ABSTRACT
The question of what to compare with what is therefore in no sense a universal or natural one, but one that is guided by strict lines of power. This has been made increasingly clear by postcolonial writers as they describe their ambiguous difficulties with language, especially with the English language which, composed as it is of specific power-and history-laden metaphors, provides a field of connections to be resisted and reconsidered at the same time as it is mined and exploited for its still potent metaphorical field. To call a yam a sweet potato is fundamentally different from calling a potato a sour yam. Metaphor here becomes inextricably involved with the history of what it means to be regarded as exotic, a process according to which the other comes to be conceived as the filling in of a missing ideal, the establishment of a new space to compensate for a metaphorical lack; metaphor reveals its relation to a web of notions of loss.
