Tensions of Modernity in Flora Gomes's the Blue Eyes of Yonta (Critical Essay‪)‬

IN ANALYZING Flora Gomes's The Blue Eyes of Yonta, this author hopes to show that in spite of the postmodern promise of leveling or rather blurring the boundary between the metropole and the colony, the relationship of the former and the latter continues to be that of economic exploitation, subordination, and dependency. This dependency perpetuates an economic and cultural hierarchy between the metropole and the colony and consequently precipitates discourses of "nativity" and authenticity in opposition to Western values. As will be evident in The Blue Eyes of Yonta, this horrific economic condition encourages cultural narcissism on the part of the colony, in spite of it embracing hybrid or syncretic cultural identifications. As Aime Cesaire observes, the controlled and selective modernization of the colony is not an accident in the colonial enterprise but germane to the definition of modernity itself (35-36). Modernity in the metropole is meaningless without the colony's alterity, which implies that claims to modernity can only be self-assuring to the metropolitan subject with reference to the "timeless," "uncivilized," "primitive," and "premodern." Incomplete or controlled modernization cannot be termed as the failure of modernity but instead is the prerequisite for any claims by the metropole to modernity. Fredric Jameson makes the relationship of the metropole and the colony clear in his analysis of the modern and the postmodern. As Jameson suggests, modernity can be described as a "sense of unique historical difference from other societies that a certain experience of the New (in the modern) seems to encourage and perpetuate" (Postmodernism 41), while postmodernism can be seen as the triumph of technology which does not valorize the New as in the modern experience (41). Jameson argues further: