Calibrations: Reading for the Social

Calibrations

PUBLIC WORLDS

Dilip Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee, Series Editors VOLUME 12

Ato Quayson, Calibrations: Reading for the Social VOLUME 11

Daniel Herwitz, Race and Reconciliation: Essays from the New South Africa VOLUME 10

Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, editors, The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity VOLUME 9

Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism VOLUME 8

Greg Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World VOLUME 7

Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches VOLUME 6

Radhika Mohanram, Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space VOLUME 5

May Joseph, Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship VOLUME 4

Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China VOLUME 3

Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism VOLUME 2

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance VOLUME 1

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

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Calibrations

Reading for the Social

PUBLIC WORLDS, VOLUME 12 U N I V E R S I T Y O F M I N N E S O TA P R E S S MINNEAPOLIS

LONDON

Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Quayson, Ato. Calibrations : reading for the social / Ato Quayson. p.

cm. — (Public worlds ; v. 12)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3839-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3840-3 (PB : alk. paper) 1. African literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Marxist criticism. 3. Mimesis in literature. 4. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PN849.A35 Q38 2003 809'.896—dc21 2003002161 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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≈ For Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo two exemplary African literary critics and for Kamau in the hope that he may grow to understand

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Mimesis, Dialectics, and the Bounding of Analytic Fields

xi

1 Literature, Anthropology, and History in Ghosh’s In an Antique Land

1

2 Social Imaginaries in Transition: Culture Heroism and the Genres of Everyday Life

30

3 African Postcolonial Relations through a Prism of Tragedy

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4 Symbolization Compulsions: Freud, African Literature, and South Africa’s Process of Truth and Reconciliation

76

5 Disability and Contingency

99

6 Literature and the Parables of Time

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Notes

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Bibliography

165

Index

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following people for their comments on various drafts of different chapters: Anjali Prabhu, Richard Feldstein, Barbara Bodenhorn, Sinead Garrigan-Mattar, Mark Wormald, Tejumola Olaniyan, Priya Gopal, and Achille Mbembe. I also thank Mary Jacobus for critical feedback on a talk I gave to her Psychoanalysis and Humanities Seminar in Cambridge, which became the material for chapter 4. A very special thanks to Valentina for her forbearance in the onrush of frenzy that accompanied the finishing of this book, and to Jijo and Abena for their constant reminder that laughter is indeed the best medicine.

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Introduction: Mimesis, Dialectics, and the Bounding of Analytic Fields Representation is an extremely elastic notion which extends all the way from a stone representing a man to a novel representing a day in the life of several Dubliners. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Representation”

This book is about close reading. It is about a practice of close reading that oscillates rapidly between domains—the literary-aesthetic, the social, the cultural, and the political—in order to explore the mutually illuminating heterogeneity of these domains when taken together. It does this not to assert the often repeated postmodernist view that there is nothing outside the text, but to outline a reading practice I call calibrations: a form of close reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform both literature and society. The method of reading itself is the main thesis of the book. Establishing it, however, will take us across different places and times, texts and contexts, and will involve various perspectival and interdisciplinary modulations to the ways in which the readings are undertaken. I want to outline from the outset the particular inspiration for these multiple tasks. Many of the readings here developed over a long period out of barely worked-out intuitions about the relationship between the

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literary-aesthetic domain and the social. The true roots of these intuitions go back to my education and upbringing in Africa. Monolingualism, it may be noted, is an uncertain affliction. Yet in multilingual environments all languages are not equal. As many Africans will readily attest, the first level of strangeness that attended our sense of self was that we were obliged to study in a language far removed from our ordinary everyday experience. We quarreled in Akan and played in Shona, woke up from nightmares in Yoruba and took parental instructions in Kikuyu. But the language of education was always European, in my case English. This meant that we always had to go through a process of translating the language of the commonplace into the language of reason and vice versa. These multilingual negotiations led to a variety of breaches in the commonplace, in their turn making an endlessly restless process of translating linguistically hybrid social forms a necessity of everyday life. At one level, as I have already noted, this translation had to do with how to convert abstract concepts, often masked as innocent quotidian ones, into the realms of our quite different everyday experiences. Thus, whereas a term such as uncle or aunt is in European languages a straightforward marker of kinship relations, in Africa it is rather the signal of sociality. In Ghana, where I grew up, an uncle or aunt was, and still is, any older acquaintance of one’s parents. The term also extends to older people met casually, in which case it becomes a form of respectful address. What is more, the term can be extended to people of different races. A Chinese or Irish person in Africa could be introduced as an uncle or aunt to a local without any sense of contradiction whatsoever. These terms are nodal points of larger interactive frameworks. It was only on residing in the West and raising children abroad that the real extent of the disjuncture in the usages made itself manifest. I cannot now say to my children that a Korean, for example, is their aunt. The first thing they will ask, and justifiably so in the context of the West, is how this is possible. It was not only in the use of individual terms that the restless translation was required. These individual quotidian terms sometimes masked entire institutional and ideological frameworks. In a particularly poignant anecdote related by Anthonia Kalu at the 2001 African Literature Association conference in Richmond, Virginia, she recalled the many years of bafflement she felt regarding a childhood primer they read in school in Nigeria in the 1960s.1 This primer was called The Man and the Pan and had a series of simple drawings of a man and a pan accompanied by sentences that all contained the two words in different syntactical arrangements. It went something like this: Introduction

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This is a man. This is a pan. A man. A pan. A man and a pan. ...

The drawings showed the man in different relationships to the pan, sometimes holding it in his right hand, at others in his left, sometimes carrying it on his head or under his arm and so on. The baffling question for Kalu and the many children who read this primer was, why man and pan? As is well known, in Africa cooking is largely undertaken by female members of the household, be they wives, mothers, aunts, or grandmothers. A man and a pan are in cultural terms therefore oddly disjunctive. The fascinating interpretation that Kalu came up with after decades of bafflement was that this man and pan had no relation to the African’s own general experience. Rather, the man and the pan obliquely referenced the domestic arrangements within the households of colonial officials in which they had houseboys and cooks who were often male.2 Thus The Man and the Pan was an attempt at naturalizing in the minds of the children what was essentially the alien order of colonial domination. As Kalu’s anecdote shows, it took a long while for its full implications to be translated into an understanding of the ideological pertinence of this seemingly innocent primer. And yet such interlinguistic translations also implied cultural comparison and a concomitant form of self-evaluation. This idea may be given theoretical focalization through remarks Frantz Fanon makes in Black Skin, White Masks: “The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. He is comparison: that is, he is constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation and the ego-ideal” (1986, 211). Fanon is addressing in these remarks the psychological condition of the colonial Antilles. He observes that Antilleans, bereft of any indigenous culture due to the ravages of colonialism, find that they are constantly comparing themselves on the one hand to white culture, and on the other hand to one another. But the difficulty is that white culture effaces itself and makes itself invisible as a standard while managing to quite radically affect the psyche of the native. Thus, according to Fanon, the Antillean is burdened with a double impress of comparison. The Antillean’s self-comparison to other blacks is surmounted by a third term—whiteness—which in effect organizes the grid of comparison from a distance. But whiteness is engendered by colonialism to become more than just a color; it is rather the cipher of civilization and of modernity. Introduction

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Comparison for the colonized native is then undertaken under the thumb of an undisclosed dimension of value. In the light of the implicit valueladenness of all frameworks of comparison, then, Fanon’s remark about the Negro being comparison foregrounds the ideological stakes within any system of comparison.3 The matter is of course complicated because for the colonized, the comparison is potentially the translation of a value that lies elsewhere but that seeks to convert the comparative framework into a mode of hierarchization. I link the idea of comparison to the general one of translation, for translation to my mind involves many of the questions of commensurability, value, and the transfer of categories from one domain to the other that the comparative method assumes as essential to its procedures. For unlike what Fanon asserts about the bereft cultural condition of the colonial Antillean (debatable, in my view), for the colonial and postcolonial African, the situation is the direct opposite. There is always a surfeit of lived indigenous culture pressing forward to produce different amalgams with what has been either imposed or assimilated from the West.4 Thus, whereas in Fanon’s account of the psychology of the colonial Antillean his emphasis is primarily on the comparison that accentuates hierarchies, in the translational transactions involved in my education and upbringing the comparisons moved through a spectrum of inflections, from conceptual translations that were meant to downgrade our own societies (for example, ideas contrasting “superstition” to “religion”) to those that were meant to show how much better our local societies were in comparison to the West (such as those to do with our range of familial ties and the behaviors that derived from them). The postcolonial translations of my upbringing were far from uniform or homogenous. But the impulse to mediate between terms and discourses has remained with me since then. If I now foreground this impulse as the starting point of a theory of reading, it is partly to make conscious in a methodologically rigorous way a predisposition that has been with me since childhood. And if interdisciplinarity as a mode of reading attracts me, it is because it captures in a more dispersed and discursive way the nature of the translational transactions with which I have intellectually negotiated my view of the world. Thus, in the calibrated readings I am trying to elaborate here the notions of comparison and translation have to be seen as operating at various levels of abstraction. First, I do not “translate” directly between cultures or indeed cultural symbols. The translational transaction I deploy in these pages is predominantly between the literary and the social and vice versa. Second, I do not translate and compare either to establish hierarchies or Introduction

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to subsume the various vectors of analysis under the impress of a unitary value. Rather, what I seek to do is to read for the social rather than through it. In reading for the social I embrace the ideological notion of using the literary as a means toward social enlightenment. Thus, I make literature the starting point of my reading of the social rather than the other way round. As I will underline later in this introduction, the social is not to be confused with society, since the second term implies specific historical configurations and the notion that it is possible to gain an unproblematic reflection of the essence of historical time through any of its temporal/ cultural instantiations. When I identify specific sociohistorical configurations, as I do in chapter 3 in relation to Ken Saro-Wiwa, and in chapter 4 with regard to post-apartheid South Africa, I do so to abstract different vectors of the social as they exhibit processes of transformation and contradiction in order to further fine-tune the perception of how these vectors might be related to the literary-aesthetic domain. I will provide a working definition of what I mean by the social later in this introduction, leaving the varied range of its meanings to be progressively elaborated in the chapters that follow. It is from these vectors of personal and not-so-personal translations of the literary-aesthetic domain for an understanding of the social that I derive my rationale for the term calibrations used here. From the OED, we find that the verb to calibrate means among other things (a) to determine the caliber of; (b) in specialized usage, to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities; and (c) to determine the correct position, value, capacity, etc., of something. The word’s etymology is traced to scientific texts of the nineteenth century, where it is evident that the term is associated with the perfection of instruments of measurement. There are two other senses that shadow this dominant scientific one, however. These are the sense of graduations or markings, and the sense of identifying the value of a phenomenon. This second sense is implicit in one of the meanings of the word caliber, from which calibrate and calibrations derive. As I use it here, calibrations, though etymologically a term referring to the fine-tuning of machines, is not meant to denote anything mechanistic or vulgarly instrumentalist. When I speak of calibrations, I intend it to mean that situated procedure of attempting to wrest something from the aesthetic domain for the analysis and better understanding of the social. In my view the social is coded as an articulated encapsulation of transformation, processes, and contradictions analogous to what we find in the literary domain. Departing from the mechanistic implications of its scientific usage, I want to emphasize instead the action of gradually identifying patterns for comparison across Introduction

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apparently disparate and incommensurable domains through a process of identifying the heterogeneous, multilayered, and interactive dimensions of such domains. To this end, the repeated fine-tuning of literary analysis is to be seen only as a starting point. In my reading there is a concomitant finetuning of a perspective on the social involved in the reading of the literary. Furthermore, I use the term calibrations to point toward the activity of the calibrator, the degree to which this fine-tuning procedure is dependent on a particular interpretative and subjective perspective. In reading for the social across the literary I do not intend to imply any simple notion of literature as a mirror. I suggest that literature be seen as a variegated series of thresholds and levels, all of which determine the production of the social as a dimension within the interaction of the constitutive thresholds of literary structure. It is in the dedication to identifying how the relations among these variegated thresholds encapsulate the social that calibrations makes sense as a method of reading. For me, the crucial index for evaluating any particular configuration of ideas is whether it provides ways of getting out of confusing habits of thought and whether it illuminates new ways of experiencing existence, whether this involves literary criticism, social analysis, and activism or the quotidian round of human relationships. But how is this kind of calibrated close reading to be distinguished from existing reading practices that have laid claim to reading literature for social analysis? In what ways does the theory of reading to be elaborated here complement and extend psychoanalytic, Marxian, or indeed general sociological approaches that have historically proved both versatile and insightful in yielding views about the relationship between literature and society? What is the need for yet another theory of reading? The answers to these questions will be sketched along two main axes, each illuminating the other but capable of standing on its own. These are, namely, (1) through a brief discussion of theories of mimesis and how these have sought to explicate the relation between literature and society, and (2) via a reformulation of the notion of context (historical, sociological, other) to define what I mean by the social. These two axes will encompass the peculiar textures of an interested and situated reading that takes ambiguity and contradiction as the main vector from which particularity is linked to the wider scale of the structure of interacting thresholds and domains.

Mimesis as Quest for Form Mimesis and representation have been among the most debated issues in Western literary history. When in Book X of the Republic Plato sought to Introduction

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banish literature from his ideal political organization, he highlighted, albeit in a negative way, the instrumentalist function of literature. Literature was dangerous because it led to disrespect for the gods. Furthermore, it had no real or direct access to the universe of ideal forms within the threetiered Platonic universe. Art was nothing but a failed mimesis at three removes from the domain of universal ideas. With Aristotle’s reflections in the Poetics, on the other hand, literature is rescued from this instrumentalist impasse and accorded a mode of analysis adequate to its own peculiar status. With Aristotle we get three ideas that have provided various emphases in the discussion of mimesis. These are, namely, that Poetry (the generic term to cover all branches of linguistic art) is a representation not of specific discrete entities in reality but of men in action. This directly contradicts Plato’s notion of mimesis. For Aristotle, the representation worthy of attention is that of a serious action (tragedy). The second key idea he bequeaths us is that the representation of serious action is best grasped as a structure whose governing core is plot. Note my somewhat paradoxical phrase “governing core,” conveying as it does the sense of plot as both transcendent (governing) and immanent (core). For one of the key questions that remains unresolved in the Aristotelian formulation is whether tragedy, and indeed literary art, is a form or a content, an issue to which I will return later in the discussion. Aristotle’s third key idea is that plotted in a certain way and with a requisite respect for a connected sequentiality and the coincidence of recognition with the reversal of the fortunes of the hero, the tragic representation serves to generate a series of emotions that it then channels into safety. Thus literature is accorded a therapeutic status that allows it to transcend Plato’s universe of forms. It is Aristotle’s notion of plot as a structured refraction of reality that strikes the attention. Plot as the soul of tragedy has been returned to many times since Aristotle, perhaps most significantly in recent times by Paul Ricouer, of whose work I will have more to say in chapter 6 in our discussion of “Literature and the Parables of Time.” In my view, however, plot is to be taken not in the Aristotelian terms of inexorable sequentiality but as the totality of all the discursive levels within the literary-aesthetic domain. More importantly, these levels have to be seen as interacting rather than stable such that the effort to isolate a single dimension for analysis must necessarily take account of the other levels that impinge on it and in fact allow it to become visible as an object of analysis in the first place. Thus, when we isolate characterization, chronology and sequence, metaphor, and the represented spatiotemporal coordinates of the literary universe and their implicit or explicit ethical dimension for examination, Introduction

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we conduct this isolation only as a heuristic surgical operation to allow us to talk about the specific literary phenomenon we are interested in. As I will be suggesting repeatedly, the isolation of literary phenomena and their subsequent reembedding within the general textual structure of the literary artifact are themselves useful methodological maneuvers also applicable to the analysis of social forms. The critical question with regard to a reading of the social, on the other hand, is how to isolate a particular cultural, political, or economic phenomenon for analysis while managing to avoid severing it from the complex and contradictory historical processes that allow it to be initially perceived as an object or objective field amenable to scrutiny. The manner in which textual levels interact is not the same as that in which different vectors of society interact. Thus, there are limitations to the homologies that can be drawn between the two domains. Two attitudes inform the way I have come to address the difference between literary forms and social phenomena. First is that I consider ambiguity and contradiction as constitutive of the social in the first place. I am thus open to varying perspectival modulations in the very process of analysis, as I will try to illustrate in the chapters that follow. The second attitude is that I conceive of the social detail as primarily intersectional or conjunctural such that the process of isolating it for analysis has to be inextricably tied to the means by which to see the forms of its embedding in a variety of structural relations. However, I also note that each social phenomenon requires its own form of epistemological grounding. The epistemological grounding of political violence, for instance, is not the same as that which underpins feelings of individual alienation, even though the first might lead directly to the second. The point is that each social phenomenon has a different way in which it expresses its determinative contradictions. Furthermore, the rate at which different contradictory elements alter and change historically are not the same. I will expand a bit more on this last point later in the discussion. With reference to Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, the undecidable transcendent/immanent status of literary plot leads to a number of interpretative fixations with regard to the meaning(s) of the literary text. Even as interpretation is perceived as contingent on the reading practices of particular readers, a central fixation in literary history is the idea that texts have a kernel. Repeatedly, the literary artifact is thought to have an inside, a kernel that requires disclosure, and the precise interests of the reader or critic in identifying this kernel are often obscured under the operations deployed for identifying that elusive kernel of meaning. At the same time, Introduction

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access to this kernel is always through the disseminated effects of literary discourse, some of whose vectors frequently lie outside the text itself. Even though literary criticism has consistently returned to this question of textual meanings, the issue of textual kernels has in my view been raised most fruitfully not from the domain of literary studies but from the analysis of the intersection of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the work of Slavoj Zˇizˇek. In his highly stimulating style, Zˇizˇek suggests in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) that there is a significant homology between Freud’s discussion of dreams and Marx’s analysis of the secret of the commodityform. To Zˇizˇek, for this homology to be fully evident, we have to eschew “the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form” (11). As he proceeds to show, in both thinkers the mechanism of the “kernel” either within dreams or in the commodity-form was discoverable at the point of focusing on the configuration of form itself as the significant phenomenon of analysis. These are the questions that Zˇizˇek seeks to answer with regard to Freud’s dream theory: “Why have the latent dream-thoughts assumed such a form, why were they transposed into the form of a dream?” (12). The answer, if we isolate a couple of formulas out of what is Zˇizˇek’s highly complicated argument, is that “the essential constitution of the dream is . . . thus not its ‘latent thought’ but this work (the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, the figuration of the contents of words or syllables) which confers on it the form of a dream.” Thus it is the specific configuration of the dream, the dreamrebus, that is significant, and not any latent or unconscious desire, which at any rate is often not “unconscious” at all but derives from anxieties that operate at the level of conscious thought. With respect to Marx and the commodity-form, a similar operation takes place: “the real problem is not to penetrate to the ‘hidden kernel’ of the commodity—the determination of its value by the quantity of the work consumed in its production—but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product.” Zˇizˇek continues: Classical bourgeois political economy has already discovered the “secret” of the commodity-form; its limit is that it is not able to disengage itself from this fascination in the secret behind the commodity-form—that its attention is captivated by labour as the true source of wealth. In other words, classical political economy is interested only in contents concealed behind the commodity-form, which is why it cannot explain the true secret, not the secret behind the form but the secret of this form itself. In spite of its quite Introduction

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correct explanation of the “secret of the magnitude of value,” the commodity remains for classical political economy a mysterious, enigmatic thing—it is the same as with the dream: even after we have explained its hidden meaning, its latent thought, the dream remains an enigmatic phenomenon; what is not yet explained is simply its form, the process by means of which the hidden meaning disguised itself in such a form. (15)

Following a comment made by Lacan, Zˇizˇek is arguing here that “Marx created the symptom.” But he goes a lot further than Lacan by suggesting that the hermeneutic procedures of both Freud and Marx have similar implications for the analysis of the form of society. It is in this perception of a particular homology in the work of the two thinkers, and in the pursuit of the formal configuration of elements as opposed to the kernel or secret that lies within the content, that Zˇ izˇek’s comments are most useful for our own discussion. As he points out, the surface structure of dream or commodity-form is a sublime condensation of the processes and relations between various phenomena. In the dream, these processes and relations may be described mainly in psychosomatic terms, whereas in the analysis of the commodity-form they have to be connected to tacit and not-sotacit social understandings. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the two domains are mutually exclusive in the genealogies of their form, one psychosomatic, the other social. On the contrary, the dream images are always both private and deeply social, while the value attributed to a commodity-form depends to a great extent on the psychological elisions of the materiality of the form with its assumed value, what Marxian critique has analyzed as reification. One way of converting Zˇizˇek’s observations to our own uses is to take what he says about the interaction between surfaces and kernels in terms of the dialectical relations between particularisms and thresholds. The quest for kernels must ultimately be tied to how dialectical relationships between elements are to be disclosed. The problematic he identifies as the quest for kernels can very well be rephrased as the quest for the particular, that from which the interplay of various levels of the text may be thought to settle into a hermeneutical configuration. In my view we should thus not merely eschew a quest for kernels; we are also of a necessity obliged to translate that pursuit into a quest for the contradictory intermeshing of various vectors that constitute the literary artifact. Particular literary details are only chimerically particular; their “real” particularity is to be seen as a function of the ways in which they intermesh with other elements within an overlapping and interacting literary structure. The interstices of Introduction

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these overlaps are thresholds between domains, and thus a particular detail is only interesting as it reveals the structural oscillations within the form of the literary phenomenon. The quest for a stable kernel is thus strictly speaking the quest for a mirage. In Toward a Sociology of the Novel (1989), Lucien Goldmann, reading Lukács, saw this particularism as the ethical dimension of the novel, which in his view essentially inscribed a degraded universe as that which helped refract the reified world of real life under capitalism. In my view every particular, whether ethical or otherwise, has to be seen simultaneously as both the expression of an implied particularity and the articulation of a threshold that opens out to other levels, some of which might serve to problematize and even distort the earlier perceived autonomy of the particular. The notion of particularity as threshold allows a variety of interpretative operations to take place. In the first place the isolation of the phenomenon, whether literary or, as we shall see, also social, is always seen to be provisionally related to something else in the first instance even if the thing that it is related to and the exact form of its relationality are not immediately evident at the start of the analytical procedure. For in a sense relationality is as much an attitude and a perspective as it is a feature of existence itself.5 Second, and from an entirely different direction, the notion of particularity as threshold provides an essential standpoint from which to perceive the problematic workings of identity. Thus in chapter 5, “Disability and Contingency,” I will note how the disabled body, while providing an inescapable particularity, is repeatedly converted into a threshold across which a variety of anxieties are played out by both the disabled and the normate. Identity is always a refraction of relationalities, some more strongly visible than others. Furthermore, the notion of particularity as threshold also helps us to take account of the many ways in which a represented particularity of collective identity, such as, for instance, the rituals of the tribal community of Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart, is subverted by being situated within a context that insists on the historical dissolution of the means by which transcendent communal values are asserted and validated. I will have more to say on the details of this operation in chapter 6. Finally, the focus on particularity as threshold allows us to sidestep one of the main pitfalls of Goldmann’s otherwise superb conception of the sociology of literary forms, namely, the too close and almost allegorical fit between the figure of the hero in the novel and the reified individual in reality. It is an inescapable fact of existence that even as there are no spoons Introduction

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without edges, there are no novels without characters, be they represented as man, beast, fowl, or tree. The problem is that characters and characterization often arrest literary analysis and prevent the full perception of the processes and contradictions that inhere at different levels of the textual discourse. In this respect my method of reading is ultimately counteranthropomorphic, seeking as it does to dissolve character within the processes and contradictions that shape it. Each textual element has to be seen primarily as the threshold of a problem or an enigma, rather than just as the disclosure of a discrete cultural or social verity as such.

The Caesura between Literature and Reality Aristotle’s notion of the mimetic effect of literature by no means exhausts the questions surrounding the concept. The issue persists as a problem in philosophy. Heidegger, for example, maintains that far from mimesis bringing us close to the truth, it produces an unbridgeable distance from it. In discussing Platonic mimesis, Heidegger notes that the concept is directed toward truth but based on an alienated distance from Truth. This suggests an ontological caesura between mimesis and reality. The artist can never reproduce the truth as similarity, but only as an aftereffect of the real: “ The mimesis is in its essence situated and defined through distance” (Heidegger 1979, 1: 215). If representation is based on an alienation from reality, it implies that mimesis resides in an incremental repetition of truth value; such “truth value” itself is functionally produced as a reiteration of reality after reality to the degree that the literary artifact comes to resemble reality only by degrees of rereadings and reiterations. And we should recall from our discussion in the previous section that the mimetic relation between representation and reality is not as mirror to nature but rather in the form of a mutual heterogeneity of interacting thresholds. In other words, the real and its representation mirror each other in their mutual subsegmental and systemic heterogeneity. It is in the repetition of this systemic heterogeneity after reality then that reality-effects are generated and lend the force of recognition to mimetic representation. In this schema of interpretation neither the real nor its representation should be taken as necessarily maintaining an ontological foundationalism in the degree to which they relate to each other. It is not so much that the real engenders representation and acquires priority over it or vice versa, as that reality itself acquires its texture only by way of the repetitions of its various representations in reality. In other words, as reality repeats itself in certain patterns, it allows the human mind not only to establish distinctions between Introduction

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a cat and a tree, say, but also to discern when the repeated patterns converge or diverge into historically significant differentiations. Critically also, the perceived reality-effects that might be said to inhere within the caesura between representation and reality are not innocent of ideological implications. Pierre Macherey puts the matter in metaphorical terms: If the mirror constructs, it is an inversion of the movement of genesis: rather than spreading, it breaks. Images emerge from this laceration. Elucidated by these images, the world and its powers appear and disappear, disfigured at the very moment when they begin to take shape. Hence the childish fear of the mirror which is the fear of seeing something else, when it is always the same thing. In this sense literature can be called a mirror: in displacing objects it retains their reflection. (1978, 134–35)

Macherey is here meditating on Lenin’s notion of the work of art as mirror to argue that the work of art is riddled with ideological contradictions. The work of art is as significant for what it reflects as for what it leaves out. More significantly, the representational surface, whether whole or fragmented, always generates the anxiety that it will produce something else. The something else might be an excess, a distortion, a dangerous supplement, or even a complete overthrow of how reality is normally felt and experienced. Thus we may also think of the caesura as a temporal space between an event and its representation, but one that can also fold into itself senses of the uncanny and of excess. This is something that I will return to in the chapter on South Africa. Taking seriously the notion of reality-effects being produced in language, we are bound to ask, for instance, what the literary representation of abstract entities such as jealousy might mean without a recourse to descriptions of jealous behavior from family, friends, or acquaintances, or in the newspapers, or even from our own liminal glimpses of loss and unrequited love.6 As affective responses can be seen to be as much part of the unpredictable experience of everyday life as they are of representation, we may proceed with an additional formulation regarding the relation between representation and reality: The literary representation is intelligible only as part of a network of reciprocal determinations. And it is this network of reciprocal determinations that undergirds and frames the production of realityeffects that I spoke of earlier. In other words, we understand concepts such as “jealousy” in literature because their meaning is reciprocally determined by other discourses that lie outside the literary-aesthetic domain but with Introduction

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which the literary artifact is obliged to interact in order to make any sense at all.7 Phenomenological experience is one of these vectors of reciprocal determination. Even if you have never read a book about the death of a loved one or the loss of an arm or leg due to whatever reasons and happen to suffer such a loss, chances are that wherever you come from, you will have mixed emotions of shock, horror, regret, and a sense of nostalgia for the loss of loved one or limb. The representation of these responses only serves to incrementally repeat them, giving the reality of the experience a tincture and emphasis peculiar to the form of the representation (a tragic representation would have a different import from, say, a satiric one). The problem of the caesura between reality and representation persists in the difficulty in ascertaining the minimum requirements for a representation to be actually perceived as invoking a reality beyond it. From Timothy Mitchell’s epigraph to this introduction about the elasticity of the term representation, we can gauge that what persists unanswered in many theories of the concept is what it is that allows a spectator or reader to recognize something as representing something else when the representational nexus relies on forms of conceptual translation of phenomena of apparently startling incommensurability (stone/man; novel/Dublin life). Furthermore, how is a representation to be recognized when the reader or spectator cannot necessarily be assumed to share all the assumptions of the poet, or, indeed, to readily recognize what she is doing when the poetic task is precisely to disrupt dominant modes of perception? In other words, how do we psychologically grasp the representation as relevant to anything else lying beyond it? The sketch of an answer to this last question may be gleaned from the writings of the art critic E. H. Gombrich, particularly in his seminal essay “Meditations on a Hobby Horse” (1985). As he puts it: The “first” hobby horse (to use eighteenth-century language) was probably no image at all. Just a stick which qualified as a horse because one could ride on it. The tertium comparationis, the common factor, was function rather than form. Or, more precisely, that formal aspect which fulfilled the minimum requirement for the performance of the function—for any “ridable” object could serve as a horse. If that is true we may be enabled to cross a boundary which is usually regarded as closed and sealed. For in this sense “substitutes” reach deep into biological functions that are common to man and animal. The cat runs after the ball as if it were a mouse. . . . The ball has nothing in common with the mouse except that it is chasable. In the language of the nursery the psychological function of “represenIntroduction

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tation” is still recognized. The child will reject a perfectly naturalistic doll in favour of some monstrously “abstract” dummy which is “cuddly.” It may even dispose of the element of “form” altogether and take to a blanket or an eiderdown as its favourite “comforter”—a substitute on which to bestow its love. (6)

Gombrich’s thesis here is that mimesis (the hobby horse) is the satisfaction of certain biological and psychological functions. These can apparently be satisfied when the work of art is even minimally mimetic of reality, a notion that makes his ideas particularly applicable to nonrealist theater. But in linking our mimetic satisfactions to the desires of childhood (an issue discussed in a different way by Aristotle), Gombrich raises a central idea more elaborately worked out by D. W. Winnicott in his psychoanalytical reflections on the place of transitional objects in a child’s development. As Winnicott persuasively argues, the child’s attachment to the cuddly toy is the adoption of the toy as a transitional object to take the place of the mother.8 Extending this, we might then argue that the work of art, dramatic or otherwise, is to an uncanny and disseminated degree a transitional object-process, a representational oasis to which we constantly return as we negotiate our alienations from reality. It is this that allows the well-known invitation proffered by the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V to make sense not merely as an invitation natural to the theatre but as something whose significance transcends it: But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vastly fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did afright the air at Agincourt? O pardon: since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. .... Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance. Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth. . . . Introduction

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Following Gombrich’s formulation, this invitation should be read as fulfilling the minimal function of invoking the real. However, its psychological function makes it more than just an invitation for us to lend our imaginary forces to the filling out of the empty space of the stage. It is rather an invitation for us to adopt the stage as a transitional object between appearance and reality. To put the matter formulaically, we could say that the caesura between representation and reality is bridged by a variety of psychological procedures, the most important being that we convert the literary or art object into a transitional object-process by which we prepare ourselves to be reinserted back into the world. From another perspective, Richard Shusterman, inspired by the work of John Dewey, maintains in Pragmatist Aesthetics (2000) that art’s essential function is to enhance the life and development of the human organism and to help people to cope with their lived environment. This, for him, requires art to be functional in a totality of relations and within a pragmatist conception that seriously takes aesthetic, conceptual, and even kinesthetic qualities into account. Thus pleasure, sensuality, and emotion are only thresholds for the larger integration of perception with feeling in our contemplation of art and its relationship to reality. Despite the potential radicalism of Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics, however, he still privileges the activity of an educated critical sensibility in outlining the pragmatist contours of a totalized art.9 It is not clear how a popular, as opposed to an elite, reception theory might account for the aesthetic domain and convert it, in the terms I have been outlining here, into a transitional object-process. For a shift to the active demotic participation of the spectator/reader, we have to turn to C. L. R. James’s fascinating discussion of the cricket spectator’s responses to the game as an aesthetic process. Much of James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) is devoted to answering the enigmatic question posed early in the book: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” He attempts to answer this question by elaborating a series of intersecting dimensions for the place of cricket in the West Indian imagination. Part of this simultaneously involves providing what might be described as a civilizational genealogy for the sport that reaches well beyond its emergence in the England of the nineteenth century. It is when he reaches the chapter suggestively titled “What Is Art” that we get the full measure of what he is attempting in establishing an extended civilizational genealogy for the sport. In this chapter James attempts a total integration of the sport into the aesthetic domain of high culture. He does this in such a way as to suggest that high culture has all along been deluded about its autonomy and its privileged Introduction

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access to the best of universal values. As he puts it, “cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community” (196). It is also first and foremost a dramatic spectacle and “belongs with the theatre, the ballet, opera and the dance” (196). The sport offers for James an important active and real-life process of what he has already taken to be the crucial Hegelian insight, the connection between thought and specific cultural phenomena. In the sport of cricket this is expressed in its sublime capacity to embody the relation of event to design, episode to continuity, diversity to unity, battle to campaign, and part to whole (197). It expresses these fertile and productive collocations in that each individual gesture in the game, though self-contained and explicable on its own terms, is also contributing to the total structure that is the aesthetic and technical form of the game. As he points out: “Within the fluctuating interest of the rise or fall of the game as a whole, there is this unending series of events, each single one fraught with immense possibilities of expectation and realization” (197). Furthermore, the “measured ritualism and the varied intensive activity” that take place in a cricket game serve to foreground the elemental qualities represented by the bare and slow repetitive structures of the game. As he further argues, right from the Greeks it is from the perception of the athletic body or the body as captured in potential motion that the earliest appreciations of art emerge. The body and its motions have always held a fascination for the human mind, witnessed not only in Greek sculpture but also in early cave drawings of the human body in motion. For the spectator, these elemental structures are continually grasped as part of the expressive aesthetic potential of the game of cricket: “What is to be emphasized is that whereas in the fine arts the image of the tactile values and movement, however effective, however magnificent, is permanent, fixed, in cricket the spectator sees the image constantly re-created, and whether he is a cultivated spectator or not, has standards which he carries with him always” (205). Coupled with this is the constant recognition of the interpretation of technique, thus making the ordinary spectator not merely a consumer of the sport but an active interpreter of the processes of its articulation on the field of sport. Thus, for James, the sport of cricket brings the ordinary spectator into the heart of the best aesthetic impulses of civilization, but this time not through the art gallery or museum but intermixed in the peculiarly appropriate form of the popular sport of cricket. James inverts established priorities by suggesting that it is the popular game of cricket that best articulates the special contours of the aesthetic realm, thus providing the ordinary cricket spectator with a means of integrating the celebration of an ordinary leisure activity with the activation Introduction

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of the best of civilizational and aesthetic values. For James, his very method of explicating the aesthetic value of cricket implies that the sport and its spectators actually activate the dialectic of idea and phenomenon, thought and process. James thus believes that the ordinary viewer or spectator is himself consciously responsible for the dialectical activation of the meaning of the competitive sport rather than being a passive consumer of mass culture.10 Following James, we might then assert that the caesura between representation and reality is not occupied just by networks of reciprocal determinations and given texture by the incremental repetition of the “realityeffects” that materialize through these networks. In certain instances the caesura encourages and indeed requires the activation of its intermeshed dialectical elements through the active participation of the audience/reader/ spectator. Given the nature of different literary or cultural genres, it would also be necessary to identify the specific ways in which the caesura proffers, enables, or even inhibits such a participation. Taken collectively, all these dimensions of literary and cultural objects help to further delineate their function as transitional object-processes. Finally, the grasping of a work of art as a transitional object-process is also ultimately an ethical one, which itself often requires a particular form of invested (ideologically aware) interpretation. I will have more to say on the ethical standpoints implied in invested interpretations in the next section.

Contextures and Calibrations So far I have strategically avoided defining exactly what I mean by the social, leaving its definition to be largely implied in the relations that have been suggested with the literary-aesthetic domain (subsegmental heterogeneities, interacting thresholds of particularities, details and processes, etc.). It is now time to pose and answer the question of what the social might be in this account. In various accounts of literary history the literary text has been interpreted as a form of social chronicle, thus being made to yield direct insights into discrete sociological forms beyond the literary. This has by no means remained uncontested, since it is also patently the case that literary form transcends its context, or repeatedly confounds straightforward contextualization. In another kind of literary sociology, the literary text is perceived as part of the expressive ensemble of a class fraction. This implies that the individual literary articulation harbors traces of its collective provenance (see Cros 1988; Amuta 1989). This generates efforts to identiIntroduction

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fy the particular syntax of such sociocultural forms, whether they are ultimately relatable to classes or other methodologically definable collectivities. Additionally the social has also been seen as produced by the referential relays within a discursive ensemble in which different fragments “speak” to each other across the interplay of knowledge, ideology, and power. This is essentially the view of Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists, and of other literary and cultural theorists such as Richard Terdiman (1985) and, in a different but related direction, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (1997). One of the difficulties that different methods of literary history and literary sociology face is that of imposing arbitrary certainties on contexts that are often open-ended and heterogeneous. In this regard the act of contextualizing necessarily becomes a strategic act of selection and depends on the ideology, cultural background, and even idiosyncrasies of the reader. The effort at objectivity about individual and specific reading practices is ultimately designed to suggest that these practices are methodologically applicable in other reading contexts. As Gallagher and Greenblatt note in Practicing New Historicism (2000): “ The interpreter must be able to select or to fashion, out of the confused continuum of social existence, units of social action small enough to hold within the fairly narrow boundaries of full analytical attention, and this attention must be unusually intense, nuanced and sustained” (26, emphasis added). The operational phrases in this formulation for me are “confused continuum of social existence” and “units of social existence.” Looked at more closely, these two phrases reveal a contradiction. If the continuum of social existence is confused, by what means do we decide on the units of social action on which to focus our analytical attention? These units of social action may not be units in any real sense at all, as in the confused continuum they may actually be processual, always in motion and on the threshold of dissolving into something else. But the point to be taken from Gallagher and Greenblatt’s formulation is the inescapable necessity of the strategic bounding of an analytical field. Pushing this idea even further, we might add the observation that every social context identified as providing the “background” to the representation is already saturated with the interests and perspectives of the analyst. This is by no means a novel idea, as it has been a central debate among historians for a long time. The point I want to highlight here, however, is the degree to which the social context adduced for a literary representation is always itself a strategic selection out of a process of flux. The social and its cognate, society, are therefore analytically bounded fields in the eyes of the literary critic. An economist, for Introduction

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example, does not adduce the same context for responses to oppressive taxation as does a cultural historian discussing representations of taxation riots, even though they may overlap in drawing on similar archival sources. One of the risks that historically informed critical models such as New Historicism face is that of making the historical the servant of the aesthetic by suggesting that it is history and society that hold the key to the interpretation of aesthetic phenomena. History and society are then valuable precisely, perhaps even primarily or exclusively, to the extent that they reveal the secret kernel of the aesthetic, which can then be taken as the true object of critical value.11 It is not just the myth of the kernel that has to be rejected but the very idea of reading from the outside in, since the outside is in reality itself the reification of an idea of the kernel, but one which is in the end placeless and having to be invoked to validate a particular modality of interpretation. I do not note this to suggest that historical contextualization is ultimately useless but to expose the degree of tautology that is at the heart of the enterprise of contextualization in the first place. It was on reading Althusser’s outline of a Marxist view of history that the necessity for strategically separating the social from society was first clarified for me. In the essay titled “The Errors of Classical Economics: An Outline for a Concept of Historical Time” (1997), Althusser launches a critique of Hegel’s notion of history as a way of establishing a distinction between a Hegelian and a Marxist interpretation of the historical. The key aspect of his critique of Hegel is that Hegel’s notion of time implies that every moment can be seen as an instantiation of History (i.e., of Spirit). This leads to two implications: first is that a methodological slicing of time in the form of periodization potentially exhausts the historical project, since the slice always bears within it the form of the totality of History or Spirit. Second is that the instantiation of Spirit implies a synchronic tyranny that disenables the perception of aspects of future time within the present. For Althusser, on the other hand, the structure of the social whole cannot be taken for granted but has to be insistently produced. This is how he puts it: “[W]e can retain from Hegel precisely what masks from us this empiricism which he had only sublimated in his systemic conception of history. We can retain this result produced by our brief analysis: the fact that the structure of the social whole must be strictly interrogated in order to find in it the secret of the conception of history in which the ‘development’ of this social whole is thought; once we can understand the apparently ‘problem-less’ relationship between it and the conception of historical time in which this conception is reflected” (97). The problem of Introduction

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the dialectical representation of History will be raised more fully in chapter 6, but for now I would like to note that the social in my terms is always an object produced out of an interrogation and thus has to be read for. The necessity in my mind to strategically separate the social from society (context, history, etc.) is also to make clear that the social that is being read for across the literary is part of an anticipatory project. If the social that is read for in any text is of any value, then it also implies that the insights derived from local texts may also be translated into different contexts and times. This of course has repeatedly been done with canonical texts such as Shakespeare’s, but without any clear methodological grounding. The grounding of this procedure has often come from appeals to Shakespeare’s universalism rather than to the ideologically saturated procedures that motivate such transpositions in the first place. But the calibrated readings I propose here are not to be seen as the corrective to an absence, an aporia in the translation and dissemination of canonical figures. On the contrary, Calibrations is meant to make plain a methodological predisposition and a detailed attitude to process and contradiction. As I have argued it, an interdisciplinary paradigm has to be seen as a necessity enjoined by the constitutive ambiguities of the social itself. Furthermore, any concrete social situation described in the literary text is to be grasped primarily as a problem or an enigma whose purpose is not (solely) the disclosure of an authentic cultural life but rather the embedded thematic of change, process, and contradiction. The form in which these are to be discerned is through a focus on the variety of relations established between the various elements in the text and between these and the several discursive contexts that might be dialogically adduced for the text, irrespective of where the text originally came from. Literature and the social are related to each other because they mutually mirror systemic heterogeneities that manifest themselves as constellated and reconstellating thresholds.

Calibrations and Dialectical Modalities Dialectical embedding becomes central to how I read both literature and society. My view is that any phenomenon, literary or otherwise and no matter how apparently innocent or irrelevant, can be made to speak to a wide ensemble of processes, relations, and contradictions. But dialectical embedding also implies other things. Historically the concept of the dialectic has often been used to register the interaction of two terms of a polarity or binary opposition, the trajectory of their interaction leading Introduction

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either to transcendence or atrophy, depending on one’s view of history. The first view is what marks Hegelian thought, and is of course taken in a more radical direction by Marxist thinking. The second is what informs certain tragic views of history, great examples in nineteenth-century historiography being those of Tocqueville and to a degree Burckhardt.12 From a literary perspective, one such tragic interpretation of the dialectic is also found in Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits (1985), which reads like an uncanny mapping of the historical dialectic of Latin American political history but leads to the total defeat of the forces of progress.13 The basis of the dialectic is the conceptualization of progress.14 As developed in Marxist thought, the three main vectors of the dialectic are (1) the struggle and unity of opposites, (2) the transition of quantity into quality, and (3) the negation of the negation. These three concepts form the bases for the analysis of class society.15 As a general rule, however, the preliminary theoretical maneuver in dialectical thinking involves the identification of the interaction of binary oppositions, leading to the emergence of a third term, whether these binary oppositions are named in the Hegelian form of Being, Essence, and Notion or in the Marxist form of Labor, Capital, and Exchange. But what if we abandon the unidirectional binaristic fixations of the dialectic and instead view the two poles as containing within themselves interrelating subsegments that are themselves in a dialectical relationship to various other subsegments in the other pole(s)? The subsegmental dialectical interactions to be identified in any configuration may not coincide at all times with the dominant contradiction governing the totality of the relation between the binary poles. To proceed in this way would be to take seriously the Althusserian view of the need to observe the many variations to the structure of the whole that themselves help disclose the contestatory temporalities inherent within such wholes. As he puts it: “ This time, as a complex ‘interaction’ of the different times, rhythms, turnovers, etc., that we have just discussed, is only accessible in its concept, which, like every other concept is never immediately ‘given,’ never legible in visible reality: like every concept this concept must be produced, constructed” (1977, 101).16 We have already seen how his critique of Hegel insists on the requirement to interrogate the structure of the social whole and never to take it for granted. The distinction to be drawn, as he argues, is that between the multiple temporalities of a given moment of time and a contradictory dialectical structure of the social whole that might be abstracted from a grasp of these temporalities. Crucially, this heterogeneous dimension of time has itself to be produced, precisely because as an immanent Introduction

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process, it is itself not self-evident. One might even add, drawing on an apparently mundane observation of everyday life, that historical process is not like a traffic light, whose color codings are regulated by law and a tacit social understanding, thus rendering the interaction of different categories of road users immediately comprehensible and manageable as such. On the contrary, historical process, as much as the social whole, has to be interrogated into view. Following Althusser, we must note that given a particular historical configuration, the interaction of subsegmental levels of the sociohistorical form may very well threaten to either overthrow or at least distort the existing dialectical order, which in its own way is always attempting to assert a dominant. Diagrammatically, a reconstellated notion of the dialectic might look something like this: Pole A Aa Ab Ac Ad

Pole B Ba Bb Bc Bd

Dialectic of Poles A & B AaBb AbBc AcBd AdBa

and so on. Under the dominant logics of poles A and B proliferate subsidiary logics. The alphabetization is meant to convey an idea of potential hierarchies in the constitutive subsegments, even though in real social analysis the subsegments of a social form cannot always be so easily hierarchized. When different subsegments interact with other subsegments, they produce a field of tension that acts as the potential transfer of a field of force beyond the force field determined by the governing logic of the initial binaristic interaction. And the conjoined > (greater than) and < (less than) signs in the dialectically interacting levels of A and B are meant to show the potential negation of hierarchies within such interactions. These interactions can be multiplied across a whole range of phenomena and do not need to be limited solely to the analysis of two interacting polarities. The particular usefulness of this reconstellated model of dialectical analysis is that it allows a grasp of social phenomena as essentially conjunctural, and therefore displaying constitutive elements at different rates of historical transformation. (Note also that a constellation cannot be seen as such unless each element of the constellation is seen in relation to the totality.) This model also allows us to reformulate an important observation of Raymond Williams concerning how to grasp the nature of residuality and emergence in the analysis of social change. He states this programmatically, Introduction

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along with his highly suggestive notion of structures of feeling in Marxism and Literature (1977). In his discussion residuality is not to be taken as synonymous with the “archaic,” nor is the emergent with the “new” in social phenomena. On the contrary the two terms are to be seen in the light of historical configurations that gradually assimilate new values to the dominant hegemonic order while marginalizing others. But the relation between the two is not to be seen as a cycle but rather as a dialectical mutation in which a variety of “old” and “new” ideas are sometimes reconstellated to produce new perspectives and realities. Between the residual and the emergent lies oppositionality, because essentially the emergent is what is oppositional within the dominant order and what may or may not be allowed to come to full fruition. The difficulty he notes for a theoretical analysis, however, is that both residual and emergent are not visible as discrete entities but only as processes within a social structure that is always struggling to mask its dominant forms as natural. With the reconstellated idea of the dialectic, an extension of Althusser’s and Williams’s mode of analysis becomes possible and indeed necessary. Consider, as a political example, the current state of the British Conservative Party. In August 2001 the Conservatives suffered their second consecutive humiliating landslide defeat in a general election. The whole party is now agreed that something has got to change and change drastically if they are not to be swept into permanent oblivion. Taking Conservative Party ideology as a conjunctural discursive phenomenon, however, reveals some fascinating subsegmental contradictions. At one level, the party is generally agreed on defining a more all-embracing agenda, redefining, for example, the terms by which they are to be seen by multiracial and nontraditional family set-ups. At this level of Conservative Party discourse, one notes significant shifts in ideology endorsed by both right and centrist wings of the party, represented as I write by the main contenders for the Conservative Party leadership, Ian Duncan-Smith and Kenneth Clarke. However, at another level, the party is incapable of transforming the subsegmental but recalcitrant tenet of sovereignty. This then determines their attitude to Europe and in fact hijacks all current debates and diverts them into different refractions of sovereignty. The Conservative Party, traditionally the upholders of British sovereignty, is now being undone by that same central tenet of Conservative ideology. Thus the debates about whether or not to join the Euro and about the threat of a European super-state become almost a repetition compulsion within the party. Nothing whatsoever is allowed to escape being connected to the great question of Europe. But precisely because of this repetition compulIntroduction

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sion, the other subsegmental levels of Conservative Party discourse get assimilated to dimensions of the European question. Thus it is that even though the party wants to open itself up to a multicultural and multiracial Britain, the question of asylum seekers becomes a way of refracting the weak security checks across Europe that allow such people to reach the shores of Britain. By imperceptible degrees the question of asylum seekers is fed into what constitutes the true British familial unit. This traditional family unit is not thought to include Pakistanis and their “desperate” extended families who seek all means fair or foul to enter Britain. Indeed, at the Conservative Party spring conference in March, William Hague, then Party Leader, warned of the real danger of Britain becoming a “foreign land” under a second Labour term. He had in mind the Labour Party’s strong pro-European stance, but it was an easy step from this sentiment to the views of Conservative backbencher John Townend, whose comments a week later suggested that foreigners had made Britain a “mongrel nation.”17 This obviously was a strategic echoing by the backbencher of Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, when Powell warned that the influx of West Indian immigrants was threatening to do major damage to British identity. Thus, the issue of sovereignty has persistently hijacked all other questions and deformed them into a dimension of identity, even though at the higher level of abstraction the Conservative Party is desperate for change. The important thing to note in this analysis is not that the Conservative Party is on the whole resistant to change but that certain subsegments of its discourse become the center points around which resistance to change is crystallized. And the resistance is crystallized not because sovereignty in itself is a reactionary concept, but because within the conjunctural order of the entire discourse, it becomes the dimension that changes most slowly, and thus accrues to itself sundry forms of resistance to the general rates of change at other levels of the discourse. This resistance then threatens to atrophy the pace and direction of the evolution and change of the entire discursive framework. Critically also, and in a further extension of the reconstellated model of the dialectic, Conservative Party discourse may be seen as dialectically related to Labour Party ideology. Commentators have noted the uncanny resemblance between the policies of the Labour Party and those of the Conservatives, down even to New Labour’s surprising maintenance of similar spending plans in their first term of office despite their massive and decisive mandate. But this is not just due to New Labour’s clever hijacking of the center ground of British politics. It is, rather, the fact that they have rid Introduction

