LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL

LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES LANGUE, LITTERATURE ET ETUDES CULTURELLES

Vol. I, No. 1

© Military Technical Academy Publishing House Bucharest, Romania, June 2008

Scientific committee / Comité scientifique Luminiţa Ciuchindel, University of Bucharest Alexandra Cornilescu, University of Bucharest Marie France David de Palacio, University of Bretagne Occidentale Robert Gauthier, University of Toulouse le Mirail Ghada Ghatwary, University of Alexandria Elena Soare, Paris 8

Editorial Staff / Rédaction Chief Editor / Rédacteur en chef: Amelia Molea Associate Chief Editor / Rédacteur en chef adjoint: Daniela Mirea Editors / Rédacteurs: Antoaneta Demergean Maria Stoicovici Maria Gabriela Moraru Assistant to Editor / Secrétaire de rédaction: Magdalena Mihailescu

Editorial Office: “ LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES LANGUE, LITTERATURE ET ETUDES CULTURELLES” 81-83 George Cosbuc Ave., Sector 5, 050141 Bucharest, R O M AN I A Tel.: +4021 335 46 60 / 253, Fax: +4021 335 57 63, e-mail: [email protected] ISSN 2065-3867

Ab uno disce omnes

On the cover: Vassili Kandinsky “Various circles”

CONTENTS ♦ SOMMAIRE Difference and Identity ♦ Différence et Identité

Literature ♦ Littérature 1. La double identité de Primo Levi: scientifique et témoin-rescapé de l’in-différence – CHIARA MONTINI........................................................ 7 2. Denzin/Carver and the new cultural subject: reading Raymond Carver’s short stories through the lens of the sociological imagination – MICHAEL HEMMINGSON ............................................... 23 3. “In consideration of your good name” la relation entre nom et identité chez Hector Saint-John de Crèvecoeur – MICHELLE CASONI .............. 45 4. Defining the novel – the beginnings of the English quest for identity – MARIA GABRIELA MORARU ................................................................ 57 5. La carte d’identité de Jean-Marie Adiaffi ou le traitement lyrique d’un sursaut identitaire – EMMANUEL TOH BI TIE ....................................... 67 6. The woman who gave birth to stories: Emma Donoghue and the reinvention of gender in historical fiction – SERENA TODESO ............. 85 7. Religious identity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient – AHMAD M. S. ABU BAKER ............................................................................. 101 8. Roald Dahl: the great storyteller revealing his life – IVY LAI CHUN CHUN ............................................................................................... 109

Cultural Studies ♦ Etudes culturelles 9. L’accès pour tous aux institutions britanniques: la multiculturalité et le multilinguisme en question(s) – VANESSA LECLERCQ ...................... 121 10.Statut de la langue française et identité culturelle au Maroc – REDA BEJJTIT .............................................................................................. 133 11.« Je suis comme l’Europe, je suis tout ca » : y a-t-il une identité Erasmus? Résultats d’une enquête sur l’apprentissage de la langue allemande auprès d’un groupe d’étudiants Erasmus a l’université de Göttingen – KRISTINA BEDIJS ........................................................... 143 5

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CONTENTS / SOMMAIRE

Linguistics ♦ Linguistique 12.Langues en miroir ou la rencontre de l’autre. L’usage de la langue corse dans un corpus narratif de la langue française – PASCAL ORSINI ............................................................... 161 13.Langues asymétriques et territorialité: nominations, origine et enjeux identitaires – ABDENBI LACHKAR...................................................... 175 14.Linguistic determinism – LEAH SADYKOV ........................................ 187

Traductology ♦ Traductologie 15.Jean Martin traducteur: une mise en cause de l’altérité linguistique et philosophique – MAGALI JEANNIN CORBIN ....................................... 213

Language teaching ♦ Didactique des langues 16.Testing, assessment and evaluation: are they all the same? – GIANFRANCO CATANZARO ...................................................................................... 225 17.Study on tactics for making English lessons more interesting – HONGMEI CHANG .............................................................................................. 233 18.Role play: fun or frustration? – JELENA GRUBOR .............................. 241

Language, literature and cultural studies / Langue, littérature et études culturelles Vol. I, No. 1, Jun. 2008

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S THE ENGLISH PATIENT Ahmad M.S. Abu Baker∗

Abstract: This paper highlights the traumatic effect of war experience and the problems of identity formation in a colonial framework as embodied in Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. It examines the racism that Kip suffers from as well as his constant process of redefining and rethinking his religious identity. Keywords: Michael Ondaatje, identity, religious identity, war, colony, racism. Résumé: L’ouvrage met en évidence l’effet traumatique de la guerre et la problématique de la formation de l’identité dans le milieu colonial tel que Michael Ondaat présente dans son roman The English Patient. Il fait une analyse du racisme dont Kip souffre, de même que du processus par lequel il passe: redéfinir et de repenser son identité religieuse. Mots clés: Michael Ondaatje, identité, identité religieuse, guerre, colonie, racisme.

