UPPINDER MEHAN AND DAVID TOWNSEND


            "NATION" AND THE GAZE OF THE OTHER IN EIGHTH-CENTURY NORTHUMBRIA

 

As well as other merchandise he saw some boys put up for sale, with fair complexions, handsome faces, and lovely hair.  On seeing them he asked, so it is said, from what region or land they had been brought.

"For some people, when you say 'Timbuktu' it is like the end of the world, but that is not true.  I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world."

 

The juxtaposition of the two passages above begins our staging of a dialogue between David Townsend, a medievalist and Uppinder Mehan, a postcolonialist. The origins of the Christianized English are traditionally found in the conversion of the heathens by Augustine, who arrived in Kent in 597 C.E. Augustine's mission is traced back to an encounter between Pope Gregory and a group of English slave boys in a marketplace in post-imperial Rome. The story relates Gregory's dismay at the contradiction between the boys' pleasing outward form and their lack of Christian faith. It is to Gregory's desire for harmony between inner and outer beauty that England owes its Christianity. Needless to say, we see much to discuss in the twists and turns involved in the figure of an Englishman living and working in England, who writes in a foreign language the story of his people's origins in the desire of the head of a foreign religion in a foreign land.

The story appears in two medieval versions, one by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in 731, and the other by an anonymous monk or nun at the abbey of Whitby about a generation before Bede. Medieval scholarship traditionally regards Bede's version as the more authoritative of the two because of his impeccable Latin (the Latin of the Whitby writer's version is considered to be faulty, idiosyncratic at best).

The cultural dynamics by which Gregory assumes the centrality of his own metropolitan perspective in the early European Middle Ages is analogous, albeit imperfectly, to the dynamics of modern postcolonial responses such as Ali Farka Touré’s in the second epigraph above. Our dialogic inquiry is an attempt to move us both beyond our respective disciplinary frames: postcolonial studies productively employs the trope of difference in colonial and post-colonial discourse but seems to regard the modern as either a sharply discontinuous time from the medieval or as simply another repetition of old patterns of dominance; at the same time, the cultural synthesis that looms large in modern representations of European medieval culture occludes sites of difference, contestation, and productivity implicit in the documents central to our understanding of that culture.

Our discussion centers on the following points: analogies between the socio-political position of medieval English writers and twentieth-century postcolonial writers; the range of choices available to writers who decide to use the language of the former imperial power in constructing their own stories; the ways in which notions of identity are brought into play by the various language choices; and the questioning of the past by the present and the present by the past.