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the Conservative Party of a central means by which to produce ideological negations of the dominant social imaginary that informs the political order in the first place. Since key dimensions of the society (the City, the increasingly Internet-savvy and multiculturally tolerant youth, a new breed of politicians and cultural activists) have now embraced change as absolutely essential to placing Britain at the forefront of global society and politics, the party that has best articulated structural change within itself has then become the expression of the desired and taken-for-granted social logic that lies on the outside of the political. Thus, Conservative Party discourse has to contend with the fact that whichever way the party turns takes it in the same direction as their arch rivals, that is, in the direction of more radical structural changes within the party as a means of reflecting the pace of change outside it and which the Labour Party has made it its business to articulate at every turn. And this is so even if the articulations of change within New Labour are at certain levels a masking of the old order (privatization, the status of the monarchy, the position on disarmament). And because certain subsegmental elements of the Conservative Party’s discourse are changing at different rates, the dialectical fallout is that the Conservative Party comes across as more reactionary than it already is. There are important distinctions to be noted in the differential workings of the literary-aesthetic domain and the social with regard to such a reconstellated model of the dialectic. Within the literary-aesthetic universe, the various interacting levels may be seen as producing contradictory vectors of progress and change only as they relate to specific generic conventions. Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for instance, defines multiple ways in which the hero is to be seen. Sometimes he is the exemplar of the romance quest hero, at others clearly a madman entrapped in the climate of a desperate idealism. Different vectors of the text allow such readings, sometimes becoming mutually reinforcing, at others contradictory. But the expansive genre of the picaresque and romance quest allows this to happen. This is not the case with genres that are politically overloaded and programmatic. A case in point is Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Petals of Blood (1977), an exemplary form of socialist realism regarding the relation between rural and urban Kenya after Independence. The novel outlines the evolution of a peasant/working-class consciousness and explores the processes by which the individual self-discovery of the four central characters is aligned to an epic coming-into-being of the ordinary people. The key weakness with this text, however, is the degree to which this impulse produces what I want to elaborate in chapter 2 as the will-toIntroduction

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transcendence. Simply put, this is an impulse in which all contradictions are assimilated to a dominant logic and effaced as contradictions. Achille Mbembe describes this impulse succinctly in his discussion of what he describes as “divine libido”: “ The imagined conflict cannot concern either the ultimate meaning of itself or the ways in which meaning is constituted, since, like this meaning itself, the modalities of its constitution belong to the system of unquestioned truths that are assumed to be unchallenged” (2001, 215).18 This idea is in certain respects akin to what Bakhtin (1968) describes as monologism, the pressure in novelistic discourse to submit all levels of the representation to the organizing perspective of the narrator, even if this narrator is dedicated to representing different characters with contradictory perspectives. However, in the terms in which I will be elaborating the concept, the will-to-transcendence is more fundamentally political, because it also names an inherently totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that Petals of Blood is totalitarian or indeed celebrates any form of political totalitarianism. Quite the opposite. Rather, to say that it exemplifies the concept of the will-to-transcendence is to note the degree to which all levels of the text, from characterization right through to the metaphor of the peasants’ journey to the city, are all produced so as to drive the dominant socialist impulse of the novel. There is no alternative perspective that is not ultimately assimilated to this overarching impulse. Thus all contradictions are in a crucial sense shaped in such a way as to disclose a particular truth of the historical consciousness of the peasants. And different levels of the narrative discourse are corralled into service in such a way as to render them almost mechanistic. One is baffled, for example, at the degree of garrulousness of the various characters. At the least opportunity they regale their companions with tales of their past, sometimes uninterrupted for four or five pages. This process is repeated again and again, and becomes almost an evangelical refrain of anguished recall (the characters’ tragic past being the main idea that is conveyed in these speechdialogues).19 In terms of certain historical conjunctures, the will-to-transcendence has also to be seen as a necessary motor of historical development. It was absolutely crucial for the proper prosecution of the anti-apartheid struggle, for instance, that an intractable desire for the overthrow of the regime focalized all energies and shaped all efforts around the nexus of a will-totranscendence. The desire for a multiracial and more just society became a foundational requirement for the epochal inception and maintenance of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela’s speech at the Rivonia Trial in 1964 Introduction

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in which he stated his preparedness to die for freedom becoming one of the mantras that echoed throughout the anti-apartheid movement.20 However, after the fall of apartheid, the entire apparatus supporting the will-totranscendence requires rigorous problematization. Whereas during the anti-apartheid struggle the will-to-transcendence was shaped around questions of democracy, equality, and justice for all irrespective of color, in post-apartheid South Africa this impulse now coalesces around the issue of absolute victimhood. Politically, the move from Mandela’s discourse of reconciliation and forgiveness to Mbeki’s African Renaissance and restitution also signals a new foundationalism. Following the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the claims to absolute victimhood are translated into the foundational myths of secular reason: I suffer(ed), therefore I am. The “I am” of the formulation folds into itself the right to speak as a South African. It is clear that with the new historical reconfiguration, the will-to-transcendence exemplified in this form of foundationalism can only work to subvert the discourse of public reason. If a reconstellated dialectical interpretation is to be taken as central to the practice of calibrated reading to be elaborated in this book, then it has to be noted that the contours of the social that the literary is calibrated to disclose will be established in these pages only progressively, and case by case. There is no uniform way in which I specify a context within which a particular dimension of the literary-aesthetic domain is brought forward for dialectical interaction with the social, since each literary-aesthetic expression establishes a structured representational constraint on the variegated levels of the social that its own interacting levels heterogeneously reflect. Thus in chapter 1, on the relations between history, literature, and anthropology, the context is established for the interaction of the three disciplines through a close reading of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), a text that situates itself uneasily on the interstice between these three disciplines, and that explores the implications for a conception of the social self that this interstitial relation suggests. Chapter 2, on the other hand, attempts to generate a socially dispersed discursive context for the conjunctural concept of culture heroism in Africa. For this, a whole array of forms is brought into view including anecdotes, urban myths and legends, and stories about politicians and market women. The main thrust of the chapter is precisely the transforming and transformative nature of certain social imaginaries in Africa. Whatever thick description of culture heroism is enabled by this assemblage of ambiguous narrative forms is generated in order to disclose the conjunctural and heterogeneous nature of the concept. Introduction

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Chapter 3 is on the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. This chapter is the most historical of all, yet it reads a slice of Nigeria’s postcolonial history in a tropological manner, in this case as the articulation of a tragic conception of history. Elements of tragedy as a process rather than merely as a literary genre are outlined to show the degree to which the African postcolony, exemplified in this case by the contradictions that have shaped Nigerian history, produces a tragedy unerringly mimetic of the tragedies we encounter in literary texts. In Saro-Wiwa’s case, however, the tragedy of his hanging calls for action rather than mere contemplation. Chapter 4 centers on South Africa and on what I describe as the symbolization compulsions that inform the post-apartheid quest for truth and reconciliation. To focus the concept of symbolization compulsions, I read the current social context of South Africa as being prefigured in the literary representations of madness. The problematic in these textual representations is often the difficulties of coping with trauma and the elusive nature of the referential locus of the traumatic event. I then translate this problematic of the referential locus into an analysis of contemporary debates about restitution in post-apartheid South Africa to suggest the degree to which all foundational statements (nation, citizenship, history, progress) are potentially undermined by the difficulty of identifying the referential locus of a tragic history that keeps engendering excessive meanings. Calibration in this case involves a careful abstraction of general principles from the literary for application to a real-life context that is fraught with anxieties and difficulties about which direction the society should go after apartheid. (After here is to be taken in both its senses of “subsequent to” and “following” as in the phrase “he followed closely after her.”) Chapter 5 centers on representations of physical disability in literature. Here the emphasis is on what I describe as narrative nervousness, that is, the proliferation of signs of linguistic or metaphorical tension and collapse around the figure of the disabled. My contention here is that these signs of narrative nervousness are mimetic of the discomfort that often attends encounters between the disabled and the normate. This focus offers a way of conceptualizing the social force of the relation between fractured bodies and the trajectories of sociality that ultimately assign them specific roles within social imaginaries. As this discomfort is cross-cultural, my hope is that the analysis here will provide a first step toward thinking about a comparative sociology of attitudes to the disabled that would take in different times and cultures. Chapter 6 is an attempt to think through the philosophical category of Time and will take us back to the problematic of dialectical History raised by Althusser. Drawing on Paul Ricouer, Walter Introduction

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Benjamin, and Dipesh Chakrabarty and reading Achebe, Soyinka, Borges, Morrison, and others, I attempt to show how literature gives us different dimensions of social time. These literary representations of Time frame it simultaneously as a problem of thought as well as one of lived experience. Even though the readings in this book center predominantly on African literary texts and contexts, I have sought to provide a more wideranging purview to the readings. Thus the opening and closing chapters provide an outer framework for thinking about the historical inscription of the individual on the one hand and the phenomenological experience of abstract philosophical categories on the other. The chapters that fall between these then situate the contradictory processes of the social in various discursive contexts. Each chapter represents a facet of the calibrated reading practice and is capable of standing on its own, though connections are established explicitly within and between chapters to help situate them within a wider methodological framework. I hope that collectively they will help to indicate the variety of ways in which I have read for the social. Toward this exploration, I now proffer Prufrock’s enigmatic invitation in the opening of Eliot’s poem: “Let us go then, you and I . . .”

Introduction

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1 Literature, Anthropology, and History in Ghosh’s In an Antique Land Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Consider the words of Grace Paley in her introduction to Soulstorm (1974), a collection of short stories by Clarice Lispector: “It is not unusual for writers to be children of foreigners. There’s something about the two languages engaging one another in the child’s ears that makes her want to write things down. She will want to say sentences over and over again, probably in the host or dominant tongue. There will also be a certain amount of syntactical confusion which, if not driven out of her head by heavy schooling, will free the writer to stand a sentence on its chauvinistic national head when necessary. She will then smile.” The girl’s wry smile is not to be seen as a relief from the burden of identity in an exilic universe. On the contrary, that seemingly triumphant smile spreading across two languages is the cipher of a lifelong process of diasporic negotiations between sometimes overlapping but often contradictory conceptual and affective responses to the world codified in particular language and discursive forms. And even the Saussurean recognition that languages have no positive terms but are systems of differential signs does not erase the fact

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that words such as family, love, and death have different evocative potentials in different ennunciatory, linguistic, and discursive contexts. As I noted in the introduction, education in Africa always involved the translation of the language of school into the languages of everyday life and vice versa. Often, these languages represented different affective and discursive domains, and it was only long effort, both conscious and unconscious, and with a lot of conceptual mistranslations along the way, that allowed us to shape meaningful passages through our social lives. This process led to various degrees of alienation, some productive and others not so productive. Even to this day, I do not find myself entirely free of an anxiety of mistranslation. After years of living in the West, I still think of postcards when I see falling snow through a closed window. Postcards provided the earliest frame in which I first saw falling snow, and this particular “framing” of snow has stayed with me ever since. The entire apparatus of alienation that comes from having to translate between different languages and conceptual apparatuses is described by Benedict Anderson as fundamental to the inception of nationalism.1 In an essay titled “Exodus” (1994), he argues that the condition and sense of “exile” is the most productive locus for nationalist consciousness. This is an extension of the discussion he had already generated with his wellknown Imagined Communities (1983). His focus in the essay is on nineteenthcentury nationalism in Europe, but the perspectives are relevant to a general discussion of senses of exile and alienation. The sense of “exile” in Europe, he notes, was generated essentially along three main axes: (1) urbanization and the feeding of big industrial cities with labor from the countryside (e.g., Manchester in the 1850s); (2) education and its implications for social restratification, especially as the learning of a prestigious, class-marked language led to the rationalization of social and political hierarchies of vernaculars and dialects that were increasingly linked to employment possibilities and opportunities for social mobility; and (3) print capitalism and the circulation of images and ideas. To extend Anderson’s argument to our context, we would have to add the dimensions of immigration and diaspora, two processes that lead to different degrees of alienation for various people across the world today. The claim to alienation and an “exilic” sensibility is not to be confused with any real or putative condition of physical exile, even though there is enough evidence that physical exile does inflect creativity through a prism of alienation and nostalgia. On a personal note, however, the entire process of adjustment to contradictory knowledges, first as an African having to translate concepts between different languages, and more recently as an G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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immigrant in the West, has often drawn me toward texts that help to situate different dimensions of the question of alienation. More importantly, for this chapter, the concept of alienation becomes a particularly suggestive interdisciplinary interstice between literature, anthropology, and history. The text I am going to use to illustrate this productive interstice is Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), a book that is disciplinarily hybrid, centering as it does on the different author-functions of an Indian anthropologist doing fieldwork among rural Egyptians, even while raising interesting questions about familiarity, alienation, and the place of these in the production of an interdisciplinary knowledge. It is also a book about the location of the social self within the context of transnational mobility.

Alienation Effects: Social Anthropology and the Writing of Loss Cultural anthropology is a discipline that has come under severe scrutiny in the past forty or so years. The breakdown in the boundaries between a Western Self and an anthropological Other, the gradual empowerment of formerly colonized peoples in challenging representations about themselves, and the general suspicion of metanarratives that emerged out of the “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s have all had their part to play in the rigorous questioning of the discipline from both within and outside its own boundaries. And at least from James Clifford and George E. Marcus’s landmark Writing Culture (1986), scholars in anthropology and other disciplines have highlighted the writerly nature of anthropology, the degree to which its key tool of representation—the ethnography—shares crucial similarities with other forms of representation that are not wholly factual, such as the literary text, the autobiography, and the travel narrative. The potential crossovers between anthropology and literature have inspired various interdisciplinary insights. When Stephen Greenblatt writes of the impact that Clifford Geertz had on his intellectual formation, he identifies the anthropologist’s fruitful deployment of a form of cultural reading as that which he found most inspirational for the New Historicism that he was later to be credited with shaping. Indeed, Greenblatt (1999) makes an explicit comparison between Geertz’s essay on “thick description” in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953) to suggest that they both shared something of the capacity to read details and embed them in larger structures of historical complexity. And when literary critics read Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, the force of his example is taken to reside in his capacity to unearth a G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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“deep-structure” to culture not dissimilar to the deep-structures that literary critics routinely attend to in the literary text. Lévi-Strauss’s inspiration is itself evident in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1972), a text whose relevance is to be felt whenever one switches on the television and sees the peculiar cultural devices deployed in televisual advertising. On the other hand, as Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey Peck note in their introduction to Culture/Contexture (1996), from the many borrowings between the two disciplines over the past twenty years has come the realization that both disciplines are mutually alive to their extrinsic and intrinsic contextures; contexture being the term used by Hobbes to connote both the texture that surrounds and the texture that constitutes. However, despite the many cross-disciplinary borrowings between literature and anthropology both in relation to discursive sensibilities and critical procedures, I want to suggest that the “writing culture” model of relating the two disciplines has hitherto led to a significant diversion from other levels at which the two disciplines might fruitfully be compared. Indeed, I want to argue, perhaps controversially, that a much more productive way of seeing the similarities and differences between the two is not so much in their shared practices of representation but rather in their mutual negotiation of different categories of alienation. The focus on alienation obviously requires an alertness to the shifts in analytical scale involved in detailing questions of subjectivity, selfhood, and agency and their relationship to process, contradiction, and change that, as I argue in the introduction, permit the proper perception of the relation between textual representation and reality. Alienation as a concept has a complex history. This history may be schematically divided into sociological and psychological approaches. Sociological approaches tend to emphasize alienation as the separation of individuals from themselves and from the object of their activity; their deprivation or renunciation of real claims of identity, satisfaction, harmony, control, or legitimacy over what they do or how they do it. These are expressed conceptually in terms of either estrangement or reification (Bryce-Laporte and Thomas 1976). Among the more sociologically inclined theorists of alienation may be numbered Lewis Feuer, George Litchenstein, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and others. Psychological theories of alienation focus on the symptoms that point toward a condition of alienation. These include at the extreme madness and disorientation, and more mildly, boredom, discomfort, nostalgia, and even disgust. The scale and intensity of these feelings are critical in defining a sense of alienation, any of them arising out of the systemic disorder inherent in a rapidly changing society, the collapse of traditional vectors of self-validation, the persistent G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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commodification of selfhood and agency, and the general speed of modernization. As I will argue in chapter 4, a persistent sense of systemic disorder may also lead to feelings of the uncanny, something that leads us to a rereading of Freudian psychoanalytical categories in relation to the crisis of the coming-into-being of post-apartheid South Africa. For now, however, let us note a more positive aspect of alienation, what Haizel Weideman suggestively refers to as the alienation built into acculturation processes that affect minority groups, migrants, and, one might add in the context of this chapter, anthropologists. As she puts it: “[A]n alienated individual is one who, in varying degrees, ceases to accept without question some of the premises upon which his central enculturative experience was based. Alienation can, therefore, be a slightly, moderately, or thoroughly disturbing condition, depending upon whether or not it serves as a transitional mechanism or becomes a permanent state of isolation and distance from all reference groups and cultural traditions” (1976, 335). Note that in this definition the key issue is the relation of the individual to central enculturative experiences. Alienation is thus thought to be built into the very process of enculturation but can become pronounced under certain conditions and for certain groups either through force of circumstance or by choice. Important also is the implicit idea that alienation is both a state and a process, one whose pace and intensity are intricately tied to sociohistorical vectors. The first thing to note with regards to the shared concept of alienation in literary studies and anthropology is the degree to which it is marginalized in ethnographic discourse but rendered central in literary texts. Many of the greatest works of literature both inside and outside the Western tradition have contended with tropes of alienation. One has just to think of the thematic similarities in texts such as Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Euripides’s Medea, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo and Wole Soyinka’s The Road to see the sheer range and persistence of the trope.2 Alienation in the anthropological text takes quite a different form and is closely related to the process by which the anthropologist gradually moves from a position of cultural ignorance to one of knowledge in the course of fieldwork.3 Even though all social anthropologists when undertaking fieldwork do so with full cognizance of the potential for alienation involved in their difference as participant-observers, it is also the case that G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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their alienation is routinely purged out of account in the writing-up of the ethnography. In anthropology an ideal of Weberian disinterestedness and the subjection to a vocational ethic defines the way in which fieldwork is turned into an object of scientific knowledge (see Rosaldo 1993, 168–72). Thus, it is only in rare cases that the symptoms of alienation are allowed to remain unassimilated into other categories in the ethnographic report or monograph. In cases where the emotional messiness of the ethnographer is incorporated into the description of the evolution of ethnographic knowledge, the emotional difficulties of the anthropologist are used as a means of grasping the emotional complexities that inform interpersonal relations within the culture being observed. This does not mean that anthropologists have not paid any attention to questions of alienation in the fieldwork experience and the problem of knowledge production constituted from this alienation. Ready examples of meditations on this question can be found in well-known semi-autobiographical anthropological classics such as Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955), Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), and in the introductions to many anthropological monographs.4 One thing, however, that remains constant in ethnographic discourse is the subsumption of the trope of alienation into the narrative of evolving familiarity. This is in many ways a necessity for the production of anthropological knowledge. In the first place the anthropologist, social, cultural, or otherwise is primarily seen as part of a social science enterprise. Furthermore, there are multiple facets and applications of anthropology, ranging from the academic production of knowledge about other cultures, to the shedding of light on home cultures, to the shaping of policy on a variety of subjects. The anthropologist thus has a different attitude to the truth-value of what he or she is doing. The implied subjectivity that would be involved in focusing predominantly on the alienations of fieldwork could potentially damage the final ethnographic product. The most important reason for cleaning up the messiness of fieldwork is ultimately that ethnographers are not really out to represent themselves but the cultural interlocutors with whose culture they have interacted. Oftentimes, the only point at which the alienation is allowed to exist on its own terms is at the point of first encounter, with a number of representational techniques being developed that serve to demarcate these points from the main ethnographic narrative and to usher in the work of representation proper (Pratt 1986). As a consequence of the essentially social-scientific emphases of anthropology, in the spate of debates concerning postmodernist ethnograG h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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phies and self-reflexivity the model of subjectivism in anthropological discourse was the first to arouse suspicion. George Marcus sees subjectivism in the modes of “the self-critique, the personal quest, playing on the subjective, the experiential, and the idea of empathy,” and refers to them as the “null form of reflexivity” (1998, 193). He is not alone in dismissing these as forms of dead-end self-indulgence and narcissism. Contrastively, however, a recent trenchant critique of modernist metanarratives in anthropology by Harri Englund and James Leach returns to the need for selfreflexive accounts of the lived experience of fieldwork, their emphasis being “on ethnography as a practice of reflexive knowledge production, not on an empiricist critique based on unmediated experience” (2000, 226). Their main contention in their wide-ranging article is the degree to which metanarratives of multiple and alternative modernities end up obscuring the central place that the experience of fieldwork has in mediating the knowledge produced about such modernities. Yet in trying to restore the experience of fieldwork into account, Englund and Leach produce an intriguing elision between the experience of disorientation and alienation suffered by the anthropologist during fieldwork and the nature of the knowledge produced. In other words, when they shift analytical scales between the experience of the ethnographer and the knowledge that is abstracted from that experience, the shift is taken as natural, with the vertigo of the experience not returned to in their abstraction. In the Englund and Leach article, Leach’s account of his fieldwork experience researching current Melanesian interests in white people, money, and consumption is particularly interesting for the way in which the elision is staged. He starts off by noting how, during his fieldwork in the villages along the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea in 1994–95, the questions he was constantly asked about white people and the origins of money took an alarming turn when new stories of “liver thieves” became prominent. The stories were about white people who were rumored to be spearheading the buying and selling of internal organs. Leach was made aware of the effect of these narratives when on one trip along the coast the people in a village scattered into the bush on his arrival (230). Later on, Leach tells us of a request that one of his informants made to him after relating a dream in which the informant’s first wife appears with a bag full of money that she tells him was his. Disconcertingly, the dream ends before the bag is handed over. His informant asks him to help retrieve the money, since as a white man, he knows where money comes from. This leads to great discomfiture for the anthropologist: G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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These kinds of requests were a regular feature of Leach’s time on the Rai Coast. They always made him uncomfortable, because he felt that his response could never satisfy his interlocutor. Moreover, he was vaguely frightened by all this talk of the dead and graves. It appeared that white people were sinister figures in the local cosmology. At issue was perhaps a critique of globalization and colonialism, a critique that tacitly situated Leach at the sharp end. (231; emphasis added)

Note that he (along with Englund, in the subsequent section of the essay) writes about himself in the third person. Disconcertingly, the requests were a regular feature of his time there, making him always uncomfortable. If that is the case, then we are not wrong in surmising that his discomfiture did not abate with his greater acquaintance with the people and their mores but that it remained only partially attenuated. But in the true tradition of a responsible ethnographer, Leach gradually retreats from the discussion of his discomfiture. Instead, he situates these stories in the people’s concerns with the sources and trajectories of wealth and money and how these are related to the emergence of white people and the vaguely apprehended forces of globalization within their worlds. When he comes to his concluding remarks, there is no mention of the earlier discomfiture: Far from being involved in a contentious moral argument, Rai Coast villagers interpret through their stories the fact of relatedness. Their ethnographer must bear the burden of accepting them as partners in envisaging human sociality. (233)

What happened to the “always” of the discomfiture that he hinted at as having suffered earlier on? Why does the abstraction of what the Rai villagers seek to do with their stories not take account of the anthropologist’s discomfiture and the fact that this discomfiture may have been productive both for him and for them, as it placed him in a position in which he always had to justify his own dispositions with regard to their requests and the beliefs that underpinned them? Might it not even have been the case that it is his discomfiture that generated intensity around the questions he was interested in in the first place and that then helped sustain such questions as relevant objects of anthropological enquiry in the longer term of fieldwork research? Ultimately, however, the point to be made about this elision is not just that the ethnographer is consciously focusing attention away from himself in order to produce a scientific form of knowledge. Rather, it is that the G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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alienation effects of fieldwork become both a primary portal of knowledge formation and something that requires conversion into a mode of distantiation for an objective form of knowledge to be produced. What I have in mind is somewhat dissimilar to what Charlotte Davies (1999) and various others have referred to as the withholding of judgment in the anthropological encounter with other cultures. My view is that that is actually impossible. Rather, it is the case that the alienation effect engenders a problematization of one’s own assumed cultural biases along with the newly encountered cultural dispositions in such a way that the new cultural dispositions then become intellectually relevant as objects of analysis. This is what happens to people such as immigrants and exiles encountering new cultures for the first time. The anthropologist’s situation is different only to the degree that it is part of their disciplinary training to remain within the space of a negative capability, that capability, as the poet John Keats defines it, “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”5 My argument here is that for the anthropologist, negative capability must be conceptualized not just as an anthropological space to be occupied in order not to pass over-hasty judgments on a newly encountered culture. The very process of knowledge formation within fieldwork has to have alienation as one of its basic vectors of experience. If there were no alienation effect within the fieldwork experience, the Other would be exactly as the Same. This in a way is what marks the difference between a tourist and an anthropologist. Objectivity is only a much later aftereffect of a long and complicated process in which alienation is a central factor of negotiation. It is in the problematic space sustained by a series of alienation effects (surprise, alarm, boredom, even disgust and horror) that the participant-observer comes into being. But the participant-observer is a special process that is sustained throughout fieldwork and is intricately enmeshed with the alienation effects that sustain that status in the first place. In other words, alienation is a primary means by which the ethnographer is kept alert to the modes by which he or she theorizes the cultural encounter.6 This is to be conceptualized as dynamic and processual, rather than static, despite the fact that in coming to write up their field notes, anthropologists routinely purge alienation out of their accounts. What we see in the Englund and Leach essay is that in invoking “experience” they do not problematize the concept but leave it as a self-evident entity that has equal resonance for the anthropologist as it does for the culture being studied. Cognizance has to be taken of an insight that has long been held by anthropologists about the ways in which studying G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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other people’s cultures helps them come to a deeper understanding of their own. But normally when this insight is invoked, the focus is on the structure of relations, symbols and ritual practices, and underlying belief systems in the studied societies and how these compare and illuminate the anthropologist’s own (see, for instance, Strathern 1992a,b). My interest is different and perhaps more problematic. My view is that far from revealing a dead-end subjectivism, paying attention to the symptoms of alienation in the course of fieldwork might actually help to foreground a whole repertoire of structures of feeling for comparative analysis. How, we might ask, is the anthropologist’s feeling of alienation in the encounter with a new culture different from that felt by, say, the illegal immigrant, who is only partly conversant with the language of the host nation and often completely ignorant of the subtlety of its mores? How do these different alienations differ from that of the political exile? Are these structures of feeling not relevant for issues of the relation between individual agency, events, and social transformations? Even though alienation and its effects are central to literature, it is still the case that as readers we do not look to literature to understand alienation objectively. Ultimately, its aestheticization renders it a topic of pleasure rather than anguish so that the knowledge that it yields is more at the level of sharpening the range of our intuitions rather than giving us directly instrumental knowledge as such. And yet, at the same time, it is not uncommon for people to make generalizations about “the human condition” from a reading of literature. This suggests the need for concepts such as alienation to be productively crossmapped along an interdisciplinary axis to help us come to a more nuanced understanding of the condition as it manifests itself in a variety of contexts. As I will show in the rest of this chapter, to centralize alienation within an ethnographic account is ultimately to foreground a literary apparatus, even while retaining the residue of an ethnographic sensibility. The question to be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective is what happens when we read the liminal and in-between position of the alienated ethnographer not from the point of view of either anthropology or literature but from both at the same time? Even though Clifford Geertz’s Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988) goes some way in answering that question, one thing that is clear from the authors he focuses on—LéviStrauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, and Benedict—is that he is interested in texts that are, for whatever their subsequent appropriations, primarily definable as anthropological texts in the first place. What happens when we take seriously a text such as Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, which raises doubt about its status and oscillates between anthropology and other G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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genres of writing in such a way as to make it a constitutively ambiguous text that can be read as a novel, an autobiography, a traveler’s tale, a quasiethnography, and in the final analysis, an intimation of a tragic philosophy of history? In an Antique Land is by no means the only text written by an anthropologist that raises such questions of boundary transgression, but it seems to me to do so from an interdisciplinary perspective that helps raise questions about the constitution of the alienated social and authorfunctions of the anthropologist in particularly productive ways.7 After a brief introduction to the book, I propose to organize the discussion around a set of key themes, not necessarily in this order: (1) the foregrounding of the author’s discomfiture and anxiety and the deliberately problematic nature of his ethnographic representation, (2) the multifaceted nature of the author-function and its relation to issues of mastery and representation, (3) the subtle ways in which the trope of alienation is shifted from a personal dimension to that of a more historical and transnational level, and (4) the relation between all these and an implicit idea of the place of the social self within historical processes of transformation. I hope by closely interweaving these foci to bring literature and anthropology into a different kind of interdisciplinary dialogue.

The Shapes of Representation in In an Antique Land As I have already noted, In an Antique Land is an interdisciplinary hybrid. Based primarily on Ghosh’s fieldwork among rural villagers in Egypt in 1980 and alternating between that and archival research into the fourteenth-century travels of Ben Yiju, a Jewish trader, and Bomma, his Indian slave, the book defines a multitiered approach both to present-day and medieval social identities. At one level, the book is about familial and clan relations among the fellaheen of Egypt. These ethnographic sections are based on his sojourn in two villages, Lataifa and Nashawy. But the fellaheen are also connected to wider realities such as the context and politics of Egyptian multicultural formations since the fourteenth century and the nature and directions of transnational migration at the end of the twentieth. The book also deploys an implicit philosophy of history. Because of the alternations between the historical past and the present conditions among the fellaheen, the book calls for an evaluation of history as a process of mirroring in which the past is often reiterated but with an easy-to-miss difference. The key thing implied is that we are often in thrall to history, precisely because we lack the capacity to fully grasp the effects of historical processes as they unfold around us. This is the lesson G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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that we get both from the archival sections of the novel and from the nature of the interactions between him, as ethnographer-historian, the people among whom he lives, and the medieval manuscripts he pores over in libraries. A central task of the anthropologist with a historical sense, as Bernard Cohn suggests, is to discover the links between event, structure, and transformation (1987, 45, 48). What is quickly to be noticed from reading the “ethnographic” sections of In an Antique Land, however, is that Ghosh does not comply with what is necessary for a sustained historical anthropology in the terms set out by Cohn. The sustained anthropological disposition to establish links between event, structure, and transformation is displaced onto a number of emblematizations that embrace elements in both the ethnographic and archival sections. This does not mean that in the ethnographic sections Ghosh does not provide us with the contexts for some of the practices of the fellaheen but that this is always done to illustrate a particular problem of interpersonal communication he faces with them and, ultimately, of the residualized relationship of these practices to an earlier world. Though situating himself in the introduction as an anthropologist, it is quickly made clear that his responses to the people and their cultural and social practices are not that of the traditional anthropologist. He does not, for example, isolate specific cultural practices for detailed discussion, nor does he insert any cultural practice into a denser ethnographic hinterland of relations, processes, and change. When he unpacks the cultural logic of the fellaheen, it is closely aligned to the unfolding friendships he has with them and to their foibles and idiosyncrasies. He thus discursively situates the fellaheen in their roles as characters-in-action, and a lot of room is given to their anxieties, befuddlements, fears, hopes, and vague ideas. Critical to the discursive elaboration of the fellaheen in the text is the way in which Ghosh’s own authority as an ethnographer is constantly undermined by various inversions of the ethnographic gaze. These inversions generate a great deal of discomfiture for him, and throughout the ethnographic sections place him in the position of the object of anthropological scrutiny. Predominantly his embarrassment occurs because he is himself from a Third World country, thus inviting the villagers among whom he lives to unhesitatingly situate him within a particular narrative of progress. This narrative, always implicitly evolutionary and developmentalist, has the technologically advanced West as its ultimate locus of rationalization. The strongest and most unsettling expression of this developmentalism occurs in the angry altercation he has with Imam Ibrahim G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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following their disagreement over the relative technological advancement of Egypt and India (234–37). Imam Ibrahim’s contention is that the mark of the West’s civilization is that they do not burn their dead but are educated and have science and guns and tanks and bombs. To which Ghosh, already highly irritated by the many references to his “backward” cultural practices (as we shall soon see), loses control: Suddenly something seemed to boil over in my head, dilemmas and arguments I could no longer contain within myself. “We have them too!” I shouted back at him. “In my country we have all those things too; we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you’ve got in Egypt—we’re a long way ahead of you.”

Their angry altercation is interrupted only by the arrival of one of Ghosh’s friends, who comes to lead him away. He acknowledges to himself that if he had not been led away, he would have stood there arguing with the Imam a good while longer, “delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence.” Ghosh later reflects on this painful incident and feels he has become “a witness to the extermination of a world of accommodations” that he had first believed to be still alive and in some tiny measure still retrievable for present-day usage (234–37).8 Ghosh is often confronted as an Indian with the odd feeling that the significance of his life has already been “read” by the Egyptian villagers. But it is a reading that ignores the processes by which that evolutionary narrative has been constructed and is still being constructed in the unfolding scales of history. At a more direct level, the inversions that he suffers are due to the fact that as an Indian and non-Muslim he is the object of an implicit world of hierarchies for the fellaheen. His difference is of great curiosity to them. Whereas as an anthropologist he is obliged to exercise a negative capability in relation to the fellaheen, they have no such obligation and move rapidly from curiosity to judgment. The areas in which the anthropological inversions show themselves most strongly are precisely on topics that should be of interest to him as an anthropologist. Questions of religion and death and issues of masculinity are constantly returned to. Early in the text, he is introduced to Ustaz Mustafa, a man who “had a habit of flicking back the cuff of his jallabeyya every few minutes or so to steal a quick look at his watch.” This gesture seems to have been rooted “in an anxiety that had long haunted his everyday existence: the fear that he might inadvertently miss one of the day’s five required prayers.” Their first encounter, engineered by Jabir, of whom we will have more to say G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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later, circles around a number of stereotypes Ustaz Mustafa has learned about India: “I have read all about India,” said Ustaz Mustafa, smiling serenely. “There is a lot of chilli in the food and when a man dies his wife is dragged away and burnt alive.” “Not always,” I protested, “my grandmother for example . . .” Jabir was drinking this in, wide-eyed. “And of course,” Ustaz Mustafa continued, “you have Indira Gandhi, and her son Sanjay Gandhi, who used to sterilize the Muslims . . .” “No, no, he sterilized everyone,” I said. His eyes widened and I added hastily: “No, not me of course, but . . .” “Yes,” he said, nodding sagely. “I know. I read all about India when I was in college in Alexandria.” (46)

Notice the stereotypes that are raised here: diet, widow burning, mass sterilization, undemocratic authoritarianism, religious persecution. Ghosh is put on the spot and required to defend his country from misrepresentation. More importantly, he has to defend himself from the embarrassing insinuation of a lack of masculinity. The conversation veers later into questions of Hinduism and the place of prophets in it. To the Muslims, this religion is a form of apostasy. To Ustaz Mustafa’s suggestion that the Hindus worship cows (another stereotype), there is “a sharp, collective intake of breath as Jabir and the other boys recoiled, calling upon God in whispers to protect them from the Devil.” Ghosh’s answers do not strike a convincing note. It is only the timely call to noon prayer that prevents him from being the object of Ustaz Mustafa’s sudden gush of proselytizing fervor. The issue of Ghosh’s religion becomes an escalating source of embarrassment in his encounters with the fellaheen. At another point in the story he finds himself embarrassingly unable to find an appropriate Arabic word to translate the practice of cremation. The verb “to burn,” which is the only one he has to hand, is used in Arabic for what happens to firewood, straw, and the eternally damned (168). But the misapprehensions that arise out of the seeming untranslatability of cultural terms also have a corollary in the misinterpretations of his everyday behavior. Gossip and rumors about him attain the status of truths because they are meant to confirm the stereotypes by which the fellaheen view him. So strong are some of the stereotypes that he almost comes to accept their inevitability: Khamees leant over to tap me on my knee. “All right then, ya doktór,” he said. “Tell us something else then: is it true that in your country everybody

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worships cows? Is it true that the other day when you were walking through the fields you saw a man beating a cow and you were so upset you burst into tears and ran back to your room?” “No, it’s not true,” I said, but without much hope: I knew from experience that there was nothing I could say that would effectively give the lie to this story. “You’re wrong. In my country people beat their cows all the time; I promise you.” (170–71)

What we see then is that the anthropologist-as-protagonist is himself raised to the level of an emblematic stereotype of Indianness, an impression that seems almost pointless to shake off. The thing to note, however, is that the inversion of the ethnographic/anthropological gaze is exacerbated by the fact that the villagers read him within an already given structure of presuppositions in which Hinduism is in an underprivileged hierarchical relation to Islam. This hierarchical difference is then read off as one with evolutionary implications, with him being taken as representative of a “backward” Indian culture. The anthropologist is thought to be primitive by the people he is supposed to be studying. One of the main consequences of the ethnographic inversion is that we are invited to read the account as something other than an ethnography, perhaps a travel narrative, an autobiography, or even a novel. Even though the narrative is in the mode of a scrupulous realism, allowing it to retain the residual qualities of an ethnographic text, it has a novelistic quality to it that shows itself at several levels. There are, for instance, certain reiterated patterns that mark transitions and shifts in the narrative, forming a kind of structural leitmotiv. In part 1, the Lataifa sections, the reiterated junctures are signaled around dreams of Cairo. Thus, the very first sentence of the section opens with reference to a dream of Cairo: “I first began to dream of Cairo in the evenings, as I sat in my room, listening, while Abu-’Ali berated his wife or shouted at some unfortunate customer who happened to incur his displeasure while making purchases at his shop” (23). Subsequently, references to Cairo will mark the transition point between the ethnographic and archival sections (32, 54, 80). Curiously enough, this “dream,” which is really a daydream, is never relayed to us in any detail and becomes a device to increase our anticipation of his visit to Cairo, something that takes place much later in the book. The Nashawy sections, on the other hand, are related as memories recalled as he talks with Shaikh Musa on a return visit eight years after his fieldwork for an emotional reunion with the villagers. A discernible distinction between the Lataifa and Nashawy sections G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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also signals a movement of transition. The distinction is in what seems to be a more “public” orientation in the Nashawy sections as compared to the more “private” emphasis of the Lataifa ones. Basically, this public/private split is to be noted in the heightened intensity of debates about society, culture, and religious beliefs that we find among Ustaz Sabry and his teacher friends in Nashawy. Thus we are told, for instance, that Ustaz Sabry had once used the occasion of the Friday prayer to appeal for funds in support of the people of Afghanistan in their war against Russian occupation (146). Ustaz Sabry’s heightened awareness of world events and his superb organizational skills mark him off as a modernizer, in contrast to Imam Ibrahim, of an older generation, who is reported to be engrossed in textual interpretations of the Quran and in dispensing folk remedies. As we have already noted, it is with him that Ghosh has a nasty altercation about the relative superiority of Egypt and India. This does not mean that Ghosh does not suffer periodic embarrassments about his Indianness in Nashawy, but that these are framed alongside wider debates on political and social awareness, which are completely absent from the Lataifa sections. This heightened consciousness even applies to Ghosh himself as an interlocutor. It is in the Nashawy sections that he tells us of his terror of symbols, taking us in a flashback to the traumatic events of Partition in India to justify his odd reluctance to discuss rituals of purification despite persistent questioning from the male guests at a wedding in the village (204–10). The guests think they are just asking questions about ordinary customs, just like he is known to do, but he knows as an Indian born after Partition but growing up with its legacy that there is often an intricate relationship between cultural symbols, nationalism, language, and violence.9 Out of Ustaz Sabry’s exemplary position comes another difference between the two sections. Whereas in Lataifa the descriptions of the land are dominated by what Javed Majeed (1995) has described as an almost bucolic sensibility, with vivid evocations of the crops surrounding the village, in the Nashawy sections the emphasis is more on the changing practices regarding land that have emerged out of the shifting nature of national land reform policies. To put matters schematically, what we see in Lataifa is a seemingly stable and traditional/conservative bucolic order, whereas in Nashawy we are exposed to the processes of self-conscious debate and the subtle but steady transformation of attitudes with regard to fundamental questions of land, religious beliefs, and the society’s relationship to the outside world. Discursively, Ghosh gives us the impression of Lataifa as being more stable, and of Nashawy as being more processual, even though both villages are ultimately the extension of the rural sensiG h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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bilities that mark the fellaheen and locate them within wider vectors of change and transformation. In the fourth and final section of the book, titled “Going Back,” Ghosh loops the narrative back to his conversations with Shaikh Musa, establishing continuities with the earlier sections, this time with the emphasis not on his reminiscences of the past but on the reencounter with his friends and acquaintances. This section comes after one titled “Mangalore,” which is mainly devoted to his researches in India and elsewhere, attempting to unearth the identity of the slave of MS H.6. An epilogue closes the book, this time producing a series of closures, as well as taking him back on a final visit in August 1990, three weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. “Going Back” and the epilogue retrace different paths of return and allow him to situate some of the changes that have taken place among the fellaheen while connecting these to contemporary world historical processes such as the Gulf War. There has then been a three-tiered process of contextual embedding of the lives of the fellaheen, from the seemingly stable environment of Lataifa to the more contested framework of Nashawy and on to their wider contextualization within tragic world historical processes marked by the Gulf War. One way of reading In an Antique Land is to take its heterogeneous elements (characters, characterization, cultural details, discursive connections, emblematizations, anthropological-biographical-literary connections, etc.) and embed them within the intersections of larger structures that are hinted at but not foregrounded in and of themselves as ethnographically coherent. In this respect the techniques of novel reading are fully applicable to the text. The alternating archival sections not only provide the counterpoint to the subverted ethnographic/novelistic discourse but also allow us to read those sections as part of an ongoing meditation on larger questions of History, transnationalism (both in terms of migration and cross-national networks), and the means by which to interpret the intersection of the individual with all of these. Furthermore, the various village characters we meet acquire a historical emblematization as representatives of a changing rural order, thus becoming part of a reiterated discursive process in the text. Ultimately the discourse of emblematization is meant to cut across a variety of vectors in both the ethnographic and archival sections. In In an Antique Land, the passage of time is thematized and linked to the detailing of History-as-process, thus making the ethnographic sections a refraction of the archival ones and vice versa. In other words, taken together, the ethnographic/novelistic and archival sections are part of a larger scheme of the discursive representation of processes that manifest themselves with G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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different emphases in both of the alternating sections. We will follow the implications of the various emblematizations and the larger discursive frames of transnational migration and history in the next section.

The History Channels In his assemblage of dispersed meanings from the historical archives he works on, it is clear that Ghosh’s main interest is in the reasons for the historical demise of the Mediterranean as one of the centers of the medieval world. The final marginalization of the Mediterranean as the fulcrum of the medieval world system took place for a variety of reasons, among which were the progressive fragmentation of the intervening overland trade route regions that had been unified by Genghis Khan during the first half of the thirteenth century, the terrible effects of the Black Death, which spread from China all the way to Europe between 1348 and 1351 and decimated most of the cities along the great sea route of world trade, and finally, the rise of Portugal as a maritime power and the opening up of sea routes to India (see Abu-Lughod 1989). The scale and intricacy of interconnection in the medieval world were progressively augmented in subsequent centuries, producing a whole range of social imaginaries that were both specific to particular locations and yet also amenable to a universalizing impulse. But to focus attention solely on commercial ties and the exchange of commodities to grasp the medieval world system is to produce a partial picture of the period. Another and perhaps even more elaborate dimension of interconnections in the period evolved in the intellectual networks that were formed among scholars, city-states, and even traders. Religion was critical for this formation, and from the point of view of the Mediterranean as a fulcrum of the medieval world system, Islam was central to these networks. Janet Abu-Lughod notes that even though there was no international language during the period, Arabic covered a wide area, as did Greek, the vernaculars of Latin, and Mandarin Chinese (8). Following Goitein, Ghosh elaborates on the spread of Judeo-Arabic among the trading communities in Fustat and Mangalore and also on the prevalence of the Arabic script in the documents of the Geniza. The historical interplay of Islam and the development of a trans-Eurasian network of market relations sustained the movement of techniques, inventions, and ideas from one society to the other, producing, as Abu-Lughod and others have shown, a significant dimension of universalism in the period. The circuits of travel were particularly sustained by scholars and intellectuals, with people such as Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun in the first part G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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of the fourteenth century emerging as classic travelers who grasped the opportunities afforded by the global intellectual network. It is not possible, however, to cast the movements of Middle Eastern or Maghrebi scholars beyond their homelands solely in the category of mercantile, educational, and indeed diplomatic circulation. From Ghosh’s speculations as to the reasons for Ben Yiju’s migration to Mangalore, there is the suspicion that he may have had to leave in order to avoid a possible claim on his life for a blood feud. Whatever the reasons were, they seem not to have been solely commercial. At any rate, what Ghosh succeeds in doing is to give us a socially diverse history by piecing together the history of little people such as Ben Yiju and his friends. By sharing with us his speculations about Ben Yiju’s love of sugar, his persistent request to his friends for particular kinds of writing materials, the modes of salutation that were employed among him and his friends, and the ways in which they received the news of his marriage to Ashu, his wife in Mangalore, Ghosh gives us an insight into the tastes, predispositions, and even idiosyncrasies of these people. He thus provides us a sense of the history of the medieval Mediterranean world as a lived space. In this sense, Ghosh offers a fascinating extra dimension to Goitein’s magisterial A Mediterranean Society, which is mainly the glossing of an encyclopedic archive of the letters and documents that were placed over several centuries in the Geniza. Ghosh works with an unacknowledged philosophy of history that is not evident in any straightforward way in the text. Majeed’s 1995 essay on In an Antique Land provides the take-off point for a discussion of this sense of history. I have already implicitly drawn on Majeed’s essay in my elaboration of the discourse of emblematization that we see in the text, something that he mentions but does not fully develop. As Majeed further points out, Ghosh highlights the material weight of the historical archive he is studying by stressing the inscriptive materiality of history itself. Thus, there are repeated references to the size, shape, and quality of the fragments of paper he is working on. The archive then becomes emblematic of historical structures, as do architectural remains, such as we find in the descriptions Ghosh provides us of Fustat in Egypt and Mangalore in India at different times. For Majeed, these emblematizations illustrate the imaginative and historical predicament of the ethnographer-historian himself: “The imagination requires evidence of continuity in order to anchor itself and recover what is described as a lost history. In some sense continuity is pre-given in the text, and discontinuity is fabricated as the rupture which brings the historical imagination into being” (47; emphasis added). The notion of a fabricated discontinuity accords to a degree with my argument G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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about the constitutive status of alienation in the work of the anthropologist, except that working as a historian, Ghosh performs a different form of author-function from that which he performs as an anthropologist in the ethnographic sections. The rupture that constitutes the inaugural speech act of history in In an Antique Land seems to me to derive not in the fabrication of discontinuity but, crucially, in the perception of a relational void. This relational void is discursively related to the difficulties involved in imaginatively invoking the “world of accommodations” between medieval and late-twentieth-century India and Egypt. The discontinuity, then, far from being a fabrication, is a felt experience of the imagined loss of a world of intricate relations between Egypt and India. The paucity of references to the Indian Bomma in the letters that were exchanged between Ben Yiju and his friends is the initial absence that triggers Ghosh’s choice of fieldwork site and that leads him to excavate the many interconnections between India and Egypt in the historical archive. He is keen to help usher the slave of MS H.6 into the theater of history. Here are the opening words of the book: “ The slave of MS H.6 first stepped upon the stage of modern history in 1942. His was a brief debut, in the obscurest of theatres, and he was scarcely out of the wings before he was gone again—more a prompter’s whisper than a recognizable face in the cast” (13). This theatrical metaphor of agency is picked up and reworked later in the text, with various speculations about the Slave’s motivations, feelings, and the nature of the ties he has to his master. The most fascinating of these speculations about Bomma is provided with regard to a business visit the Slave made to the port of Aden to arrange for a consignment of goods from the port for his master. It turns out that pirates of Kish had attempted to capture some trading vessels at the time of his visit, something to which there was a decisive and firm response from the Adenese authorities. In Madmun’s letter to Ben Yiju, from which the account is taken, it is not the raid that is uppermost in his mind. The honor is reserved for Bomma, who, it appears, “had spent his wages on an extended drinking bout during which he presented himself several times in Madmun’s office, demanding money.” The final image we get of Bomma is perhaps one of the funniest in In an Antique Land: “We cannot be sure, of course, but it is not impossible that the Adenese soldiers were cheered into battle by a drunken Bomma, standing on the shore and waving his flask” (259). These speculations about Bomma (and at other times about Ben Yiju, his Indian wife, Ashu, and various other figures the trader had exchanges with) are designed to breathe existence into what Ghosh perceives as a G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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void in the archive. As we have noted, that void, far from being just the void of the person of the Slave, is actually the void of the extensive relations between Egypt and India in the medieval period. Bomma provides the rationale for Ghosh’s choice of fieldwork site, the “sense of entitlement,” as he puts it, and beyond that, the trigger for the excavation of a whole range of relations between the two countries in the medieval period and by implication, of the ways in which the villagers (mis)interpret him in the contemporary period of fieldwork research. In other words, Bomma is emblematic of a cipher of wider relationships that ramify across the two periods. In that sense, the main characterizations and emblematizations of the ethnographic sections are recursively reread through the archival traces of Bomma and Ben Yiju to hint at the circuits of cultural, trading, intellectual, and other exchanges between the two cultures in the medieval period and to lament their attenuation in the twentieth. But if the discursive maneuvers of the ethnographic sections are reproduced within the archival sections, it is also the case that the authorfunction that we see operating in the two sections is not the same. In the ethnographic sections, as we have already noted, Ghosh is the subject of a series of ethnographic inversions, in which he is the object of repeated embarrassments and humiliations. He is not at all the masterly anthropologist studying a culture and scaling it down to the theoretical categories made available by his discipline. He is adrift, lonely, and often confused. Not so in the archival sections. In these sections he is a master historiographer. He has a sound grasp of the etymology and history of words (witness, for instance, his accomplished account of the various meanings of Masr, the Arabic name for Cairo, along with a brief history of the city, 32–39). He also has a thorough knowledge of the orientalist practices that marked the discovery and acquisition of the Geniza documents, and he is able to slowly but steadily piece together the name and identity of the Slave Bomma in what can only be described as an extraordinary piece of historical detective work. In the archival sections, Ghosh is a master of the methods of doing history and displays his meticulous procedures at every turn. With this mastery, he in a sense problematizes his seeming position of powerlessness and ineptitude in the ethnographic sections. Discursively, what seems to have happened in the text is a careful displacement of the disciplinary mastery that is often retained by the anthropologist in tidying up field notes into a recognizable form of ethnography onto the archival sections. He is clumsy as an anthropologist but masterly as a historian. Which then raises a question: Does Ghosh the anthropologist differ essentially from Ghosh the historian? In a certain sense we are obliged to G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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answer yes to this question, for the simple reason that he produces himself as the subject/author of different discursive frameworks. In other words the “I/eye” of the ethnographic sections is not the same “I/eye” of the archival sections. At the same time, these author-functions—anthropological and historiographic—are implicitly augmented by a literary function, in which patterns of characterization, emblematization, and repetition help to make the text simultaneously readable as a literary text. The generic conventions that govern its literariness are those of the travel narrative and (auto)biography, even though neither of these is allowed to dominate the text entirely. All three levels are codified around different authorfunctions, thus discursively producing different Amitav Ghoshes. The various Ghoshes are ultimately unified within the framework of the subtle processes by which various social “subjects” emerge within the ethnographic and historical sections and are allowed to become discursively resonant. The gradual and painstaking fleshing out of Bomma that we find in the archival sections parallels to a certain degree the discursive process by which the “dream” of Cairo is incrementally promised to us in the book but not delivered until much later in his visit to the Geniza. It is almost as if Cairo at one level, and Bomma at another, mirror the process of coming-into-consciousness of a multifaceted reality. In this case, the multifaceted reality has particular resonance in the foregrounding of the intercultural relations between Egypt and India in an earlier phase of transnationalism. The fact that Cairo (dream) and Bomma (archival trace) are both disclosed slowly and after some form of interpretative labor also serves to signal the active place of the ethnographer-historian in making visible the hidden tapestry of things past. The author-function becomes mimetic of a hermeneutic function, thus unifying Ghosh’s various discursive locations in the text as ethnographer, reader, historian, and, perhaps most significantly, Author (in the sense of one who brings things into being). This is not to attribute a God-like function to the writer but to suggest the degree to which the seeming generic hotchpotch is actually concealing a careful process of discursive emergence and control. One last thing remains to be said about the parallels between the two parts of the book, and that is with regard to the implicit philosophy of history that organizes them. As we noted earlier, Ghosh’s purpose in tracing the intimate ties between Ben Yiju and his slave Bomma is primarily to lay claim to a fertile medieval history of Egypt-Indian relations, part of which his journey and life among the fellaheen is supposed to rehearse. But in making that claim he also reveals another concern, which, however, seems secondary until near the very end of the book. This is the idea that the deG h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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mise of the nexus of trade and other relations between Egypt and India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries due to the religious and military upheavals in the medieval world from about the 1140s is paralleled by the impact of the Gulf War on trans-Arab relations toward the end of the twentieth. The implication we are encouraged to draw is that the two “invasions” are homologous at least at the level of the impact that they both had on relations among classical and ancient cultures.