Introduction “It’s a strange time, the end of the war.” [Caravaggio] “Yes. A period of adjustment.” [Hana] (The English Patient, p. 54) The English Patient is, more than anything else, a war novel. Boehmer describes it as one of the novels which depict the “colonial state of bereavement” which has been described by writers as “orphanhood or urchinhood, bastardy, metaphors underscoring the loss of communal moorings, the destruction of an essential umbilical cord with history” (Boehmer, p. 190). It tells the story of four characters (the English patient or Almásy, Hana the nurse, Kirpal Singh the Indian sapper, and Caravaggio a thief who worked for the Allies during the war in Secret Intelligence) struggling to come to terms with their past just prior to the end of the Second World War. All of these characters ∗

Al al Bayt University, Mafraq 25113, Jordan, PO Box 130040, [email protected] 101

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AHMAD M.S. ABU BAKER

are out of place. They are all “international bastards – born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from [their] homelands all [their] lives” (pp. 176-77). They live in Villa San Girolamo which, according to Simpson, represents “an escapable textual presence” and “compels a hazardous exchange between notions of property, propriety, displacement, and loss” (Simpson 1994:217). The four characters suffer from a traumatic war experience and try to deal with it in the villa in which “they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others” (p. 117). The truth would set them free and help them heal from the traumatic war experience or learn at least how to cope with it. Like many war novels, The English Patient depicts the aftermath of war. The physical destruction of landscapes and the psychological destruction of characters are both represented. The physical destruction is evident in, for instance, the meadow that is “scarred now by phosphorus bombs and explosions” (p. 11), “the bombed-out orchard” (p. 7), and the cemeteries which are “in rough shape” (p. 29). As for the psychological “destruction”, it is evident in the behaviour and attitude of Hana who is represented as “restless”, “mad and unconcerned with safety” (p. 13). The English patient also notices Hana’s “dead glances”, and realises “she was more patient than nurse” (pp. 9596). Her restlessness is due to her inability to come to terms with the traumatic war experience. “[S]he had lifted live men to discover they were already being consumed by worms. In Ortona she had held cigarettes to the mouth of the boy with no arms” (p. 178). These images which Hana represses during the day probably come back to haunt her at night and to trouble her in her sleep. When Hana’s hair touches the blood in a soldier’s wound, she “cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length” (pp. 49-50) and stopped looking “at herself in mirrors again” (p. 50). The doctors diagnose her with “[p]artial shell shock” (p. 28). The narrator explains that “Nurses too become shell-shocked from the dying around them” (p. 41). Caravaggio is also psychologically destroyed. He cannot come to terms with the cutting off of his thumbs by German soldiers (pp. 55-60). He only looks at “the thumbs of people … [in] envy” (p. 59) and uses morphine to give him “false limbs” (p. 116). He is also restless and worried about dying. He wishes he could enjoy a drink “without a fucking bomb going off” (p. 33). As for the English patient, he has to come to terms with his past and with the death of Katharine. Kip and his unit also suffer from the effect of war and struggle “to stop each other going crazy” (p. 129), and Kip tries to deal with British racism as well as his feelings of alienation and estrangement. He has to come to terms with the death of his teacher Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden, and Mr. Fred Harts (p. 178). In a situation where identity, religion, nationality, and the human body are

Religious Identity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

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deconstructed, peoples’ genealogy is highlighted. The following section targets the crisis of Kip’s religious identity and the racism he is subjected to.

