In And Out Of Illusion

This study, drawing on postcolonial theories of Fanon, Said and Spivak, aims at the revealing of the colonial discourse hidden in Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)'s highly-valued autobiographical novel, Out of Africa, in which she creates a Garden of Eden, where people from different countries and tribes coexist in harmony. However, this harmony is just an illusion. The author, though skillfully omits her life details as a colonizer, still cannot erase her colonial nature from the discourse. No one colonizes innocently. As an artist of Western civilization, an arrogant cultural formation which denied that there was anything of any interest or worth in the other cultures encountered in the process of colonial expansion, she is part of that ideology producing mechanism, a mechanism with 2000 years'tradition of constructing the West as a dominant Self, and other civilizations as the subaltern Other, in the disguise of civilizing missionary. Thus her sensual attraction to Africa is rather a pursuit for exotic interest based on racism than a true understanding with respect for other civilizations, which is complicit with the ideological tradition of imperial Europe. Her masterpiece, though judged high by her fellow artists, is a product of the economic dominance, and part of the Western discourse, which is at that moment particular, the colonial discourse. A rereading of the book shows a way to be out of illusion.