to bear in mind die fact that the diree playwright
focused upon in this paper are simply used as examples ofa different, other per?
spective to the narrative of the island. Being products of specific histories an
discourses, they do not possess a direct, unmediated access to die island exper
ence nor are they guaranteed one, even if such uncomplicated access were pos
sible. They are only grouped together here because they provide a
much-needed instance of island narratives by tiiird world writers of recognized
stature in which die islanders themselves are focalized.
3. It is useful to always remind ourselves diat what is described as a "dialect" and
what counts as a "language" is intimately tied up with issues of power, among
otiiers.
4. According to Asein, the December 1954 production of The Sea at Dauphin
"sparked off a storm of protest from the Cadiolic community who (sic) objected
to the play's 'morbid fatalism' and its blasphemous jibes. Representing that
group was a Catholic zealot who, writing under the pseudonym 'Cauiolicus',
criticized the irreverence of the characters and the supposedly false picture of
St. Lucian life which the play depicted" (234).

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 Harry Garuba 75

5. Virtually every critic of the plays mentions one or other of these influences. For
a sample, see Ogunba; King; Walder; Fugard, Notebooks; Orkin; and Crow.

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