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Amphibian hermaphrodites: A dialogue with Marina
Warner and David Dabydeen
Heike Härting & Tobias Döring
a
a
Lecturer at the Freie Universität , Berlin
Published online: 19 Jun 2008.
To cite this article: Heike Härting & Tobias Döring (1995) Amphibian hermaphrodites: A dialogue with Marina Warner and David
Dabydeen, Third Text, 9:30, 39-45, DOI: 10.1080/09528829508576527
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829508576527
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Amphibian Hermaphrodites
A Dialogue with Marina Warner and David Dabydeen
Heike Härting and Tobias Döring
Tobias Döring: Marina Warner, the critic Kate Besset has described you as an
amphibian because you are working in two worlds at once, you are at home in
two worlds at once. David Dabydeen, you describe yourself as a hermaphrodite,
a creator of male and female voices. We are interested in this dialogue between
the two of you talking about such crossovers.
David Dabydeen: I grew up with a whole lot of girls. Coming from a family of
women, I shared the same bed with three sisters. So I grew up as a tomgirl which
meant that I just knew about women's bodies at a very early age. I suppose that
has conditioned what I write about women.
TD: How do you respond to that as a woman?
Marina Warner: It makes me rather jealous. I do think it shows how much we
have lost by the puritan sexualisation of the western world. There is this intense
sexualisation of discourse and analysis but in fact an extraordinary puritan
relationship to bodies and contact. Of course, what David has described — the
brother sleeping with three sisters — is a situation in which the children would
be taken into care in Britain. I don't know you personally but it has produced
in you this sort of sensuous pleasure, and there is no misogyny in this experience.
TD: Let me come back to the notion of the amphibian. Do you find this a fair
assessment of your work relating the Old and the New World, that is, England's
colonial heritage and its post-colonial and post-imperial realities?
MW: I suppose I have always hoped that through writing I could in a way move
beyond the restrictions of my background and formation. I think she was trying
to say that by right of the imagination I had perhaps achieved that. I have been
in several families of women in my life, too. First of all, my mother was Italian,
her whole attitude to the world, this intimacy of domestic female skills and
survival was very similar. Then I was in my various convent schools which are
all families of women. And then I worked for women's magazines which in a
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very different way are also families of women. I am not building it up or anything,
but I am saying I have actually been raised through many different female families.
The interesting thing is, there is a relationship to language and literature. I believe
this very deeply, that the whole expression 'mother tongue', the way stories are
passed on, are mainly female ways of dealing with experience. They don't have
to be plotted, they don't have to be well-known fairy-tales. It's gossip, stories
you hear at your mother's knee. And this is how imagination is nourished.
Heike Härtung: But is imagination also fed by the experience of the body? I am
asking because we referred to that earlier. I am particularly thinking of writing
a landscape of colonial experience via the body, as it is suggested through the
character of Dulé in Indigo. He is born from a dead body, whereas the foetus in
Turner remains unborn. So would you perceive Indigo and Turner as a new
cartography of the body?
DD: The idea of body in relation to language, in relation to landscape and to
postcolonial efforts and deeds, is something which I think we have worked to
death now.
TD: Have we?
MW: I think that the connection is that these bodies are not entirely embodied.
These are bodies which have almost become surfaces. They are dispersed. What
is significant about them is that they are not integral individual forms, they are
scattered. There is a dismemberment in this.
DD: I like the idea of disappearance. The absolute absence of bodies — which
isn't a Buddhist idea — but emerges from a recognition that for black people,
or for people from the colonies, your physique was yourself. Your existence was
because of your physique: to cut cane. You were your muscles. So therefore, what
you really want to do now is not to write the body — because to write the body
is to write those grievances — but to write the absence of the body. That is why
one creates ghostly figures, figures that want to disappear, figures that aren't
actually born. Now you place them in the sea, so you don't need to give them
a land. You are trying to escape from landscape, body, history, by having a kind
of unborn foetus in the sea as a way of just disappearing from concepts.
HH: But that has also been a part of the women's liberation movement in the
Sixties. And women now tend to reassert their bodies just because they have
disappeared.
DD: We have done that.
HH: But bearing in mind that the body is also the agent of self-recognition, you
once said: "I am writing my own biography, I am writing my own body."
DD: Yes, but you have to go beyond that.
MW: I agree; I think it is moving on. You have put your finger on an interesting
change that has taken place and that relates to realism. There is literature of the
Seventies, perhaps late Sixties and Eighties: menstruation, hair, body fluids, etc,
asserting bodily, physical difference — just as black writing did in the same period
— not in an emblematic way but actually rooted in material, perceptible realities.
