Strategic Silences and Transgressive Metaphors in Out of Africa: Isak Dinesen's Double-Voiced Rhetoric of Complicity and Subversion

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Southern Communication Journal

Volume

62

Issue

4

Publication Date

1997

First Page

333

Last Page

343

Abstract

The "double-voiced quality" of women travel writers of Dinesen's time is much in evidence in Out of Africa, for although Dinesen is seemingly silent on colonialism, her silence on that topic structurally creates an absence in the text into which she inserts metaphorical accounts of her affinity with and attraction to African people, which leads the reader to the subtextual level where those metaphors collectively constitute a sharp critique of colonialism. The cumulative effect of Dinesen's metaphorically rich narratives of affinity and attraction is an engendering of her deep identification–personal and cultural–with the Kenyans. Persuasive, indeed, is her invitation to enter the Kenyans' world and to identify with, as she plainly does, their knowledge, values, practices, and lives. And she further induces identification with the Kenyans by contrasting their enlightened, tolerant attitudes to the prejudicial narrowness of the European settlers, a view amplified upon in her letters.

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