The silencing touch of colonialist intellectuals scratches and scars the Othered colonized population, as recounted by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in a few ways. The first is through the Colonizer’s cultural obliteration of the native population, a process of constituting an objectified colonial subject, which Frantz Fanon and other postcolonial theorists also detail. This annihilation and systematic restructuring of knowledges is one exemplar of epistemic violence. The re-educating program of the elite and the invader replaces the knowledge of one population.

Spivak continues offering a second vision of violence that results from the privileging of a single narrative formed by the intermingling of Subject and Other, which in turn eliminates the notion of an essentialist, organic voice of the people as “when a line of communication is established … the subaltern has been inserted in the long road to hegemony” (2012). In creating a narrative center, other voices not brought to the table are relegated to the margins. At times, the colonial ruler created a privileged class among the ruled to maintain control while offering some crumbs to satiate those who aspired towards or were bestowed with participation in traditional intellectual institutions. Once the Other comes in contact with the Colonizer’s narrative and cultural formation, their story is no longer “untouched” by the hegemony but brought in line with the powers that be and sifted through their lens and for their purposes.

What, then, could be said of the postcolonial, empathetic scholars’ role in the academic space and production? With a seemingly pessimistic conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak and that even the most well-intentioned intellectual has an impact that perpetuates the status quo, what ought we do? Spivak gives possibilities and potential frames of mind but not answers when she discusses deconstructing mono-centered academic world concepts. She writes, “Part of our “unlearning” project is to articulate our participation in that formation — by measuring silences, if necessary — into the object of investigation.” (2009). An internal interrogation is needed to critique what voices we are omitting, silencing, or withholding. With this, we can reduce the harm done in our reproduction of hegemonic ideas and potentially expand the circle of inclusion.

However, is inclusion and representation desired? Do these not continue the colonizing project by melding and altering the positionality and identities of these people? Should not they remain distinct so as not to join themselves in complicity with the empire? These questions, for Spivak, cannot yield easy answers. And, is that not the point?

In The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon poses a question central to the relevance of the arts in pursuing a more liberated society, “Is the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?” (1366). Is there a place for the graphic novel writer, the rapper, the visual artist, the filmmaker, the television actor, and the video game designer in the movement towards a decolonized, just society that places power in the hands of the people rather than the hegemonic forces that stifle us? 

In undergrad, I debated with a close friend about the necessity of liberal arts in addition to the medical field. Orlando V. was a dear friend and contrarian of the most pragmatic sensibilities. His claim argued that literally saving individuals’ lives was monumentally more important than the trivial pursuits of interacting with and producing various forms of art. I countered, insisting there is life-giving and society-transforming power in literature, among other artistic endeavors. The tools that create culture construct realities for individuals, marginalized groups, and even nations.

In the aforementioned seminal work, Fanon illustrates the colonized natives’ ability to organize, as Antonio Gramsci dubs, “organic intellectuals.” These individuals break from the institutions of the powers that be to create new modes of being and produce a counterculture that threatens oppressive control. These grassroots organizers come from the native people of a land and deconstruct the manufactured consent that permeates the colonizers’ culture. Fanon helps track a possible trajectory of how such a movement develops, one that I will compare with the work and life of Chinua Achebe.

When a colonizing power invades, they do so not only with physical might but with an eye towards “cultural obliteration” in order to control the very reality and ideas that exist in the minds of their colonized subjects. (Fanon 1361) In Things Fall Apart and in an “Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Chinua Achebe notes how the culture of the colonizer invades Nigeria and the heart of the Congo basin, respectively, writing a new reality and creating the terms by which people themselves are defined. The colonizer forces the colonized, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Congolese into a new culture, religion, and political landscape that envisions them in racist ways, placing significations of inferiority in every aspect of their lives. 

