July 12, 2015

Jeremy Younger    

At the launch of Jenny Blood’s book of poems

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I could start in so many places.

I could start in 1946 with my birth and my knowing from that moment that I was different – that I was queer. Some queer people do, for some it a realisation they takes much longer to reach.

I could start with the story I told my best friend Andrew – he was just so sexy but I had no words for it but anyway I invented a great story – that I was really the son of a rich and sparkly prince and I had been adopted by my suburban, North London, family and nobody knew. I was nine and I told him on the edge of the cricket field when we were supposed to be fielding – he believed me! I knew from then on that being queer meant being different.

I could start with the postcard I wrote to the composer Benjamin Britten. I knew he was queer – perhaps my father told me and he would have read it in the News of the World – so I sent him a postcard – I was about 16 – I told him I thought I was gay and what should I do. And he replied – “keep going” he said “you’re OK” – and he invited me to tea if I was ever in Norfolk! If only I could have got there!

I could start on the top deck of a red, London Transport bus on my way either to or from my friend Paul with whom I was exploring sex, even exploring love. That bus ride was such a regular, transitional passage from one part of me with, David, to the other with my parents.

I became highly adept as time went on moving between spaces. However the place really to begin what I want to say is not on a London Transport Bus (perhaps that was just a rehearsal!) but on the British Airways plane that brought me to Aotearoa, New Zealand in 1994.

This then is what I want to explore or open up today in this brief ten minute contribution: the interrelationship on the one hand between my understanding of myself as a queer – with a lifetime of being “colonised” as are all queers within the colonising “normal” straight world; and on the other hand my understanding of myself as a settler – becoming part of the world of the “coloniser” as are all settlers.

For me as both queer and settler it is a life in a half empowered limbo.

As the Queer I fetishize yet disparage the “normal” world which in turn deprecates me while envying my sexual freedom and creativity. And I recognise that by turn I infantilise and displace my desire completing the hierarchy of parallel loathing.

For the Settler I fetishize yet disparage the homeland which in turn deprecates me while envying my energy and enterprise. And I recognise also by turn that I infantilise and displace the indigene completing the hierarchy of parallel loathing.

In both it is the inherent awareness of “there” and “here” – the space of “intermediary knowledge” – “the fusion of horizon”. I shall come back to this idea later, especially using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s idea of the “Fusion of horizons”.

The writings of Homi Bhabha give us a way to language what happens in relationship, especially but not only postcolonial relationships. He talks of the structures of control and uses three key interrelated concepts: hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence.

Hybridity speaks of the way identity – any identity: cultural, sexual, psychotherapeutic – the way identity is always constructed in a contradictory and ambivalent space, which contradicts any notion of “purity”. When you and I come into relationship we create this hybrid, this ambivalent space and from whichever side we view it – your side or mine – we experience it as a lack. We then have two choices; either we can stay resolutely on the one side or the other, clutching the myth of cultural, sexual, therapeutic purity - and from that isolated place judge the hybrid space – the space we have created – as lacking authenticity or we can do the risky thing and move into the hybrid space, experience it and celebrate it. The hybrid space is the only space in which we can make relationship.

Mimicry, which very easily becomes mockery and undermines the coloniser’s authority, occurs when colonial discourse encourages the colonised subject to mimic the coloniser’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions, and values, resulting in “blurred copies” and "authorised versions of otherness".

Ambivalence, a term borrowed from our world of psychoanalysis, describes the continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite – simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

Bhabha is saying what we know as therapists that communication is a process which is never perfectly achieved; that there is always a slippage or gap between what is being said and what is being heard; that we try to get control by getting the other to be like us and we always fail, and anyway we are ambivalent about what we desire and complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relationship.

Some would argue that Pakeha culture in New Zealand with its preference for the anodyne, clean, clear agendas of mainstream modernism is so close to the first world as to make no conceivable difference.

I would suggest that the difference is not perceived because Pakeha culture is not ready to acknowledge it. It’s just too scary.

The argument is made that because of this slippage in the discourse of relationship the coloniser can never represent the Colonised. Edward Said’s profoundly influential critique on representation has shaped, in a fundamental way, the debate in this area. He says:

“The act of representation almost always represents violence of some sort to the subject of the representation, It implies confinement, it implies a certain kind of estrangement or disorientation on the part of the one representing.”

This Post-Colonial received wisdom presents us with an essentialist view that suggests that any representation by the coloniser renders the colonised as irredeemably and pathetically vulnerable.

It seems to me that if authentic representation is restricted only to those ideas, beliefs, icons, images and symbols to which you lay claim by birth, skin colour, gender and so on then any engagement with complex exterior worlds is ruled out and leaves only a move towards interiority and a manufactured complexity; taken to the extreme: if all representation can be reduced to abuse, then autobiography and the exploration of the self soon become self-abuse.