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Now there are artists who are interested in dissolving the differences, but not
in the name of some universal world harmony. For instance, Helen Chadwick
has taken extraordinary photographs of genitals in which she almost reverses
the male obscene in the way that it becomes an open welcoming arrangement.
So she is interested in exchanging and reversing phallic and female shapes.
DD: I come back to Walcott's statement that if you look for Caribbean history,
look for it in the pages of the sea. This means that the Caribbean character has
been subjected to endless transformations, so that it is in a constant state of flux.
The Guyanese landscape itself creates a desire for absence, not just historically
because the Amerindians were nearly wiped out — their presence, however, is
still there — but because the landscape itself just disappears: rivers that would
serenely glide along for miles and miles suddenly drop: the plateaux we have
are heads without a mountain. The sea washed in millions and millions of years
ago, and then washed out millions of years later. So, really the landscape just
reminds you constantly of disappearances. This is why Wilson Harris writes in
that kind of disembodied way.
HH: Since you mention Wilson Harris, that reminds me of his statement that
history becomes a servant of material vision of time. I think you both work with
an immaterial vision of time and place.
MW: It all relates to the point about metamorphosis and transformation. Elizabeth
Bishop, in her Caribbean work, has created a series of images of provisional
dwellings. She has a poem about a wasps' nest; the papery wasps' nest is the
idea of a hanging home, of dwelling without roots, of weaving a home out of
your own body. It is an image of the imagination working to make the home
rather than actually belonging to the place where you come from. And this is
directly counterpoised to the Empire's view of history, to the idea that the web
must have a centre. The wasps' nest, however, has no centre, it is just a series
of hanging crustations of cells.
DD: I think that at one stage we probably were as imperial in our psyche as the
British were in that we came from rigid societies in India, which is highly stratified
by castes and colour systems. Of course, the Africans who came over from west
Africa would have also come from places where they had a sense of being rooted
in terms of tradition and ritual. You were released from all sorts of bonds and
rituals of the past; you emerged into this New World, this new psyche which,
as Marina says, does not recognise centre or periphery. The tragedy of that,
though, is a permanent sense of being deracinated. And you know, the
imagination can never find a home. Wilson Harris says the imagination is
sovereign, but at critical moments in your life, what the imagination makes of
home is not fulfilling. You still need to be rooted somewhere. And I know this
sounds greatly romantic, but I feel that the only place you can root yourself and
call home is a woman or somebody you love. If you are in love, it doesn't matter
where you are living or what home is — somehow you can remake all of that
in the wasps' nest of love.
MW: It is interesting you say that because the history of female loyalty has been
like that. I mean the story of Ruth and the birth in the Bible: "Your God should
be my God, your people, my people, your earth, my earth"; that the old JudaicChristian relationship is quite pervasive in the world and it is curiously liberating.
One of the paradoxes of women's oppression is that it is actually rather flexible
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to be able to choose your paternal half. Then of course you have to work out
your relationship to this authority. After all, it is a relationship of subordination:
you lose your name, you lose your identity. So it can't be worked out in that
way as just being swallowed up, being absorbed. But it does give women a curious
flexibility. Women have always enjoyed more class mobility than men. One of
the reasons why prostitutes were so feared and loathed was that they had the
ultimate freedom. They had class mobility: if they were successful, they could
move in two years from being an urchin to being a great lady.
TD: Let me ask a question about this loss as well as liberation process we are
talking about. I find it interesting that you use a poem by Paul Celan as an
epigraph for the seventh chapter of Indigo, The poem, called 'Psalm', begins "No
one moulds us again out of earth and clay/No one conjures our dust/No one."
What is the relationship you draw here between Celan's rewriting of the biblical
text and your novel?
MW: I thought of it as all the lost people, all the disappeared ones. To me the
"No one" is all those who have been effaced, those who have been swallowed
by the sea. And it is the "No one" who must be truly remembered. And in relation
to Heike's question about history and memory I would like to quote Anna
Akhmatova, who says that there is a huge distance between having something
in mind and actually remembering it. So she says the difference between not
forgetting and remembering is "as far, my friends, as the distance from Luga's
ice fields to the land of the satin masks". Many people now are working in that
gap between having something in mind — we know about the Empire, we know
about slavery, we know about indenture, we know about all the forgotten
nameless ones — and actively remembering it. You have to create the memory
rather than just having it in the back of your head.
TD: You are talking about creating memory, Marina. You talk about creative
amnesia, David. Could you respond to that?