The Nervous Conditions of Transnational Migration As I have already noted, one of the central organizing themes of In an Antique Land is precisely that of cross-cultural exchanges and of transnational circuits. Transnationalism in the late twentieth century of the fellaheen is intricately connected to a notion of migration and movement, which in themselves are also tied in with feelings of alienation. Arjun Appadurai has suggested that we distinguish locality, as a multilayered phenomenological property of social life and a structure of feeling, from neighborhoods, the specific geographically located entities around which cultures and life-forms are enacted. The key problematic of locality, as Appadurai argues, is that it intersects with a number of other vectors such as the moments of colonization and of othering. The colonization of immediate (or sometimes not so immediate) geographical environments and the processes of “othering” involve the perception of hierarchies and differences between one people and another and between a people and their surrounding physical environment. Furthermore, these processes are often connected to the imagining of an external outside world, a translocal reality that also has an effect on the imagining and shaping of locality (1996, 178–99). If locality is first and foremost a production dependent on a series of ritual, material, and conceptual mechanisms, then the implication is that the individual social subject is himself or herself crosscut by a series of dimensions that are both localizing (i.e., involved in the processes of producing locality) and nonlocalizing (i.e., involved in the process of the alienation of that locality). Alienation then becomes a trope of locality and is intimately tied to processes of enculturation, as pointed out by Weideman. If, following Appadurai, we think of locality and transnationalism as structures of feeling that are not necessarily tied to specific locations, then we could conclude that the individual subject exposed to the knowledge of transnational realities is provided with a trajectory of aspirations and desires that are potentially alienating of locality. The disjunctures that G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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produce the alienation of locality may on the one hand be taken to be structural, that is, in the gap between how the transnational is imagined and the local cultural, political, and economic infrastructure by which it can be mediated in the formation of a locality. Or the disjunctures may be emotional, that is, in the ways in which trajectories of desires and aspirations are generated but left unfulfilled within the given local environments. Both of these are useful for an analysis of the thematization of the effects of transnational migration in In an Antique Land. It is around the character of Jabir that the notion of what might be termed the nervous conditions of transnational migration show themselves. We are first introduced to Jabir in Lataifa. He is in his late teens then, with bright, malicious eyes and “a tongue that bristled with barbs” (26). He has a “sly-smile” and “blunt-featured face” with “an adolescent’s crop of stubble and unquiet skin” (27). He lives in Abu-’Ali’s house, where Ghosh himself has been given a room, and is protected from being thrown out of the house by the fact that his father was a cousin to Abu-’Ali in the paternal line and thus a member of Abu-’Ali’s lineage. He is constantly taunting Ghosh and is responsible for getting him into a series of embarrassing situations. We meet Jabir again eight years later on Ghosh’s return to the village. Jabir is now a changed man in more ways than one. The first thing Ghosh notes about his friend is that he is physically much different and looking “older than his twenty-five years.” Furthermore, “his face had grown considerably rounder and heavier, the hair at the top of his head had receded and at his temples there were two very prominent patches of grey (mere spots, as he was quick to point out, compared to mine)” (305). But three things in particular mark him as a changed man, and only one has to do with his looks. In the first place, and much to Ghosh’s surprise, Jabir slams shut the door to his room and turns the key, locking out the troop of children who were following close behind them. Ghosh observes that in all the time he had been in Lataifa and Nashawy, he had never seen anyone shut a door on people in their own house. When he comments aloud on this, it is Jabir’s turn to show surprise, pointing out that it is Ghosh himself who used to have the habit of shutting his door. But further conversation reveals that the shutting of the door is connected to something else. Jabir now cultivates solitude, a solitude through which he nurtures his frustrated aspirations for self-improvement. Having been to university and lived on campus in a big town away from home, he develops a different sense of himself and of his ultimate hopes and aspirations. Post-university life springs various disappointments, the most painful of which is the discovery that he cannot get the civil service G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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appointment he thought to have naturally walked into after his education. Ghosh intuitively grasps the significance of this cultivated solitude on his friend Jabir. On being shown an old picture he had taken of Jabir and some of his friends several years previously, Ghosh makes these observations: Seeing that picture again, after so many years, I realized that it was neither Jabir’s grey hair nor the shape of his face that was responsible for the difference in his appearance: the real change lay somewhere else, in some other, more essential quality. In the Jabir who was sitting in front of me I could no longer see the sly, sharp-tongued ferocity my camera had captured so well that day—its place had been taken by a kind of quiet hopelessness, an attitude of resignation. (307)

Jabir shows him more pictures, and as he talks through them, a narrative of his life away from home emerges that highlights the intermeshing of locality, in the terms defined by Appadurai, with the translocal and transnational. Most of the pictures were taken in the gardens and buildings of the university. In an earlier set of photographs he was always with the same group of friends, classmates with whom he shared rooms for the first couple of years. Most of them were now “outside,” working in the Gulf States. Later pictures show him sporting a flowing beard, a mark of his immersion in a politically and ideologically inflected Islam. He has to shave it later under pressure from his family, mainly because of the fear of the Egyptian state’s clampdown on Islamic fundamentalism. Their easy conversation later veers into detailed questions from Jabir about currency exchange rates, and how much Ghosh has paid to come to Egypt on this visit. It emerges that Jabir is looking to get a job “outside.” He had worked briefly in Iraq while in college and was keen to go again now that it was clear that his country held no real hope of fulfilling his dreams. What were these dreams? Very simply, they were to make enough money to come back and marry a suitable girl with a comparable educational background. There was mounting pressure to get married soon because his younger brother, who had not been to college but had left for Iraq much earlier, was not only helping to build a new house in the village but had recently indicated his desire to come back home to marry. This put Jabir in a rather uncomfortable position. He had waited a long time, hoping that his friends in Iraq would find him a job. Being 1988, the labor market had changed drastically in Iraq, with the army reservists now coming back from the war and wanting their jobs back. The Iraqi government had established strict new rules that made it hard for Egyptian workers to send money home. Jabir had in the meantime applied for a government G h o s h ’s I n a n A n t i q u e L a n d

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job, which was taking years to come through. He had taken to bricklaying, “until I find a job outside,” as he hastily put it. He was now in despair. Not only that, Ghosh notices that from the way he piled the photographs together and rearranged his suitcase, packing his suitcase had become a habit with him. The apparently compulsive habit with which he packs his suitcase suggests that he is no longer at ease in the old dispensation. This is the final image we get of Jabir: In some part of his mind, Jabir was probably entirely in sympathy with his brother’s predicament, yet if Mohammed were to be the first to marry, it would be a public announcement of his own failure. I had only to look at Jabir’s face to know that if that happened he would be utterly crushed, destroyed. Turning his back on me, Jabir busied himself with his suitcase, repacking it yet again, as though to satisfy a craving. “I’ll be going back to Iraq soon,” he said, in a voice barely audible. I couldn’t see his face but I knew he was near tears. (312)

It is to Ghosh’s credit that he can convey the poignancy of the moment without over sentimentalizing it. Jabir’s almost compulsive packing and repacking of his suitcase reveal a nervous condition of transnationalism. We note that the suitcase itself is emblematic of travel. Thus its constant repacking suggests that Jabir is always elsewhere, alienated from the context in which his locality is produced as a structure of feeling. What might we conclude about Jabir as a subject exposed to knowledge of opportunities “outside”? On one reading his is just the straightforward case of the articulation of the dreams and aspirations of the transnational migrant-to-be, and thus completely tied to economic considerations. But this reading ignores a number of significant factors impinging on Jabir. First is the fact that by getting a college education, he is already positioned to situate his rural life as part of a larger conceptual realm. We can presume that this reconceptualization of the local inheres in a concrete knowledge of the outside world and the links between concepts within this world. For that is precisely what any education provides, a means not just to make causal and other connections between objects and phenomena but to grasp the relations between concepts. Jabir’s ties with his old college friends, many of whom go to work abroad and send back the objects and signs of their transnational locations also ensure that his worldview is constantly saturated with the view of other possibilities that transcend the local. To compound all of this, of

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course, the Egyptian nation-state itself is riddled by severe economic and social contradictions, all of which render the transnational objects and signs into a form of incarnated semiotic of desire. For Jabir, then, his desire is two-fold: (1) to acquire the semiotic incarnations of desire, disclosed directly as economic wherewithal, and (2) to in turn convert this semiotic into the symbolic capital of prestige by which a new social position can be negotiated within the old community. Getting himself a wife with comparable education is then part of a larger scheme of this semiotic regime. What we are driving at here has to be distinguished from the semiotic regime of the advertised Signs of the Commodity. What we are describing is not exhausted by an analysis of the Coca-colonization of the world, even though it might act as an entry point. The interest here is in attempting to understand how the dispersed semiotic of incarnated transnational signs gets intermeshed with local self-imaginings such that the local, once it is brought into a dialogical relationship with the translocal, is progressively evacuated of a stable means for validating the social self thus exposed. The local, then, is not abolished but re-created as a product of transnational determinations. It is in this regard that we might say that transnationalism produces a series of alienations, partly of locality, and partly of the selves within that locality. The dialectical relation between the local and the transnational finds another expression in a symbol that is recognized as one of the key articulations of transnationalism and globalization: the TV. Here, however, the television news of the Gulf War generates a different and more tragic response in the Egyptian viewers. Not for them the transformation of the war into a form of televisual spectacle, a war game in which American and Western audiences were invited to collapse the traumatic events unfolding daily on their screens into something resembling the virtual wars of a Nintendo game. This it what allows Baudrillard to declare, polemically, that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). For the Egyptian villagers huddled before the screen, the television news is scanned for the faces of dear ones milling out of Iraq before the bombing starts. As usual, Ghosh gives us a sense of the historic by focusing on the predicament of a hapless individual, in this case Nabeel, who had been introduced earlier in the novel in Nashawy: A little later we went to Isma’il’s house to watch the news on the colour TV he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case, in the centre of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw

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beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage of the epic exodus: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in hallabeyyas, some carrying their TV sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part. There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds. Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History. (353)

These are the last words of the book, and there is an uncanny echo of the once and repeated time of the cycles of history in them that recalls the fate of Bomma. The title of the book itself provides added resonance to this notion of the once and repeated time of history. Taken from Shelley’s 1818 poem, “Ozymandias,” the echo of a traveler encountering the wreckage of an ancient culture is not to be discounted. The features of the ruined bust encountered amid the Egyptian sands, the poet tells us, “ Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.” The bust of Ozymandias is that of a king now laid waste through the ravages of time, but in reading Ghosh’s book are we not subliminally to link this vague evocation of tragedy on the visage of the ruined bust with that of the potential collapse of a known world represented in the Gulf War? Is a common thread of a tragic history not to be discerned in Shelley’s poem and in Ghosh’s text, even if from entirely different perspectives? The answer, perhaps, should be traced in the different positions of the traveler in poem and novel. For the traveler in Shelley’s piece discloses nothing of his response to the ruins except indirectly through the choice of words he uses to describe the scene. In Ghosh’s case, he is a traveler himself negotiating different subject positions in the face of loss. The alienation effects of his various subject functions then help to place him both inside and outside the tragic history he sees unfolding before him. And because we have been encouraged to empathize wholeheartedly with the characters we have come across in the course of the work, the anxiety about history’s void with which Ghosh opens his researches thus becomes subliminally our own. It is an invitation to contemplate the traumatic cycles of history and the anxieties inherent in a form of transnational sensibility, with the reader becoming a spectator before the tragic theater of loss.

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Conclusion: Interdisciplinarity as Conundrum No interdisciplinary configuration is disinterested. Interdisciplinarity involves first and foremost the location of interstitial realities. Or of realities perceived in their relatedness to other realities. These, of course, are constituted differently between various phenomena. But there will always be a tension in interdisciplinary analyses between different disciplines because of the differing discursive histories that each discipline brings to bear on the interdisciplinary configuration. In any way it is looked at, the interdisciplinary paradigm will involve a strategic positioning in relation both to the specific interdisciplinary conjuncture as well as to the phenomena under scrutiny. If I have calibrated a reading of the interrelationships between the fields of literature and anthropology around tropes of alienation rather than those of writing, it has been to focus attention on an area that has been central to one but seemingly peripheral to the other, but which at different levels is constitutive of what the two disciplines concern themselves with. But to establish the precise focus, I have turned to an interstitial text that plays repeatedly with questions of alienation and situates itself restlessly on the boundary between disciplines. The discussion has been shaped in a particular way because of the text that was chosen. Ghosh’s book was read for literary devices, something that might not seem particularly relevant to anthropologists. The question that was not raised was about its truth content, whether what he claims to have been representing was the reality of life among the fellaheen. For anthropology, one would assume that this would be the more crucial question. As can be seen, the question as to the precise nature of the knowledge that the interdisciplinary configuration produces may never be satisfactorily settled. But the crucial thing, perhaps, is always to be rigorously conscious of the options that have been exercised and to recognize that ultimately the disciplinary boundaries are completely artificial. We should welcome their blurring as a strategic choice in our impulse to better understand the social and applaud the wry smile of the little girl in Clarice Lispector’s short story.

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2 Social Imaginaries in Transition: Culture Heroism and the Genres of Everyday Life

Our point of departure in this chapter is Charles Taylor’s comments on the link between social imaginaries and alternative modernities: The number one problem of modern social science has from the beginning been modernity itself. I mean that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization); of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality); and new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution). In our day, the problem needs to be posed again from a new angle: is there a single phenomenon here, or do we need to speak rather of “multiple modernities,” the plural reflecting the fact that other non-Western cultures have modernized in their own way, and cannot properly be understood if we try to grasp them in a general theory which was originally designed with the Western case in mind. (2002, 91)

This is the opening paragraph of his essay “Modern Social Imaginaries,” in which he discusses the self-understandings that have given rise to modernity and the relation between current social imaginaries and the constitutive divergencies that were involved in the project of modernity from the Enlightenment onwards. His notion of multiple or alternative modernities

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is part of a growing body of work that recognizes that modernity is by no means the same across the world. What is of interest in his remarks for our discussion here is his view of the interrelated domains of modernity, what he terms the “unprecedented amalgam” of new practices and institutional forms, of new ways of living, and of new forms of malaise. The task for a proper discussion of “alternative” modernity would then be to detail this amalgam in its complex specificity and to show how it is on the one hand distinctive and yet, on the other, participates in modernity at large, to echo the title of Arjun Appadurai’s 1996 book on the same theme. In African Studies the analysis of alternative modernities is to be seen, among others, in the work of Timothy Burke (1996) on the political economy of hygiene in Southern Africa, Peter Geschiere (1997) on the “modernity” of the discourse of witchcraft and the relation this has to notions of entrepreneurship and politics in Central and East Africa, and James Ferguson (1999) on cosmopolitanism and localism in the Copperbelt region of Zambia. Alternative modernities are encapsulated in specific social imaginaries that may be seen as operating along certain paths of historical unfolding that even though showing overlaps and tangential crossings with Western modernity, are not easily assimilable to the history of the West in any straightforward way. Despite the increasing number of fine studies on alternative modernities, however, various methodological and conceptual problems persist in the discussion of the subject. These problems may be posed around a number of questions, some of which I have already noted in the introduction with regard to how to isolate social phenomena for analysis: how do we isolate a particular social, cultural, or political phenomenon for analysis while retaining a view of its relationship to complex and contradictory historical processes that allow it to be perceived as an object or objective field in the first place? More pointedly, how do we relate a notion of social imaginaries to the nation-state form in Africa without either installing the nation-state as the sole and dominant horizon of significance or ignoring its overdetermining impact in shaping relations among the populace? How are our readings to take account of the processes by which social imaginaries gain coherence and change through time in relation to as well as in subversion of the nation-state form? Drawing on Foucault, social and cultural phenomena may be seen predominantly as part of an expressive ensemble linked to power. Marxian analyses, on the other hand, generate a different emphasis on the relation between sociocultural phenomena and the power/ideology nexus. The implication is often that the individual phenomenon or conceptual cluster S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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harbors traces of its collective and class provenance. As Edmond Cros suggests in his Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism, “every collectivity inscribes in its discourse indexes of its spatial, social, and historical insertion, and consequently generates specific microsemiotics. . . . Thus mental structures, landscapes, and life-styles are inscribed in the discourse of collective subjects (generations, employment and trades, family, social classes, regional collectivities, etc.)” (1988, 14, 16). This view, which is partly inspired by structuralism, generates the effort in Cros’s work to identify the syntax of sociocultural forms and to establish their ultimate relation to classes or other definable social collectivities. His analyses also imply a particular mode of historical embedding. Essentially, this involves identifying the semiotic component of specific cultural texts such as novels, films, and other cultural products and taking these as topical networks of collective symbols that represent certain underlying cultural assumptions. When he notes schisms in these products, they are detailed so as to bring cultural typology into a close connection with social polyphony. This then becomes a highly intricate mode of sociocriticism whose aim is to reveal the ideological underpinnings of these cultural phenomena. However, what is also clear is that Cros’s method ultimately requires a heavy investment in textual analysis, to the detriment of the extraliterary categories that are intuitively assumed to provide the referential and ideological surround to the texts he examines. In other words the network of determinations that refract the cultural encoding of the symbolic phenomena isolated for analysis is not in itself pursued as a methodological issue. Cros follows a long and august tradition of sociocriticism, drawing inspiration from Lukács and Goldman to Foucault and Bakhtin. In the case of a study of African social imaginaries, however, the impulse toward a Marxian microsemiotic sociocriticism has to be qualified by a mode of analysis responsive to the fluid boundaries between creative, imaginative, and extraliterary categories that frequently overlap and are hardly ever stable. The extraliterary categories are particularly important, as they involve the wide-ranging expressive devices of orality. This is particularly so with the concept of culture heroism, which as we will see in this chapter, is a thoroughly conjunctural sociocultural concept whose meaning depends not only on literary texts and popular novels but on the oral resources of folktales, urban legends, myths, rumors, and political stories among many other discourses. The trope of culture heroism depends on a variegated network of determinations, all of whose disparate sources could be pursued individually along different trajectories of significance. In this chapter, what I seek to paint in broad terms is how the particularity S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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of the social imaginary of culture heroism is a threshold that reveals important structural ideas about the nation-state form in Africa.1 The work of Cornelius Castoriadis and of E. P. Thompson provide further ways of thinking about how to embed social imaginaries within wider processes and to relate these to the political domain as such. We can largely agree with Castoriadis’s assertion that “the institution of society is the institution of social doing and of social representing/saying” (1987, 36). Distinguishing carefully between individual and social imaginaries, Castoriadis assimilates the process of socially “meaningful” signification to social imaginaries and argues for seeing social significations as efficacious in constituting societies. Signification, in his terms, does not refer solely to specific symbols but to various dimensions of representation on the basis of which other things are represented. For example, “the ‘economy’ and the ‘economic’ are central social imaginary significations which do not ‘refer’ to something but on the basis of which a host of things are socially represented, reflected, acted upon and made as economic” (362). Thus, following Castoriadis, we may think of the social imaginary as a signifying chain or series, all the links of which are not necessarily visible or manifest at all times, but on the basis of which a range of social forms become meaningful. However, even as Castoriadis provides a varied and productive account of different dimensions of social signification, ranging from language use right through to understandings of bureaucratic arrangements and the economy, he leaves out of account the status of socially significant stories and characterizations, something which, it seems to me, would help to clarify what he describes as “the curvature of the real in society.” As I propose to elaborate in this chapter, urban stories and legends are absolutely crucial in understanding the social imaginaries of the African postcolony. One might even assert polemically that stories are one of the most important if largely unacknowledged gateways to understanding social processes in postcolonial Africa. From a different direction, the cultural materialism of Thompson enables us to factor the dimension of stories into account. In his work we see a particular attention to counterhistorical forms of cultural ideas as a first step toward mounting a rigorous critique of traditional forms of social historiography. In “ The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (1991a) and “The Moral Economy Revisited” (1991b) Thompson provides a succinct introduction to both his theory and practice of historiography. Whereas most historians of the English food riots in the eighteenth century have tended to focus on economic factors to explain the behavior of the crowd, Thompson focuses his discussion on the common S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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people’s consensual evaluation of what they considered legitimate or illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, banking, and the other material and discursive practices to do with the growing and distribution of corn. He notes that this consensual evaluation in its turn “was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor” (1991a, 188). Rather than following the then dominant view of economic historians, who tended to see the riots as part of the inexorable process of the evolution of the free market, Thompson showed how at every point within the process of the passing of corn from the farm to the table (in the form of bread), there were “radiating complexities, opportunities for extortion [and] flashpoints around which riots could arise” (193). What he persuasively details, then, is that far from the riots being merely the spasmodic responses to hunger and shortage of food, they represented a wellorganized set of interpretations by the common people of the moral arrangements pertaining between producers, distributors, and consumers. Thompson’s account of the moral economy of the crowd is also in many respects the detailing of an alternative social imaginary about the market. For him, the market is not just a physical place but a metaphor for social and, indeed, interpersonal relations, the place where, in his words, “onehundred-and-one social and personal transactions went on; where news was passed, rumour and gossip flowed around, politics was (if ever) discussed in the inns or wine-shops round the market square” (1991a, 256). Thus, we see in his discussion a particular methodological concern with stories and anecdotes, a concern that is clearly absent from Castoriadis’s much later account of the social imaginary. These anecdotes serve to speak the subalternity of the historically ignored voice, thus helping to point out the particular limits of dominant culture from the perspective of its constitutive peripheries.2 With the views of Cros, Castoriadis, and Thompson in mind, I want to make the following propositions as a means of specifying my own methodological concerns: 1 That many, though not all, social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena articulate multiple realities and can be described from different if not divergent angles. They are best seen as conjunctural concepts. 2 That the analytical bounding of such phenomena can only act as a heuristic device, since in reality such conjunctural concepts are S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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often part of a more labile set of discourses and practices and, indeed, of other conjunctural concepts with which they overlap. 3 That in particular contexts these conjunctural concepts do not remain innocent of the play of power. As we will soon see, if they are truly conjunctural, they are likely to be appropriated for different uses in different contexts. 4 That these conjunctural concepts are best analyzed via sensitive perspectival modulations that would allow them to be connected to different thresholds of significance at the same time. What I want to do in the rest of this chapter is to focus on the notion of culture heroism as such a conjunctural concept of the social imaginary. Rather than settle for a microsemiotic analysis of the concept, however, I want to go a step further to define its relation to a particular conceptualization of civil society and concomitantly to the postcolonial state form in Africa. I describe this relation in the idiom of privatization, something which, though understandable from an economic perspective (i.e., of divestiture programs, projects for the privatization of security, etc.), is deepened and rendered more complex when seen from the perspective of attempted conversions of the bureaucratic nexus into the economy of the gift, in which the bureaucratic state apparatus is almost compulsively converted into relations of personal reciprocity via circuits of gift exchange. Taken from the viewpoint of urban myths and their putative disclosure of a social imaginary, the various tropes of culture heroism reveal a particular “privatization” of the public sphere. The discussion will be an interweaving of a number of theoretical threads, moving in a general direction of greater complexity regarding the linkage between urban myths and postcolonial social and political relations in Africa. Schematically, the chapter may be read as proceeding in the following trajectory: urban myths and legends and what these reveal about the conjunctural concept of culture heroism → the differential subsegments and rates of change within the conjunctural concept of culture heroism (e.g., to do with women) → at another level of significance, a focus on politicians’ appropriations of tropes of culture heroism as part of a process of legitimation → the elongation of the reach of the politicians through the tropes of organicity implicit in such appropriated tropes of culture heroism → the extrapolation from the essential impulses of these stories of the attempt to translate the bureaucratic state apparatus for private uses (privatization) → related to this previous point, the persistent insertion of the bureaucratic state apparatus into a circuit of reciprocity via the practices that mark the gift economy. I provide this S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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“map” only to render visible what is going to be a highly intricate argument, in the hope that the shifts in scale between different levels of the discussion may be followed without too much disorientation on the part of the reader.

Culture Heroism and the Genres of Everyday Life The culture hero is a conjunctural concept that finds articulation in literature, in politics, and in what I want to term as the genres of everyday life (urban stories and myths, rumor, sensational stories and folktales, among others). But its complexity as a conjunctural concept also derives from the various degrees to which this characterization is appropriated in different contexts and made to express specific collective and political interests, imaginings, and aspirations. Most of my examples will be drawn from West Africa, which is the area I am most familiar with, but I hope that with certain qualifications the conceptual apparatus developed here could be extended for other contexts in Africa. As already stated, the purpose here is not to treat the concept exhaustively (something which would require a fuller study on its own) but to outline problems and to open up avenues for further exploration. The culture hero is not a homogeneous concept across Africa. To do justice to the concept, one would have to distinguish between different forms of culture heroism. At the simplest level, the trope of culture heroism may be defined as a mode of characterization of agency whose typology involves some of the heroic associations of priests, traditional rulers, medicine men, hunters, politicians, and even thieves and popular rogues. Account would also have to be taken of gender-related tropes of culture heroism such as those to do with the status of political women in certain cultures (the Queenmother among the Ashanti, for instance), market women, Maame Watta stories, and the general ideas associated with women’s power and witchcraft, largely a feminized category. A significant focus would have to be the oral resources of folktales, proverbs, enigmas, praise songs and epithets, and so on. One would also have to pay attention to “new” forms of culture heroism that draw on Christian and Islamic sensibilities and on the perception of celebrity in both local and foreign contexts. Foreign celebrities to be taken into account might include wellknown black political and social figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson as well as great sports figures such as Mohammed Ali and Michael Jordan.3 Additionally, we would have to pay attention to the many stories that circulate about the survival tactics of variS o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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ous Africans abroad, something that generates its own form of culture heroism. All these can themselves be shown to be interacting with more traditional ideas to produce a peculiarly syncretic form of culture heroism. Other identifiable resources of orality and popular culture might include recent popular videos that provide particularly rich views on a variety of contemporary topics (romantic love and its many problems, the vagaries of existence in the city, the fear of the other world, the chicanery of politicians, etc.) and popular novels, which themselves have proliferated specific character types.4 There are also various lived contexts for the circulation of characterizations of the culture hero such as those of family, town, or village ritual and customary practices (funerals, naming ceremonies, harvest festivals, etc.), in conversations on public transport, in the sensational tabloid press, and perhaps most significantly, in drinking bars and the various contexts of alcohol consumption.5 This is not to say that all these sources and sites produce a single or coherent characterization of culture heroism, but that these are the sites where the process of abstraction of the social imaginary of culture heroism may be identified. Though my focus here is predominantly on urban folktales and legends, all the various sites and sources I have mentioned form a background to the discussion. Ideally urban myths are to be distinguished from rumors and legends, even though this is a methodological distinction that in most instances proves quite difficult if not impossible to sustain. As Luise White points out in her fine study of vampire rumors in East and Central Africa, the effort to disaggregate discourses such as rumors, legends, and urban stories ends up being a struggle over the relative importance of the truth of stories, compared to the importance of how they are told (2000, 56–59). The significant focus has to be on whether they are believed or not, and this depends on the different styles and contexts of their telling as much as on what is being told. In the particular case of urban myths, one thing they seem to share across Africa is a close relation to ideas of the trickster. In a 1997 essay titled “Politics and Urban Folklore in Nigeria,” Nigerian Ropo Sekoni suggests that many urban myths are transpositions of folktale models into new frameworks to reflect changing sociocultural concerns. Their modes of transformation are interesting in themselves, and Sekoni traces the variety of transpositions through which folktales have passed in urban Nigeria. These he divides into roughly three phases. The first is that of the colonial era, when folktales and folktale motifs were reinterpreted to present critical perspectives of the colonial administration or the white man. We should pause to note in this regard that in certain contexts the characters of folklore had their real-life counterparts working within the S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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environment of the colonial administration. An example of this is provided in Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s fascinating semifictional account of the life of Wangrin in his inimitable The Fortunes of Wangrin (1999). The stories about Wangrin were themselves first related to Bâ in his childhood by a griot. Encountering Wangrin in later life gave Bâ the opportunity of hearing more stories from the man himself, which he then set down after many years. The range of circulation of the stories of Wangrin and the fascination they held for Bâ, himself an accomplished oral raconteur, mark Wangrin out as a culture hero of no ordinary stature. As Bâ shows, Wangrin was a very astute and manipulative player within the French colonial bureaucratic apparatus from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. He was an interpreter who due to his indispensable role in mediating the contact between his people and the French colonial bureaucrats in Senegal was able to play one against the other to his own advantage. He was a masterful colonized Machiavel and read against other better-known Africans in the service of colonial bureaucracies, provides an interesting perspective on the ambiguities of the formation of the colonized administrative elite. Wangrin materializes in an uncanny way the behavior of the trickster figure of African folktales, but this time with practical consequences for the French colonial administration in Senegal (and, it has to be said, for his own compatriots). The second phase that Sekoni notes in Nigerian urban stories is that of the direct aftermath of decolonization, when different political figures came into the limelight and their followers created fantastic stories about them to augment their political capital. Thus, it was common in the 1960s to hear apocryphal stories about how the WHO had attempted to buy Nnamdi Azikiwe’s brains for preservation (Sekoni 1997, 142). Azikiwe was from the Igbo minority in eastern Nigeria, and the stories about him served to strengthen their claim to his being the most intelligent politician to emerge out of post-Independence Nigeria. In the 1970s Awolowo, of western Nigeria, also had his share of legends, one of which suggested that he had been spotted on the moon with his wife just prior to the 1979 elections. Both these examples hint at the desire to raise the profile of political leaders and to project them as larger than life, in a part extension and part transformation of the ways in which legendary figures are treated in the oral narratives and proverbs that circulate in the indigenous domain. Sekoni notes that during the 1980s a different trope of culture heroism becomes manifest in urban Nigeria. This is that of the trickster figure, mainly expressed in stories about ordinary Nigerians who are able to outwit their masters (often political) and make away with large sums of money, posh cars, or even the numbers of Swiss bank accounts (1997, 143–45). As S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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he goes on to point out, the main feature that distinguishes these urban folktales from the traditional ones (which have a subjective poetic mode, as he puts it) is that they are essentially realist in temper and have real-life characters in a variety of recognizably modern social settings. As we have already noted with regard to the character of Wangrin, it is evident that the realist temper of the urban folktales can be traced much further back. At any rate the significant thing from Sekoni’s account is the degree to which in 1980s Nigeria, at the same time as the discourse of urban folktale becomes focused on exploring the escapades of various anti-hegemonic trickster figures, there is a move in the opposite direction of appropriating resources from the indigenous realm to ground hegemonic discourses and projects at the higher level of official political discourse: “[A]t the same time that the masses switched to the anti-hegemonic narrative form, prohegemonic propaganda for such projects as the Green Revolution, Ethical Revolution, War Against Indiscipline, and Mass Mobilization for Social Reliance were couched in the subjective poetic mode” (Sekoni 1997, 144). As I have already mentioned, across Africa one thing that urban myths seem to share is a relation to ideas of the trickster. In Arthur Goldstuck’s two collections of South African urban myths, for example, one notices the emphasis that is placed on the wit and resourcefulness of the dispossessed.6 Sometimes these urban myths have well-known figures such as Nelson Mandela at their center. In other cases the central characters are ordinary people. Repeatedly we find that urban myths are centrally about the exercise of wit in the face of bewildering social and political realities. Thus, Sekoni’s Nigerian accounts seem replicable for other urban areas in Africa. In my view a subgenre of urban myths and folktales, however, may be seen in the various stories that circulate about how ordinary people either interact with the bureaucratic state apparatus or, as is now increasingly the case, respond to the pressures of globalization. Encounters with the bureaucratic state apparatus and with the processes of globalization are also shown to require the peculiar exercise of native wit. One fascinating globalization story from Ghana that got as far as being retold by an FM radio disc jockey in Accra relates the story of a wealthy middle-class woman and a dutiful kayayoo (market porter) whom she regularly paid on visits to the market to have her groceries carried to the trunk of her car.7 The story goes that after several months of carrying the groceries for the same rate, the kayayoo one day hikes up her price by a whopping 500 percent. To her middle-class client’s bewildered protests, the kayayoo plants her fists firmly on her waist, cocks her head to one side, and asks: “Where have you been all these months, my dear? Don’t you know that the dollar S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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has gone up?” The kayayoo’s price hike is a direct response to the dollarization of the Ghanaian economy, the fact that everything seems to be linked to the dollar such that with the unpredictable fluctuations in the rate of the local currency against the dollar the prices of goods keep going up. She also reveals in her own way a complex grasp of the relation between external economic processes and the impact these must have on the rate of her labor. Not to be frozen out of account by the vagaries of the economy, the kayayoo also hitches her services to the rising dollar. And good for her too, we might add. This apocryphal story reveals an understanding of how global processes are translated into a local cultural idiom of the interaction between social classes. For in Africa, shopping at any street market involves as much cultural know-how as it requires economic knowledge (of prices, their fluctuations, the effect that the relative distance of locations from the city center affect pricing, and the degrees to which this is manipulated by both consumers and merchants, etc.). I will have more to say on the link between the cultural and economic nexus later in the chapter.

Women and the Fissures of Culture Heroism As will have been noticed, many of the urban tales Sekoni discusses are male-centered. However, the kayayoo’s story tells us that these urban tales are by no means dominated by men. There have historically also been strong women culture heroes. Examples that readily come to mind are Yaa Asantewaa of the Ashantis who led them in war against the British toward the end of the nineteenth century, and legendary figures such as Anowa, a prophetess of the Akan people.8 In Nigeria we have evidence of female heroism in the robust women-led antitaxation riots of the 1930s and 1940s. Nina Mba’s book on women’s political activism in southern Nigeria, Nigerian Women Mobilized (1982), captures something of these strong women.9 In the popular imagination, however, there is a sense in which the strong woman is, though admired, often perceived as anomalous or possessing witchcraft. The constitutive ambiguity involved in popular attitudes to strong women makes it such that urban stories that circulate about them are on the one hand highly approving and on the other hand marked by a fear of women’s power. In Ghana, a good sign of the terror that strong women evoke can be seen in how Jerry Rawlings reacted during his first stint in power in 1979 to the strength of the women of Makola Market, a walled market that had always been the economic hub of Accra’s city center. Rawlings ruled the country for four months in 1979 (June to September) and subsequently S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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without interruption from January 1981 to December 2000. Throughout the 1970s, these Makola mammies, as we used to call them, were reputed to have had a determining influence on fiscal and budgetary policy at the highest levels of government.10 Their influence was gained not through any direct interventions in the corridors of power but in their astuteness in managing the dynamics of the supply and demand of basic consumer goods. They were thought to be experts at creating artificial shortages at will and were reputed to be able to sell anything in the market, from tomatoes to diesel oil to even police uniforms. There were also terrific stories of their general impunity toward the security agencies. One story told is of a terrifying practice they had of storing old urine in pots underneath their wooden stools to use as a deterrent spray on over-inquisitive policemen whenever they found it necessary. These women illustrated something of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, subverting power through the sheer joy of mocking it and exposing its limitations. When Rawlings came to power in June 1979, one of the first things he did in his so-called “housecleaning” exercise was to evacuate the market and have it bombed from the air. The material site of women’s power was bombed to the ground and with it a major source of urban folktales. It is a curious historical contradiction, however, that even as stories of the market women’s impunity were silenced after the bombing of the market, a cluster of stories came to evolve around Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings, wife of the head of state. Her vociferousness in public life was read as an unbridled thirst for power, and all sorts of stories circulated about her. She became a classic hate-figure in Ghanaian politics and in many ways came to embody the perceived problematic power of women in politics, which had at first been imagined to reside mainly among the market women. Fissures and contradictions relating to female culture heroism are to be seen particularly with respect to the contrast in the definitions of women’s private and public roles. Whereas for men, the movement between private and public is smooth and largely unremarked, for women, the movement into the public sphere is often registered as posing danger. This manifests itself structurally as an anomalousness attached to female heroic agency. This anomalousness is frequently seen in the articulation and control of female sexuality and reproductive capacities. In these two areas women, when heroic, are imagined as negating or at least setting aside their socially defined sexual and domestic roles. Even as the robust redefinition of their socially assigned roles is celebrated, there is also a small tinge of nervousness about what exactly this might mean for the society at large. This contradiction in the role of women is to be seen in the work of literary writers S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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as well as in popular culture more generally. And so we find that even in more progressive representations of women such as in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (1967), the indomitable Segi is the leader of a club of prostitutes. The final gesture of defiance she displays against the tyrant Kongi is to disrupt his carefully staged New Yam festival by passing to him in place of the ritual yam the decapitated head of a political opponent he had earlier had executed. This freezes Kongi in mid-celebration. But discursively, it also places Segi at a desperate proximity to the tyrant, as she is obliged to circulate the symbols of death to challenge his power. And it is not to be discounted also that she had previously been his lover. Even with Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), a novel that is widely regarded as a major example of African feminist writing, there is an inescapable sense that the redefinition of the female role comes at an incredibly high cost. The novel is notable for what might be described as the ethnography of the private sphere in the movement between tradition and modernity. In this respect it contrasts perfectly with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which is clearly an ethnography of the public sphere and one that is predominantly masculine and tradition-centered. In Achebe’s novel, even when there is a suspicion that a female character is being built up as a potential nucleus of alternative values, she is quietly peripheralized in the text. This is what happens to both Ekwefi, one of Okonkwo’s wives, and Ezinma, her precocious daughter.11 The “nervous conditions” of Dangarembga’s title recalls Fanon’s words in Wretched of the Earth about the condition of the native being a nervous condition, but in the novel it is the women of the story who suffer from that condition, and what generates the nervousness is not colonialism but patriarchy. Centering on Tambu and her departure from her rural homestead to live with her uncle, a headteacher, the novel traces what seems at one level to be a straightforward female bildungsroman. The novel is narrated by Tambu and shows us the ways in which her intelligence and critical consciousness are aligned with the manner of her progressive socialization into modernity. Self-doubt and a healthy skepticism of accepted wisdom are definitive of this mode of consciousness. At the same time, the novel gives us various images of the domestic sphere in both the rural homestead and at the headteacher’s house. Homemaking is defined around a series of rituals to do with cooking, cleaning up, receiving visitors, and so on, at all levels centralizing women’s roles. Tambu comes to question the division of domestic roles gradually, and even then not in a way that would unduly disturb her capacity to fulfill them. The task of radically challengS o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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ing these roles is left to Nyasha, her cousin, who has had part of her education in England and who, contrary to her father’s wishes, is robustly independent-minded. Discursively, Nyasha moves in the opposite direction to Tambu. Whereas Tambu moves from a rural traditionalism into a modernity signaled by her education, Nyasha is keen to move away from that modernity and into a more strategic and fraught appropriation of both rural and modern spaces. Her intense skepticism about received knowledge leads to running battles with her father, a clearly authoritarian figure, and to the onset of a painful anorexia, which is received with bafflement by the rest of the family. Matters come to a head with a nervous breakdown she suffers while preparing for her impending final school examinations: Nyasha grew weaker by the day. She weaved when she walked and every night was the same. Although we were on vacation she studied fourteen hours a day to make sure that she passed her “O” levels. She worked late into the night to wake me up regularly and punctually at three o’clock with a problem—a chemical equation to balance, the number of amperes in a circuit to be calculated or an irregular Latin verb to be conjugated, although I was only in Form One and could not often help her. “I have to get it right,” she would whisper with an apologetic smile. It was truly alarming, but nobody commented, nobody acted; we were all very frightened. One evening, at supper, she passed out into her plate. It didn’t last long, only a minute or two, but it was enough to overtax her father’s precarious patience. Babamukuru, who thought she was making a scene, ordered her to her bedroom, where she lay open-eyed and quiet all night. At three o’clock she woke me up. . . . I touched her to comfort her and that was the trigger. “I won’t grovel, I won’t die,” she raged and crouched like a cat ready to spring. The noise brought Babamukuru and Maiguru running. They could do nothing, could only watch. Nyasha was beside herself with fury. She rampaged, shredding her history book between her teeth (“Their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies.”), breaking mirrors, her clay pots, anything she could lay her hands on and jabbing fragments viciously into her flesh, stripping the bedclothes, tearing her clothes from the wardrobe and trampling them underfoot. “ They’ve trapped us. They’ve trapped us. But I won’t be trapped. I’m not a good girl. I won’t be trapped.” Then as suddenly as it came, the rage passed. “I don’t hate you, Daddy,” she said softly. “ They want me to, but I won’t.” She lay down on her bed. “I’m very tired,” she said in a voice that was recognisably hers. “But I can’t sleep. Mummy will you hold me?” She curled up in Maiguru’s lap looking no more than five years

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old. “Look what they’ve done to us,” she said softly. “I’m not one of them but I’m not one of you.” She fell asleep. (200–201)

Let us pass quickly over the tearing of her books, which is selfexplanatory, and the breaking of the mirrors (fragmentation of identity) and her clay pots (fragmentation of a romantic ideal of rural domesticity), and even her violence toward her own body (self-flagellation and death wish). Let us focus instead on the innocuous sentences “I am not a good girl” and “I don’t hate you, Daddy. They want me to, but I won’t.” Why is it that in the vortex of her nervous crisis she says she does not want to be a “good girl”? She is here directly addressing her father’s wish that she put up behavior that would make her marriageable. For him, this means in effect completely acquiescing to whatever his wishes are, in other words, making complete obeisance to patriarchy. This is something Nyasha rejects even at the moment of her breakdown. And yet at the same time she says she does not hate her father. “ They” want her to, but she won’t. But who are “they”? The they she is referring to are the forces and factors that have produced her father as a token black in a white-dominated world (this is pre-Independence Zimbabwe). In other words, she sees her father’s authoritarian attitudes as being a refraction of a larger systemic patriarchy, the prime exemplar of which is colonialism itself. Thus, the following day she says to Tambu that there is a whole lot more, “there’s nearly a century of it.” Even though there is no represented public sphere in Dangarembga’s novel in the sense in which we see it in many male-centered novels, it must still be noted that Nyasha is positioning her own crisis of identity as precisely an encounter with a public sphere that is sedimented within the private sphere of domesticity. For she interprets her father’s authoritarianism as being ultimately overdetermined by his location as a conduit of the civilizing impulses of colonialism, one that comes perforce with a series of hierarchies and authority positions. Her nervous condition is aggravated at precisely the point when she has to take her school examinations, which in this case can fruitfully be interpreted as the needle’s eye of modernity and the very gateway to attaining a new identity. This gateway, however, is saturated for her with all the contradictions involved in the passage between tradition and modernity, enlightenment, colonialism and freedom, and, most significantly, the empowerment of self-creation. She craves the freedom to be whoever she wants to be but cannot completely ignore the contradictions that this involves. Her breakdown then becomes the signature of an impossibility. We see, then, that the attempt to challenge the traditional roles of S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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womanhood, and the appropriation of a public sphere of agency and interpretation lead to the exaction of a price. The contrast with Tambu is complete. Tambu’s is a questioning that does not involve a desire for a public sphere intervention, even at a subliminal interpretative level. (This does not mean that she does not stage her own rebellions; she does, but they lack the ramifications generated by her cousin’s self-consciousness.) Though also always skeptical about received ideas, Tambu maintains just enough acquiescence in the established codes to retain the capacity to progress without the fragmentation of her sense of self. Nyasha, on the other hand, goes all the way to reject her socially defined roles and to project a vigorous intervention within the imagined public sphere of colonial relations. It is this she suffers for ultimately. One thing to note with regard to women’s stories is that even as the trope of culture heroism changes through time, all dimensions of this social imaginary do not change at the same rate. Because in reality women are situated within specific hierarchical structures that work to disempower them, the stories about them also tend to refract their often difficult and ambivalent position. It is almost as if the stories about them register a recalcitrance toward change within the larger framework of the conjunctural concept, reproducing instead certain ambivalent ideas about their power/ powerlessness. The different rates of change in popular stories about men and women in the public sphere are precisely because the stories are themselves embedded within larger discursive and material frameworks that position women differently than men. Thus, even within the domain of a single social imaginary such as that of culture heroism, fissures and contradictions may be detected and isolated for a historical analysis.

