1The rhetoric of the ghostly—of haunting, spectres, the eerie and indistinct—can be discovered across a number of divergent postcolonial literary and critical contexts, where two predominant figurations of postcolonial ghostliness may be discerned. The first is exemplified by Simon Gikandi’s work on the writing of identity in the culture of colonialism. His 1996 book Maps of Englishness explores the ways in which the cultural consequences of colonialism still resonate very much at the moment and in the locations of colonialism’s recent negation, both within the postcolony as well as at the European metropolitan centre. As he argues, ‘the great categories that came to define the modern age—race and citizenship, civility and authority, for example—were haunted from the start by the colonial question’.1 Conceived in this way, modernity is ghosted by ‘the hitherto invisible spectre whose presence we have felt around us, whose effectivity we have encountered in the texts of our identity, but whose logic we could not name until now’ (Gikandi 1996: 3). The ‘ghosting of colonialism’ (Gikandi 1996: 3), as Gikandi terms it, is being exposed at modernity’s twilight (an apt time for ghouls and shadows, perhaps?) when the inseparability of metropolis and colony is being laid bare, very much against the wishes of nationalists in Europe and, surprisingly perhaps, also in the former colonies. Certainly in Britain, he argues, during the period of decolonisation the aforementioned ‘great categories’ of colonial modernity resonate ‘in their phenomenality and ghostliness, to call into question the axioms of Englishness’ (Gikandi 1996: 9). Gikandi’s example is a familiar one to us, taken from Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988), when Rosa Diamond looks out at the English shoreline and spies the ghostly arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066. ‘What’s a ghost?’, she muses. ‘Unfinished business, is what’.2 In demystifying the national purity of England by bodying forth the ghostly presence of foreign occupation at its mythic origins, Rushdie’s Norman ghosts of occupation challenge the insularity and separateness of the metropolis from the world of conquest and colonialism. They also defy the logic of ultranationalists such as Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher who sought to reinvent Britain and Britons during decolonisation as having no meaningful relations with cultural and political world beyond its shores. But Rushdie’s postcolonial ghosts resurrect other stories, of course, and their spectral subjectivities return to menace the identity of nation, people, and subject.

2In this first formulation of postcolonial ghostliness, the figure of the ghost works in two related ways. On the one hand, the haunting of colonialism within the prospect of modernity points towards the shadows where one might detect evidence of that mysterious, troubling, dark ‘other’ upon which modern subjectivity so often depended. As David Richards has explained with reference to Homi Bhabha’s rereading of Frantz Fanon, in this context ‘The postcolonial subject emerges as a shadow figure, “tethered” to the more substantial presence of an erroneous western subjectivity’.3 The partial presence of this shadow figure has the capacity to bring to crisis the key categories of the modern which have both secured that tethering and also condemned colonised identity to the limbo of the spectral. On the other hand, and additionally, the rhetoric of the ghostly points to a range of lives and identities which have been arrested, subjugated, or cut short by the invasion of colonial culture and its representations. Rushdie’s sense of ‘unfinished business’ captures this notion of lives buried but not concluded, departed but not deceased. The temporal model implied by this first formulation of the ghostly is extremely well suited to the contradictions of the ‘post’ (as in ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postmodern’): that is, a sense of belatedness which is also in many ways a critical return to the source or point of origin, as Jean-François Lyotard famously argued.4 The postcolonial, then, rewrites the origins of modernity as both womb of the modern subjectivity and tomb of colonised identity.

3The second formulation of postcolonial ghostliness also concerns issues of subjectivity and identity, but installs a different temporality quite distinct from the first. We can begin to discern this second kind of ghostliness in the following quotation from the poetry of Jackie Kay, in which a mother marks the giving of her child up for adoption in an elaborate form of burial: she digs a hole and buries the clothes she had bought for her now-absent daughter whom she has recently given up:

I gave her a service then, sang
Ye banks and braes, planted
a bush of red roses, read the Book of Job,
cursed myself digging a pit for my baby
sprinkling ash from the grate.
Late that same night
she came by the window,
my baby Lazarus
and suckled at my breast.5

