Glossing the Empire: Colonial Norms and Subversion in The Emperor's Babe
The epigraph
at the beginning of Bernadine Evaristo’s The
Emperor’s Babe reads, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,”
and the book takes this Oscar Wilde quote to heart. It is through the rewriting
of the history of Roman Londinium, particularly through the rewriting of its
language, that Evaristo comments on London today. Zuleika’s tale offers a
glimpse of a social hierarchy dislocated in time and space, populated almost
entirely by people who can never fit properly within its framework.
The book’s
very first poem puts the focus on Zuleika’s relationship to language, specifically
her struggles with Latin as they relate to her marriage. The poem is titled “Amo
Amas Amat,” drawn from midway through, when Zuleika “was sent off for decorum
classes,/learned how to talk, eat, fart,/how to get my amo amas amat right, and
ditch/my second-generation plebby creole,” (Evaristo 4). The Latin here serves
two-fold. “Amo amas amat” is the beginning of the conjugation for the Latin
verb amare, or to love. Therefore, the title translates as “I love, You love,
He/She loves[1].”
Not only is this one of the first verbs many Latin students learn—including Zuleika,
it would seem—but it also hints at the book’s larger narrative. Zuleika may have
learned from her tutor how to get her forms of love right grammatically, but she certainly did not learn how to sort out love
itself. However, even her grammatical lessons seem not to have stuck. The same
poem ends with the line, “Solitudoh, solitudee, solitudargh!” (Evaristo 5). While
at first glance this seems to be another list of Latin conjugations, it is not.
Indeed, it does not seem to mean anything at all in Latin. It is as if Zuleika
has tried to treat the word solitudonem
as a verb and then conjugate it, only to grow so frustrated as to finish the
final one not with a Latin verb ending but with an onomatopoetic cry of anguish.
Indeed, the entire line becomes a sort of onomatopoeia, conveying Zuleika’s
frustration with the solitudonem her
marriage has brought her not through its definition or denotational meaning,
but through its form. It resembles proper Latin, but only enough to get her
meaning across to an audience that does not actually speak Latin—or at least an audience engaging with the text
primarily through a language that is not Latin. It is Latin constructed by a
non-native speaker of Latin for non-native speakers of Latin.
This
disconnect between Zuleika and her Latin raises the question of why she uses
the language at all, and the answer lies with power. Though the story takes
place in what is now London, and few of the characters are actually from Rome, the
dominant culture in Zuleika’s Londinium is distinctly Roman, and as such, Latin
is the language of power. Just as Rome has colonized the land of Londinium, it has
colonized the language of its people, tying their cultural fluency and position
to linguistic fluency. The use of Latin is a status symbol, one Zuleika uses to
assert her dominance over less fluent characters like Valeria and Aemelia,
whose Latin is even worse than hers and whose speech she calls “vulgar babble”
(Evaristo 55). Yet Zuleika’s speech is deemed no better, called “second-generation
plebby creole,” (Evaristo 4). This is a distinctly loaded term, and perhaps the
best illustration of how Zuleika is seen by Roman society. The label of “second-generation”
is accurate, certainly, but here it becomes a pejorative term, full of the same
sort of anti-immigrant xenophobia that plagues London today as much as third
century Londinium. “Plebby,” too, is a term with significance both modern and
Classical. Literally, it refers to Zuleika’s status as a plebeian, the Roman class
of commoners. However, the term “pleb” is still used today in England as an insult
to denote those of the working class. Finally, “creole” has a distinctly double
meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has a linguistic definition
of “a language that has developed from the mixing of two or more parent
languages and has come to be the first language of a community, typically
arising as the result of contact between the language of a dominant group
(historically often a European colonizer) and that (or those) of a subordinate
group (often the colonized people, or a slave population),” (“Creole, n. and
adj.”). Thus, the language Zuleika speaks is in fact a creole, in that it
likely combines elements of Latin, as the dominant language, with elements of local
languages that have been subjugated under Latin. However, The Emperor’s Babe is written not in Zuleika’s creole, but in ours.
Modern English as a language arose largely through the combination of Norman
French with the local Germanic Old English following the Norman Conquest.
Ironically, English has now become the language of Colonial Power in many parts
of the world, just as Latin—itself once an Indo-European dialect influenced by
local Etruscan and Celtic ones—has become for Zuleika’s Londinium.