As one witnesses with the converts in Things Fall Apart, some of the colonized attempt to fit into the schema of the colonizer “throw[ing] [themselves] in frenzied fashion in the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying culture” (Fanon 1361). Nevertheless, the occupiers see them as less than others, “depersonalize a portion of the human race” and, in effect, silence them (Achebe 1542). The colonizer sets the terms of culture and how these subjects ought to be perceived by those in power. 

However, according to Fanon, there is a path forward, one that Achebe’s life illustrates. The native intellectuals and artists begin to counter the “dominating power.” They become not merely subjects of reproduction of dominant culture but “producers” of literature, art, and ideas that lead to the “crystallization of the national consciousness” that will “disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public” (Fanon 1362-1363). Achebe’s stunning works rose high in influence, challenging colonizing powers and cultural mindsets. Along with others, he formulates an indigenous counterculture and liberatory literature that influences the populace at such a scale as to animate the imaginations of the people, “by carving figures and faces which are full of life…the artist invites participation in an organized movement” (Fanon 1364). His own country, Nigeria, gained independence a few years after publishing his novel. This example does not suggest simplistic causation between this novel and that historical event. Rather, it proposes that the ideas envisioned in this novel and many other productions of culture by the colonized contributed to the actualization of a liberated Nigeria. 

The artist has a key role in deconstructing the culture of hegemony. They produce art from the people, demystifying the propaganda of the ruling classes and providing opportunities for a liberated existence and alternative realities. In effect, the arts also save lives.

In her work, Melville’s Fist, Barbara Johnson winds up a classic American story and lets it totters off in new directions, playing with language and our concept of the role of characters in texts. Herman Melville’s Billy Budd reveals to us a few notable characters with apparently allegorical and archetypal roles that consumers of literature would quickly identify: Billy Budd, the innocent, naive, face-value do-gooder; John Claggart, the persnickety, paranoid villain; and Captain Vere, the trustworthy, mediating, authority figure. Johnson notes how masterfully Melville upends the perceptions of his cast through the prior two characters’ counter-intuitive actions. Billy, the beautiful and benevolent, kills while Claggart, the schemer, falls victim to an act of violence. Johnson describes this role reversal as a chiasmus, a crossing which breaks these two men into opposing functions. 

Farther along, Johnson expands this idea by explicating how the characters read their setting, circumstances, and each other. She writes, “It seems evidence that Billy’s reading method consists in taking everything at face value, while Claggart’s consists in seeing a mantrap under every daisy” (2330). They have a set intention, a kind of worldview that they purport to use as a lens by which to make meaning of their lives. Johnson notes that despite their own value systems and intentions, both the naive Billy and the contrarian Claggart act, think, and speak in ways that show their limited cohesion and consistency to their reading styles. Billy does not, indeed, take everything at face value, and Claggart maintains a bias – without critiquing or challenging the signs –  towards anything that fits his perception of treachery around every corner. There is a slippery nature to how they interpret the signs around them. They bring their own inconsistencies, multiplicity of logics, and human error to each reading of each other and life aboard the Bellipotent.

Vere, for Johnson, represents a third type of reader who takes into account the political and historical context as well as reads and speaks in an active performative manner distinct of the other characters. She postulates, “Vere, on the other hand, interrogates both past and future for interpretative guidance. While Budd and Claggart thus oppose each other directly, without regard for circumstance or consequence, Vere reads solely in function of the attending historical situation: the…mutinies (2332). He peruses not only the frames of mind and perspectives of the two antagonistic forces but also mulls over meaning within time and space – reading in a multidimensional way, as it were. Johnson aptly addresses how Vere’s poring over the situation in judgment also includes an introspective reading of self and how his interpretative performance will be received and subsequently interpreted itself. The layers pile on. As she explores Billy Budd beyond the limits of allegory and simple significations, meaning and language become playthings for Johnson. Rather than coloring within the lines and parsing out binaries such as knowing vs doing performance vs cognition, Johnson plays with the text and imagines the “deadly space” as “that which, within cognition, functions as an act …that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (2337). The center of the issue evades and yet within this interior vacuum, rather than the supposed opposing boundaries, there remains a multiplicity of readings and meanings.

