The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

In a late 1980s paper on the oppression of Indian women, “Can the Subaltern Speak’, postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak declares that the subaltern woman is silent in the Indian context. Her position is that women, the subaltern, are silenced by the official discourse even in an independent state. She argues that women are oppressed by epistemological violence that is inherent in the colonial/post-colonial structure that is so endemic to our society.

She offers: “I am thinking of the general nonspecialist, non-academic population across the class spectrum, for whom the episteme operates its silent programming function. Without considering the map of exploitation, on what grid of ‘oppression’ would they place this motley crew?” (Spivak 1989, 78)

In The Bahamas, very little has changed since the 1960s. Silence is often imposed on those who powerful individuals ‘feel’ should not have access to information or to the ability to speak for themselves.

Speaking for oneself is a sign of relative power. The ability of the official register to ignore, to disempower, to silence voices they do not wish to have heard in public speaks to an awesome amount of power that instead of being used to promote national development and human advancement is used to control and stagnate. Politicians use their power to ensure that their family members and friends benefit under an entirely rigged system. When, in the 19th Century, Powles was a travelling magistrate in the Bahama Islands he commented on how rigged everything was against the blacks.

Today, the same rigging remains in place, only now different people are doing it. They are more interested in maintaining the status quo than in facilitating positive change. The silence of the majority of women to their inequality means that their voices are never registered by the powers that be. Also, the insistence on women remaining unequal further speaks to an epistemic violence against women.

Spivak writes that “[t]he education of colonial subjects complements their production in law” (77). This ultimately means that women are educated into silence; they are taught that colonial masters are their betters and that politicians are allowed to usurp their voice to further their own political agendas.

According to Spivak (1988):

“The narrow epistemic violence of imperialism gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the possibility of an episteme...If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow (82–83).”

Politicians speak a language of empowerment, of wanting to give women equality, but where are the women? Where are their voices?

Certainly women’s groups are advocating for the constitution to be changed; this change not only benefits women but men as well. But there are some special interests groups who sit around and produce stories about what the constitutional changes will usher in.

These stories do nothing but continue to empower those who are already empowered. The women in politics and in government seem to be audibly silent in the House. There are precious few who are speaking up in any meaningful way. What is even more annoying and insulting is that they have the nerve to say that it’s a man’s world. Duh! As if we did not know that.

We also know that by the virtue of you being there it means, generally, that you have chosen to further empower that male agenda. What seems to be offered as an excuse is that women cannot expect to have equality in this society because this society is run by men; we push women into the margins, much like segregation tried to do with non-whites during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Did that marginality stop them from pushing, from fighting, from insisting that their voice be heard? Spivak actually says it much better, when she argues:

“Let us move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced centre) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry...According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardisation and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here), can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: on the other side of the international division of labour from socialised capital, inside and outside the circuit of epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?” (78)

In The Bahamas we seem to be saying, “No, the subaltern cannot speak.” We refuse to listen to those in the margins even when they do raise their voices. When they chose to vote against legalising numbers, government ignored them, ignored their voices and did what they wished, anyway. There is little wonder why so many young people argue now that the referendum is not going to happen and even if it does, what difference will it make?

Government will do what government wants to do. It is a travesty of democracy, of independence and postcolonialism for the government of the people by the people to use that old tool of silencing its population through very intentional epistemic violence.

The law is a blunt instrument that has been used by the postcolonial lawyers to disempower and to silence the masses they claim to be helping. Foucault and Deleuze may argue one way in the developed world, but Spivak, as painful as her critique may be of the postcolonial developing world, shows that the subaltern cannot speak because the tools of imperialism and the weapons used to oppress by an earlier system have been honed by those who do not look much different from us.

The silence of those in power to the continued exploitation of women is simply put using their vote to impose violence on the masses. The status quo reigns supreme even when they are women who are expected to represent women’s interests.