Rethinking Religious Identity In a war context, the sky seems godless. Hence, “the Holy Trinity” (p. 178) is blown off. Religious futility prevails because of the peoples’ sense of despair and belief that God had forsaken them or that God is dead. Religious futility as a theme is represented in the crucifix which Hana uses as a scarecrow for her vegetable garden. She puts “empty” sardine cans on the crucifix thus linking the religious and the mundane. The cans are empty to suggest the religious “emptiness” or the godless skies (p. 14). The idea is further emphasised in the description of churches as having “[a] colder darkness. A greater emptiness” (p. 71, my italics). Kip also compares the church’s “hollowness and darkness” to that “of a well” (p. 72). The churches are apparently deserted not only by people but also by God. The death of Patrick, Hana’s father, in a dovecot produces the same effect of linking the religious and the mundane. David Roxborough notes that “[t]he coupling of war with religion pervades The English Patient.” The equation of “a dog’s paw and a cathedral (8) … denigrates the holiness of the latter. Dog paws and sardine cans fail to uphold the glory of God to say the least” (Roxborough 1999). Hana writes to Clare about the similarities between the dove-cot and the church. “Safe as a dove-cot. A sacred place. Like a church in many ways. A comforting place” (p. 293). Madox too felt that the church “had lost its holiness” (p. 260) when he “heard the sermon in honour of war” (p. 240). Yet even during these ‘godless’ times, Christianity affects Kip. He yearns for Christianity and is fascinated with Christian figures to the extent that he has to remind himself that “he had his own faith after all” (p. 80). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin note that post-colonial literatures are greatly concerned with “place and displacement.” To them, “[a] valid and active sense of self” can be “eroded” or “destroyed” because of “dislocation” which is caused by “migration”, “enslavement”, “cultural denigration” and “the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model” (Ashcroft et al. 1989:8-9). Hence, Kip protests to the English patient that “[y]ou and then the Americans converted us. With your missionary rules” (p. 283, my italics). His words highlight the role of Christian missionaries in colonization and invoke Aimé Césaire’s equations of “Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery” (Williams et al. 1994:173), which led to the creation of “abominable colonialists and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the yellow peoples and the Negroes” (Williams, p. 173). Césaire’s remarks reveal how religion, if manipulated, can easily turn into a tool for hatred/murder and a barrier towards assimilation.

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Kip’s displacement in Toronto “erodes” his identity and makes him adopt the ‘superior’ European culture/religion and “trust” (p. 104) the church’s “biblical figures” whose “flesh [is] darkened by hundreds of years of oil and candle smoke” (p. 77, my italics). Kip uses his gun’s telescope to get closer to the Biblical figures, but he cannot reach them because Christianity is depicted as a religion only for the Whites. Roxborough points out that “[w]ar follows religion. Religion follows war. Religion is war” (Roxborough 1999). Simpson explains this usage as Ondaatje’s way of revealing how that “the acolyte becomes an assassin, and the tourist a terrorist” (Simpson 1994:224-25). This interpretation reveals how each person has a hidden killer lurking inside his personality which comes to surface with the right catalyst. The affinity Kip feels with these Biblical figures is only caused by the similar colour of their “flesh” to his. When Kip sleeps besides the androgynous “grieving angel”, he “felt at peace” (p. 90). He feels at home in a church and views these figures “as if he were searching for a brother in the crowd” (p. 77) and compares “the face of Virgin Mary” in the darkness to the face of “someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter” (p. 80). Albert Memmi explains that the “conversion of the colonized to the colonizer’s religion would have been a step toward assimilation” (Memmi 1974:73). However, such an assimilation never really takes place because racism prevents the colonized from being treated as an equal to the colonizer. It is only darkness that gives these Biblical figures a dark skin similar to that of Kip thus making him feel related to them. The Annunciation portrait of Angel Gabriel and Virgin Mary which Kip views as “parental figures” (p. 280) present a special fascination for him. He notices the “terracotta figures painted the colour of white humans …. Still, for Kip, they are company” (p. 279, my italics). The figures appear to be having a “discussion … that represent[s] some fable about mankind and heaven” (p. 279, my italics). He is “fooled” by the “white flower” (my italics) which the Angel holds, just like he is fooled by his colonisers. He thinks it stands for peace, but, like him, “[t]he angel too is a warrior”. This scene “suggests a debate over his fate … a promise of some great future for this sleeper, childlike, foreign-born” (pp. 280-81). As far as I am concerned, the scene is a “debate” over Kip’s possible conversion to Christianity and over his ability to break away from his role as a colonised who accepts colonisation. Kip realises that Christianity is a religion for the Whites after the nuclear bombing of Japan. He realises that “[t]here are no brunettes …. among Florentine Madonnas” (p. 96). Christianity has played a violent role in colonisation. Koestler notes that Western countries were/are “armed with gunand-gospel truth” (Koestler 1960:11). Christianity has condoned and encouraged the colonisation of other races − a matter that is also exemplified in Caravaggio’s painting of David with the head of Goliath which, according to Clare Brandabur, represents “the intrinsic violence and genocide which are


