attack of the massa's clones

For this blog post, I want to delve into three specific concepts in Shawl’s short story in order to relate my interpretation of its colonial/post-colonial narrative: uploads & downloads, clones, and "neuropathy."

First, Shawl’s “uploads” and “downloads” indicate the presence of a hierarchal dichotomy, where Point A serves as the source of information to be downloaded, and Point B as the subscriber of this.

The Psyche Moth was a prison ship. Like those on board, Wayna was an upload of a criminal’s mind. The process of uploading her had destroyed her physical body (12).

Within this passage, Shawl mentions the criminalization of Wayna’s “upload” to suggest its inferior and disruptive nature. Shawl uses this description to reiterate the subjugation of colonized people. Through subjugation, everything about their people, culture, language, and lifestyles are deemed as something that is out of the “law” (Order of things, or the way things are). This passage tries to justify that the reason for colonization is to “un-criminalize” and to prevent the spread of criminal tendencies from a people. Shawl also tries to comment on one way of “un-criminalize” people: one is by using a physical model/appearance of an “orderly” person--if a colonizee is a criminal, then the oppressor must be “orderly.” Shawl seems to critique this concept of making physical replicates of the oppressor with a colonized mind: “their bodies came from, were copies of, the people against whom they’ve rebelled. The rich. The politically powerful” (17). With this, Shawl describes a common strand in post-colonial histories/stories where the colonizee empowers him/herself by rebelling against his/her subjugation through a revolution. I also think that this remarks on the benevolent aspect of colonization where the oppressor fashions his subject into becoming someone and everything like him. It reinforces the idea of a unilateral relationship through “downloading [order, success, progress]” that transfers the flow of power. Wayna is a clone if her master, that becomes ruined by having an “upload” with a colonizee’s nature.

Why is this destructive?

Shawl tries to move away from this notion of completely removing oneself from his/her colonizer as the only way to amend “criminals.” Will isolation from the master’s culture ultimately cure Wayna’s “neuropathy?” (12) Wayna’s dependence on Dr. Ops to find an alternate body signifies the complex relationship between a colonized person and his/her oppressor. “But Wayna’s body was hers. No one else owned it, no matter how different it looked from the one she had been born with. How white” (17). This line speaks of two different layers: 1) that a sense of ownership and awareness of Wayna’s situation allows her to discover what is wrong with her body, and what is necessary; 2) that being “white” gives her this privilege of having the access to these alternatives. Shawl subverts from one mode of interpretation, to suggest that the relationship between a colonized and the oppressor:

In my hands, massa’s tools don’t dismantle massa’s house -- and in fact, I don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake massive renovations -- they build me a house of my own. (Hopkinson 8)

Shawl comments on how a colonizee does benefit from the tools that his/her oppressor brings, even at the expense of the people. It’s not enough to just advocate for complete separation and isolation from the “massa” because this simplifies the relationship into something that is easily achieved. This is why I think that Shawl is writing from a very displaced perspective, such as Fanon’s “third space,” in order to explicate this underlying problem that is rarely addressed.