Rhetorics of Survival: The Power of Mimicry and Re-imagining the Power of Alterity

As I sit here and contemplate this week’s readings, while formulating what it is I want to say, I find myself wondering how many of us put on a show in our daily lives. Better yet, I sit here and wonder how many people put on clothes and associate certain feelings or emotions with them.

This baseball hat makes me look like a dude. Now where’s my protein shake?

           

This blazer means business. I’m an independent woman out to change the world. I won’t take any shit!

These glasses show how intellectually stimulating I can be, I’m a student.  In language there are only differences.

                       

I’m guilty of promoting certain stereotypes but there is some truth to the stereotypes that define us!

How often do you pretend to be something other than you are not, and when you do so do you do so under the pretense of wielding a certain power? Is it for the purpose of subversion or avoiding subversion? Why do we pretend to be something other? What do we gain by doing so? Why must we constantly re-imagine our own lives at the expense of our own identities?

Is this an innate mechanism of survival that we all must live with or is it a product of cultural phenomena?

I have a story, which I’d like to tell again, if it’s one thing I learned so far stories are what we are!  I often find myself reverting to it when I am reading about the cultural discourses that define my course of study—specifically the ideology that surrounds cultural mimicry and alterity. High school was a difficult time for me.  Yeah, cliché I know, but it was.  My experience was unique but I’m sure it’s one I can share with others who lived a closeted life.  Long story short, in high school I realized I was gay; it was a terrifying realization for someone who only knew homosexuality as taboo and disgusting.  As such, I treated my own sexuality this way.  I loathed this part of me and avoided it. I couldn’t avoid because as a young male my hormones were all over the place.  I longed for some sort of physical contact that assured me that what I felt wasn’t wrong, but a natural part of life.  I’d secretly fantasize about male sexual relations, yet I’d tuck these fantasies away in some dark corner and “pretend” to be straight.  My best friend was gay—truth be told I had the biggest crush on him—and I treated him horribly.  I’d tell him to stop being such a faggot and I made fun of him to avoid the stares that threatened to expose who I really was—A certified, Class A, flaming homosexual.  I cringe now at the way I had treated my best friend. I had power, but at what expense? Simple, I lived a life that was not my own.  I pretended to be something other than who I really was.  AND I found myself constantly reimagining my own life, wanting to be something more than the weakness that was “supposedly” my own sexual identity.   I was a ghost, physical on the outside and intangible on the inside.

Needless to say, I got pass this stage of my own sexual identity, thankfully my best friend Nathan forgave me as well, but I learned something in the process. 

There is great power in alterity and mimicry.  What I was doing was an act of sexual mimicry—pretending to be straight when I was not.  However, I’d like to point out one concept.  The problem wasn’t my sexuality.  IT was the way society, as well as myself, perceived my homosexuality.  Therefore, I learned that the only way to survive was to work the system in hopes that one day I could freely express who I was.  I saw mimicry as a rhetorical form of survivance—thus I think it’s important to first examine Powell’s essay.

 I must humble myself before I do so, because a whole culture didn’t rely on whether or not I was comfortable to express my own sexual identity

 But the premise of my story is the premise of what Powell calls Rhetorical Survivance which is a key theoretical concept to this week’s readings.

Malea Powell’s essay “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing” was perhaps my favorite article, mainly because it helped me understand my own story better in terms of understanding mimicry and alterity.  I’d like to examine briefly a concept that was rather new to me and made me question the term post-colonial.  It also made me think again about mimicry and alterity and their places within poco theory.   Powell brings up the question of whether or not Native Americans are “post-colonial” or “neocolonial” peoples (399).  She makes the argument that they are not post or neo colonial peoples.  Instead, she uses a term coined by Vizneor, and calls them “paracolonial” which means “a colonialism beyond colonialism, multiple, contradictory, and with all the attendant complications of internal, neo-, and post-colonialism” (Vizneor qtd in Powell 399).  This is perhaps the most awesome, and terrifying, term I have ever faced when it comes to post-colonial theory.   Is it safe to say that what both Vizneor and Powell both theorize is that Native Americans are stuck in a permanent stasis of alterity? Are they are bound by pre and post-colonial phenomena? Are they forced into a space of colonial/cultural hybridity?

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Sorry for the little interlude, but I feel as if I should clarify what alterity means before I go further with my explication of the theory and text: Alterity is a system of colonial power that is similar to a binary/dichotomy, in which a person’s subject position is constantly defined by that which is different or other than one’s self. We are talking about the anthropological discourse of the “Other.”

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I love what Powell has to say, because she not only calls for Native’s to re-imagine their own identities but to use the “simulation of dominance” as a form of “liberation” (401).  In essence she says that the way Native American’s use writing as a form of rhetorical survivance is through embracing what she calls “acculturation.”  I wonder why she doesn’t just use the term mimicry because that is basically what she describes when it comes to the writing of both Eastman and Winnemucca—Native writers who have deconstructed the other binary and in doing so understood the power, or duality, of cultural mimicry.  Perhaps she avoids using the term mimicry because it is understood as a concept of post-colonial theory, and she made it quite clear that when it comes to Natives they must be understood as paracolonial.  Yet I think the term mimicry is extremely applicable to what Powell has to say.  Through her analysis of Eastman and Winnemucca Powell explains that both Native writers used writing to destroy the power that colonial discourses as a form of objectification of their own lives.  They become subjects instead of objects—and they do so by subverting the system that works so hard to destroy them.    

This concept of re-imagining one’s self and cultural mimicry/hybridity is also prevalent in Powel’s other essay “Listening to ghosts: an alternative (non)argument.”  Powell discusses her own cultural hybridity and the fact that she is bound by the empirical discourses of the academy ( 13).  This is more of a call to action, for those Native Americans in the academy to rethink and seek “alternative” discourses when it comes to studying and promoting the rhetoric of indigenous people (12).   This alternative discourse that Powell seeks starts with what she says is “writ[ing] [her]self and [her] body into comprehensible space” (12).  I think what she is trying to clarify is the fact that in order to promote indigenous rhetoric, one must first start by opening a physical space for Natives to begin the discussion, to tell their stories. To use writing as a way to reclaim what was lost.

I want to end this post with a challenge by King, which comes from the chapter titled Afterwords: Private Stories.  King writes that:

I know it’s an easy job to be critical, easy enough to look around the world, easy enough to find      bad behaviors everywhere, easy to say that the proof of what we truly believe lies in what we do    and not in what we say. So I’ll say it. Perhaps we shouldn’t be displeased with the “environmental ethics” we have or the “business ethics” or the “political ethics” or any of the myriad of other codes of conduct suggested by our actions. After all, we’ve created them. We’ve created the stories that allow them to exist and flourish. They didn’t come out of nowhere. They didn’t arrive from another planet.

Want a different ethic? Tell a different story.(164 ITAL added)

King calls for us to rethink the way we define ourselves, after all according to King stories define our very existence.  But the difference is in the way we retell the story.  When it comes to rhetorical survivance Natives must re-imagine their own existence, to face the system of alterity that exists, and embrace it.  That is where power comes from, realizing that there is power in being different—whoever controls that difference makes the rules.

There’s power in turning colonization on its head.

Decolonize your mind, decolonize the world.