4These lines are from Kay’s poem ‘Baby Lazarus’, taken from her sequence titled The Adoption Papers (1991). They are haunted by another poem, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1962), which tells of suicide and annihilation; but Kay’s poem is quite different. If Plath’s poem touches upon a self which yearns to be over, Kay’s poem turns to subjectivities which have not been allowed to commence. In terms of selfhood, the realities of adoption means that the narrator will never be the baby’s mother, and the baby cannot ever be her daughter. In contrast to the identities explored by Gikandi and Rushdie which concerned lives which happen in the shadows, the kinds of identity which Kay explores in her representations of adoption are those which will never happen. The baby Lazarus is ironically named: she will survive spectrally not as the return of a life which has passed, but as a projection of a future which never took place, and which was never lived. This is not so much ‘unfinished business’ as business unbegun. In this second formulation of the ghostly, the figurative resources of ghostliness afford a way of framing and phrasing the imagining of selves which have never fully existed—lives which have not been permitted to happen or become real. These traces of future lives which were not permitted to establish themselves offer their own ghostly challenge to the shoring up of ‘legitimate’ identities within the enduring culture of colonialism at its politically decolonised moment, and enable us to glimpse other kinds of significantly spectral selves.

5Kay’s work is well-known, of course, for its occasional attempt to explore the consequences of transracial adoption in postwar Britain. Her poetic sequence The Adoption Papers concerns the adoption of a mixed-race Scottish child by white Scottish parents, while her 1998 novel Trumpet features the adoption of a so-called mixed-race boy into a family which has one white and one black parent. In The Adoption Papers, the new identities both forged and denied by the act of adoption are never far from a ghostly sense of the unestablished and unbegun. The adoptive mother lives in fear of the spectral hollowness of her claim to being a mother which would deny her the right fully to embody this selfhood. When she tells her daughter that ‘I’m not your real mother’ (Kay 1991: 21), it is significant that her daughter fears that her mother will be spirited away back to the realm of the insubstantial: ‘I was scared to death she was gonnie/melt or something or mibbe disappear in the dead/of night and somebody would say she wis a fairy/godmother. So the next morning I felt her skin/to check it was flesh’ (Kay 1991: 22). The daughter also has her own hauntings to contend with. When she attempts to discover her birth-mother, all she can discover are the faint eerie tracings which appear as indistinct marks amidst the archives, and which offer inadequate evidence of those arbitrary things with which the daughter must make up a life: place and time of birth, the birth-mother’s partiality for hockey and her job as a waitress in Aberdeen, her height in feet and inches. In the birth-mother’s narrative the adoptee is fixed in her natal state, returning forever as ‘baby Lazarus’ rather than as a growing woman; while the thought of the adoptee’s unpredictable appearance is as scary to the birth-mother as the visitation of a ghost: ‘Now my secret is the hush of heavy curtains drawn./I dread strange handwriting / sometimes jump when the phone rings’ (Kay 1991: 28). In addition, the birth-mother comes to think of her self as an unsteady projection at odds with fleshy embodiment: ‘my hair is grey // the skin around my neck is wrinkling / does she imagine me this way’ (Kay 1991: 12). Of the three figures in the sequence she is at the one most conscious of her self as ghostly, uncreated rather than unfinished, waiting to become embodied as mother in the mind of the absent adoptee: ‘she conjures me up or I just appear/when I take the notion, my slippers/are silent and I walk through doors’ (Kay 1991: 29-30).

6Each of these women, then, might be thought of as haunted by a revenant without a referent: each feels and fears the ghostly presence of a life that has never been lived. For each, the words ‘adoption’ or ‘adopted’ beckon a dangerous incorporeality, for they challenge the substantiality of legitimate selfhood with the spectral subjectivities of secreted circumstances.