Johnson’s whimsy with reading characters as readers themselves is a pleasant and expansive twist that destabilizes limiting understandings of a two-dimensional fashion. This advent with the play of subject and object, language and the looseness of signs, signifiers, and signified, can be amplified further with a play in a different direction – that of the readers as characters, themselves acting, performing within a text. Just as Vere brings a wide context of the sociopolitical atmosphere with his reading, we flesh and blood readers enter the world of Billy Budd and Melville’s Fist with our own lived contexts and outer-world understandings. The physical scribblings on the pages of each work fail to become a text, and thus their characters, readers (or anything/anyone else), until the reader incarnates into said text. How could the meanings of the actions, speech, and personalities of the characters be altered through the interrelationship between each of them and each reader? How do sign, signified, signifier, and the space between and among and outside and inside and through each of these become infleshed and defleshed with each individual reader (and each reading done by one individual)? How can a text be further wound up and unleashed in new, undetermined, unpredictable directions? What are the limits between the “reality” within a work, the reality of the outside readers, and the multiple realities bridging and spinning between them? Just as Vere’s judgment, the act of speak-reading is, in turn, judged and read; perhaps there is some dynamism, reciprocity, and troubling of identifiers between characters as readers and us readers as characters as well.

In forming a thought, one conjures up a representation of reality, and not the real. Conceptualization is inherently a fabrication, a self-deception. Yet, often we humans forget or fail to acknowledge this. In our own egotistic pursuit of correctness and desire to be perceived as upstanding, trustworthy individuals, we claim truth as our aim, our aura. Nietzsche speaks on this when he writes, “The arrogance inherent in cognition and feeling casts a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings, and because it contains within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition, it deceives them about the value of existence” (Nietzsche 752-53). Our very presence in space and time is beget in deception and even if we are able to uncover a sliver of its purpose, we play at knowing and living in some sort of authentic otherworld in which we know truth and speak it. Not only do we participate in deception, we enjoy it like a game. We flatter, we pander, we tell-half truths both in self-congratulation and in appeasement or encouragement of others in order to maintain socially constructed group norms and hospitality. 

The Traitors has quickly gained prominence and fanfare amongst reality TV show competitions. This game of deception, trickery, persuasion, dubiously meaningful mini games, and coalition building garners a cult following from the public, I suspect, because it reveals what we all know deep down – we, too, play a game of deception. 

The fact of untruths does not disturb us, but rather is warmly accepted by us and implemented into our everyday way of communicating. Nietzsche correctly asserts that humans do not hate being lied to, nor do they love being told the truth. Rather, they want to minimize harm received. Because we cannot fully conceive or reproduce actuality, we embrace the stand-in, the metaphor, the signal so long as it is not to our detriment. 

Language is constructed around designation and substitutes that altogether are not what is represented. The production of language is a cascade of metaphors: first that of perception of the actual thing-in-itself to a thought image, second, that of the thought image into a sound, and continuing into written and other representations. Truth, in conception and in expression through language, is thus nothing but deception, “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms…subjected to rhetorical intensification, translation, decoration…which…strike people as established, canonical, and binding” (756). Truth is a construct centered around a mutually enforced perception of reality.

Indeed, in season 2, episode 4 of The Traitors, Housewife and traitor Phaedra Parks remarks at the demise of fellow contestant (by her own edict) Ekin-Su, “Oh, my Lord! Sweet baby Jesus! Not Ekin-Su. Lord, not Ekin-Su!” The remaining cast mates do not suspect Phaedra because their mutual perception of what a housewife, devout Christian woman, and extravagant personality is demonstrated. They have forgotten the illusion, that their conception of her and her words have been agreed upon en masse as truth, though they are not founded in reality but dolled up in custom, finery, and affectation. We enjoy mutual deception of language and cognition – of representations, metaphors, and signs. We love being in on the game, until we are not.

For Nietzche, as for Phaedra, deception is just part of the game. That’s life, baby.