Conference Abstracts
23. Hakim, Hassan; Faculty of Letters Oujda:
"Unmapping the Imperial Centre Unruly Presence and Narrative
Ambivalence in Ben Okri's Short Stories"
Ben Okri's short stories, especially “Disparities”
and "Hidden History", may be seen as an entry point to
the analysis of the immigrant Other as ‘latent’ in and
anterior to the Western metropolitan centre and its discourses.
The homogeneity and universality of the metropolitan centre get
shattered into ‘fragments’, 'hidden histories' and epistemological
‘disparities’. In its representation of itself as the
Identical and the Same, as the centre in itself and for itself,
the imperial centre is no longer conceived as an origin, a totality
sufficient onto itself. It is opened in its own representation.
The invisibility of the immigrant Other who inhabits the imperial
space as an absent presence disturbs the present/presentation of
social relations with an incommensurable and unruly otherness.
As he unmaps metropolitan space, the Other therefore
destabilises the terrain on which Western appropriating strategies
are conducted. To re-map the centre’s geographies and identities
can be an act of resistance especially when metropolitan space is
re-described from within the perspective of the Other. This social
unmapping contests the terms on which the narratives of the centre
are constructed ; the formal devices of representation played a
great role in naturalising and legitimating the worldview and status
quo of the imperial centre. To re-describe the centre from within
otherness is to dismantle the ontological, social and cultural inscriptions
on space.
The centre transforms thus into a ‘constellation
of delirium’ in Fanon’s words, where dislocation, violence,
racism but above all ‘absence’ and ‘ellipsis’
rupture order, presence, space and temporality. The oxymoronic conceptualisation
of the Other as absent/present defines the immigrant Other as never
present, never now. Okri’s postcolonial narrative strategies
institute accordingly new stances about identity. ‘Uncanny’
happenings do erupt to destabilise the mental topologies which construct
identities. The postcolonial Other becomes a hobo, an unusual picaro
who, for instance, explores and unmaps the worldview that frames
the centre. With his spaceless presence, the hobo unsettles the
discourses that delimit the metropolis and its daily activities.
As he roams space with his unruly presence, he keeps subverting
the social habitus and the cultural topographies of the metropolitan
map.
Though ‘unrepresentable’, the Other does
not unsettle the centre to celebrate the periphery. Okri’s
postcolonial strategies of resistance seek to embrace a perspective
whereby identity, space and temporality may be rendered contingent,
shifting and uncertain. Otherness becomes a haunting presence that
undermines even the language of the Enlightenment body politics:
the right to citizenship and the right to representation. History
transforms into a palimpsest; totality turns into contingency; incontrollable
phenomena resist sociological analysis.
In dealing with the absent Other of the metropolitan
centre, Okri's stories not only undermine the universal consensus
of human rights and social equality as an impossible political and
social utopia, they touch upon the limits of the finite thought
of the Same, upon the inadmissible and the uncanny. They point to
the uncertainty and ambivalence at the heart of the self and other,
centre and periphery to institute that which exceeds the “historical”,
the “social”, the “rational”, and above
all the “Manichean”.
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