Growing up in Zimbabwe to British parents, Doris Lessing often imagined herself into the landscape of modern England. In it, she saw the possibility of freedom, the horizon of an emergent literary life, and the promise of a prodigal return to the homeland.

Like the paradisal utopias we find so often in religious texts, Lessing’s England implies a familiar teleological arc. And yet, at the same time, it was a utopia that, for Lessing, already existed in a concurrent, parallel dimension. It was not, in other words, some distant end-state inscribed into futurity, but a lateral move into a different context.

A utopia that is relative to us sideways or flanks our current circumstances seems less cruel than those classical, forever-unattainable ones. However, there is still something pernicious in Lessing’s desire for the English utopia which both manufactured(s?) and understood(stands?) its exceptionalism selectively by excluding the non-white, non-male individuals reared outside of the beloved Blighty. Lessing’s desire, then, implicitly a desire for rejection or metamorphosis, seems to border on the pathological; it amounts, at some level, to a desire for self-erasure.

How might we imagine utopias that do not posit exclusion and self-enclosure as conditional requirements? How might we navigate a desire to be the “chosen ones” while still keeping our cultural, religious, social, and national entanglements in view?

This brings to mind Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea is a gyre that quite literally emerges out of the tensions produced by four ocean currents- each of them bordering a continent implicated in the Triangular Trade. For Rhys, the sea symbolizes how the diffuse echoes of power, empire, and violence engender, on one end, the cognitive disarray of colonial subjecthood. A kind of schizophrenia that continues to define what it means to live in the Caribbean. But just as these echoes define, they also obscure. They prevent the Caribbean from existing outside of the Triangular structure that relegates the region to a colonial commodity; a relic of imperialism collecting dust on the fringes of the known world.

Cuba, where my mother’s family is from, has a similar history of trading hands between Europe and the Americas. It's a place that, like Eliot’s drowned Phoenician Sailor, has pearls for eyes; no longer able to recognize itself or who it wants to become after the intercontinental swells left it turning in the gyre. As Cuba’s political turmoil indicates, its struggle for self-determination has been an abortive one. And it's not particularly surprising that, rather than depositing the island in a Hegelian fashion at the golden end-state- Cuba’s struggles seem to have left it in a vibrating, entropic condition. Survival, yes, but no mobility. The Cuban poet, Virgilio Pinera, touches upon this restless inertia when he writes: “The curse of being completely surrounded by water condemns me to this coffee table. If I didn’t think that water encircled me like a cancer I’d sleep in peace.”

In contrast, the English utopia with its illusion of internal coherence and self-enclosure, becomes almost irresistible. Why, then, struggle against it? Precisely because it is an illusion. One that not only legitimates a misplaced exceptionalism but legitimates violence against the individuals that find themselves beyond its frontiers. By reaching into the gyre and pulling out the swallowed islands, we can reform this utopian image. This is exactly what Rhys accomplishes in Wide Sargasso Sea.

In her novel, Rhys imagines a narrative for Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre that retroactively revolts against the expressive impoverishment of Caribbean characters in Victorian novels, and, in turn, signals a dynamic strife between ways of imagining cultures, histories, and possible worlds.

This latter point comes through as a rejection of the subject-object prepositional relations that, in our literary and historical archive, identify “colony” as a goldmine and “empire” as the philosopher-king who, in order to move the world towards moral and rational perfection, needs to fund his PhD. Tapping into the savage’s riches becomes effectively better for humanity.

However, in Wide Sargasso Sea, the colony is not inert matter to be partitioned at whim. It has eyes that reflect “empire” back to itself antagonistically, showing it bloodied with stains that cannot be scrubbed out with Holy Water or pages from the Nicomachean Ethics. In this mirror-image, Victorian England ceases to be the product of a unitary vision, but splinters into incongruous fragments that battle for representational power.

Placed alongside Rhys, Lessing’s desire becomes insurgent. In claiming a right to utopia, it resists exclusion and affirms a suppressed continuity between the colonial subject and empire, the woman and mankind, the rest of the world and Europe. It testifies to mutual shaping, an agency to shape, and an entitlement to the co-constituted national territory.

Perhaps, a utopian imaginary that acknowledges and encompasses difference without producing inferiority may not be possible. Through Rhys and Lessing, however, two things become clear. If such a utopia will ever figure in our collective thought, we must appeal to the past just as much as our future. We must interrogate the archival evidence and the literary canons that have for centuries licensed continued subjugation and narrative silencing. By looking back subversively, our desires for utopia can become, in themselves, a revolt against Euro-centric exceptionalist ideals. These desires, insofar as they keep hybridity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy in view, can orient us towards a shared future. Not one, not some, but all.

Sketch of a Woman by Jean Louis Forain
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
(pastel on canvas/1885)