The Moment of Touching: an Analysis of David Malouf's Poetic Experience

Anxiety about ambivalence stems from a deep-seated contradiction in the process by which the Other is constructed, a basis of fundamental contradiction which opens colonial discourse to the possibility of fracture from within. The dominant discourse constructs Otherness in such a way that it always contains a trace of ambivalence or anxiety about its own authority. In order to mantain authority over the Other in a colonial situation, imperial discourse strives to delineate the Other as radically different from the Self, yet at the same time it must mantain sufficient identity with the Other to allow control over it

Recent postcolonial studies have analysed how the concept of Empire and its egemony on subject areas (a central image from which the same concept of Postcolonialism was born) is rooted to the perception of an Otherness characterized by negative features of distance and alienity, perception used in an ambivalent way as a source of exploitation, sometimes extending the centre's own features in order to gain a better control on the subject perceived as ‘other’. In his book The Location of Culture, and precisely in chapter three and four, Homi K. Bhabha introduces the concept of ‘ambivalence’ as a key feature of the relations with Otherness that develop in a colonial landscape. According to Bhabha, what is central for the colonial attitude is the legitimation of its control over subject people: ‘the objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’. This happens by ‘othering’ the colonized, making them victims of stereotyped assumptions, and thus moving them away from the sphere of identity of the controller. However, there is an intrinsic contradiction that prevents this ‘othering’ aim from being fully achieved, contradiction understood by Bhabha as the consequence of a tendency which pulls towards two opposite directions. On one side, as we have seen, there is the attempt to estrange and alienate the colonized subject, leaving her/him out of the colonizer’s domain and power, and making her/him an object of fear; on the other side, there is the tendency towards a comprehension and a consequent ‘domestication’ of the subject perceived as ‘other’: in short, getting close enough to control it, yet remaining far enough to avoid direct or indirect identification with it. In John McLeod’s words:

The distance between the colonizers and the colonized is lessened, as the colonized are brought within the boundaries of Western knowledge. But, on the other hand, colonial stereotypes also function contrariwise to mantain this sense of distance. The colonizers must never admit that other people are not really very different from themselves, as this would undercut the legitimacy of colonialism.

Moreover, in considering the handling the European colonization brought about in its attempts to settle colonized lands in European terms (with huge effects on the sense of displacement and disposession felt by the population) and, most importantly for this discourse, in analyzing the colonizator’s attitude towards alien dimensions, it is possible to notice, recalling what Bhabha said, that this exploitation takes the form of a subject-object negative relationship, where the periphery becomes a counterpart to the sense of self of the West in its being Otherness, an Otherness which is deeply feared and towards which the connection can only be of exploitation, in the sense of reducing the other's identity to a stereotypical image enclosed within the settled universe of the dominator's model, and furthermore to know and control (through a partial approach to it) what is essentially unknowable and uncontrollable, thus awakening irrational fears and distresses that mark this perception. By picking up this fearful attitude towards the alien and giving it a mythical form in the image of the wolf, Malouf deals with the problem of moving close to Otherness.