Politicians, Politics, and the Nervous Conditions of the State Form At the same time as the transposition of ideas of culture heroism is taking place in the domain of urban folktales and in literary writing, politicians also define their own ambit of culture heroism and attempt to validate modes of political action with recourse to the indigenous sphere. In a fascinating article humorously titled “His Eternity, His Eccentricity, or His Exemplarity?” A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (1991) shows that all these practices relate to a process of the legitimation of the African leader’s status that is of a piece with the taking of titles and epithets for the projection of the leader as a modern culture hero. Kirk-Greene challenges the Weberian interpretation of charismatic leadership that was applied to many African leaders in the political science literature of the 1960s and 1970s. For him S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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the label of culture hero can be applied to the modern leader who “consciously and quite deliberately, reaches back into the history of his people and, by a positive reaffirmation of their cultural dynamic, simultaneously enhances both his stature and his legitimacy” (174). He names among such leaders Jomo Kenyatta, who expounded a suggestively Kikuyu vision of Kenya with culturally well-versed leaders like himself implicitly at the center in Facing Mount Kenya; Ahmadu Bello, who reaches well into a Hausa cultural past to forge himself in an identifiable cultural mode; Kwame Nkrumah, who had a predilection for praise names and epithets transposed from indigenous discourses of praise singing; and Sékou Touré, who invoked the epic Samore as his ancestor. Though all the leaders named were the first crop of post-Independence leaders and therefore might be thought to have been feeling their difficult way toward authenticating their power within the heady and bewildering processes of African nationstate formation, we should also recall Mobutu of Zaire and his penchant for leopard-skin finishing to his clothes, which he wore until his overthrow in 1997. Curiously enough, this object of attire was given a new and startling inflection by Kabila during his long drawn-out guerrilla war to oust Mobutu. As part of the symbolic paraphernalia that surrounded him in his meetings with the international press, Kabila had a flag on which was embossed the logo of Simba, the young lion in Disney’s The Lion King.12 This immediately invokes all kinds of narratives, such as those of the globalization of images of heroism, the flow of ideas of rite of passage, and the appropriation of symbols of masculinity, all of which go to further show that the images that define culture heroism are not always derived wholly from indigenous contexts. And still sticking to leopards, lions, and the feline fraternity, it is interesting to note how a form of fractious political materiality was defined for colonial Ibadan around a “cloth of gold,” which pictured a crowned Olubadan holding a leopard on leash bought for the big meeting of Yoruba chiefs in 1936 (see Watson 1998). In a sense, however, the old forms of political authentication are gradually changing. Though it is too early to say in full what he represents in this process, one of the main figures in this shift is Nelson Mandela. Mandela represents a combination of indigenous culture heroism with the figure of the modern martyr. Already urban myths have started circulating about him (as witnessed in Goldstuck’s 1994 collection), and it would be interesting to research what the implications of his being a characterization of culture heroism are for the social and political imaginary across the continent. Figures such as Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, and Desmond Tutu of South Africa S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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might fruitfully be added to this examination. The point to note with regard to politicians’ appropriation of ideas of culture heroism is that it is intimately tied to legitimation anxieties. Both urban myths and political appropriations of tropes of culture heroism circulate within a significatory regime of incoherence. This is both social and political. As is easily demonstrable, the promise held out by independence has by no means been delivered in postcolonial Africa. Certain constitutive ambiguities define the postcolonial African nationstate. These ambiguities date from the colonial foundations of the state form, deriving, as Mbembe argues in On the Postcolony (2001), from the absence of a contract between the rulers and the ruled. Worryingly, as Mbembe shows, this colonial governmentality was bequeathed almost intact to the postcolony, the situation becoming even more aggravated under African totalitarian regimes because the postcolonial commandement was articulated within the full glare of what, following Appadurai (1996, 27–47), we might term the transnational ideoscapes of political ideology. Subjects no more, postcolonial citizens are still under the domination of an unaccountable political order yet at the same time fully cognizant of what citizenship might mean in a globalized and transnational world. All the institutions of central power in the African state (the administrative, military, police, and judicial apparatus) are significant in producing what I will elaborate as an impulse toward political transcendence. A pertinent implication of what Mbembe describes as the absence of the social contract in the African postcolony is the fact that the political domain can be said to engender a set of nervous conditions of political and social existence. This is not due merely to the fact that civil society and the state are inextricably linked, but to the fact that the form and direction of civil society and, indeed, of the private sphere are often ruptured by the state. A story from Ghana in the late 1970s serves to illustrate this. During the last days of General Kutu Acheampong, when the country was grinding to a halt due to civil and political unrest, the story was told of a civil servant who arrived home to find that his wife, also a civil servant, had burnt the evening meal to cinders. A big row ensued, and after a series of heated insults and counter-insults, the man sought to silence his wife with an accusation that he knew she had no answer to: “It is because of Kutu that you burnt the food,” he declared with finality, “you have been thinking about politics too much these days.” Consider the power of this insult in “silencing” the woman. She burnt the food because she had been (a) thinking of another man, and (b) thinking about politics, and therefore, as we have already noted with respect to Dangarembga and others, positioned herself S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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in relation to the public sphere. This “double infidelity” led to the burning of her husband’s food. Her role as civil servant (a public role) can not overrule that of wife in the domestic sphere. The quarrel is to be seen as a means of the rupturing of the private by the incoherence of the undemocratic state. This rupture coincides in this particular case with the work of patriarchy in situating the woman within the uncompromising grid of domesticity, over which her husband seeks to exercise ultimate control. Of course, from the perspective of the effect of the incoherence of the state, such interruptions of the private sphere also had a more violent dimension, with people “disappeared” from their homes and “accidentalized” on their way to work by agents of the totalitarian state. But it is the laughand-cry quality of the story, its ability to encapsulate an essentially tragic contextualization of the domestic within the domain of the political that shows the force of the social imaginary in coping with what was in the period a highly confusing set of sociopolitical conditions. The African postcolonial state makes itself existentially “unforgettable,” invading all spheres of social existence to the degree of rendering itself a constant horizon for the interpretation of sociocultural phenomena. It is almost as if the African postcolonial state creates its own peculiar phenomenology, its own ability to make itself remembered as farce in the terms outlined by Jean-François Bayart (1993), or as nightmare in those laid out by some of its literary writers. Quite often, its unforgettability is closely tied to the issue of the legitimation of governments. To put matters schematically, one might say that illegitimate power is the most important obstacle to the achievement of individual autonomy in Africa. It is thus not for nothing that this lack of autonomy is thematized in African literature in terms of individuals who are alienated from their societies and, once recognizing the inexorable direction of their alienation, go mad.13 With the crisis of legitimation, African leaders attempt to produce an image of culture heroism for themselves that resembles that which pertains within the indigenous sphere. As can be shown from studies of different African cultures, in the traditional worldview the culture hero(ine) was organic to the individual cultures in which they appeared.14 Crucially, however, culture heroism in the indigenous sphere comes with specific duties and obligations. There are ways in which heroes cease being heroes, and traditional leaders are deposed. Transferred into governmental rationality, however, the African leader attempts to invoke a sense of organic relation between leader and led while bracketing out the specific nature of reciprocal obligations immanent in the indigenous sphere. This is in a sense inescapable, especially as it is often the case that the tropes of culS o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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ture heroism African leaders deploy are hybrids from more than one ethnic background. However, what is pertinent is the persistence of the desire to project a sense of organicity deriving from relations within the indigenous sphere onto the sphere of modern state/society relations, while at the same time retaining the capacity to abrogate the required obligations enjoined by the indigenous sphere. Politicians’ appropriations of the trope of culture heroism are thus strictly speaking the assemblage of partial features geared toward strengthening the image of the leader in the minds of the led.15 Essentially, most African leaders perceive the bureaucratic state apparatus as an extension of themselves. The “elongation” of the political self can be demonstrated directly from the speed with which some heads of state proliferate their images in public places. Streets are named after the leader and members of his immediate family, and the ordinary citizen is often required to make some form of obeisance to the public image. This can be demonstrated for a variety of both totalitarian and democratic regimes ranging from early nationalists such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kamuzu Banda to later entrants and coup makers such as Mobutu, Eyadéma, Idi Amin, and Sani Abacha. Arap Moi and Mugabe occupy a curious in-between position, being on the one hand leaders of democratically elected governments but on the other displaying the full spectrum of totalitarian impulses. Perception of the state as an extension of the leader’s personality is part of the general idea of the organic relation between leader and led. Often, through codes of dress, the use of proverbs, and the strategic deployment of certain recognizable traditional rituals during important state functions, the leaders wish to comprehensively define themselves as representing all the different ethnic groups and peoples. However, the deployment of such characterizations is not to be separated from the desire to elongate the reach of the ruler. This is a significant dimension of the contradictory privatization of the state from the perspective of the politicians. Within the operations of the central authorities, the implications of organicity inherent in the political appropriations of culture heroism reveal another worrying dimension. This is the will-to-transcendence, what is ultimately the desire to provide particular frameworks within which contradictions are abolished or subsumed under the impress of a supervening general good. The will-to-transcendence is the desire to transcend social and political contradictions and to provide discursive and material contexts through which the dangerous energies of such contradictions can be channeled in particular directions rather than in others. At the same time S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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as the postcolonial African state is engendering a set of nervous conditions, it is also keen to produce a mode of political transcendence. What this means essentially is that the African postcolonial state form often conceals an essentially totalitarian impulse. This political impulse has a number of features. The primary one is that of the proliferation of binarisms, such as those of good versus evil, us versus them, dissent against the state versus support for the state, with the governed being invited to take sides in this Manichaean allegory. This is of course directly tied to questions of legitimation. The will-to-transcendence expresses itself through the attempt to present stark choices to the citizenry as a means of enforcing allegiance. And even when “democratic,” as is evident in the recent political problems in Zimbabwe, the democratic procedures are framed around stark options, this time on the basis of the particularly fraught subject of white-owned lands. In other words, strict binaristic thinking is symptomatic of a desperate and urgent desire for legitimation that is never fully capable of fulfillment, as once successful, it aggravates the anxieties of the ruler about the possibility of dissent. Thus is the tautology of power established, with binaries provoking further binaries in an ever spiraling series.16 The political domain proliferates binarisms in the public sphere and encourages people to take sides at all times either for or against particular options. Often, of course, the means of coercion are frequently brought to bear on the area of choices, so that it is not merely a matter of making a decision at one’s leisure.

Social Imaginary as the Privatization of the State If, as I am trying to argue, the social imaginary of culture heroism is a means of mediating the nervous conditions of existence in the face of the incoherence of the nation-state form in Africa via particular stories, in what ways can we conceptualize its contradictory relationship to the political domain? When these stories are exchanged on the streets, they seem like perfectly innocent and humor-laden stories having no structural relation to the political imaginary as such. My point is the direct opposite. I want to suggest that these stories are highly revealing about the relation between people, civil society, and the nation-state form in Africa. To ground this assertion, I want to elaborate the notion of “privatization” I hinted at earlier in the chapter. One thing that all the stories I pointed out share in common is that they are essentially elaborations not merely of a characterological schema but of a process of abstraction. This process of abstraction must be seen as developing along two axes, (1) as a S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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way of understanding social relations, and (2) as a way of linking these to a set of ideas about relations in the political sphere. Often the form of social relations and the form of the political sphere are collapsed one into the other. Even though urban folktales are not exclusively about relations within the public sphere, the characters in them are often presented as exhibiting responses to what lies “outside” the domestic sphere, whether this outside is the urban landscape itself, the state, or the globalized world. This is not to suggest any easy opposition between public and private but to highlight the specific interests of urban folktales in suggesting attitudes to social and political existence. Specifically, many urban folktales have to do with the ways in which the nation-state form is rendered comprehensible for private use. Thus, the social imaginary revealed in urban folktales is part of an ensemble of responses to the central authority and its bureaucratic state apparatus. This reveals some complex dimensions. One very important dimension of privatization involves ordinary people’s primary impulses in their encounters with the bureaucratic state apparatus. Anyone who has been in Africa and has had to deal with the bureaucracy will attest to the great difficulties that are often put in their way. Africans, innovative as always, have devised means by which to deal with these problems. It is not uncommon to find that when Africans want to deal with officialdom at any level, their first impulse is to find someone they know. Finding someone you know sometimes involves elaborate circuits of contacts, normally starting from extended kinship ties: “I have a cousin who has a friend who has an aunt whose second son is married to a lady whose former schoolmate works in that office.” This form of “networking” in reality entails the translation of the bureaucratic state apparatus, firstly, into the modalities of the gift economy, and secondly, into the relations of reciprocity that regulate social behavior at various levels of society. As Marcel Mauss’s seminal 1954 study of gift exchange has shown, the gift is an example of a “total social phenomenon” involving legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. Crucially, however, in many cultures the gift is used to establish circuits of reciprocity. The problem arises when these circuits of reciprocity extend to the workings of the bureaucratic state apparatus, an area that did not feature in Mauss’s examination of the economy of the gift. From a comparable domain, Mayfair Yang’s Gifts, Favors and Banquets (1994) is a fascinating study of similar responses to the bureaucratic state apparatus in China. A pervasive set of practices called quanxi underlies everyday interactions with the bureaucratic state apparatus in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, doing business, S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, obtaining housing, and even buying train tickets all call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and the cultivation of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. In Ghana, this is called kalabule, a term whose provenance, though unclear, remains popular to this day. However, the difficulty with kalabule as a term is that it is translated directly as “corruption.” I would hesitate to place such a normative label on the proceedings, as it often turns out that ordinary people are deeply affronted by the behavior of corrupt politicians and yet do not hesitate to translate the state into the domain of the gift economy themselves whenever the opportunity presents itself. Often in Africa the finer details of the networking that comes through gift exchange are circulated by way of urban myths about people’s successes in dealing with the bureaucratic state apparatus. There is a moral dimension to the translations of the bureaucratic state apparatus into the sphere of private gift exchange that allows ordinary people to be able to pass judgment on corrupt politicians while suspending moral judgment on what they do themselves. Even though a comparative analysis of quanxi and what I am describing as privatization is well beyond the scope of this chapter, one wonders whether in fact the respective nation-state forms in China and in Africa do not show some constitutive similarities that tell us something about their relative proximity to traditional spheres of exchange that are different from those that pertain in the West.17 Along with the subversive actions of the Makola mammies of the 1970s in Ghana, these privatization processes might reasonably be interpreted in Bakhtinian terms as the popular subversion of the grand récits of the modern state by carnivalesque forms of social imaginaries and practices. Attractive though this interpretation appears, it seems to me to appeal to too great a sense of coherence in the ways in which the state is interpreted by ordinary people. The picture is more confused. The social imaginary of culture heroism, when joined to the ritual “privatization” of the state, also signifies a progressive replacement of the state within the social imaginary by an ensemble of partial features that are selected in terms of a system of ends and with reference to a pseudo-conceptualization of relations between the individual and the political and social system. This pseudoconceptualization is somewhat arbitrary even if efficacious in helping people to negotiate their encounters with the bureaucratic state apparatus. It is a process of abstraction that, to echo Castoriadis, is in a sense a “systematic delirium” (1987, 57), that is, constructed according to incoherent principles and assimilating different and apparently incompatible categories of social existence into one other. In this respect the processes by S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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which the bureaucratic state apparatus is abstracted for private use subtend the incoherence of the postcolonial nation-state form itself. This is then the logic that allows us to establish a parallel between the bureaucratic translations of ordinary people and the appropriations of politicians of the tropes of culture heroism and to read both of them as related dimensions of privatization. For both at the level of politicians’ appropriations of tropes of culture heroism and at that of ordinary people’s circulation of stories, features of a systematic delirium are in evidence. Even though there is a homology implied in the mutual attempt of politicians and of ordinary people to convert the state to private use, it has to be noted that the privatization of the state inherent in the urban myths and legends is a process of abstraction that operates on a different scale from that of the political domain. For ordinary people, privatization is a process of abstraction that coalesces the scale of relations of reciprocity inherent in either kinship or social ties with that of the obligation to deliver goods and services essential to the operation of the bureaucratic state apparatus. This process of abstraction, like what we observed with regard to that of politicians, requires the assimilation of notions of kinship or social relations to that of the relations between the citizen and the state. Essentially, it involves the translation of different scales of social relations onto the scale of the relations between the citizen and the state, normally made manifest in the encounter between ordinary people and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Witchcraft, another conjunctural concept that overlaps with that of the trope of culture heroism, best exemplifies this process of abstraction of kinship relations for application to the relations between citizen and state. As Peter Geschiere puts it in his The Modernity of Witchcraft, “It is striking, however, that this discourse [i.e., witchcraft], so closely linked to the domestic realities of the home and the family, is used at the same time to address modern changes and the increase in the scale they imply. In many African societies, witchcraft beliefs seem to be the obvious discourse for attempts to relate to new inequalities, which requires a dynamic use of the notions of both witchcraft and kinship” (1997, 11). This assimilation of the “increase in scale” represented by new political and social relations into an idiom of kinship ties is akin to a “moral economy” in the terms outlined by Thompson. The discourses of witchcraft and of culture heroism represent ordinary people’s incoherent abstraction of the state via social relations of reciprocity. The variegated social imaginary involved in this process of abstraction is a means of bringing the state and its apparatus of power into a sphere of comprehensibility. Taken together with the strategic giving of gifts and the cultivation of S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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obligations, the variegated social imaginary is part of a larger discursive ensemble, one of whose key impulses is privatization of the state. It has to be noted, however, that for the nation-state form and its bureaucratic apparatus to operate properly as an abstractable totality, they must be seen as an objective order completely separable from kinship relations and from the private sphere. This does not mean that in practice the postcolonial nation-state form will remain completely distanced from the interests of certain social fractions. However, it is arguable that the conceptual assimilation of the bureaucratic apparatus to the interests of a class represents a different process of abstraction from the notion of its assimilation to the idiom of kinship relations. Classical political theory assimilates the postcolonial state to class interests or to the interests of social fractions, whereas the popular imagination assimilates it to the modality of kinship and social ties. But class relations provide a different ground of contradiction from that pertaining to kinship relations. Whereas class relations denote contradictions within relations of production, kinship relations connote contradictions within largely organic arrangements that are supported by rituals of exchange and reciprocity. It is perhaps for this reason that totalitarianism and democracy in Africa often fade into each other. This is because the expressive social imaginary by which the two opposing forms of political arrangements are grasped by ordinary people remain practically the same whichever political order is instituted. It is this that suggests that only a partial ensemble of features of the state has been made to stand for it as a whole within the social imaginary, therefore slowing down its transition into another form of politico-social order. This does not mean that effective challenge to the state form does not periodically break out (something for which there is ample historical evidence in the secessionist bids and ethnic wars on the continent), but that it is rarely the case that such revolutions give birth to completely new responses to the state form. In this regard, the social imaginary underwrites an incremental repetition of familiarization procedures with respect to the state form. The question is whether a degree of alienation from these familiarization procedures is not necessary for a transformation of the postcolonial African state form into a form of real accountability. The answer is yet to be found.

Conclusion: Conjunctures and Analytical Fragments What we have seen in this discussion is the degree to which certain conjunctural concepts such as that of the culture hero allow us to follow the S o c i a l I m a g i n a r i e s i n Tr a n s i t i o n

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radiating points of a social imaginary that is itself intricately connected to a variety of spheres. There is no straightforwardly linear way of analyzing this concept. The main moves in our attempt to try to adduce the shape of the social imaginary of culture heroism have involved first identifying the everyday genres in which various dimensions of that imaginary are articulated. Though various urban myths and legends have been central, in the background have been ideas drawn from a variety of other popular discourses. But the next step involved seeing these stories not merely as signs of the creativeness of ordinary people in coping with the incoherence of postcolonial African society and politics but as structurally related to the articulation of the state form itself. The structural relation is traced through two main vectors, namely, the encounter between the ordinary citizen and the bureaucratic state apparatus, and in terms of its conversion, through the insertion of this apparatus into the circuits of gift exchange, into a mode of privatization for strategic use by ordinary people. The process of the privatization, however, is shown not to lie solely in the hands of ordinary citizens. Its other main dimension is the appropriations of the political sphere of the tropes of culture heroism to address the legitimation anxieties of modern postcolonial African governments. Obviously, this kind of analysis will have to be augmented with more wide-ranging interdisciplinary readings of the directions these stories might be going in and their implications in a globalized economy of diasporic Africans. Do Africans abroad trade the same stories, or are these stories resonant only inside of the continent? And if they are shared outside of Africa, what stories do diasporic Africans share about their host countries? These and various other questions remain to be answered. But in the present account, the main purpose has been to conjoin a cultural analysis of certain types of stories to the exposition of interconnected vectors of African realities. Conceptual conjunctures and narrative fragments have thus been critical to this account. In the next chapter we will see another dimension of the relations between the postcolonial African state and its citizens, but this time from the view of tragedy rather than of the implicit comedy of many of the urban myths and legends dealt with in this chapter.

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3 African Postcolonial Relations through a Prism of Tragedy And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it: by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince—or at least those to whom he has delegated his force—who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken. The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of “terror.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

As we saw from the previous chapter, there are various ways in which ordinary people attempt to convert the state for social use via an idiom of privatization. This involves an elaborate discursive ensemble that includes urban myths and legends about negotiation of the public sphere, and the various practices of gift exchange by which people attempt to coalesce the scale of kinship and social ties with that of the bureaucratic state apparatus. I also noted the degree to which politicians attempt to conceptually assimilate the state to their own persons by appropriating tropes of culture heroism that have notions of organicity inherent in them. One of the things that was left out of account in the discussion is the asymmetry in

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the relative force and effectiveness of the appropriations of ideas of culture heroism by ordinary people and by the state. This chapter adds another dimension to the earlier views on postcolonial citizen-state relations by looking at the tragic outcomes of the incoherence and violence of the African postcolonial state. The focus in this chapter is mainly the life and tragic death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, exemplary minority rights activist and writer who was unceremoniously hanged by Nigeria’s Abacha government in November 1995. I take the events surrounding Saro-Wiwa’s activism and death as nodal thresholds for the analysis of a range of levels, including the historical, the political, and the literary/aesthetic, with the literary/ aesthetic being used as the interstitial prism through which the other levels are refracted for discussion. It is Achille Mbembe (1992) who first indicates how literary and cultural theory might be used for the analysis of political ideas in the African postcolony.1 Drawing on Bakhtinian notions of the banal and the grotesque, he traces the ways in which a necessary “familiarity and domesticity” emerge in the relationships between governments and those they govern in the production and institution of political “signs, narratives and symbols” that in their turn make the postcolonial subject a participant in his or her own domination. As he points out, “officialdom and the people have many references in common, not least of which is a certain conception of the aesthetics and stylistics of power” (9). He is thus correct in shifting his focus away from the sheer binarisms that proliferate in standard interpretations of domination. Bakhtin is joined to Gramsci, Foucault, Habermas, and others to produce a highly supple form of cultural theory for his political analysis. Nonetheless, there is a question that Mbembe’s model does not elaborate, and that is the question of state violence under totalitarianism and what this implies for the creation of political subjectivity. Though noting the violence that is visited on those who, consciously or otherwise, flout the observances of the state’s practices of symbolic self-affirmation, he pays too little attention to the degree to which state violence procures acquiescence in its symbolic self-assertion while simultaneously creating the grounds for its violent reversal and overthrow. It is not only in a rehearsal of the self-validating terms of the state’s symbolism that people mime its rationality. The general purview of urban myths and legends and their relation to the discursive ensemble that undergirds the process of privatization elaborated in the previous chapter suggests a more complicated form of mimesis of the state’s rationality. It is a mimesis that involves an assemblage of partial features selected in terms of a system of ends and with a pseudo-conceptualization of the relations African Postcolonial Relations

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between the individual and the political system. Stories speak to this pseudo-conceptualization, but these subversive stories are sometimes augmented by subversive and revolutionary actions as well. Set alongside the sometimes public and sometimes private civil dissent exercised by ordinary people, the “ludic” and the “convivial” that Mbembe writes of in his essay often fade into attempts at a violent discomposition of the state. The many humorous stories we noted in the previous chapter can also be conjoined to a darker dimension of citizen-state relations. As I will show later, violence becomes a means by which to visit popular displeasure on those associated with the state, particularly minor officials and those seen as colluding with it. And this becomes heightened during periods of serious civil dissent, as can be shown for the Ogoni case in Nigeria. Thus, any analysis of people’s collusion in the state’s domination needs also to pay attention to a parallel order of potential violence that subtends and frequently organizes ordinary responses to the state in Africa. Mbembe’s cultural theory is extracted from a range of sources, allowing him to highlight a variety of vectors of the postcolony. It is possible, however, to expand Mbembe’s hybrid theory by drawing not just on literary and cultural theory but on certain specific literary paradigms, such as tragedy, as they provide tools by which to analyze political actions at the dual levels of structure and agency. This is to attempt a form of translation in which real-life events are relocated in the emotionally and philosophically charged discourse of literary tragedy. This is not so as to produce an allegory of the real in the form of the literary, but rather to calibrate the literary paradigm to help further our understanding of process, change, and contradiction in a slice of postcolonial history, in this case that of Nigeria. As we will soon see, this involves an oscillation between the literary and the historical, in such a way as to create a double vision of the postcolony. The hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa drew a lot of anger from the international community. People expressed shock at the fact that the Nigerian government seemed not to have had even token respect for human rights in the hurried way in which it tried and executed Saro-Wiwa. How were the terrible events to be understood in the face of the insulting gesture Abacha made to heads of Commonwealth governments gathered in New Zealand when he hanged Saro-Wiwa at the start of the Commonwealth Conference? For most people horrified by the events, there was an unconscious attempt to make sense of them within the available categories offered both by academic and journalistic discourses. One of these, which was repeated again and again, was that of “tragedy.” There were numerous African Postcolonial Relations

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references in the newspapers as well as among academics (in discussions on the Internet discussion site Nuafrica, for example) in which SaroWiwa’s death was referred to as “tragic.” It is evident that this term was often used in its everyday sense of “sad” or “terrible.” But the term also retained a vague ghost of its literary and scholarly dimension. It is at the intersection of the scholarly and the everyday that a rereading of the events leading to Saro-Wiwa’s death may be productively located. The overlap between the ordinary use of the words tragic and tragedy and their more specialist uses has been commented on by various critics. Raymond Williams sets this up as the starting point of his discussion in Modern Tragedy (1966). He sees the overlap in terms of a “crossroads” and pursues the meanings of the term through a survey of the tradition of literary tragedy and its discussions by literary writers, critics, and philosophers. As a consequence of his particular focus, however, Williams remains entirely within the domain of literary theory, and even though he makes frequent references to everyday understandings of tragedy, he inadvertently institutes an uneasy dichotomy between the two. Williams’s failure to break from the literary derives from the fact that the key source material for his meditations was literary tragedy itself. He does not establish an equivalent and parallel source in the domain of the extraliterary by which to test his understanding of the concept. Like many others, he proceeds by discussing tragedy and tragic theory and then abstracting from these for generalizations about life without mediating the generalizations with reference to specific real-life examples. The solution to the problematic raised in Williams’s methodology does not reside in reversing the procedure by starting from the real world and then moving into the aesthetic domain. Rather, it is preferable to systematically blur the distinctions between the two domains by cross-mapping the analysis between them. This is not so much to suggest that real-life suffering is infinitely amenable to aestheticization, but rather to link the seriousness and rigor with which literary tragedy is often dealt—its aesthetic, emotional, philosophical, ethical, and formal intensities—to an engagement with a specific event or sets of events in the world. If the suggestion of the transfer of literary tragedy as a category is to be fruitfully pursued, however, a problem arises about its definition. Tragedy, in the specialist sense, is nothing if not notoriously slippery as a concept. As I noted in the introduction, Aristotle’s conceptualization of tragic mimesis allows for a variety of theoretical elaborations. Particularly to be noted is his idea that tragedy is a serious action articulated through a formal structuring of incidents. Aristotle ultimately aligns his notion of plot African Postcolonial Relations

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structure to an analysis both of the ideal plots of tragedies and to a discussion of the emotional effects that a tragedy might be properly perceived to engender and channelize. The first step in applying tragic categories to real-life events would have to be to perceive any such real-life events as enunciating a form. In Salman Rushdie’s words, “Everything has a shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form” (Midnight’s Children, 226). However, the form of real-life tragedy has to be interpreted as more the expression of history than of aesthetics. And yet history is not a blindly transcendent category, somehow producing its own essential logic. History resides in the structural and discursive relations between people, events, and institutions. The key word here is relations. It is the question of discursive and structural relations that allows the deployment of the tragic trope in the first place, because like literary tragedy, the significance of a real-life event may be grasped as inhering in the very constitution and later fragmentation of the cultural, symbolic, personal, and political, the “enunciative modalities” that, in Foucauldian terms, give it coherence and solidity. Following Hegel, it can also be added that history manifests its essential lineaments in the most important figures of each epoch. The lineaments of history are manifested in the ethical differences between important figures. But important figures are sometimes positioned so as to inspire the confidence of many and to stand as representatives of popularly shared ideals. This is particularly the case in an age where the media magnify and project the ideas of significantly placed individuals. As such, ethical differences are sometimes played out in the relations between individuals, people, and institutions so as to open up the potential for change, and when this is difficult to achieve or is resisted, for revolution. Thus it is possible to take exception to Hegel’s notion of contradiction as being the working out of the logic of the ideal Spirit. The logic that is worked out is of the reconstitution of society. But whether such a reconstitution is entirely for better or worse is only partially decided by those who live within the realm of the reconstitution. The value of change is also partly assessed in a future configuration of ethical positions breaking out in conflict in the determination of both past and future. In the specific case of Nigeria and Saro-Wiwa, however, a conundrum regarding the ethical positioning of key actors needs to be noted. The ethical positioning of Saro-Wiwa and those who murdered him needs to be ultimately linked to the question of class conflict in Nigeria. Classes, of course, are here defined not merely as social strata but as relational entities in competition for the control of productive resources (see Samoff 1982; African Postcolonial Relations

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Lonsdale 1981). In my view, however, though economistic modes of class analysis are important for an understanding of class relations, the crucial thing about African classes is their scramble for control of state power. The control of economic resources is ultimately mediated through the struggle for political authority, which is, in the final analysis, the best means for control of economic resources in the African postcolony. This is especially the case because of the size of the public sector (see Sklar 1979; Schatzberg 1988). It becomes quite important to control the state because of its expanded role and its assumption of “a major responsibility not only for insuring the rationalization of production, the mobility of capital and the availability of labor, but, also, in general, for managing the framework for accumulating capital and reproducing capitalist relations” (Samoff 1982, 124–25). In these struggles for control of the African state, however, it is the military that has shown itself to be at an advantage. I have argued elsewhere, though somewhat lamely, that the military in Africa is the most coherent class grouping that not only shares a particular view of the world but also possesses the means of force by which to ensure the furtherance of its interests (Quayson 1994a). And even though arguments can be marshaled to the contrary to show that like any other class, the military is riddled with internal contradictions that render it not so much a monolithic class but one always in formation, I would like to argue that precisely because of the nature of its mode of entry into the political domain in Africa, the military has molded a rationality that links specifically to the ultimate control of power. In Nigeria, where for three-quarters of the country’s life since independence it has been ruled by the military, the interests of soldiers have solidified into a class interest. Thus, what Issa Shivji (1978) terms the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” in Africa needs to be perceived as primarily aligned to and subserving the interests of the military in power. It is then pertinent to note with Ebo Hutchful (1991, 185) the central problem for soldiers in government everywhere on the continent: “How to establish general and impartial rules of political procedure in which the subjective interests and preferences of the military are nevertheless embedded—this forms one of the abiding dilemmas of military constitutionalism.” There is a second thread in Aristotle that is important to highlight. This is his notion of the tragic hero’s demise or reversal in fortune as deriving from an error of judgment. The error of judgment defines the ethical quality of the tragedy and simultaneously humanizes the great character, thus allowing our identification with the tragic hero (see Jaspers 1953; African Postcolonial Relations

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Langer 1953, 351–68). And yet the specific ethical quality of the error of judgment requires greater specification, for the error of judgment has been expressed in tragedies in relation to different dimensions of experience. In Sophocles’ Oedipus, for instance, it was an error related to ignorance both about his polluted self and the fate the gods had set down for him. The error of judgment was due to a misapprehension of his own self and of the status of cosmic laws. The entire dramatic action is devoted to slowly peeling off the circumstantial encrustations that prevent him from knowing the truth. This truth, when it comes, is so devastating that he can only blind himself. Something of the Greeks resides in Shakespeare but with a number of crucial differences. One key difference between them is the manner in which Shakespeare psychologizes his characters. The error of judgment in Shakespearean tragedy is often correlated to the dramatic unfoldment of psychological tensions. When Lear is exposed to the elements on the heath, it is an extreme psychological crisis that is being fine-tuned by the clashing of the spheres. As he begins to understand the true nature of his folly in allowing himself to be deceived about the nature of Goneril and Regan’s filial love, the ravages of the weather are foregrounded. Perhaps the most complex expression of this link between error of judgment, dramatic structure, and psychological stress is provided in Hamlet. The meandering nature of the play, especially up to the play-withinthe-play scene, seems to rehearse the vacillations in the eponymous hero’s mind. For Hamlet—suicidal, melancholic, lovelorn, and yet intellectually alert—expresses to a certain degree the problem of bringing a fractured consciousness to bear on the enterprise of revenge. Each step of the external circumstances has to be negotiated by Hamlet through critical inquiry. But the critical inquiry is related to stabilizing his own mind. For Hamlet there is no clear error of judgment by which to trace a change in the fortunes of the hero. If he commits any serious error, it comes when he misinterprets Claudius’s true intentions in inviting him to spar with Laertes. But this misinterpretation is itself prefigured at the point when he establishes interpretive closure on events in his conversation with Horatio, when he finally decides that it is “to be damned to let this canker of our nature come / In further evil” (5.2.68–70). This is precisely the point when he has achieved at-one-ment with his own mind, and has consolidated reasons for taking some form of action against Claudius. It is then, and only then, that he commits the error of judgment that costs him his life. If the notion of error of judgment is going to be useful for application to a real-life context, however, it needs to be even further problematized. African Postcolonial Relations

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The error of judgment of individual actors in the world is often not related solely to a misapprehension of the significance of events, though that can be shown to be quite often the case. In the case of Saro-Wiwa another dimension needs to be introduced that links error of judgment not just to ethical misapprehension but rather to the misapprehension of historical processes themselves. Sometimes the pursuit of an ethical standpoint is undertaken when that standpoint is itself the subject of a process of residualization within the larger configuration of events. Thus we see in Coriolanus, for instance, that even though he has always been rewarded for asserting the warrior ethic, the world of Rome in Shakespeare’s play requires a different democratic ethic for the stability of the new political environment. Coriolanus is uncomfortable with the request to expose his war wounds as a means of electioneering. What he resists is the conversion of his military body into the discursive domain of a body-politic. When he is taunted by the tribunes, his response is to go back to the military ethic in which black is black and white is white, where valor is an ethical requirement for the would-be ruler or ruling class, and where any form of cowardice is to be despised. In Williams’s terms, the warrior ethic has become residualized by the processes of history, and a new and emergent one is struggling to take its place. The thing to note, then, is the degree to which Coriolanus misapprehends historical processes and becomes a victim of them. This interpretation of error of judgment, or misapprehension, actually brings the status of the hero closer to the everyday, for which of us can completely comprehend the processes of history as they alter discursive and structural relations? How can we hope to position ourselves in relation to the direction of its flow? If we recapitulate what we have highlighted about tragedy so far, a number of things emerge: firstly, that tragedy resides in the formal and shifting arrangement of events. This arrangement presents itself as an aesthetic modality in literary tragedy but as a historical set of discursive and structural relations in real life. The two are not mutually exclusive, and, indeed, literary tragedy often provides instances of such structural and discursive relations. Secondly, tragedy involves an error of judgment. This error of judgment may be grasped in conjunction with psychological processes or simply in relation to the misapprehension of historical processes. Finally, tragedy always involves a presentation of ethical qualities, which can be grasped either as universals or as peculiarly related to the specific predicament adduced by the tragedy. To all these, I should add a fourth dimension, which is especially important with regard to the case of Saro-Wiwa. Tragedy often emerges in the assertion of ethical values and African Postcolonial Relations

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of selfhood in the face of forces that would negate them. The assertion of such values is preeminently expressed in a will to act in spite of the forces of negation. Sometimes these forces seem so drastically intent on asserting a monologic order of things that they are grasped as versions of a metaphysical evil or of something that exceeds the bounds of rational explanation. At other times they are much more subtle and complex and are inextricably tied to the very act of asserting the ethical values themselves. As an act of assertion is expressed in a non-ideal world, consequences emanate from it that are not always under the rational control of the person making the assertion. It is in the interstices of all these factors, I think, that the tragedy of Saro-Wiwa may be fruitfully located.

Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogonis Ogoniland is in the delta area of Nigeria. Its population was estimated at half a million people by the time of Saro-Wiwa’s death; its size is approximately 404 square miles, with a population density of 1,500 per square mile, spread out over three local government areas. There are six clans that among them hold 111 villages. In Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy (1992) Saro-Wiwa turns his mind to the place of the Ogoni in the Nigerian nation-state. More importantly, he interprets the history of Ogoniland as a tragedy. This is significant because even though he is using the term only in its everyday sense, there is an indication that his personal decision to commit his life to fighting on behalf of his people derived partly from his understanding of their terrible predicament. For him, their predicament could only be relieved through the total commitment of his own life to a cause much larger than himself. The book itself is clearly an attempt to define the reasons for the Ogoni struggle in the first place, but in doing this he also delineates an interesting set of contradictions in the formation of the Nigerian nation-state itself that points to a larger problematic of postcolonial identity in general. Saro-Wiwa sets the question of the Ogoni struggle firmly in the context of a larger perceived postcolonial Nigerian failure. Two things are particularly relevant in this respect. The first is his pointer to the different modes by which various tribes were integrated into the colonial project. Because of the swampy terrain of the Niger Delta on which Ogoniland is located, they were a self-sufficient people who lived an existence fairly independent from their larger neighboring tribes. In his words, “ Throughout their recorded history, there is no instance of any of their neighbors being able to impose upon them in

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any manner whatsoever. They were never defeated in war and were not colonized by anyone except the British (1992, 12). To this fact is added another one of perhaps even greater historical significance. Because they lived an independent existence and were not colonized except by the British, they entered into the sphere of colonialism very late in their history. If it is recalled that in Yorubaland, serious intertribal wars had been raging from about the 1850s (see Johnson 1921) and that Yorubas themselves were the earliest to gain the benefits of Western education and Westernization, we see then the extent to which until the second decade of the twentieth century, the Ogonis had lived a relatively self-contained and peaceful existence. The fact that they were integrated into a larger Nigeria along with other ethnic groups that had had different paces of historical development is interpreted by Saro-Wiwa as a potential source of tension for the new nation. This is precisely because the differences in historical experiences of Western contact, linked to the different sizes of the ethnic groupings making Nigeria, became translated into significant political differences between the ethnic groupings (1992, 19 ff). The difference in the relative sizes of the ethnic groupings also had a part to play in exacerbating the tensions. Flowing out of this earlier point also was the fact that because of the late stage at which Ogoniland was integrated into the rest of Nigeria, they did not feel the potentially unifying experience of an administrative state apparatus until 1914, the very year that Nigeria was formed. It is pertinent to note that among the Ogonis, there was no clear pan-Ogoni sense until the various clans in Ogoniland thought it necessary to come together to fight on common administrative grounds (see Osaghae 1995, 327–38). Ogonis do not have a myth of common origin and constituted a loose ethnic group mainly on the basis of sharing commonalities of language, custom, tradition, farming methods, and attitudes, and on living in a contiguous geographical location (Osaghae 1995, 328, quoting G. N. Loolo, A History of the Ogoni). Among other things, Benedict Anderson (1983) notes in his analysis of imagined communities that the sense of participating in a framework provided by a specific bureaucratic apparatus gradually provides a sense of belonging to the same entity. The interaction with administrative structures and personnel potentially produces not just a sense of common belonging but also an opportunity for definition against such an apparatus, both positively, in terms of the translation of the bureaucratic apparatus for “private” use, and negatively, in relation to the sharp distinctions between the public and private spheres. We can safely assume that because of the

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colonial nature of the bureaucratic apparatus in early-twentieth-century Nigeria, various degrees of alienation with regard to the meaning and status of these bureaucratic instruments must have been felt. These produced a different ensemble of responses from what we noted in the previous chapter to be pertinent for an analysis of the postcolonial state form. Readers’ letters in the various newspapers and journals of the period testify to this (see, for instance, West Africa Magazine, published since 1917). The problematization of the terms provided by a bureaucratic and administrative apparatus in itself feeds into identity formation as does the quest for political and other resources (see Eboreime 1992; Bayart 1993, 55–59). With the Ogonis, however, even after they were subjugated following sporadic British military campaigns from 1903 to 1914 when Ogoniland finally capitulated, there was no serious attempt to integrate them into a clear administrative apparatus. Saro-Wiwa points out that for twenty years after the Ogonis’ final capitulation “the area was left to stagnate”: The British did not establish an administration; the Ogoni nation was administered as part of Opobo Division within Calabar Province. The divisional headquarters was separated from Ogoni by the Imo River and Calabar was about 200 miles away. British rule of the area was “haphazard.” (1992, 16)

Even more disturbing in his view was the fact that the British seemed to be interested only in collecting taxes. Apart from one or two schools established by churches in the area, there was no clear sense that the Ogonis benefited from their taxes (1992, 16–17). Because of the slow pace of development of Ogoniland, which to them was directly linked to their not having a direct local administration, the demands for a separate administrative division in Ogoniland were continually voiced. From the earliest contacts with the British the central theme of Ogoni demands was a desire to control their local administration. These demands increased after independence, when it was clearly perceived that control of resources was tied inextricably to the control of the administrative apparatus. With the outbreak of the Biafra secessionist bid in 1967, Ogoniland was caught in yet another conundrum of the Nigerian state. Because their land bordered the Biafran zone, they fell between federal forces and the Biafran army. According to Saro-Wiwa, the Igbos of Biafra decided to evacuate Ogoniland when a threat from federal forces was perceived. This forced evacuation, however, led to the Ogonis feeling unnecessarily embattled. For Saro-Wiwa, the terrible mistreatment his people faced at the hands of the Igbos at this time was a clear sign that the Igbos wanted African Postcolonial Relations

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the Ogonis destroyed.2 It also led to the development of an “Exodussyndrome” among Ogonis.3 In other words, they pined for home and seized on the biblical Israel’s bondage in Egypt as a useful historical analog for understanding their own plight. By far the worst complication to afflict Ogoniland, however, was the discovery of oil there in 1958 and the subsequent emergence of Shell-BP and Chevron as key players in the area. The effects on the environment of the drilling of oil in the region have been terrible.4 A 1995 World Bank study titled “Defining an Environmental Development Strategy for the Niger Delta,” shows that 76 percent of all the natural gas from petroleum production in Nigeria is flared, compared to 0.6 percent in the United States, 4.3 percent in the United Kingdom, and 21 percent in Libya. At temperatures of 1300° to 1400° centigrade, the multitude of flares in the delta area heats up everything, causing unimaginable emissions of poisonous gases. The flares release 35 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, and 12 million tons of methane. According to Claude Ake, writing in the Nigerian Tell Magazine in January 1996, this means that Nigerian oil fields contribute more to global warming than the rest of the world put together. In addition to this, Rivers and Delta States suffer about three hundred major oil spills a year that discharge about 2,300 cubic meters of oil.5 The most disastrous of such oil spills occurred at Dere (Bomu Oil Refinery) in 1972. The damage of the spill was so extensive that, according to Saro-Wiwa, over twenty thousand people lost their means of livelihood. Acid rain fell on the area for months following this spill, and both children and adults coughed blood. To add insult to injury, a High Court presided over by a British-born judge awarded damages against Shell of the paltry sum of £168,468, thus preempting the imposition of fines of tens of millions of dollars agreed upon by a special governmental committee set up to investigate the matter (1992, 44–83). Many of the problems highlighted in these reports are only now being addressed, with the pace of change far from satisfactory (see Mitee 1999).