7If The Adoption Papers explores the rhetoric of ghostliness as a way of raising those spectral selves which have not been permitted fully to exist, then Trumpet suggests the creative possibilities of productively reconceiving self in such terms. The novel tells of Joss Moody, a Scottish jazz saxophonist of so-called mixed race who becomes one of Britain’s leading male jazz musicians in the postwar years, but who also harbours a secret which is publicly revealed when he dies: namely, he is biologically female. Trumpet explores the emotional responses to Joss’s death primarily experienced by his white Scottish wife Millie (who knew the secret) and their son Colman (who didn’t) whom they adopted in 1962, and who is coincidentally of mixed race. The novel, then, is the story of an afterlife—it is set after Joss has died and the revelations concerning his biology have been made public. An image of Joss’s life is offered primarily through the recall and memories of others, so that a substantial, corporeal embodiment of Joss is never fully secured in the novel: Joss walks through the walls of the other characters’ narratives so that he is neither fully absent nor present in the novel. Instead, an indistinct image of him emerges from the traces he has left in the lives and thoughts of others. Kay contrasts Joss’s spectral insubstantiality with the ways in which his identity is settled institutionally by those officials involved in the certifying of his death, such as the doctor, the registrar, and the funeral director. In this officious world of form-filling and documentation, received categories of gender offer no room for identitarian innovation, and it is in this mechanical process of certifying selfhood that Joss exists as both freak and scandal.

8The novel’s representative of this ungenerous modality of identity is the ghost writer Sophie Stones, a hack journalist who spies an opportunity to make a fast buck by convincing Colman to let her ghost-write his memories of growing up as Joss’s son. At the beginning of the novel Colman is keen to participate in the scandalised representation of Joss and willingly helps Sophie; but as the novel continues, he is instead pulled into another way of conceiving of his father’s identity—and, ultimately, his own—which goes beyond the officious and received. This involves Colman becoming a different kind of ‘ghost writer’, one which seizes upon the possibilities of the life which his dead father never led, imagined anew through the traces left behind.

9Late in the novel Colman shares an important scene with his grandmother (Joss’s mother), Edith. As a surprise guest in her home, Edith and her grandson are distanced by their unfamiliarity and ignorance of each other’s lives, while their adoptive familial link underscores the coincidental character of their connection. Although we are not witness to their conversation, Colman leaves Edith’s house at night with hitherto unheard of stories of his father’s girlhood, and two photos of Joss as a young girl. When looking at the photos by a street lamp, Colman simultaneously sees the man whom this young girl became, as well as his other existence as female. The fusion of these images is a remarkable moment in the novel:

Now that he’s seen the little girl, he can see something feminine in the memory of his father’s face that must have been there all along. ... The streets are too dark, and the light too dim for him to see the little girl clearly, but he stands and peers just the same. Waiting for something to happen. Some other image to appear behind the image he is holding in his hand.6

10This nocturnal apparition of Josh, flickering like a kinetic holograph that changes when it is moved around, projects a faint image of the life which Joss did not fully begin, as an adult female, while the life he did lead as a man is now haunted by the trace of the self he did not become. In seeing his father within the full context of his existence, Colman has to grasp the insubstantial, and to embed his sense of the known and visible Joss within the unseen, unlived existence linked to his biology. The bonds which are made available here between father and son offer an alternative to the gendered filiations of masculinity and the male line, and also to the biological imperatives of family identity and rootedness which adoption cheerfully always exposes as conservative fictions. Crucially, they are bonds brokered in narrative, and which turn Colman into participating quite actively in what we might regard as a form of narratorial séance, raising an ever-renewing image of his father and his family from textual remains such as photographs and memories. This is how we connect selfhood, suggests Kay’s novel: not mystically through the corporeality of bloodlines and other such earthly substances (it is ironic that Joss and his wife Millie meet at a blood bank, where they are giving blood), but by what we make in our own lives of the traces of those whom we once thought we knew.

11At the novel’s climax Colman discovers a letter from Joss concerning the arrival of Joss’s father in Scotland from Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. The language used by Joss is noticeable for its ghostly rhetoric, especially at the moment when he tells of Colman’s grandfather’s first days in Scotland:

Ghost country. The people and the weather shrouded in uncertainty. Shadow people, he thought, insubstantial, no colour. He was a young boy full of fears. Life, then, he said, was something that happened to him. Other people pulled the thin strings and he moved his limbs. This new country was a wet ghost, cold fingers searching his cheeks for warmth. It was as if he walked off that ship into nothing, as if the strange grey air might gulp him down, whole.
(Kay 1998: 271)

