Subaltern (postcolonialism) - The Voice of The Subaltern

The Voice of The Subaltern

Gayatri Spivak’s line of reasoning was developed in Geographies of Postcolonialism (2008), wherein Joanne Sharp proposed that Western intellectuals delegate other, non–Western (African, Asian, Middle Eastern) forms of knowing — of acquiring knowledge of the world — to the margins of intellectual discourse, by re-formulating said forms of knowing as myth and as folklore. Therefore, in order to be heard and known, the oppressed subaltern must adopt Western ways of knowing, of thought, reasoning, and language; because of such Westernization, a subaltern people can never express their ways of knowing (thought, reasoning, language) and instead must conform expression of their non–Western knowledge of colonial life to Western ways of knowing the world. The subaltern’s abandonment of his and her culturally customary ways of thinking — and subsequent adoption of Western ways of thinking — is necessary in many post-colonial situations. The subordinated man and woman can only be heard by his oppressors if he or she speaks the language of the oppressor; thus, intellectual and cultural filters of conformity muddle the true voice of the subaltern. For example, in Colonial Latin America, the oppressed subaltern must conform to the colonial culture and utilize the filters of religion and servitude, in his or her language, when addressing the Spanish Imperial oppressor. In order to appeal to the good graces of their Spanish oppressors, slaves and natives would mask their own voices with the culture of the Spanish Crown.

In year 1600, Francisca de Figueroa presented a request to the King of Spain, that he permit her reunion with her daughter, Juana de Figueroa, in the Americas; as an Afro–Iberian woman, Francisca must repress her native African tongue, and speak in Spanish, her adopted colonial European tongue:

I, Francisca de Figueroa, mulatta in color, declare that I have, in the city of Cartagena, a daughter named Juana de Figueroa. And she has written, to call for me, in order to help me. I will take with me, in my company, a daughter of mine, her sister, named María, of the said color. And for this, I must write to Our Lord the King to petition that he favor me with a license, so that I, and my said daughter, can go and reside in the said city of Cartagena. For this, I will give an account of what is put down in this report. And of how I, Francisca de Figueroa, am a woman of sound body and mulatta in color . . . And my daughter María is twenty-years-old, and of the said color, and of medium size. Once given, I attest to this. I beg your Lordship to approve, and order it done. I ask for justice in this. On the twenty-first day of the month of June 1600, Your Majesty’s lords presidents and official judges of this house order that the account she offers be received, and that testimony for the purpose she requests given.

— Afro–Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero–Atlantic World: 1550–1812 (2009)

Layers of meaning must be considered when engaging the voice of the subaltern. In Francisca’s eyes, it is crucial to portray herself as servile; there is no hint of pride or defiance in her words. In the letter of appeal to the King of Spain, Francisca does not mention her own religion; by identifying herself as a Catholic, her request probably would have been granted sooner. One of the first questions that the Spanish Inquisition asked of Francisca’s neighbors concerned her religion; upon finding that she was a third-generation Catholic, and “not of Moorish or Jewish caste, or of those recently converted to Our Holy Catholic Faith”, Francisca’s request acquired greater regard for consideration by the King. To attain the reunion with her daughter in Cartagena, in her letter to the King of Spain, Francisca must make herself a subject; thus, she continually identifies herself by her race, as a “mulatta”, rather than by her ethnic lineage as an African woman; she continually degrades herself, by identifying herself with the cultural and ethnic labels that the Spanish applied to her heritage. Such a form of self-subjugation is a common example of the sound of the voice of the Subaltern: self-relegating.

Hence, the Colonial Historian Fernando Coronil said that the goal of the investigator must be “to listen to the subaltern subjects, and to interpret what I hear”, and to engage them, and interact with their voices. We cannot ascend to a position of dominance over the voice, subjugating its words to the meanings we desire to attribute to them. That is simply another form of discrimination. The power to narrate somebody’s story is a heavy task, and we must be cautious and aware of the complications involved. Spivak and bell hooks question the academic’s engagement with the Other, and argue that, to truly engage with the subaltern, the academic would have to remove him or herself as “the expert” at the center of the Us-and-Them binary social relation. Traditionally, the academic wants to know about the subaltern’s experiences of colonialism, but does not want to know the subaltern’s (own) explanation of his or her experiences of colonial domination. According to the received view in Western knowledge, hooks argued that a true explanation can come only from the expertise of the academic, thus, the sub-ordinated subject, the subaltern man and woman, surrenders his and her knowledge of colonialism for the use of the Western academic; hooks describes the relationship between the academic and the subaltern:

no need to hear your voice, when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.

— “Marginality as a Site of Resistance” (1990)

As a means of constructing a greater historical picture of society, the Subaltern’s story is a revealing examination of society; the perspective of the subaltern man and woman, the most powerless people who live within colonial confines; therefore, the investigator of post-colonialism must not assume a lumbering cultural superiority in the course of studying the voices of the oppressed subalterns.