Jungle and Desert in Postcolonial Texts: Intertextual Ecosystems

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’sLe silence de la forêt(1984) and Tahar Djaout’sL’invention du désert(1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.