12This moment of diasporic arrival in Scotland is narrated as a tryst with the insubstantial. It is where the grip of past certainties has been loosened, and where the challenge of the new remains suspended beyond matter. Joss’s father is described as oddly ethereal as he stands at the water’s edge, looking into the fog of his new country: ‘my father felt as if he too was disembodied. His own body became broken up by the fog; his left arm missing, his left shoe’ (Kay 1998: 273). In this arrival, Joss finds a new way of figuring his own mixed-race, adopted subjectivity which connects him to his father’s and grandfather’s challenging lives, and which helps him revise his very notion of self through an encounter with disembodiment. Joss’s father’s sense of disembodiment is driven by his life as a black migrant in turn-of-the-century Scotland; Joss’s disembodiment was forced by his secret transgendered life in a society that forbids gender troublings; Colman’s disembodiment is fashioned by his mixed-race relationship with Britain and complexified by his adoptive circumstances. The realities of each of these lives troubles reference: each demands a new conception of identity which does not make illegitimate or scandalous the brigandly lives of each. It is Colman’s gift in the novel to turn the discourse of spectral insubstantiality into the beginning of a new way of fashioning of self which transgresses those securing modes of identity that seek to make bodies visible, substantial, knowable and controllable. In his last letter to his son, Joss challenges Colman to renarrate his life using in part the traces he has left: his hidden letters, those photographs, the textual flotsam and jetsam of his life. In many ways Colman finds himself in a position to produce that which his father could never have lived: namely, a life where the roles of female, man, father, adopter, musician, black Briton, and others, might be legitimately constellated, and where the resulting self (r)evolves more substantially than the flickering kinetic holograph which Colman holds under the street light after visiting his grandmother Elsie. ‘You will be my father’, Joss writes to Colman, ‘telling or not telling my story’ (Kay 1998: 277). Colman inherits not blood or identity, but the unrealised/unreleased substance of stories: all the paper records of birth and adoption, the photographs and letter and scraps and patches of someone else’s past which he will be responsible to: what to retain, what to cherish, what to throw away. The trace of his father will remain, to be sure, but as a kind of embodied haunting or benign possession—in attitude, or behaviour—not in any peculiar mystical or racial sense, nor in a filial cultural one too. The adoptive relationship between Joss and Colman underwrites the non-exclusivity of these relations: in other words, Trumpet is at pains to suggest that the spectral subjectives it explores are not just the remit of black folks, or black cultures, but take us far beyond the sensible selfhoods and collectivities of modernity. ‘The future is something else entirely’ (Kay 1998: 277), writes Joss, almost at the end of his life. Trumpet looks to the future by demanding the re-narration of the past in terms of a future which, due to the residual languages of selfhood in the present, has not yet fully begun.

13In turning next, and briefly, to the short fiction of Pauline Melville, we may discern how these two temporalities of the ghostly I have been exploring— unfinished business, and business unbegun—can be detected as animating the concise yet imperative critique of modernity which emerges from its encounters with cultural difference. In Melville’s evocative and imaginatively rich short fiction, the future is sometimes posited as imprisoned by the still-resonating languages of modernity. In challenging the arrogance of continued Eurocentricism, Melville directs our attention not only to the ghosting of empire and conquest (one thinks again of Gikandi’s haunting of modernity by colonialism) by those from other cultures, but also to the absence of a ghostly consciousness which enables the incomplete project of modernity to keep going. In her short story ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ (1998) from the collection of the same name, she explores and uncovers the deathly clasp of modernity both within Europe and in those locations which Europe once sought to settle, and points to the ghostly absence of those annihilated by modernity’s confident institutions. Yet, she also dwells upon the unhappy consequences of a melancholic preoccupation with the dead, and invites us to ponder how the ghosts which haunt modernity’s violence may be exorcised, so that the unbegun business of the future can be started.

