Empire and the house in postcolonial fiction: Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom, Romesh Gunesekera’s The Sandglass and Jean Arasanayagam’s “Time the Destroyer”

Abstract

In this essay I argue that the notion of colonial “paradise” endorsed in island discourse is challenged in the works of Caribbean author Lawrence Scott (Witchbroom, 1992) and the Sri Lankan writers Romesh Gunesekera (The Sandglass, 1998) and Jean Arasanayagam (“Time the Destroyer”, 1995). The “colonial house” in these postcolonial texts is a trope of management and control for the owner, but displays the paradox of paradise and prison as the women inhabitants are confined within the domestic sphere, in a gendered imprisonment. All three writers expose the myth of colonial “paradise” in narratives which illustrate that the end of empire is a borderline time between colonialism and postcolonialism, representing the ambiguity of colonization and decolonization. I explore how far Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity can provide a liminal “in‐between” space to negotiate the paradise/prison paradox and the ambiguity of this era.