The Ogoni Struggle against Nigeria and Shell It is in Saro-Wiwa’s intervention in the history of his people and in his attempt to alter the means by which as a minority they related to the Nigerian state apparatus, that he enters into the realm of tragedy as we have already defined it. For, in doing this, he not only came to represent an ethical position radically opposed to that represented in the Nigerian state but also triggered processes well beyond his control that in the end came to African Postcolonial Relations

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destroy him. The structural and discursive relations that he sought to redefine can be seen in respect to four main groupings and organizations: first were ordinary Ogonis with whose plight he identified and whose political awareness he sought to raise; second were the traditional leaders of Ogoniland, with whom he had to work in close alliance; third was the totalitarian bureaucratic apparatus of the Nigerian state; and fourth was Shell, the multinational oil company. The crux of the discursive relations and what ultimately became the key point of contention between the last three of these groupings was the mobilization and control of the popular masses. Until 1990, minority demands all across Nigeria were largely pursued through delegations, petitions, and meetings with state and federal authorities. An important turn took place in the case of the Ogonis with the formation of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in 1990 with Dr. Garrick Leton as president and Saro-Wiwa as spokesman. This organization was put together by Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni elites to mobilize their people in the struggle for better treatment by the oil companies and the government. The formation of MOSOP could be said to have spelled an important shift in Ogoni identity-formation when they were radically transformed, in the words of Osaghae, from an ethnic group-in-itself to an ethnic group-for-itself (1995, 329). In an important sense, the leaders of MOSOP had triggered the processes that Frantz Fanon identifies in “On National Culture” (1967) as critical for the formation of coherent national and cultural identities: “ There is no fight for culture which can develop apart from popular struggle.” Even though Fanon states this in relation to the formation of national culture in the era just after independence, his thoughts are pertinent for understanding identity-formation in general, especially in the context of minority rights and the creation of a common consciousness of oppression (see also Crawford Young 1983). The first step in prosecuting a common struggle on behalf of the Ogonis for MOSOP was the drawing up of the Ogoni Bill of Rights in the latter part of 1990. This was presented to the government of Ibrahim Babangida, the UN subcommittee on the Prevention of Discrimination Against Minorities, the African Human Rights Commission, Greenpeace, and the Rain Forest Action Group, among others. Their demands were fourfold: the right to control their political affairs; the control and use of a fair share of economic resources derived from Ogoniland; the protection, use, and development of Ogoni languages; and the protection of their oil-producing environment from further degradation. The Bill of Rights, then, covered the political, economic, cultural, and African Postcolonial Relations

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environmental concerns of the Ogonis. But in raising the question of oil compensation and the environment, the Ogonis were touching a raw nerve in Nigerian politics. For the military junta, dependent so heavily on oil revenues for maintaining its system of patronage, the example being set by the Ogonis was liable to lead to big trouble if it was emulated by other ethnic groups whose lands had oil. Even more disturbing was the faint whiff of secessionism that was implied in MOSOP’s strident call for the reorganization of the Nigerian federal arrangements so as to accord minorities greater economic and political rights. In fact, MOSOP argued strongly for the creation of a specific Ogoni state within Nigeria so that they would have oil revenues coming to an administrative framework that they would not have to share with other splintered groupings. And matters took a decidedly alarming turn in the eyes of both the government and Shell when in December 1992 MOSOP wrote to Shell and other oil companies demanding, among other things, the payment of billions of dollars for environmental degradation as well as for the right to negotiate directly with the oil companies. The notion of a bill of rights, evoking as it does the American Bill of Rights as well as the French Rights of Man, signals something important about the MOSOP leadership’s understanding of the struggle into which the people were being led. It was in a sense an attempt to delineate their struggle as an epic one. The epic trope, which had in a way operated at a subterranean level ever since their experiences during the Biafra war, was now being channeled by Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP into a conscious political discursive instrument. Saro-Wiwa was at pains to indicate the special nature of his people’s plight and regularly referred to them as being the victims of genocidal tendencies in Nigeria. And so, in a newspaper interview in 1993, he pointed out: If you take away all the resources of the (Ogoni) people, you take away their land, you pollute their air, you pollute their streams, you make it impossible for them to farm or fish, which is their main source of livelihood, and then what comes out of their soil you take entirely away . . . if more people in Ogoni are dying than are being born, if Ogoni boys and girls are not going to school . . . if those who manage to scale through cannot find jobs . . . then surely you are leading the tribe to extinction. (quoted in Osaghae 1995, 330)

The point of this assertion is not whether his people were in fact under a threat of genocide. It is that for the sake of prosecuting the struggle, SaroWiwa strategically defined his people within an epic paradigm in which African Postcolonial Relations

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they were the victims of a massive campaign of persecution. This notion of epic scale was joined to the mass mobilization drive in order to give his people a sense of participation in a specifically constructed historical process. More crucially, however, is that by joining this epic trope to the mass mobilization drive, Saro-Wiwa and the leaders of MOSOP were actually suggesting the possibility for the reconfiguration of class arrangements through the mobilized power of ordinary people. It also suggested the possibility of shifting the control of the direction of historical processes away from the governing military–middle-class alliance into the hands of ordinary people. And even though this was being suggested only for people of the Delta area, it was to the military junta a problematic signal of the rise of an oppressed class. Even as an epic trope was being deployed by Saro-Wiwa as a strategic device linked to mass mobilization, it also had the effect of antagonizing other members of MOSOP, as it was interpreted as part of a drive for personal authority. The epic trope could be seen as signaling two contradictory impulses: the impulse to raise his people’s consciousness and the impulse to assume the mantle of leadership as irrevocably his. Partly as a consequence of his perceived personal ambitions, the earlier leaders of MOSOP became gradually disenchanted. There was a falling out that was itself due to a complex set of reasons. Most prominent was the fact that unlike the traditional elders with whom he went on delegations to meet with government authorities, Saro-Wiwa did not trust in the promises made by the government. He favored a more militant approach. By the early months of 1993, the tension between the two perspectives was beginning to show. Saro-Wiwa spearheaded the formation of the National Youth Council of Ogoni People (NYCOP) along with other organizations for women, teachers, religious leaders, and professionals. This move was seen by the rest of the leadership of MOSOP as being Saro-Wiwa’s way of creating a corps of dedicated youth on whom he could call and who had allegiance solely to him. Indeed, by April 1993, NYCOP turned on traditional elders who had written in a newspaper ad describing an earlier Ogoni attack on a Shell contractor as the upsurge of “lawless activities.” NYCOP not only vilified the chiefs, calling them “vultures,” but also set about burning their property and hounding them out of Ogoniland (McGreal 1996; Human Rights Watch/Africa 1995). Perhaps a good sign of the crucial differences between Saro-Wiwa and the rest of the leadership of MOSOP was in their reading of the impact of the 1993 elections on the Ogoni demands. Whereas the traditional authorities along with other members of MOSOP thought it expedient to African Postcolonial Relations

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bide their time and wait for a civilian administration, Saro-Wiwa interpreted the political campaigning as being colored by parochial interests that did not take account of minority rights in the first place.6 He insisted that Ogonis completely boycott the elections in protest. This led to further friction between him and the others. In the event, he turned out to have been perfectly correct. The results of the elections were annulled, and the military stayed in power. The thing to note is that the military junta perceived the election results as threatening to seriously alter the balance of power in the country to their detriment. What Saro-Wiwa clearly saw was that the elections did not promise any meaningful structural changes in the ways in which the federation was run and in how its resources were distributed. On May 21, 1994, a fateful meeting was called by Ogoni chiefs. SaroWiwa was turned away by police as he tried to enter Ogoniland to address a rally. He was asked to return to Port Harcourt. The chiefs’ meeting, held at the palace of the Gbenemene Gokana, was disrupted by a mob, who, shouting insults, set upon them. Four chiefs, namely Chief Edward Kobani, formerly a commissioner in the Rivers State government and former deputy president of MOSOP; Chief Samuel N. Orage, another former Rivers State commissioner; Chief Theophilus B. Orage, formerly secretary of the Gokana Council of Chiefs; and Mr. Albert Badey, a former permanent secretary, commissioner, and secretary to the Rivers State Government, were brutally murdered. The journalist Chris McGreal, in “A Tainted Hero” (1996), attempts to reconstruct the Saro-Wiwa story, paying attention to the multiple perspectives of his supporters as well as to those of the families whose relatives were killed by the youth mob, for which Saro-Wiwa and eight others were eventually hanged. The article is wellbalanced except for the interpretation of moral responsibility that McGreal uses to pin a measure of liability on Saro-Wiwa for what finally befalls the chiefs. McGreal’s main contention is that Saro-Wiwa was partly responsible for creating the environment in which the chiefs were vilified and that finally led to their brutal murder. For him, in spite of Saro-Wiwa’s absence from the scene of the crime, and despite the lack of reasonable proof that he ordered the murders, Saro-Wiwa is still to be held partly responsible for the murders. What McGreal fails to take account of, in deploying a largely liberal humanist understanding of “personal moral responsibility,” is the extent to which the environment in which the Ogoni leadership operated was itself heavily overdetermined by the ethos of Nigerian politics. The Babangida years had seen the perfection of a system of political patronage popularly African Postcolonial Relations

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known as “settlement.” Babangida was generally believed to have systematically bought off his opponents by giving them bribes or offering them key political appointments. Even Wole Soyinka, when he accepted the chairmanship of the National Road Safety Committee in the mid-1980s, was accused by his critics of having been “settled” by Babangida. Because of this, any persons who put themselves up as representatives of their people ran the danger of being accused of being “settled” if they ever showed signs of compromising with the government. And so when the traditional leaders argued that the aggressive politics of Saro-Wiwa would alienate them from the political authorities and that they should take a more measured stance, it was easy for them to fall under suspicion of having been bought off. It is evident that the chiefs were seen, wrongly or rightly, as “contaminated” by politics. Attacking them was then seen as partly an attack against the Nigerian state, much as was the case in South Africa during the heyday of apartheid when suspected collaborators with the regime were caught and summarily “necklaced” with burning tires. To complicate matters even further, there is evidence to show that a regime of wanton extrajudicial murder had been systematically orchestrated by the government since the Ogonis began their protests in 1990 (Human Rights Watch/Africa 1995; Welch 1995). The atmosphere of vilification did not require a Ken Saro-Wiwa as such, particularly as he had vigorously advocated nonviolence both in public and in private. McGreal’s argument problematically condemns Saro-Wiwa by re-siting moral responsibility away from the governing political ethos and onto the individual. This takes us back to the point I raised at the beginning of this chapter in highlighting the subterranean feeling for violence that subsists in ordinary people under a totalitarian regime. The totalitarian state apparatus in Nigeria has always shown a predilection for violence. Hanging SaroWiwa was not so much a sign of disrespect for international opinion as a sign to Nigerians themselves that there was no escape from the state’s totalitarian apparatus and that no one in the whole wide world could save them. No one. The entire gamut of circumstances of the Saro-Wiwa trial—from the fact that the accused persons were tried not under the normal processes of law but under a decree passed by the military itself, the 1987 Civil Disturbances (Special Tribunal) Decree; the fact that defense lawyers were sometimes manhandled, and relatives of the accused were refused entry into the courtroom; and the fact that crucial videotaped evidence about the chicanery of certain key witnesses was not allowed in evidence—all showed that the totalitarian regime was interested in showing their unquestioned power of life and death over its citizens.7 Such a African Postcolonial Relations

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model of governmentality is far from the “ludic” and “convivial” model Mbembe adduces for the African postcolony. Rather, it generates what we might describe as “cultures of impunity.” Cultures of impunity are evident in many parts of the continent. A minor traffic infringement may cause a person instant and violent retribution from bystanders. To fall in love with the wrong woman may invite physical mishaps of unimaginable sorts. An altercation in a shop may lead to assault and battery and so on. The worrying thing is that this culture of impunity often marks all levels of civic society and polity, from the excesses of totalitarian regimes, to the banality of policing, right down to the breakdown of civil address between neighbors. The reasons for these cultures of impunity vary, but their effect is always the same: vigilance about one’s physical safety becomes a necessary condition of existence on the continent. War, the ultimate culture of impunity, is only an exacerbation of what is essentially an endemic form of social disorder whose spasmodic expressions can be glimpsed in the violent land seizures in Zimbabwe today, the chaotic violence on the streets of Lagos, and the pillage of natural resources in Sierra Leone, Angola, and other places. In the specific case of Saro-Wiwa and the Ogonis, the youth attack on their chiefs was an extension of these cultures of impunity. In launching a mass mobilization drive against a multinational oil company and the state of Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa located himself at the vortex of multiple historical processes and contradictions. At the level of the state, his effect on mobilizing a hitherto quiescent minority around oil and environmental rights was a dangerous signal of a new praxis for other dispossessed minorities both in the oil-producing regions and in Nigeria more generally. At a more local level, he clashed with traditional and more conservative authorities that could not fully grasp the significance of the revolutionary processes that were being unleashed. But even more problematically, he motivated popular forces that began to articulate their perception of political action partially from within the ethical framework provided by the system of patronage and violence in place in Nigeria. Obviously, in his absence the masses deployed the means of understanding politics that was discursively instituted in Nigerian politics itself. To their minds, anyone could be “settled,” and disagreement with the militant goals of their struggle was a sign of collusion with the state. Furthermore, violence was the medicine that the state had been meting out to them ever since their struggle began. In a crucial sense, the anger and violence that erupted against their leaders may well have been a turning in on themselves as the state’s security apparatus tightened its grip, arrested their more popular leaders, and threw them into detention, unleashing a carefully African Postcolonial Relations

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orchestrated reign of terror upon them. When they called the chiefs “vultures” and brutally murdered them, they were extending a process of demonization that subtended a combined traditional discourse of morality as well as the dominant discourse of Nigerian politics. It was a singular historic and tragic failure. There is one last problematic that needs to be noted before we can move to close the curtain: How does the death of the tragic hero in real life affect the lives of others? Can we afford to impose the same forms of closure we impose on literary tragedy on the events of real life? It is here that the literary and the world of real events part ways. For whereas in the literary domain, the tragedy does not call upon us to take a stance or to act, and allows us to go back to our homes with an abstract feeling of having participated in something of a terrible beauty, the events of real-life tragedy enjoin a different form of response. Wole Soyinka (1975) speaks of the tragic hero as inspired by Ogun. In the stress of transition Ogun is able to help his people across the abyss of chaos into a newly reconstituted domain of significance. And this affects both the imagined community inscribed within the dramatic action as well as the audience itself. Nonetheless, Soyinka’s meditations on heroism need a number of qualifications for application in the Saro-Wiwa case. As in Christian conceptions of tragedy, they hint at the redemptive quality of the hero’s death. But redemption can breed quiescence and apathy by suggesting that the action of ordinary mortals is foreclosed by the death of the hero, since the hero is taken as carrying the responsibility for salvation. On the contrary, it is important to hold out the possibility of redemption as residing in a continual reappraisal of the life and death of the hero as a means of renewing the resolve to struggle on in the process of challenging the dominant structural and discursive relations begun by the tragic hero. And it is also important in the particular case of Saro-Wiwa to understand his ethical position in its truest world-historical significance. The fight for a right to a clean earth, the struggle against a negating totalitarianism and the predatory privations unleashed by international capital, and the effort to arouse a silent people into an engagement with their history are all values that give his activism a resonance beyond Ogoniland. In this, then, lay Saro-Wiwa’s tragic heroism: that he dared to assert an ethical position against a totalitarian state and multinational interests in spite of all the clear processes that threatened to negate this assertion. It is the clarity of his vision joined to the compromising circumstances of an unideal and sullied national history that defines his tragedy. And it is one, I think, that may touch us all whenever we stand up rigorously for what we African Postcolonial Relations

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think is right. Saro-Wiwa is a tragic hero because he committed himself to his people but could not possibly have controlled all the forces he unleashed. In his commitment and self-sacrifice, in the generosity of his spirit, and in his sense of rightness in his struggle, he rose above the ordinary. It is as a tribute to this act of rising above the ordinary that I think his life, activism, and death should be discussed with the same emotional and philosophical fervor that we use in discussing our greatest tragedies. As we will see in the next chapter, reading for the social requires a sensitive view of relations and contradictions at all levels of text and context. Postapartheid South Africa and the literature of the ex-centric provide us another mode of calibrating the literary for reading the social.

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4 Symbolization Compulsions: Freud, African Literature, and South Africa’s Process of Truth and Reconciliation Attitude is incipient action.

I want to pose in this chapter a set of questions to do with nation and narration. As is frequently remarked in African literary studies, there is often a cross-mapping of literature onto national politics. Early anthologies of African literature made this point an implicit organizing principle by dividing up the literature into “national” contexts. Scholars such as Neil Lazarus (1990) and Ato Sekyi-Otu (1996), with a more theoretical motivation and drawing on Fanon, have tried to provide a framework by which these connections could be addressed more rigorously. All this served to relate African literary criticism to what might be termed the nation-and-narration school of criticism, a school given particular visibility in postcolonial studies by works such as Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983). Even though I find all this useful, I want to pose a question that none of the current work in postcolonial studies seems to have posed in any rigorous way, if at all: How is the narrative of the nation to be elaborated from the perspective of the ex-centric? The echo of the word eccentric in ex-centric here is deliberate, but my emphasis is on the idea of the off-center, the view that falls outside the perspectives of sanctioned historical tellings of the

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nation, whether these are done from the standpoint of nationalists themselves or, as is often also the case, from literary historians who seize the already available shapes of national history to account for the direction and rates of transition of the literature itself.1 In posing this question I seek to highlight two things. First is the idea that the African postcolony, especially under the violent conditions of its birth, often produced a multiple narrative, some strands of which were not amenable to any simple explanation. Being freed from colonialism was only one stage in the transition from citizen to subject that Mahmood Mamdani suggestively outlines in his Citizen and Subject (1996). This process was far from univocal or straightforward. It often involved the activation of certain ideas about the political subject drawn from the colonial period for shaping postcolonial political rationality. Thus we may argue, in an extension of the observations about Nigerian postcolonial relations in the previous chapter, that in suppressing the Ogoni Uprising and hanging Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Abacha government acted very much like a “colonial” government, defining a kind of citizenship-by-repression for the Ogonis. The second idea I want to highlight, again in an extension of the discussion of Saro-Wiwa, is that as much as anything else the postcolony is a place of violence. This violence, often the product of the wars and acts of expropriation that undergirded the colonial order, becomes endemic in the postcolony and produces a series of persistently violent political and social disjunctures. As Jonathan Boyarin has already noted, ethnic and nationalist discourses tend to draw on and centralize metaphors of the body, the links between the body and the nation operating at both the level of organic metaphors of nationalist ideologies as well as in the fact that these ideologies by necessity “recruit bodies” to become meaningful historically (Boyarin 1994, 24). Viewed from an ex-centric perspective, the African postcolony is a place not of any straightforward political and social integration but rather of violence and death such that to attempt to transcend this space of death requires a careful understanding of the trauma that in fact produced the nation in the first place and that, on the current evidence, is still pertinent to its understanding across the continent. I pursue these points through specific methodological procedures, starting first by extrapolating some concepts from Freud’s discussion of trauma for use in this discussion. I then attempt to explore these concepts by running them through two significant literary representations of trauma in African literature, Dambudzo Marechera’s novella “House of Hunger,” in his collection of stories of the same title (1978), and Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name (1994). These are by no means the only texts that could be used for Symbolization Compulsions

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this exercise, but they have the advantage of both being set in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the country’s war of independence. They both also make links between personal identity, violence, language, and nationhood in highly intricate and thought-provoking ways.2 My third step, however, is to further extrapolate from these two stages for an analysis of the processes of truth and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. My reading of this process is not from the standpoint of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) or the South African government. Nor is it in fact from the standpoint of the many victims of apartheid violence. It is from an excentric position, drawing from the traumatic details of the testimonies before the TRC but aiming to constitute a traumatized subject recalcitrant to any processes of easy reincorporation into political history. One of the key difficulties that the TRC faced in its work was in trying to uncover the truth of the past as part of the general process of reconciliation. The problem, however, as André Brink has noted elsewhere (1998, 30), was that in the work of the TRC truth was equated with fact. But, as I will suggest in this section, traumatic events do not easily yield “facts” in any straightforward sense of the word. The difficulty is compounded in the case of South Africa where for many, their personal traumas were so closely interwoven with the trauma of (non)citizenship within the scheme of the apartheid state. To follow this potentially contentious ex-centric viewpoint is not to suggest that all hope for truth and reconciliation is lost, but to suggest that no easy solution to the traumas of apartheid is possible and that in fact this restless disorder of memory is to be taken as constitutive of a new political imaginary. As will be seen, the calibration in this chapter involves an inductive extrapolation of certain ideas about history and fragmented agency from specific literary texts for an analysis of a post-apartheid problematic. Whereas the previous chapter on tragedy was a reading from the larger scale of a discursive literary genre—historically extensive and with multiple articulations— on to the scale of an aspect of postcolonial Nigerian history, this chapter is concerned with reading from the minutiae of textual details outward into the minutiae of historical details in post-apartheid South Africa in a restless oscillation. Bringing the two sets of details together is aimed at highlighting important conceptual overlaps between representation and reality, without suggesting that the one can be easily collapsed into the other.

Repressed Homologies: Trauma, the Uncanny, and Literature Two clusters of ideas from Freudian psychoanalysis provide a means by which to define the role of the ex-centrics in African literature. These are Symbolization Compulsions

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the notion of trauma and that of the uncanny, which though normally used to designate different psychodynamic realities, help connect the excentrics with the general processes of truth and reconciliation in South Africa. Freud describes trauma as pertaining both to the moment of the traumatic event itself as well as to the moment of the recall of such an event. Trauma is due to excessive excitation of stimuli that the psychic processes are not able to deal with, leading to a variety of symptoms and coping mechanisms. However, the traumatic event does not necessarily retain its original form in the process of recall: It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident—a railway collision, for instance—leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms, which can be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it is. He now has a “traumatic neurosis.” It is quite unintelligible—that is to say—, a new fact. The time that has passed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called the “incubation period,” in a clear allusion to the pathology of infectious diseases. . . . In spite of the fundamental difference between the two cases—the problem of traumatic neurosis and that of Jewish monotheism—there is nevertheless one point of agreement: namely, in the characteristic that might be termed latency. (Freud 1938, 67–68) Dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. This astonishes people far too little. They think the fact that the experience is constantly forcing itself upon the patient even in sleep is proof of the strength of that experience. The patient is, as one might say, fixated to his trauma. . . . Anyone who accepts it as something self-evident that dreams should put them back at night into the situation that caused them to fall ill has misunderstood the nature of dreams. (Freud 1926, 13)

Since trauma is partly a function of the unassimilability of the event when it occurs, and partly that of recall, the notion of trauma raises the issue of the unstable referential locus of its meaning(s).3 The referential locus of the trauma is in a sense deferred and has to be traced back through the posttraumatic stress disorders of compulsive symptoms, reiterated dreams, and the reactivation of negative affect during recall. The point, following Freud’s lead, is that the trauma does not lie wholly in the past or within the Symbolization Compulsions

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event that inaugurated it. It is also a function of narrative and recall, with the process of recall actually activating certain symptoms that are themselves traumatic. As we will see in relation to post-apartheid South Africa’s process of truth and reconciliation, it is almost impossible to speak of a traumatic nexus that can be easily retrieved for therapeutic evacuation. Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny raises different possibilities for theorization. In it he notes the curious observable overlap between heimlich (homeliness) and unheimlich (unhomeliness/uncanny). The uncanny is the unsettling recognition of the strange within something that is normally perceived as heimlich or ordinary. It is, put another way, a breach in the commonplace. In his account the uncanny is assimilated primarily to a repressed memory, often a castration anxiety. This is one of the main observations he draws from his account of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816). He also notes among other things the repetition anxiety engendered in instances of repeated coincidences of particular names, numbers, and incidents within a short span of time. Finally, he isolates the negative affect that attends our sense of objects that seem to combine human and nonhuman qualities (such as a machine that seems to have human qualities or vice versa) and suggests that in this we see the potential for our own dissolution or negation. Of the various elements that Freud assembles to describe the uncanny, the one that is of most interest to us here is the fear of dismemberment, what in his terms is the terror of castration. In his reading of “The Sandman” he assimilates Nathaniel’s fear of losing his eyes to a castration anxiety, thus reading the former in terms of a repressed affective economy emanating from childhood. Pushing two of Freud’s elements a bit further, we might say that it is not only (a) the perception of blurring between man and machine, or (b) the strength of a castration anxiety as it is assimilated to some aspect of reality that generates the sense of the uncanny, but more generally the conversion of the perception of a systemic disorder into a negative affect. In the face of persistent physical or social violence brought on by either acute political chaos or the general collapse of the social order, there is an internalization of these perceived disorders in terms of either guilt, an inexplicable terror, or a general sense of disquiet that does not seem to have a clear source. This idea finds some support in the psychoanalytical work of Yolanda Gampel and others on social violence and the prevalence of the uncanny. For, as she notes from her wideranging clinical work with survivors of the Holocaust and their children, and from consultations with children and adults undergoing traumatic situations in Israel, South America, and the former Yugoslavia, people feel safe when they exist in a constant social context, the feeling of uncanniSymbolization Compulsions

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ness overwhelming them when they are thrust into “a fragmented, violent social context, one without any continuity and that transmits extremely paradoxical messages” (2000, 55). The effect of such acute social fragmentation varies, but predominantly it involves various psychic mechanisms that define a breaking down of the integrated ego and the forming in its place of a new ego structure of an ambiguous nature (Bleger 1967; cited in Gampel 2000). This ambiguous ego restructuring often takes place in a space between anxiety and terror. This space, in my view, is also the space of the uncanny. Our interpretation of the uncanny being the conversion of a sense of systemic disorder gains further coherence when we observe that the element of reiteration in “ The Sandman” is meant to signal an unsettling sense of semiotic instability. As Neil Hertz (1985) notes after a fascinating discussion of the oscillation in the story between the demonic and psychological motivations for Nathaniel’s fear, there are various interactions in the story that seem to define an exchange of signs, sometimes benign and sometimes baleful: Briefly we could say that the interaction of any pair of characters in “ The Sandman” is figured less as an exchange of meaningful signs (conversation, gestures, letters, and so on) than as a passage of energy between them, sometimes benign, sometimes baneful (warm glances, penetrating words, scorching missiles) and that the effectiveness of this “communication” ought to be measurable by its power to leave a lasting mark. . . . As a result of Hoffmann’s manipulations a reader is made to feel, confusedly, that Nathanael’s life, his writings, the narrator’s storytelling, Hoffmann’s writing and the reader’s fascinated acquiescence in it, are all impelled by the same energy, and impelled precisely, to represent that energy, to color its barely discerned outlines, to oblige it, if possible, to leave an unfading mark. (110)

“Impelled by the same energy”: The implication here is that in unsettling the precise status of exchanged signs (benign/baleful), the narrative itself rehearses the affective economy of the uncanny. It is liminal, unsettling, and not easily locatable. It is this, I wish to argue, that defines the sense of systemic disorder we will be elaborating in a moment. In conjoining Freud’s notions of trauma to those of the uncanny, one remaining element that needs to be highlighted is the place of what he describes as latency. The latency involved in the conversion of the sense of systemic disorder into an affect derives from the fact that for the traumatized there is always a repressed negative energy. This repressed or latent energy induces a repetition compulsion. The compulsion is designed to Symbolization Compulsions

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order meaning but, as in the case of the dreams that repeatedly return the traumatized to particular scenes, fails to do so. But the repetition cannot stop. It is driven by this latency. Rather than stick with the notion of repetition compulsion as such, I want to suggest the term symbolization compulsion to define what takes place in the literature of the traumatized and the ex-centric. Symbolization compulsion is the drive toward an insistent metaphorical register even when this register does not help to develop the action, define character or spectacle, or create atmosphere. It seems to be symbolization for its own sake but in fact is a sign of a latent problem. As we will see with regard to Vera’s Without a Name, this is often due to an unutterable traumatic occurrence, an occurrence that though having a clear referential locus in time, cannot be named except through symbolized digressiveness. Symbolization compulsion might also serve as a term for the sublimation of the effects of trauma. It is a useful coping mechanism, although, as we will see, it also involves a specific and often problematic redisposition of meanings.

Two Ex-centrics in Dambudzo Marechera and Yvonne Vera In Marechera’s work we find a highly worked out ex-centric focalization of the contradictory processes of nation-state formation and its attendant traumas. The title story of The House of Hunger exemplifies the focalization of details through the perspective of a fevered and near insane consciousness. It is narrated in the first person and is reminiscent of the stream-ofconsciousness novels of high modernism. It also gestures toward magical realist elements, especially toward the end when the story veers into a surreal and quasi-parabolic exchange between the first-person narrator and a sage old tramp. The story is about many things, all of which resist reduction into any clear sequence or details. The “House of Hunger” of the title is relevant in this respect, as it simultaneously becomes a metaphor for the corrosive contradictions of the narrator’s social environment and an image of his own mind: “I leaned back against the msasa tree and lay still, trying not to think about the House of Hunger where the acids of gut-rot had eaten into the base metal of my brain. The House has now become my mind; and I do not like the way the roof is rattling” (13). The House, then, is no ordinary house. It suggests all the overdetermining processes that, following Althusser, we might say interpellate this near schizophrenic individual and call him into being.4 And the processes of interpellation are all violent. The story is set in Rhodesia, in the years following Ian Smith’s UniSymbolization Compulsions

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lateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, when a guerrilla war was launched against his rule, culminating in Rhodesia’s transformation into independent Zimbabwe in 1980. The story is propelled by a series of conversations and encounters with different characters from within the narrator’s family and from among his schoolmates and is sprinkled with fascinating philosophical meditations on the family, colonialism, culture heroism, the traumatic hybridity of language, and the futile quest of the youth for modes of validation through drugs, violence, and sex. All these are rendered in an account that moves rapidly from past to present and from material description to metaphor, often integrating all levels of the narrative into an almost nightmarish seamlessness. Two interrelated ideas are persistently repeated. These are the quest for identity in a terrain that demonstrates the steady liquidation of all stable systems of institutional reference, and concomitantly, an inventory of incoherences and violent effects that shape the morally corrosive environment and propel the disassembling of identities. The violent effects manifest themselves quite brutally at the level of content: there are several descriptions of fights, beatings, bloodshed, rapes, and illnesses. In this respect “House of Hunger” echoes the scatological molds of other African novels such as Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence (1968), and Calixthe Beyala’s The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me (1996). In all these the scatology is not merely in the extreme narrative interest in dirt, bodily waste, and sex but in the details of a decaying physical environment. This level of scatological content in the story is augmented by a variety of fragmenting effects at the level of form. As has already been pointed out, there is a nightmarish seamlessness about the narrative. Because the violence is demonstrable at both the level of content and of form, and within the objective world as well as within the mind of the protagonist, in “House of Hunger” the protagonist’s mind becomes the theater of horrific phantasms, whose nightmarish quality reflects the incoherences of the external world itself. At several points the narrator indicates a grasp of the degree of conflation of this theater of horrific phantasms with the nature of the external world, but nowhere more subtly than when he is reflecting on his responses to the unpredictable weather: The little tricks and turns of the weather not only seemed to be personally directed against me but their venom was of such an unpredictable character that I—how long ago it is now!—made a point of ignoring their unwanted Symbolization Compulsions

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attentions. Friends who acted out of character affected me in the same way. I could not of course cut a tropical storm dead, but the ignominy of scuttling for shelter from what one felt after all peculiarly part of oneself was an indignity I could not forgive. And I was by this creating for myself a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh me within its crude mythology. That I could not bear a star, a stone, a flame, a river, or a cupful of air was purely because they all seemed to have a significance irrevocably not my own. Therefore I ignored them but recreated them with words, cadences, lights, murmurings and storms of air escaping the blast that came from “out there.” I was all mixed up. I found the idea of humanity, the concept of mankind, more attractive than actual beings. On a baser level I could not forgive man, myself, for being utterly and crudely there. I felt in need of forgiveness. And those unfortunate enough to come into contact with me always afterwards consoled themselves and myself by reducing it all to a “chip on the shoulder.” (7)

We notice first the almost hubristic centrality that the narrator gives to his own ego in relation to the universe, here represented in terms of the vagaries of the weather. The second sentence suggests an analogy in his mind between the weather and the behavior of some of his friends, both of whose unpredictability he deals with by peremptorily “ignoring their unwanted attentions.” More significant, however, is the fact that from a recognition that he lacks the Adamic power to “cut a tropical storm dead,” he proceeds to create for himself “a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh [him] within its crude mythology.” The “prison house” effect of language seems inescapable. But the idea of re-creating the natural world in “words, cadences, lights, murmurings and storms of air” also suggests that the writer’s psyche limns reality and renders it anew through the sheer force of the Imagination, echoing M. H. Abrams’s outline of Romanticism, mimesis, and the mind of the poet in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). And yet, in the case of Marechera’s protagonist, at the same time there is within the creative fervor of the Imagination a sense of insecurity and a restlessness with being human. These two impulses sit uneasily. The protagonist’s attitudes almost verge on misanthropy. Humanity, both his and others’, seems to carry the burden of original sin. He feels in need of forgiveness. The significance of this brilliant meditation cannot be grasped solely from within the discursive logic of its own expression. The ambiguity that it expresses between hubristic creative potential and the guilt of being human relies for its energy not on the ambiguities of the individual psyche Symbolization Compulsions

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but on the repression of another conceptual category. But this category cannot in itself be understood as a secret, kernel or even a discrete entity. Rather this “detail” is in the very form and structure of the perverse inventory of violence itself. The language in which the creative imagination in this case seeks to bring forth a new world is always itself already caught within the webs of hierarchical violence that shapes society. More pointedly, as this story is set in the context of Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence, there is a suggestion that the human body has to undergo a form of violence and dismemberment for the body-politic itself to come into being (recall our discussion of the predicament of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in the previous chapter). This notion is pointedly allegorized in the school fight between Stephen, the Afrocentric bully who espouses a dogmatic preference for all things African, and Edmund, mild-mannered lover of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gorky, and all aesthetic things Russian. The fight is bloody, and Edmund comes out the worse for it. The allegorical inflection of the fight is unmistakable, and the narrator ensures that we do not miss the point: “ The Edmund-Stephen fight was the most talked-about event the year it happened. It even outclassed Smith’s UDI” (63). And later in the account: “Stephen came out of the bathroom wiping his hands and staring ruefully at his bruised knuckles. There was blood on his shirt; a rather large stain which seemed in outline to be a map of Rhodesia” (65). The ironies of the fight cannot be lost on us. That the Afrocentric Stephen becomes the mindless perpetrator of violence and is in fact aligned symbolically with the map of Rhodesia is meant to suggest the paradox of a situation where the mindless quest for nativist ideological purity atrophies the best of human impulses. Much later, we find that it is the mild-mannered Edmund who joins the guerrilla forces and is captured by Smith’s soldiers. The photographs of his capture in the newspaper are telling: “The photographs showed twenty-two dead guerrillas laid out for display and in the centre of them stood the ‘prisoner,’ a dead-looking youth staring morosely at the camera. He had, it said, been captured during the fierce engagement” (60). This “dead-looking youth” is none other than Edmund. But our attention should simultaneously be focused on the bodies of the twenty-two dead guerrillas laid out for display, for if the mild-mannered Edmund has for unfathomable reasons taken up arms against a sea of troubles (to echo Hamlet), it is with a sense of fatalism signaled by the direction that the dead bodies in the picture ultimately point to. Edmund’s idealism is arrested by the fatalism of having to wrest an identity from the very teeth of violent struggle, first in the school fight and then on the fields of guerrilla warfare. Symbolization Compulsions

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It is this fatalism, couched as an incipient recognition of the preponderant threats to identity in the context of violent nationalist struggle, that underlies the narrator’s sense of language as a prison house, of his humanness as a burden, and of the complexity of both as things that can be expressed only in an idiom of anguished fragmentation. The narrative fragmentation is the effect of this fatalistic motivation and the condition of its message. It is uncanny. Thus in Marechera’s story, the language of identity can only be limned out of the context of the brutal dismemberment of the body, a dismemberment symbolically enjoined for the birth of the new body-politic. In other words, since the colonized’s quest for identity cannot be fully expressed without the dismantling of colonialism, and since this dismantling, in this particular context, has to be achieved through so much bloodshed and violence, the quest for a language that seeks to shape reality is always undermined by the consciousness of the brutality and violence that attends the colonized’s body. The discomfort with the “thereness” of the body and the concomitant craving for forgiveness are precisely because the body, constantly afflicted by violence and wracked by sickness and pain, makes itself existentially unforgettable because it is caught within the violent webwork of the coming-into-being of the nation. It is arguable, as Elaine Scarry (1985) points out in her superb book on the body in pain, that this unforgettability is differently coded for those who inhabit the pain than for those who stand outside it, either inflicting or objectifying it. Pain, she points out, gives certainty to those who suffer it and doubt to those who are obliged to confront it from a point outside their own bodies.5 Fanon provides another way of understanding this phenomenon in his discussion of the condition of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks (1986) with reference to the “psychoexistential complex,” a series of inferiority complexes that manifest themselves in the existential condition of the colonized individual. In the essay “The Fact of Blackness” he speaks of the difficulty that persons of color encounter in the development of their bodily schema (110).6 This is because the slow composition of the self is undertaken in the middle of a spatial and temporal world within which the black body is regarded in terms of stereotypical malediction. The essay centers particularly on the black man in a white environment, one in which he is regarded as a bogeyman to children, a terror, and the object of a cultural spasm. If, as Fanon argues, the schema of the black body is one determined painfully by the stereotypes that have historically attended blackness, then the black body (especially within a white world) becomes a burden and in need of redemption. Here, however, we are Symbolization Compulsions

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obliged to part ways with Fanon. For the problem of identity in “ The House of Hunger” is not solely a racial problem. The psychoexistential— or to be more specific, psychostructural and psychocolonial—complex in the story emerges out of the subliminal knowledge that the colonized body itself is an object upon which violence is visited from both within the spaces of interiority (language, the psyche, the family, and all the domains of sexuality and privacy) and without (in this story both by soldiers of the regime and by neighbors, the system of education, and friends). Tragically, these appear most acutely in the violent processes that give birth to the nation. Thus the disruption of the bodily schema that Fanon speaks of is in this context an effect of the structural violence of nationstate formation. What the narrator of “The House of Hunger” experiences as guilt in the thereness of his body is a symptom of the spasm of the violent coming-into-being of the nation-state. The emergent (Zimbabwean) postcolonial nation is a threshold of disassembled identities that are its concomitant products. Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name (1994), set in Zimbabwe in a similar historical period to that of “The House of Hunger,” exemplifies even further the parameters of an ex-centric symbolization compulsion. As we noted earlier, this term designates a situation where the novelistic discourse insistently proliferates metaphorical categories even when these do not seem to promote either the plot, the description of character or of spectacle, or the narrative flow directly. Symbolization compulsion is meant to highlight the threshold of an acute epistemological enigma signaled in the form of an insistent straying of the literal into the metaphorical, the metaphorical into the metonymic, and vice versa. These shifts are governed by a semiotic code whose nature remains concealed from view. The latency that drives them is shaped by trauma. On first opening Without a Name, the first thing to note is the coupling of abstract concepts with animating and anthropomorphizing details. Also noticeable is the unusual collocation of metaphors from disparate areas of experience: Heat mauled the upturned faces. The bus was fierce red. Skin turned a violent mauve. That is how hot the day was. The faces jostled and hurried, surrounded the bus with shimmering voices. The large black wheels were yellow with gathered dust. Mud had dried in the wide grooves within the tires. Small stones looked out from the mud. Thick layers of brown earth covered the windows and the rest of the body, but the bus still shone red. It was that red. It was so stunningly red it was living. Symbolization Compulsions

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Mazvita separated herself from the waiting red of the bus, colour so sharp it cut into her thought like lightning. Merciless, that red. It was an everywhere red which cracked the white and black shell of her eyes. Heat thundered beneath her feet. She retreated. She stood apart, anxious, waiting for the doors of the bus to burst open. She watched the door closed tightly against her entry. The bus sat in a rippling lake of rising heat and dust. The dust sucked the water from her eyes. “Nothing to load onto the bus?” The voice swooped toward her. It did not wait for an answer but swept past and landed on the trembling roof of the bus; it belonged to an agile black shape fastening beds, caged chickens, maize sacks, chairs and tables. (1)

Different qualities are given to the color red. It is not just an abstract color but also has the quality of being so “fierce” and “merciless” that it “cracked the white and black shell of her eyes.” But not only the color red is described in this way. Faces, seemingly disembodied from the bodies that own them, metonymically “jostle” and “surround the bus with shimmering voices.” This particular metonymic displacement is also applied to the voice of the person on top of the bus. Not only does the voice feature in the text as a disembodied entity, it also “swoops” threateningly like a bird of prey. Finally, we notice the startling effect achieved by linking heat waves to ripples of water in “the bus sat in a rippling lake of rising heat.” The features we notice here are consistently used in the first five chapters, producing a surreal stream of consciousness that makes little concession either to plot or setting. It is only from the sixth chapter that we begin to see a vague pattern forming. The chapters, often no more than six pages long, move swiftly between Mazvita’s past in the village of Mubaira and her present condition in the city of Harari. Even past and present are fragmented, however, with different trajectories of both epochs being woven into a structure of labile images. Much later, and after a severe demand for total participation by the reader, we gradually glimpse what might account for this particularly unsettling narrative device. The setting is 1977, in the thick of the chimurenga, Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war of independence. People are terrified in the rural areas, and though some, such as her first boyfriend Nyenyendzi, believe strongly in the justness of the war, others like Mazvita desire only escape, “departures,” as she calls it. Her hope is that in Harari she will be able to find a new self through the cosmopolitan mix of the city. This proves to be a tragic chimera. Mazvita has been traumatized, and this, as we are gradually brought to discover, is due to two main factors, both of which shift in priority from Symbolization Compulsions

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stage to stage of the narrative. The first is that she is raped by a soldier one morning on her way to fetch water from the village stream. The description of the rape scene is highly poeticized and allusive, with a great deal of attention being paid to the mist, the wetness of the grass, the color of the sky, and other such details of the surrounding environment. The next thing that accounts for her trauma is that she decides to strangle the disowned baby she has had with Joel, the man who picks her up and shares his bed with her when she first gets to Harari. She decides to do this and to return to her village with the child strapped to her back, in a strange and futile quest for ablution from the “motherland.” It is only when we understand the traumatic roots of her state of mind that we can recontextualize the features of symbolization compulsion that proliferate in the text. The symbolization compulsion in this context is a narrative means of coping with the burden of traumatic memory. In fact, Vera provides a wonderful passage in the novella from which we can abstract the mechanisms of this compulsion: Mazvita accepted the season of emptiness as her own particular fate. She grew from the emptiness. The emptiness lifted her from the ground and she felt something like power, like joy, move through her. The heaviness lifted from her shoulders and her arms, from her eyes which she had closed after the mist had collapsed into her eyes. Mazvita wished for an emotion as perfectly shaped as hate, as harmful as sorrow, but she had not seen the man’s face. She could not find his face, bring it close enough to attach this emotion to it. Hate required a face against which it could be flung but searching for the face was futile. Instead, she transferred the hate to the moment itself, to the morning, to the land, to the dew-covered grass that she had felt graze tenderly against her naked elbow in the horrible moment of his approach, transferred it to the prolonged forlorn call of the strange bird she heard cry a shrill cry in the distance, so shrill and loud that she had had to suppress her own cry which had risen to her lips. The unknown bird had silenced her when she needed to tell of her own suffering, to tell it not to someone else—certainly not to the man—but to hear her own suffering uttered, acknowledged, within that unalterable encounter. A cry, her own cry, would have been a release of all the things she had lost. But she did not cry then and so it was as if she had lost the world. And all the many things that contained that loss, continued to remind her of her pain. She transferred the hate to the something she could see, that had shape and colour and distance. The mist had taught her that morning is not always birth. (30; emphasis added)

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Mazvita’s crisis may be analyzed in terms of interpsychic transfers, or the crossing of interpsychic pathways. Since the moment of her rape is unalterable (and unutterable, because she cannot cry out), Mazvita’s mind transfers her anguish onto the things in the environment of the rape that met the eye, that, as she puts it, “had shape and colour and distance.” Everything that can be seen is saturated with the negative affect of the trauma, except for the thing that caused the trauma in the first place, that is, the face of the soldier. That key element is left repressed, thus creating a problem of locating the referential locus of this particular traumatic event. But there is also a transfer taking place at a more symbolic level. Her saying that the shrill cry of the bird prevented her from uttering her own cry of anguish can be interpreted as a metaphoric transfer of her anguish onto the bird. The bird metaphorically articulates her anguish through its own shrill cry, as though bearing witness while simultaneously disenabling her from expressing it herself. It is almost as if the moment of the trauma is also a moment of a psychoexistential impasse for her and the narrative. The bird then acts as a deus ex machina, taking on the burden of the impasse and retranscribing the cry of anguish as an intransigent element of the surrounding environment itself. A number of subtle and fascinating procedures take place here. First is that the rape event, owing to its force and negative affect, becomes a semiotic system that generates a series of signifiers. This generativity is, however, governed by the curious movement of a silent metaphoricity, in that in the process of the transfer of the affect from rape event to environment, the environment comes to bear an excess of meaning. The metaphoricity itself has a metonymic dimension because it is continuously making the environment stand for the rape event itself. Thus, the order of metaphor gets conflated in Mazvita’s mind with the order of the literal, in which things gain their meanings from simultaneously being contiguous with and differentiated from their surroundings. The crucial blindness, of course, is that this semiotic structure has itself been produced by a trauma, whose intensity completely obscures its referential locus. It thus produces a blindness, a repression, and the order of aporia. The entire pattern of symbolization compulsion is then to be interpreted as an acting out rather than a working through Mazvita’s veritable entrapment within an experiential structure that does not seem to have any clear conceptual coordinates or hierarchies. It is a constitutive existential loss for which there seems to be no restitution for the rape victim in these circumstances. This layered passage also encapsulates the processes of compulsive symbolization depicted by the narrative more generally. The features I Symbolization Compulsions

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have already noted (of semiotic leakage, the metonymic and metaphoric transfers, the anthropomorphization of abstract concepts, and the collocation of metaphors from different and seemingly contradictory aspects of experience) are all mechanisms defining the work of a text that is supposed to mime as closely as possible the conceptual epistemological problems brought on by psychological trauma. The entire narrative then might be described as mimetic of a struggle for knowledge of the self, but one that is constantly subverted by the workings of traumatic memory. In both “The House of Hunger” and Without a Name the deferred circuit of the referential locus is enacted throughout the entire chain of discursive relationships represented in the text (both symbolic and social) and not just with respect to the personal narrative of an individual’s fragmented subjectivity. Thus it could be said that trauma is reactivated in both texts through the particular phenomena that appear and disappear within the processes represented of historical transition, in this case the transition into a postcolony. The transition is enacted through tragic loss, fragmentation, and the debris of interpersonal and social relationships.

Reality Defects: South Africa and the Referential Locus of Trauma To seize the surge of language by its soft, bare skull Beloved, do not die. Do not dare die! I, the survivor, I wrap you in words so that the future inherits you. I snatch you from the death of forgetfulness. I tell your story, complete your ending—you who once whispered beside me in the dark. “When I opened the door . . . there was my closest friend and comrade . . . She was standing on the doorstep and she screamed: ‘My child, my little Nomzamo is still in the house!’ I stared at her . . . my most beautiful friend . . . her hair flaming and her chest like a furnace . . . she died a day later. I pulled out her baby from the burning house . . . I put her on the grass . . . only to find that her skin stayed behind on my hands. She is with me here today.” “I was trying to see my child. Just when he was about to open the police van at the back, I heard a voice shouting, saying: ‘No, don’t show her anything—hou die meid daar weg!’ [‘Keep the kaffir girl away from here!’] But I managed. I pulled a green curtain . . . I saw . . . my. . . child . . . sleeping among the tyres . . . and he was foaming in the mouth and he was . . . already dead . . . Then they pulled him out and threw him on the ground . . . And I looked at him . . . And he was dying . . . And they won’t allow me to hold him . . . and my key fell on the ground . . . And they Symbolization Compulsions

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asked, quickly: ‘What’s that? What was that?’ . . . And I said: . . . ‘It’s the key of my house.’” (27)

These extracts are from Antjie Krog’s book, Country of My Skull (1998). Krog was a journalist with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the entire two years of its existence from April 1996, and put the book together as her own testimony to the nature of the events. Note from the extracts the notion of memorializing through language, the seizing of the surge of language even in the face of its discomposition. Note also the vividness of the details, details of events that in most cases occurred many years previously. Finally, note also the suspension marks in all three testimonies. These indicate moments when language breaks down and the people testifying have to break off to take a sip of water, wring their hands in anguish, choke back a tear, or open up to the full blast of loss. The extracts are best left underinterpreted to allow them to “speak” their truths directly to our imagination. It does not take any stretch of the mind to conclude that these are testimonies to the resilience of people who have had to confront severe traumatic events. The commission received twenty thousand statements from victims, two thousand of which were in public hearings. It also received eight thousand applications for amnesty from perpetrators. The sheer mass of testimonies and the mediatized nature of the TRC’s work ensured that the hearings produced a peculiar form of public addressivity and interlocution in which the traumas suffered by individuals were automatically a subject of identification, reflection, and debate by the nation as a whole. And in high profile cases such as those of Winnie Madzikela-Mandela and Pik Botha, strong emotions were felt on both sides of the racial divide. The discourse of the TRC itself invites the application of psychoanalytic categories. Through its three branches (Human Rights Violation Committee, Amnesty Committee and Reparation, and Rehabilitation Committee), the TRC saw its job as partly to provide a framework for social psychotherapy after the terrible injustices of apartheid. If psychoanalysis is any use in the post-apartheid context, it is because it has generated concepts from Freud, Klein, Lacan, and others such as the culture/nature split, the formation of motivational structures, identification, transference, ambivalence, pathology, the Other, and the formation of subjectivity that have variously been productively deployed in other disciplines. From these concepts a homology can fruitfully be drawn between the etiology of recalcitrant behavioral symptoms in individuals and the nature of the social factors that produce violent social and civil disjunctures. Under Symbolization Compulsions

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situations of long-term social disjunctures, such as was the case under apartheid, the social may be read as a locus for the mapping of psychostructural trauma and for understanding the evolution of social reactions and perceptions to traumatic events. As James Sey, editing a special issue of American Imago on South Africa, succinctly puts it, “[T]he experience of traumatic violence endured in South African society under apartheid has produced a range of responses and preoccupations analogous to the formation of symptoms in the traumatised individuals who lived through the fascist regime” (1998, 5). At the same time, it is also the case that the trauma of apartheid had different effects according to gender, race, class, and age relations. All of these are yet to be properly mapped out by scholars of South Africa. The trauma of apartheid counts for both the perpetrators as well as the victims of violence because there is a sense in which the perpetrators were themselves pawning their humanity on behalf of the then dominant order. The guilt that is depicted in the testimonies of many of the perpetrators testifies to the late recognition of this loss of humanity (see, for example, Krog 1998, 89–91; also Slovo 2000). But since victims and perpetrators were normally on different sides of the racial divide, it is also the case that the quest for a new South Africa will for a long time have to deal directly with the terms of public debate between different racial and political constituencies in the nation. Mary Tjiattas focuses on precisely this point in a brilliant essay concerning psychoanalysis and the constitution of public reason in the new South Africa. She notes the opposition that pertains between the need for “conversational restraints,” civility, and reason that preoccupies theorists of liberal political discourse such as Rawls and Ackerman and the directly opposite method enjoined by psychoanalysis: On the face of it, a number of indispensable psychoanalytic principles seem to require a steadfast opposition to modern political liberalism. The latter’s embracing of conversational restraint runs directly counter to the “fundamental rule,” the constitutive directive of the analytic situation: say everything that comes to mind (without regard to relevance, importance, taste, politeness), and more generally to the therapeutic objective to encourage the emergence of transference materials. (1998, 58)

Tjiattas resolves this paradox by highlighting the various ways in which conceptual categories in psychoanalysis might help develop the motivation to use public reason and to assist in managing verbal utterances associated with “unspeakable” events and experiences, providing a means by which to reconstruct the trauma story. Symbolization Compulsions

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However, it is also obvious from her discussion that there is still much to be thought through. This is particularly important if the quest for public reason is itself viewed as a problematic continuing process, rather than anything that can be achieved at one go or through a process of straightforward rearticulation of meanings. For there is always a sense in which public reason means negotiations between public consensus and new and conflicting ideologies. There would always have to be a dialogical interchange between terms that are at play. Furthermore, public reason often involves the performative enactments of secular myths, myths to do with the conduct of reasoned and rational discourse. And in such performative enactments, particular traumas might be appropriated as foundational for those who experience them, rehearsing a sense of loss as a form of constitutive absence or vice versa. We might note with Dominick LaCapra that sometimes one may have to seek “a dialectic that does not reach closure but instead enacts an unfinished, unfinalizable interplay of forces involving a series of substitutions without origin or ultimate referent—an interplay that may enable more desirable configurations that cannot be equated with salvation or redemption” (1999, 705). In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, it seems necessary in setting up a public discourse to resist the protocols of working through trauma that generate normative limits. For such limits, even when affirmed as legitimate, must be yet subject to challenge and radical reorientation. It is in this area that some of the insights from “The House of Hunger” and Without a Name become pertinent. From the testimonies before the TRC, it is noticeable how the psychostructural complex expresses itself contextually in a quest for knowledge and justification. When asked at the TRC what they wanted from their enemies, many of the victims of apartheid violence responded that all they required was knowledge (about lost ones, about the causes of the violence, about why the perpetrators of violence failed to recognize them as human, etc.). What they asked for was not the reason but the rationale. They sought to look beyond the appearance that masks itself as truth. The essential point, however, is that the tragic events of apartheid cannot ever be understood in terms of reason; they are completely unreasonable. When these people interrogate the past, they are doing this not solely for its own sake but for how this interrogation might help them exist in the present. The elements of this historical recall are primarily that the past ought to have a meaning to be revealed for the present to be lived properly. And yet the meaning does not reside wholly within that past as a ker-

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nel. It is part of a contradictory process, some of whose implications reside in the unfolding present, articulated from within the discursive framework of the new South Africa and from which the events can be publicly recalled and acknowledged in the first place. The retranscription of memory that psychoanalysis speaks of is one that is required in order that the traumatic nexus be resituated for present uses, but resituated not just as secret/kernel but also as part of an unfolding structure. The linguistic breakdowns that we noted in the extracts from Krog indicate the degree to which language falters in the face of this task. A parallel can fruitfully be drawn between the ellipses of the testimonies and the problem of language in Marechera and Vera. The nightmarish retranscription of events that occur in the work of both writers captures in a symbolic and literary form the same difficulties with the recall and naming of traumatic events in reality. As the locus of referentiality in trauma is always unstable and deferred, the problem for the individual is now how to get a sense of the past that somehow coheres with meanings in the present of lived experience. For Vera, the problem is succinctly encapsulated in the symbolization compulsions of her text and in the fact that the referential locus of the traumatic event of rape is necessarily rendered invisible, while for Marechera the difficulty is encapsulated in the nightmarish inventory of violent and scatological effects. The key problem in the way of historical recall is precisely that the affectivity of the traumatic nexus has already hemorrhaged into the structuring of historical processes themselves. Given the fact that this hemorrhaging has become integral to the coming-into-being of the postapartheid body-politic, it is then extremely difficult to return an integrated political subject back into history. First, it has to be remembered that the traumatic nexus of violence was not produced via the normal channels of the family saga or the disjunctures within the familial unit but rather through the banality of the apartheid state’s violence. Second, current race relations in South Africa often threaten to reproduce the disjunctive effects of the traumatic nexus and thus to direct the referential locus in one direction rather than in another. It is not insignificant that President Thabo Mbeki has shifted from Mandela’s discourse of reconciliation to one of racial accountability. This makes for different contemporary inflections of the past and how it is to be retrieved and processed for present-day uses. The implications of thuggery and of ideas about “credentialism” for the constitution of the body-politic in South Africa are highly pertinent in this regard. On visiting South Africa, one is struck by what a professor at

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Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg describes as “security inflation.”7 Everybody is worried about violent crime. The issue of crime in South Africa is of course couched in terms of law and order, and rightly so, but there is a sense in which the current spate of crime is actually dialectically related to the culture of impunity that was manufactured by the apartheid state as a means of prosecuting its unjust war against its enemies. For the apartheid state disorder was a useful political instrument, in the terms that Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz describe it in Africa Works (1999). Chabal and Daloz theorize disorder in nation-state formation in Africa in terms of its political instrumentalization, in which political actors seek to maximize their returns on the state of confusion, uncertainty, and chaos that seems to characterize most African polities at the present time. Their views are directly applicable to the apartheid state, for there a politically instrumentalized disorder was the foundation of governmental rationality. However, they were arguably not the only ones to benefit politically from this disorder. The anti-apartheid movement itself had of necessity to buy into the reigning culture of impunity and violence in order to pursue its legitimate struggle against the state. What we see postapartheid is the residue of the culture of impunity and disorder displaced onto the streets. An added and disquieting dimension of this culture of impunity is the spate of rapes that are recorded in South Africa. The culture of impunity and disorder always requires as its necessary expression a series of victims; women are thus becoming the new victims of the culture of impunity and disorder. From the perspective of the need for historical recall, however, the significance of the conditions of crime that permeate everyday life lies in the fact that there is a consistent evocation of the danger of dissolution that we noted in Marechera. Whereas the imagined universe of Marechera’s story postulates this problematic as a function of the coming-into-being of the nation, in contemporary South Africa the issue of violence relates to the problem of transition as such. As in the uncanny, the threat of violence cannot but translate to a certain degree into a mode of fatalism and extreme anxiety, for everyday life is constantly hedged round by the threat of violent negation. There is then a persistent perception of systemic disorder that leads to feelings of extreme anxiety and that in certain conditions is even used as a reference point for explaining neuroses.8 The South African government is, of course, fully cognizant of the dimension of the problem and is working hard to tackle it. In the interim, the question remains as to what effect all the reports of violence must be having for the social imagining of the nation-in-transition. Symbolization Compulsions

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Conclusion: Method or Madness? No signifying system is ever complete but requires reference to a metaphysical masquerade of itself. This masquerade in its turn does not represent a stable or coherent entity. The word masquerade is used advisedly in this context. It is meant to recall a Yoruba story about Eshu, the trickster god, who paints half of his face white and the other black and walks down a path where two friends have farms on either side. The first farmer pauses from his labor to call out to his friend, saying how strange the chap who just passed looked. His face is all black, he avers. To which his friend responds with derision. “Are you blind,” he says. “His face was all white.” The disagreement is so intense that they fall to fighting. After the fight has abated and the two friends have glumly returned to their respective sides of the path, Eshu walks back the path again, this time from the other direction. They see the strange gentleman walk by again and this time see different sides of his face. Their absolute attachment to their different interpretations is only assuaged when they recognize that this was a masquerade of the elusiveness of the world. As the Igbos of Eastern Nigeria also put it, “When the world is dancing, you cannot see it by standing still.” The world is itself historically fissured and in process. The crucial thing, then, is to remember that the literary-aesthetic domain is not merely mimetic of facts or events but rather of processes and contradictions. As we noted in the introduction in Slavoj Zˇ izˇek’s comparison of Marx to Freud, we have to eschew “the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden in the form” (1989, 11). The “kernel” of history is not a secret but the contradictory processes by which the event becomes historical and gains magnitude. It is the configuration of these processes, conceived of not as stable but as always in motion that provides the “surface” against which the significance of the historical event is then read. Thus, there is no easy distinction to be drawn between kernel and surface; both are in a restless interplay. The same applies to the literary-aesthetic domain, where it is the configuration of all the levels in the text interrelated as a literary process that allows a surface to be grasped. But perhaps the final move is to bring the literary configuration-as-surface into a dialogical relationship to the historical configuration-of-process-as-surface, to “hold it up to nature” in such a way as to mirror nature as a process of discovery. In this way their simultaneous proximity and distance to each other can be marked such that neither is transcendentalized and tested according to simple notions of truth. The question is not just how true or false a literary or historical account is to discrete events (important though this often Symbolization Compulsions

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turns out to be for ideological and other purposes), but whether it encapsulates the processes and contradictions by which struggles for meaning take place in the world. But in adopting this standpoint a critical pitfall to avoid is the desire to seek contextual relevance only from texts that refract specific contexts. It would be easy, say, to consider for the analysis of the historical condition of a particular country only the literature produced from within the geographical boundaries of that country. Useful though this might be, it is actually quite an impoverished model. Rather it is better to take individual texts for what they articulate about certain processes and contradictions no matter where they come from, and then to extrapolate for the analysis of society. We might note in this regard Brink’s thoughtful exploration in his “Stories of History” (1998) of the need for fictional narratives to reengage differently with South Africa’s apartheid past. In setting up his argument, he turns to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, a novel that attempts a reconstruction of a homicide from the multiple viewpoints of certain historical participants in the investigations. What comes across in Atwood’s novel is precisely the difficulty of discovering the real “facts” of the case. Even the historical Grace Marks becomes in the novel only an alias, and it is from this position that an unstable history is reconstructed. What Brink’s fine reading shows is the sensitivity of a writer reading another writer to understand a difficult lived reality in a different context. This form of literary reading for social analysis is then comparative in the widest sense of the word, allowing texts from completely different historical configurations to enter into a dialogical relationship with other contexts and conditions. In this account, we have drawn on texts from Zimbabwe, a country also in the Southern African subregion, for a discussion of the difficulties in identifying the referential locus of trauma for the articulation of a political discourse of restitution in South Africa. But there is no reason why the texts could not have been taken from elsewhere in Africa or Latin America or indeed from anywhere else. It is this in its turn that allows us to calibrate literature for social analysis wherever literature is found. We can then attempt a postcolonializing even of the Western canon, extracting from it modalities by which to read completely different realities. Ultimately, it is the attitude to lending our strength to the amelioration of a confusing and painful reality that should justify the critical paradigm we deploy and not the critical paradigm for its own sake. Attitude is incipient action.