This
linguistic oppression is mirrored throughout the book by more overt displays. Despite
being the child of Sudanese refugees living at the farthest reaches of the
Empire, Zuleika is expected to adhere not to Sudanese cultural norms, nor to
British ones, but to Roman ones. She is expected to gain status for herself and
her family through marriage to a Roman nobleman, and within that marriage she
is expected to behave like a proper Roman wife. Though Felix marries her specifically
because she does not resemble the Roman women available to him, calling them “simpering
debutantes,” he then turns around and pays to have Zuleika educated specifically
to make her more like those very noblewomen (Evaristo 16). This illustrates quite
clearly the double-standard that Felix—and by extension the rest of Roman
culture—holds Zuleika to. They praise her for her beauty, often linking it
specifically to her race and exoticizing her endlessly, and yet she is expected
to wear wigs or false hair and makeup to lighten her skin, making her look more
like a Roman woman (Evaristo 27). Just as women of color often are in Western
culture today, Zuleika is fetishized for not conforming to white beauty standards,
and then promptly expected to work to better conform to those same standards.
Even her poetry must be mediated through Rome. Her tutor insists that before
she can write her own poetry, she must learn the canon by wrote. The problem
with this, as Zuleika points out, is that the canon Theodorus is offering does
not reflect her experiences. (Evaristo 83-84) It is written by and for people who
fit the Roman mold, something Zuleika cannot and will not do.
There is,
however, resistance to the power structures of Rome, both linguistic and physical.
Venus, in particular, seems to represent much of that resistance in Zuleika’s
life. She is a quintessentially queer character, not only in her gender
identity, but in her queering of societally enforced norms. Like drag queens
and many trans women today, Venus performs hyperfemininity in a society that
expects her to be masculine. She adheres to all the beauty standards that Rome expects
Zuleika to—face-paint, high heels, fancy gowns—and yet in doing so, she
subverts them. Venus takes the story of Hadrian, one of Rome’s great emperors,
and focuses not on the conquest or the state-building, but on Hadrian’s same-sex
relationship (Evaristo 122-123). She takes a tale of Roman glory and turns it
on its head by pointing to what was already there but what many would rather
not see. Similarly, by simply existing as a visibly queer individual who
refuses to conform, Venus points to the nonconforming elements of Roman Londinium
as a whole. And indeed, her performance is not restricted to gender or sex. She
affects a Cockney accent and even Cockney rhyming slang, such as when she
offers to “ball-of-chalk you home, darling,” despite actually being from a
wealthy family in Camulodunum (Evaristo 44) (Evaristo 46). Not only does Venus
reject the gender she was assigned at birth, she rejects the status symbol that
Latin and cultivated speech represent in Londinium. Instead of asserting social
dominance by peppering her speech with Latin words and phrases, the way Zuleika
often does, Venus uses distinctly British slang. And yet, despite all this—or perhaps
because of it—Venus is also tremendously successful in defining her own destiny.
She is wealthy enough to own a club, she has enough cultural influence to
gather an audience for Zuleika’s poetry reading/orgy, and every indication at
the end of the book points to Venus having finally found the great love she was
looking for. If anyone in the book has found a way to exist within Roman colonial
culture while also subverting it, it is Venus.
It is,
perhaps, Venus’s influence that leads to Zuleika’s own subversive tendencies. For
all Felix’s insistence that she remain a chaste, dutiful wife, she takes a
lover. For all her lessons in deportment, she still uses much of the slang from
her youth. And for all her tutor’s insistence on Classical canon, she writes to
us not in hendecasyllables or in Latin, but in English free verse. Even the pressure
to gain status through rich, Roman men is subverted. Zuleika certainly manages
to associate herself with a powerful figure in Roman society—the Emperor, no
less—but the man himself is fundamentally not
Roman. Zuleika’s great love is just as much an immigrant as her parents,
and his language reflects this. Severus’s first quoted word in the book, “Aiwa,”
is not in Latin but in Arabic, (Evaristo 140). He even mentions how he “was
ridiculed on arrival in Eternal City/because of his thick African accent,”
(Evaristo 144). Zuleika finds true happiness only in the arms of a man who,
like herself, has had to force himself to fit the mold of Roman citizen in
order to advance, and yet also one who still does not fit that mold. Unfortunately,
the Roman order quickly reasserts itself. As soon as Severus is dead, Zuleika
finds herself once again trapped in her old life, and then finally murdered for
her transgressions against the role she has been assigned. It is Felix—perpetually
the stand-in for repressive Roman culture—that kills her, in the end. And yet,
though Zuleika goes quietly to her death, she goes—at least in some small way—on
her own terms. The collection’s penultimate poem, “Vade in Pace (Go in Peace)” sees
Zuleika take control of her death the way she so rarely could control her life.
She asks Alba to bury her, embracing the only female solidarity and friendship that
she has had from her very beginning, without the intervention of Rome, and she
asks to be buried not with the slap of a Roman woman or the wig she wears in “A
Quiet Bedtime Voice,” but with an afro pick and braids, both of which signify
embracing her African heritage.
"Creole, n. and adj." OED Online, Oxford
University Press, June 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/44229. Accessed 20 June
2018.
Evaristo, Bernardine. The
Emperor's Babe. Penguin Books, 2004.
Wong, Jennifer. Personal interview.
20 Jun. 2018.
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