Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
(1996) both apply a strategy of connecting rape to other forms of oppression, suggesting
that incest is at least partly the result of the dynamics of being colonized and
“othered”. This article brings out the problematics of closely associating colonization
and (incestuous) rape by exploring the associations made in these two novels. It uses
Kelly Oliver’s concept of “the colonization of psychic space” to argue that the novels
demonstrate that without a positive space of meaning, victims of racial oppression and
of sexual violence find themselves among the abjected. The close association made
between colonization and incest is criticized for ignoring the specificity of the processes
by which incest and rape function to make one feel abjected