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5

Disability and Contingency

This chapter focuses on disability studies and the representation of disabled people in literature. In turning to such literary representations, I continue the methodological predisposition of reading literature for social analysis, further illustrating the kinds of theoretical calibrations central to the readings being expounded in this book. But here a difference in focus has to be noted from the outset. Whereas in the previous chapters the theoretical calibration had to do with aligning a discursive genre or paradigm (e.g., tragedy, urban myths, literature of the ex-centric) to a reading of various dimensions of the African postcolony, here the analysis centers on inchoate and subliminal dissonances in the literary representations of disabled characters. These representations, I want to argue, are coextensive with the larger societal dissonance affecting relations between the disabled and the nondisabled, especially when the representations are done by the nondisabled.1 My purpose in the present chapter is to illustrate the peculiar resonance of literature in disclosing the subtle processes and contradictions that coalesce around particular figures, expressions, or even events and that in their turn might be taken as refracting similar factors in reality. This is not to submit to an empiricist reflectionist interpretation or to glorify particular forms of realist representation but to show how literature is a form of negotiation of the real and a recapitulation of social

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processes even when ostensibly purporting to subvert such processes. This is not to proffer literature as a “mirror” up to nature but rather to take the image of the disabled as a nodal point in the intersecting of thresholds of signification. This, as has repeatedly been suggested in this book, is what allows literature to rehearse the heterogeneously intersecting structures of reality itself. As a focal point I want to explore what I describe as the “discursive nervousness” that often attends literary representations of physical disability. I want to examine this idea by way of an elaborate but necessary digression through a set of related questions to do with societal attitudes toward people with physical impairments. This exploration centers on a particular question that has been formulated in a variety of ways by several disability activists and scholars. It can be stated simply in this way: What accounts for the intensity and range of negative and embarrassing responses of the nondisabled toward people with disabilities? My answer to this question, which I will set out in the first part of this chapter, is that physical disability represents a strong expression of the tyranny of contingency. My general proposition is that the greatest perceived threat to life and happiness is not to be taken as death or even illness but contingency, and that physical disabilities, whatever their etiology and provenance might be in congenital factors, debilitating illnesses, industrial accidents, and war are often interpreted as an embodiment and radical reminder of this tyranny. The force of contingency shows us that we are slaves to “fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,” to echo the words of Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (1633). And as Richard Rorty suggests in his discussion of Nietzsche’s views on the contingency of selfhood, “the process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical to the process of inventing a new language,” that is, of thinking up a fresh set of metaphors by which the self can be spoken (1989, 27). In other words the recognition of contingency not only shows us the limit of our autonomy, it perforce enjoins a new mode of language to recognize this limit. As I will explore more fully in the second section of this chapter via a reading of Lacan, the recognition of radical contingency represented by the disabled produces features of a primal scene of extreme anxiety whose roots lie in barely acknowledged vertiginous fears of loss of control and of dismemberment. And yet, in partial contradiction to Rorty, the recognition of contingency brought on by the encounter with the disabled serves to generate linguistic collapse and tension as part of the means by which to divulge a new language of self-apprehension.

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This often peculiar contradiction in the representation of physical disability subtends the nervousness with which the able-bodied deal with the disabled in reality. Defining disability is fraught with problems. Any attempt to universalize the category “disabled” runs into conceptual problems of the most fundamental sort. Furthermore, the category is often used to refer to a broad range of phenomena, covering manifest physical disability and extending to less manifest forms such as deafness, blindness, and insanity (see Whyte and Ingstad 1995, 5; Linton 1998; Wendell 1996, among others). There have been many attempts over the past ten or so years to place new issues on the Disability Studies agenda, with a general effort at highlighting disability as a sociocultural as well as a physical problem, and thus foregrounding a social model of disability as a much-needed corrective to the reigning medical model. The social model interprets disabilities as being an interaction between physical impairment and the social and cultural environment. In other words, the problem for the person with an impairment is not just the struggle with the physical body that this often entails, but the larger and more inchoate struggle with certain negative and intransigent attitudes toward people with impairments. In Western societies the prime areas in which the social environment has sought to adjust to physical impairment have been through architectural redesigning of the public space, and through developments in communication technologies that have helped give people with various kinds of impairment a better life. However, as the experiences of people with disabilities and the disability literature readily show, there is still a massive amount of prejudice regarding disabled people. The seminal work of Erving Goffman, suggestively titled Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), illuminates the nature and sources of social stigma. Goffman points out that physical disability produces its own gestalt, and that those encountering the disabled often have a whole range of attitudes based on stereotype (6). More disturbingly, these stereotypes often work on the psyches of the disabled themselves, generating problems with their self-esteem, as Robert F. Murphy (1987, 96–115) shows from personal experience. One of the key problems in this regard, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues in a stimulating problematization and extension of some of Goffman’s insights, is that social encounters between the nondisabled and people with disabilities are somehow shortcircuited by the ways in which impairments are interpreted. She puts the matter succinctly thus:

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In a first encounter with another person, a tremendous amount of information must be organized and interpreted simultaneously: each participant probes the explicit for the implicit, determines what is significant for particular purposes, and prepares a response that is guided by many cues, both subtle and obvious. When one person has a visible disability, however, it almost always dominates and skews the normate’s process of sorting out perceptions and forming a reaction. The interaction is usually strained because the nondisabled person may feel fear, pity, fascination, repulsion, or merely surprise, none of which is expressible according to social protocol. Besides the discomforting dissonance between experienced and expressed reaction, a nondisabled person often does not know how to act toward a disabled person: how or whether to offer assistance; whether to acknowledge the disability; what words, gestures, or expectations to use or avoid. Perhaps most destructive to the potential for continuing relations is the normate’s frequent assumption that a disability cancels out other qualities, reducing the complex person to a single attribute. (12)

There are several significant strands to Thomson’s description that I will be taking up in various ways in my own discussion, which for the sake of simplicity I want to reorder and state as follows: 1 There is often a massive amount of information to be processed in first-time social encounters; 2 People normally probe the explicit as a sign of the implicit; 3 The physical impairment distorts the process by which the nondisabled sort out their perceptions and form a reaction; 4 Several contradictory feelings may be felt, none of which is expressible according to accepted social protocols, thus producing a dissonance between experienced and expressed reaction; and 5 There is often an assumption on the part of the nondisabled that disability cancels out other qualities.2 Thomson proposes the notion of the normate to explicate the cluster of attitudes that govern the nondisableds’ perception of themselves and their relations to the various “others” of corporeal normativity. As she persuasively shows, there are complex processes by which forms of corporeal diversity acquire cultural meanings that in their turn undergird a perceived hierarchy of bodily traits determining the distribution of privilege, status, and power. In other words, corporeal difference is part of a structure of power, and its meanings are governed by the unmarked regularities of the normate. However, as the paragraph I have just quoted shows, there are Disability and Contingency

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various elements of this complex relationship that do not disclose themselves as elements of power as such but rather as forms of anxiety, dissonance, and disorder. The common impulse toward categorization in interpersonal encounters is itself part of an ideal of order that is assumed as inherent within the universe, making the probing of the explicit for the implicit part of the quest for a metaphysical order that is thought to lie elsewhere. Yet the physical impairment is often taken to be the manifestation of the exact opposite of order, thus forcing a revaluation of that impulse and, indeed, of what it means to be human in a world governed by a radical contingency. The dissonance and anxiety that cannot be properly articulated via available social protocols then define the affective and emotional economy of the contingency. In other words, the recognition of contingency is not solely a philosophical one (in fact it hardly ever is at the moment of the social encounter itself); it is also and perhaps primarily an emotional and affective one. The usefulness of the social model of disability is precisely that it now forces the subliminal cultural assumptions around the disabled out into the open for examination, thus holding out the possibility that the nondisabled may ultimately be brought to recognize the sources of prejudice and the constructedness of the normate. However, since the world is constructed with a particular notion of unmarked normativity in mind, people with disabilities themselves often have to confront some of these ideas about contingency in articulating their own deeply felt and problematic sense of being. At least two further implications derive from Thomson’s description of first-time encounters between the nondisabled and people with disabilities. The first has to do with how this description of dissonance might be related to encounters between the nondisabled and people with invisible disabilities. Disabilities such as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), environmental sensitivity, and various forms of gradual debilitative diseases produce a different reaction even though the effects are no less embarrassing. The most common reaction of the nondisabled is that of disbelief or even of utter skepticism such that the person with an invisible disability is required to prove that they indeed have a disability. When the invisible disability is disclosed, problems arise about how best to react, with the nondisabled oscillating confusedly along a behavioral spectrum ranging from acknowledgement on the one hand and total denial on the other. The thing to note in the case of those with invisible disabilities is the degree to which they are thought to disrupt the smooth predictabilities of social encounters, thus suggesting in themselves a certain dissonance on a different scale from those with manifest disabilities. Given this particular form of Disability and Contingency

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disruption, people with invisible disabilities are immediately interpreted via a medical discourse, some of whose implications are that not only can they be cured but that they themselves have an obligation to heartily participate in the quest for their cure. It is from this aspect of medical discourse that the irritating and patronizing nondisabled calls to the disabled to “think positive,” or “consult alternative practices,” or even “get a grip” emanate (see Wendell 1996, 1–33, 87–106). The second implication of Thomson’s discussion is on a much more complicated level and has to do with how her description is to be applied to families that have disabled people in them and are thus obliged to deal with the fact of the impairment of their loved ones on a more or less permanent basis. As noted earlier, impairments have different causes and etiologies. But in all cases it is arguable that the families of people with disabilities have to constantly negotiate the fact of disability over a length of time, whether the disability was thrust into the midst of the family through congenital disorders or through accidents. This is not the place to outline the various coping and negotiation strategies that primary caregivers of people with disabilities have perforce developed, except to suggest that because the familial unit is in a constant interactive relationship with the external social world, which is in its turn governed by the category of the normate, the notion of dissonance that Thomson describes may be considered to produce a constant interruption of the familial relation. This is not to say that families of disabled people are somehow incapable of loving their disabled kin freely, but that the presence of the disabled in their family becomes constitutive of the other family members’ social selfconception. In many African cultures, for example, the presence of a disabled person in a family may have the effect of reducing the marital opportunities of other members. This is particularly the case with traditional marriage arrangements where even the history of criminality or of any social aberrations in the immediate family may turn out to be a decisive factor in marital considerations. It is not for nothing that some of the most sensitive disability activists and scholars have lived close to people with disabilities as family members and that the passion they bring to bear on the questions is constantly informed by the constitutive effect of disability on their primary familial relationships. If, as is being argued here, dissonance is the affective mark of the perception of contingency, then it might also be shown through a careful sociological and cultural analysis that the dissonance is prepared for by the larger and dispersed patterns of affirmation within social structures more generally. In his book The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Disability and Contingency

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Conflicts (1995), Axel Honneth provides a useful way in which issues of self-esteem, love, and respect may be discussed. Tracing a genealogy of the social struggle for recognition from the early writings of Hegel, he argues for understanding the issues of self-esteem as essentially guaranteed through the domain of the intersubjective and interrelational rather than as a matter solely deriving from the individual’s self-perception. There are three dimensions in which a person’s sense of selfhood gains affirmation, the home (love), the law (rights; the guarantees of personhood), and the state (solidarity; the institutional forms of reciprocal recognition). Honneth argues that denigration and insults form the basis for social struggles of recognition of the victims of disrespect. By this he also seeks to show that the struggles for recognition by various minority constituencies such as gays and lesbians, racial and religious minorities, and so forth ought to be seen as essential moral struggles rather than merely as struggles over economic, political, and other interests. This is despite the fact that struggles for recognition have historically been manifested as struggles over specific economic or political interests. With this formulation, Honneth leads us away from a Hobbesian or Rousseauian notion of social struggle to a much more complex conceptualization of social struggle through which the concerns of Disability Studies and other standpoint theories might usefully be articulated. Taking his notion of the home as being the primary basis of the dialectical consolidation of a wider structure of affirmation, the space where emotional bonds and a shared orientation of values are first developed, we should note, however, that a schism appears in the structures of affirmation between home on the one hand and civil society on the other precisely around questions of corporeal difference. It is to this domain that the social dissonance around the disabled has to be traced. The nature of the schism is perhaps best grasped by way of a comparison of the othering of the disabled and that of racial minorities in predominantly white cultures. Unlike people with disabilities, black people are normally born into vibrant and specific subcultures that historically have developed sophisticated modes of self-affirmation. Of course, these subcultures have had to historically negotiate their fraught position within the hegemonic white order, be this the system of slavery and its aftermath or of colonialism. However, by the later part of the twentieth century it is possible to assert that black subcultures have established a vitality that makes them almost hegemonic (one thinks of forms of black music such as jazz, blues, and rap, for example). The structures of positive affirmation apply at the level of the home as well as at the level of the perception of a commonality of Disability and Contingency

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experiences among black people from other places. Without attempting to essentialize the obvious differences between black Africans and African Americans, it is evident that many of Bob Marley’s songs, to take one of many possible currently globalized examples, speak to a commonly shared perception of what it is to be black in the world. One is reminded, for instance, of his “Redemption Song” (1980) and “War” (1976). “Redemption Song” proposes the song’s protagonist as a quasi-epic black figure who has been plundered by pirates and sold into the merchant ship of slavery bare minutes after being taken from a bottomless pit. The interfusion of the fate of the biblical Joseph with the trope of slavery and the Middle Passage serves to consolidate the sense of a quasi-epic journey of black folk. “War,” on the other hand, speaks to the perceived condition of injustice suffered by black people everywhere, suggesting that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes, there will be war. In both these songs, as in many others sung by people of African extraction, an ethos of affirmation is proffered in the public sphere that is supposed to counteract some of the negative images of blackness that threaten the denigration of black life. In the black home, then, whatever structures of affirmation derive from the domestic sphere are arguably part of a larger public order of ideational affirmation (and differentiation) at the level of images and affects. This structure of black cultural affirmation is taken as a counter to the racism and disaffirmation that affect black peoples in contexts where they are either a racial minority, as in America and in parts of Europe, or in those in which, though in the majority, they have historically been excluded from political power, as was the case in apartheid South Africa and in Zimbabwe before independence. In other contexts such as those in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa where the cultures are predominantly black, the affirmation of personhood at home finds reconfirmation from outside the home as well. Some problems may arise with regard to ethnicity, gender, and class, but race is rarely a matter of contention since all the people are presumably of the same race. As noted, a different picture emerges in contexts such as in America and Europe, where people of African descent are in a racial minority. Here, whereas there might be a strong affirmation of personhood at home, this is often directly contradicted by the racism that black people face within society. Thus, there is the sense of a schism, something that many black thinkers have commented upon, from Du Bois through to Fanon and others. Even though this schism between home affirmation and external disaffirmation seems to me to capture the essential contradiction with reDisability and Contingency

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gard to racial minorities in the West, complications have to be accounted for with regard to the porosity of the home/societal boundaries and the extent to which negative images of blackness may invade the home and end up distorting the black person’s self-perception from the inside. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), for example, tells of the degree to which the psyche of a young black person can be terribly scarified by the images of white beauty that abound outside and actually become constitutive of the ambiguous relation of inside to outside. But this same text also gives us fascinating models of the questioning of this notion of beauty, suggesting that Pecola’s fate is partly due to the crisis of a dysfunctional household. Furthermore, black homes are not immune from the gender bias that predominates in society at large. In black homes there are often different modes of aspiration set out along gender lines, such gender distinctions then leading to significant differences in how different members of the family are affirmed. Recalling Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, which we discussed in chapter 2, we should note that the young Tambu’s struggles to be sent to school were partly pursued in the face of her parents’ assumption that only her older brother had a right to education given their straitened financial circumstances. The startling first words of the novel, “I was not sorry when my brother died,” have to be read with the implication of this gender hierarchy in mind. On the other hand, the negotiation of gender differences coincides with tensions in intergenerational interpretations of agency in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), providing us with a potent image of the overall difficulties that members of a poor black home had to contend with during the era of segregation. The examples can be multiplied across a whole range of African and African American texts. Despite these important caveats, however, the general point I want to highlight here is that when members of the black family are affirmed, the affirmations are either (a) reconfirmed directly in contexts where blacks are in the majority and politically significant, or (b) reconfirmed through an affirmative black cultural discourse even while potentially being partially contradicted by white racism. Contrastively, and at the risk of overgeneralization, it may be argued that in the case of disabled people it is historically and cross-culturally the case that the structure of affirmation is fissured from both within and outside the home and that multiple reconfirmations of this negative structure compound the problem of social affirmation for the disabled. Simi Linton provides a broad cross-cultural typology of how disabled people have historically been viewed (1998, 34–70). Though individual cultures differ, it is generally the case that the disabled are taken to be the threshold of an Disability and Contingency

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enigma or anomaly, thus generating severe cultural responses of fear and uneasiness. Whereas it is rare for a black mother to feel guilty for having given birth to a black child, a nondisabled parent may have to cope with feelings of guilt and impotence in their dealings with a disabled offspring. This is due to several factors among which are the fact that apart from the Deaf community, disabled people are not born into a subculture as such; that the normate governs the most intimate familial relations of the disabled; that the ameliorative positive images of minority subcultures rarely find parallels in the case of the disabled; and finally, that even now few countries have laws that protect the disabled from prejudice with regards to jobs and access to social welfare.3 The most significant exception is, of course, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which sought to define disabilities within the paradigm and model of civil rights, thus extending the social model of disability and consolidating a whole range of arguments about the relation between impairment and the social environment in the production and continued resonance of disability.4 Disability, then, bears the brunt of denigration, one of the primary triggers, as noted by Honneth, of social struggles for recognition. My main aim in making these rudimentary points about structures of affirmation is really to challenge the oft-heard assertion that “everyone is disabled,” which some nondisabled people state either to identify with or indeed to dismiss the arguments of people with disabilities. It is also to move some way to distinguishing the easy slippage of the impact of prejudice on racial minorities with the impact of prejudice on disabled people. The two are not symmetrical either in their intention, implication, or effect. This is not to suggest that a broad community of social struggle cannot be established between racial minorities and those with disabilities, but that to elide the condition of the two is to ignore the very palpable ways in which nondisabled racial minorities themselves reproduce corporeal distinctions and benefit from the hierarchies maintained by those distinctions. It is, to appropriate a term applicable to postcolonial studies, an unconscious intrasubaltern hierarchization that needs to be unmasked and to which this analysis of the differential structures of affirmation is devoted. For to say that everyone is disabled is to ignore the specific nature of the disabled struggle for recognition at the sexual, interpersonal, economic, and social levels. My argument then would not be to institute a drastic dichotomy between the interests of the disabled and that of racial minorities, but to suggest that perceiving the nature of either civil or physical disability for minorities must be a condition of vital awareness about the variegated workings of the normate that, whether consciously or inDisability and Contingency

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advertently, the racial minority often acquiesces to even while battling for social recognition.

Fragments in the Mirror Keeping the ideas of dissonance and of radical contingency highlighted in the first part of this chapter in mind, I want to make three critical moves: the first is to turn to a Lacanian conceptual apparatus for further exploring the affective dissonance that occurs in the relationship between the nondisabled and the disabled. This will be done through a strategic reading of two essays, namely “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” and “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” both in Écrits (1995a,b). The second is to attend to the various discursive ways in which the disabled are figured in postcolonial writing, with particular reference to J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983). These will provide the main sources for theorizing the notion of “discursive nervousness.” The third is to argue that these primal scenes may be useful for situating the constitutive repressions of literary discourse that enable it to both contemplate and conceal its articulation of the limits of corporeal contingency. I conclude by suggesting that postcolonial histories are the expressions of radical contingency, especially when these histories are “littered with disembodied pasts” as is the case in various African countries torn by present and past wars. What, in other words, does it mean for the reconstruction of civil imagining when history itself has to be seen through a trope of disability? If physical disability is constitutive of social and psychological relationships in a troubling way, how does this come to be as it is, and in what terms do we describe the primal scene of the encounter of the nondisabled and the disabled through a Lacanian paradigm? To summarize Lacan’s argument in “ The Mirror Stage”: when a child is between six and eighteen months, they enter a curious phase in which they begin to recognize themselves in a mirror and start a long-term process of subjectivity that continues throughout life.5 The salient points of this mirror stage may be stated schematically as follows: (1) the baby learns to recognize its image and gestures in the mirror; (2) the baby discovers that the image in the mirror has its own properties (pun intended) and, furthermore, that it is whole; and (3) the baby develops an attachment to this specular image, which though reflecting a unified object back to it, is actually deluding the baby with a sense of wholeness. The phase is attended by signs of triumphant jubilation and playful discovery. As Malcolm Bowie puts it, “At Disability and Contingency

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the mirror moment something glimmers in the world for the first time. . . . The mirror image is a minimal paraphrase of the nascent ego” (1991, 22). That the baby’s sense of identification is delusional is seen in the fact that even as it requires the support of parental hands or of some artificial contraptions, it has begun to imagine itself whole and powerful. For Lacan, the ego is formed on the basis of an imaginary relationship of the subject with this specular image. Because this stage is actually not a phase but a stadium (stade), the mirror stage rehearses a lifelong process by which the ego, as Maud Ellmann succinctly puts it, “constantly identifies itself with new personae in the effort to evade division, distance, difference, deferral, death” (1994, 18). The result, she continues, is “a wilderness of mirrors in which self and object oscillate perpetually, each eclipsed under the shadow of the other.” Ellmann’s notion of perpetual oscillation is an interesting one to which we will return later. In translating Lacan’s conceptions into a definition of the primal scene of the encounter with the disabled, it is crucial first of all to take away the mirror while still keeping it in mind. One significant difference between the gaze of Lacan’s baby and that of the nondisabled as he or she gazes at the disabled is that in the second case there is a flow of affectivity. This affectivity relates to a multiplicity of emotions, which include guilt, bewilderment, and even fear, what we have already described under the rubric of dissonance. Robert Murphy points out that the disabled serve as “constant, visible reminders to the able-bodied that the society they live in is shot through with inequity and suffering, that they live in a counterfeit paradise, and that they too are vulnerable” (1987, 100). But these often contradictory emotions arise precisely because the disabled are continually located within a multiple frame of significance that is activated through the culturally regulated gaze of the normate, to reinvoke Thomson’s key word. My use of the word frame in this context is not idle. It is useful to think of such a frame in the light of physical coordinates as if thinking of a picture frame. The frame within which the disabled are continually placed by the normate is one in which a variety of concepts of wholeness and completion structure the disabled and place them at the center of a peculiar conjuncture of conceptions. At the same time, and quite paradoxically, this frame always harbors behind it the earlier frame of the mirror phase of childhood. A conflation of the mirror phase of identification with a culturally structured set of stereotypes about wholeness and personhood gives this primal scene its particular intensities. But how are we to attend to this contradiction? How does the new frame of wholeness and completion palimpsestically, as it were, overwrite Disability and Contingency

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the mirror stage of childhood? To attend to this point, we have to turn to Lacan’s second essay. In “Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis,” Lacan notes the degree to which the analyst becomes an object of cathartic resolution for the aggressivity inherent in the analysand’s self-imagining. But the aggressivity is often captured in what he describes as imagos, tropes, as literary critics might call them, some of which “represent the elective vectors of aggressive intentions, which they provide with an efficacity that might be called magical” (1995a, 11). These imagos are the images of “castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that I have grouped together under the apparently structural term of imagos of the fragmented body” (11). As he further points out, aggressivity is in the early stages inextricably linked to the images of the fragmented body: One only has to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces. . . . (11) 6

Crucially, however, he also notes that “in itself, dialogue seems to involve the renunciation of aggressivity . . .” (12). He has in mind the role of the analyst in establishing a dialogic context within which the analysand’s repressions may be brought to the surface. But, unlike Freud, Lacan maintains that the analyst is never completely detached from the unfolding process of psychoanalysis but is inextricably involved in its very discursive composition. Transposing these insights into the primal scene of the encounter with the disabled, it may be argued that it is precisely the enframing within normative assumptions of personhood that disenables a liberated “dialogue” or “dialogic” encounter with the disabled. This represents the fact that the encounter is always overdetermined by stereotypes of the normate. And, paradoxically, the notions and stereotypes of the normate are grounded on the repressed imagos of the fragmented body. The primal scene of the encounter with the disabled may then be described as always being crossed by a problematic aggressivity. The aggressivity, however, can rarely be expressed in its own terms but is diverted in different directions and manifests itself as guilt, bewilderment, fear, and, in a happy moment of sublimation, charity. At this point, a distinction has to be made between what we noted in the previous chapter in qualifying Freud about the relation between systemic disorder and the uncanny, and what we are taking from Lacan here about imagos of dismemberment and the workings of aggressivity. In the Disability and Contingency

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social collapse that triggers a general sense of systemic disorder, it is not necessary to perceive the sense of systemic disorder as having a source. Wars and rumors of war, news about the collapse of social order, and even narratives handed down from parents and older generations about traumatic events may all contribute to the perception of systemic disorder. As I noted, this perception may then be converted into emotions of guilt, inexplicable terror, or extreme anxiety. All these come together to define the systemic disorder as itself the seat of the uncanny. From Lacan’s discussion of imagos of fragmentation and of aggressivity, however, what we extrapolate is the specific confrontation with a discrete image of dismemberment, whether this image is present, recalled from the past, or even assembled from the many images of fragmentation that surround people in their everyday lives. The two states—of systemic disorder and of a direct encounter with imagos of fragmentation—are in my view to be distinguished in terms of the scale of perception and the degree to which that perception is generalizable beyond the individual. Clearly, they are to be seen as overlapping with each other, except that Lacan’s imagos of fragmentation are delimited as pertaining to the individual, whereas the uncanny that derives from the perception of systemic disorder might be generalizable across an entire family, community, or other group that either has to live with or negotiate the realities of social collapse.7 If Lacan’s mirror stage is taken as metaphorically extending throughout life, it is possible to argue that this phase represents for any evolving subjectivity the figuring of wholeness as normative. For the disabled caught in the mirror stage, it is not only their own reflection that they see. As many commentators have noted, there is an endless internalization on their part of the images that define wholeness (see Goffman 1963 and Murphy 1987; also Ablon 1984, 23–30). The mirror is populated endlessly with the reflections of “whole” people and a world in which things are made with such people in mind. At the primal scene, there is a series of double visions at play: the nondisabled see a totality that is themselves reflected back to them along with an anxious fantasy of dismemberment. For the disabled, the vision is of what is normative crossed with their own sense of otherness. Finally, and even more uncannily, they are both being made the objects of the gaze of the frame of wholeness and completion whose repressed Other is all the figures of corporeal difference that play across the mirror stage. The “perpetual oscillation” in the making of the ego that Ellmann remarked in discussing the mirror stage may then be said to be hyperinflected in the primal scene of the encounter with the disabled.

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The Anxieties of Literary Discourse in the Encounter with the Disabled It is now time to test these formulations against some postcolonial texts.8 The first thing to note in the primal scene of the encounter with the disabled as represented in literature is that the narrative is often marked at such points by signs of what I have already suggested should be seen as discursive nervousness. This is reflected in a variety of ways, either in a sudden effusion of violence and chaos accompanied by a change in the texture of the language, or by a general reversion to images of primary sensations or even of a subliminal unease with questions of identity. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is an interesting illustration of the last of these points. Waiting is about a character called the Magistrate, through whose eyes the entire novel is narrated. At the opening of the novel he has been a dutiful functionary of the Empire for many years. Now, however, a propaganda frenzy has led to the arrest and torture of members of barbarian tribes who live at the edges of the Empire. One of these barbarian girls, blinded in torture and with broken ankles and sundry scars, is taken in by the Magistrate. His motives seem at first to be altruistic, but it does not take long for him to begin desiring her sexually. It is a relationship, however, that for a while is doomed to remain unconsummated, owing partly to the Magistrate’s mental struggle to erase the scars from her body. At one point in the narrative, he is watching her eat while thinking about how much pain she must have suffered: I watch her eat. She eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch. She has a good appetite, the appetite of a robust young country woman. “I don’t believe you can see,” I say. “Yes, I can see. When I look straight there is nothing, there is—” (she rubs the air in front of her like someone cleaning a window). “A blur,” I say. “There is a blur. But I can see out of the sides of my eyes. The left eye is better than the right. How could I find my way if I didn’t see?” “Did they do this to you?” “Yes.” “What did they do?” She shrugs and is silent. Her plate is empty. I dish up more of the bean stew she seems to like so much. She eats too fast, belches behind a cupped hand, smiles. “Beans make you fart,” she says. The room is warm, her coat hangs in a corner with the boots below it, she wears only the white smock

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and drawers. When she does not look at me I am a grey form moving about unpredictably on the periphery of her vision. When she looks at me I am a blur, a voice, a smell, a centre of energy that one day falls asleep washing her feet and the next day feeds her bean stew and the next day—she does not know. (29; emphasis added)

Because this novel is narrated entirely from the viewpoint of the Magistrate, the nervousness is as much his as that of the narrative in general. Particularly significant in this regard is the fact that at the end of this extract he shifts into a free indirect discourse that momentarily conflates his own perceptions with those of the barbarian girl. In describing how he appears to her—like a grey form moving peripherally, or a blur, a voice and a smell—he seems to be uncannily “seeing” himself through her eyes. This self-seeing, which folds into itself a self-unseeing, defines the precise space of an unnameable anxiety for the Magistrate. It is the anxiety of being effaced and disembodied in the partial gaze of the girl even as he thinks himself whole and in control of her immediate destiny. This is illustrative of the primal scene of enframing that I elaborated earlier, but with the added dimension that here the disabled girl is actively gazing back. The barbarian girl is a mirror that reflects back to the Magistrate his potential dissolution across its surface. Curiously enough, this uncanny moment of dissolution comes after the Magistrate’s location of the girl in a stereotypical frame of reference. He notes matter-of-factly that “she eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch.” In addition, that “she has a good appetite, the appetite of a robust young country woman.” What is this about blind people gazing at the distance while they eat, and what is it that sustains these broad generalizations? It is simply the fact that he feels himself empowered to enframe and name her, both as one who controls the tools of such procedures as well as one who regulates the movement of the narrative in the first place. It is therefore highly ironic that he finds himself later in the passage an object of effacement in the eyes of the girl. Later on in the novel, the Magistrate makes an admission to himself that shows the extent to which the framing of the blind barbarian girl is a desperate attempt at stabilizing a sense of wholeness that would liberate his libidinal impulses: No more than before does my heart leap or my blood pound at her touch. I am with her not for whatever raptures she may promise or yield but for other reasons, which remain as obscure to me as ever. Except that it has not escaped me that in bed in the dark the marks her torturers have left upon her, the twisted feet, the half-blind eyes, are easily forgotten. Is it then the Disability and Contingency

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case that it is the whole woman I want, that my pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is it the case (I am not stupid, let me say these things) that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find, do not go deep enough? Too much or too little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears? (64; emphasis added)

The Magistrate seems to be in an odd position of psychological denial. He asserts that he is not with her for any possibility of rapture, but that he cannot identify the real reason for his attraction to her. More important, however, is his admission that he simultaneously desires her without the marks of torture and seems to be attracted to her because of them. The oscillation in his mind is nothing other than a figuring of the uneasy dialogical relationship he has attempted to establish with the disabled barbarian girl. He desires a dialogue with her as an equal and struggles to understand her historical position in the brutal narrative of empire. And yet, contradictorily, he finds himself frustrated from doing this not only because she is a barbarian (his view of her table manners reflects this sense) but also because her disability reflects to him all the negations of personhood that, as a liberal humanist, challenge unconscious assumptions about identity and autonomy he has held all his life. His problems are additionally compounded because he also recognizes that her body has been scarified by an imperial history to which he has somehow contributed. Her disability exceeds its frame of reference to envelope him in an embrace of complicity and guilt. Part of the Magistrate’s only partially admitted project in taking in the barbarian girl is to provide a means to salve his liberal humanist guilt. Though a dutiful dispenser of justice for many decades, it is only with the opening of the events of the novel that he comes to discover the degree of his own complicity with the Empire’s ideology. When he repeatedly falls into a slumber after washing the barbarian girl’s feet, it is almost as if he is making a gesture of ablution, but an ablution that remains incomplete because of his incapacity to know how to respond to the dangerous knowledge of his complicity. Much later, he generates a laudable response by agreeing to send the barbarian girl across an expanse of wintry wasteland back to her own people. In doing this he himself becomes an enemy of the Empire and is incarcerated and severely tortured. There is a disturbing silence regarding the true causes of the barbarian girl’s blindness that serves to raise another enigma in the text. When the Magistrate asks the girl in the first passage, “What did they do?” we notice Disability and Contingency

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that she remains silent. That she was tortured there is no doubt, and this the Magistrate already knows. But why this refusal to speak the “unspeakable” of the traumatic event? To grasp the reason we have to momentarily step back from the Magistrate’s unfolding first-person narrative, which completely situates us in the present tense of its unfoldment, to pose the question, what would have been his reaction if she had agreed to describe her torture in detail? Though she does not tell him the details of what happened, he overhears her later telling other women downstairs about what happened to her. But why not to the Magistrate, her main representational interlocutor whose consciousness is privileged by the text because of the first-person narratorial standpoint? I propose that the barbarian girl’s torture is unspeakable not only because of the problems with recalling the trauma, but precisely because for Coetzee to have allowed her to disclose the details of her anguish to the Magistrate in full would have meant directly undoing the gentle liberal humanist discourse that underpins the Magistrate’s narrative. At this stage in the narrative it would have meant that the entire apparatus of the text would have had to directly confront a pressing ethical issue, perhaps altering the aesthetic terms by which the issue is articulated. Its liberal humanist discourse would have been undone by the requirement that the Magistrate make a direct commitment to take sides urgently against the injustice of the system. To put it another way: for the causes of her impairment to have been fully disclosed would have meant that the liberal humanist Magistrate would have had to act, rather than merely sympathize. This is because the source of her impairment is automatically conflated with the grounds of her disability, that is, the warped political ideology used by Colonel Joll to justify torture, and the continuing responses of the normate that situate the tortured victim as an anomaly, the cipher of a metaphysical disorder. Disclosure in this case is also an unmasking of contingent complicities and the need to act decisively to rectify those complicities. The text, then, seems to discursively conceal the true moment of crisis, never really requiring the Magistrate to confront the Empire and his complicity in it directly or, indeed, to fully acknowledge the degree of his terror of negation as it is represented in the blinded barbarian girl. His personal crisis comes to a head only when he himself is taken as a barbarian and his body is visited with all the violence previously reserved for the barbarians. The text allows the confrontation with Empire only when he himself has been transformed into a victim and therefore has had his moral complicity in the devices of Empire ameliorated by his change in status. This notion of the potentially disruptive nature of the (political) Disability and Contingency

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grounds for disability is one we will return to later, but for now let us for the sake of the discussion put it formulaically: To have a full disclosure about the social and political grounds of an impairment is perforce to go beyond the impairment and to engage the social, political, and cultural factors that produce disability. In this case to know is to have to act. Full disclosure of the grounds of a disability (rather than the etiology of an impairment) is thus always a threat to the normalizing ideologies of social relations. The distinction that Waiting for the Barbarians suggests is, on the one hand, between having to respond to political violence as the real obscured etiology of physical impairment and, on the other, the response to disability as a socially constructed model saturated by unacknowledged assumptions of normativity and order. The issue for the Magistrate is really that of the form of agency to adopt if the implications of the political ideology he had dutifully served were to be suddenly disclosed to him (as opposed to his unearthing this himself through the progressive but gradual use of his own intellect). It is essentially the discursive difference between radical rupture and gradual realization. In the real world, it is the deep-seated ideas about the place of the disabled within a social universe of order and our complicity in translating impairments into disability that would require unmasking for an effective confrontation. If the main features of the primal scene of the discursive encounter with the disabled may be seen in the bounded interaction of such scenes in Coetzee’s novel, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People illustrates a far more complex configuration of the primal scene in that the entire text perpetually rehearses the restless oscillation of the encounter between the disabled and the normate. It also shows in a more dispersed way the dangerous potential inherent in the full disclosure of the grounds of disability. There are three main protagonists in the novel: Kerewin, an artist who lives by herself on a South Island beach in New Zealand; Simon, a child with a speech impairment; and Joe, his adoptive father. Kerewin’s first encounter with Simon is fruitful in the way in which it reproduces the contours of the primal scene: She stands over by the window, hands fistplanted on her hips, and watches the gathering boil of the surf below. She has a curious feeling as she stands there, as though something is out of place, a wrongness somewhere, an uneasiness, an overwatching. She stares morosely at her feet (longer second toes still longer, you think they might one day grow less, you bloody werewolf you?) and the joyous relief that the morning’s hunting gave ebbs away. . . . Disability and Contingency

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There is a gap between two tiers of bookshelves. Her chest of pounamu rests in between them, and above it, is a child. A thin shockheaded person, haloed in hair, shrouded in the dying light. The eyes are invisible. It is silent, immobile. Kerewin stares, shocked and gawping and speechless. . . . She doesn’t like looking at the child. One of the maimed, the contaminating. . . . She looks at the smoke curling upward in a thin blue stream instead. “Ah, you can’t talk, is that it?” (16–17; emphasis added)

Hulme’s novel is marked by a highly poeticized mode of writing. Though it is essentially a third-person narrative, there is a constant integration of the thoughts and feelings of individual characters. From these extracts, however, two things are worthy of note in relation to my argument. The first is that Kerewin has a sense of a “wrongness somewhere, an overwatching” when alone in her house whose source is not clearly formulated until a little later. Though this uncanny feeling of being watched might be said to be a natural intuitive reaction to being the object of an undisclosed person’s gaze, it is important to note that later the notion of a vague “wrongness” is given a specific location when she thinks of the child as one of the “maimed, the contaminating.” Significantly, though, she thinks of him in this way before she fully discovers he has a speech impairment. Is this momentary foreknowledge attributable to Kerewin’s heightened intuitions, or does its significance lie elsewhere? At this point the issue is undecidable, but as the narrative progresses, it is clear that Simon’s proleptic framing as a maimed and contaminating factor in Kerewin’s mind even before she discovers he has a speech impairment resonates at a more complex level of the narrative’s discourse. Simon comes across as a disturbed child, but as the novel progresses one senses a certain struggle to avoid a full disclosure of what seems to be the source of this disturbance. Though, as I noted before, the novel frequently reflects the innermost thoughts of individual characters, what goes on in Simon’s mind is rigorously withheld from us. All we get is his momentary sensations and reactions to events, not his thoughts on his own condition. In fact, much of the novel reads almost like a psychological mystery thriller in which we are constantly made to wonder at what possibly might have happened to Simon. We are shown signs of physical abuse but led in a circuitous way to suspect various people other than Joe of harming the boy. When Kerewin arrives at a fair conviction that Joe is responsible for the boy’s abused condition, her subliminal sensual attraction to Joe initially prevents her from dealing with him as ruthlessly as she Disability and Contingency

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would have wished and from reporting his actions to the social services. The moment of the explicit disclosure of Joe’s responsibility for Simon’s abuse is a moment of great violence and bloodshed. It is also paradoxically the moment when Simon strikes back, and we are allowed to grasp the intensity of his delayed response. In reaction to being physically abused yet again by Joe for some minor misdemeanor, Simon launches wildly at Joe with a glass splinter, stabbing him in the stomach and almost killing him (306–9). Only at this point are we forced to reinterpret all the coded signals provided earlier in the text about the ambivalent looks that Simon often gave Joe, his strong attachment to Kerewin and reluctance to go to his own home, and the tense behavior that he often displayed in the presence of the two adults. Strangely enough, however, shortly after this explicit articulation of the boy’s response to his abuse the three characters are separated, and the text falls apart. Joe’s confession to Kerewin and her subsequent reactions to the full disclosure are particularly relevant in this regard: “You know what?” he asks again, on the last recital, and she shakes her head tiredly. She has become more and more sober as the night wore on. “I think I was trying to beat him dead,” says Joe. “I think I was trying to kill him then.” . . . (328) He says something in passing that Kerewin wishes he had never revealed. A few words, but they make for horror. He says, “I don’t think I’m the only one that’s hurt him. He had some bloody funny marks on him when he arrived.” . . . She stowed her backpack into a large suitcase, added a few clothes, all her remaining smokes, the last of the bottle of Drambuie, Simon’s rosary and three books. One is the Book of the Soul, the one she normally keeps under lock and key. One is the Concise Oxford Dictionary. The last is peculiarly her own. It is entitled, in hand-lettered copper uncials, “Book of Godhead,” and the title page reads, BOG: for spiritual small-players to lose themselves in. It contains an eclectic range of religious writing. . . . It was a book she had designed to cater for all the drifts and vagaries of her mind. To provide her with information, rough maps and sketches of a way to God.

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She had a feeling her need for the numinous will increase dramatically from now on. (329; emphasis added)

We notice, first of all, that Kerewin refuses to pass judgment on Joe. This is especially odd, as she has been shown in the novel to be very strongminded and forthright with her opinions. What is even more strange, however, is the fact that immediately after this confession, she decides to pack bag and baggage and leave her lovingly created spiral home. The books that she decides to take along are also significant in this respect: a dictionary and several spiritual books. But it is not for nothing that she senses an increasing “need for the numinous.” The novel itself subsequently becomes highly religious and esoteric in tone, following Joe on a visit to a shaman in a quest for atonement for his cruelties and, sporadically, Kerewin on a journey that seems not to have any clear direction. All this narrative “falling apart,” however, has to be understood in the light of the novel’s special discursive location of Simon as a disabled character and the contradictions involved in his rebellion against oppression. Simon is frequently described with an array of quasi-religious significations. His age is undecidable. He seems to be simultaneously five years and ten times that. His eyes are “seagreen” (22), and he is said by Joe to have come on shore as part of the flotsam of a shipwreck a few years earlier (51, 83–88). When she first sees him, Kerewin describes him as a “thin shockheaded person, haloed in hair, shrouded in the dying light” (17). He makes a gift to Kerewin of a magnificent rosary of semiprecious stones that seems to be some kind of heirloom. Looking at how his hair falls across his face, she is reminded of “the skirts of dervishes as they spin to ecstasy” (68). Later on in the novel, when he is hospitalized following the brutal final encounter with Joe, his hands are said to be marked by a network of pink scars, and his feet are described as being wrapped in bandages, covering “what feels like holes” (387). His hair is shown to be “gone to a fine gold fuzz” (389). And, to top it all, Simon claims with great conviction to be able to see people’s auras in the dark (93). What all these quasi-religious references suggest is that Simon is a sort of sacrificial figure and is made to carry, pace Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the “slings [stings] and arrows of an outrageous fortune.” The point, though, is that this outrageous fortune is not only the fact of being the adopted child of an abusive parent; it is also the fact of carrying an impairment that makes him the butt of insults and suspected of contamination, and, at a more complex discursive level, that operates so as to render him silent, spoken for and misunderstood within the narrative. It is therefore significant to note that despite Disability and Contingency

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Kerewin’s growing friendship with him, she consistently thinks of him in terms of negative epithets, repeatedly extending in different directions what she earlier defines intuitively as “contaminating.” The novel rehearses the contours of the primal scene at several levels of its discourse. Much as in Coetzee’s novel, the disabled in this text, though located within a particular frame, exceeds its regulative parameters and is seen to affect the boundaries of the entire narrative itself. It is almost as if the text is nervous about the disabled, its nervousness displaying itself in ways that undermine its narrative stability. Furthermore, just as was the case in Waiting, once the violence and exploitation of the disabled are fully disclosed, they call for action, something that the narrative economy cannot contemplate. The narrative thus has to fall apart, to disperse its energies in a quasi-esoteric pursuit of redemption.

