Yellow Skin, Any Mask
Whither should I go now? What is the cure to my “Manichean delirium” (Bhabha, 1986, p. xxvii)? I must forget the myth of authenticity and identity. I must continually negotiate the contradictory strains of the languages lived, and the languages learned. In fact, I should not think of identification as the affirmation of a pre-given identity; it is the production of an image which gives transforming power to the subject in assuming that image. The West has inscribed in me the value of liberty. Now I must make use of that liberty to assert my presence, to make people uncomfortable, to assert my space, to be as yellow as I want, and as white as I want. For there is one thing I know for sure: I will forever be “not quite/not white.”
I am drawn at this point also to think of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities. For Anderson (1983), the nation is an imagined community, “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 49). Such a community is thus reified by communication – print capitalism that allows a language, history, and beliefs to be standardised and disseminated. I had variably thrown myself into British literature or into Chinese literature – for the lack of being white or living in China, being British or being Chinese was in the first instance engaging with the literature. Perhaps I should have seen then the emptiness of my endeavour, and the emptiness of national identity, for both communities are ultimately imagined. I, nor anyone else, has privileged access to real Chineseness or Britishness.
On a final note, and in the spirit of community, I want to remind the reader that one needs not be black or colonised to use the tools of their self-examination. The crisis of self-image does not only result from overtly oppressive racism or colonisation. Dislocation, in all its forms – slavery, indentured labourers, free settlers, economic migrants, refugees, etc. result in a dialectic between place and displacement. In our present world, which teeters between globalisation and xenophobia, the theoretical tools which were applied to master/slave, colonised/coloniser deserve to be repurposed.