Spivak and Ibn Tufayl

        In the second chapter of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Gayatri Spivak uses Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee's Foe to discuss the native informant and the “figuration of the wholly other as margin” (Spivak, 174). I want to highlight some ways this analysis can be placed it in conversation with Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, by placing these texts in conversation with one another in terms of their discourse on the margin/subaltern.

        Ibn Tufayl's text tells the story of Hayy, a boy who grows up on an island isolated from all other human contact. A tabula rasa, Hayy is a model of self-acquired knowledge, and through the use and development of his intellect is able to attain knowledge of the world, himself, and God. When Hayy is thirty years old, a visitor comes to the island. Asal leaves his country to go to the island to meditate and practice his religion in solitude. Asal and Hayy discover each other, and Asal begins to teach Hayy his language in order to educate him and to convert Hayy to his religion. Asal is shocked to discover that Hayy knows more about spiritual truths than he does. hearing about Asal's society Hayy wishes to travel to it and teach the people the wisdom he has gained through his own reflection. The city ultimately rejects Hayy, and the story ends with the two friends returning to the island.

• The island is central in Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in fact the location and name of the island are clues to the allegorical reading(s) of the text. The island that Hayy grows up on is identified as the Island of Wāqwāq. Wāqwāq is an Arabic word of unclear origin. It could possibly be onomatopoeic, referring to a cuckoo bird or the noise of a baboon or bat, thus alluding to babble or irritating noise. How does this relate to Spivak's discussion of Crusoe (Defoe) and Susan Barton (Coetzee) teaching Friday? Who has greater control of language and intellect, Hayy or Asal? As an imaginary place, this island usually signifies the edge of the known world, the boundary between the known and the imaginary or fantastic, or the meeting point (barzakh) between the physical and the spiritual. Who is the subaltern here? Hayy? Asal? Both?
• The story of Hayy begins by naming the island and distinguishing it as the location of a tree that bears women as its fruit. How does this fit into Spivak's discussion of the competing narratives of capitalism and empire (Defoe) and gender and empire (Coetzee)? If one is discussed the other has to be marginalized. Women are “almost-native informants”. “The feminism we inhabit has something like a relationship with the tradition of the cultural dominant, even when adversarial” (Spivak, xi) The woman- fruit bearing tree is never mention again, but it is possible to read it as present in the margins of the text. “For every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his 'voice,' there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. 'The native,' whatever that might mean, is not only a victim, but also an agent. The curious guardian at the margin who will not inform.” (Spivak, 190)