DD: Creative amnesia means the desire to forget history. Which is an active desire,
especially if you live as a minority in a bigger country where people are always
gazing at you, either admiringly or disparagingly. Whenever there is a riot in
England, I always get called up to comment. I haven't got a clue about riots, but
somehow you are always a spokesman for the tribe. All you want to do is escape.
So there is a desire for amnesia because of social pressures. But it goes beyond
that. It is a sense of restlessness in yourself, of knowing that you never know
what you are at any one stage. Therefore it is best just to envelope yourself in
a kind of total forgetfulness out of which something might emerge. It is a desire
for invisibility. You can't get rid of Columbus: you can't be anti-Columbian,
because you are still being determined by Columbian legacies; and you can't be
post-Columbian, because the contours of your life are still being shaped by what
happened in the past; and you can't be non-Columbian...
TD: So what can you be?
DD: You blink and you forget it. It no longer exists but then what do you write
after that? If you don't write out of history, if you don't write out of memory,
what do you write about? I think these things, memory, the recovery of history,
are now oppressive in black writing.
MW: I think that's right. It should be asserted that everyone has a right to use
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the ultimate freedom which is to be free of the past. One of the things that certainly
happened to me as a British subject, as we are still called, in the last fifteen years
is that it became imperative to write with a view to the political and cultural crisis.
That was a loss of liberty. Before that I could sit in my attic and write lyric love
poetry. But Thatcher has destroyed that freedom for me.
DD: You have to write of social and political themes, it is true, because of
Thatcher.
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HH: You said, David, that you have to write the horror of the Empire. In respect
to your poem Turner you said: "Turner turned a blind eye on the English horror
of his time." And in your Reith Lectures, Marina, you said: "He did paint a
synthesis of the trade's horror."
MW: I did say he obscured it by the paint. The trade's horror has become invisible
in the painting and has also been obscured by the perception of the painting.
The painting became famous because of Ruskin, and the way he writes about
it totally drowns it again. What I also found extremely interesting is that Turner
left his money to all poor artists as long as they had two English parents of English
birth who were married.
DD: My own view was that Turner was vulgar about this and was more or less
jerking off on black suffering, foreign suffering. I think there is something very
voyeuristic about Turner's response to all that blood and mayhem, in the same
way that slavery provided the horror that fed into the neo-Gothic novel at the
turn of the 18th century: all that horror and Neo-Gothicism partly fed on the
descriptions of slavery, the shark, the broken nigger, the blood. All this created
a kind of frisson in his own life. He preferred the company of children to adults,
and at the same time he is being turned on by this idea of blood and destruction.
MW: I think it is unfortunate that his erotic work is destroyed. It is obviously
a tragic loss to an understanding of Turner, and I think that you have intuited
a connection, which would be made apparent if the erotic works had survived.
DD: There is nothing wrong in a kind of frisson that emerges from contact with
the other, with the other body. And I don't necessarily think there is anything
wrong about being voyeuristic. Why shouldn't we peep at each other and
somehow recover that original gaze, which must have had an element of awe
and wonder. Where one objects to Turner, I think, is that it goes deeper, it goes
into realms of sado-masochism. In other words, when Turner phantasises about
suffering and the black body in pain, he is entering into those realms of sadomasochism and savouring it. Which means you have to connect up those moods
to actual incidents in the Caribbean.
MW: It has to do with where you place the subjectivity. And that is what you
have done; because in the poems you have shown that the subjectivity of interest
to Turner is only his own subjectivity and perhaps the ship owner's. He has no
interest in the subjectivity of the drowned. And this is where it relates to Tony
Morrison's essay 'Playing in the Dark', where she says — and this is something
that a white writer really has to take on board — that as you look at the great
giants of American literature, what you find is that there are many more black
people in the books than have ever been acknowledged. But they have not been
seen to be there, because what they are is punctuation for the agonising dilemmas
44
of the main characters, who are white. They are there to illustrate the struggle
for white liberty. So the captive in chains or the drowned being eaten by the shark
is only there to define how terrible it is for Turner, for me, to struggle towards
our frustrated liberties.
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DD: I take the point about the great body of white writing that just uses Africans
or blacks as a kind of back-drop. I think it goes beyond that in the sense that
it begs larger questions about artists or writers in relation to their subject. I
remember a Jewish friend of mine accusing Sylvia Plath of taking on the
holocaustic experiences, which are vast and massive experiences, and very recent,
to describe her own private condition. As a Jew, she was arguing against Plath's
easy, or what seemed to be an easy, kind of absorption of this body of imagery.
So there is the question of whether there are certain subjects we shouldn't touch.
TD: Are there?
MW: I think it is more the philosophical ground on which the question is based.