14In ‘The Migration of Ghosts’, adoption is mentioned only once, and in passing; but its mention throws into relief some of the prevailing preoccupations of this story. Melville’s narrative concerns a married couple called Vincent and Loretta—he is British, she is a Macusi Indian—who live in Roraima in Brazil but are visiting London and Prague to attend a wedding and enjoy a brief vacation. During a conversation about Communism, Loretta remembers a young couple—the girl, she recalls, was pregnant—who appeared at their house two years previously having escaped a police massacre of their people by pretending to be dead.7 The two were communists: Loretta recalls that the young man held a cheap, tattered copy of the communist manifesto in his hand, and that even when describing the horrors of the massacre ‘his description and analysis of the events were illuminated by ideas and sayings gleaned from these books which he studied every night’.8 His girlfriend was due to travel to Sao Paulo to have her baby and immediately give it up for adoption, then return to Roraima and continue with the struggle (it is noted that we never hear the mother-not-to-be speak in the story, so it is unclear how happy she might be with her boyfriend’s plans). The enthusiasm for principles rather than people is chillingly conveyed at this moment: the demands of politics will not permit the lives of three people at stake here to begin their business as a family. The story makes much out of the subservient relations between institutions or ideas and the people who are ensnared within them, and focuses in particular on the deadly consequences of those who, as Vincent also enjoys, ‘talk politics’. A disjunctive, deathly relationship is opened between modernity and its critique (in this instance, communism) on the one hand, and the fortunes of those subjected to it, both supporters and victims, whose lives are at times only one gunshot away from the ghostly. A perception of such lives, lost or broken, is at the heart the story’s challenge to the rationalisations of the modern. Yet as we shall see, a spectral consciousness of those who come to haunt the business of modernity brings its own problems.

15The story juxtaposes two forms of memory in which the presence of ghosts, spirits and hauntings is radically different. The first is connected primarily to the character of Vincent, whose return to Europe is fuelled by his memories of his relatively happy young life there. The trip enables him to indulge in some memories: he takes Loretta on a visit to Prague where he used to holiday with his parents during the communist era, and at the close of the story he treats Loretta to a night-time drive past the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. When having breakfast with Loretta in Prague, the couple overhear a German businessman offering a bribe to a Czech government official concerning the building of a road to Dachau. Each of these locations—London, Prague, Dachau—have played an important, deathly role in the history of Europe, especially recently, but Vincent scarcely remembers this. At Prague Castle he visits Kafka’s house in the castle precinct and enthuses about ‘the wonderful book about bureaucracy’ (Melville 1998: 185) which Kafka wrote, although he cannot remember if it was The Trial or The Castle. He makes no comment about the overheard conversation regarding the Dachau Road; while his only recognition of London’s bloody past comes in a clichéd reference to Henry VIII, the Tower of London and Ann Boleyn’s beheaded spectre. Vincent is a man full of idyllic memories but free from ghosts, and everything he looks at proves the beauty and wonder of life. Life, it seems, is best enjoyed with no consciousness of the dead. Wittily Vincent does not believe in spirits, but he wishes he could be reincarnated: ‘I love life. I want to know what is going to happen. I’d come back as anything just to be here—a tree, a stone step, a feather, anything’ (Melville 1998: 194).

16Where Vincent spies only proud monuments and sanitised heritage, Loretta is perpetually haunted at every turn by those whose lives have been blighted by the operations of all forms of European power and authority (as Kafka would have understood, of course). Bored amidst the buildings of Europe, her mind is constantly resculpting the events of her vacation in terms of her Macusi background—the bride at the wedding reminds her of ‘the white grub that inhabits the kokerite seed in her native savannahs’ (Melville 1998: 180)—and she frames much of her experience in Prague in terms of Macusi cosmology: she feels most comfortable in Prague when she happens upon a small courtyard decorated with aquatic murals which reminds her of the Macusi water spirits. Yet other spirits from home preoccupy her mind too; she is haunted in particular by the bloody violence she has witnessed growing up, where the world of authority has impacted murderously upon her memory. At the story’s climax, when she quarrels with Vincent about her lack of enthusiasm for London and Prague, she articulates many grim recollections: one involves the drowning of a family whose canoe capsized which she witnessed when she was nine; another concerns the activities of soldiers whom she saw raping young girls and ‘sticking broken bottles into their vaginas’ (Melville 1998: 195). ‘I still have nightmares’, she states, and she declares that she would never want to be reincarnated: ‘Once is enough for me’ (Melville 1998: 194). If Vincent’s memory is empty of ghosts, Loretta’s vision of life is overdetermined by her consciousness of the spirits of those who have departed, to the extent that she almost craves death as an exit from the hardship and cruelties of the world.

