Читать книгу Jeremiah 26-52 - Carolyn Sharp - Страница 26

Those in the position of subaltern may “mimic” their oppressors’ cultural and discursive practices, including their harmful ideologies, in order to survive. Mimicry constitutes a kind of cultural camouflage. For those at risk of exploitation, incarceration, or physical harm, it makes good tactical sense to show themselves as being in solidarity with those who wield the power to torture, violate, or destroy one’s own body or the social body of one’s group. ­Mimicry as a survival tacticWhen one reflects back to the oppressor not only submission but subtle characteristics that re-utter what the oppressor is doing, it secures more firmly the impression that the subaltern is not a threat. Such mimicry can take a wide variety of forms as strategic responses to the particular threats and opportunities in local contexts. In military crises when it has become apparent that the enemy will prevail, some soldiers and noncombatants will defect to the enemy in a bid to save their own lives, effectively aligning themselves with the armed forces that are poised to destroy their peers and the structures and resources that had sustained their common life. In times in which the crisis is less acute, the steady dehumanizing pressure of colonization forms and deforms those who must live under threat. Depending on the inner resources—personal and cultural—available to individuals and groups under colonization, some responses are pathological and violent, re-performing the colonizer’s ways of forcible violation over those individuals and subgroups that fall under the pathological subject’s influence. Other responses are more nuanced and creative, seeking to promote resilience through subtle gestures of resistance and ironized mimicry that may be perceptible to the colonized while going undetected by the colonizer. In all cases, the subaltern is trying to model a kind of agency that will avoid or deflect further violence or suppression from the colonizer. This can be done in an infinite variety of ways, spanning possibilities from active collaboration to subtle ventriloquizing of the colonizer’s goals and utterances, from the adoption of a nonthreatening mask or compliant persona in public to a pedagogy of tactical mimicry in private spaces that may foster compromise or even resistance within the subaltern group. Here we may note the interplay of pragmatic and symbolic levels, in multiple and sometimes chaotic ways, within discourses generated as mimicry of what the colonizer projects onto a subjugated group. For example: slaves may appear subservient in part because pragmatic subservience secures their temporary freedom from punishment. Subservient slave discourse in the presence of the oppressor does mimic the desire of the oppressor that the slave yield to the domination of the oppressor. But seemingly subservient utterances can also operate on a symbolic level on which an enslaved person knowingly creates ironic agency within a death-dealing system. Thus the apparent subservience of the subaltern, in words or in actions, is false in the sense that it is a contingent mimicry of the oppressor’s ideology, but it is also a pragmatic truth of the subaltern’s authentic way of surviving in the world of the oppressor. The Judean scribes’ mimicry of Babylonian conquest discourse takes part in the brutal power that the Neo-Babylonian Empire exercised, in a remembered past, over defeated Judean subjects. In another sense, though, this “empowered” Judean accommodationist posture is secured at the cost of much that made Judah what it had been before Babylonian soldiers breached the walls of Jerusalem, desecrated the temple, and slaughtered Judean noncombatants.

Judah may survive by yielding to Babylonia, praying for its shalom and acknowledging that in Babylon’s welfare is to be found Judah’s own welfare (29:7). But over time, Judah may become nearly unrecognizable in that process. It can never be Babylon, and it cannot be itself, viz., the halakically observant covenant community of Yhwh whose prophets had continually urged it not to make alliances with other nations. Judah will never belong in diaspora, yet it cannot return to what it had been before surrendering to the coercive desires of the conqueror. Homi Bhabha underlines the ambivalent effects of mimicry for the subaltern subject or community:

Mimicry represents an ironic compromise…. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is … stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is … a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers.¹⁷⁴

