Untitled - witz cultural

357THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTengages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic,which I term 'hlpertext' or 'postcolonial', represents the need to switchfrom the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounterscharacterizing the performance of the same to that of non-linear,multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters thatare marked by repetition of the same with and in difference." In "The Performativeand Processual: A Study of the Hypertext/Postcolonial Aesthetic," thestudy in which Odin advances her proposal to use hypermedia as an effectivemeans of understanding various aspects of postcolonial situations, she concentrateson analyses of Leslie Silko and Shelley Jackson. Looking at someproblematic aspects of liberation rhetoric, as Lazarus has done, as well as thefiction and autobiography of major decolonization writers demonsffates thevalue of her approach. Antoinette's problems with her double or triple identityin Wide Sargasso Sea, Soyinka's more joyous presentation of his complexmultiple heritages in ,\ke and Isarq: A Voyage around Essay, and Kerewin'scomplex ethnic, sexual, and artistic identity in Hume's The Bone People aln'tes'tify to the need in postcolonial situations for what Odin terms "non-linear,multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters thatare marked by repetition of the same with and in difference."The writings of Salman Rushdie, Sara Suleri, and many others supportOdin's claim that "the intertextual and interactive hypertext aesthetic is mostsuited for representing postcolonial cultural experience because it embodiesour changed conception oflanguage, space, and time. Language and placeare here no longer seen as existing in abstract space and time, but involve adynamic interaction of history politics, and culture." Rushdie's meditationsin Shame on roots, rootlessness, migration, and being between exemplifywhat Odin means. Rushdie's narrator explains that he knows "something ofthis immigrant business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and anewcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my familymoved against my will)." According to him, if gravity equates with belongingsomewhere, he and other wanderers among various cultures "have come unstuckfrom more than land. We have floated upwards from history frommemory, from Time" (90-91). The best thing about people who have movedbetween worlds, say, Rushdie, is "their hopefulness," the worst "the emptinessof their luggagel' Here many postcolonial novelists would disagree, forthey find that they travel with too much baggage rather than too little.lnMeatless Days,for example, Suleri blends languages, geographies, andlife stories emphasizing the heavy weight of public and private histories.Occasionally, multiple identities defined by their simultaneous existence in