I was doing a little reading today for my linguistics class on the history of the English language, and the Norman invasion and the battle of Hastings came up, which made me think of those early scenes with Rosa Diamond. (pp. 133-135) Maybe everybody already knows this and it was only revelatory to me, but the Anglo-Saxon defeat at Hastings by the French Norman invadors marked the beginning of 300 years in which England basically became a colony. Norman French and Latin became the languages of power and prestige, and by the time England regained independence, its language and culture were extremely hybridized in the wake of 300 years of occupation and intermarriage.
What's interesting is that Rosa welcomes the phantom of "(William) the Conquerer in his pointy metal-nosed hat," and just when she thinks the ghosts are all in her imagination, she sees Gibreel awaken with his mouth full of snow rather than sand, and she's ecstatic.
From here, I'm not exactly sure where to go, but it seems to have something to do with the notion of a more recent invasion, not by armies of soldiers from across the channel, but by armies of migrants from England's former colonies, that, after 900 years, will once again forever transform and further hybridize Britain.
Posted by Eric Lynn (Sorry, I wasn't able to sign in because I'm using my wife's laptop and all the settings are in Korean.)
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Thanks for this, Eric -- it's a useful point to make, and an important one, reminding us as it does that in the Rosa Diamond section we're being made aware that Britain is the product of many invasions, and that each one has made it that much more chimerical to talk about national origins and essences. There are too many bloodlines in the system, right? Rosa (and by extension, colonial discourse) can only fall back on a rather futile repetition, which "had become a comfort in her antiquity; the well-worn phrases, unfinished business, grandstand view, made her feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to be" (134). We can see/hear the cracks some pages later, too, in another exemplary moment: "Then she began without bothering with onceuponatime, and whether it was all true or all false he could see the fierce energy that was going into the telling, the last desperate reserves of her will that she was putting into her story, the only bright time I can remember, she told him, so that he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room, and that the silver land of the past was her preferred abode ..." (149).
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