Locating Spivak’s Subaltern in Baaba Sillah’s When the Monkey Talks: A Case between Bhubaneswari Bhaduri and Eddu Fara Mundaw

Abstract

The Aku (Krio) people of The Gambia have a maxim that goes, “When monkey talk, monkey yerri,” which translates to “When the monkey talks, the monkey hears.” Although this wise old saying denotes the culture of common understanding among members of any homogenous group, Gambianist scholars recode this meaning, and authors such as Baaba Sillah use it to comment on his society’s failure to understand and recognize the sociopolitical role played by the late Gambian statesman, Edward Francis Small. This paper argues that some historical personalities chose outspokenness against colonial and capitalist exploitation in colonial Gambia and as such suffered exclusion and persecution from the colonial establishment. Using the postcolonial perspective, this paper compares the life of Sillah’s Eddu Fara Mundaw (a pseudonym for Edward Francis Small) to Spivak’s Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in “Can the Subaltern Speak.” The paper reveals that while Spivak’s Bhubaneswari used her body through suicide as a text, Sillah’s Mundaw’s life of service symbolized that their people failed to decode their messages. Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, from Spivak’s seminal essay, was a young woman who committed suicide by hanging at a time when she was menstruating. Although she expected herpeople to be able to read and decipher her message (suicide during menstruation) to rule out possibilities of any involvement in an illicit love affair and perhaps pregnancy, it sadly failed to be understood. This paper concludes that the exclusion and futility of the subaltern’s speech is akin to the arguments that postcoloniality is pervasive in global scholarship.