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

The literature of exploration, slavery, and colonialism is replete with islands. For explorers, islands have always been objects of desire, the 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 render 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 conventions and discursive expectations, which govern that relationship. The investment in otherness, the tropes of its representation, and the entire symbology that went with it have become so well known as to bear no repeating. 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 simply, the "blank spaces" and "virgin lands" of an earlier discourse later metamorphosed into places of darkness (see, for instance, Smith).

Several critics and commentators have charted the historical and discursive map of this movement, its shifts, its decisive moments, and the processes and politics involved in the textual conquest of the other. What emerged from these attempts to historicize and theorize the construction of a "Civilisational Other" in opposition to the self-constitution of the West are a set of descriptive tropes through which this relationship is figured. The most commonly deployed of these are those of Prospero/Caliban and/or Robinson Crusoe/Man Friday and, of course, the island. Through the discursive circuits of the Western academy, these tropes have been so endlessly circulated that they have acquired a hegemonic power that virtually compels us to accept them as the singular, constitutive determinant of non-Western subjectivity. It is understandable, from the point of view of the explorer and the colonist, that these images should possess great significance as descriptive and analytical tools through which the colonial encounter is processed; and analyses of the power relations they depict should certainly be of much interest for colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory and criticism. Obviously, no one can reasonably deny the great benefit of analyzing and theorizing the impact of Empire on subjugated peoples. However, relentlessly asking the same questions and using the same procedures of research and interrogation within the same object-field not only yields distressingly few new results but also forecloses other areas of prospectively fruitful inquiry.

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 difficult 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 of the subject's encounter with colonial space unconsciously reveals that the former's knowledge of the latter is mediated by European discourse, and not determined by the actual physical terrain. For instance, what Crusoe is described as seeing is not a neutral space void of all...