Signifying with a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers (review)

Those who once were colonized, it now appears, have become the beneficiaries of a curiously inverted situation: from the perspective of a postcolonial critique, they find themselves in a culturally and ethically dominant position. It is now the colonizers who appear limited, deluded, and backward in their thinking—precisely because they had always imagined themselves to be the repositories and vehicles of values taken to be universal by virtue of their Western provenance. The languages and culture they sought to impose on the benighted and backward masses of the non-Western parts of the globe were—by definition—deemed to represent the eternal essence of humanity and set the standards, once and for all, for what it meant to be human. It was a pretense that made them often blind to their own basic inhumanity. All the more reason, then—for those who have assimilated the languages and cultural codes of the colonizers—to write back with a vengeance, as Salman Rushdie puts it. In light of this ironic reversal, "the instrument of subservience [has become] a weapon of liberation" (5).

To illustrate the implications of his book's central theme, Mustapha Marrouchi—who was himself once a French colonial subject—has chosen to discuss the writings of three "oppositional" critics, Foucault, Derrida, and Said, and three novelists, Ben Jalloun, V. S. Naipaul, and Morrison. The writings of these six authors, Marrouchi proposes to show, not only end up demystifying the languages and cultures of the colonizers but help the victims of colonization find their own literary voice.

Michel Foucault's approach provides the main theoretical model for Marrouchi's critique because of its "rejection of the totalizing explanations of human development in favor of a more detailed analysis of power functions within particular discourses" (8). Edward Said once was an admirer of Foucault but eventually became disillusioned with the French philosopher. Nevertheless, Marrouchi considers Said to be one of the key figures in postcolonial discourse, admiring the "resolutely principled intellectual" in him and finding that he has achieved "what all of us aspire to, which is to write with one foot inside the worlds he describes, and one foot out" (178). Derrida, on the other hand, is blamed for his longstanding refusal to acknowledge fully his roots—that is, his Algerian origins. This reticence has prevented him from addressing the "Algerian question," for example, and Marrouchi doubts "whether Derrida will ever speak out on behalf of the oppressed, be they Algerian under the French or Palestinians under Israel" (114).

While Foucault is a "missionary of transgression," the novelists Marrouchi has chosen to discuss are "missionaries in reverse." The reversals they effectuate by writing against the Empire end up blurring the boundaries and distinctions between center and periphery, insiders and outsiders. Not only are distinctions such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial, local and global impossible to draw, but, as Morrison shows, even racial lines become blurred "as the alliances and coalitions between white and black women, and the conflicts among black women and black men [. . .] prove" (233). At the same time, this new way of demystifying and dispelling the validity of categories that used to be considered essential has given the novel a fresh spirit and new-found dynamism. And although colonialism and its effects are by no means over, "we are witnessing the dawning of another way of telling," Marrouchi finds (4). In this light, Marrouchi's own way of telling the story of colonialism can be appreciated as an apt illustration of the ironically contrapuntal strategies of resistance he elucidates.