The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

Chapter 2: When the Subaltern Speaks and Speaking of a Suicide

49 2 When the Subaltern Speaks and Speaking of a Suicide For the “true” subaltern group, whose identity is its diͿerence, there is no unrepresentable subaltern that can know and speak itself; the intellectual solution is not to abstain from representation . The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been traced so as to oͿer an object of deduction to the representing intellectual. In the slightly dated language of the Indian group, the question becomes, How can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics. With what voice consciousness can the subaltern speak? —Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of a Vanishing Present In her landmark essay, “&an the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak considers to what degree colonialism successfully silenced the voices of colonized people. She argues that postcolonial resistance, our agency to act and speak out against power and domination, does not belong to the subaltern woman. In her view, prevailing postcolonial discourse presumes agency on all counts and underestimates the psychic impact of violence on the subaltern. Her response to the profusion of critiques from the Àeld leaves her unwavering; even with the third rewriting of “&an the Subaltern Speak?” in Critique of Postcolonial Reason, she insists that devastating conditions and the impact of colonial epistemic violence forecloses the possibility of subaltern resistance because even when she does speak, her speech acts are unhearable. 50 The Better Story Spivak’s challenge to subaltern and postcolonial studies is still relevant : today the devastating psychological impact on the subaltern from collective social injuries must not be undermined in the interest of our postcolonial dreams and desires. In this chapter, I build on Spivak’s concerns by proposing a method for how we can hear the subaltern voice. The subaltern woman speaks, I suggest, not as victim or in opposition to victimization, but through a voice that belongs to the obscured experience of her di΀culty. While some might argue that this voice has no political agency, I would like to examine the very presuppositions of our notion of agency. Rather than polarize postcolonial subjects into those who know the conditions of their oppression and can speak against them versus those who cannot, we might want to consider how the subaltern woman speaks aͿectively about her conditions—decipherable not in what she says (or what we would want her to say), but in what exceeds the very terms of knowledge. If our view of agency is not limited to the accepted requisites of political resistance and if resistance is not the only precursor of agency, how might this alter how we hear the subaltern woman? When we only project our story-forms onto the words of the other—rather than actually examine how di΀cult conditions are expressed in excess of language—we may agree with Spivak and conclude that the subaltern woman cannot speak. However, in this chapter I argue that it behooves us to give serious consideration to Amit Rai’s concern when he asks, “can we be sure that her ghost does not?” (1998, 91). Resistance, as I will argue in more depth in chapter 4, might be the better story of leftist intellectuals and movements, as a strategy for surviving devastating racial violence. Resistance has certainly been a mainstay of postcolonial imaginary: it features prominently in the interpretation of history, in conceptualizing postcolonial subjectivity and in the demands of postcolonial political communities. Its ubiquity is entirely understandable in the historical context of epistemic colonial violence against “essentially ” inferior racialized peoples who were deemed incapable of agency. As a psychic necessity, the collective discourse of resistance has become almost naturalized in leftist circles and has, as such, become our ontology and epistemology. Spivak’s “&an the Subaltern Speak?” challenges the ontological status of postcolonial resistance. For me it raises the problem for how resistance is Àgured as the only antidote to colonial and imperial violence and the only manner of speaking that can be heard. This chapter will oͿer a way to hear the subaltern by regarding the emotional character of voice. It oͿers a “method” for how to think about When the Subaltern Speaks and Speaking of a Suicide 51 postcolonial representation beyond the intellectual project of resistance. By attending to the traumatic traces or the diͿerence of representation, I ask us to question prevailing formulations of political resistance that foreclose the voices of grief...