If the world of sensual and intellectual experience can be carved up into no-go zones, then each of these zones must be occupied by inhabitants with natural and exclusive rights

Can I only represent late middle aged, white gay males living in Grey Lynn? To whom does plight and predicament belong? Does it only belong to the afflicted? I am not Jewish – may I not speak out against the Holocaust? I am not Japanese – may I not grapple with Hiroshima?

Rightly, one of the chief insights postcolonial theory has given us is that Western representations of ‘others’ (paintings of exotic women, novels set in some distant colony, academic discourse about the Orient, photographs of Papua New Guinea tribesmen and women, video footage of peace keeping excursions in East Timor) reveal more about the interests of the ‘self’ than they do about the realities of the represented. But is this to say that they speak abusively when they do so? If that is so, the relationship of the ‘self’ to the ‘other’ is frozen into a scenario where the former always dominates the latter. We co-habit the same space but we are not allowed to talk about each other?

Should we not challenge this binary model which refuses the ‘other’ any agency? When ‘self’ and ‘other’ are always fixed by this postcolonial construct, the ‘other’ is always silenced, determined and acted upon. I want to suggest that this position is as oppressive as its colonial antecedent, and it suggests a kind of essential purity that is just not possible in our lived experience in New Zealand today. Who is pure enough? How will we tell? What if we are too grubby and contaminated? Are we to be silenced?

To arrive at a true postcolonial position in New Zealand will mean that the dialogue will be stretched, extended and possibly even be seen to be abused in the process, torn out of its intended limits. Misconceived or other-conceived juxtapositions will mock our initial intentions. As we seek symbols of the self, the self will be symbolically torn and distorted in the exchange.

One would think that a postcolonial attitude must admit different theories of knowledge. And by that

admission one is bound to admit some that imply the falsity of one’s own inherited assumptions. One is bound, in other words, to betray one’s own ethnic inheritance in an attempt to open oneself to the reality of others – to quote Tzvetan Todorov, the Bulgarian Philosopher “The need to try to do away with my own presence for the others sake." The only option, and it is a rather scary one to contemplate, is to give up truth and its security of self, the very values for which a theory of knowledge was developed in the first place, and accepts that all such matters are simply what Foucault calls the game of truth and falsity.

There is not much evidence of that around; lets face it, when the structures of control like the Registration Board or even NZAP, have not even begun to allow themselves to be prised from their traditional Eurocentric perches.

Michael Parekowhai, the Māori artist, in an interview said: ‘Don’t give me that "What we need is one big melting pot. Big enough to take the world and all it’s got!”stuff. What that’s asking for is for all of us to become white’.

He is right; the dominant culture has to be prepared to transform itself. This is the real postcolonial challenge and in my opinion the only option facing us in New Zealand if we do not want to denigrate who we are and how we can articulate our unique position in the world. What a long way we have to go, when European design, Western intellectuals and Coronation Street are all in their way so highly privileged here.

What I’m suggesting certainly will disturb the rather elegant streamlined binaries that the influential theorists, who have shaped the debate to this point, hold onto. I would suggest that it is this essentialist terrain that makes it difficult for us in New Zealand to locate ourselves.

Surely one of the advantages we can embrace from ‘the post modern condition’ is a jettisoning of rigid binaries. Starting with two sexes, described as opposites or alternatives or complements – locks us into a logic, a limiting binary system, that often seems remote from lived, spoken experience and is complicit with all those other binary pairs I have alluded to today. There is surely another alternative. Should we not be talking of paradoxes and spectrums, not contradictions and mutual exclusions? ‘The unconscious,’ Freud reminds us,’ speaks more than one dialect.’

I spoke at the beginning of Gadamer’s phrase “Fusion of horizons”. And I want to return to it as a way to hold coloniser and the colonised, queer and normal. It is easy to think of the horizon as a boundary, that’s its deceit, an horizon is that which expands, that which we can see beyond with a little effort, and that which points toward something more. Although a horizon marks the limit of sight at any moment, it is not an insurmountable limit. Simply walking a short distance, or going to the top floor of a building can help us see beyond our previous horizon. Horizons might appear as a limit at a particular time, but they are always also gateways to something beyond.

Both the queer and the colonial demand that we see further and risk welcoming what’s over the horizon. This is about more not less – about difference not identity, about opening up not closing down, not saying that’s all there is but knowing there is always more.

To reduce a discussion of cultural difference or sexual orientation to coloniser/colonised queer/normal and by extension, Maori/Pakeha or black/white or the historically disempowered and the powerful, or gay/straight is to perpetuate flawed assumptions of fixity.

In closing I am reminded of Satre’s reworking of Hegel in his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

“I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculpts it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret - the secret of what I am. The true stranger, the Other, whom one meets, is, therefore, intimately known. His attractions are endlessly beguiling. He is me.