"Nous les Colonises": Reflections on the Territorial Integrity of Oppression

Whatever his degree of energy, ability, originality, man is constantly fabricating a world.

—José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis

My reflections in this essay have three aims. One is to suggest that an inevitable consequence of Western Europe's self-constitution as the subject of a history made at the expense of "the rest of us"¹ lies in a spatial and chromatic representation of oppression as a territory in the discourses of Europe's historical others. Two is to show how oppression, construed as a spatiochromatic territory, aspires to an insidious foundationalist essence of those discourses. Three, I examine how the exceptionalist² uses we make of our location in the said territory can be generative, albeit innocuously, of various processes of exclusion. My exploration will navigate various global contexts (Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East) where some of history's most gripping narratives of oppression have been transformed into volatile and quasi-sacrosanct imaginaries of self-definition.

Taking my cue from John Beverley's comments on the centrality of storytelling to his theoretical articulations in Subalternity and Representation, and Edward Said's privileging of the personal narrative in some of his theoretical writings,³ I begin with a personal experience. In August 1998, I arrived in Vancouver from France to commence a doctoral program in francophone African literatures in the French department of the University of British Columbia. The first week of the new session was devoted to the usual fare of course registration, teaching assistant orientations, and departmental cocktail parties. In all that frenzy, I was able to sense that I had been inserted into a politicized terrain marked by tension between an Anglo-Canadian bloc and a Québecois bloc. I was given an office in a spatial zone dominated by Québecois graduate students in the department. That signaled for me the beginning of what was to be a yearlong engagement with Québecois linguistic and cultural nationalism in its most radical ramifications.⁴

Teaching assistants were assigned two to an office. On my second day in our new office, my office partner walked in and introduced himself as a fellow graduate student. After the initial exchange of pleasantries, he asked me the usual Western questions about Africa: "You are working on francophone African literatures? Are there any other writers from that region apart from Senghor and Césaire?"⁵ I replied, "Well, Césaire is not from francophone Africa. That leaves the whole of francophone Africa with only one writer, right?" He tried another angle: "What are the challenges for you, an African, working on African literatures?" I didn't exactly know how to respond, so I ventured what I figured was the most sensible answer: "Roughly the same challenges you face as a Canadian working on Canadian literatures." It was an unfortunate response; I had struck a dangerously raw identitarian nerve. I was yet to learn that it was a bad idea to label a Québecois ultranationalist, impatiently waiting for the next secessionist referendum, a Canadian. "Hey, I am a Québecois working on Québecois literature. As someone from a once-colonized country, you should know better than to toy with the identity of a fellow oppressed." He left the office before I had the opportunity of a repartee, leaving me in utter amazement. "A fellow oppressed?" I couldn't possibly have heard him right. The next morning he apologized for his behavior, and we got off to a fresh start.

As my mind reflected on the fact that he had described me as "a fellow oppressed" the previous day, I asked for clarification. He was genuinely surprised that the "very obvious fact" that we shared a "common experience of oppression" at the hands of English colonizers could be lost on me. Then followed a meticulous historical inventory of the "horrors" of colonial oppression the Québecois have suffered from their Anglo-Canadian oppressors: the...