Tensions of Modernity in Flora Gomes’s The Blue Eyes of Yonta

In analyzing Flora Gomes's The Blue Eyes of Yonta, this author hopes to show that in spite of the postmodern promise of leveling or rather blurring the boundary between the metropole and the colony, the relationship of the former and the latter continues to be that of economic exploitation, subordination, and dependency. This dependency perpetuates an economic and cultural hierarchy between the metropole and the colony and consequently precipitates discourses of "nativity" and authenticity in opposition to Western values. As will be evident in The Blue Eyes of Yonta, this horrific economic condition encourages cultural narcissism on the part of the colony, in spite of it embracing hybrid or syncretic cultural identifications.

As Aimé Césaire observes, the controlled and selective modernization of the colony is not an accident in the colonial enterprise but germane to the definition of modernity itself (35–36). Modernity in the metropole is meaningless without the colony's alterity, which implies that claims to modernity can only be self-assuring to the metropolitan subject with reference to the "timeless," "uncivilized," "primitive," and "premodern." Incomplete or controlled modernization cannot be termed as the failure of modernity but instead is the prerequisite for any claims by the metropole to modernity. Fredric Jameson makes the relationship of the metropole and the colony clear in his analysis of the modern and the postmodern. As Jameson suggests, modernity can be described as a "sense of unique historical difference from other societies that a certain experience of the New (in the modern) seems to encourage and perpetuate" (Postmodernism 41), while postmodernism can be seen as the triumph of technology which does not valorize the New as in the modern experience (41). Jameson argues further:

[T]he keen sense of the New in the modern period was only possible because of the mixed, uneven transitional nature of that period, in which the old coexisted with what was then coming into being […]. One way of telling the story of the transition from the modern to the postmodern lies then in showing how at length modernization triumphs and wipes the old completely out: nature is abolished along with the traditional countryside and traditional agriculture; even the surviving historical monuments, now all cleaned up, become glittering simulacra of the past, and not its survival.

(41)

Modernity therefore depends on the existence of the old forms of economy and culture to prove its newness, which implies that the countryside is a reminder to the modern subject of its newness. The "native" needs to be one and the same with nature to justify domination while at the same time affirming the colonizer's modernity; or at best the "native" has to remain "bad copies" for the metropole to assert its modernity or "superior" civilization (Landau 141–71; Dirks 1-25; Gable 294–319). The native's assumed closeness to nature and "barbarism" have been used as reasons to justify the terrifying level of violence which came with modernity whether in Africa, the Caribbean, or even in the southern United States.

It is generally assumed that, after decolonization, global relations no longer depended on the use of force, especially since the nationalist movements and independence of the former colonies have forced the colonial administration back to the home country and the bourgeois subject has announced its own death (Jameson, "Consumer Society" 12–29). As Ellen Meiksins Wood would argue, rather than decreasing, the use of force has increased tremendously, which can be evidenced in the presence of the United States military in about one-hundred-and-forty countries (1). In addition, multinational corporations have replaced the colonial government and have perpetuated the exploitation and subordination of the colony, invariably creating a relationship of dependency (Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism" 43–66). One discovers that in spite of gaining independence, whether politically or economically, the colony has not significantly modernized, a situation which characterizes the uneven development common in Third World countries but which can be traced to the logic through which colonialism operated.

Jameson's idea of "postmodern relief" becomes pertinent at this point. One of the...