Conclusion But how do we move from these observations concerning two texts to a wider theory of discursive nervousness to do with representations of disability? To go back to our ideas of dissonance and contingency, it is as if in this discursive nervousness we are seeing another dimension of contingency. As will be recalled from the beginning of the chapter, contingency is often perceived as an affective dissonance and not directly as a conceptual category. The problem, then, is not merely that of representing the disabled as such. The full disclosure of the conditions of disability reveals the contingent repressions that the texts have to undertake to allow them to speak about the disabled in the first place. The acknowledgement of such a contingent repression would as it were then strike the texts silent. In other words, the full disclosure of the conditions of disability would perhaps force the aesthetic domain into a more explicit ethical standpoint, something which, at least in these two accounts, the texts are unable to do. We might even go further to note that the literary representation of the disabled is always an aesthetic problem, one that though coextensive with their representation in real life, can to a degree be examined separately. The issue seems to be that the aesthetic domain desires to differentiate itself from ordinary discourse even while refracting some of the dominant forms of such a discourse of the everyday. In this regard, the most sophisticated aesthetic expressions often struggle to avoid lapsing into either propaganda or utopia. But this requires a complex engagement with ethical issues in such a way as not to substitute the need for always anticipating alternative options with a rapid and perhaps ill-judged response to Disability and Contingency

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ethical problems. But here is where the image of the disabled disrupts the smooth flow of the aesthetic domain’s ethical negotiation. For, as I have tried to show, the disabled always enjoin a response, one that in an unreconstructed social domain is dominated by affective dissonance rather than awareness. In most texts with disabled people in them, the disabled have either been figured as wholly negative and megalomanic (e.g., Shakespeare’s Richard in Richard III, Melville’s Ahab in Moby Dick, Naguib Mahfouz’s Zeita in Midaq Alley), or as somehow possessing a specially heightened insight about reality (Faulkner’s Benjy in Absalom, Absalom, Kofi Awoonor’s Amamu in This Earth, My Brother). The second group are generally those shown with a cognitive disability or heightened mental disorders rather than with physical disabilities. As a general representational rule also, disabled people in political authority are often portrayed as tyrannical, while those that are victims of social disorder are portrayed as either hapless or, as mentioned earlier, insightful. It is when, as in the case of Coetzee’s and Hulme’s texts discussed here, the disabled are placed in positions of ordinary everyday interaction that the disruptions to their usual representational coding arise. Placing them in a condition of ordinary everyday interaction also means that they have been shifted from the dominant modality of merely occasioning virtue (either negatively or positively) to being fully acknowledged persons in themselves. And yet, to fully acknowledge them as persons is also to have to recognize not just their impairments but the conditions that render them disabled and sustain a hierarchy of privilege between the nondisabled and the disabled. Although this is not the place for a full discussion, I would like to point out another direction in which the narrative disclosure of the conditions of disability might conduct itself. This is where the disabled figure is allowed to provide the central locus of consciousness in the narrative text, providing a perspective on the doings of others while at the same time actually reflecting upon their disability in relation to how others perceive them in the world. There are several sides to this focalization that show that the mere privileging of a disabled perspective does not necessarily exhaust the tasks of an ethically alert representation. The discussion of the focalizations through the perspective of the disabled would to my mind need to be fuller than what Rosemarie Thomson argues takes place around the many disabled figures in Toni Morrison’s work. These, which include Eva in Sula, Baby Suggs in Beloved, Marie-Therese Foucault in Tar Baby, and Pilate in Song of Solomon, are all self-possessed characters and thus have the empowerment to shape social attitudes toward themselves. The discussion would also have to exceed the kind of centralization of the disabled seen Disability and Contingency

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in a text such as Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991), where the centrality of the disabled child narrator is undermined by the fact that her precociousness is a feature only of the relationship between herself and the reader and not in the relations between herself and other characters within the narrative itself. There is thus a contradiction that borders on implausibility, because she behaves like an adult to us but is an ordinary child within the narrative. In the case of Cracking India the problem seems to be that Lenny is being proffered as an analogy for Pakistan, a young and mutilated country emerging from the partition of India that is none the less ancient in pedigree. The disability thus merely becomes a device of analogy and does not allow for the mimetic complexity that inheres in the experience of people with disabilities themselves. In this respect the representation of such disabled figures is still distinct from the representation of the nondisabled, who in many demonstrable cases often reflect upon their sexuality, education, emotional predilections, and other aspects of their experience in their relationships with others. The presence of disabled people in postcolonial writing marks more than just the recognition of their obvious presence in the real world of postcolonial existence and the fact that in most cases national economies woefully fail to take account of them. It also marks the sense of a major problematic, which is nothing less than the difficult encounter with history itself. For colonialism may be said to have been a major force of a historical impairment, frustrating the colonized from taking their place in the flow of history other than in a position of stigmatized underprivilege. The devastating effect of colonialism on the psyches of the colonized has been written about by Fanon (1967, 1986) and need not detain us here. What is important to note, however, is that the encounter with the disabled in postcolonial writing is as much a struggle to transcend the nightmare of history as it is of making sense of the unfolding present. But it is a nightmare that is also as much a product of warped struggles over postcolonial national and ethnic identities as it is of the traumatic processes of colonialism. This is particularly the case in Africa, where wars and rumors of war succeed in proliferating disability on the streets daily. Angola is a case in point: “Long cited as one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, the early UN estimate of 10 to 15 million landmines contaminating Angolan soil is still widely cited.” These are the words of the Landmine Monitor Report of 1999 on Angola (117). Even though the report suggests that the figure should be revised downwards, there is no doubt that the extensive land mines in the country will ensure that physical impairments will be a part of the social fabric for a long time to come. Angola, Mozambique, Disability and Contingency

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Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Congo. In all these countries reckless wars have ensured that the disabled are a part of everyday life. In any attempt to create a civil imagining in these countries, the problem will always be how to confront a traumatic history of disability at the personal as well as social level. And though it is not wise to venture any hasty answers, we may yet state that there is likely to be a perpetual oscillation between the traumatic and violent past and the debris of reconstruction of the present that will make civil societies in such contexts liminal and constantly riddled with emotional contradictions. A crucial step, perhaps, would be to recognize this for a fact and to account for it in terms of a discourse of disability as a contingent process of becoming, one that needs to be grappled with in its full sociohistorical and traumatic complexity before it can be resolved. This requires self-reflexivity, patience, fortitude, hope, and, above all, dialogue. A ceaseless dialogue.

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6

Literature and the Parables of Time What is time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not. Saint Augustine, Confessions XI, XIV

Saint Augustine’s oft-quoted conundrum about time is recognizable in the quotidian round of everyday life. The clock is not always the best way to tell time’s passage, even though the most universal and convenient.1 The passage of time is measured not just by the hands of the clock or annually in birthdays, but by registering impressions of seemingly mundane events such as the subtle furrows on one’s brow or on that of another, the unexpected loss of breath on climbing an accustomed stair, and the sudden encounter with long-lost acquaintances who suddenly bring back a flood of memory of our old selves. Time’s passage is also detected in the length of memory that we have of things past—nearly twenty-five years ago such and such was my experience—and in the sprouting of a new generation of children, or nieces and nephews, or grandchildren. Or, most dramatically, time’s passage is registered on the death of loved ones and acquaintances. The passage of time, then, is often a refraction of unfolding relationships with others and with different moments of our own pasts as well as with

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the dramatic or indeed inexorable sense of absolute loss. In all these instances there is a magnifying of the perception of time’s passage as it is unexpectedly focalized through a momentary intensification of the perception of change. These crystallized moments of passage may fade away as quickly as they flash up to consciousness, or they may stay with us and become nodal points for fresh cognitions and perturbations. All these senses of time’s passage foreground an important if lamentable fact: that without being somehow abstracted from the flow of time, we can never recognize its passage. It takes a momentary shock for this abstraction and distancing to take place, yet in the ordinary run of everyday life for most people, time passes by invisibly and unnoticed. Already in these reflections on time’s passage we can discern two dimensions that have been the subject of philosophical enquiry. The first is what Paul Ricoeur, in qualifying his discussion of Saint Augustine’s view of the concept via a reading of Heidegger, describes as “time when,” which is the constitution of time in terms of relations of simultaneity and succession. This is the time marked by the clock, what leads to the abstractions of various “nows” in human experience. The second dimension he elaborates is that of time as a phenomenological factor in which the actuality of the now is shaped by the orientation of human desire, the primacy of the future in this orientation, and the fundamental capacity of human recollection of the past within the present (Ricoeur 1991, 100–102, 107–10). Through his analysis of fiction, Ricoeur elaborates the various imaginative variations on time as represented in narrative. These tend to incorporate segments of world events and of temporality within the temporal experience of fictional characters. One central tendency he notes, however, is that fiction’s imaginative variations are a response to the major aporia in the phenomenology of time, itself conceptualized in a variety of ways in the work of Aristotle, Augustine, Husserl, Heidegger, and other philosophers. This is how Ricoeur explains fiction’s representation of temporal aporia at one point in his discussion of Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and The Remembrance of Things Past: The figure in which the time of the world appears is that of the various domains in which there operates what we have termed, along with Gilles Deleuze, the apprenticeship to signs: signs of the social world, signs of life, signs of sensuous impressions, signs of art. However, because these four domains are never represented except through their signs, apprenticeship to them also involves the world and consciousness. Another cleavage results from this, opposing time lost to time regained. Lost, first of all, is past time,

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prey to the universal decay of things. . . . Lost also is the time dissipated among signs not yet recognized as such, destined to be reintegrated within the great work of recapitulation. Lost, finally, is dispersed time, like the places in space. . . . We might speak of the intermittence of time, as one speaks of the intermittence of the heart. (1988, 131)

The supervening gap he is trying to explicate is that between the time of consciousness and the time of the world, something that is expressed in terms of an apprenticeship to (I should say desire for) signs. And then there is the problem of the orientation to temporality where time lost, dispersed, or barely recognized becomes the subject of a quest for reintegration. This quest, as is amply demonstrable from literature, is one that often ends up in failure and disappointment, since the quest for integration is part of a larger enchantment with ideas of the autonomy of the self, when such autonomy is persistently undermined by our misapprehension of the contradictions in our relation to others, the political economy of our desires, and even the very signs by which we articulate the various vectors of our existence. Following Ricoeur, I want to highlight the view that literature also provides the context in which temporal categories are represented as social facts. This is done partly through the assimilation of signs of social temporality into the domain of the fictive. Represented social facts are also perceivable as such due to their intelligibility as part of a network of reciprocal determinations. To recall what I raised about mimesis in the introduction, I should note that the literary-aesthetic domain is obliged to interact with other discourses, thus making meaning through the reciprocal interactions of these various discursive domains. The example that I used in the introduction was that of jealousy, but I could refer to Kantian conceptual categories of time, space, and causality as also becoming meaningful within literary representation by virtue of the reciprocal determinations that are established by the interaction of different discursive domains that centralize these concepts. The ritual divisions of time, its experience as shaping social relations, and the misapprehensions of its effects are all shown to be socially produced and in their turn socially reproducing. In focusing on examples from the short stories of Borges, the novels of Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe, and the theater of Wole Soyinka in this chapter, I want to contrast time as a chronological framework (primarily marked by clocks but also including cultural and sociological vectors of temporal marking) to time as a phenomenological quality experienced by characters. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, even though methodologically it Literature and the Parables of Time

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is useful to separate them for analysis. In what follows, each section will draw on textual examples that highlight framework or experience, the purpose of this being to foreground specific textualized features of time for discussion. Two reflections on time, by Walter Benjamin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, provide useful points of contrast for my discussion. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1992), Benjamin preoccupies himself with meditations on time, historicism, and their relationship to history. XVII illustrates one crux of his views: Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. (emphasis added)

Benjamin is theorizing in his own distinctive way the aporia of time and their links to historical interpretation. Three strands of thought may be isolated for discussion: (1) the constructive principle behind materialist historiography is precisely an epiphanic recognition within a historical moment pregnant with tensions; (2) this moment pregnant with tensions is a configuration (he calls it elsewhere a constellation) of present and past, conceptual frameworks and ideas; (3) the moment presents the materialist historian, standing as an interpreter, with the means by which to perceive the past as a monad and to recuperate it for radical uses. Underpinning all these is the recognition of history as an almost religious experience that serves to reconfigure both past and present simultaneously. As Benjamin elaborates his ideas in the “Theses,” he is at pains to establish a distinction between traditional historiography, what he terms here universal history, and a more radical form of historical understanding that would serve to “blast open the continuum of history” (XVI). But it is the intricate relationship between a present moment pregnant with tensions Literature and the Parables of Time

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and the perception of the past as a monad touching upon the present that is of interest to us here. Benjamin’s notion of monads draws on a certain neo-Platonism as well as on the theories of Leibniz for its essential features. Leibniz (1646–1716) conceives of matter as essentially made up of monads. His inspiration comes partly from the discovery of the microscope, but he adds the dimension of persistent change and evolution to his monadic structure of the universe. For Leibniz each monad is a distinct entity possessing its own kind or degree of consciousness and existence. This strand of thinking, already well established in the West from the time of the Greek Atomists, serves to produce what might be termed a “granulated” view of matter and reality, with the important difference that in Leibniz’s account monads are not materialist but possess a subtle and ultimately transcendental content.2 In the Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977), Benjamin adds an important distinction to Leibniz’s monadology, suggesting that the monad “contains an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others” (47). For Benjamin, the purpose of the representation of the idea is “nothing less than an abbreviated outline of the image of the world.” The idea is a monad, and as the monad contains an indistinct abbreviation of the world, every idea contains the image of the world. This neo-Platonist strand, which might easily be mistaken to rest upon a notion of the visible world as postlapsarian and therefore spiritually tarnished, is turned by Benjamin to radical usage in terms of a quest for revolutionary action. In seeing historical interpretation as primarily a project of emancipation Benjamin echoes the thinking of Theodor Adorno in his reflections on similar matters toward the end of Minima Moralia (1974): The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought. (247)

The necessity expressed by Adorno of looking awry at reality in order to estrange it from the normal rounds of thought and expose it to a Literature and the Parables of Time

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revolutionary potential is very much in keeping with Benjamin’s own radical project of historical interpretation. In its neo-Platonist strain, monadology allows Benjamin access to a crucial religious component of his theory of ideas, namely, anamnesis. Anamnesis is the idea that truth is already and eternally present in the world, and that in order to get it we need only to recognize it in the flow of existence. Benjamin’s monadic ideas then emerge as a vehicle for generating anamnesis, that is, for blasting open the possibility of accessing truth beyond the confines of form (Roberts 1982, 118). When Benjamin and, indeed, Adorno refer to the Messianic potential in history, they do not do this to assert a form of spiritual obfuscation. In all such cases of the potential for rupture in historical interpretation, their suggestion is that transcendence is always immanent within the precise recognition of historical process.3 In Benjamin’s thought the configuration pregnant with tensions highlights this moment of potential transcendence that has to be seized upon as it flashes within the structures of reality to help push that reality beyond the confines of calcified thought. One recalls here the words that the narrator of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) has to say of the childlike and absent-minded Remedios the Beauty. Far from her being an idiot, as some people suspect, the narrator tells us that “it seemed as if some penetrating lucidity permitted her to see the reality of things beyond any formalism. That at least was the point of view of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, for whom Remedios the Beauty was in no way mentally retarded, as was generally believed, but quite the opposite. ‘It’s as if she’s come back from twenty years of war,’ he would say” (164). What we are encouraged to abstract from Benjamin’s notion of the monad is the need for a penetrating lucidity beyond all formalism conjoined to a revolutionary project in our understanding and use of history. The penetrating lucidity called for in Benjamin’s thought might allow it to be recouped from an inchoate Hegelianism. As I noted in the introduction, Althusser’s critique of Hegel’s notion of History turned precisely on the question of the degree to which every moment of time could be taken as a sublime instantiation of Spirit, thus enjoining the task of periodization as the main task of the Historian. Althusser further points out that Hegel’s account makes no room for great figures who attempt to transcend their historical moment, their place being accounted for only as a space of presentiment. The key distinction to draw between Hegel’s thought and Benjamin’s, then, is in the radical place of consciousness in interpreting the pregnant perturbations of time as a breach of the commonplaces of historical thought, thus requiring an active rupturing of consciousness to Literature and the Parables of Time

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make way for the future captured or indeed inhibited by the present. The task for Benjamin is one of a revolutionary consciousness grasping the possibility of transcendence from within the very interstices of time’s passage itself, at the precise moment when it constellates into an apparently unresolvable contradiction. Despite the potential for a radical historical understanding expressed in the “Theses,” a number of qualifications have to be made if we are to apply Benjamin’s ideas to the varied thematizations of time in literature. One implication of Benjamin’s thought is that History is never innocent of a degree of affectivity that inheres in the moment of cognition of the monadic flash point. But if we take Benjamin’s monadology not as a rhetorical device to encapsulate the idea of a flash point of recognition but as central to the conception of the philosophy of history he is at pains to elaborate, then we are faced with a conundrum. How can the “moment pregnant with tensions” he names in the “ Theses” generate a monad as such? Monad, from the Greek word monas, implies singularity or oneness. The monad, even when taken as a reflection of some aspect of the world, seems to operate as a singular and perhaps even unified entity. How can the historian, steeped within the epiphanic moment of radical monadic perception remain coherent enough in his or her cognition to extract a history from the debris of the past? I want to emphasize instead the significance of two levels of what must be thought of as a fragmented framework, embracing both the dimension of the interpretative surround enframing a concept or configuration and the dimension of the consciousness of the interpreter of that enframing surround. Benjamin elides the two, thus scaling down the full implications of the “moment pregnant with tensions” in his formulation. What I want to explore are the implications that the pregnant tensions might be thought to have for the possibility of shaping both the consciousness of the observer as well as the shape of history.

Morrison and the Pregnant Affects of Rememory Once we focus on the dialectical relations between pregnant moment-asframework (fragmentary or otherwise), the historical perceiver, and the retrieved past, a series of refocalizations of represented time make themselves manifest. I have already noted in chapter 4 the degree to which trauma generates a problem for retrieving the referential locus. In that chapter the emphasis was mainly on how this problem could be related to the restoration of an integrated post-apartheid political subject back into history. Trauma, as we noted, raises a difficulty with the recuperation of the Literature and the Parables of Time

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past for present uses. The implications of this conundrum are raised suggestively in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In Beloved the third-person narration is closely aligned to the unfolding perceptions and feelings of the characters. Free indirect discourse is coupled with a stream-of-consciousness method of narrative unfoldment to ensure that the narrator is hardly ever seen as anything other than dissolved within the perspectives and sensibilities of the characters. And even when, as is often the case, the narrator takes leave to describe the context of a represented action, that context is described so as to take on the emotional coloring of the central characters involved in that segment of the action. Thus, early in the novel, we find that after Sethe and Paul D’s lovemaking, their thoughts mutually return to the same past moment on Sweet Home farm. The conjoined moment of memory is when Sethe’s husband took her amid the cornstalks, presumably to show respect for the four other men who had desperately desired Sethe when she was first brought to the farm. The thoughts of Sethe and Paul D in the present moment of narrated action are intimately traced by the narrator, with the shift between each character’s thoughts cued in by the movement they make on the bed as they suppress an involuntary laugh, stretch an arm or a leg, or mutually adjust themselves for comfort on the bed. So subtly has the narrator handled the entire sequence that when she steps back to describe the events in the third person, it is impossible to distinguish narrator from characters. This is further complicated by the fact that the text lyrically refers back to the tactility and taste of the broken corn the men gathered up following the lovemaking in the cornfield: How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice. The jealous admiration of the watching men melted with the feast of new corn they allowed themselves that night. Plucked from the broken stalks that Mr. Garner could not doubt was the fault of the raccoon. Paul F wanted his roasted; Paul A wanted his boiled and now Paul D couldn’t remember how finally they’d cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel. The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt. As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free.

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No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free. (26)

The shift of person from Paul D to Sethe and then to the universal “you” indicates a subtle process of abstraction from the experience being described. This abstraction derives from the simple act of tasting the corncobs and recognizing the sheer surprise and sensuousness of being alive to such taste. The close alliance between the narrator’s perspective and the consciousness of the characters then means that the past that is recalled is only meaningful as it is experienced by the characters, who, as we already see, are in a state of a satisfied postcoital reflection. Note the word felt, as what we see in Morrison’s Beloved is a conception of the past as harboring a series of affects, any of which can be triggered by random events within the present to produce a specific representation of the past. Dedicated so intently toward tracing the thoughts and feelings of the characters, the narrative then recalls history as a series of fleeting impressions and affects, with the overarching order being the drastic traumatic effect of the experience of slavery. It is this experience that seems to ultimately shape past, present, and future and forces time to be figured as loss, dispersal, and elusive apprehension. Later, it is through the view of the past as harboring an inalienable affect that we need to understand Sethe’s notion of rememory. As she tells it to Denver: “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, I’s gone, but the place— the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm— every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s

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more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.” (35–36)

In Sethe’s interpretation, certain events, especially collective traumatic events, cannot be encapsulated within a coherent historical account. They live as thought-pictures with a particular affective quotient and lie in wait to be relived by the people who first experienced it as well as by others. The implicit déjà vu of rememory is meant to define a momentous event in the past that produces an excess beyond temporality, thus coexisting with the present as a thought-picture with a peculiar experiential force. The work of rememory seems analogous to Benjamin’s notion of the monad. However, it is also evident that in Beloved the moment pregnant with tensions is not simply one of a once and unrepeatable epiphany. On the contrary, precisely because of the traumas of slavery suffered by the characters, each and every moment of their lives is pregnant with the tensions that engender the flashes of interpretative fervor. The tensions of the lived moment are in a rapid dialectical relationship with the tensions of the past, such that past and present constantly threaten an unbearable coexistence. As for the monadic implications that might have inhered from the sudden epiphanic cognition of rememory, it now becomes clear that the past is not retrievable as a simple monad. It is too dialectically entangled with the fissured consciousness of the interpreter. In Beloved the moment pregnant with tensions has a bifurcated reality, firstly within the traumatized consciousness of the character, and secondly within the affective secretions of a traumatizing history. Time, then, becomes dialectically granulated, with each moment in past and present pregnant with the deadly potential for traumatic rupture. If we have centered on a rereading of Benjamin’s notion of history and time by focalizing it through the consciousness of a traumatic narrative, it is not to centralize trauma as a modality for grasping history. Far from it. It is rather to highlight a point that we will be returning to incrementally during the course of this discussion, namely, the degree to which time is dialectically related to the framework of the present (either seen as an institutional sociological framework of recall or as a tapestry of fissures). Time, incarnated insecurely as a phenomenological experience within the event, relates to the present moment of cognition thematically as well as Literature and the Parables of Time

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conceptually, constantly reconfiguring past, present, and future. It is one of the key parables of time we are invited to take from literature.

Borges and the Concentric Frameworks of Time Pregnant frameworks also generate a degree of pressure to hierarchically organize the insights of history. This happens even when the thematization of time is thoroughly discombobulated, as is seen in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose writing provides other ways of looking at parables of time in literary representation. The echo from One Hundred Years of Solitude about a penetrating lucidity beyond all formalism is particularly applicable to Borges, who, indeed, was a key inspiration behind Márquez himself and other magical realist writers. Borges was scrupulous in emphasizing the problem of the inherent ungraspability of the universe. His essays and short stories are shaped so as to produce this particular insight in the form of a series of open-ended enigmas that resist easy closure. In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1963), for instance, he presents a classification of languages that foregrounds the constructivist principle behind our interpretative enterprises. He is citing “a certain Chinese encyclopedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”: On these remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. (133)

What this points to is that all representations are dictated by certain conventions, simply because, as Borges puts it, “there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is” (133–34). Foucault, in commenting on what is now a much quoted passage, notes in the preface to The Order of Things (1994) that classificatory systems localize the power of contagion of the named categories. For, as he asks, where else could all these animals meet except in the non-place of language? But our attention is also drawn to how the classification includes itself in the classificatory schema. Borges attempts to efface the site of this location by making the encyclopedia part of its own classification, thus blurring the boundaries between the construction and the constructed. Literature and the Parables of Time

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It is, however, in the persistent blurrings of temporal structures that Borges provides us with parables of time. Often the blurring of temporal structures is part of a wider schema of boundary transgressions that include the semiotic relay between fact and fiction, between real and imagined, and between genres. “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1980), for example, is at various levels a spy thriller (of the fugitive spy Yu Tsun’s attempt to escape Richard Madden and to send a coded message to his masters in Germany during World War I), a quasi-gothic quest narrative, a parable about labyrinths, and an oedipal story about the discovery and murder of a father figure in the person of the sinologist Stephen Albert. It is told mainly by Yu Tsun and is supposed to be his signed statement. It is in Borges’s careful cultivation of “objectivity” that the boundaries between fact and fiction are paradoxically blurred. From the opening of the story there is reference to “page 22 of Liddell Hart’s History of World War I” to which the story we read is supposed to be providing a corrective detail. This factual framing is further buttressed by a footnote on the bottom of the first page attributed to “the editor,” in which he hypothesizes on the murder motive of another spy not directly represented in the story. The footnote, however, immediately undermines the distance of the framing narrator, because it is essentially a partisan explanation of an event that we do not see for ourselves. But there is something more than this taking place. Essentially, the footnote and the device of objective framing have the effect of assimilating the paratextual apparatus enframing the story into the narrative text that unfolds slowly before our eyes.4 This is reproduced at the level of the story itself, where Yu Tsun, as the narrator, frequently pauses to make metanarrative philosophical observations about the events in which he is entangled. But given this discursive mirroring of the narrative impulses of “editor” and “narrator,” how do we know who is really responsible for the story that unfolds before us? More importantly, what value do we assign to the words For Victoria Ocampo and Translated by D.A.Y. that appear at the bottom of the last page of the story? Because of the assimilation of the paratextual apparatus to the fictional representation, these proper names suddenly occupy a liminal threshold between fact and fiction, their italicization in the text notwithstanding. It is in relation to the temporal frameworks within the narrative that the central conception of time becomes manifest. I have already noted how the text pretends to be a footnote to a real historical happening. The events of the story appear to unfold in the course of a decisive evening during World War I. As Yu Tsun flees his nemesis Richard Madden, the sense of temporal pressure is both accentuated and retracted to accommoLiterature and the Parables of Time

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date differential conceptions of the relation between time and choice. The primary temporal framework is that governed by the spy-thriller narrative genre, in which the pursued spy has a limited amount of time within which to pass on a message to his German masters. His decision is to assassinate the famous sinologist Stephen Albert, whose second name is the same as the place where a major British arsenal is located. As he knows that his boss in Germany is constantly scouring the newspapers for news, Yu Tsun is sure that the report of his bullet will be inadvertently but immediately converted by the local press into a crucial espionage report that will provide the Germans with the necessary information for their bombing campaign. The spy-thriller temporal framework of the story is codified around Yu Tsun’s pursuit by Richard Madden and the fact that he has only a limited amount of time to contrive his report before he is apprehended by his formidable foe. Madden runs onto the platform just as Yu Tsun’s train is departing the station, immediately registering the fact that Yu Tsun has only the forty minutes between trains to his destination to carry out his plan. Curiously enough, however, this tense account of the opening few pages gives way to an almost timeless description (in terms of the relative absence of temporal markers) when Yu Tsun gets off the train and makes his way to Albert’s house. Told by some youths at the station platform to keep turning left as he goes down the path to the sinologist’s house, his mind gradually drifts into images of a labyrinth on the same principle perfected by an ancestor of his: Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. . . . Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day worked on me, as well as the slope of the road which eliminated any possibility of weariness. The afternoon was intimate, infinite. (48)

So absorbed is he in illusory images of the labyrinth that he “forgets his destiny of one pursued.” This forgetting marks the suspension of the modalities that govern the spy-thriller genre. Instead we are presented with an almost quasi-gothic sense of space and time. He imagines himself an “abstract perceiver of the world,” the remains of the day and the glimpses of the environment working on him to produce a sense of the infinite and the intimate. It is almost as if he has temporarily escaped the Literature and the Parables of Time

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torments of pursuit and entered into the womb of space-time. (The collocation of nature with the primeval scene of nothingness and being is a suggestively common trope in literary writing, with examples found in as varied sources as Shakespeare’s green world comedies to Wordsworth’s Prelude to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Soyinka’s Dance of the Forests and beyond). When he gets to Albert’s house, the sense of pursuit has completely receded from the narrative. What we are presented with instead is the suggestive parable of “The Garden of Forking Paths.” The basic idea governing the account of the infinite garden written by Tsui Pen, who, as it happens, is one of Yu Tsun’s ancestors, is that it is possible to conceive of the possibility of infinite time by narrating it in terms of the consistent choosing of all alternatives to a course of action. Whereas in most fictional works when a person is confronted with several alternatives he or she is obliged to choose one and eliminate all others, in this parable the idea is to be able to simultaneously choose all of them, thus raising the possibility of experiencing all the infinite outcomes consequent upon any of the choices exercised. This then stands as the parable of infinite time that Yu Tsun is invited to contemplate. However, he has a more pressing task at hand, which is to assassinate his unsuspecting host. Significantly, Yu Tsun does not actually pull the trigger until he sees Madden rushing in through the garden outside. His time is up. With the entry of Madden, the spythriller genre with its implications of time’s inexorable flow takes over the narrative again, displacing the timeless implications that had been registered by the enigmatic center of the story. If we view Madden not as a mere character but as a codification of temporality inherent in the spy-thriller genre, we can conclude, borrowing from Ricoeur in his discussion of Mrs. Dalloway, that he is the thematization of a temporal limit (1988, 129–30). In this case Madden would be interpreted as the thematization of Absolute Time, itself meant to indicate the limit to the variations of temporality and choice represented in the text. Absolute Time in this text is to be understood in a number of ways. It provides the central governing framework to which the story returns at the end to force a choice and form of closure. It thus hints at the will-totranscendence noted in chapter 3 in my discussion of African social imaginaries and their relation to the postcolonial state form in Africa. As I noted there, the will-to-transcendence is that which attempts to waylay all systemic contradictions and to place them within the sign of a dominant order of closure. It is the governing impulse that underpins totalitarianism within a political system, and the mainstay of a monological framework as elaborated by Bakhtin. As we can see from “ The Garden of Literature and the Parables of Time

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Forking Paths,” it is also a device that short-circuits the free flow of meanings even while not being able to contain them all within an instant. What Borges does in this story as in “The Aleph,” “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Death and the Compass,” and others in his oeuvre is to multiply enclosed worlds and to produce an imagined world as a palimpsest of other possible worlds. This often entails the construction of mutually dependent structures that have no resolution and the elaboration of logical dilemmas that have no clear answer. The focus in these stories is on formal consistency, the formal consistency being what allows an idea of the real to be glimpsed. The formal consistency of a Borges story is ironically meant to suggest how limited the mind is when it tries, on the one hand, to apprehend reality, and on the other, to organize an ideal pattern that could conceivably correspond to that reality. Thus in a way each of Borges’s stories replicates the problematic of the apocryphal Chinese Encyclopedia. In this scheme of things time becomes a refraction of the problem of knowledge, with the concentric frameworks of the narratives providing a means by which to contemplate the enframing multichronicity of events. Again, going back to Benjamin, we see how the monad of time may be conceptualized as a moment pregnant with multiple temporalities moving at different rates of unfoldment, notwithstanding the fact that often one element may be seen as trying to exert a logical pull on the heterogeneity of the rest.

The Time of History and the Times of the Gods One aspect of Benjamin’s thought—that of the messianic implications to be derived from the constellation—has so far in our discussion been assimilated to the dual notions of pregnant time and to concentric temporal frameworks. It is now in order to institute a decisive split between messianic time and ordinary time, whether this ordinary time is seen in its multichronomic dimension or as unilinear. The purpose of this split is to foreground another critical problem with regard to historical representation, something that Chakrabarty attends to in “The Time of History and the Times of Gods” (1997). Chakrabarty’s concerns in this essay are predominantly to do with the question of the relationship between “disenchanted time,” that is, the notion of homogeneous time that becomes the informing assumption of scientific historiography, and “enchanted time,” that which includes gods, spirits, and other esoteric entities as the motors and explanations of history. His main contention is that Western historiography necessarily translates enchanted time into a disenchanted discourse as its key condition of discursive possibility. However, by a careful Literature and the Parables of Time

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analysis of the discourse of Indian labor historians such as Gyan Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Richard Maxwell Eaton, and himself, Chakrabarty shows how the “objective” discourse of the social sciences leads to an unconscious assimilation of the category of peasant labor that is informed by beliefs in gods and spirits into a dominant modality of Marxist historical analysis that serves to bracket out the significance of these counterrational practices and rationalizes them either as evolutionarily backward categories or as features of false consciousness. In pointing out the persistent problem of historical explanation with regard to some of these spiritual beliefs and practices, Chakrabarty does not seek to invoke what he refers to as the “raging Medusa of cultural relativism.” Rather, his contention is that historiography has to allow for pluralities, pluralities that themselves imply singularities that may resist easy assimilation into any overarching category of historical explanation (46–48). The gods are the nodal points of such a singularity, problematically raising the issue of how they are to be represented by a scientific historiography. The translation of categories also has another inflection in Chakrabarty’s account. He notes the degree to which within certain nonmodern ritual practices, a subtle translation of terms takes place between religions and cultural belief systems that bypasses all the implicit sociologies that inform the work of historians. Translation in this case is “antisociology and for that reason has no obligation to be secular” (51). However, despite his wide-ranging and thoughtful remarks on the opposition between enchanted and disenchanted time, by the end of his fascinating essay one has the vague sense that the problem as raised by Chakrabarty is far from settled in his own mind. In the course of his discussion he enters the caveat that he is not making a “postmodern argument announcing the death of history and recommending fiction writing as a career for all historians” (48). Even though he points out that fiction and films are the best modern media for handling the antisociology implicit in nonmodern forms of translation, he is at pains to point out that that option is “not open to the historian.” The question, though, is why this particular opposition between history and fiction? Unless we take his earlier opposition between disenchanted and enchanted time as somehow being the starting point respectively of history and of fiction, the later opposition between the two disciplinary discourses is not adequately prepared for in his discussion. The opposition between history and fiction itself derives from another explicitly stated concern of Chakrabarty, namely, that the logic of secular human sciences has been intermeshed with that of bureaucracies such that a training in modern historical consciousness becomes a necessary means Literature and the Parables of Time

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of contesting the bureaucratic state apparatus. In this contestation gods and spirits are necessarily demoted because reasoning through them fails to meet the standards by which the bureaucratic apparatus normally adjudicates on the truthfulness of propositions. The subaltern classes thus need a modern historical knowledge to prosecute their battles for social justice. “When,” he asks trenchantly, “has the International Monetary Fund or the United Nations listened to an argument involving the agency of gods?” (48). It is not, however, the normative implications behind the history/ fiction, enchanted time/disenchanted time pairs that I want to address here, but whether literature does not provide us a way of dissolving the dichotomies altogether, raising in their place the possibility of dialectically grasping enchanted and disenchanted time in their simultaneity and inextricable codependence as mutually reinforcing understandings of the processes of transformation of cultures in the first place. Two examples from African literature offer us windows into this perspective. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) provides us with two cross-illuminating conceptions of time and temporality and with the conundrum of translating enchanted time into the time of historical/ethnographic representation, while Wole Soyinka’s The Road (1973a) allows us to think through the sociological implications of the clash between cyclical and linear time as they inform specific social imaginaries within a particular urban configuration in Nigeria.

Achebe and the Chi as a Prism of History Things Fall Apart centers on the life of Okonkwo, a self-made man in the fictional Umuofia clan of the Igbo people at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Through sheer hard work, he rises to become one of the lords of the clan. But pride and a quick temper soon undo him. At a point in the story his rusty gun goes off and accidentally kills a young member of the clan at a funeral to commemorate the death of a great warlord. He is exiled from the clan, and in his seven-year absence things change rapidly in the clan. The white man arrives, first bringing religion, then commerce, and after that an administration. When Okonkwo returns to his village, things have fallen apart. His own son has joined the new religion, a trade has been established in palm nuts, previously a “woman’s” crop, and the clan’s strong sense of identity seems to have somehow dissipated. At the end of the novel he tries to give his clansmen a cue for epic action. A meeting has been called to address an Literature and the Parables of Time

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insult of the district commissioner against the elders of the tribe. The clan elders had been invited to join him for a palaver to resolve a dispute concerning the burning down of the church house, but he tricked them out of their weapons and humiliated them by having their heads shaved with broken bottles. He also held them hostage and asked for a huge ransom from the clan to let them go. When the big gathering of townsfolk is called, messengers of the district commissioner are sent to disperse the meeting. But their leader has the misfortune of meeting Okonkwo at the edge of the gathered circle. Okonkwo’s machete descends twice, and the messenger’s head lies beside his body. But instead of action, his clansmen break into tumult. The end of the novel finds Okonkwo hanging from a tree, a suicide. He is finally alienated from the tribe on whose behalf he thought he was asserting the ultimate warrior ethic. His final act on their behalf was a tragic error of judgment. The first thing to note about the novel is the degree to which even as it is at pains to assert the viability of an indigenous way of life, it also discloses the gradual erosion of the transcendental basis for the self-evidence of the cultural value system. This is seen not so much in terms of particular questionings, captured most adroitly by the novelist in the character of Obierika, as in the very ways by which larger historical processes come to coincide with internal schisms in the local cultural imagining so as to generate a newly emergent meritocratic order. This new meritocratic order comes to threaten a displacement of the old order, the “things fall apart” of the title gaining its force from the pregnant tensions that mark this process of displacement. Thus the coming of the Christians, for instance, served to instigate the process by which people were inserted into a new religious sensibility, gained access to education, and were progressively integrated into the colonial administrative apparatus as court clerks, interpreters, and so on. Furthermore, Christianity also provided the lineaments of a new aesthetic sensibility, one that seemed on the surface not to be directly instrumental. Within the culture itself the figure of the lazy Unoka, Okonkwo’s disgraced father, provides a key to the problematic status of this noninstrumental aesthetic sensibility. For unlike all “sensible” people in the culture, Unoka elects to be a flute-playing aesthete who refuses to participate in the labor processes of the society. He sustains himself through persistent borrowing, putting off his creditors with a clever manipulation of proverbial rhetoric. When he dies of an unnameable disease, he is buried in the Evil Forest. However, this noninstrumental aesthetic, what in Chakrabarty’s terms might be seen as representing enchanted

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time, is extended and given repeated articulation through the folktales that Ikemefuna tells, and ultimately, through the beautiful songs the earliest Christians sing, which stir a particular longing in Okonkwo’s son Nwoye and lead him to leave his home to join the Christians. The thing to note here is the degree to which this noninstrumental aesthetic sensibility is both a means by which an unexpressed longing in the society is given articulation, and, conjoined to its homologous (Christian) counterpart from outside the culture, becomes the conduit for alienation from it. Starting from the coming of the Christians, the effect of alienation is always present in the historical processes that have consolidated this noninstrumental aesthetic. This is because even if appearing on the surface to be noninstrumental, Christianity is embedded within a new form of colonial relation that its purpose is to partially disguise. The struggle between an aesthetic sensibility (instrumental or otherwise) organic to the indigenous culture and an aesthetic order that comes with colonialism might then be interpreted as the struggle between two different ways of knowing, interpreting, and relating to the world. The novel itself makes the question of how to represent a culture saturated in enchanted time central to the narrative discourse itself. It is an epistemological concern that Chakrabarty would have recognized as relevant to the concerns of historians. This is seen most strongly in the consistency with which the magical and potentially extrarational aspects of Umuofian culture are submitted to the control of a carefully objective rather than mythical form of causality. Though a broad vista of the magical and supernatural is opened up in the depiction of the gods of the land and the various beliefs in the fluid contact between the tribe and their ancestors, at no time is there any suggestion that these supersede the human capacity for comprehension and control. There is no disruption of the sequence of cause and effect, of cause before effect, and of both cause and effect as graspable within the workings of the objective realm. This is in spite of the fact that the narrative itself undertakes a series of frequent digressions to nestle various mythical stories and folklore within the dominant narrative. Even in this digressive movement, there is a clear suggestion of the rational control of events and their submission to a nonmythical causality. Supernatural factors such as Ani, goddess of the earth, ngadi nwayi, one-legged old woman and active principle of Umuofian war medicine, and other supernatural beings are reported rather than displayed. There is no sense in which any human action, even when the permission of the gods is ritually sought, unfolds by way of supernatural motivations.

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Both characterization as well as causality are firmly within the ambit of rational representation. The narrator is like a scientific ethnographer in this respect, translating the times of the gods into the time of history. There are many instances in the narrative when there is a threatened disruption of the principles of realist representation, but the scientific ethnographic mold is never allowed to be completely subverted. The emergence of the egwu-gwu from the “bowels” of the earth to sit in judgment exemplifies this tendency. With the emergence of the masked egwugwu to sit in judgment, a new mythical ethos is suggested. Their entry is described in tones of awe, and their physical appearance is meant to strike fear in the gathered villagers. Their whole appearance is aptly described as a “terrifying spectacle.” But this awe-inspiring spectacle is quickly undermined when it is revealed that the women in Okonkwo’s household recognize the gait of one of the egwu-gwu: “Okonkwo’s wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second of the egwu-gwu had the springly walk of Okonkwo. . . . But if they thought these things they kept them within themselves” (64–65). The emergence of these surrogate spirit beings is shown to depend on a tacit social pact clearly regulated by a suspension of disbelief. For the silence that the women impose on themselves is in order to maintain the belief value of the spectacle. The physical incursion of the “spiritual” is not allowed to take over the texture of the narrative. The egwu-gwu do not fly, or metamorphose, or dissolve into thin air but behave within the prescribed ambit of reality and depend on a tacit social pact for their authority. (One can only speculate as to what the effect of a deadpan Márquez-like touch to the proceedings concerning the egwu-gwu would have had on this section, or on the narrative in general. The self-imposed constraints of the realist representation are critical for what the narrative does or does not do.) It is when we come to the novel’s discursive grasp of time and historical process, however, that enchantment and disenchantment are carefully balanced, bequeathing to us the sense of a historiographic imaginary in which enchanted and disenchanted time cross-illuminate the historicity of indigenous cultures in their encounters with colonialism and the West. This is mainly seen in the significance assigned to the concept of the chi in the Igbos’ self-perception and the connections that this concept has with the novelist’s sense of historical process and unfoldment. The concept of the chi points to the belief in a personal god, personal fate, if you will, but in such a way as to defy easy explanation. When Okonkwo’s gun goes off at Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s funeral and kills the dead man’s son, triggering his exile from the clan, it seems that his chi has begun to say “no” to his selfLiterature and the Parables of Time

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affirming “yes.” It raises in a stark way the issue of individual autonomy. Since the chi is not a visible physical entity, the culture’s understanding of it is expressed through a variety of proverbs and ritual dispositions. But for the implications of the chi to be fully grasped, a whole range of relations would have to be understood: the hierarchical ones between men and women, the relations of exchange and reciprocity, the link between a proverbial language and a rapidly changing world, the economy of exclusions that peripheralize certain constituencies in the culture despite its essentially meritocratic impulse (osus, twins, untitled men, etc.). In other words, the question of autonomy cannot be grasped except through a form of embedding that takes the whole range of possible and potential social relations into account. And yet, on closer examination, the concept of the chi in the novel also serves to raise a question about the knowability of history. The utter elusiveness of the chi parallels to a certain degree the problematic status of the historical processes that affect the culture and lead things to fall apart. When the white man first comes to Umuofia in the shape of the early missionaries, he is perceived as easily explainable within the conceptual scheme available in the culture. What are these but a bunch of “clucking hens,” as Okonkwo asserts derisively? They are efulefu, effeminate men who can do no harm and who should either be chased away immediately or just tolerated as a nuisance that would hopefully vanish in due course and without a trace. The Umuofians of course turn out to be tragically wrong. However, the significance of their misinterpretation is not that they failed to recognize a tragic history when it walked into their midst in the form of the white man, but that this potential for misrecognition inheres in any human encounter with historical processes as such. In the novel the unknowability of historical processes as they unfold is paralleled to an uncanny degree by the elusiveness and unknowability of the chi concept. In other words, there is a homological conceptual structure in the novel that is only discernible when the chi concept is seen as the parallel of the unknowable face of a tragic history. The chi concept may then be seen as a historicizing concept used by the culture to explain personal fortune and culpability rather than the wider details of historical unfoldment. Both the chi concept and history, then, might be thought to raise identical epistemological questions, one articulated at the level of the personal, the other at the level of unfolding historical processes. Furthermore, and shifting the focus, it might be argued that the concept of the chi raises a problem for History itself, since it undermines the idea of a fully autonomous being that is so much an implicit assumption of modern historiography. Literature and the Parables of Time

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A text such as Things Fall Apart disrupts the implicit dichotomy between enchanted and disenchanted time by narrativizing the tragic fall of Okonkwo and his clansmen partly through the prism of the historical irruption of colonialism and partly as the work of the recalcitrant and not wholly predictable chi concept. Two conceptions of time and history are discursively placed side by side, without necessarily meeting in the minds of the characters. This dissociated sensibility might be thought to mark a particular phase in the insertion of colonized cultures into new temporalities of historical representation and thought. It is the phase in which certain historical conceptions even while already existing within a culture and articulable as homologous to a Western historiographic consciousness, are not brought into direct dialogue with each other as such. This is a historical phenomenon that may be traced in several different instances.5 The beauty of Achebe’s representation of historical configuration is that he respects this dichotomy as part of the problem of historical and ethnographic representation. In later texts such as Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease, the dichotomy between historical concepts is broken down, thus showing the shifting historicity of the cultures and times he is describing. Fiction in Achebe’s works lends a helping hand to historiography in the ways in which the novels conceptualize the historicity of the dialectical relationship between enchanted and disenchanted time in the cultures represented.

Wole Soyinka: Linearity versus Cyclicality in Temporal Conceptions In contrast to Achebe’s novel, Soyinka’s The Road presents us with the direct encounter between different understandings of time within the consciousness of fictional characters, but this time within a postcolonial setting. Here, the indigenous conception of time that is largely cyclical does not parallel but coalesces with a linear and quasi-Christian conception of Western time, producing a series of category confusions both in the minds of the characters and in the dramatic vehicle of representation. The Road opens among unemployed motor-park touts in a notional Nigerian city in the mid-1960s. Recognizable traces of Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, and other big Nigerian cities are evident not in specific details but in the general combination of hope and hopelessness among the peripheral urban social types central to the dramatization of the edge of the city. These touts live off dreams of earlier employment conditions as great cross-country drivers while attempting to stem off their gnawing sense of impotence through a series of petty criminal activities such as the forging Literature and the Parables of Time

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of driving licenses and the provision of a ready pool of thugs for use by local politicians. Their activities are presided over by Professor, an eccentric figure on a quest for the enigmatic “Word,” the pursuit of which throws up all sorts of contradictions both to do with his own character and with the spiritual ethos of the play more generally. Professor’s first entry in the play is particularly telling: Professor is a tall figure in Victorian outfit—tails, top-hat, etc., all thread-bare and shiny at the lapels from much ironing. He carries four enormous bundles of newspaper and a fifth of paper odds and ends impaled on a metal rod stuck in a wooden rest. A chair-stick hangs from one elbow, and the other arm clutches a road sign bearing a squiggle and the one word, “BEND.” P R O F : [he enters in a high state of excitement, muttering to himself]: Almost a miracle . . . dawn provides the greatest miracles but this . . . in this dawn has exceeded its promise. In the strangest of places . . . God God God but there is a mystery in everything. A new discovery every hour— I am used to that, but that I should be led to where this was hidden, sprouted in secret for heaven knows how long . . . for there was no doubt about it, this word was growing, it was growing from earth until I plucked it. . . . (157)

Professor is a bundle of contradictions, something hinted at in his very outfit. His threadbare Victorian tails and top hat are a throwback to his class position, which in the play he has clearly lost. His quest for the enigmatic Word has quasi-Christian implications, but Professor deforms these by reducing it to a search for printed words. He delights in thinking that an aggregation of words—from newspapers, football pools, road signs— would somehow disclose the true Word. Ordinary words are taken by him to be the avatars of the true word, almost as if reading the world through a depleted Leibnizian monadology. This deformation of the Word into words can be read in terms of Soyinka’s own satiric statement on what he elsewhere refers to as “quotational garrulity,” especially as it is not lost upon us that Professor’s predilection for bombast is reminiscent of much academic discourse. But there is more to Professor than meets the eye. Professor also attempts to realize his quest by focusing on Murano, a liminal figure whom he had previously rescued from a car crash. As a palm-wine tapper, Murano is automatically filiated to the cluster of significations surrounding Ogun, Yoruba god of roads, metalworkers, and transition.6 Murano has a limp, and as one rescued from near death, is thought by Professor to be limping between the two realms of the living and the dead: Literature and the Parables of Time

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P R O F : When a man has one leg in each world, his legs are never the same. The big toe of Murano’s foot—the left one of course—rests on the slumbering chrysalis of the Word. When that crust cracks my friends—you and I, that is the moment we await. That is the moment of our rehabilitation. When that crust cracks. . . . (187)

Professor seeks a pathway via Murano into the secret of death-in-life. But here a contradiction presses itself to our attention. As a throwback to mock Victorian codes of apprehension, Professor is really shaping a quest along two contradictory conceptual frameworks. On the one hand there is the quasi-Christian and therefore linear and teleological quest, the one that ends in apocalypse and the fulfillment of time. Yet, on the other, his quest is also shaped along a cyclical apprehension of the relationship between the living and the dead, as the Yoruba belief system considers the afterlife the meeting point between the spirits of the living, the dead, the ancestors, and the yet unborn.7 It is essentially a nonlinear representation of the reality of the afterlife. And so when Professor sets off on his quest for the Word but launches this pursuit partly through a fixation with whatever metaphysical realities Murano represents, he is activating two contradictory worldviews and attempting to negotiate his quest between them but without subsuming or hierarchizing the two. Professor can also be interpreted as being a trickster and carnivalesque figure. Professor’s trickster and carnivalesque impulses show themselves when he assists the unemployed road touts to forge driving documents and thus sidestep obligations to civil authority. He seems on the one hand to be the typical Gramscian organic intellectual, departing from his middle class base to identify and articulate the aspirations of the working class. And yet, paradoxically, he is also a highly authoritarian figure, utterly ruthless and thus replicating the relations of domination that pertain between his original class and that of the one he is ostensibly identifying with. His desire for knowledge of death-in-life is also nothing short of Faustian, as the gaining of that knowledge can only be achieved through the loss of his own life, something that the play shows to be inescapable at the very end when he is stabbed for trying to force the egun-gun masquerade, symbolic personifications of ancestral spirits, to dance for him. For Say Tokyo Kid, an otherwise “modern” tout, this is too much of a sacrilege. He stabs him to prevent a perceived blasphemy. Crucially, however, it has to be noted that none of these contradictory impulses are resolved in the action of the play. On the contrary, as Biodun Jeyifo (1985) notes, there is a general feeling of undisclosed violence that Literature and the Parables of Time

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expresses itself sporadically in sequences of bravado and petty thuggery among the touts as well as in the general tenor of the language of the play. This sense of violence only becomes clearly articulated at the very end of the play, when, as has already been mentioned, Say Tokyo Kid stabs Professor. And yet because the stabbing takes place with regard to a perceived contravention of a metaphysical code, the violence becomes attached to a sense of apocalypse rather than being expressed directly as the consequence of a social problematic. The countervailing metaphysical dimension to the play is never allowed to solidify into a clear articulation of a spiritual apprehension as such but flits in and out of view in the traditional songs the touts often sing, their references to accidents in the past, and, predominantly, in Professor’s repeated references to the Word. The contradictions and displacements in the structure of The Road have to be explained through recourse to realities outside the fictional action of the play. The play was first produced in 1965, four years after Nigeria’s formal Independence. Soyinka had always been critical of his country’s politics, but this period was particularly significant because of his increasing forays into political activism.8 With The Road he turns his considerable powers of imaginative analysis to the condition of the urban periphery. For him, this urban periphery is the site upon which the strengths and weaknesses of Nigeria’s headlong dive into modernity are to be explored. The urban periphery represents the very limits of modernity. The unemployed motor-park touts we see represent people who have left their rural homes for enticing opportunities in big cities but have been denied the possibility of being properly integrated into the socioeconomic forms that regulate the urban sphere. More significantly, they exhibit a traditional worldview and sensibility, depicted most strongly in their general predilection for praise names and epithets. This is strongly reminiscent of the tradition of Yoruba oríkì (praise singing; see Barber 1991). Say Tokyo Kid exemplifies this tendency, though he is by no means alone in expressing it: Say Tokyo S A Y T O K Y O K I D : I say boy it sure is good to be back among friendly faces. Goorold Samson the Champion Tout! And Kotonu the demon driver himself, coast-to coast Dakar to Yola Koton Kafiri to Kontagora No Danger No Delay Here Today Gone Tomorrow. How’s business kid? (212) SAMSON:

This oríkì-like impulse is combined for Tokyo Kid with a heroic sensibility taken from Hollywood Westerns (he exhibits a peculiar kind of braggadocio gleaned from movies). The characters in The Road illustrate the reality Literature and the Parables of Time

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of transition between two structures of feeling that overlap but do not necessarily resolve themselves into clear-cut modes of validation. Professor has a pact with risks, dangers, and death but also represents a dissociated consciousness whose roots lie partly in his former religious attachments, partly in his oversized ego, and partly in his disaffiliation from his class. He represents a dialectic of intentionalities that are ultimately contradictory and conflictual. But in this, Professor mirrors in his consciousness the contradictory temporal frameworks that shape postcolonial transition. For what we see, predominantly in the character of Professor but also in that of the touts in general, is that they attempt to retrieve an enchanted time for existence within a configuration of disenchantment. Professor attempts this operation consciously, but it only leads him into the domain of madness and incoherence. It is almost as if, in his character, contradictory impulses of temporal organization that are historically sedimented within the configuration of transition in the postcolony find a problematic articulation that resists closure. His character, then, becomes an allegory for the anguish of transitions that are not executable but remain historically liminal as such. This is a theme that Soyinka returns to again and again, particularly in works such as Death and the King’s Horseman, Kongi’s Harvest, and The Interpreters. It is his peculiar way of providing a literary condensation of what is effectively an acute historical problem. The various dislocations in the dramatic action have then to be viewed as dislocations in multiple conceptions of time.

