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Reviewed by:
  • Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing by Donna McCormack
  • Valérie K. Orlando
Donna McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 228 pp.

Donna McCormack’s Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing offers a cogent analysis of “how we read literary texts” in relation to “a critical exploration of how we read bodies and objects” (181). The book’s primary focus is “concerned with the institutional apparatus of colonial rule, particularly the production and consolidation of racial, able-bodied, sexual and gender hierarchies and prejudices in and through the family home,” and how these are portrayed in three postcolonial novels (181). Specifically, McCormack studies Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (which portrays an “elusive Caribbean context haunted by histories of Canadian missionaries and British colonialism”), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable (which represents the period of transition from French colonial rule to a post-independent Moroccan nation), and Anne-Marie McDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (a novel that explores life on Cape Breton Island on the East Coast of Canada as haunted by British colonial ideals about “racialized and gendered familial and social relations”) (5). McCormack notes that these novels exemplify a “queer postcoloniality” that is contextualized by experiences of trauma that manifest from a colonial past replete with “colonial surveillance and control” (5). Trauma theorists, notes McCormack, study traumatic events through “non-linear [End Page 369] time” in order to contextualize how the colonial period still haunts the present. For the trauma survivor, “the lived moment is a simultaneous experience of reality as it unfolds” and then reoccurs “in a tangible and distressing sense” (10). Colonial remembrances of trauma manifest in the three novels studied in her work through repetitions, fragmented narratives, and disembodied narrators. For example, in Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel, L’Enfant de sable (1985), queerness is represented by not only the female protagonist who must dress as a male in order to survive in a hyper-patriarchal world, but also by the trauma of her/his very story; a story that is “incessant, infinite and psychosomatically disruptive” (78). Ben Jelloun’s narrative is a story that, in a sense, will never be whole. The novel, thus metaphorically and symbolically alludes to “the impossibility of lording authority over texts, language and bodies.” McCormack continues, noting that because of the novel’s “incessant repetition of the same story, its emphasis on collective stories, and its insistence that language and texts are embodied” (78), readers are forced to witness the “multiple, discordant histories of colonial and familial violence” which continue in the postcolonial moment. In Ben Jelloun’s novel, while the story may slip out of the protagonists’ hands, “it never leaves their bodies” (78). Characters thus are forever metaphorically and symbolically marked by the identity crises that have ensued since the dawn of the postcolonial era. This era is still fraught with the unreconciled traumas of the colonial past that persist as painful remembrances in the present. For McCormack, L’Enfant de sable is an allegory depicting the transition from French protectorate to the post-1956 independent state of Morocco. The story metaphorically articulates through the primary protagonist who is both man and woman, the effects of both colonialism and nationalism on his/her body. These effects perpetuate a “psychosomatic existence” that continues to influence the way authors construct narratives (78). As an allegory, Ben Jelloun’s attempt to search for a postcolonial self mirrors Morocco’s own efforts to root itself in its own nationalist, postcolonial identity (78).

McCormack brings the realms of queer and postcolonial together in order to describe the creative form through which these narratives articulate and weave together “desire, bodily morphology, and embodiments with colonial institutions” (5). She argues that queer postcoloniality is less about being “a mode of categorizing” than about “an approach to the process of reading” (5). Her analyses focus not only on the “presence of evidently ‘gay’ characters in novels that explore European colonization”; they also examine “how reading itself is reconfigured in texts that call upon the reader to take responsibility for the stories being told and the livability of...

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