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compressed into Western Judaeo/Christian mythic iconography, and which we have been misled into worshipping”. She explains that “the Bible with its violence, its command to slay all the Amelachites, its justification for the triumphal David to slay the defender of the land he steals, is repudiated” (Brandabur 2000). This interpretation reminds one of the true aim of colonization which is to legitimize colonization. After hearing of the nuclear bombing of Japan, Kip left the villa and rode his motorbike to the church saying “[l]et the dead bury the dead” (p. 286). Kip is leaving Hana and Caravaggio, who are now to him “dead” as friends, to bury the dying/“dead” Almásy. His head remains filled with the Biblical words “For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke and the earth shall wax old like a garment. And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner” (p. 295). These words are described by the narrator as a “secret of deserts from Uweinat to Hiroshima” (p. 295). These words which describe the death of a population and the end of civilisation can be used to describe the effect of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Kip feels that “he carries the body of the Englishman with him in this flight” and that “[t]he voice of the English patient sang Isaiah into his ears” (p. 294). Kip loves Isaiah’s face and words because “he had believed in the burned man and the meadows of civilisation he tended” (p. 294). Kip’s belief reflects his fascination with Western civilization and religion as superior to his own. To Kip, the face of Isaiah was a “great face and was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving” (p. 77). The “unforgiving” face of Isaiah contradicts the discourse of tolerance which is a pillar of Christianity. It stands for religion as a tool of hatred and violence. Kip becomes haunted with the voice of the English patient singing Isaiah to him. “He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country” (p. 294). Kip has been “tossed” into a large country, and he has seen its “tremor of Western wisdom” (p. 284). Kip will always be haunted by the horror of Western civilisation and will always view Christianity as “unforgiving” as the face of Isaiah. This horror invokes Césaire’s remarks on the colonised races “in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair and behave like flunkeys” (Williams et al. 1994: 178) before their European colonisers. The horror of the nuclear bombs does not only affect the “ethnic targets”, as McClintock would call them (Williams et al. 1994:302), who survived the bombing, but also their descendants and descendants’ descendants. Hence the words, “And my words which I have put in thy mouth shall not depart out of thy mouth. Nor out of the mouth of thy seed. Nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed” (p. 294). It is this “tremor of Western wisdom” (p. 284) which makes Aimé Césaire state that Europe is “responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history”

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(Williams et al. 1994:174). In short, Christianity is depicted as encouraging and/or condoning wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Nevertheless, Kip’s love for Isaiah and affinity with Biblical figures remain even after the bombing. However, he views them as “naïve Catholic images” which he, nevertheless, keeps “with him in the half-darkness” (p. 278). The images are “naïve” just like Kip used to be because he failed to realize that equality does not function within the colonial discourse of Christianity that is unforgiving and racist. Consequently, Kip enters the church to see the face of Isaiah another time and finds a statue “bandaged in scaffold” which symbolises Kip’s wounded beliefs in Christianity. He “wanted to get closer to the face, but he had no rifle telescope” and “wandered around underneath like somebody unable to utter the intimacy of a home” (p. 291, my italics). Here Kip realizes that Christianity is only for the Whites and feels alienated because of his race and skin colour. Ondaatje emphasizes Kip’s brownness by depicting him against white backgrounds such as when Kip “descended, down into the giant white chalk horse of Westbury … he was a black figure, the background radicalizing the darkness of his skin and his khaki uniform” (p. 181) which makes him mainly remember only that “[h]e is in the white horse” and “feels hot on the chalk hill, the white dust of it swirling up all around him” (p. 201). Everything around Kip seems to “radicalize” the darkness of his skin. Hana’s skin, the white background, the milk he loves to drink possibly hoping it might change his colour, the burnt body of the English patient, and even the concrete bomb whose characters were all painted “black” thus pulling him “into a psychological vortex” (p. 99). He belongs elsewhere and is described as an “intimate stranger” (p. 226), “a tentative visitor” (p. 75), and a “foreigner” (p. 105). Ondaatje treats the Indian Kip with a certain grace unlike other Anglo-Indian writers who treat the Indian with contempt. He treats him as an exotic figure to marvel at. Hana loves the different brown colours of his body (p. 127). Apparently, Ondaatje tries to prove that being different (brown) is beautiful. When Kips falls into the river, he departs from the white world into his “brown” world. The narrator remarks that “the road rose above the whiteness, the mist a bed behind him …. now he slid through in minutes, recognizing only the Black Madonna shrines” (p. 292, my italics). David Roxborough explains that Kip acts as “the modern Christ” and “leads the way to mythological salvation by being ‘literally blown . . . into the past, back into the tradition he came from’” (Roxborough 1999). Kip wishes to break free from this white/black binary. Ondaatje contests the notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ by giving Kip the chance to break away from the grip of colonisation. Ondaatje gives Kip a chance to fight back and feel the Europeans’ need for him. Simpson suggests that “[a]s an Indian in England and then in Italy, Kip must turn the (post)colonial tables on the British Kim in India” (Simpson