Conclusion: Time and Existential Deepening I have attempted to separate two key dimensions of the representation of time in narrative, namely, time in its phenomenological dimension as interpreted and felt by individuals, and time as a framework marked by clock face and the cultural rituals of temporal imagining. At various points in the discussion these two dimensions have been shown to coalesce, and it is only with great difficulty that they have been kept apart. With Benjamin’s philosophy of history, for instance, we saw how the two dimensions are brought together in his attempt to foreground the notion of the monadic to explain his revolutionary project. With Chakrabarty, on the other hand, we saw how he dealt with the problems of translating an enchanted phenomenology of time into the scientific framework of Western historiography. In both cases, the different emphases were adduced in order to extend the implications of their ideas for our own analyses of time. However, it is when the two dimensions are incarnated in a single Literature and the Parables of Time

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interpretation that the problem of their separation for understanding the relation between representation and temporal understanding comes to the fore. Such an example of a singular incarnation of temporal polarities is poignantly hinted at in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a text that we have already had recourse to earlier in the discussion. We are told in the novel that time “also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room” (283). In this interpretation, time is seen not simply as having an effect on people, arguably the main direction in which it is anthropomorphized, but as itself growing old and being affected by its own passage. Time, in other words, lives through time. Thus the eternalized fragment it leaves in a room is a signal of its senility. But this interpretation also means that time has become both agent and victim, both temporal framework and a phenomenological experience felt by itself. In this metaphor that blurs the boundaries between abstraction and anthropomorphism, agency and victimhood, the representation of time generates a sudden existential deepening because the very process of grasping the multiple levels at which the metaphor operates enacts time’s passage and the attendant loss of absolute meaning. If philosophy gives us the tools by which to abstract ourselves from the flow of time in order to contemplate its implications better, literature tells us that in the very linguistic categories by which we try to explain our experience of it we contemplate the vertigo of its sheer dispersion and thereby deepen our understanding of it. Through the linguistic effort to calibrate time, then, we make it partly our own.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Anthonia Kalu related this anecdote at a panel titled “Writers as Translators: Postcolonial Identities in African Literature,” April 7, 2001. The chair of the panel, Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi of the University of Southern Mississippi, recalled to me in a subsequent e-mail exchange that The Man and the Pan was also used during her early schooling in Cameroon in the late 1960s. 2 The classic representation of this relationship in African literature, though not in the colonial era, is Ferdinand Oyono’s The Houseboy (1966). But see also the character of Joseph, houseboy of the Pilkingses, colonial officials par excellence in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). 3 See also Natalie Melas, “Versions of Incommensurability” (1995), for a brilliant discussion of this Fanonian assertion in the light of the implicit terms underpinning comparative literature frameworks. 4 Indeed, this surfeit of indigeneity leads to specific burdens for the practice and definition of African literature. As Abiola Irele has noted in The African Imagination (2001), the key problem that African literary writers and critics have had to negotiate from the 1950s has been the means by which to integrate the various resources of orality into the domain of literary production. This effort then becomes constitutive of both a potential and a limit for literary theory and practice on the continent and generates a whole series of contradictory positions in relation to the central problem. 5 I take my cue here from Theodor Adorno, especially in Minima Moralia. Here, every quotidian observation is ultimately connected to a larger and more complicated domain, but in such a way as to show that the larger domain was already part of the quotidian in the first place. For an elaboration of my views on Adorno, see my Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (2000), 27–33. 6 In Fictional Truth (1990), Michael Riffaterre writes of this in terms of what he calls

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the diegetic implementation of narrative models. For him, fiction reflects reality only to the degree that it conforms to a syntax or grammar such that the rules of grammar implement a principle of substitutability. Riffaterre represents to me what is a highly sophisticated structuralist reading of representation, the only difficulty being that reality remains inert in his account. Once the syntax of representation is identified, the real can be replicated indefinitely, irrespective of the contradictions and changes inherent in that reality. 7 Pete de Bolla, in The Discourse of the Sublime (1989), has argued that in the eighteenth century there was no clear division between various discourses. Thus, economic rationality, the discourse on gardens, and ideas about war all partook of the literaryaesthetic domain and made it difficult to assert it as autonomous in any way. It becomes autonomous, according to Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), only with the coming to dominance of the process of state formation and of commodification. The irony for Eagleton is that the aesthetic domain becomes the object of intense philosophical interest at precisely the moment when it enters the sphere of mass commodification. 8 See, particularly, Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971) and The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (1964). Astrologer Liz Greene (2001) has even suggested that mobile phones are not dissimilar to transitional objects in the terms defined by Winnicott. And in another context I try to elaborate the curious structure of anxiety that is generated by information technology and the Internet, with which people are desperate to be and remain connected. The billions spent on the millennium bug is only one sign of this structure of anxiety. The notion of the Internet as a transitional object seems very appealing to me, even though I will have to leave it to others to properly trace the lineaments of this fixation. For a preliminary take on this, see the introduction to David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, Relocating Postcolonialism (2002). 9 Shusterman attempts to go beyond this impasse in his theory by insisting on bridging the gap between high art and popular art forms such as rap music. His thesis is that the division between high and low art constitutes a regrettable schism within the universe of the work of art and prevents us from engaging properly with the full spectrum of the pragmatist function of the literary and aesthetic domain. In pursuing this argument, however, he is obliged to read individual art objects for the schisms between high and low forms that they exhibit, rather than as constitutively ambiguous and contradictory within themselves as such. This impulse sometimes leads to somewhat unsubtle readings, particularly of literary texts. In his discussion of Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” (1911), for instance, his emphasis is wholly on the division between the aesthetic tastes of the Lady and that of the young man, who, though obviously interested in the universe the woman inhabits, is unable to be fully integrated into her sterile aesthetic world. This then is interpreted by Shusterman as a sign of moral limitation on the part of both the Lady and the young man. In doing this, he fails to account for the dialogical play of voices in the text, a play that depends on a series of strained echoes in which the selves of both the Lady and the young man are adrift in a futile quest for friendship and sexual consummation. The emotional aridity is conveyed through the constrained nature of the form of the poem itself, which mixes unattributed reported speech with the direct reflections of the young man/poet in a curious play of narcissistic echoes. In other words, Notes

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the conflict in the poem is much more than that between bourgeois middle-class and popular aesthetic sensibilities (see his discussion in Pragmatist Aesthetics, 148–56). Though this is not the place for it, a contrast might fruitfully be drawn between James’s theory of mass culture and that of Adorno, specifically in relation to their interpretation of the activation/deformation of the form of the Hegelian dialectic. For a preliminary comparative sketch of the two thinkers in these terms, see Brian Alleyne, “Cultural Politics and Globalized Infomedia: C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno and Mass Culture Criticism” (1999). I must acknowledge my debt at this point to Ian Baucom, who provided me with the key reflections for the reformulation of my ideas regarding this point in his report on the manuscript. Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) is the classic study of the different modalities of history writing in the century. The distinctions that he draws are still useful today, as we can see when we compare the historiographic practices in texts such as Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (2000) with E .P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Charles Van Onslen’s award-winning The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985 (1996). The image we are left with at the end of Allende’s novel is that of Alba, a greenhaired magical realist character and survivor of rape who attempts to step outside the form of revenge tragedy of the history traced in the novel by reinterpreting her clairvoyant grandmother’s notebooks, which themselves have formed the basis for the events in the novel in the first place. Other contrasting literary-historiographic examples of the historical imagination may be seen at work in works as varied as C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1963), Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World (1949), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1983), V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), and Toni Morrison’s inimitable Beloved (1987), of which more in chapter 6. For a useful discussion of this problem in postcolonial writing, see Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature (1998). “The abstract form of the continuation or advance,” writes Hegel, “is, in Being, an other (or antithesis) and transition into another; in the Essence, showing or reflection in its opposite; in the Notion, the distinction of the individual from the universality, which continues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, what is distinguished from it” (1975, section A, 240). Genealogies of the dialectic can be traced back to Greek thought, where dialektos simply meant “discourse” or “debate.” Thus Plato’s Socratic dialogues were an early form of the dialectic where the purpose was not the disclosure of new thought but the clarification of propositions through dialogue. Schelling applies the dialectic to nature and to history while Hegel is responsible for adducing dialectic thought as a means by which to contemplate the evolution of the Spirit as such, articulated in his terms in the reason of the State. Marx and Engels turn Hegel’s idealist use of the historical dialectic into an analysis of class society, and by this propose a means by which to understand the forms of changes in the material bases of social organization and the contradictions that lead to further radical changes. The notion of teleology is common to most uses of the dialectic but becomes particularly strong in Hegel and after. Of the many expositions of the dialectic, the ones I have Notes

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predominantly drawn upon for my discussion here have been, in addition to the work of Hegel, Engels, and Marx, those of John and Ellis McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896), Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976), Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), and John Rees, The Algebra of Revolution: the Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition (1998). Robert Young’s White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) fruitfully assimilates the “moment” of postcolonial theory to the general problematic of the dialectical conceptualization of universal history in the Western Marxist tradition. The other particularly fertile Althusserian site for my reflections is his essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx (1969). For newspaper articles on this, see pieces by Patrick Wintour, Nicholas Watt, Matthew Tempest, Roy Greenslade, and others in the Guardian (London) from March 1 to May 1, the period when the discussion of the relation between race and Britishness seems to have been most prominent in the lead-up to the 2001 elections. Mbembe’s discussion of divine libido, in a chapter provocatively titled “God’s Phallus,” forms part of his startling and wide-ranging critique of the African postcolony. In his book he concentrates on a careful decentering and deconstruction of the dual terms Africa and Power, the chapter on God’s Phallus providing him with a means by which to excavate a theological notion of power as the seminal ground of all versions of political power and authority. For a review of On the Postcolony in which I take up this and other issues, see “Breaches in the Commonplace: Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony,” African Studies Review (2001); also H-NET List for African History and Culture; http://www.h-net.msu.edu, 14 August 2001. On the other hand Ngugi wa Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), though also centering on the problem of recall and the consciousness of the peasants, is much less monological. Its open-endedness derives from placing an antihero as central to the villagers’ conceptualization of the epic moment of Independence. Mugo is a complete antihero and traitor, but in their desperation the community ignores all his own desperate attempts not to be their epic hero. Mandela’s final words at his Rivonia defense are exemplary of a positive foundational impulse, one that should be repeated at every opportunity: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” C H A P T E R 1 : L I T E R A T U R E , A N T H R O P O L O G Y, A N D H I S T O R Y IN GHOSH’S IN AN ANTIQUE LAND

1 This point is also elaborated in Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1995, introduction). Kiberd extends Anderson’s insights for a literary history of Ireland inflected by postcolonial theory. 2 The literary primacy of the concept of alienation is highlighted in a third-year Cambridge English paper called “Tragedy.” The paper’s coverage is from the Greeks to the modern day, students being obliged to show a good grasp of the Greeks and Shakespeare before wading off to other literary, philosophical, and religious expressions of the concept. Being inherently comparative, the Tragedy paper encourages Notes

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a great deal of reading across periods, genres, and regions. The impression of the centrality of alienation and estrangement is almost inescapable for anyone teaching or studying the paper. It has to be pointed out that the entire discussion of the anthropologist’s alienation that follows is related to fieldwork “away from home.” This notion of fieldwork is itself under serious scrutiny within the discipline. For a fascinating recent sample of debates on the status of fieldwork and its different manifestations for the discipline, see Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Anthropological Locations (1997). Of the three texts that I have mentioned, by far the most “literary” is Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. His eye for detail and his wry sense of humor make it a delight to read. It is also noticeable that the account is shaped in terms of an epic rite of passage in which he is the epic hero. All the many difficulties that he faces with recalcitrant officials and people encountered in the course of his researches are overcome through a combination of wiliness, sheer stubbornness, and wit. Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, on the other hand, is a careful elaboration of the blunders that he made during the course of his research in Morocco. The interpersonal dimension of the interpretation is strongly emphasized, with the slow evolution of people’s responses to him and his to them gradually revealing the messiness and unforeseen sources of knowledge that arise in the course of fieldwork. Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami takes the question of interpersonal relations to try to make a radical statement about anthropology: that anthropological knowledge is constituted by way of a complex negotiation between the anthropologist-as-actor and the various others he or she happens to encounter in the course of fieldwork. In his case, Tuhami, his central informant, is the one with whom he negotiates knowledge about the local culture. The central thing that Crapanzano notes is that “objectivity” is a product of such negotiations and not a state of knowledge that the anthropologist is capable of attaining in and of itself through any objective practice. The difference between these texts and Ghosh’s lies mainly in the fact that Ghosh’s anthropological persona never quite manages to transcend the phase of ignorance and discomfiture in the ethnographic sections of the book. His “mastery” is, rather, displayed in the archival sections of the work. This quotation is to be found in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers, George and Tom Keats, on December 21, 1817. For psychoanalytic extensions of the idea of negative capability, see W. R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation (1984, 124–26) and his A Memoir of the Future (1991, 207). See also Robert French, “The Importance of Capacities in the Psychoanalysis and the Language of Human Development” (1999). One thing that feeds into this idea of alienation is of course the changing role of the background of the ethnographer, the anthropological theories that they bring to bear on the cultural encounter, and the awareness of their cultural interlocutors of precisely these factors. Historically, imperiousness gives way to nervousness through the shifts or at least the problematization of the power relations between self and other and the theories that grow out of the shifts in these power relations. Other texts that come to mind as potentially useful for the kind of questions that are posed here include Helen Watson, Women in the City of the Dead (1992); and Anna Grimshaw, Servants of the Buddha: Winter in a Himalayan Convent (1992). Also of interest is Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993), which is about a cultural critic trying to make sense of American Indian texts by inscribing them within a series of life Notes

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narratives to create a document that would “open the world people share with each other” (6). He writes with multiple audiences in mind—folklorists, art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, teachers, tribal scholars—and produces a thoroughly hybrid cultural text with him as the observer of moving frames of reference. As in the case of Ghosh’s text, all of these place themselves between genres and disciplines, refusing to be subsumed under any single category. A larger project along the lines I am sketching in this chapter might place these and other texts in an illuminating comparative account to focus on the disciplinary hybridity of these texts, and not just on how well they addressed individual disciplinary audiences. 8 The only point at which he is not thought to be “backward” is when he is invited by Mabrouk, a nephew of Shaikh Musa, to examine their made-in-India diesel water pump. He makes the most of this opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of the villagers, studiously circling the machine, knocking on it at various points with his ear pressed against the metal to test for sound, before finally declaring to great acclamation that it was a good machine. But this single incident, described early in the book and occurring in Lataifa, does not prevent the villagers from pestering him with embarrassing questions about his religious and cultural orientations. The encounter with Imam Ibrahim in Nashawy represents the highpoint of their perception of his backwardness. 9 For more on the intricate relations between these vectors of identity, see Veena Das, Critical Events (1995); and Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory (2001), among others. CHAPTER 2: SOCIAL IMAGINARIES IN TRANSITION

1 The discussion in this chapter draws on and elaborates my earlier thinking on the subject in Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (2000), where I linked the concept of culture heroism mainly to literature and the political sphere. See Postcolonialism, 85–102. 2 A remarkably rich discussion of Thompson’s use of anecdotes and the specific place they have in his work is provided by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt in chapter 3 of Practicing New Historicism (2000). But it would also be fruitful to compare Thompson’s method to those of the Subaltern Studies historians of Southeast Asia. For a general overview of Subaltern Studies historiography, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject” (1988). 3 A painting in Accra I saw in August 2000 neatly captured the curious place of foreign celebrities in the social imaginaries of ordinary people. Outside a signwriter’s shop at Dansoman, a largely middle-class suburb of the capital, was a painting composed of three busts against a dark blue background. To the left was the face of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana and Pan-African nationalist par excellence; on the right was the figure of Kofi Annan, Ghanaian Secretary-General of the United Nations. And in the middle—three guesses—firmly ensconced between these two great sons of the soil was the image of Princess Diana, the British royal who died tragically in Paris in 1997. In a sense Princess Di (as she is lovingly called by the British) was standing in for Queen Elizabeth II, but this transposition is in itself fascinating because the princess now seems to be taking the role of a “mother” of the downtrodden, if not their sister. Many of such paintings express a perception of the relevance of global celebrity icons to local contexts, and it is not at all unusuNotes

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al to see paintings of Ghanaians alongside people such as Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, and many others. A fascinating research project lies waiting to be done on this phenomenon. On popular novels and their forms of characterization, see especially Stephanie Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction (2000). And on popular videos, see Graham Furniss, “Documenting Kano ‘Market’ Literature” (2000); and Jonathan Haynes, ed., Nigerian Video Films (2000). For a rich discussion of the social history of alcohol in Ghana and its connection to the nationalist struggle, see Emmanuel Akyeampong’s seminal 1996 study, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change. The fascinating thing is how drinking bars were converted into places for the circulation not just of local neighborly gossip but of stories about the colonial regime. This then provided ready-made political “cells” for the circulation of nationalist ideas in the lead-up to Independence. Goldstuck’s two collections are both about modern South African myths and urban legends, but the second one is focused primarily on stories from the 1994 elections. See The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree: Modern Myths and Urban Legends of South Africa (1991), and Ink in the Porridge: Urban Legends of the South African Elections (1994). I heard the story in August 2000 on an evening music show hosted by Fiifi Banson on Peace FM in Accra. For biographies of twelve heroic female figures from across the continent, see David Sweetman, Women Leaders in African History (1984). Nina Mba’s more recent book (with Johnson-Odim [1997]) on Funmilayo RansomeKuti, mother of musician Fela Ransome Kuti and aunt of Soyinka, also gives us the profile of a woman who fought for women’s suffrage and equal rights for her countrywomen long before the second wave of the women’s movement in the United States and elsewhere. She is further immortalized in Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) in the description of the women’s organization against the hated land tax, but this time through the open-eyed fascination of Soyinka’s own childhood. For an informative study of the lives of market women in Ghana, see Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (1994). For more on the problematic peripheralization of potential female centers of validation in Achebe’s novel, see my “Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both,” especially 129–32. See a report on Kabila in The Times (UK), March 12, 1997. A classic example of this is Kofi Awoonor, This Earth, My Brother (1972); also Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (1974); and Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger (1978). But see also Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987); Yvonne Vera, Without a Name (1994); and Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (1995), for different perspectives of the nightmare of social existence on the continent. For a historical account of such an organic relationship, see Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (1998); for a more general theoretical discussion, chapter 3 of Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982), provides useful terms for discussion. Achille Mbembe pays fruitful attention to the various ways in which these images are subverted by the populace. See chapters 3 and 4 of his On the Postcolony (2001). It is fascinating to see how such binaristic thinking informs even political forces in the opposition. A case in point is with Ghana’s Rawlings. His party had a shock Notes

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defeat in the 2000 elections after twenty plus years in power. Now a member of the opposition and effectively “retired” from his party, he has taken to explaining all the new government’s activities as signs of their failure to take account of silent forces of dissent (in this case the army), which he ominously suggests will one day rise up to punish the government (BBC interview, July 2001). Rawlings’s dire warnings are not merely the rantings of a disgruntled loser. They are more serious than that. They have to be seen as the essential operation of a binaristic logic by which he himself dominated Ghanaian politics for many years and that now generates in his mind its own inexorable dynamic. A research paper waits to be written on the issue of the moral logic of political power in Ghana and other parts of Africa, addressing the rhetoric by which ruling regimes reflect on oppositions and vice versa. But this will have to wait for another occasion. 17 It is interesting to note, in this regard, the degree to which business schools view the differences between practices in non-Western countries from those in the West. Thus, for example, a wide-ranging study of IBM cultural values administered among its staff in seventy-two countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s provides fertile ground for generalizations about different business cultures. This study was itself augmented by a Chinese culture survey, which helped to complicate the picture provided in the IBM survey and also to confirm the radically different Chinese business ethos. The focus on business environments of course means that these studies are only quasi-anthropological; they also do not seem to integrate their analysis into discussions of different political economies as such, though it would be interesting to do an interdisciplinary analysis of such surveys. For a discussion of the general idea of cultural metaphors, see Martin J. Gannon’s Cultural Metaphors (2000), especially 25–58. C H A P T E R 3 : A F R I C A N P O S T C O L O N I A L R E L AT I O N S T H R O U G H A PRISM OF TRAGEDY

1 A shorter version of this essay subsequently appeared as chapter 3 of Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2002), to which I have already referred in the previous chapter. 2 Saro-Wiwa returns to the memory of the Biafra War several times in his writings. See, for example, On a Darkling Plain (1989) and Songs in a Time of War (1985a). Even Sozaboy (1985b), his most well-known work, is about the fate of a young recruit who comes back from a civil war to confront the devastation of his village and of his own psyche. 3 It is interesting to note that during the height of the Ogoni struggle, at a special vigil on March 13 called for them to express their sentiments while praying for God’s help, the words of one of the songs they sang were “Go down go down to Abuja [federal capital] and tell government: government, let Ogoni go.” See Osaghae 1995, 337; also Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day (1995), 151–52, 214. 4 For a useful interpretation of the place of Ogoniland in the contradictions of oil capitalism in Nigeria at large, see Andrew Apter, “Death and the King’s Henchmen.” Apter’s essay is part of a collection of essays and tributes titled Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria, edited by Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah (1998), which brings together both creative writers and scholars for a wide-ranging analysis of the significance of the Ogoniland crisis. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in that collection. Notes

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5 See also The Drilling Fields (1994) and Delta Force (1995), documentaries on the Ogoni environmental crisis produced by the UK’s Channel 4 Television in association with Ken Saro-Wiwa; also Greenpeace International 1994. 6 For Saro-Wiwa’s thoughts on Babangida and the electoral process, see A Month and a Day, xi, 26, 42, 55, 76. 7 See the special edition of Liberty, a publication of the Nigerian Civil Liberties Organization, vol. 6, no. 4, for a detailed account of the judicial implications of the mistrial. C H A P T E R 4 : S Y M B O L I Z AT I O N C O M P U L S I O N S

1 Two well-known examples from African literary studies are Chidi Amuta, The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism (1989), which aligns literary history to nation-formation from a Marxist framework, and Kenneth Harrow, Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition (1994), which follows a more structuralist line of linkage. The two studies represent extreme forms of the same tendency: the first, overtly political and pressing a political claim on literature, and the second, more formalist but still taking the threshold of the nation as the implied horizon of values. Several kinds of studies fall between the two and in varying degrees reproduce the problems inherent in an unmediated linkage of nation to narration. 2 Other texts that might prove equally fruitful are Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists (1974b) and The Road (1973a); Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (1974); Calixthe Beyala, The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me (1996); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1998); and Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (1995). All these texts present us with different perspectives on the relation between trauma, language, and nation and provide a useful conceptual map of how the issues have been and are being treated in African literary writing. 3 For another perspective on the locus of referentiality, see Cathy Caruth’s discussion in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), 1–24. Caruth attempts a more detailed engagement with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to elaborate what she describes as the double wound inflicted on the body and on the mind. I take what is essentially a sliver of her more wide-ranging concern—the question of the referential locus—to situate a more sociopolitical kind of analysis. 4 Althusser’s account of interpellation (1971) is of course tied to his notion of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). This controversial yet highly suggestive essay provides a way for thinking about how identity is generally “called forth” through a variety of processes, not all of which can necessarily be assimilated to ISAs. Judith Butler suggests ways in which the Althusserian model might be fruitfully taken in different directions in her The Psychic Life of Power (1997). 5 Scarry provides a wide-ranging discussion of the intersections of bodily pain, subjectivity, and ideology, especially in the first two chapters of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), where she sets out the central theoretical issues. 6 See especially chapter 5 of Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, “ The Fact of Blackness” (1986). There are echoes there of W. E. B. Du Bois’s views on the split Negro consciousness in the Souls of Black Folk (1989) as well as in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Decolonising the Mind (1986). Notes

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7 Isabel Hofmeyer, personal communication, March 1999. The Mail and Guardian Bedside Books, which are selections of the best pieces of journalism for each year, provide an interesting overview of the main concerns that have dominated public discourse in the country. I consulted those for 1997 and 1998. 8 In a talk to the Cambridge Southern African Seminar series on March 12, 2001, titled “The ‘Nerves of Suffering’: The Experience of Mental Distress in Khayelitsha Township, South Africa,” Hayley MacGreggor pointed out that the word iinerves, combining Xhosa and English, is being used to describe a series of nervous conditions among the people of Khayelitsha Township in South Africa. The interesting thing is that the word is used by a wide range of social actors including those suffering from mental breakdown themselves, biomedical health care workers, local healers, and ordinary people who are apparently healthy and sane. From the range of references she makes, we find that for the people of Khayelitsha iinerves has come to stand for both symptom and cause of physical and mental discomfort. One might go even further to suggest that the people’s use of iinerves represents a process of abstraction of the causes of illness. This process parallels that suggested in the use of witchcraft as an explanatory model to account for illness in other African environments. I have already noted in the discussion of social imaginaries in chapter 2 how the discourse of witchcraft, along with that of culture heroism, may be seen as part of an ensemble of processes of conceptual abstraction to do with different levels of citizen-state relations. With regard to its overlap with iinerves, however, whereas witchcraft as a concept primarily assigns social disorder to a disorder in kinship relations (witches are often, though not exclusively, thought to be members of the extended family), iinerves is a concept that relies on a more dispersed process of social abstraction. Unlike witchcraft, it does not relate to a perceived disorder in kinship relations but to a disorder in the socioeconomic system itself. It seems to me, then, that iinerves is a cluster or conjunctural concept one of whose elements is the uncanny, as I have elaborated in this chapter. MacGreggor’s Ph.D. research is provisionally titled “Social Suffering and the Care of the Mentally Ill in South Africa.” CHAPTER 5: DISABILITY AND CONTINGENCY

I wish to say a special thanks to Jo Emeney, who, as a student of mine at Pembroke College in Cambridge in 1995–96, first drew my attention to the proliferation of disabled figures in postcolonial literature. Thanks are due also to Kate Huntington and Bibi Jacob of Kings College, Cambridge, who in the Lent term of 1997 had to sit through what I thought was an interminable supervision at which I struggled with great enthusiasm but little coherence to explore my ideas on Keri Hulme’s The Bone People; also to Mark Wormald, my colleague at Pembroke, for reading and commenting on a first draft of the chapter. All these people provided the initial motivation for the shape and earliest incarnation of this chapter, the ideas of which were first published in an exploratory manner under the title “Looking Awry: Tropes of Disability in Postcolonial Fiction.” I also want to say a big thanks to the Berkeley Disabilities Studies Group, in whose meetings I was privileged to participate in spring 2000, especially to Susan Schweik, Ellen Samuels, and Celeste Langan. They formed a lively community of dedicated scholars ready to share their insights and emergent ideas on the discourses of disability. Notes

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Finally, I want to dedicate this chapter to my late father, a great storyteller, who had one leg shorter than the other. 1 The assumption that one can tell whether a writer is able-bodied or not from his or her writing is, of course, an extremely dangerous one. Since none of the writers I am going to be looking at here have said anywhere that they are disabled or have physical impairments, and no sense of their own impairments, if any, is part of the fabric and texture of their literary writings, I am proceeding on the assumption that they are indeed nondisabled. I deliberately leave out of the discussion the increasing number of literary writings by disabled people centering on their own disabilities. In such cases the disability itself becomes an imaginative threshold and the central vector through which social relations are shaped. The choice in this chapter is the degree to which the normalization of an invisible corporeal assumption of normativity serves to obscure crucial distinctions and hierarchizations taking place in the literary representation of the disabled by the nondisabled. The focus on literature by disabled people will have to be taken up later in a larger and more comparative project across genres and cultures. 2 For a well-considered exploration of constructions of normalcy and their relation to disabilities, see Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy (1995), especially chapter 2. 3 Even in the Deaf community, which has historically defined itself as a linguistic minority rather than as a disabled group, non–hearing-impaired children of deaf parents often find they have to struggle between disavowing any hearing impairments and acknowledging that though not having an impairment, they are part of a community. Lennard Davis (1995) refers to his own experience with this and says that his solution was finally to accept that he was part of a bicultural community. 4 This is not to suggest that other Western countries do not have such acts. The UK’s Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 is also an important landmark in this respect. The critical difference between the American and UK versions of the act derives mainly from the different histories of civil rights struggles in the two countries. This affects the nature and scope of awareness about disability issues, which in turn affects the context in which the acts are received and interpreted. 5 Revising this section, it suddenly strikes me that the deictic shifts in this sentence between “he,” “they,” and “themselves,” all of which are meant to denote “the child” in Lacan’s formulation, inadvertently capture in the convolutions of grammatical usage the deep-seated divisions in the ego. For the child’s ego at this stage, and subsequently in adult life, is always an assemblage of images of the self, some of which are contradictory and require constant negotiation in the flux of existence. I have deliberately left the contradictory oscillations in the personal pronouns in this sentence as they are to mark this tension in a subliminal way. 6 An example of this childhood fascination with dismemberment is reflected in Disney’s Toy Story (1995). In this film about toys coming to life, fragmentation is continually represented in the figure of Mr. Potato Head, a toy potato with detachable limbs and facial components. Not only does Mr. Potato Head regularly detach parts of his body to stress his arguments or gain some tactical advantage over the other toys, at three different points in the film he suffers complete fragmentation on collision with fast-moving objects. 7 At the time of revising this chapter (September 24, 2001), the terrible terrorist Notes

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attacks on New York and Washington had taken place. I wondered to myself what feelings of abject anxiety and terror ordinary people might have to live with after the event. To my mind, after these events a sense of systemic disorder will always be part of the fabric of the American psyche, especially considering the extent of television footage of the events. The problem is that there is no simple way of coming to terms with such an apocalyptic occurrence. Even the rapid vengeance that President Bush and Colin Powell have promised will not assuage the pain and the anguish. This perhaps marks an epoch when the uncanny leaks into history. 8 Though I will be looking mainly at the two texts I have already mentioned, the general thesis may be tested and elaborated in relation to a variety of postcolonial texts in which the disabled appear either peripherally or centrally. A useful list of such works might include Ngugi wa Thiongo, Petals of Blood (1977); J. M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K (1983); Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (1992); Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists (1974b); and Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley (1947); among many others. C H A P T E R 6 : L I T E R AT U R E A N D T H E PA R A B L E S O F T I M E

1 I deliberately use an uncapitalized reference to time, mainly to connote its quotidian everyday dimension. However, it is also clear from the discussion that I have in mind a more specialized and philosophical view of the concept. I deliberately leave it uncapitalized to retain the blurred boundaries between the quotidian and the philosophical, thus hopefully capturing the problematic way in which it is experienced as both passage and rupture in everyday life. 2 I take this happy phrase—granulated reality—from a discussion by Charles J. Ryan in “On the Monads of Leibniz,” Sunrise Magazine, October 1963. 3 I offer an extensive analysis of Adorno’s dialectics and the relations he establishes between situated observations and totalities in Postcolonialism (2000), 27–33. 4 On paratexts, see Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997). 5 One can think here of Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of transculturation and autoethnography in Imperial Eyes (1992), and of Johannes Fabian’s notion of the lack of coevalness in early anthropological interpretations of other cultures in his Time and the Other (1983). In Rev. Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas (1921), on the other hand, what we find is a sequence of different modalities of historiography, with the mythological and enchanted form of historiography making way for a documentary and Western form that is felt to have become dominant within a particular historical configuration with the coming of the British administration. For a discussion of this, see my chapter on Rev. Samuel Johnson in Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997), 34–41. 6 For the cluster of significations around the god Ogun, see Adeboye Babalola, “A Portrait of Ogun as Reflected in Ijala Chants” (1989); and Bade Ajuwon, “Ogun’s Iremoje: A Philosophy of Living and Dying” (1989). 7 For this and other reflections on the Yoruba worldview, see Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976). 8 See particularly Soyinka’s autobiographical account of the period in question, Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946–1965 (1994).

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Index

Ablon, Joan, 112 Abrams, M. H., 84 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 18 Achebe, Chinua, xxi, xl, 42; Things Fall Apart, 5, 141–46, 159 ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), 108, 163 Adorno, 129, 153, 155, 164 Agyemang-Rawlings, Nana-Konadu, 41 Ajuwon, Bade, 164 Ake, Claude, 67 Akyeampong, Emmanuel, 159 alienation, 2, 4–7, 9–10, 143, 156; and negative capability, 9; and transnationalism, 23–24, 26–27 Allende, Isabel, xxxii, 155 Alleyne, Bryan, 155 alternative modernities, 30–31 Althusser, Louis, xxx, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxix, 82, 130, 156, 161 Amuta, Chidi, xxviii, 161 Anderson, Benedict, 2, 65, 156 Appadurai, Arjun, 23, 31, 47

Apter, Andrew, 160 Aristotle, xvii, xxv; mimesis, xvi, xxii; tragic plot, xvii–xviii, 59–60, 61–62 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 83, 159, 161 Atwood, Margaret, 98 Auerbach, Erich, 3 Augustine, Saint, 125, 126 Babalola, Adeboye, 164 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxxvii, 32, 41, 52, 57, 138 Barber, Karin, 149 Barthes, Roland, 4 Baucom, Ian, 155 Baudrillard, Jean, 27 Bayart, J.-F., 48, 66 Beckett, Samuel (Waiting for Godot), 5 Benjamin, Walter, xl, 128–31, 150 Beyala, Calixthe, 83, 161 Bhabha, Homi, 76 Bion, W. R., 158 Borges, Jorge Luis, xl; “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 127, 135–39

≈ 175 ≈

Bowie, Malcolm, 109–10 Boyarin, Jonathan, 77 Brecht, Bertolt (The Life of Galileo), 5 Brink, André, 78, 98 Bryce-Laporte, Roy S.: and Claudewell Thomas, 4 Burke, Timothy, 31 Butler, Judith, 161 calibrations: definition, xv–xvi, xxxviii, 29, 98, 99; inductive and deductive methods, 78 Carpentier, Alejo, 155 Caruth, Cathy, 161 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 33, 34, 52 Cervantes, xxxvi Chabal, Patrick: and Jean-Pascal Daloz, 96 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, xl, 128, 139–41, 142, 143, 150 Clark, Gracia, 159 Clifford, James: and George E. Marcus, 3 Coetzee, J. M., 164; Waiting for the Barbarians, 113–17, 121 Cohn, Bernard, 12 Conservative Party (UK), xxxiv–xxxvi Crapanzano, Vincent, 6, 157 Cros, Edmond, xxviii, 32 cultural translation, xii–xiv, 1–2 culture heroism, 32, 33, 38, 52, 83; as conjunctural concept, 35; definition, 36–37; and the genres of everyday life, 36, 37–39; and politicians, 45–46, 49–50, 53, 55, 56; and the privatization of the state, 35, 49, 50–54, 55, 56, 57; and systemic incoherence, 47, 50; trickster figures, 38–39; urban myths and legends, 35, 37–39; and witchcraft, 53; and women, 40–42, 45 cultures of impunity, 73, 96 Dangarembga, Tsitsi (Nervous Conditions), 42–45, 107, 161 Daniel, Valentine: and Jeffrey Peck, 4 Das, Veena, 158 Davies, Charlotte Aull, 9 Davis, Lennard, 163

De Bolla, Peter, 154 Dewey, John, xxvi dialectics: definitions and sources, xxxii–xxxiv, 155–56; dialektos, 155; and embedding, xxxi, 17, 32, 33, 145; interacting subsegments, xxxii–xxxiv; and interpretation, xxxviii Disabilities Discrimination Act, 163 disability: as enigmatic threshold, 100; narrative nervousness, xxxix; and the nondisabled, 101–4, 110, 112, 122, 163; and the normate, xxi, 108, 101–4, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117; and the postcolony, 123–24; and structures of affirmation, 105–8 disability studies, 99, 100, 101, 105 Du Bois, W. E. B., 106, 161 Eagleton, Terry, 154 Eboreime, Joseph, 66 Eliot, T. S., xl; “Portrait of a Lady,” 154–55 Ellmann, Maud, 110 Englund, Harri: and James Leach, 7, 9 Eshu, 97 Euripides (Medea), 5 Fabian, Johannes, 164 Fanon, Frantz, xiii–xiv, 42, 68, 86–87, 106, 123 Ferguson, James, 31 Foucault, Michel, 31, 32, 56, 57, 60, 135 French, Robert, 158 Freud, Sigmund, 77, 92, 97, 11; latency, 79, 81; referential locus, 79; repetition compulsion, 81–82; trauma, 79–80; the uncanny, 80–82, 96 Fugard, Athol (Sizwe Bansi Is Dead), 5 Furniss, Graham, 159 Gallagher, Cathy: and Stephen Greenblatt, xxix, 158 Gampel, Yolanda, 80–81 Gannon, Martin J., 160 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 10 Genette, Gérard, 164 Geschiere, Peter, 31, 53

Index

≈ 176 ≈

Ghosh, Amitav (In an Antique Land), xxxviii, 3, 157, 158; author-functions, 20, 21–23; authority as ethnographer, 12–15; discourse of emblematization, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21; philosophy of history, 22–23, 28; reiterated patterns, 15–16 Goffman, Erving, 101 Goitein S. D., 19 Goldberg, David Theo: and Ato Quayson, 154 Goldmann, Lucien, xxi, 32 Goldstuck, Arthur, 39, 46 Gombrich, E. H., xxiv–xxvi Greenblatt, Stephen, xxix, 3 Greene, Liz, 154 Greenslade, Roy, 156 Grimshaw, Anna, 158 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, xxix Gupta, Akhil: and James Ferguson, 157 Hamilton, Carolyn, 159 Hampaté Bâ, Amadou (Fortunes of Wangrin), 38 Hansberry, Lorraine, 107 Harrow, Kenneth, 161 Haynes, Jonathan, 159 Hegel, W., xxvii, xxxii, 60, 105, 130, 155 Heidegger, Martin, xxii,126 Hertz, Neil, 81 Hobsbawm, Eric: and Terence Ranger, 76 Hoffmann, E. T. A. (“The Sandman”), 80–81 Hofmeyer, Isabel, 162 Honneth, Axel, 104–6, 108 Hulme, Keri, (The Bone People), 109, 117–21 Hutchful, Ebo, 61 Ibsen, Henrik (Hedda Gabler), 5 interdisciplinarity, xiv, 29 Irele, Abiola, 153 James, C. L. R., xxvi–xxviii, 155 Jameson, Fredric, 156 Jaspers, Karl, 61 Jeyifo, Biodun, 148 Johnson, Rev. Samuel, 65, 164

Kalu, Anthonia, xii–xiii, 153 Kaul, Suvir, 158 Keats, John, 9, 158 Kernels and surfaces, xviii–xxi, xxx, 85, 95, 97 Kiberd, Declan, 156 Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., 45 Klein, Melanie, 92 Krog, Antjie (Country of My Skull), 92–93, 95 Labour Party (UK), xxxv–xxxvi Lacan, Jacques, 92, 100, 109–12 LaCapra, Dominick, 94 Langer, Susanne, 61 Lazarus, Neil, 76 Leach, James, 7–8 Leibniz, 129, 147 Lenin, xxiii Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 3, 6, 10, 157 Linton, Simi, 101, 107 Lion King, The (Disney), 46 Lispector, Clarice, 1, 29 literary thresholds: and mimesis, xxii, xxvi; particularities as thresholds, xx–xxii; and the social, xxviii Lonsdale, John, 61 Loolo, G. N., 65 Lukás, Georg, xxi, 32 MacGreggor, Hayley, 162 Macherey, Pierre, xxiii Mahfouz, Naguib, 122, 164 Majeed, Javed, 16, 19 Mamdani, Mahmood, 77 Mandela, Nelson, xxxvii, 39, 46, 156 Marcus, George E., 7 Marechera, Dambudzo (The House of Hunger), 5, 77, 94, 95, 96, 159; prisonhouse of language, 84, 86; scatological narrative, 83, 95; violence and fragmentation, 83, 86–87 Marley, Bob, 106 Márquez, Gabriel García, 5, 130, 135, 144, 151 Marx, Karl: and Friedrich Engels, xxx, xxxii, 155

Index

≈ 177 ≈

Mauss, Marcel, 51 Mba, Nina, 40; with Cheryl JohnsonOdim, 159 Mbeki, Thabo, xxxviii Mbembe, Achille, xxxvii, 47, 57, 58, 73, 156, 159, 160 McGreal, Chris, 70, 71–72 McTaggart, John: and Ellis McTaggart, 156 Mda, Zakes, 159, 161 Melas, Natalie, 153 Melville, Herman, 122 mimesis, xvi; Aristotle, xvii–xviii; Heidegger, xxii; Mimetic caesurae, xxii–xxviii; Plato, xvii; and postcolonial civil society, 57; reciprocal determinations, xxxiii–xxxiv, 127; transitional objectprocess, xxv, xxviii Mitchell, W. J. T., xi, xxiv Mitee, Ledum, 67 Morrison, Toni, xl, 5, 122, 127; Beloved, 131–35, 155; The Bluest Eye, 107 multilingualism: and cultural translation, xii, xiii, 1–2 Murphy, Robert, F., 101, 110, 112 Na’Allah, Abdul Rasheed, 160 nation and narration, 76–77 Newell, Stephanie, 159 New Historicism, xxix–xxx Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana, 153 Ngugi wa Thiongo (Petals of Blood), xxxvi–xxxvii, 156, 161, 164 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 158 Ondaatje, Michael, 164 Ong, Walter, 159 Osaghae, E. Eghosa, 65, 68, 69, 160 Ouologuem, Yambo, 83 Oyono, Ferdinand, 153 Paley, Grace, 1 Pratt, Mary Louise, 6, 164 Rabinow, Paul, 6, 157 Rawlings, Jerry, 40–41, 159 Rees, John, 156

Ricoeur, Paul, xvii, xxxix, 126–27, 138 Riffaterre, Michael, 153 Rorty, Richard, 100 Rosaldo, Renato I., 6 Rushdie, Salman, 60, 155 Ryan, Charles J., 164 Samoff, J., 60, 61 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, xv, xxxix, 57, 77, 160, 161; MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People), 68, 69–70; NYCOP (National Youth Council of Ogoni People), 70; Ogoni Bill of Rights, 69; through a prism of literary tragedy, 58–60, 63–64; and Shell, 68–69, 70; use of epic trope, 69–70 Sarris, Greg, 158 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 156 Scarry, Elaine, 86, 161 Schama, Simon, 155 Schatzberg, M. G., 61 Schelling, Friedrich, 155 Sekoni, Ropo, 37–39 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 76 Sey, James, 93 Shakespeare, William, xxv, 120; Coriolanus, 63, 85; Hamlet, 5, 62, 120; King Lear, 62; Richard III, 122 Shivji, Issa G., 61 Shusterman, Richard, xxvi, 154–55 Sidhwa, Bapsi, 123 Sklar, Richard, 61 Slovo, Gillian, 93 social, the: definition, xxviii–xxxi; and dialectics, xxxiii; and embedding, xviii; intersectional and conjunctural phenomena, xviii; and literary thresholds, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxi, xxviii, xxxi; reading for, xv social imaginaries, xxxviii, 30, 33, 34, 48, 52, 54; conjunctural concepts, 34–35, 54; and culture heroism, 35, 55; iinerves, 162; privatization of the postcolonial state, 35, 49, 50–54, 55, 56, 57; urban myths, 37–39; witchcraft, 40, 162 Sontag, Susan, 1 Sophocles (Oedipus Rex), 5, 62

Index

≈ 178 ≈

Soyinka, Wole, xl, 42, 72, 74, 138; Kongi’s Harvest, 42; The Road, 5, 146–50, 159, 161, 164 Strathern, Marilyn, 10 symbolization compulsion(s), xxxix, 82, 90–91; definition, 82, 87; and latency, 87; and the semiotic code, 87, 90 Taylor, Charles, 30 Tempest, Matthew, 156 Terdiman, Richard, xxix Thompson, E. P., 33–34, 53, 155, 158 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 101–4, 122 time and history: Walter Benjamin, 128–31; Dipesh Chakrabarty, 139–41; and cognition, 134; as granulated reality, 129; and memory, 127–28; as monad, 129–30; multichronic vs. unilinear, 139, 148; Paul Ricoeur, 126–27; and traumatic rupture, 139 Tjiattas, Mary, 93 Toy Story (Disney), 163 trauma: and affects, 133–34; haemorrhaging of meaning, 95; referential locus, 79, 95, 98, 131, 161 TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), xxxviii, 78, 92

Van Onselen, Charles, 155 Vera, Yvonne (Without a Name), 77, 82, 94, 95, 159; chimurenga, 88; referential locus, 90, 91, 95; symbolization compulsions, 87, 89 Watson, Helen, 158 Watt, Nicholas, 156 Weideman, Haizel, 5, 23 Welch, Claude, Jr., 72 Wendell, Susan, 101, 104 White, Hayden, 155 White, Luise, 37 Whyte, Susan Reynolds: and Benedicte Ingstad, 101 Williams, Raymond, xxxiii–xxxiv, 59, 63 will-to-transcedence, xxvi–xxviii, 49–50, 138 Wilson-Tagoe, Nana, 155 Winnicott, D. W., xxv, 154 Wintour, Patrick, 156 Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, 51 Young, Crawford, 68 Young, Robert, 156 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, xix–xx, 97

Index

≈ 179 ≈

is a fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where he is university lecturer in English and director of the African Studies Centre. He was educated in Ghana and received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? and Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, and the editor, with David Theo Goldberg, of Relocating Postcolonialism. He recently wrote the introduction and notes for a new edition of Nelson Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom. AT O Q U AY S O N