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Jane Porter and her maid Esmeralda share this yoke of patriarchy in "Tarzan of the Apes". Esmeralda unfortunately, is what Sandra Gilbert would call ‘the doubly colonised’ because of her colour and gender. Though Esmeralda speaks English, it is pidgin, and she is forever invoking “Gaberelle”. Her grammar is skewed, – “what am it now? A hipponocerous? Where am he, Miss Jane?” – and her speech is servile and inarticulate – it is ‘darky’ dialogue.
The native is always inferior even if he has been salvaged by using what Gramsci calls ‘hegemony’ - power achieved through a combination of coercion and consent. Gramsci argued that the ruling classes achieve domination not by force or coercion alone, but also by creating subjects who ‘willingly’ submit to being ruled. The colonizers tried to achieve this by forcing an alien language and an alien God (all other religions are ‘heathen’) on those they colonized, and Esmeralda is but one example of the ‘willing’ subject.
Colonization plays an important role in identity formation (or malformation) of the ‘willing’ as well as ‘unwilling’ colonised subject. Franz Fanon, citing his own example, shows us how a person who is colonized, not only loses his identity in the process of colonization, but also fails to assume another identity even in a postcolonial setting. At the screening of a Tarzan film in France, Fanon was shocked when he realised that he was expected to identify with the ‘negro’ instead of, as he had always done, with Tarzan. Thus his black skin/white masks reflects the miserable schizophrenia of a colonized identity that is supplemented by likes of Tarzan.
Towards the "blacks", Tarzan is quintessentially colonial. If he feels that ape vocabulary is insufficient (at least in "Tarzan of the Apes"), he considers the “natives” as people almost without a language. When Jane Porter and her father arrive in Africa, Tarzan sends them a note – “THIS IS THE HOUSE OF TARZAN…”. His miraculous grammatical accuracy is more than fantastic, but what is more implausible is the fact that he never thinks of using this language with the villagers of Mbonga. In response to this, Jeff Berglund critiques,
‘If he (Tarzan) intuits that writing is a product of humans, why does he refrain from using it with other humans? If the binary opposite of textuality is orality, then the Africans of the Mbongan tribe in their extreme orality – cannibalism – are alienated from the English book, from all that it connotes, the power it bestows…Tarzan…intuits that writing is a means of communication between white humans, not just between paper and reader’.
This may be construed as an example of how colonialism conceptually depopulates countries, either by acknowledging the native but relegating him or her to the category of subhuman, or simply by looking through the native, denying his/her existence. Disney’s supposedly innocuous animated version of Tarzan (not of the Apes – that it is only Tarzan is significant, and reveals Disney’s agenda) happily elides the natives and depopulates Africa of most of its population – there are no Africans in Africa in the Disney version.
As Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson tell us, such depopulation was a necessary practice for invoking the claim of terra nullius upon which the now disputed legality of imperial settlement (as opposed to ‘invasion’) is based. Only empty spaces may be settled, so the space had to be made empty by ignoring or dehumanising the inhabitants. As Peter Hulme points out, ‘The topic of land (was) dissimulated in the topic of savagery, this move being characteristic of all the narratives of the colonial encounter’.
Inscribing the natives as primitive and unable to make use of the natural resources around them allowed first the biblical parable of the ten talents, and then the Darwinian theory of natural selection to justify dispossession as part of Destiny. Resistance was interpreted as malignant treachery and a justification for brutal suppression, and even annihilation. Of course, they (in "Tarzan of the Apes", the French), “spared the children and those of the women whom they were not forced to kill in self-defence, but when at length they stopped… it was because there lived no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga”.
If labour was required in the coffee plantations or on cattle stations, to exploit the ‘natural’ wealth of the seemingly limitless tract of land, a new encoding of the native was employed. The coloniser now saw the native, in Kipling’s phrase, as ‘half savage and half child’. Childhood itself, as Jo-Ann Wallace demonstrates, was not a primordial concept in the Anglo-Saxon archive, but one that had been comparatively recently developed. It is almost, she argues, as though the idea of childhood was a necessary conceptual precursor to empire.
Tarzan, the coloniser, exploits “his children” in later novels like, "The Jewels of Opar". He robs (Burroughs conveniently calls it “replenishing his (Tarzan’s) store”) the ancient city of Opar of gold and jewels and uses the natives as coolies. Tarzan is the “protector” - he “protects” the High Priestess of Opar, the enchanting and exotic La from her own “tribe”. (La is just one of the many high priestesses and princesses who love Tarzan and assist him when the need arises: Tarzan, of course, is immune to their charms and always returns to his Jane). In a similar fashion, Tarzan “protects” his “blacks” from other “invaders”(i.e. east European Jews, Arabs, blacks – women being almost completely exempted from evil or sin).
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Pallavi Mogre
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