It has to do with sensitivity. This is where I part company with some feminists,
particularly in America, because I object very, very strongly, and it makes me
very angry, when a law professor or a writer makes common cause with children
who are being sold into prostitution, or women who are suffering clitorectomies.
What is this virtual victimhood taken on by people whose experience of oppression
may be totally different in character? It is a kind of hypocrisy I get very upset by.
DD: I think that there is no subject that can't be approached or discussed or
analysed or felt, as long as one recognises oneself in relation to the subject and
makes sure that one doesn't just exploit it for one's own titillation...
MW: ...or for the delectation of readers through violence. That is why I left out
slavery from Indigo. It was a conscious choice that I would leave out that period;
I would do the period before and the period after, but the middle bit would not
be expressed.
HH: One of David's favourite words is transfiguration. But although you, Marina,
have consciously left slavery out, your omniscient narrator still knows about
Sycorax, what she thinks, what she feels. How do you come to know this? Isn't
Indigo a seduction of transfiguration as well?
MW: Well, I don't know exactly how I know about Sycorax, but there is one
little fragment of autobiography which I didn't mention, and that is that I had
a black nanny in Egypt. I don't remember her very well, because I was only six
when we left Egypt, but I do remember her physical presence, and I loved her
very, very much. I lived with the servants, as children in those sorts of households
often do, and there was Ahmed and Mohammed and my nanny. My mother
can't remember her name and I can't... because I called her Nanny.
TD: But your novel is very specific about the biographical details of Sycorax. I
wonder, for instance, why is she given an exact birth date? Why is she captured
in the timescale of our reference system?
MW: I intended the world of Indigo to have a material reality. I wanted to make
this civilisation that had been displaced and corrupted and shattered, disappeared.
I wanted to make it powerful, present, historical rather than symbolic. That was
why she was given a birthday.
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HH: David, do you feel seduced by the way Marina put Sycorax back on the
map of history?
DD: Why shouldn't I be? You see, a novel like that would succeed or fail formally.
If the project is to recreate and to reconstitute the body that was only intimated
in Shakespeare, you've got to do it lushly, sensuously, with sensuous detail, with
flourishes and in language that is always escaping meaning. I think that white
writing on blackness succeeds or fails in terms of form. That really is the ultimate
test. I am not trying to sound neutral here, but the form of a work of art tells
you about the integrity or the lack of integrity of the writer. If something is
formally, to use an old-fashioned word, beautiful, then it has worked in terms
of an imaginative penetration into otherness. In my own writing, I like the pun
of 'otherness' and 'udderness'. You see, if in the Caribbean you say 'other', you
say 'udder'. So the thing is how to get to the udder, and the milk of the subject.
And you always know whether you have done it badly: if the form is all messy,
the milk is all over the ground. I think that is the best criterion in this post-colonial
period rather than saying to writers that you can't write about Jews or you can't
write about blacks.
MW: There is another sort of parallel that comes to me, which is Schindler's List.
I think the film has taught us as writers that often the problem is where the gaze
is. The Jews here don't exist. They are seen, they are beheld. What I wanted
to do in the novel is that you don't actually see Sycorax. What I tried to do by
making her a voice is to see things from her point of view, so that she is not
beheld as black, as other. It isn't that I wanted to absorb difference altogether,
I am aware of that.
DD: Where I thought Indigo succeeded — unlike Schindler's List which is
unbalanced because the gaze emanates from Schindler, as you said — is that there
is no narrative focus. The narrative voices in Indigo are dispersed: you are telling
the story from different angles, which means that in some ways you are also
erasing yourself.
TD: Our final question: in both your writing, the moment of natural birth is no
longer present, the foetus cannot be born at all. Dulé is born through an act of
surgery and adoption. Does this, in our post-colonial period, relate to the process
of writing, in the way the imperial archive of culture is being dealt with?
MW: Of course, surgery is so coded as an act of cruel intervention. I am not sure
that I want to adopt that. But you reminded me of a line I like very much from
Beckett, which is: "It is better abort than be barren." For me, writing is actually
not connected to birth. The image that I constantly feel about writing is actually
connected to fishing: I love these poised spring traps that were made in Guyana,
those beautiful fish traps. I think of writing as the construction of a very delicate
organism with just a few spring triggers, and whatever it is that you wish to
capture might float in and the spring might go, it might have it. You don't have
to kill it afterwards, you can let it go again, or restore it.
TD: I think the four of us have captured a few fish in our nets today. Thank you
for this dialogue.
This dialogue took place at the literaturWERKstatt in Berlin in May 1994 on the occasion of the
festival 'Migrant Voices — New Literature from Britain'.