In my last post, I talked about James Scott’s theory of pubic and hidden transcripts, an approach that a number of Classicists use in their search for the voices of Greek and Roman slaves in classical texts and inscriptions. Then I raised up Gutyari Spivak, whose work on subalterity questions to what extent it is possible to disentangle language and the power of oppression. Let me first continue to explain, my understanding at least, of Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Primarily for the sake of space, but also because it is the part of Spivak’s essay that tends to stick in my mind the longest (I first read the essay back in 2009 and it was this part of the essay that I remembered seven years later, rather than Spivak’s analyses of Foucault, Marx and Derrida), I will focus on the incident with which Spivak concludes her article. The incident is the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a teen-aged woman who lived in North Calcutta. In 1926 she hanged herself. Spivak tells us that her family noted and remembered that she had been menstruating when she hanged herself. This detail served to clear her of any claims that she had killed herself because she had been pregnant outside of wedlock.
But why then did she die? Spivak offers up a number of details without offering anything that resembles an explanation: she endured melancholia, she suffered the longing of an illicit love and that she was a member of a number of organizations that advocated the violent ouster of the British. That Spivak even reports that Bhaduri had been interested with an assassination attempt does not indicate that Spivak gives this aspect of Bhaduri’s life more weight in terms of assigning her death a motive.
But before I move onto Spivak’s conclusion, I need to recap Spivak’s explanation of the practice of sati-suicide. Most bluntly put, this is the practice of certain Hindu women killing themselves after their husbands have died. Spivak is in part interested in this practice because the British occupiers attempted to stop women from doing this. Since Bhaduri was so young, she was not a widow and therefore not eligible to commit the sati-suicide. Nonetheless, because the practice was a frequent point of tension between the colonizers and the colonized, Spivak puts this practice into the context of Bhaduri’s death, writing:
“The displacing gesture – waiting for menstruation- is at first a reversal of the interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself; the unclean widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege. In this reading, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide is an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide as much as the hegemonic account of the blazing, fighting, familial Durga. The emergent dissenting possibilities of that hegemonic account of the fighting mother are well document and popularly well remembered through the discourse of the male leaders and participants in the independence movement. The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.” (1988: 308)
True, Spivak does jump quickly from the event at hand to the grand-sounding pronouncement “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.” However, I do think that Spivak is writing with the faith that her readers will grasp what she says. My take-away is that Spivak points out how the discourse into which Bhaduri surrounds herself with as she dies is full of the expectations of speakers and writers who do not share Bhaduri’s concerns or experiences. Furthermore, Spivak implies that Bhaduri, all clever enough to manipulate her body in order to defy certain expectations, nonetheless this cleverness is not enough to ensure that anyone is able to understand why she does this. Her thoughts and motivations do not fit into the discourse and are therefore unintelligible.
If the above explanation did not make sense to you, let me add this interpretation that my undergraduate professor offered. The class was on postcolonial literature, as a result a common theme in the course was power and language. My professor asked us to consider one of the women in Spivak’s essay, one who had lived her entire life in rural India. Would she be the same woman if she then studied for many years, indeed studied enough in order to read and write essays such as Spivak’s?
I think about this kind of question in regards to ancient slavery. For there are some ancient writers and thinkers who were slaves. For example, the Roman playwright Terence is said by Suetonius to have been a slave. The philosopher Epictetus describes himself as having been a slave for a number of years. Is it really surprising that these men do not offer up any indictments of slavery? When they were successful poets and philosophers respectively, what relationship did former slaves have to their past lives as slaves?
A less pessimistic approach than Spivak’s would say that men such as Terence and Epictetus did not describe their previous lives as slaves or use such experience as the basis of critiques of slavery because they had been assimilated into the Greco-Roman world. I don’t doubt that Spivak would agree with this idea. However, her position takes up a more radical notion: that it would not have been possible for an anti-slavery position to have been articulated in Greco-Roman discourse.
Primarily for the sake of space, but also because it is the part of Spivak’s essay that tends to stick in my mind the longest (I first read the essay back in 2009 and it was this part of the essay that I remembered seven years later, rather than Spivak’s analyses of Foucault, Marx and Derrida), I will focus on the incident with which Spivak concludes her article. The incident is the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a teen-aged woman who lived in North Calcutta. In 1926 she hanged herself. Spivak tells us that her family noted and remembered that she had been menstruating when she hanged herself. This detail served to clear her of any claims that she had killed herself because she had been pregnant outside of wedlock.
But why then did she die? Spivak offers up a number of details without offering anything that resembles an explanation: she endured melancholia, she suffered the longing of an illicit love and that she was a member of a number of organizations that advocated the violent ouster of the British. That Spivak even reports that Bhaduri had been interested with an assassination attempt does not indicate that Spivak gives this aspect of Bhaduri’s life more weight in terms of assigning her death a motive.
But before I move onto Spivak’s conclusion, I need to recap Spivak’s explanation of the practice of sati-suicide. Most bluntly put, this is the practice of certain Hindu women killing themselves after their husbands have died. Spivak is in part interested in this practice because the British occupiers attempted to stop women from doing this. Since Bhaduri was so young, she was not a widow and therefore not eligible to commit the sati-suicide. Nonetheless, because the practice was a frequent point of tension between the colonizers and the colonized, Spivak puts this practice into the context of Bhaduri’s death, writing:
“The displacing gesture – waiting for menstruation- is at first a reversal of the interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself; the unclean widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege. In this reading, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide is an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide as much as the hegemonic account of the blazing, fighting, familial Durga. The emergent dissenting possibilities of that hegemonic account of the fighting mother are well document and popularly well remembered through the discourse of the male leaders and participants in the independence movement. The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.” (1988: 308)
True, Spivak does jump quickly from the event at hand to the grand-sounding pronouncement “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.” However, I do think that Spivak is writing with the faith that her readers will grasp what she says. My take-away is that Spivak points out how the discourse into which Bhaduri surrounds herself with as she dies is full of the expectations of speakers and writers who do not share Bhaduri’s concerns or experiences. Furthermore, Spivak implies that Bhaduri, all clever enough to manipulate her body in order to defy certain expectations, nonetheless this cleverness is not enough to ensure that anyone is able to understand why she does this. Her thoughts and motivations do not fit into the discourse and are therefore unintelligible.
If the above explanation did not make sense to you, let me add this interpretation that my undergraduate professor offered. The class was on postcolonial literature, as a result a common theme in the course was power and language. My professor asked us to consider one of the women in Spivak’s essay, one who had lived her entire life in rural India. Would she be the same woman if she then studied for many years, indeed studied enough in order to read and write essays such as Spivak’s?
I think about this kind of question in regards to ancient slavery. For there are some ancient writers and thinkers who were slaves. For example, the Roman playwright Terence is said by Suetonius to have been a slave. The philosopher Epictetus describes himself as having been a slave for a number of years. Is it really surprising that these men do not offer up any indictments of slavery? When they were successful poets and philosophers respectively, what relationship did former slaves have to their past lives as slaves?
A less pessimistic approach than Spivak’s would say that men such as Terence and Epictetus did not describe their previous lives as slaves or use such experience as the basis of critiques of slavery because they had been assimilated into the Greco-Roman world. I don’t doubt that Spivak would agree with this idea. However, her position takes up a more radical notion: that it would not have been possible for an anti-slavery position to have been articulated in Greco-Roman discourse.