Banality of Violence: (Mis)Remembering the Past

Abstract

The interaction between dissimilar cultures, languages and traditions is a fertile site to evaluate how identities, borders and belonging is defined. The literary representation of these spatial and temporal negotiations provides an insight into the narrativization of the past, present and future. By critically examining Temsula Ao’s short story “Soaba”, I will interrogate the portrayal of a contact-zone that is steeped in conflict and quotidian violence. Here, Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact-zone becomes a crucial tool to evaluate the encounter between competing claims to authority and authenticity. I suggest that Ao’s narrative departs from normative anticolonial narratives of national identities to illuminate the distinct confrontations between “metropolitan” and “peripheral” lives and life-worlds. Yet, I propose that Ao recreates hierarchical binaries in her representation of the past, and risks reproducing the “noble native” trope that obscures the complex and dynamic history of negotiating modernity in the postcolony. Through this paper, I reassess Ao’s authorial intention and execution of the act of remembering and representing a past before the consolidation of a nation-state. Drawing on the notion of necropolitics and slow violence, I demonstrate that Ao’s story highlights the banality of both slow and spectacular violence in the quotidian life of the local inhabitants. By doing so, her short story interrogates the normative ideals of progress, development and modernity, and foregrounds the coercive manner of assimilating indigenous populations.