17The disjunction between Vincent’s bloodless memories of Europe and Loretta’s deathly recall creates something of an impasse, with which the story is primarily concerned: to be free from the grip of the ghostly is just as undesirable perhaps as to be conscious of little else. This impasse is given climactic expression towards the story’s end, when Loretta and Vincent sit in a car which parked under a street light on the Thames Embankment, and they look towards the Houses of Parliament—a symbol, perhaps, of the twinned projects of modernity and colonialism. Vincent muses upon the apparent mystery of his wife, whom he at times struggles to comprehend, and his thoughts turn to his relationship with Brazil.‘ He wondered about the ghosts’, we are told. ‘Although he enjoyed his life in Brazil, perhaps he would never feel that he understood it properly because he did not know the ghosts. Just as Loretta did not know about Henry VIII or Kafka or Dachau’ (Melville 1998: 196). This call to ‘know the ghosts’ might be read as the stirring of the kind of consciousness which Gikandi talks about: the strange feeling of the cost of conquest which emerges at its twilight hour. The irony, of course, is that Vincent does not seem to ‘know the ghosts’ of Europe in any depth. To what extent does he, and, by extension, contemporary Europe, truly understand or recognise the deathliness of its history? An enthusiasm for the beautiful buildings of authority (the House of Commons, Prague Castle) is permissible so long as the links between authority and its murderous operations—as suffered by 39,591 people at Dachau concentration camp, or Kafka’s K on the last page of The Trial, or the communist couple’s friends—remain forgotten or hidden by ‘heritage’.

18Loretta’s disillusionment with life, overwhelmed by the pain of the ghostly presences which haunt her imagination, does not necessarily seem a ready-made alternative. In her memory, ghosts seem far from migrating to a new form of memorialisation, or existence, or set of meanings: rather, they remain locked in their misery, condemned to die again with each recall of a traumatic event, and for Loretta they tell only of the fragility and futility of life. ‘I can’t wait for it to be over’, she tells Vincent as they sit under the London street light, parked in their car; ‘Life has been a burden’ (Melville 1998: 195). There is no happy middle ground to discover between these two trysts with the dead. The story leaves the reader suspended between unhappy alternatives—life and death, Europe and the Americas, bloodless memory and recurring violent nightmares— just as the couple end the story stuck in traffic beneath Farrington Bridge, with Loretta holding an empty tin she bought as a souvenir in Prague which is labelled ‘THE LAST BREATH OF COMMUNISM’. The emptiness of that tin signals perhaps the impasse at which the incomplete project of colonial modernity has arrived at: refusing to the face the ghosts of its so-called expendable dead, devoid of the means, spiritually or ideologically, to begin the unbegun business of a possible future which remains denied to the living and the dead.

19The spectral subjectivities I have been discussing in the work of Kay and Melville demonstrate how the language of ghostliness fashions a valuable, probing and creative vista in which the common rhetoric of modern subjectivity finds itself confronted. These ways of figuring subjectivity which do not easily fit officious modes of identity that seek to make bodies visible, substantial, knowable and controllable. Images of ghosts enable such writers to point to and body forth alternative forms of knowledge and subjectivity which partially escape received epistemologies and appear within them as spectral traces, half-hidden from the imperious eye of power/knowledge: one thinks of Jackie Kay’s adoptive subjectivities, revenants without referents, or Colman’s ghost writing of new forms of subjectivity built from the traces of fugitive lives. Melville’s ghost story points to those spectral presences which haunt the scene of modern notions of revolution or progress, and invites us to wonder how we are going to contend with their memory while remaining concerned about the necessity and the form of their exorcism. The vocabulary of ghosts and their stories offers a vital, critical, and quintessentially postcolonial means of framing and engaging with realities beyond the narrow, tomblike confines of officiousness, corporeality, and ‘sense’.