Bhabha suggests that mimicry performed by the colonized in ongoing relationships under colonialism can threaten to displace the actual colonizing power. I am less interested in that aspect for the study of Jeremiah—that is, in the possibility that Babylon’s hegemony might be being subtly threatened as Dtr-Jer scribes adopt it and transform it in their theology and politics. As closely as I listen for traces of mockery or irony in Judean elites’ ventriloquizing of the voice of the Babylonian overlord, and as much as I have delighted in theorizing irony extensively in numerous texts and discourses in the Hebrew Bible,¹⁷⁵ in the Dtr-Jer prose I cannot discern many ironic traces. In the texts privileging the Judean diaspora group in Babylon, I cannot hear light mockery around the edges; I do not discern a playful or politically subversive speaking of faux-Babylonian stentorian pronouncements that clearly will experience their own decay and disintegration in due time. No, to my ear the voicing of the Judean “submit to Babylon” ideology seems entirely earnest in its coercive brutality toward Judeans who assess the options differently. I can note the volume of that voice—“volume” as a metaphor for the scope of its influence within Jeremiah, and “volume” also as an aural metaphor for the loudness of that ideological voice within the polyphony of Jeremiah traditions. I can also note that this mimicry of Babylon is the product of trauma. But I perceive little threat to Babylon, even figuratively, and so as regards the mimicry performed by Judean elites in Babylon, I am more interested in what such accommodationism has done to the Judean subject.

In the Jeremiah traditions, “Judah” is represented as scattered and fragmented in three geographical locations (the homeland of Judah, the Babylonian diaspora group, and the group of Judeans who fled to Egypt). In no one place is the exilic Judean subject whole. The dominant voice of the Babylonian golah subgroup, with its aggressive disenfranchisement of other Judean subgroups (see Jer 24 and 44), deepens the rifts among these parts of the Judean social body, rendering “Judah” as a profoundly unstable and injured subject. Discourses of open resistance to Babylon and shared traditions that lamented the trauma would not necessarily harm the unity of Judah. Indeed, such cultural expressions could serve to bolster the impulse toward solidarity. But the golah group’s rhetoric of blaming and hatred of other Judeans reveals their own pathologically fractured nature even as it enacts the further violating of the colonized subject Judah. In these texts, preserved as authoritative for a community that is to read and reread them, it is as if the golah group were performing the violent destruction of Judah over and over again long after Babylonia itself had directed its troops elsewhere—indeed, even after Babylon had fallen to Persia.

Perdue and Carter discuss the postcolonial analyses of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) and Paulo Freire (1921–1997) regarding the phenomenon of disempowered groups attacking one another when they are unable to stop the oppres­sor’s violent and dehumanizing practices. Rage explodes in “horizontal violence,” something that unquestionably applies to the golah Judeans’ rhetorics of shame and harm directed against their compatriots in Jer 24 and 44:

Antagonisms and fractures … exist “between the colonized excluded from the benefits of colonialism and their counterparts who manage to turn the colonial system to their advantage”…. Horizontal struggles develop because the oppressed mimic … the competitiveness and violent domination that mark the imperial situation…. Lashing out against similarly oppressed groups deflects open and direct attacks on the too-powerful oppressor even as it mimics their power.¹⁷⁶

To a certain degree, Judeans’ mimicking of Babylonian aggression displaces the control wielded by that imperialist power, at least within the confines of Judean culture though not in the wider political landscape. Reflecting on colonial mimicry, Bhabha writes that it creates an

uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a “partial” presence. By “partial” I mean both “incomplete” and “virtual.”… The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.¹⁷⁷

In the Dtr-Jer prose, we see the golah group resembling Babylon as it menaces other Judeans with extreme vows of divine destruction. We also see the golah group performing their resemblance to Yhwh-fearing Judeans through their polemical excoriation of Judeans in Egypt for worshipping other gods. In this latter move, the golah group that had urged submission to Babylon implicitly menaces that colonizing power by its pressure for conformity to the tenets and values of Yahwism. The menace here is being performed within Judah’s sacred texts and internecine disputes—as reflected in the Dtr-Jer prose—and is not necessarily anything Babylonian officials would notice or about which they would care. Such reassertions of covenantal identity surely would have been heard with suspicion by Judeans who could see the golah group’s distorted blaming of compatriots, Judeans who were shocked by the claim that the destroyer of Jerusalem and violator of Judean bodies had been Yhwh’s “servant.” Such is the ambivalence generated by tactics of survival in times of trauma. In Jeremiah more than any other book of the Hebrew Bible, we see conflicts and anguish wrought by the varied and contestatory tactics of survival that had been practiced during and immediately after the Babylonian onslaught.