Empire and the house in postcolonial fiction: Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom, Romesh Gunesekera’s The Sandglass and Jean Arasanayagam’s “Time the Destroyer”

Abstract

In this essay I argue that the notion of colonial “paradise” endorsed in island discourse is challenged in the works of Caribbean author Lawrence Scott (Witchbroom, 1992) and the Sri Lankan writers Romesh Gunesekera (The Sandglass, 1998) and Jean Arasanayagam (“Time the Destroyer”, 1995). The “colonial house” in these postcolonial texts is a trope of management and control for the owner, but displays the paradox of paradise and prison as the women inhabitants are confined within the domestic sphere, in a gendered imprisonment. All three writers expose the myth of colonial “paradise” in narratives which illustrate that the end of empire is a borderline time between colonialism and postcolonialism, representing the ambiguity of colonization and decolonization. I explore how far Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity can provide a liminal “in‐between” space to negotiate the paradise/prison paradox and the ambiguity of this era.

Keywords:

• hybridity
• ambivalence
• liminal
• gender
• “colonial house”
• prison/paradise paradox

Notes

1. Loxley says the island topos in 19th‐century literature “coincides with the era of high imperialism in Britain and its ideological consolidation within colonial, political, cultural and educational discourses of the age” (xi, 3).

2. Arcadia was originally a mountainous district of Greece and “during the Renaissance it became the typical name for an idealised rural society where the harmonious Golden Age still flourished” (Gray 32).

3. Creole is of mixed race with predominantly European descent. See Donnell and Lawson Welsh (10).

4. In Sri Lanka the term Creole is not used in the same way but nevertheless can be applied to Arasanayagam’s Burgher identity.

5. Mas is the masquerade tradition of carnival in Trinidad.

6. “J’Ouvert” is the first morning of carnival when the revelry begins at the breaking of dawn prior to Lent and signifies a new beginning.