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1994:220). To him, “the continual references to Kipling’s Kim suggest that even to the ostensibly official cultural and literary face of empire is all too often excruciated in its expressions” (Simpson, p. 220). Brandabur also notes that “Kip steps away from the colonial system in which he, like Kipling’s hero had been trained and employed” thus Kip becomes “an ironic parody of the book out of which he stepped into Ondaatje’s post-modern text as though called by magic” (Brandabur 2000). Ondaatje gives Kip the power to make Europeans invisible to him and to break away from the shell of colonisation. By removing all the insignia off his uniform, Kip casts away his attributes as a colonised object, deserts the army and goes back to India – a matter that Kipling’s Kim fails to achieve. Ondaatje gives Kip the chance to realise that White Madonnas are only for the White race, and to, therefore, reject them. The presence of the Middle East, the Bedouins, and Alamsy’s reference to the “mad prophets of the desert” serve, as far as I am concerned, as a reminder that Jesus Christ was a brown man himself. Kip’s return to India suggests that one cannot be happy or live in harmony and assimilation with other races in a colonial racist context, particularly with presence of Nazi Germany in the background of the novel. Ondaatje seems to suggest that unless there is a consensus on the equality of races, any attempt at assimilation or having interracial relationships is bound to be frustrated. Therefore, Ondaatje is different from Kipling who wants people of mixed races and religions to live in racial harmony by accepting British dominance over them.

Conclusion Christianity in the novel is exclusive. Kip learns that it is only for the whites. He yearns for it, yet he is bound to remain outside its sphere. Christianity also appears to support and condone wars. Skies in the novel are ‘godless’ and ‘indifferent’, churches are empty, and religious symbols of Christianity are devalued. The novel concludes with Kip learning that no matter how close one gets to the colonisers, no matter how much one adopts their culture, no matter how much one believes he/she has become one of them, one remains outside their camps. The novel leaves us to “swallow [our] history lesson” (p. 285). Eventually, in Ondaatje’s novel “all that remains is a capsule from the past” (p. 33). Being a Sri-Lankan Canadian writer, Ondaatje tries to bring into his readers’ perspectives new ways of understanding the ‘other’ by removing the dominating discourses of power. Kip, for instance, is the one who controls his relationship with Hana, and strong racial markers like Catherine’s blue eyes are erased to reveal the shared and similar essence of the human race. Kip’s otherness is not negative like that of Kipling’s Kim. His otherness is celebrated, and the British racism against him is condemned.


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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, London: Routledge. Boehmer, E. (1995) Colonial and Postcolonial Literature – Migrant Metaphors, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandabur, C. (2000) Parody and Pastiche in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, An unpublished article presented at the Yarmouk University (Irbid-Jordan) Conference on Literature, Linguistics and Translation. Koestler, A. (1960) The Lotus and the Robot, London: Hutchinson. Memmi, A. (1974) The Colonizer and The Colonized, 1965. rpt. London: Souvenir Press. Ondaatje, M. (1993) The English Patient, London: Picador. Roxborough, D. (1999) The Gospel of Almasy: Christian Mythology in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Essays on Canadian Writing, Internet Explorer Issue 67 (p. 236-254). Simpson, D. M. (1994) Minefield Readings: The postcolonial English Patient. ECW: Essays on Canadian Writing Issue 53. Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. (1994) (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory - A Reader, London: Harvest Wheatsheaf.